Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 4

alone, are only of historical and termi-
nological value. It was only in the 19th
century that, in Egypt, there appeared
the first Arabic agricultural work based
on modern science; it was produced by
Amad Nadā who, after being sent to
France on an educational mission, wrote
the two-volume usn al-ināa fīilm al-zirāa ,
published in Cairo in 1291/1874. At the
present time, text books in the Arabic lan-
guage exist in all branches of agriculture,
written by the teachers of the faculties and
practical schools of agriculture.

home of the celebrated Latin agronomist
Junius Columella of Gades/Cádiz, that
an agricultural literature in the Arabic
language was created and developed,
particularly during the 5th/11th and
6th/12th centuries, in the brilliant period
of the satraps ( mulūk al-awāif ) and the
Almoravid governors who followed.
The principal centres of this literature
were Cordova, Toledo, Seville, Granada
and, to a lesser extent, Almeria. In Cor-
dova the great doctor Abu 'l-āsim
Zahrāwī, who died in 404/1010, known
as Albucasis in the Middle Ages, is reputed
to be the author of a Compendium on
agronomy ( Mu ¶ taar kitāb al-filāa ).
In Toledo, at the court of the renowned
al-Mamūn, the great “garden lover”,
lived the celebrated doctor Ibn Wāfid
(d. 467/1075) known as Abenguefith in
the Middle Ages. He was appointed by
al-Mamūn to create his royal botanical
garden ( ⁄ annat al-sulān ). Among other
works, he wrote a treatise ( ma ¡ mū ) on
agronomy which was translated into Cas-
tilian in the Middle Ages. Another inhab-
itant of Toledo, Muammad b. Ibrāhīm
Ibn Baāl, devoted himself exclusively
to agronomy. He performed the regu-
lar pilgrimage, travelling via Sicily and
Egypt, and brought back many botani-
cal and agronomic notes from the East.
He also was in the service of al-Mamūn,
for whom he wrote a lengthy treatise on
agronomy ( dīwān al-filāa ); this work was
subsequently abridged into one volume
with sixteen chapters ( bāb ), with the title
Kitāb al-asd wa 'l-bayān “Concision and
clarity”. This work, which was translated
into Castilian in the Middle Ages, was
published in 1955 with a modern Castilian
introduction. The treatise by Ibn Baāl is
singular in that it contains no reference to
earlier agronomists; it appears to be based
exlusively on the personal experiences of

3.— Terminology and literature
For the Arabic terminology of agro-
nomic science there exists a dictionary
compiled by the writer of this article
( Dictionnaire français-arabe des termes agricoles ,
Damascus 1943, Cairo 1957), contain-
ing about ten thousand terms concisely
defined in Arabic.
The Arabic language is rich in agri-
cultural terms, particularly in relation
to date-palms, vines, cereals and desert
plants (cf. the Mu ¶ aa of Ibn Sīda), and
the imagination of the poets of antiquity
has endowed it with a vast and original
literature on the nature of plants and
their connexions with human beings.
Not only flowers (roses, narcissi, jasmine,
violets, pinks, irises, anemones, etc.) and
fruit (dates, apricots, apples, pears, pome-
granates, jububes, Neapolitan medlars,
quinces, Seville oranges, lemons, etc.) but
also a great quantity of cereals, legumes,
vegetables and wild plants of the fields,
pasturages and prairies are mentioned or
described in verse.

(Mustafa Al-Shihabi)

ii.—Muslim West
So far as we know at present, it was
exclusively in the Iberian peninsula, the