Introduction: the inheritors

The fourth/tenth-century traveller and geographer al-Muqaddasῑ (d. c. 390/1000) observed laconically that the inhabitants of central Arabia were both ‘frugal and emaciated, so little nourished are they by food’. In the account of his travels through nineteenth-century Arabia Deserta, Doughty noted that the ‘Arab can live for long months so slenderly nourished that it seems to us they endure without food’. While one cautions against assuming that conditions remained static over the intervening millennium, both comments strikingly reflect a mood found in Muslim ‘recollections’ of their early community. This introduction, impressionistic as it must be, attempts to capture basic features of the Arab food culture before the rise to prominence of the major urban centres of the emerging Islamic tradition in the provinces of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Persia and beyond.

First, central Arabia in the Prophet’s lifetime experienced a relative scarcity of food resources, and hence its fellow traveller, hunger. The Prophet Muḥammad was once asked, ‘We live in a land where we are afflicted by hunger, so when may we eat animals which have died a natural death?’ The tradition (ḥadῑth) is making a legal point concerning meat not ritually slaughtered. Implicitly it also touches on a familiar problem of scarcity and necessity. The Prophet answered, ‘As long as you have neither a morning or evening drink [presumably milk] or gather vegetables you may eat them.