Chapter 3
[Scheherazade] possessed courage, wit, and penetration. She had read much, and had so admirable a memory, that she never forgot any thing she had read.
—ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
ANOTHER OF THE GREAT MYTHS OF PAPER HISTORY CONcerns Chinese prisoners. This one comes to us from Al-Tha’īlibī, a tenth-century Arab historian who wrote a book with the dubious title Book of Curious and Entertaining Information. In it, he says that after the battle of Talas in 751, the Arab commander Ziyad ibn Salih, having defeated the Chinese forces of Gao Xianzhi, took Chinese prisoners who then went on to teach papermaking to artisans in Samarkand. Thereafter, according to Al-Tha’īlibī, paper was a valuable export for the city: “Its value was universally recognized and people everywhere used it,” he wrote.
The problem with this story is that paper had already been in use in Central Asia in the fourth century, as was proven in 1907 by the legendary Hungarian-born British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein. Stein discovered a packet of undelivered letters written on paper in Central Asia dating from 313–14. An angry wife whose husband had gone off somewhere and left her with no money had written them. “I would rather be a dog’s wife or a pig’s wife than yours,” she wrote.
According to Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, the great Chinese scholar who died in 2015 at the age of 105, paper was first made in Central Asia no later than the early fifth century. Arab words for paper, such as kaghid and qirtas—a word that is used in the Qur’an—are thought to be of Chinese origin. Others credit papermaking in Central Asia to the Buddhist monks who were prominent in the area decades before the 741 battle with the Chinese.
In any event, it must have taken time to perfect the craft of papermaking in Central Asia. Made from beaten rags, it was different from Chinese paper. The making of paper from rags was not a Central Asian invention either (as usual, the Chinese had gotten there first), but they were the first to produce high-quality paper exclusively from rags. When rags were used in China, they were only one component in a mixed pulp. The Arabs also sized their paper differently. The Chinese often used a glue made from lichen, while the Arabs, living in a much drier climate, used a starch made from rice and wheat.
Samarkand, at the western end of the Silk Road, conquered by Alexander the Great in 329, had long been an important center of commerce. In the eighth century, linen rag paper from Samarkand, commonly known as Samarkand paper, became famous in the Islamic world, which turned the city into the first paper center outside of eastern Asia.
ORIGINALLY, THE WORD “Arab” specifically meant someone from the Arabian Peninsula. But after the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, established an Islamic theocracy in Medina in 622, the Arabs began to expand beyond their peninsula, and the word began to be applied to other peoples. In 634 the Arabs took Syria and Iraq. Eleven years later, they controlled Cyrenaica, the eastern part of what is now Libya, Egypt, and the upper Mesopotamian region.
In 660 the Umayyads, a merchant family from Mecca, gained control of the caliphate, or Islamic government, and moved their capital to Damascus. In 750 the Abbasids, direct descendants of Al-’Abbas ibn ’Abd al-Muttalib, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, overthrew the Umayyads and established their capital in Kufa, a city on the banks of the Euphrates. In 762 the new caliph, Al-Mansur, built a splendid new capital to the north of Kufa, a grand city of palaces and gardens named Baghdad.
Under the Abbasid caliphs, the Islamic world blossomed—it was a golden age of culture and learning. In time, they ruled an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees in the east to the Amu Darya River in the west; the Amu Darya runs through Central Asia, past Afghanistan, and into what is today Pakistan. As they expanded their reach, the Arabs took their religion, science, and culture with them—and to spread their ideas and their laws, they made paper.
The Abbasid Caliphate faced fierce resistance from the Persians, whom they finally defeated in 660, and from the Berbers of North Africa, whom they defeated at the end of the seventh century. They tried unsuccessfully to take India, controlled Sicily from 847 until the Normans conquered it in 1072, struggled to gain control of Cyprus, and, for a generation, controlled Bari and Taranto on the Italian mainland. The great Abbasid Caliphate lasted only 150 years before splintering off into smaller groups that became increasingly independent. By the late ninth century, the Turkish military controlled the caliphate and by the eleventh century, Baghdad was part of the Ottoman Empire.
As the Arabs conquered territories in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe, they built on and adapted aspects from all the cultures they acquired. Now a minority in the Muslim world, the Arabs were open to other cultures and peoples, though Arab blood always had special status. When Al-Mansur was building Baghdad, he consulted constantly with two non-Arab men. The first, Nawbakht, was a Persian ex-Zoroastrian, and the second, Masha’allah, was a Jew. The Muslim population was divided in many different ways—by language, by region, by culture—but the most important and long-lasting schism was between the Sunnis and Shi’as. Originally a disagreement about the succession of leadership following the Prophet Muhammad’s death, this enmity became a major factor in the destruction of the Islamic Empire, and continues to be the source of much tragic strife, violence, and civil war in the Muslim world today.
THOUGH THEY LATER earned the reputation of being a highly literary and poetic people, the early Arabs had little need for writing material. They did not even develop a written language until the late fourth and fifth century, and then it was a Semitic language from the Phoenician family, written right to left with only consonants. Very few examples of pre-Islamic Arab writing have been discovered. The Arabs did have poetry, but it was oral poetry. The poet would recite his poems to his handpicked disciples, who would memorize and spread them to the general public through recitation.
The use of writing in the Arab world increased with the founding of Islam in the first half of the seventh century. The Qur’an was believed to be God’s word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, who, like most of the people on the Arabian Peninsula at the time, could not read or write. He dictated the Qur’an to scribes. As Islam spread, more and more copies of the Holy Book were needed, and each copy had to be made with painstaking accuracy. Not a syllable of God’s word could be altered. The pages of the book themselves also had to be beautiful—the origin of Arab calligraphy.
During Muhammad’s lifetime, only a few written copies of the Qur’an existed, as its words were largely transmitted in the same oral manner as poetry. That is why the Muslim religion has always attached a great importance to memorization. But in 633, a year after Muhammad’s death, numerous hafiz, the men who memorized and recited the Qur’an, were killed in battles, and the Muslim leaders decided that orality was not reliable enough. More written copies of the Holy Book were needed. Scribes were put to work, and from the time of Muhammad’s death to the time of the Abbasid Caliphate 130 years later, written Arabic changed from a crude and awkward scratch to a graceful, flowing language with one of the most beautiful scripts ever created.
Muslim calligraphers were often men of high social standing, even aristocrats, and many of their names have been preserved in the histories of their day. The great calligraphers of the Qur’an were respected as holy men. In fact, it says in the Qur’an that God gave us the pen—suggesting that writing comes from God. The number of cursive styles used to write Arabic increased; by the tenth century, there were twenty—some curvy and swirling, others more angular, still others more horizontal.
IN THE COURSE of their conquests, the Muslims came into contact with many centers of learning, and every conquest advanced their knowledge. They learned papermaking and alchemy from the Chinese in Central Asia, and mathematics from the peoples of Egypt and Syria. From the Greeks, they learned hydraulic engineering, and in North Africa, Spain, and Sicily, they observed Roman civil engineering—the building of bridges, dams, aqueducts, and irrigation.
If the Arabs had encountered papermaking earlier in their history, and they may have, they would have had little use for it. But by the time they began making paper in Central Asia, they were expanding their empire and the reach of their religion, and needed it to aid that expansion. Paper was also essential for the bureaucracy that was administering their empire, for the many new things they were learning, and for their increasingly rich culture of arts and science.
Jonathan Bloom, professor of Islamic and Asian art at Boston College, defines a “literate society” as one “where a significant portion of the people regularly read and wrote,” and credits the Islamic Empire as being the world’s first truly literate society. The Muslims believed that the written word was a privilege not just for the elite few, but for the population at large—rich and poor, religious and secular.
When the Abbasids first came to power, everything was still being recorded on papyrus, which had become easily available after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641. Records were kept on loose sheets or in rolls until Vizier Khalid ibn Barmak ordered that all the papyrus records be transferred to codices, which had been the Syrian practice. Papyrus does not work well for codices because the pages fray, and so like the Syrians, the Abbasids began using parchment.
In 786 Harun al-Rashid, the son of an Abbasid caliph, came to power. “Al-Rashid” was an honorific meaning “the just” and Harun’s twenty-three-year reign was lavishly praised in his lifetime and throughout subsequent history. Even the nineteenth-century British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote of “the good Haroun Alraschid.” But in truth Harun’s reign was marked by brutality, torture, and a great deal of killing. However, he was also known for spurring a rich expansion of Arab culture, and one of those achievements was that his administrator Al-Fadl al-Yahyã pushed for all government work, including that stored in libraries, to be switched from parchment to paper.
The Arabs did not give up parchment or even papyrus easily. They tried cultivating papyrus along the Euphrates, and hired Egyptian experts from the Nile delta to produce it. But in time, the Arabs came to recognize that papyrus couldn’t meet their needs and that paper—inexpensive, lightweight, and durable—could. Paper also had another important advantage: it prevented fraud. Parchment and papyrus documents could be easily altered, but paper documents could not.
In order to make paper work for them, the Arabs had to make changes. The process of producing ink in the Arab world was not well organized, as each calligrapher and scribe made his own ink. Furthermore, that ink, designed for parchment, had a high acid content that ate through paper. With their switch to paper, the Arabs turned to lampblack ink, the black carbon ink of choice for the Chinese. The new ink was called midad.
Handwriting changed with paper too. A new style of cursive script was adopted, with spaces between words for easier reading and comprehension by the general public.
The original Muslim scribes were men who copied the Qur’an, and even after paper was introduced, they stubbornly insisted on writing the sacred text on parchment because it would last. But as a result of the expanding empire, there were many other works to transcribe as well, and for these, the scribes did turn to paper. As the Arab Empire continued to grow, the kutab, the writers, became central to their bureaucracy. In theory, these men were simply bureaucrats who did the paperwork, but some became extremely powerful government aides and advisers. Government documents were expected to be not only informative but elegant in style and beautifully written. The kutab were expected to be knowledgeable about everything from poetry to folk tales to the Qur’an.
ONCE THE CHANGE to paper was made, a great deal of it was needed, and in the year 794 the caliphate hired Chinese workers to build a paper mill in Baghdad so that the great capital could produce its own. Baghdad was perfectly situated for a paper mill: it was situated on a river and had a large enough population to produce a sufficient supply of rags.
The Baghdad mill was water-powered. One of the important ideas that the Arabs learned from the Greeks was how to harness the force of hydraulics. Both the vertical and the horizontal waterwheel were invented in third-century BCE Greece, and a Greek engineer, Philo of Byzantium, wrote a technical book on waterwheels that the Arabs likely translated. Around 10 BCE, the Roman engineer Vitruvius had described a gear-driven water-powered undershot wheel, which is a vertical wheel with paddles that are moved by the water at the bottom to drive a horizontal axle. Only a few years later, an overshot wheel that used buckets instead of paddles was developed; the buckets were propelled by the water that was deposited by other buckets passing over the wheel.
These wheels were first utilized by the Greeks for grinding grain, and in one case, for a machine that kneaded bread. By 30 CE, waterwheels were being used in China in the iron smelting process. The Romans attached waterwheels to boats to take advantage of water movement, and later, the Arabs did the same on the Tigris and Euphrates. The Arabs combined all of these ideas in the manufacture of paper, an inventive solution born out of knowledge of two cultures. The use of a waterwheel was one of the pivotal innovations in the history of paper. From the eighth century until the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, a paper mill was a watermill built near a river or falls where the water ran swiftly.
SOME SAMPLES OF Baghdad paper have survived. Among them is a letter sent to Egypt from a member of the Babylonian Jewish academy, now housed in the Cambridge University Library. Dating from the ninth century, it is written on Baghdad paper that is thick, but smooth and even. A Qur’an from the year 1000 has also survived. Inscribed in beautiful, ornate script by the famous scribe Ibn al-Bawwab, it is written on paper that is smooth and thin, demonstrating how by that time, Baghdad was producing paper of a high-enough quality to be deemed suitable for the Qur’an.
Baghdad could not vie with the paper production in Samarkand, but otherwise, it had little competition. The Muslim world was limited in terms of its number of paper mills because mills need running water. There can be no desert paper mills. A third Muslim mill was built in Tihamah, the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea, and a fourth farther south by the rivers below the Great Arabian Desert in what is now Yemen.
Then a more serious competitor sprang up: Damascus, Syria. The paper made there was of high quality and it became widely known, even in Europe, where it was called charta damascena, or Damascus paper. The Syrian town of Bambyx on the banks of the Euphrates River also began making paper, which was called charta bambycina, meaning “cotton paper.” Because of this, the Europeans were convinced, as late as the late nineteenth century, that Arab paper was made from cotton and that paper made from rags was therefore a European innovation.
The Arab papermakers tended to live and work together in papermaking villages near the cities. Most of the paper was made out of either hemp or linen, from rags or ropes or sometimes raw material. Ropes that were untwisted and cut up were a good source of hemp. The cut-up material was then soaked in lime, washed off, and dried in the sun. Then it was ground with a mortar and pestle. The resulting pulp was highly diluted in water and the watery mix was placed in a large basin. A rectangular mold, made out of woven split reed stalks sometimes tied to each other with horsehair, was then dipped in the water. The resulting paper that formed on the mold was usually white and a bit puffy, which may be another reason why the Europeans thought it was made from cotton.
When the Arabs began making paper in Cairo in about 900, they had already been using Baghdad and Samarkand paper for a century. Yet Egypt soon proved itself to be an ideal paper producer. The Egyptians grew huge quantities of flax, which was woven into famous high-quality linen, which in turn provided ample rags for the paper industry. Cairo became not only a papermaking center, but also a market center, famous for the variety of paper sold there. By the end of the ninth century, paper was far more popular than papyrus throughout the Muslim world, and rags were becoming greatly valued. A courteous note dated between 883 and 895 ends with the apology, “Pardon the papyrus.” Nonetheless, Egypt continued to make papyrus, where it was used locally and exported to other societies until the thirteenth century.
Ironically, once papyrus making did end in Egypt, it was the Arabs who kept it alive for a time. Perhaps they discovered it growing wild or perhaps they planted it in the marshes near Syracuse, Sicily, which was then under Muslim rule. At any rate, it was used briefly for local government documents, and the Sicilians exported it in small amounts. There was little market for it, however, and papyrus making soon died out.
Parchment survived, however, even in Egypt. The Muslims, Jews, and Coptic Christians all insisted on using it for sacred texts, and the Muslims and Jews used it for certain family documents such as marriage contracts and divorces. It only took about a hundred years for paper to replace parchment in the Arab world, but by the mid-ninth century, paper was the leading material used for most writing, from letters to records to books. Parchment was still used for the Qur’an until about the year 1000, when most Muslim scribes switched to writing their holy book on paper. The Jews continued to use parchment, however, and even today, Jews insist on using parchment for the Torah.
The Arabs had many uses for different papers. A special light, thin paper was also made for messages sent by carrier pigeon. And an amazed Persian traveling in Cairo about 1040 wrote, “The venders of vegetables and spices are furnished with paper in which everything they sell is wrapped.” A century later, a Baghdad physician visiting Cairo caused a stir when he claimed that the paper in which the food was wrapped was made from the cloth wrappings of mummies that Bedouins had stolen and sold to paper mills.
THE ARABS, ESPECIALLY the Abbasids, were not merely open to people and learning from other cultures, they were eager for this exchange. The Qur’an says that good Muslims should seek knowledge, and they did so passionately and with a great deal of ink and paper.
Al-Mansur’s vizier, Khalid Barmak, came from a family of Buddhist clergy in Balkh, a renowned Buddhist center in what is now northern Afghanistan. He and his family were also well versed in Greek culture, and it was Barmak and his family who started the movement under the Abbasids to seek out valuable manuscripts so that they could translate them into Arabic. In this way, the Arabs learned the legends of India; the history of Persia; and Greek logic, mathematics, and medicine. The Arabs also started studying astronomy and calendars, and translated the work of the seventh-century Indian mathematics and astronomy genius Brahmagupta.
Brahmagupta explained cubes and cube roots and squares and square roots, but probably his most important work was introducing the concepts of zero and negative numbers. These may seem like simple ideas to us now, but they are counterintuitive. How can there be a number for nothing? If you have five goats and you take away five goats, how many goats are left? There aren’t any. But the mathematical answer is 0, a number that you can work with for further calculations. The same is true with negative numbers. These ideas advanced mathematics tremendously. Brahmagupta’s simple rule, one that all schoolchildren still learn at some point, was that when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged. But if a number is multiplied by zero it becomes zero.
When Harun al-Rashid was only twenty-one years old, he was already a legendary general. Even at the age of fourteen he had already led successful military campaigns against the Byzantines. It was for this and not his sense of justice that he was given the title Al-Rashid, the just. Elected caliph, he built himself the grandest palace in Baghdad, and founded a library, research, and translation center, the Khizanat al-Hikma, which sought to collect and translate Greek manuscripts. Many of these had been acquired through diplomatic connections with the Byzantine emperor, and works such as Euclid’s The Elements became extremely influential in shaping Islamic mathematical thinking. Among the other books found in the collection are translations of work by Archimedes for which no original Greek text has ever been found. The center’s first chief librarian, al-Fadl, a poet and translator of Persian, was the son of Nawbakht, who had been an adviser to the caliph’s grandfather in the building of Baghdad.
The next caliph, Harun al-Rashid’s son, Ma’mun, came to power in 813 and wanted to go far beyond acquiring and translating Greek manuscripts, and in the beginning of the ninth century, established the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom, in Baghdad to encourage the study of not only Greek but also Indian mathematics. An early director of the House of Wisdom was a mathematician named Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who changed the Western world by urging the adoption of Hindu numerals—1–9—as well as the zero and the base-ten system that we use today. He recognized that using the Hindu numerals was a far more efficient means of calculation than using the Roman ones. Just compare calculating “32 + 49” to calculating “XXXII + IL.”
The ninth-century mathematician Al-Khwārizmī expressed abstractions in formulas, which he called al-jabr (algebra), an Arab word meaning “restoration.” This was one of the few true mathematical innovations made by the Arabs. The Muslim contribution to mathematics is not so much innovation as it is assimilation. The Arabs were the ones who took all the known ideas from the world around them and put them together into one system. Their skill in mathematics was applied to everything from astronomy to the making of highly accurate sundials, which were placed on the walls of mosques. The Muslim world ran their day on time-telling long before other societies. According to legend, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who sought contacts everywhere, once sent a sundial and an elephant to Charlemagne as gifts of friendship.
Muslim learning often had a practical or even commercial side. A fascination with alchemy led to the distillation of rose water and other flower- and plant-based perfumes, which were sold abroad and along the Silk Road to China. Commercial perfume distilleries thrived in Damascus, Kufa, and Şabūr in Iran.
Muslims are also thought to have learned how to distill alcohol in the eighth century, though the oldest written recipe found is from the ninth century, in a tome entitled Book of Perfume Chemistry and Distillation by Al-Kindt. The Arabs were nevertheless among the first to distill alcohol; the Europeans didn’t learn how to do so until they translated Arab writings on the subject in the twelfth century.
This is an interesting bit of trivia, given that Muslim culture ostensibly abhors drinking alcohol. But early Muslims apparently were drinkers nonetheless; the first reference to it in the Qur’an forbids attending services while intoxicated. Actually, the Qur’an never mentions alcohol per se—it probably didn’t exist at the time it was written—but warns instead about “intoxicants.” It is not certain when or where the absolute prohibition of alcohol consumption in the Muslim world began. The word “alcohol”—like “algebra,” “algorithm,” “alfalfa,” and “alchemy”—is an Arabic word, as its prefix, “al,” functions as a definite article, like “the” in English.
ALCHEMY, ASTRONOMY, ENGINEERING, and mathematics were only one part of what led to the flourishing of books under the Abbasids. At the time, a great European library was one that consisted of a few hundred books, such as the 400-book collection of the ninth-century Abbey of Saint Gall monastery in Switzerland, or France’s twelfth-century Cluny monastery, which had 570 books. In contrast, Arab libraries of that era, even private libraries, boasted thousands or even hundreds of thousands of books.
At the center of this lively literary life were the mosques. Even works commissioned by the Abbasid leaders had to be taken to the mosque to be written. A writer would go to the mosque and find a scribe to whom he could dictate his work. This is why even the most secular of works, even a cookbook, began with a tribute to the greatness and mercy of God. Authors and scribes would sit cross-legged on the floor together creating books.
To take oral literature and write it down gave it prestige in Arab culture. It signified that a work was important and deserved to be preserved for posterity. In Arab culture, writing was everywhere, on objects and on buildings. Since Islam, like Judaism, forbids the representation of humans or animals, writing became the leading visual art.
The Islamic scholar Jonathan Bloom estimated in 2001 that 600,000 handwritten manuscripts have been found, and given the destruction of whole libraries and other mishaps with the passage of time, this is thought to be only a fraction of what was produced. Arab book production began with the Qur’an and theological books on Islamic law and Islamic schisms, creating a wealth of material that sorted out the differences between the Sunnis and Shi’as and Ibadis, the latter of whom were a sect centered in Basra. Then the government, which had previously ruled by oral decree, decided to codify those laws in books, which led to numerous other tomes on civil and religious law and the conflict between them. As the government expanded, an increasing number of books were written on administration. Next came histories, often based on the Qur’an and beginning with the creation, as well as books on the Arab language and linguistics.
Persian culture, like Arab culture, was virtually defined by poetry. The tenth-century rulers of Persia, concerned that Persian culture might disappear following the Arab conquest, commissioned Abolqasem Ferdowsi to write the great epic poem of Persia. The sultan offered Ferdowsi a gold coin per line. Paying by the line can be dangerous; Ferdowsi wrote 50,000 long lines, making his opus, Shahnameh, the longest poem in history. But that was only the beginning of the expense, because scribes were also paid by the line. And then there was the cost of the paper. The sultan insisted on using Chinese paper, the best available, which may also have been an intentional snub to the Arabs. The book became the central classic of Persian literature, and while expensive copies were periodically made, sections were often read to the public by official readers. In the 1970s, a 1530 copy of the Shahnameh, considered the finest illustrated manuscript in Middle Eastern history, was broken apart and sold a page at a time. In 2006, a single page sold at Sotheby’s in London for $1.7 million.
Even after it became traditional to write poetry on paper, poetry retained its strong oral tradition. All kinds of material, sacred and profane, highbrow and lowbrow, were publicly read, and the mosque was a favorite place for such readings. Poetry had the highest standing in the Muslim literary canon, and poems were often committed to memory. Stories, on the other hand, were regarded as literature for the masses. The readers of stories tended to be rough, working-class individuals, and in Egypt, as in Turkey, storytellers had their own guild and performed in coffeehouses. Nonetheless, the caliphs wanted everything that was publicly read, including stories, written down in books. The most famous example of this is One Thousand and One Nights, which is a collection of oral stories that were later written down. Each version of the collection differs somewhat from the others. The earliest version is a fragment of an opening page from the early ninth century that was found in Syria. In the late nineteenth century, Sir Richard Burton undertook to compile and translate into English as many of the stories as he could find. His work is sixteen volumes long, and contains 468 stories. An early French version is only six volumes. Scholars generally believed that there were many more stories than we have found. They were told by an unknown number of people and written down by an unknown number of authors. The Arabs say that no one can read this book through to its end—perhaps because the end has never been found.
In some of the stories, the wise Caliph Harun al-Rashid appears as a character. Some stories seem like fairy tales, others moral allegories; still others are erotic and even sometimes scatological. Pornographic literature, sex manuals, and “dirty” stories were another common Arab genre. They were called kutub al-bah. One Thousand and One Nights is essentially erotic literature. The premise is that a mythical ancient king named Shahriyar discovers his wife in flagrante delicto with a man on the kitchen staff. He has her executed and then decides that he cannot risk being betrayed again and will only make love to virgins, beheading them the next morning.
After Shahriyar spends his time deflowering and beheading numerous women, the vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, understandably against her father’s will, volunteers to be his next lover. She goes ahead with the lovemaking but postpones the execution by telling a tale that she cannot finish that night. The king, wanting to hear the end of the story, allows her to live until the next night, when they again make love and she again tells him that she cannot finish the story that night. And so it goes. She tells stories within stories, so that nothing ends for 2 years and 271 days—1,001 nights. By then, she has given him several children and the king decides not to execute her.
The premise of the stories is that Scheherazade is a woman of extreme intelligence. To establish this it is stated that she not only has extensive knowledge and is well read but she also has an excellent memory. The goal of reading is memorization. A good memory is the key to enlightenment, an idea that pre-dates literate society.
FOOD WAS A favorite topic in the Arab world. Literary anthologies often contained a few pieces on culinary topics. Many poems, often commissioned by aristocrats, were written about the subject, and certain poets became celebrated food poets. Prose writing on food was also common. In fact, some intellectuals complained that there was too much of it. The eighth-century Abd al-Quddus, a rebellious thinker who was eventually executed in 783 by Caliph al-Mahdi in a campaign against heretics, once complained, “If you write about fish and vegetables, you garner much merit in [the public’s] eyes, but if you expound truly scientific subjects, they find it irksome and boring.”
Much of the Arab food writing, as is also true in the West today, was about food for the affluent. Like the better Arab cuisines today, the cooking was sophisticated, conversant in a wide variety of spices and seasonings, and often involved many steps. Also like fashionable food does today, it sometimes took weird turns in an attempt to be bold and new. There was “omelet in a bottle”—eggs were boiled in a bottle until hard and then the bottle was smashed open, leaving eggs shaped like a bottle behind. Or “mock brains”—liver and fat mashed up (essentially chopped liver), stuffed into a copper tubing, boiled, and shaken out onto a plate. We are told this was “similar to brains in appearance as well as in flavor.”
Cookbooks were popular. These were not, however, the world’s first cookbooks. In the fourth century BCE, Archestratus, a Greek in the Grecian colony of Gela on Sicily, wrote a book on food with recipes called The Life of Luxury. In the first century CE, a Roman named Apicius also wrote a small cookbook, and in the second century, Marcus Aurelius’s physician, Galen, wrote what could be considered the first Western health-food/diet book. But the Islamic Empire was the first culture to produce an entire shelf’s worth of cookbooks. Few have survived, but there are enough references to “cookbooks” in documents for historians to suppose that there were quite a few of them. In 945, Hamdani wrote, “The actual food and drink in Yemen are to be preferred to the recipes in the cook books.” A 988 book gives a bibliography of books on seasoning alone, none of which have survived.
One cookbook, dated 1226, was written in Baghdad by a man named Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn al-Karim al-Kãtib al Baghdãdi. His name provides a whole genealogical chart, complete with the names of Muhammad’s ancestors and their location, but we know nothing else about him other than the fact that he loved food and quoted from the Qur’an, which does not rule out the possibility that he was a secular hedonist. As was the custom, he wrote his book, “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate,” and then proceeded to describe and explain the many dishes of the Abbasids:
Pleasure may be divided into six classes, to wit, food, drink, clothed, sex, scent and sound. Of these the noblest and most consequential is food.
Muhammad ibn al-Hasan offers 164 recipes that are written, as all recipes were until late in the Industrial Revolution, in a narrative rather than formulaic style. Here is hummãdiya, a recipe for an unspecified meat, which usually meant mutton.
Cut fat meat into middling pieces, and leave in the saucepan with a covering of water and a little salt. Boil, then throw in the stout cotton bag containing the seasoning, namely dry coriander, ginger, pepper, and cloves ground fine: add also a few pieces of cinnamon. Now mince red meat with seasonings, and make it into cabobs: where the saucepan is boiling, throw in the cabobs, and as soon as these are cooked, remove the bag of seasonings. Now take the pulp of large citrons, seeded, and squeeze well in the hand, add about a quarter as much of grape-juice, and pour into the saucepan on top of the meat. Boil for an hour. Take sweet almonds, peel, chop up fine, soak in water, and add to the saucepan. Sweeten with sugar, or with syrup if preferred. Leave the saucepan over the fire to settle. Sprinkle with rose-water, wipe the side with a clean rag, and remove.
Here is a recipe for leftovers, qaliya al-shiwa, which means fried roast.
Take cold roast of yesterday and cut into small pieces. Take fresh sesame oil, put into the frying pan, and boil: then add the roast stirring. When its fat is melted, throw in fine-brayed coriander, cumin, and cinnamon. If desired sour, sprinkle with a little vinegar colored with saffron. Garnish with poached eggs: instead of vinegar, lemon-juice may be used, only in that case without eggs. Leave over a gentle fire an hour to settle: then remove.
Arab cuisine included dessert recipes centuries before the Europeans were eating desserts. This might have been because, also unlike the Europeans at the time, the Arabs cultivated sugarcane. Here is a recipe for halwa, the sweet nougat that is still made in very much the same way throughout the Arab and Mediterranean worlds:
Take sugar, dissolve in water, and boil until set: then remove from the dish, and pour onto a soft surface to cool. Take an iron stake with soft head and plant it into the mass, then pull up the sugar, stretching it with the hands and drawing it up the stake all the time, until it becomes white, then throw once more on the surface. Knead in pistachios, and cut into strips and triangles. If desired it may be colored, either with saffron or with vermilion. Sometimes it is crumbled with a little peeled almonds, sesame, or poppy.
This book bespeaks an opulent society, but only a generation after it was printed, the Mongols invaded and sacked Baghdad, burning its libraries and thereby ending the golden Abbasid age.