Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond

Kirill Dmitriev is lecturer in Arabic at the University of St Andrews, UK. His primary research focuses on the study of classical Arabic language and literature, the religious history of the Arab world, and comparative literature. He is the author of Das poetische Werk des Abū Sahr al-Hudalī, Eine literatur-anthropologische Studie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), co-editor of the volume Religious Culture in Late Antique Arabia, Selected Studies on the Late Antique Religious Mind (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, Islamic history and thought 6, 2017), and convener of the collaborative research initiative Khamriyya as a World Poetic Genre: Comparative Perspectives on Wine Poetry in Near and Middle Eastern Literatures. Julia Hauser is assistant professor of global history and the history of globalization processes at the University of Kassel. She is currently working on an entangled history of vegetarianism. Her work has been supported by grants from the German Research Association, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gemeinschaft, and the Max Weber Foundation. She is the author of German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut: Competing Missions, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015, and co-editor, with Christine Lindner and Esther Möller, of Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19th-20th centuries), Würzburg: Ergon, 2016. Julia Hauser is a member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Bilal Orfali is associate professor of Arabic Studies at the American University of Beirut. He specializes in Arabic literature, Sufism, and Qurʾanic Studies. He co-edits al-Abhath Journal, and Brill’s book series Texts and Studies on the Qurʾan. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on a broad range of subjects relevant to Arabic and Islamic Studies.

Notes on Contributors



Introduction



Part 1

Food and Social Status



Social Dining, Banqueting, and the Cultivation of a Coherent Social Identity

The Case of Damascene ʿUlamaʾ in the Late Mamluk and Early Ottoman Period

Tarek Abu Hussein



Eating Up

Food Consumption and Social Status in Late Ottoman Greater Syria

Christian Saßmannshause



Part 2

Prohibitions and Prescriptions from Classical Islam to the Present



Peeling Onions, Layer by Layer

A Journey with Two Bulbs through the Islamicate World and Its Literature

Yasmin Amin



Beyond Ḥalāl

The Dos and Don’ts of Syrian Medieval Cookery in a Twelfth-Century Market Inspector Manual

Karen Moukheiber



Molecular Halal

Producing, Debating, and Evading Halal Certification in South Africa

Shaheed Tayob



Part 3

Food, Gender, and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries



Food, Happiness, and the Egyptian Kitchen (1900–1952)

Anny Gaul



Food, Body, Society

al-Shidyāq’s Somatic Experience of Nineteenth-Century Communities

Christian Junge



Part 4

Intoxication: Wine and Hashish in Literary Sources and Beyond



The Symbolism of Wine in Early Arabic Love Poetry

Observations on the Poetry of Abū Ṣakhr al-Hudhalī

Kirill Dmitriev



Hashish and Food

Arabic and European Medieval Dreams of Edible Paradises

Danilo Marino

The “Abominable Pig” and the “Mother of All Vices”

Pork, Wine, and the Culinary Clash of Civilizations in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Eric Dursteler



Part 5

Abstention: Vegetarianism in the Mediterranean and Europe from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century



An Ontological Dispute in the Writings of Porphyry of Tyre

The Discussion of Meat Eating as a Battlefield for Competing Worldviews in Antiquity

Pedro Ribeiro Martins



The Missionary and the Heretic

Debating Veganism in the Medieval Islamic World

Kevin Blankinship



A Frugal Crescent

Perceptions of Foodways in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Vegetarian Discourse

Julia Hauser



Part 6

Managing Scarcity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries



Some Eat to Remember, Some to Forget

Starving, Eating, and Coping in the Syrian Famine of World War I

Tylor Brand



Local Histories of International Food-Aid Policies from the Interwar Period to the 1960s

The World Food Programme in the Middle East

Lola Wilhelm



Index