Along with pepper, nutmeg, and mace, the cloves of the Moluccas played an important role in the history of world trade. The earliest records of their use in China come from the Han dynasty early in the second century BCE. It appears that the Chinese first received cloves through several cultural intermediaries, including Nusantao seafarers, who are among the putative ancestors of today’s Filipinos. The spice reached India around the second century CE, where it was given the Sanskrit name kalika-phala, which diffused into Arabic-speaking lands as karanful.
Cloves had made it into both Greek and Egyptian markets by the first century, and over the next two centuries, Phoenician traders delivered cloves to all parts of the Mediterranean. Later, Radhanite Jewish traders assured their distribution throughout Europe.
It took until the publication of the journals of Marco Polo around 1300 for Europeans to become aware of the origin of cloves. The book describes how, on his way back to Europe, the Venetian learned about cloves in Hui Muslim and Han Chinese ports on the East China Sea. By 1421, the Hui Muslim naval commander Zheng He had cultivated the collaboration of Moluccan spice traders, who had already converted to Islam in order to renew links among Muslim traders who moved cloves along various trade routes. The Portuguese were late-comers to the spice trade, but by the early sixteenth century, they had developed a monopoly on the valuable spice, which lasted for about a century. Following the Portuguese, Dutch middlemen controlled clove commerce until 1662, when King Charles II forbid the purchase of cloves by Englishmen unless they came directly from the producers.
Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 4, 2013.
Turner, Jack. Spice: The History of a Temptation. New York: Vintage, 2005.
Weiss, E. A. Spice Crops. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2002.
• MAQLAY SAMAK •
Fried Fish on a Bed of Coconut Rice
Perhaps no food items give the sense of ancient trade across the Indian Ocean as clearly as spiced fish, rice, coconut milk, lentils, kaffir limes, and young ginger. Indeed, it is hard for newcomers to the Omani coast to know whether they are being served traditional Omani Arabic dishes or recently introduced fare from the many Indian and Pakistani guest workers currently engaged in the foodservice industry in the sultanate. From a historical perspective, trade between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent in staple grains, legumes, fruits, dried fish, vegetables, and spices has been going on for so long that the definitions of what is traditional, endemic, or authentic to either landscape are ambiguous at best.
Maqlay samak, which translates simply as “fried fish” in Yemeni Arabic, calls for marinating fish in spice-laden lime juice, frying it, and then serving it on a bed of rice infused with coconut milk. Any coastal white fish, such as bream, mullet, or sea bass, can be used.
A simple side dish of baked eggplant slices marinated in olive oil or of baba ghanoush is a fitting accompaniment. Serves 4.
½ cup green lentils
¾ teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1½ cups basmati rice
Olive oil for sautéing rice
4 cardamom pods, split
Ghee for frying
1 tablespoon peeled and grated fresh ginger
3 cups coconut milk
1 cup water
Sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground cumin seeds
1 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom seeds
1 teaspoon freshly ground cassia cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
Juice of 2 kaffir limes
1 fish, about 2 pounds, cleaned
In a bowl, combine the lentils with water to cover and stir in the lemon juice. Allow to soak at room temperature for about 7 hours. Drain, rinse, and reserve.
Put the rice in a bowl, add water to cover generously, and swirl the rice around with your fingers until the water is cloudy. Pour off the water, re-cover the rice with water, and swirl the rice again, then drain. Repeat until the rinsing water is clear, then drain the rice well. In a frying pan or wide saucepan, heat a spoonful or so of olive oil over low heat. Add the rice and sauté for a couple minutes, then remove from the heat and set aside. This step ensures the rice grains will not stick together as they cook.
In a dry saucepan, toast the cardamom pods until fragrant, then remove from pan. Add ½ teaspoon ghee to the same pan and heat over medium-high heat. Add the ginger and cook until fragrant. Add the reserved lentils and rice and stir well. Add the coconut milk, water, and cardamom pods and bring to a simmer. Season with salt, turn down the heat to low, cover, and cook until the liquid has been absorbed and the rice and lentils are tender, 30 to 45 minutes. Remove from the heat. Use a spoon to remove the cardamom pods before serving.
About 10 minutes before you put the rice and lentils on to cook, begin preparing the fish. In a shallow bowl large enough to accommodate the fish, combine the cumin, ground cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, kaffir lime juice, and a pinch of salt and stir well. Let stand until the mixture thickens, at least 10 minutes. Rinse the fish, pat dry, and place in the bowl with the spice mixture, turning the fish to coat it evenly. Let marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes.
Place a frying pan or wok over medium-high heat and brush the surface with ghee. Heat until the ghee is sizzling, then remove the fish from the marinade, add it to the pan, and fry, turning as needed to prevent scorching, until well browned on both sides and the flesh just flakes when prodded with a knife tip, 10 to 12 minutes total. The timing will depend on the thickness of the fish.
Spoon the rice onto a platter, top with the fish, and serve.
Al Taie, Lamees Abdullah. Al-Azaf: The Omani Cookbook. Muscat: Oman Bookshop, 1995, pp. 161–62.
CHAPTER 5
Mecca and the Migrations of Muslim and Jewish Traders
It is a moonless night along the beaches that front the resort hotels of Abu Dhabi. And yet, I struggle to find any darkness at all in the desert itself as I speed across a stretch of the Arabian Peninsula. The land itself remains illuminated with as many foot-candles as crude oil can buy. There are roving spotlights, laser shows dancing across the bay, and blazing digital billboards. I glimpse concert halls and stadiums surrounded by parking lots with metal halide floodlights kept so bright that you could read a newspaper without any visual aids.
As I speed along the superhighway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai in a Lexus rented as a “shuttle” by my favorite airline, I am amazed by what I can see in the wee hours of the morning. One of the recently completed resorts, Palm Jumeirah, occupies an artificial island complex constructed of a half billion metric tons of rock and sand piled up in a silhouette of a date palm. In addition to roughly fifty miles of newly created beaches lining the Persian Gulf, there are over four thousand villas, apartments, and hotel rooms. These habitations surround a multimedia entertainment center for those who tire of swimming or sunbathing all day. A sheikh has built a giant racetrack there, where you can watch camels fight for the lead from the comfort of your air-conditioned box seat. Skyscrapers more numerous than those in Los Angeles, Tokyo, or São Paulo stretch along the horizon, an infantry of giants marching to the edge of the sea.
One need not succumb to cynicism or sarcasm to see Abu Dhabi and Dubai as the ultimate expressions of globalization to have appeared on the planet toward the end of the twentieth century. Despite some arabesque motifs seen in hotel lobbies, the architecture is cosmopolitan and technology driven rather than culturally based. The food can rightly be called fusion cuisine, since Mexican, Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese ingredients and culinary techniques are used as much as anything locally sourced, traditionally prepared, or endemic to the Arabian Peninsula. And the economy is so global that Halliburton, one of the world’s most powerful oilfield service corporations, which has its founding headquarters in Texas, has established a second headquarters in Dubai
, to accommodate a business that now spans all continents.
But a couple of years after 9/11, when George Bush’s U.S. government was close to awarding a security contract for twenty-two of its international shipping harbors to Dubai Ports World, the entire range of American politics—from the John Birch Society and Michael Savage to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—expressed anxiety. They feared that because Dubai Ports World was operated by a holding company controlled by Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who was also the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Arab terrorists could easily infiltrate its operations.1
As one observer familiar with Dubai explained to a National Public Radio show host, there are indeed terrorists based in Dubai, but expert counterterrorists are just as available for hire there. It is really an ideal place, he suggested, because if you pay the right price, you can purchase excellent intelligence information on terrorist activities and protect yourself from them. It didn’t much matter whether the security-force employees are followers of Islam, Arabic speakers, and UAE natives, they will do the work required as long as you pay them well. Nevertheless, the U.S. Congress voted five to one against the Dubai Ports World contract, and the company quietly turned over four U.S. ports that it had already been managing to an American-owned firm. Nevertheless, its thirty thousand employees continue to manage maritime trade through over fifty ports that U.S. ships frequent in thirty-one countries, making the company as essential to the intercontinental movement of spices, perfumes, medicines, oil, and fiber today as other Arabs were in centuries past.
Although the ports of Dubai and Abu Dhabi may be the most prominent trade centers on the Arabian Peninsula today, fifteen hundred years ago, an altogether different kind of place began to emerge as the peninsula’s most important hub for spice merchants. It was, in ways, a rather odd location for a trade center, for the site called Mecca was far inland from the great ports of its era. What’s more, there were few spices or incense trees of any value that grew in the bleak and inhospitable uplands that surrounded the valley where Mecca was nested.
Even though a few Meccans served as guards or guides on one of the most ancient and frequently traveled Frankincense Trails that passed in or near their town,2 Mecca was somewhat off the beaten path for most caravans moving along the major desert corridors running between Yemen and Syria. As one historian has put it,
In the hilly areas of the Hijaz in western Arabia there were [a few] small commercial and agricultural towns, including Medina and Mecca, and it was the inhabitants of these small Hijazi towns who [became the trade-oriented] elite of the early Muslim empire. . . . The most important of these new trading centers seems to have been Mecca. Mecca is situated in a barren valley between jagged arid mountains, a very discouraging environment for a city, but it seems to have had a religious significance that attracted people. A shrine had grown up around a black meteoritic stone.3
If tens of thousands of Arabs and Jews could be captivated by an enigmatic black meteor believed to have been sent from the heavens—for it was merely one of thousands of meteor fragments that land on earth each year—then perhaps it was because they were rich in imaginative capacity, even though they remained poor in natural resources. Other than that luminous black stone called the Kaaba, venerated by pilgrims passing through the desert, nothing notable or even tangible seemed to occupy Mecca at that time, for it was more of a social and economic backwater than a crossroads.
Out of such an apparent void, however, there emerged a cadre of outrageously audacious and imaginative poets, prophets, and seers who performed and proselytized at nearby fairs, festivals, and celebrations. Keep in mind that “poetry was the sole medium of literary expression among the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period,”4 and that the society believed poets to be endowed with spiritual, political, and promotional power not currently afforded to this calling by contemporary societies. They were the voices that cried out from the desert wilderness, ultimately demanding global attention. Curiously, these charismatic poets and prophets included both Arabs and Jews, and that ultimately led to a showdown between these two Semitic cultures.
Within a few miles of Mecca’s center, three small villages had become renowned both for their markets and for what we might today call their poetry slams. These poorly populated outposts burgeoned with thousands of additional Bedouin tents a few times each year when trade fairs featured goods passed hand to hand, as well as stories and verses passed mouth to mouth from as far away as Yemen, Oman, Egypt, Syria, Chaldea, and Persia.
At these pre-Islamic fairs, various goods entered new hands without being taxed or even elaborated into value-added products. At the fabled trade fair in the meager marketplace of Ukaz, just outside Mecca, most of the local Bedouins simply bought fresh goat meat, bulgur wheat, raisins, and dates, and perhaps sold some of their own goat cheese, clarified butter, or medicinal plants. They also brought in huge piles of stiff rawhides and bags of unwashed wool, which were sent away to distant markets before the desert winds closed off the roads for a season. If they were lucky, they might be shown a few tantalizing pieces of silk and baskets of saffron, some clay pots dripping with sesame oil or packed with incense, modest pieces of onyx or little bottles of perfumes. Hawkers tended to offer a rather small quantity of these exotic items, so they encouraged a motley ensemble of Arab street poets to make the fair more memorable in order to pump up the enthusiasm and spending of the crowds. Occasionally, someone would recite a few verses of his own saj‘ composition, which might predict a disaster, foretell of a social schism, or rivet listeners with a satirical parable that would be remembered for decades.
About a millennium after the first poems in Arabic were recorded in the region, sometime between 500 and 600 CE, a loosely knit but rambunctious amalgam of Bedouin merchants and livestock breeders trickled into town, hoping to capitalize on trade in some of the precious metals that had recently been found in the hills of the Hejaz. Members of an Umayyad tribe known as the Quraysh, they first took possession of Mecca’s sacred Kaaba stone and positioned themselves to capture most of the revenues from visiting pilgrims.5 They gained some prominence in the short-distance distribution of goods across the peninsula known as transit trade as well as in camel breeding.
One of the few spices that they themselves brought into trade was called al-sh/hēbā‘, a “grayish entanglement” that may have been either a lichen known in English as stone flower or a parasitic dodder.6 Its bitter flakes were added to soups and stews that the Quraysh themselves were fond of eating, but stone flower soup never gained much currency with the Egyptians, Persians, Romans, or Greeks. The stone flower was nearly as perishable as manna and not as suited to long-distance trade and inflated prices as the Quraysh might have wished. In fact, the Arabs had yet to have much effect on European and Asian cuisines, except for their role in making some extra-local spices available to the royal and merchant classes.
To make a living with the scant natural resources at hand, the Quraysh merchants had to elaborate value-added products from the little that they could accumulate. They excelled at tanning goat hides with the acidic bark of desert shrubs and at cleaning and spinning sheep’s wool. They would select their most highly bred camels and try to sell them off to the Persians and Syrians by elaborating fantastic stories of their feats. They were also engaged in the trade of finely cured and highly ornamented leather goods. But the Quraysh in the role of middlemen were never able to accumulate the wealth that their Nabataean predecessors had achieved. Their bulky, relatively low-value goods failed to make many of them rich.
So they played their hand in transit trade across the peninsula as best they could. Twice a year, Quraysh caravans brought incense originating in Indonesia, Yemen, or Ethiopia through Mecca, including lubān jāwa (Javanese gum Benjamin) from the benzoin tree and darw or mastikā (mastic) from wild pistachios, a widespread species. But the historic timing of their developing caravans out of Mecca was rather poor. By this period, most of the franki
ncense and myrrh was already being transported by boat across the “liquid roads” of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf rather than mounted on camels and tediously making its way along one of the many landlocked Frankincense Trails.7 The merchants who had specialized in more valuable goods were now riding more ships than camels, using the Arabic term rakaba markab to claim that they were metaphorically “mounting the backs of the waves and galloping across the seas.”8 The 680 denarii cost per camel of running a caravan across the peninsula could easily be undercut by faster-sailing maritime caravans with larger hauling capacities.
In short, the Quraysh risked being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mecca appeared to be an exceedingly unlikely location for the emergence of an intercontinental trading center, let alone a major religion. But a struggle would soon take place in the Hejaz between two eloquent men whose talents were not dissimilar: a poet and a prophet. Whichever visionary most entranced the “language-intoxicated” masses9 of the Hejaz would become the winner who would take all. The poet was half Arab and half Jewish but recognized as an up-and-coming sharif among the Jews of Medina. The prophet was from a splinter group of the Quraysh and had begun to chant some remarkable revelations that he had received in a cave just under two miles from the Arab settlement in Mecca.
FIGURE 10. Salman the Persian (Salmān al-Farsi), a disciple of Muhammad, is shown meeting merchants from the Quraysh tribe. From Siyar-i Nabi (The Life of the Prophet), 1594–95. (Spencer Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)
The name of the half-Jewish poet, Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, is one that few contemporary people, other than medieval scholars, can conjure up today, despite his infamy in the earliest Islamic era. The name of the prophet was, of course, Muhammad, who is known by most people living in the world today. The prophet’s full name was Abu al-Qasim Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Abd al-Muttalib Ibn Hashim. Once a spice merchant, he was mystically transformed into a spiritual messenger. In the very first line of his sura informally known as “1001 Nights,” Muhammad straightforwardly identified his roots; his upbringing and surroundings were replete with the traders of spices and other goods: “I was a merchant among merchants.”
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