Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 260

of Seville ca. 1100 A.D., and the Kitāb fī
adab al-isba by al- Saaī, which supplies
similar information regarding Malaga of
about a century later. All of these texts,
which cover norms of activity for those
responsible for the market, the regula-
tions which they are expected to apply
and safeguards against the more blatant
forms of fraud, are more concerned with
the control of professions and the polic-
ing of the market, thus its functioning and
practical reality, than with the broader
function of the isba.
This seems to be due to the specif-
ics of this control of the market in al-
Andalus, where the Umayyad tradition
seems to have preserved, better than was
the case in the Abbāsid East, a post for
the policing of commercial activities, the
one responsible retaining the title of walī
al-sū or āib al-sū. There is no doubt of
the existence of a particular magistrate
entrusted with the wilāyat al-sū , distinct
from the wilāyat al-madīna since the time
of Abd al-Raman II (206-38/822-52).
Information is available concerning
numerous jurists who exercised this func-
tion, which was closely involved with the
practical regulation of economic life, and
constituted one of the echelons of a kind
of cursus honorum of magistratures and
senior official posts (Ibn Abd al-Raūf, for
example, seems to have been successively
āib al-sū, wālī al-madīna , then wazīr ). For
P. Chalmeta, confusion with the isba was
a late and rather deliberate development
in al-Andalus, and among the populace,
the functionary entrusted with this role
was still seen primarily as “controller of
the market”. The later treatise, that of
al-Saaī, is also the more precise and
more vivid in regard to the ingenuity of
fraudulent practices, the composition and
manufacture of products: it provides an
exceptionally clear insight into the daily life
of a sū which seems principally devoted

to the promotion of a multiplicity of small
and highly specialised businesses.
The Andalusian treatises often paint a
detailed and colourful picture of a world of
impecunious small tradesmen and rogues,
seeming to exist on the very edge of sur-
vival. They have little to say of higher-
level commercial activities, and are almost
silent on the subject of costly merchandise
(where luxury products are mentioned, it
is their manufacture which is described,
rather than their marketing). Chalmeta
draws a firm distinction between the
closed world of small artisans and mer-
chants of the sū as such, defined by him
as awāntī , and the much more open one
of the major traders, tu ¡¡ ār , who were
not, in his opinion, subject to the juris-
diction of the āib al-sū . He stresses the
separation of the two commercial circuits,
local and long distance, which in his view
had very little in the way of coordination
or interaction with each other, and even
developed in divergent directions. In her
study of commerce—and particularly
large-scale commerce—in al-Andalus,
O.R. Constable, while slightly modifying
the notion of the non-intervention of the
āib al-sū in long distance commerce (in
areas such as the supervision of vessels
and of ports), agrees that texts dealing
with control of the Andalusian sū leave
aside almost entirely precious products,
major commerce and major traders. She
believes that others were entrusted with
this charge, but concedes that the sources
say virtually nothing on the subject. It
would probably be necessary to distin-
guish between different types of town.
It would be helpful to have a better
knowledge of the precise geography of
the places, in the city, where commercial
activities were practised. The sū in the
strict sense, the aysāriyya s, fundu s, open
markets, certainly also played an impor-
tant role, without counting the extramural