Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 259

āī who directly assumed the function
of mutasib. Sometimes, the latter would
even have been the personal prerogative
of the sovereign himself: twice a month,
the Almohad caliph Abū Yaūb Yūsuf
is supposed to have called together the
umanā (s. amīn ) responsible for each of the
professions to report to him on the state
of the markets. The sources do, however,
mention at about the same time a mutasib
of Marrakesh.
In his study of Zīrid Ifrīiya, Idris
makes virtually no mention of magistrates
being in charge of a single market, which
in his opinion was the responsibility of a
kind of secondary judge, distinct from the
āī and called ākim , probably exercising
supervision over the umanā responsible for
the different professions, or a nāir al-sū ,
mentioned in a document of 430/1038.
Besides a fairly thorough nomenclature
(names of sū s, straightforward mention of
the sū s of such and such a locality), sū s,
as a concrete reality, appear hardly at all
in Brunschvig's survey of afid Tunisia,
although there is mention there of the cre-
ation of markets by sovereigns, and details
of the revenues levied by the state on the
different markets in the mid-8th/14th
century. But under the afids, the role
of the mutasib , if indeed it existed, had
little importance. Regarding the late Mid-
dle Ages, the Risāla fi 'l-isba of al- ⁄ ārsifī,
which dates from ca. 700/1300, neverthe-
less gives an interesting insight into the
life of the urban proletariat of the sū s in
the towns of the western Ma ∞ rib, if, as
Chalmeta believes, the work was indeed
written in Fez or in Tlemcen and not
in the Narid kingdom as has also been
suggested.
The situation in al-Andalus is quite dif-
ferent from that of the Ma ∞ rib. There
the sū s are in fact one of the better
understood aspects of the economic his-
tory of the country, illuminated as they

are by numerous texts of isba. This
type of source appears to be an Andalu-
sian speciality, taking account of the
fact that Yayā b. Umar, cited above,
was of Andalusian origin, considering
also the doubts which remain over the
geographical localisation of the work of
al- ⁄ ārsifī. Information regarding Cor-
dova is, however, not perhaps quite as
precise, or abundant (in particular from
a topographical and institutional point of
view) as could be hoped. The description
of the sū s of the caliphal capital supplied
by Lévi-Provençal is very general and is
based principally on his knowledge of the
“traditional city” in western (Ma ∞ ribī)
Islam, and on data gleaned from manuals
of isba of which only one, the Risāla of
Ibn Abd al-Raūf, dates from the caliphal
period. A useful point emerging from this
survey is the indication that the corpo-
rative system, which is thought to have
operated in towns of the Abbāsid East,
did not exist in al-Andalus: there were no
professional “corporations” as such, only
amīns or ārifs recognised by the authorities
and serving as responsible intermediaries
between them and each profession. Chal-
meta's fundamental work supplies much
more abundant information.
Besides the information, perhaps rather
theoretical, which may be drawn from
it regarding the jurisdiction of the āib
al-sū/mutasib of caliphal Cordova (relat-
ing to the supervision of prayer, mar-
riages, etc.), the Risāla fī adab al- isba by
Ibn Abd al-Raūf provides some interest-
ing details concerning the regulation of
the sū s of Cordova in the 4th/10th cen-
tury, weights and measures and the types
of fraud likely to be committed by artisans
and merchants. But the two most impor-
tant texts for the study of the sū in al-
Andalus are: the Risāla fi 'l-aā wa 'l-isba
by Ibn Abdūn, which contains a wealth
of detail regarding control of the market