Download PDF | (Islamic Area Studies) Tsugitaka Sato - Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam-Brill Academic Pub (2014).
249 Pages
Series Editor’s Acknowledgements
This is the second Brill publication written by Professor Tsugitaka Sato, following his previous work, State and Rural Society in Medieval Islam: Sultans, Muqtaʿs and Fallahun in 1997. Professor Sato was a prominent scholar of Islamic history, having published a great many articles and books in both Japanese and English since 1967.
He was a luminary of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in Japan, serving as head of the research department at the Toyo Bunko (The Oriental Library) for twenty years, and marshaling two joint-research programs for Islamic Area Studies, one based at the University of Tokyo (1997–2002) and another based at Waseda University (2006–). He planned for the publication of a series of books that explore the dynamics in Islamic areas and beyond. He completed the manuscript for this, the inaugural volume of the series, shortly before his sudden death in April 2011. Professor Sato was born in Yokohama on August 27, 1942. His parents were farmers, and he himself said that helping out on the family farm naturally fostered his interest in rural society. The first topic that captured his interest was the iqṭāʿ system of land management. His research showed that, from the tenth century on, this system moreover served as the core of relations between state and rural societies.
His second research interest was the Mamluks, who were given iqṭāʿ lands to manage as a source of tax revenue. In 1991, he published a Japanese book titled Mamlūks: Muslim Rulers from the non-Islamic World. As the subtitle hints, he was captivated by how the mamlūks, purchased as slaves, rose to become an elite group with political power, which shows intriguing aspects of how Islamic societies accepted and employed “the other”. His third interest was local societies, as the intersection of rural, agricultural, and urban networks. He published a history of The Syrian Coastal Town of Jabala (1988) in English, and a monograph in Japanese on the legend of wandering saint Sultan Ibrahim, who was buried in Jabala. In 1995, he edited a unique Japanese book focusing on the outlaws of the Islamic world, including a paper of his own about the ʿayyārūn in medieval Baghdad.
His fourth interest was the connections between lifestyles and material objects. This culminated in his final publication, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam in Japanese in 2008 (Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo). The book you are reading is the English revised edition. Bringing together a wide variety of historical sources, this work shed light on the production and use of sugar in the Middle East, previously a lacuna in the world history of sugar. His interest in sugar originated with research he did on sugar production and taxation in the Fayyūm region, a rural Egyptian society. For more than forty years, he gathered information from medical and pharmaceutical texts, cookery books, literary works, and other historical sources, and hand-wrote it onto index cards, a practice he maintained even after the advent of personal computers. This book is a testament to both his inquisitive mind and his patience in hunting down source materials to “draw a single picture” from fragmentary facts, as he was fond of saying. A bibliography of Professor Sato’s works is included in my paper “Professor Sato Tsugitaka and His Achievements”, in Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, vol.69 (2011).
I would like to express our gratitude to Professor Kentaro Sato at Hokkaido University for his diligent efforts in checking over the entire manuscript the author left behind, and proofreading it in cooperation with Jeff Gedert. This book could not have been published without their careful work. With the consent of Setsuko Sato, the author’s wife and pillar of support for nearly forty years, we have changed the order of family name and given name, from Sato Tsugitaka in his previous book, to Tsugitaka Sato in this book. Professor Sato firmly embraced the long-standing tradition in Japan and other East Asian countries that authors put their family names first, even when writing for publication in English. However, this can lead to confusion among scholars and librarians unfamiliar with the convention when referring to the family and given names of Japanese scholars.
In the pursuit of clarity and consistency, the editorial committee has decided to adopt a uniform family name comes last arrangement for all names, including Japanese, European, and Middle Eastern names. Sato, the Japanese word for sugar, is homophonic with author’s family name, though their meanings are different. Professor Sato often joked that he was writing Sato’s book on sato. He must be pleased with this publication, drinking a toast to it in paradise, which according to Buddhist traditions is located in the west. Toru Miura Series Editor Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, 15 May, 2014
Preface
On 16 June 2006, just after the Second World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES2) in Amman had concluded, my Japanese colleagues and I made a short trip to the old city of ʿAjlūn in North Jordan. Syrian geographer al-Dimashqī (654–727/1256–1327) once described ʿAjlūn as having a robust fortress (ḥiṣn) and numerous fruits trees irrigated by a river that runs through the city (Nukhbat al-Dahr, Petersburg, 1866; repr. Osnabrück, 1982, 200). Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1368–9 or 779/1377) also described ʿAjlūn as a beautiful city with many markets and a strong citadel (qalʿa) (Tuḥfat al-Nuẓẓār, Paris, 1854; repr. 1969, I, 129). As we walked through the castle museum there, I found myself transfixed in front of a case displaying an ublūj, a cone-shaped piece of unglazed earthenware pottery. The ublūj (pl. abālīj) was about 30 centimeters in height and maximum diameter, and had three small holes at the bottom.
It was designed to separate out sugar from molasses. This was a rare and precious experience to see an ublūj in person. When I described my experience in ʿAjlūn to Doctor Mutsuo Kawatoko (Director, Institute of Islamic Archaeology in Tokyo), he explained that he had found a similar type of ublūj in his excavations in al-Fusṭāṭ, and kindly made pristine photocopies for me. According to Professor Christian Daniels, a specialist in the history of sugar production in China, this type of earthenware separating device has as yet never been found in any part of China. I first gave a presentation about the spread of sugar production through the Islamic world back in 1985 at the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, a division of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. It took me quite a while to compile the book you are reading, partly because my attention was diverted by the history of the Mamluks, the sufi legend of Sultan Ibrāhīm b. Adham, and the states and kingship of medieval Islam.
But the main reason for the delay seems to have been that details about the history of sugar resided in a daunting variety of sources, including Arabic language chronicles, urban histories, geographies, travel accounts, biographies, medical books, and pharmacological sources. It is no light task to locate within these voluminous primary sources and then extract the few accounts of sugarcane cultivation, sugar production, sugar trade, and sugar as medicine. This book mainly covers from the time sugarcane cultivation expanded from India to Iran and Iraq in the seventh century to the decline of sugar production in Egypt and Syria in the fifteenth century. It attempts to show what Muslim societies were like in the medieval ages, focusing on sugarcane cultivation, sugar production technologies, and sugar as a commodity, a medicine, and a festival treat.
The primary sources used for this study were Arabic and Persian books, as well as Arabic manuscripts. The details of these sources are thoroughly discussed in the Prologue. The research on the Arabic manuscripts was done in the years 1969–70, 1974, 1984, 1986–87, 1988, 1992, 1993–94, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2010 under funding from the University of Tokyo, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Technology, the Japan Foundation, the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), and Waseda University. My thanks go out to the staff of Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīya in Cairo, Maktabat al-Ẓāhirīya & Maktabat al-Asad in Damascus, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi in Istanbul, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Library in London, and the Institute of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg for their kind help and advice in the course of my study of the Arabic manuscripts. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Professor Muḥammad Aafif (Muḥammad V University), Professor Abdul-Karim Rafeq (The College of William and Mary), Dr. Mutsuo Kawatoko (The Institute of Islamic Archaeology), Mr. Ḥāfiẓ Fatḥī (Cairo branch of the Institute of Islamic Archaeology), Professor Yuzo Shitomi (The University of Tokyo), Associate Professor Kentaro Sato (Organization for Islamic Area Studies, Waseda University), Professor Christian Daniels (Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), and Associate Professor Kikuko Suzuki (National Defence Academy of Japan), all of whom served as sources of invaluable information on the history of sugar.
I also express my sincere gratitude to Professor Bruce D. Craig, for inviting me to the University of Chicago to give a lecture entitled “Sugar in the Economic Life of Mamluk Egypt” in May of 2003. This encouraged me to complete my study of the history of sugar in the Islamic world and finish writing this book, which was initially released in Japanese under the title Sato no Isuramu seikatsushi (Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam) in December 2008. With the goal of a revised and enlarged edition, I then started to translate it into English with the help of Jeff Gedert, to whom I am much obliged for his careful proofreading of the manuscript. Last but not least, I could never have written this book without the warm encouragement and understanding of my colleagues at Waseda University’s Organization for Islamic Area Studies. Tsugitaka Sato Waseda University, 15 October, 2010
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