Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 19

the present, the renown of the succulent
daglāt al-nūr “fingers of light” of Alge-
ria and Tunisia, exported to all parts of
Europe, needs hardly to be stressed.
The coverage and shade provided by
the palmery create conditions favourable
to animal as well as vegetal life. Thus the
date palm has its share of arboreal guests
who use it both as a habitant and a source
of food. Among these, the most common
is the Palm Rat or Alexandria Rat ( Mus
alexandrinus ) which, as a result of mari-
time trade, has spread as far as Italy. It
builds its nest at the top of the tree and,
when hunted, it blows itself up like a bal-
loon and, consequently, can drop to the
ground without suffering any harm. It is
often confused with the Cabbage-Palm
Rat ( unba ; Tam., akkolen ) which in fact
is a small squirrel ( Euxerus erythropos ) liv-
ing on dates; its flesh, when pounded, is
administered in pellet form to camels as
a remedy against fits. In the Indies, the
Cabbage-Palm Squirrel ( Sciurus palmarum ;
sin ¡ āb al-na ¶ l, ¡ ulhum ) and the Reddish
Rat ( Mus rufescens ) are found in a date
palm habitat. In addition to these small
mammals, a considerable population of
fruit-eating passerines and wild doves is to
be found nesting in the clumps of palms.

know of it, nor did Ctesias, physician of
Artaxerxes Memnon ( ca. 416), but in the
age of Alexander the Great, Nearchos,
his admiral, and Onesicritos, who com-
posed a history of this ruler's expedition,
speak of a reed of India producing “honey
without bees”, as does Megasthenes, who
was the ambassador of Seleucus Nica-
tor. Theophrastos, author of a history of
plants who died in 287 B.C., speaks of a
meli kalaminon , an expression that is trans-
lated as “reed honey”. Pliny did not know
of sugar cane, but Dioscorides mentions a
kind of coagulated honey from India and
Yemen that is gathered from a reed.
It is not known exactly when the cul-
tivation of sugar cane passed from India
to Persia. The scholars of the celebrated
School of Medicine of ⁄ undaysābūr,
which flourished between 532 and 579
A.D., knew of sugar cane through their
relations with India. It is not impossible
that they had a part in the introduc-
tion of sugar cane into Persia, where it
found favourable ground for its cultiva-
tion in the hot and humid swampy land
of Lower Mesopotamia and ‡ ūzistān.
After the conquest of Persia by the Arabs,
the cultivation of sugar cane was devel-
oped by them fairly rapidly, wherever the
conditions of the climate responded to the
needs of the plant, and it reached as far as
the Muslim West.

(F. Viré)

Sugar cane

I.—Muslim East
The zones of cultivation of sugar cane
in the Eastern Muslim world are quite
numerous, for several regions have low
ground enjoying a hot and humid climate
favourable to its cultivation and able to be
irrigated easily. The cultivation of sugar
cane has also developed

The Arabic aab al-sukkar is also called
aab al-ma , because one sucks it, and
aab ulw . Cultivated sugar cane may
be from a wild variety, but the attempts
which have been made to cultivate the
wild species which is related to it have
not been successful. The country of origin
of sugar cane cultivation is Bengal, from
where, in the 7th century B.C., it must
have passed to China. Herodotus did not

- in ‡ ūzistān or Ahwāz, in the region of
Tustar, watered by the Masruān canal
diverted from the Du ¡ ayl, in that of