An Introductory Survey of the Arabic Books of Filāḥa and Farming Almanacs

[Full citations concerning individual works and authors can be found in the linked author
profiles. The titles of Arabic books often employ subtle word-play and are notoriously difficult
to translate, hence interpretations offered here are only approximate]

The Arabic words filāḥa, ‘cultivation, tillage’, and by extension ‘agriculture, farming,
husbandry’, and fallāḥ, ‘husbandman, tiller of the soil, peasant, farmer’, are derived from the
verbal form falaḥa meaning ‘to cleave, split’, and in particular, ‘to plough, till, cultivate the
land’. It also means ‘to thrive, prosper, be successful, lucky, or happy’, the two meanings being
brought together beautifully by Ibn ‘Abdūn in the quotation above. Moreover, the word is
sung out from the minarets of every mosque throughout the Muslim world five times each day
during the call to prayer - hayya ‘ala ’l-falāḥ : “Come to success, come to salvation”.
Husbandry, well-being (in this world and the next) and worship are thus inextricably linked in
the Arabic language.

This may come as some surprise. The Arabs, in popular imagination, came out of the desert as
nomadic sheep- and camel-herders or breeders of fine horses, pastoralists rather than
cultivators, and the Islamic civilization they engendered and spread through half the world is
renowned more for its accomplishments in urban architecture and the decorative arts, its
learning in philosophy, mathematics, medicine and the sciences, and for its technical
inventiveness and mercantile success than for any particular proficiency in agriculture. Yet,
three thousand years before Islam, farmers in what is now Yemen were skilfully terracing rain-
fed mountain slopes1 and cultivating wadis by means of spate irrigation to create what the
ancient Greeks called Eudaimon Arabia, and the Romans Arabia Felix, ‘happy, fortunate,
flourishing Arabia’, on account of its abundant fruits and flocks2. Elsewhere, in Eastern Arabia,
intensive oasis agriculture based on subterranean falāj irrigation was being developed as early
as 1000 BC3. The Arabs already had a long history of farming when with the spread of Islam
from the 7th century AD this expertise, especially in matters of water harvesting and irrigation,
in conjunction with the local knowledge of farmers in Iraq and Syria, Palestine and Jordan,
Persia, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily and Spain (each with their own long traditions of husbandry),
produced a remarkable resurgence in agriculture.

By the early 9th century most parts of the world under Islamic governance were experiencing
an extension of agriculture into lands which had never been cultivated or which had long been
abandoned. By means of newly introduced crops, the widespread diffusion of irrigation
technology, and the more intensive rotations that these made possible, there were marked
improvements in the productivity of agricultural land and labour4. Over the next five to seven
hundred years, with variations from place to place, agriculture thrived. In The Mind of the
Middle Ages. the historian of ideas Frederick B. Artz writes: “The great Islamic cities of the
Near East, North Africa and Spain … were supported by an elaborate agricultural system that
included extensive irrigation and an expert knowledge of the most advanced agricultural
methods in the world. The Muslims reared the finest horses and sheep and cultivated the best
orchards and vegetable gardens. They knew how to fight insect pests, how to use fertilizers,
and they were experts at grafting trees and crossing plants to produce new varieties”5. And
Thomas Glick, writing of Muslim Spain, says: “Fields that had been yielding one crop yearly at
most prior to the Muslims were now capable of yielding three or more crops in rotation …
Agricultural production responded to the demands of an increasingly sophisticated and
cosmopolitan urban population by providing the towns and cities with a variety of products
unknown in Northern Europe”6. The flourishing, cultivated, predominantly urban civilization of
classical Islam was only made possible, and was largely dependent upon, an equally
sophisticated and fertile revolution in the countryside.

Islamic Agriculture[back to top]

Although the notion of a medieval Arab Agricultural Revolution, first proposed by Andrew
Watson in 19747, or of an Islamic Green Revolution as called by others8, has been challenged
by some scholars this is not the place to recapitulate the argument, which seems to revolve
around matters of degree and detail rather than substance. What is clear is the marked change
in the way farming was done, and its undoubted success. The new agriculture that followed in
the wake of Islam and emerged across much of the Middle East and Mediterranean world
appears to have been quite different from the Roman, Byzantine, Sassanian and Visigoth
models that preceded it. It resulted from the synthesis of a number of new and old elements,
skilfully worked into a productive and sustainable system, giving it a particular, characteristic
stamp. The elements of the new agriculture, identified and meticulously documented by
Andrew Watson in his seminal study on agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world9, can
be summarized thus:

© R. GOODALL

Tarocco blood oranges growing on the slopes of Mt. Etna near Misterbianco, Catania, Sicily.
Although the lemon, lime, shaddock and sour orange were probably introduced into Sicily by
the Arabs in the 10th century, it seems that the sweet orange did not appear until the early
16th century, probably brought by the Portuguese from India.

Foremost was the introduction, acclimatization and further diffusion of new food crops, mainly
fruit-trees, grains and vegetables, but also plants used for fibres, condiments, beverages,
medicines, narcotics, poisons, dyes, perfumes, cosmetics, timber and fodder, as well as garden
flowers and ornamental plants. The most important of these new crops were sorghum, Asiatic
rice, hard wheat, sugar cane, Old World cotton and some citrus fruits, as well as such exotics as
the banana and plantain, coconut, watermelon, mango, spinach, colocasia, globe artichoke
and aubergine. The influx of new crops and plants, many of which came from India, South-East
Asia and Central Africa, was only made possible by the unprecedented unification of a large
part of the Old World under Islam, which facilitated long-distance travel by merchants,
diplomats, scholars and pilgrims, and unleashed the free movement of peoples from very
different climates and agricultural traditions - Indians, Malays, Persians, Yemenis, Africans,
Berbers and Syrians, among others. This human flow and cultural exchange facilitated not only
the diffusion of crops and plants but the know-how to grow them. At the same time, a fertile
intellectual climate of scientific enquiry and experimentation among botanists and
agronomists, and the propensity of traditional husbandmen everywhere to select for local
conditions, produced a profusion of cultivars of the old and new crops (as well as new breeds
of livestock). For example, in the 9th century Al-Jāḥiẓ stated that 360 kinds of dates were to be
found in the market of Basra; in the early 10th century Ibn Rusta reported 78 kinds of grapes in
the vicinity of Sana‘ā’ in Yemen; Al-Anṣārī, writing of a small town on the North African coast
about 1400, said that the environs produced 65 kinds of grapes, 36 kinds of pears, 28 kinds of
figs and 16 kinds of apricots; and in the 15th century Al-Badrī wrote that in the region of
Damascus 21 varieties of apricots, 50 varieties of raisins and 6 kinds of roses were to be
found10. For the Yemen, Varisco records at least 88 named varieties of sorghum, the staple
crop, documented in literary sources or used today in the field11. The range of crops and
plants grown (and eaten) was unparalleled.

The newly introduced crops induced significant changes in cultural methods. Because many of
them originated in hot, moist tropical and sub-tropical climates, in their new environment they
needed the heat of summer, traditionally a ‘dead’ season in Middle Eastern and
Mediterranean agriculture which had hitherto been more or less restricted to crops that could
be grown in the cooler but wetter winter months. Many of the new crops had to be irrigated
but the bonus of a new summer growing season led to the widespread adoption of systems of
crop rotation and multiple cropping that allowed two, three and even four crops a year to be
taken from the same piece of land, summer and winter, where before in the Roman, Byzantine
and Judaic agricultural traditions there had been at best one crop a year, and most commonly
one every two years12. Such intensive cropping regimes would inevitably deplete the soil of its
natural fertility if not replenished, so the new farming redressed the balance with copious
(though carefully controlled) applications of all kinds of organic manures, natural fertilizers,
composts, mulches and minerals, incidentally bringing about a closer integration between
cultivation and the rearing of livestock.

© S. G. FITZWILLIAM-HALL

A water divisor in Figuig, Morocco. Water harvested by means of an underground foggara

emerges at the surface and is here divided among the irrigators according to a strict timetable
on a rotational basis.

While not all the new agriculture was dependent on artificial irrigation, many of the new crops
- especially sugar cane and rice, and to a lesser degree cotton and some of the tropical and
sub-tropical fruits - were water-hungry crops. The development of sophisticated systems for
harvesting, storing and distributing water was a hallmark of the new agriculture, driven by the
expertise of Arab irrigators drawing on their long experience of oasis cultivation. Certainly
irrigation had been practised since antiquity in all the newly Islamic lands, but many of these
systems were in terminal decline. Although few really innovative hydraulic technologies were
invented at this time, the revival and expansion of irrigation through the widespread adoption
and improvement of well-known devices and structures including water-lifting machines,
qanāts, diversion dams, distribution networks, siphons and storage reservoirs, married to new
Islamic institutions and legal frameworks for the equitable distribution and management of
water, and the undoubted skill of the irrigators themselves, transformed the agricultural
landscape.
The diffusion of new crops and cultivars, the adoption of new multiple-cropping and rotation
regimes, the abundant use of manures, and the refinement and expansion of irrigation were
supported, crucially, by changes in land tenure and taxation that accorded farmers more
liberty and a greater incentive to improve their land, all underpinned by Islamic precepts and
customary laws by which farming was conducted more fairly and more effectively. For the first
time in many places, any individual - man or woman - had the right to own, buy, sell, mortgage
and inherit land, and most importantly, farm it as he or she liked. Relatively low rates of
taxation, where they existed at all, were paid as a fixed proportion of output, freeing farmers
from uncertain and capricious tax hikes, in contrast to the oppressive rural taxation prevailing
in the late Roman, Sassanian and Byzantine empires. Large estates, which had everywhere
come to dominate and often monopolize agriculture, were often broken down into smaller
ownerships, or at least had to compete with smaller farms and individual peasant
smallholdings. The lands around cities were almost everywhere given over to small market
gardens and orchards. Serfdom and slavery were virtually absent from the countryside in the
early Islamic world - instead, “the legal and actual condition of the overwhelming majority of
those who worked on the land was one of freedom”13.

These are the salient features of the new agricultural system which has been called Moorish
agriculture in relation to Spain but which is more properly and inclusively termed Islamic
agriculture, for it was not confined to Moorish Andalusia, and although its origins lay in the
intensive, irrigated, multi-storey, mixed-crop farming of the ancient Arabian oases and wadis,
it was not exclusively Arab either, but developed in association with the traditional knowledge
and skills of farmers right across the new Muslim world under the impetus and aegis of Islam.

© ADAM WOOLFITT / CORBIS

Andalusian agro-ecosystem, Malaga province. Ploughed wheat fields and olive groves.

© CAROLINE PENN / CORBIS

Saffron stigmas being separated from the flowers. La Mancha, Spain. The Moors reintroduced
the saffron crocus into Spain and cultivated it throughout the southern provinces of Andalucia,
Castile, La Mancha, and Valencia.

The Andalusi Books of Filāḥa[back to top]

While agriculture improved and expanded throughout the Muslim lands, it was in Al-Andalus
that it reached its apogee. In the opinion of Scott in his History of the Moorish Empire in
Europe the agricultural system of Moorish Andalusia was “the most complex, the most
scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man”14. Superlatives aside, it
surely marks one of the high points in world agricultural history, supporting a 10th century
population of about 10 million15 as well as major exporting sugar-refining and textile
industries, the latter based on the fibre crops cotton, flax and hemp and dye-plants including
indigo, henna, madder and woad. The extraordinarily bio-diverse agro-ecosystem of Al-
Andalus was composed of cultivated lands - a mosaic of tree crops, huerto or market-garden
crops, and field crops, both irrigated and rain-fed - permanent meadows and pasture lands,
and commons with rights of usage by local inhabitants. The range of crops available to the
medieval Andalusi farmer was extensive. Towards the end of the 11th century Ibn Baṣṣāl
mentions more than 180 cultivated crops and plants, and at the end of the 12th century Ibn al-
‘Awwām notes 585 different species and cultivars, though not all of these would have been
cultivated. It is worth listing the most important of these:

Tree crops included olives, vines, almonds, carobs, figs, peaches, apricots, apples, pears,
medlars, quinces, chestnuts, walnuts, pistachios, hazelnuts, hawthorns, date palms, lemons,
citrons, sour oranges, jujubes, nettle trees and mulberry trees, as well as holm-oaks, arbutus
and myrtles.

Kitchen gardens grew lettuces, carrots, radishes, cabbages, cauliflowers, melons, cucumbers,
spinach, leeks, onions, aubergines, kidney beans, cardoons, artichokes, purslane and numerous
aromatic plants such as basil, cress, caraway, saffron, cumin, capers, mustard, marjoram,
fennel, melissa, lemon verbena and thyme.

Fields of cereals and pulses were sown with wheat, barley, rice, millet and spelt among the
former, and broad beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, vetch, lupine and fenugreek
among the latter; sugar-cane was grown on the coast of Almuñécar and Vélez-Málaga; fibre
plants included flax, Asian cotton and hemp; dye plants included safflower, madder, henna,
woad and saffron, and sumac was grown for tanning; wild species such as esparto, osier and
oil-palm were harvested; numerous ornamental species were planted in gardens and an
enormous number of medicinal herbs were also employed16.

It was here too in Al-Andalus that an important development in Islamic agriculture took root
and flourished in the form of an Arabic literary genre - the Books of Filāḥa - which attempted
to synthesize the accumulated knowledge and theories of the past with practical husbandry on
the ground, thereby systematizing a new science of agriculture. The Books of Filāḥa are
scattered in hundreds of manuscripts, many of a miscellaneous character and frequently mis-
catalogued, in dozens of libraries across the world, and it is only relatively recently that these
texts and their authors have been established with reasonable certainty. Nevertheless many
questions remain and there is still much work to be done on the corpus of Arabic agricultural
literature in general.

© E CICCOMARTINO / ROBERT HARDING

Beehives in olive grove, Rif mountains, Chefchaouen, Morocco.

Between the 10th and 14th centuries, and especially during the period of the independent
Tā’ifa kingdoms in the second half of the 11th century, at least ten Books of Filāḥa were
written by Andalusi agronomists: the Anonymous Andalusi, Al-Zahrāwī, Ibn Wāfid, Ibn Baṣṣāl,
Ibn Ḥajjāj, Abū ’l-Khayr, Al-Ṭighnarī, Ibn al-‘Awwām, Ibn al-Raqqām and Ibn Luyūn. These
authors were all too aware of being the inheritors and transmitters of a long tradition of
agricultural knowledge whose literature reached back to the Byzantines, Romans,
Carthaginians, Greeks and Chaldeans and they cited these earlier works meticulously and
copiously. However, the Arabic Books of Filāḥa are not mere compilations of ancient
knowledge and theories, for many of their writers were practitioners working in the field, and
avid experimentalists too. They challenged and tested the inherited wisdom, and compared it
to their own experience and observations in the orchards, gardens and estates of their native
Andalusia. Their books are, for the most part, at once theoretical discourse, scientific treatise,
and practical manual, and although they are often referred to as agronomical works (that is,
concerned with the science of agriculture) and their authors described as agronomists, these
labels are somewhat misleading. The subject matter of the Books of Filāḥa is extensive and
inclusive, concerned not only with agriculture and the cultivation of field crops such as wheat,
barley, the pulses, cotton, flax, olives, vines and so on, but also with the growing of all manner
of fruits, vegetables, herbs, garden flowers and shrubs (what we would term horticulture
today), as well as trees for ornament, timber and shade (modern arboriculture), and, in many
cases, bee-keeping, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine. They often address the post-
harvest storage and processing of crops, the production of perfumes by distillation, and
matters of domestic economy such as bread making and the preparation of dried fruits, oils,
vinegars and syrups. Sometimes they detail the medicinal and dietary properties of plants, in
the manner of herbals, as well. They are therefore far more than books of agronomy, or even
of agriculture, and are more accurately described as books of husbandry. Indeed, even in pre-
Islamic times the word filāḥa was extended beyond the core meaning of ‘breaking the earth’ to
denote the occupation of farming or husbandry in a much wider sense17. Moreover, it has
been argued that the Books of Filāḥa display what we would now call an ecological
sensibility18, a holistic approach to farming and a duty of care towards nature that is implicit in
the notion of husbandry as the prudent management and conservation of resources. Having
said that, in the absence of any single, appropriate word in English that adequately describes
the scholars/practitioners/experimentalists/scientists who wrote the Books of Filāḥa, we must
continue, reluctantly, to call them agronomists.

The Andalusi Books of Filāḥa were not of course written in a cultural vacuum. They were
products of the Andalusian Golden Age, the brilliant intellectual and artistic renaissance that
began during the era of the Western Umayyad Caliphate (929-1031), whose capital Córdoba
was not only the largest and most prosperous city in Europe at the time19 but its intellectual
and cultural centre, and continued uninterrupted through the period of the independent Tā’ifa
kingdoms during the second half of the 11th century and well into the next under the Berber
Almoravids. In the unfettered, cross-disciplinary intellectual spirit of the age, agronomy, as the
applied science of husbandry, was pursued in close association with botany, pharmacology and
medicine, four branches of knowledge united by a passionate scientific interest in plants.
Indeed many of the so-called agronomist authors of the Books of Filāḥa were true polymaths
who excelled in several of these fields, and in others outside them: Al-Zahrāwī was a court
physician and surgeon, famous later in medieval Europe through his translated work; Ibn
Wāfid was also a physician, botanist and noted pharmacologist, equally well-known in
Christian Europe; Abū ’l-Khayr, it seems, had an alter-ego in the Anonymous Botanist of Seville
who wrote the most important botanical encyclopedia of medieval Islam; Ibn al-Raqqām was a
well-known mathematician, astronomer and physician. Not all were scientists: Ibn Ḥajjāj was a
wazīr or minister of state and man of letters; Al-Ṭighnarī was an accomplished poet and man of
letters who served in the royal court; and Ibn Luyūn was a philosopher, poet, jurist and
mathematician. Only two, Ibn Baṣṣāl and the later Ibn al-‘Awwām, seem to have dedicated
their lives solely to husbandry, and not surprisingly, they produced the most distinctive and
interesting works.

Loci of Andalusi Agronomists

© EPI F. VILLANUEVA

Molino Albolafia, Cordoba. First documented in the 9th C., this oft-reconstructed Moorish
water-wheel, powered by the flow of the river, raised water from the Guadalquivir up to the
gardens on its banks.

The Andalusi agronomists lived and carried out their work in different parts of Al-Andalus. The
initial centre of agronomy was Cordoba, the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the earliest
surviving agricultural work is the Kitāb al-anwā’, better known as the ‘Calendar of Cordoba’,
compiled by ‘Arīb ibn Sa‘d for the year 961. Belonging to the genre of the Arabic almanac it is
neither an agronomical treatise nor a manual of husbandry but nevertheless carries some
detailed information on the seasonal round of farming activities and on the introduced crops
and other plants grown at the time. The next two agricultural works were also written by
Cordovans. The anonymous Kitāb fī tartīb awqāt al-ghirāsa wa ’l-maghrūsāt, ‘Book on the order
and times for planting and cultivation’, was probably written by a certain Ibn Abī ’l-Jawwād
who lived towards the end of the 10th and beginning of the 11th century in Cordoba. The
scope of the Kitāb fī tartīb is much wider than its title suggests and although it has a somewhat
limited coverage compared to later works it is the earliest existing Andalusi horticultural
manual as such, and treats in some detail the cultivation of tree-crops, garden vegetables and
herbs, as well as a range of ornamental plants and flowers then grown in Al-Andalus. The third
text, existing in fragments among half a dozen miscellaneous manuscripts, is the Mukhtaṣār
kitāb al-filāḥah, the ‘Abridged book of agriculture’, by Abū ’l Qāsim ibn ‘Abbās al-Nahrāwī, who
has been identified with the well-known physician and surgeon Abū’l Qāsim al-Zahrāwī of
Cordoba, famous in the West as Albucasis, who died between 1009 and 1013. We know little
about his book of husbandry since no critical edition or translation has yet been produced.

© ATLANTIDE PHOTOTRAVEL / CORBIS

Toledo and the Tagus river. The agronomists Ibn Wāfid and Ibn Baṣṣāl lived and worked here in
the 11th C.

With the slow demise of the Cordovan Caliphate in the early decades of the 11th century, the
centre of Andalusian agronomy shifted to Toledo in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, well to
the north of Cordoba. Here two of the most important Andalusi agronomists lived and carried
out their agricultural work, probably as master and student: Ibn Wāfid and Ibn Baṣṣāl. Abū ’l-
Muṭarrif Ibn Wāfid (998/99 or 1007/08-1074/75), better known in medieval Europe as
Abenguefith, the author of a very influential materia medica, also wrote an agricultural
treatise, the Majmū‘ fī ’l-filāḥa or ‘Compendium of agriculture’, which was widely read and
highly regarded, being translated into Castilian during the reign of Alfonso the Wise (r. 1252-
1284) and influencing the great Renaissance work of agronomy, the Obra de Agricultura of
Gabriel Alonso de Herrera. Ibn Wāfid was responsible for planting the famous garden of the
ruler Al-Ma’mūn, the Bustān al-Nā‘ūra or Garden of the Water-Wheel, one of the earliest
botanical gardens in Europe, where he propagated exotic plants brought from the Middle and
Far East and conducted agricultural and botanical experiments. His manual, though surviving in
incomplete form, is practical and thorough, dealing with soils, water, and manures; the staple
crops of wheat, barley, vines and olives - from site selection and preparation of the soil to
harvesting and storage; the propagation, planting, pruning and care of fruit-trees; and the
cultivation of vegetables and herbs. It includes also a section on bee-keeping, pigeon-keeping,
and pest management.

Muḥammad ibn Baṣṣāl, born in the mid-11th century in Toledo, most probably served his
apprenticeship under Ibn Wāfid and later succeeded him as director of the botanical garden of
Al-Ma’mūn, to whom he dedicated his great agronomical treatise, the Dīwān al-filāḥa. This was
subsequently abridged as the Kitāb al-qaṣd wa’l-bayān, the ‘Book of concision and clarity’, and
translated into Castilian at the same time as Ibn Wāfid’s work. We know that at some point Ibn
Baṣṣāl made the pilgrimage to the Holy Cities in the Hijaz, apparently travelling as far afield as
Yemen, Abyssinia, Syria, Persia, northern India and Khorasan, from where, for example, he is
said to have brought back new ideas on the cultivation of cotton. For someone in his
profession there can be little doubt that his extended journey after the pilgrimage was indeed
a plant-collecting expedition to gather seeds, cuttings and roots of rare, interesting or useful
plants to grow on in the royal botanical garden. Prior to the fall of Toledo to the Christians in
1085 Ibn Baṣṣāl moved to Seville where he created a new garden, the Ḥā’īṭ al-Sulṭān or Garden
of the Sultan, for the poet-king al-Mu’tamid. Here we know he experimented with the
propagation and cultivation of blue lilies, asparagus and jasmine, among others. Ibn Baṣṣāl’s
Kitāb al-qaṣd wa’l-bayān is unique among the Andalusi treatises in that it contains no
references to earlier agronomists or ancient works and seems to be based exclusively on his
personal knowledge and experience. He begins his manual with a discussion and classification
of waters, then lands and soils, then manures and fertilizers. The following chapters deal with
ploughing and preparing the land for irrigation, trees of all kinds, types of propagation,
pruning, grafting, and the cultivation of all manner of crops - legumes, root vegetables, leaf
vegetables, cucumbers, melons, spices, and aromatic and scented plants including the rose -
mentioning more than 180 different plants in all. He ends his work with an extended
discussion on the construction of wells, and the preservation of fruits and nuts. Being a
dedicated plantsman Ibn Baṣṣāl does not include anything of animal husbandry in his work
and, strangely, the section dealing with the cultivation of cereals, indicated in the preface, is
missing from the existing manuscripts. His manual is practical, systematic and clearly didactic,
and is organized on a pattern that is more or less followed by later agronomists.

© AGE FOTOSTOCK / ROBERT HARDING

Farmland, Seville province, Andalusia. Here Abū’l-Khayr, Ibn Hajjāj and Ibn al-‘Awwām all
carried out agricultural experiments.

With Ibn Baṣṣāl’s move to Seville the city became the locus of what can only be called an
informal ‘school of husbandry’ that operated in “a dense climate of botanical study and
experimentation”20, with Ibn Baṣṣāl as the pivotal figure and acknowledged master of a circle
of eminent agronomists, botanists and physicians among whom were Ibn Ḥajjāj, Abū’l-Khayr
and Al-Ṭighnarī, who were all to write agronomical works over the next few decades. Of Abū
‘Umar Aḥmad ibn Ḥajjāj’s Al-Muqni‘ fī ’l-filāḥa, ‘Sufficiency in farming’, written in 1073, only
some extracts on the cultivation of the olive, vine, fig, and several garden and aromatic plants
survive, but as the original work was extensively quoted by Ibn al-‘Awwām about a hundred
years later, it has been possible to reconstruct a good deal of Ibn Ḥajjāj’s own text. He himself
quotes extensively from classical agricultural works, citing a total of 23 authors (not all of them
directly), and in this he was much admired by Ibn al-‘Awwām who wrote: “When I come to
discuss the cultivation of lands, I always give precedence to the principles established by the
shaykh al-khatib Abū ‘Umar Ibn Ḥajjāj in his book, which has as its subject the theories of the
ancients”21. While Ibn Ḥajjāj was perhaps the most erudite of the Andalusi agronomists he
also possessed considerable practical expertise and we know, for example, that he
experimented with olive propagation in the Aljarafe district, an elevated, fertile tableland
outside Seville.

Abū ’l-Khayr al-Ishbīlī, surnamed Al-Shajjār, ‘the tree-planter’ or ‘the arboriculturist’, was also a
native of Seville. Around 1070-75 he authored a treatise on agriculture, the Kitāb al-filāḥa, and
later, probably, the most important botanical encyclopedia of medieval Islam, the anonymous
‘Umdat al-ṭabīb fī ma‘rifat al-nabāt li-kull labīb, ‘The Physician’s reliance in the knowledge of
plants for every man of understanding’. Autobiographical references in this latter work
indicate that he was a disciple of Ibn Baṣṣāl (and the botanist-physician Ibn al-Lūnquh) so he
probably worked in the king’s botanical garden in Seville alongside his teacher. Although
surviving in incomplete form, Abū ’l-Khayr’s Kitāb al-filāḥa deals with all the main elements and
operations of husbandry and the cultivation of a multitude of crops and plants. He is especially
esteemed by Ibn al-‘Awwām for his knowledge of soils, irrigation, the construction of wells,
and the cultivation of olives. Abū ’l-Khayr often cites his predecessors, especially his master Ibn
Baṣṣāl, as well as the ancients, but like his contemporary Ibn Ḥajjāj he also draws on his
personal experience, experiments and observations in the gardens, olive groves, and ramblas
of Aljarafe.

© www.otragranada.org

The Vega of Granada today. The fertile plain where Al-Tighnari worked in the 12th C., and de
Herrera at the end of the 15th C.

The fourth agronomist of the Sevillian school was Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Murrī al-
Ṭighnarī, also known as Al-Ḥājj al-Gharnāṭī, ‘The Pilgrim of Granada’, who wrote an agricultural
treatise entitled Kitāb zuhrat al-bustān wa-nuzhat al-adhhān, ‘Book of the glory of the garden
and recreation of the mind’, probably in the first decade of the 12th century. Al-Ṭighnarī was
originally from Granada and first served in the court of the Zirid prince ‘Abd Allāh ibn
Bulughghīn (r. 1073-90), leaving Granada at some point for the ṭā’ifa kingdom of Almería
where he conducted various agricultural experiments in the royal gardens of the Al-
Ṣumādiḥiya palace. Later, having made the pilgrimage to Makkah and travelled through
various parts of North Africa and the East, he returned to Al-Andalus, alternating his residence
between Granada and Seville, where he joined Ibn Baṣṣāl’s circle of agronomists and botanists.
Al-Ṭighnarī’s Zuhrat emerges as one of the clearest and most systematic of the Andalusi
agronomical treatises. In general it follows the form and content of its predecessors but
includes valuable linguistic, toponymic, botanical, and medical information, displaying the
depth and breadth of his knowledge.
In our survey of the Andalusi agronomists so far, two points are especially worthy of note, both
concerning the acquisition of knowledge. First, the primacy of direct transmission between
them, from master to student, and second, their significant role in establishing and developing
various experimental botanical gardens in Al-Andalus, which preceded any others in Europe.

The historian Ibn al-Abbār reports that Ibn Wāfid studied medicine under Al-Zahrāwī at
Cordoba, although the date of the younger man’s birth, either in 998/99 or 1007/08, and that
of the elder’s death between 1009 and 1013 (if correct), make this improbable. However, the
connection is intriguing for we now know that Al-Zahrāwī wrote an agronomical work and if
Ibn al-Abbār is right and our dates are wrong, there would have been a chain of personal
transmission from Al-Zahrāwī to Ibn Wāfid to Ibn Baṣṣāl, and through him to Ibn Ḥajjāj, Abū’l-
Khayr and Al-Ṭighnarī. For this reason Al-Zahrāwī is considered by some to be the initiator of
Andalusian agronomy.22 In any case, the relationship among the others is secure. Clearly, the
medieval master - apprentice, or teacher - disciple, tutelage system was crucial to the 11th
century flowering of agronomy in Al-Andalus, which produced in a span of some forty years, as
we have seen, five important agricultural works.

The key role played by some of the early Andalusi agronomists in the establishment and
development of botanical gardens in Al-Andalus, and thence into Europe, has not been
sufficiently recognized. These mostly royal institutions not only held living collections of native
and exotic plants, they were centres for the collection, acclimatization, propagation and
dissemination of the new crops and species that invigorated the new Islamic agriculture; they
were the foci of scientific research and experimentation, especially in the crossing and grafting
of new varieties; and they were places of learning where botanists, agronomists and physicians
passed on their knowledge. We have seen that Ibn Wāfid was appointed to plant and oversee
the royal botanical garden in Toledo where Ibn Baṣṣāl also worked and succeeded him, that Ibn
Baṣṣāl then established a botanical garden in Seville where Abū’l-Khayr worked under his
tutelage, and that Al-Ṭighnarī conducted various experiments in the royal gardens of the Al-
Ṣumādiḥīya palace in Almería. We also know that Ibn Baṣṣāl and Al-Ṭighnarī both went on
pilgrimage and travelled extensively in North Africa and the East, no doubt collecting plant
material for the botanical gardens.

These 11th century botanical gardens were not in fact the first in Al-Andalus. The earliest
appears in the 8th century at Ar-Ruṣāfa near Cordoba, the country estate of the first Umayyad
ruler, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I (r. 756-88). From the description left by Al-Maqqarī we are left in no
doubt about its nature as a true botanical garden: “One of the great works that ‘Abd al-
Raḥmān ibn Mu‘āwiya carried out at the beginning of his rule was the munya of Ar-Ruṣāfa …
He built a splendid royal palace, and laid out extensive gardens in which exotic plants and trees
from all parts were grown. He ordered the planting of pips and stones from special fruits, as
well as rare seeds brought by Jazīd and Safar, his ambassadors to Syria, so that with the
benevolence of God and careful cultivation, the surrounding gardens became the home of
luxuriant trees producing exotic fruit, which shortly spread to all parts of Al-Andalus, where
the supremacy of these fruits over other varieties was soon recognized.”23 Over the following
centuries other royal botanical and experimental gardens were established in Al-Andalus (and
elsewhere in the Islamicized world), including the three already mentioned in connection with
our agronomists, but even these were some two hundred years ahead of the first botanical
gardens in Christian Europe, the earliest of which appear to have been those planted by
Matthaeus Sylvaticus in Salerno c. 1310 and Gualterus in Venice c. 1330; others, more well-
known, were not established till the 16th century - Pisa in 1543, Padua, Parma and Florence in
1545, and Bologna in 1568.

After the Sevillian school nearly a hundred years elapsed before the next Andalusi agronomical
treatise appeared at the end of the 12th century, the magisterial and encyclopedic Kitāb al-
filāḥa of Abū Zakariyā Yaḥyā Ibn al-‘Awwām, about whom we know very little except that he
farmed and carried out successful agricultural experiments in the Aljarafe district to the west
of Seville (as did his predecessors Abū’l-Khayr and Ibn Hajjāj), where he was probably an
aristocratic landowner. His book, however, is the best known of all the Andalusian works.
Having been translated first into Spanish by Banqueri in 1802, then into French by Clément-
Mullet in 1864-67, it was for a long time the only source on the agriculture of Al-Andalus in any
European language. It is also without doubt the most comprehensive agricultural treatise in
Arabic. Ibn al-‘Awwām gathers all the knowledge of his time concerning agriculture,
horticulture and animal husbandry into a huge compendium of excerpts from all the previous
agronomical traditions and treatises. From 112 named authors he includes a staggering one
thousand nine hundred direct and indirect citations - about a third from Byzantine sources, a
third from Near Eastern sources, mostly from Ibn Waḥshīya, and a third from the earlier
Andalusi agronomists24. To these he often adds his own observations and experiences, about
which he says: “As for my own contribution, I put forward nothing that I have not first proved
by experiment on repeated occasions”. The work deals with all aspects of agronomy and
horticulture, mentioning 585 different plants, explaining the cultivation of more than fifty fruit
trees, and including many valuable observations on soils, manures, grafting, and plant
diseases. The last part of the work is devoted to animal husbandry, with sections on cattle,
sheep, goats, camels, horses, mules and donkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, pigeons, peacocks,
and beekeeping.

Some hundred years after Ibn al-‘Awwām the last two works in the Andalusi agronomical
tradition were written. The first, sometime in the early part of the 14th century, was Abū ‘Abd
Allāh ibn al-Raqqām’s Kitāb khulāṣat al-ikhtiṣāṣ fī ma‘rifat al-qūwá wa’l-khawāṣṣ, ‘Book of the
quintessence of competence in knowing faculties and particulars’, which is really an
abridgement of Ibn Waḥshīya’s celebrated al-Filāḥah al-Nabaṭīya or ‘Nabataean agriculture’
(see below), written at the behest of one of the Nasrid emirs of Granada who wanted the
latter work purged of all that was pagan in origin. Then in 1348 Abū ‘Uthmān ibn Luyūn from
Almería wrote his Kitāb ibdā’ al-malāḥa wa-inhā’ al-rajāḥa fī uṣūl ṣinā‘at al-filāḥa, ‘Book on the
principles of beauty and the purpose of learning, concerning the fundamentals of the art of
agriculture’, also known simply as Urjūza fī ’l-filāḥa, ‘Poem on agriculture’, composed as a
rhyming didactic poem of 1,365 couplets in rajaz metre. Ibn Luyūn himself declares in the first
lines of his poem that he wrote it in verse to facilitate the learning of agricultural knowledge.
Like his predecessors, heorganizes his work around the main principles of husbandry - land,
water, fertilizing agents and agricultural/horticultural skills, operations and techniques, paying
particular attention to propagation, grafting, and the layout of gardens.

The Arabic Almanac or Farming Calendar[back to top]

No survey of medieval Arabic agricultural literature would be complete without including the
almanac, which if not specifically devoted to agriculture often contains a wealth of information
on weather, the seasons and the agricultural cycle, the sowing and harvesting times of crops,
animal husbandry, and other matters of concern to the farmer (and to the agricultural
historian). The almanac is essentially an annotated calendar, a month-by-month and day-by-
day reckoning of changes in the natural world and a guide to the proper times for various
agrarian operations and other human activities in accordance with these. Besides agricultural
matters the almanac typically records a more or less diverse range of events and occurrences
that can include day- and night-lengths, shadow-lengths for particular times of the day, entry
of the sun into zodiacal constellations, star risings and settings, lunar phases and mansions, the
first day of seasons, the onset and end of winds and rains, changes in temperature, the rise
and fall of groundwater and floodwaters (especially of the Nile and the Euphrates),
navigational periods, animal migrations and behaviour, the growth, flowering and fruiting of
wild plants, historical events, as well as Islamic, Jewish, and Christian holy days. At the end of
each month’s listing there is usually a round up of relevant farming activities, including
notifications of tax assessments on particular crops, and advice on appropriate dietary
regimes, bodily hygiene, health and medical treatments.

The history of the Arabic almanac has yet to be written. As a literary and scientific genre it has
virtually been ignored by both Arab and Western scholars, and although hundreds of
manuscripts exist, perhaps well over a thousand, few have been published and there is still no
bibliography of the genre.25 However, it seems likely that almanacs developed from, or
alongside, the closely related Books of Azmina, on times and seasons, and the Books of Anwā’,
which are lexicographic, astronomical, and meteorological works drawing on traditional pre-
Islamic Bedouin star lore - the term anwā’ properly referring to the reckoning system of 13-day
periods based on the setting and rising of certain groups of stars which in Arab folk astronomy
(that is, practical, applied astronomy as opposed to theoretical astronomy) divided the year
and marked times of climatic and atmospheric phenomena, especially rainfall. The subject is
complicated by the fact that there is no generic term in Arabic for the almanac as a primarily
agricultural calendar, and their authors did not distinguish them from the Books of Azmina and
Books of Anwā’, which titles they often used for their works. The word ‘almanac’ - cognates of
which are found in all European languages - although ostensibly Arabic, has no known etymon
in that language. It is presumed to derive from a supposed Andalusi Arabic al-manākh, from
Late Greek almenichiakon, ‘calendar’, possibly from Coptic, but its true origin remains a
mystery.26 Like our word ‘almanac’ the so-called Arabic almanacs encompass a spectrum of
calendrical works that combine, to a greater or lesser degree, astronomy, agriculture, liturgy,
medicine and astrology, from formal astronomical tables on the one hand to forecasts,
predictions and the enumeration of favourable and unfavourable days on the other. The
agricultural almanacs sit within this range of related material and are rarely found as separate
texts, being most often incorporated within works on astronomy, astrology, medicine,
lexicography, and agriculture, as well as in general encyclopedias. Their identification as such
must remain, at this stage of research, somewhat subjective.

While the almanacs may have been inspired by pre-Islamic Arab folk astronomy and weather
lore, and surely reflect the indigenous agricultural milieu of where each was compiled, they
contain certain astronomical, calendrical and medical concepts that can be traced back to
Assyro-Chaldean, Greek, Judaic, Hellenistic, Romano-Byzantine, Coptic, and even perhaps
ancient Indian, Egyptian and Babylonian traditions. Underlying all, however, is the
fundamental conception of correspondence between the regular movement of the stars, sun,
moon, and other heavenly bodies, the unfolding of the seasons, the rains, the growth of
plants, the round of farming and pastoral activities, the particular nature - wet or dry, hot or
cold - of each food, the four bodily humours, and health. Not only agriculture, but all human
affairs and activities, including diet, sexual activity, bathing, exercise, travel and medical
treatment have their times and seasons in accordance with the natural cycle. As Ibn al-
‘Awwām remarks in the introduction to his farming calendar: “One of the most wonderful
things in the ordering of time and the seasons is that each activity is ordained to be done at its
proper time, such that when it is done at another the result is never as favourable.”27 The
Arabic almanacs present, in a nut-shell, a very ancient, perhaps universal, belief in the
necessary order and harmony between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of nature.

© JOHN REYNOLDS / EYEFETCH

Rice fields at Calasparra, Murcia. Considered to be the very best rice in Spain, Calasparra rice is
cultivated using an irrigation system inherited from the Moors.

No Arabic almanacs are known from before the 9th century, though they doubtless existed,
and the earliest extant work of this nature is probably the Kitāb al-azmina, ‘Book of times’, of
Ibn Māsawayh (Mésué), a Nestorian physician of Baghdad who died in 857. Another early
surviving almanac of great agricultural interest is from Al-Andalus, the already-mentioned
Kitāb al-anwā’, better known as the Calendar of Cordoba, compiled for the year 961 by ‘Arīb
ibn Sa‘d, physician, poet, man of letters and chronicler, as well as secretary of the royal
chancellery under the Umayyad caliph Al-Hakam II. In fact the Calendar of Cordoba is really a
hybrid, comprising ‘Arīb ibn Sa‘d’s Kitāb al-anwā’ and the Christian liturgical calendar of Rabī‘
ibn Zaīd, also known as Racemundo, the bishop of Elvira (Granada) at that time. As well as
detailing the seasonal round of farming and horticultural activities it is one of the most
important sources for establishing the introduction of certain crops into Al-Andalus by the
Arabs, among which are mentioned the grapefruit or citron (uttrunj or uttruj), rice (arūz),
aubergine (badinjān), sugar cane (qaṣab al-sukkar), cotton (al-quṭun), banana (al-mawz),
watermelon (dullā‘), and a type of cucumber called qiṭṭā al-shāmī. The almanac tradition in Al-
Andalus continued with the early 11th century Kitab al-anwā' wa ’l-azmina of Abu Bakr ibn
‘Aṣim, a lexicographical work that includes an almanac with agricultural notices, and later in
the century, the agricultural calendar appended to Ibn Wāfid’s Majmū‘ fī ’l-filāḥa, which is one
of the few Andalusi books of Filāḥa to contain such a calendar. The anonymous Andalusi
almanac of the early 13th century entitled the Risāla fī awqāt al-sana, ‘Epistle on the seasons
of the year’, contains notices on the times and methods of cultivation and matters of animal
husbandry but also many fanciful prognostications based on natural phenomena such as
thunder and earthquakes, typifying a superstitious tendency in some later almanacs.

Although, as we have seen, one of the earliest extant almanacs, and certainly the best known,
was compiled for Cordoba, the almanac tradition was more prolific, probably more deep-
rooted, in other parts of the medieval Arabic-speaking world, especially in Egypt and Yemen.

Beyond Al-Andalus: Egypt, Yemen and Syria[back to top]

While there was a remarkable flowering of Arabic agricultural works in medieval Al-Andalus
they were neither the first nor the last. The earliest were in fact translations of Byzantine and
ancient Near-Eastern works and though they were immensely influential and contributed
much to Islamic agronomy, as shown later, they were not indigenously Arab. Other Arabic
works pertaining to agriculture were indeed written in various parts of the Islamic world, as we
would expect, especially in Egypt, Yemen and Syria but we know much less about them. They
tend to be later than the Andalusi Books of Filāḥa, more sporadic, certainly less numerous, and
few are what we would call manuals of husbandry or agronomical treatises.

In view of the fact that the Nile Valley and Delta nurtured one of the earliest ‘hydraulic
civilizations’, based on irrigation agriculture and the flooding of the Nile, and Egyptian farmers
preserved and practised this expertise for millennia through the Pharaonic, Roman, Byzantine,
and Islamic eras to achieve a model of sustainable agricultural production, it is somewhat
surprising that only three agricultural works are known from medieval Egypt. In late-12th
century Ayyubid Cairo, As‘ad ibn Mammātī (1149-1209), head of all the Dīwāns under both
Saladin (r. 1169-93) and his son Al-‘Azīz (r. 1193-98) and a noted historian, poet, and prolific
writer, compiled the Kitāb qawānīn al-dawāwīn, ‘Statutes of the councils of state’, an
administrative history and survey of Egypt during his tenure of office. It was the first and most
complete medieval cadastre of agricultural lands in Egypt, classifying them according to
fertility, irrigation, products, seasons, horticulture and so forth, and included a description of
the agricultural year in the form of an almanac, which survives in two versions, a long and a
short. Although by no means a manual or treatise on filāḥa, the Kitāb qawānīn nevertheless
contains rare and important information on agricultural and irrigation systems in Ayyubid
Egypt. In late-13th century Mamluk Egypt, Muḥammad al-Waṭwāṭ, a wealthy Cairene
bookseller, wrote his Mabāhij al-fikar wa manāhij al-‘ibar, an encyclopedia of natural sciences
and geography, whose fourth section, entitled ‘Al‑Fann al‑rābi‘ fī ’l-filāḥa’, deals with
agriculture and cultivated plants. A third agricultural treatise from Egypt was Al-Filāḥa al-
muntakhaba, ‘Selected agriculture’, or Kitāb al-filāḥa al-muntijah, ‘Book of fruitful agriculture’,
written by Ṭaybughā al-Tamār-Tamurī, a Burjī Mamluk of Circassian origin who died in 1395.
We know little about him except that he spoke the language of the wealthy landowner and
knew both Egypt and Syria. His work, which includes a Coptic agricultural almanac, seems to
draw heavily on Ibn Waḥshīya’s ‘Nabataean agriculture’, as well as Al-Filāḥa al-Rūmīya,
‘Byzantine agriculture’, although the author also wrote from personal experience and
observation.
In contrast to the agricultural treatises, there are probably more surviving medieval
agricultural almanacs from Egypt than any other part of the Arab world though only about
seven have been published to date, ranging from the late-12th century through to the mid-
15th century, all based on the solar Coptic calendar and contained within larger works. In
addition to those of Ibn Mammātī, both the long and short versions, and Al-Tamār-Tamurī
mentioned above, farming calendars are found in the Minhāj of Makhzūmī (d. after 1185), in
Qalqashandī’s 14-volume encyclopedia of 1412, the Ṣubḥ al-a‘shā or ‘Dawn for the Blind’, in
Maqrīzī’s (1364-1442) Al-Khiṭaṭ, which deals with the topography of Fustat, Cairo and
Alexandria, and Egyptian history in general, and a later anonymous almanac preserved in the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. While all these calendars borrow from previous, mostly
uncited works to a greater or lesser extent and in so doing contain some errors and
inconsistencies in astronomical calculations and calendrical adjustments, they nevertheless
record valuable information on agrarian affairs in late Fatimid and Mamluk Egypt, especially
those of Ibn Mammātī (the long version), Makhzūmī, and the Anonymous Parisian manuscript.
To give a flavour of these Egyptian agricultural and ‘lifestyle’ almanacs it is worth quoting an
extract - this from Ibn Mammātī, for example, in the general remarks at the end of the chapter
on the Coptic month of Baramhāt, corresponding to late February - late March:

CURTIS'S BOTANICAL MAGAZINE V.120 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Colocasia or taro, Colocasia esculenta (Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 1894)

During the course of this month cotton and safflower are sown. Watchers are placed on the
riverbanks. Summer vegetables are sown. Beans and lentils reach maturity. Flax is uprooted.
Sugar cane is sown in fertile ground that has lain fallow for some time. Cattle that were sent to
pasture in Ṭūbeh (early January) are bought and sold. The collection of natron begins and is
transported from Wadi Hubayb to the depot at Aṭ-Ṭarrāna. Wind from the north. It is the
beginning of the sowing season for sesame, melons, cucumbers, watermelon, haricots,
aubergines and colocasia. Green chickpeas reach maturity, trees flower, and some set their
fruits. Late vines are pruned. Alexandrian senna is also sown. Grass is abundant. Wild jujubes,
almonds, apples and apricots reach maturity. Trees are fully leaved. Vines are planted.

[In this month] it is beneficial to eat ḥalāwa, eggs, dried fruits and rice, to be cupped and apply
depilatory paste, to drink fenugreek water, to visit the hammām regularly and be rubbed with
oil of narcissus, lily and coconut, to have regular sex, but all within reasonable limits … one
should avoid eating fresh or salted fish, cheese, onions, garlic or anything acidic. This month is
favourable for the absorption of medicines, for visiting the hammām, and for constructing
wells. It is desirable to take light meat, boiled eggs and wine cut with water.28

Outside Al-Andalus, the richest corpus of agricultural texts comes from the Yemen. Home to
one of the oldest terrace-farming systems in the world and an equally ancient and
sophisticated irrigation technology, Yemen was the birthplace of Arab agriculture and was
known in Islamic times as Al-Yaman al-Khaḍrā’, ‘the Verdant Yemen’, on account of its fertility.
Situated at the pivotal point of Indian Ocean and Red Sea shipping and trade it was from
earliest times in contact with Egypt, East Africa, Persia, India and beyond, and became a centre
for the diffusion of new crops, plants, and techniques into the Near-East and Mediterranean
worlds. Yemeni agriculture, and agricultural literature, flourished in late medieval times,
especially during the Rasulid era from the 13th to 15th centuries. The Rasulid sultans were
enthusiastic patrons of the arts and sciences, and several of them were accomplished scholars
in astronomy, astrology, botany, medicine, veterinary science and agriculture. Three sultans
wrote agricultural treatises on farming practices in various parts of the Yemen, as well as other
agricultural works and almanacs, and some carried out horticultural experiments - on roses
and grape vines for example - in their royal gardens. Probably hundreds of almanacs and small
treatises exist on agriculture in the Yemen, though only a handful has come to light. The study
of the Rasulid agricultural texts and traditional husbandry in Yemen has been the life work of
Daniel Varisco (see main bibliography), and what follows is based largely on his published
research.

© S. G. FITZWILLIAM-HALL

Urban agriculture, San‘ā’, Yemen. About 10,000 people still work on some 9,300 hectares of
agricultural land in the city, producing more than 37,500 tons of vegetables (leeks, coriander,
radishes, onions and tomatoes), forage (alfalfa, maize, and barley), fruits (grapes, berries, nuts,
peaches and apricots), qat and other seasonal grain crops. Around 4,500 cows and 110,000
sheep and goats, in addition to camels, donkeys, poultry and bees, also populate the city
(RUAF, 2009)

The earliest Rasulid agricultural treatise, the Milḥ al-malāḥa fī ma‘rifat al-filāḥa, ‘Beautiful
words on the knowledge of husbandry’, was written by Al-Malik al-Ashraf, the third Rasulid
sultan of Yemen who ruled for a brief 21 months in 1295-96 after the long reign of his father.
His text contains seven chapters dealing with (1) Times for Cultivation, Planting and Preparing
Land; (2) Grains; (3) Legumes (qaṭānī); (4) Fruit Trees; (5) Flowering and Aromatic Plants; (6)
Vegetables; and (7) Agricultural Pests. Much of his material is specific to the Yemen. Al-Malik
al-Ashraf also compiled the earliest extant Yemeni almanac, written for c. AH 670/AD 1271,
which is contained within his astronomical treatise entitled Kitāb al-tabṣira fī‘ilm al-nujūm. It is
also the most detailed of the Yemeni almanacs. Together, Al-Malik al-Ashraf’s Milḥ al-malāḥa
and almanac furnish a detailed and comprehensive account of the science and practice of
agriculture in Yemen during the latter half of the 13th century, preserving and transmitting the
“wise practice of knowledgeable Yemenis”, in the words of the author. There are no references
to other texts or citations from earlier authorities, suggesting that Al-Ashraf did indeed gather
information from local informants, though no doubt he had access to some written texts from
outside Yemen.

Some hundred years later, the sixth Rasulid sultan Al-Malik al-Afḍal (d. 1376) wrote his
Bughyat al-fallāḥin fī al-ashjār al-muthmira wa-al-rayāḥīn, ‘The farmers’ object of desire in
regard to fruit-bearing trees and aromatic plants’, a major medieval text on agriculture with
extensive quotes from the 6th century Al-Filāḥa al-Rūmīya of Cassianus Bassus, the early 10th
century ‘Book of Nabataean agriculture’ of Ibn Waḥshīya, and from the Andalusi agronomist
Ibn Baṣṣāl. In addition, the author cites from the texts of his Rasulid predecessors Al-Malik al-
Ashraf and Al-Malik al-Mujāhid (d. 1362) whose Al-Ishāra fī al-‘imara, ‘Instruction on
[managing] the estate’, no longer exists. The chapters comprise: (1) Types of Land and their
Quality; (2) Fertilizers and Manures; (3) Water; (4) Selection and Clearing of Land for
Cultivation; (5) Agricultural Seasons and Activities, including a partial almanac for the winter
months; (6) Grains; (7) Legumes (qatānī); (8) Vegetables (buqūl and khadrāwāt); (9) Spices and
Herbs; (10) Flowering and Aromatic Plants; (11) Fruit Trees; (12) Pruning of Trees; (13)
Grafting of Trees; (14) Properties of Various Plants; (15) Major uses of Plants; and (16)
Medicinal Plants. Al-Malik al-Afḍal also wrote a short but highly informative royal crop register
for the year AH 773/AD 1371-2, the Faṣl fī ma‘rifat al-matānim wa-al-asiqā (?) fī al-Yaman al-
maḥrūsa, ‘Section on the knowledge of planting times and tax assessments (?) in the protected
realm of Yemen’, which provides an agricultural gazetteer for most of the coastal region or
Tihāma, and the southern highlands, and the dates for planting a long list of crops, flowers and
aromatic plants throughout Yemen. Although both Rasulid authors cover the field of
agriculture and horticulture, neither include anything of animal husbandry or veterinary
practice in their works, although Al-Malik al-Ashraf did write a separate veterinary treatise, Al-
Mughnī fī al-bayṭara, ‘The Enricher in veterinary science’, which also deals with fodder crops,
especially sorghum.

At least eight extant Rasulid almanacs provide details of the agricultural cycle in Yemen. Apart
from those of Al-Malik al-Ashraf for c. AH 670/AD 1271 and Al-Malik al-Afḍal for c. AD 1370,
already noted, the most interesting from our point of view are (1) Jadwal al-yawāqīt fī ma’rifat
al-mawāqīt, ‘The stream of precious stones in knowing the appointed times’, written c.1300 by
Muḥammad al-Ṭabarī, also known as Abū al-‘Uqūl, court astronomer of Al-Malik al-Mu’ayyad;
(2) the anonymous 14th century Fusūl majmū‘a fī al-anwā’ wa-al-zurū‘ wa-al-ḥiṣād, ‘Collected
materials on the anwā’ stars, planting and harvesting’, which owes much to the earlier
almanac of Al-Malik al-Ashraf; and (3) the anonymous Al-Anwā’ wa-al-tawqī’āt…’, an
agricultural almanac for AH 808/AD 1405-6. Although most of the Rasulid almanacs draw on
previous texts (as did later Yemeni almanacs, for the tradition continues up to the present –
see the 18th C. almanac of Yūsuf al-Maḥallī), they often add new information, and each is
unique to its time. Together they provide a series of time-lapse snapshots of medieval Yemeni
husbandry, a record seldom found elsewhere in the Arab world. Moreover, as Varisco has
shown, these agricultural treatises and almanacs are part of a living tradition that can still be
observed in the country today, in the accumulated knowledge and time-honoured practices of
Yemeni farmers.

After Al-Andalus, Egypt and the Yemen, a final late flowering of Arabic agricultural literature
grew from the soil of Al-Sham or Syria. In the late-13th/early-14th century Shams al-Dīn al-
Dimashqī (1256/7–1327), shaykh and imām at al-Rabwa, a locality near Damascus, and best
known as the author of the encyclopedic Nukhbat al-dahr fī ʿajā’ib al-barr wa-al-baḥr, ‘Time’s
choice wonders on land and sea’, a large geographical work that included cosmography and
astronomy, wrote the Ad-Durr al-multaqaṭ min ‘ilm filāhatay ar-Rūm wa n-Nabaṭ, ‘Pearls
gleaned from the science of the two agricultures of the Byzantines and the Nabataeans’. From
its title it would seem to be an abridgement of two ancient texts, the 6th/7th century Al-Filāḥa
ar-Rūmīya, ‘Byzantine agriculture’, of Cassianus Bassus, and the early 10th century ‘Nabataean
agriculture’ of Ibn Waḥshīya. A little later in the 14th century an anonymous Syrian wrote a
work entitled Miftāḥ al-rāḥah li-ahl al-filāḥa, ‘Key of comfort for the people of agriculture’,
quoting liberally from Ibn Waḥshīya and apparently using a complete work of the Andalusi
agronomist Ibn Baṣṣāl as one of his sources. His 31 quotations from Ibn Baṣṣāl are often more
extensive and clearer than those in the summarized version of Ibn Baṣṣāl that has survived.29
However, the anonymous author may well be Al-Dimashqī himself, as comparison between the
Miftāḥ al-rāḥah and Al-Dimashqī’s Ad-Durr al-multaqiṭ reveals certain similarities, such as the
same system for classifying plants. Both books seem to rely exclusively on borrowings,
quotations, and summaries of other works, lacking any individual contributions based on
personal experience.

AFP / GETTY IMAGES

Damascus rose-buds, al-Mrah, Syria. The village is famous for the cultivation of the Damask
rose, used in cosmetics, medicaments, and food products, especially rose water and the
popular local rose syrup.

An important late Syrian agricultural work is that of Rāḍī al-Dīn al-Ghazzī al-‘Āmirī of Damascus
(1457/58-1528/29), scholar and judge, who visited the Hijaz, Palestine and Egypt to observe
their agricultural and horticultural practices and compare them with those pertaining in Syria,
subsequently writing his Jāmi‘ farā’id al milāḥa fī jawāmi‘ fawā’id al-filāḥa, ‘Complete
guidelines for elegance in all the uses of agriculture’. The work covers all aspects of agriculture
and horticulture, excluding animal husbandry, and seems to be based on first-hand knowledge
as well as extensive use of the Andalusi Books of Filāḥa although, for Zuhayr al-Bābā, it is
“deeper, more comprehensive and closer to modern scientific agronomic works than those
that emerged in Al-Andalus.”30 According to Hamarneh, Al-Ghazzī “achieved the highest rank
attainable in good farming and horticulture in the entire region during the late Mamluk and
early Ottoman periods in Islam.”31 Certainly Al-Ghazzī was much admired in his own land, for
no less than three explanations or summaries of his treatise were written in the late-17th and
18th centuries, two of which echo, in part, the title of his work. The first was the Kitāb ʿalam al-
malāḥa fī ‘ilm al-filāḥa, ‘Book of the mark of elegance in the science of agriculture’, by ‘Abd al-
Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641-1731), mystic, theologian, poet, traveller, prolific writer on a variety of
subjects and a leading figure in the religious and literary life of Syria in his time. Then followed
the Risālat al‑bayān wa-al‑ṣarāḥa bi-talkhīṣ kitāb al-malāḥa fī ʿilm al-filāḥa, ‘Explanation and
summary of the book of elegance in the science of agriculture’, by Muḥammad ibn ʿĪsá ibn
Kannān (1663/4-1740/1) of Damascus, and finally the ʿUmdat al‑ṣināʿa fī ʿilm al‑zirāʿah, ‘The
reliance of skill in the knowledge of agriculture’, of ‘Abd al‑Qādir al-Khalāṣī (d. 1785/6?). No
critical editions or comparative studies of these late Syrian Ottoman works seem to have been
published so we don’t know how closely they follow and summarize Al-Ghazzī, or whether
they include different or new information.

Finally, we should mention the few extant works of agricultural interest that we know from
other parts of the Arabic-speaking world. In late-13th or early-14th century Maghreb the
famous mathematician and astronomer Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Bannā’ of Marrakesh
(1256-1321) wrote, among his hundred works, the Kitāb al-anwā’, an almanac in the anwā’
tradition. In it he quotes mainly from ʿArīb ibn Saʿd’s Calendar of Cordoba but refers also to Al-
Khaṭīb al-Umawī (11th century), ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥusayn ibn ʿĀṣim (12th century), Ibn al-
ʿAwwām’s Kitāb al-filāḥa and a Kitāb an-nabāṭ, possibly that of Abū Ḥanīfah al-Dīnawārī.32
While Ibn al-Bannā’s work is principally an astronomical calendar it includes the usual
agricultural notices and advice for each month, making it one of the very few sources we have
on medieval agriculture in the Maghreb and North Africa outside Egypt. In the 17th century,
two agricultural works, entitled Falāḥ al-fallāḥ, ‘Success of the farmer’, and al-Fuṣūl al-sanīya fī
al-filāḥa al-Madanīya, ‘Sublime chapters on the agriculture of Madinah’, were written by the
Madinan historian and scholar Muḥammad Kibrīt al-Ḥusaynī, who died about AH 1070/AD
1659/60. The Falāḥ al-fallāḥ consists of fifteen chapters, four of which are, unusually, devoted
to water, wells and cisterns, the rest to the weather, soils, the cultivation of trees, crops and
vegetables, and pest management. The Fuṣūl al-sanīya is mainly a list of plants, vegetables and
fruits, their times of planting, properties if eaten or used in other ways, the optimum
conditions and methods of planting, and the different varieties of particular species. Late as
they are, these two works furnish important information on agriculture in the Hijaz at this
time. A little later, another work, also called Falāḥ al-fallāḥ, ‘Success of the farmer’, is
attributed to Khayr al-Dīn ibn Ilyās (1675/6-1715), imām and khaṭīb of the Prophet’s mosque in
Madinah, but it is not clear whether this is the same work as Kibrīt’s, or an adaptation or
summary of it.

This concludes our survey of the Arabic Books of Filāḥa and agricultural calendars. As we have
seen, they were authored mainly in Al-Andalus, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, more or less in that
sequence. It is striking that no works seem to have been written for other important
agricultural regions in the Arabic-speaking Islamic world, especially Iraq (except perhaps the
early-10th century ‘Book of Nabataean agriculture’, of which more later), Oman, the Maghreb,
and Sicily. However, while there can be little doubt that hundreds of unknown manuscripts still
exist, especially among private collections, it is unlikely that any surviving major work on
Arabic agriculture remains to be discovered.

The Sources: Transmission of Knowledge[back to top]

As we have seen, a crucial factor in the formation of the Sevillian school of agronomists was
the acquisition of knowledge (and no doubt skills) by direct transmission from master to
disciple, and among and between the loose circle of scientists and physicians who gathered in
that cultural capital in the second half of the 11th century. Many of the Andalusi agronomists
(and later Yemeni authors too) also acquired knowledge from local farmers, as well as from
their own practical experience and experimentation in the botanical gardens, estates, farms
and countryside of their homelands. Being learned men, the authors of the Books of Filāḥa and
later Arabic works and almanacs also drew from a large corpus of agricultural literature that
reached back to ancient times, from many different traditions, citing directly and indirectly
from a multitude of earlier works. Whilst they acknowledged their debt to the ‘ancient sages’,
and greatly admired them, they also refuted them when their own experience proved
otherwise or when they simply thought they were wrong. In this respect the development of
agronomy as a discipline was no different from that of any other branch of learning. Earlier
texts were synthesized and systematized through a process of translation, commentary,
critique and comparison and then tested against current practice, personal experience and
experimentation. These ancient works provided, in large part, the theoretical framework of the
humoural system by which the new agriculture was explained and organized as a formal
science of agronomy, as well as describing the old cultural methods and techniques of practical
husbandry by which the Arabs could measure their own. From a scholarly point of view, the
chain of citations and inter-citations within the Books of Filāḥa provide a valuable and
fascinating insight into the history of ideas and the transmission of knowledge.
Among the many literary sources admired and quoted by Arab agronomists were those from
the Greek tradition, including Aristotle (384-322 BC), much cited by Abu’l-Khayr, and the
physician and philosopher Bolos Democritos of Mendes in Egypt (2nd century BC), quoted by
Ibn Wāfid, Abū ’l-Khayr, Ibn Ḥajjāj and Ibn al-‘Awwām;33 from the Carthaginian tradition,
Mago, the ‘Father of Agriculture’, and from the Latins, Varro (116-27 BC), who transmitted
material from Cato, the first Roman agricultural writer, and Columella (1st century AD) who
hailed from Gades in Roman Hispania; from the Late Roman Near-East, Vindonios Anatolios of
Berytos (4th-5th centuries AD), known directly from the Arabs and much admired by Ibn
Wāfid, Ibn Ḥajjāj and Ibn al-‘Awwām;34 from a very rich Byzantine tradition they drew
especially from Al-Filāḥa al-Rūmīya, ‘Byzantine agriculture’, of Cassianus Bassus (6th/7th
centuries AD); and finally the most influential of all, the early-10th century Al-Filāḥa al-
Nabatīya, ‘Nabataean agriculture’, translated by Ibn Waḥshīya, which in part seems to reflect a
late Babylonian or Chaldean tradition. In terms of practical husbandry, it appears that the
classical sources were especially significant in matters of arboriculture, cereals, and olive and
grape cultivation, the Near-Eastern sources on soils, manures and fertilizers, and the earlier
Arab Andalusi sources on irrigation, grafting and pruning, garden vegetables and flowers. 35

Two of the above works were especially esteemed by the Arab agronomists, the first being Al-
Filāḥa al-Rūmīya, ‘Byzantine agriculture’ (or Al-Filāḥa al-Yūnānīya al-Rūmīya, ‘Greek-Byzantine
agriculture’), written by Qusṭūs ibn Askūrāskīnah (from the Greek title skholastikós), also called
Qusṭūs al-Rūmī, who is probably the Cassianus Bassus Scholasticus to whom agronomic works
collected from Greek and Latin authors are attributed and who is said to have lived at the end
of the 6th or beginning of the 7th century. Unfortunately, next to nothing is known about
Cassianus Bassus, whose work is no longer extant in the Greek original nor in Syriac
translation, but has survived in two Arabic translations, one made from the Greek in AH
212/AD 827 and the other made from a Pahlavi translation, the Warz-nāmeh, and also as part
of the 10th century Byzantine compilation, the Geoponica, that also includes the works of
Anatolios and a certain Didymos as well as fragments of Democritos.36 Judging from the
number of extant manuscripts and frequent citations the Filāḥa al-Rūmīya was an influential
work. It is arranged in 12 parts, focusing on the months, their names, the seasons,
constellations, animal husbandry, dendrology and arboriculture. Cassianus Bassus seems to
draw mainly on his personal experience, then on named and unnamed earlier and
contemporary Greek and Byzantine authors, on whose views he sometimes takes a critical
stance, and lastly on the opinions of his contemporaries, especially farmers whom he knew.

The second is the controversial and enigmatic Kitāb al-filāḥa al-Nabatīya, ‘Book of Nabataean
agriculture’, certainly the most widely used source in the Andalusi Books of Filāḥa and the
Rasulid Yemeni and Syrian texts, known also to Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas in the wider
medieval world, and the subject of intense debate among 19th and 20th century scholars. That
the ‘Nabataean agriculture’ was immensely popular and influential is borne out by the large
number of extant early as well as late manuscripts (at least forty are known),37 and the
existence of many abridgements and summaries over the years. As we have seen, Ibn al-
Raqqām’s early-14th century Andalusi agricultural treatise is an expurgated version of the
‘Nabataean agriculture’, while the Egyptian Al-Tamār-Tamurī’s Al-Falāḥa al-muntakhaba and
the Syrian Dimashqī’s ‘Pearls gleaned from the science of agriculture of the Byzantines and the
Nabataeans’ seem to be largely based on it too.
The Filāḥa al-Nabatīya is thought to have been translated by Ibn Waḥshīya in AH 291/AD 904
from ‘Old Syriac’ manuscripts of around the 5th century AD, with additional material from
contemporary Aramaic-speaking informants. It appears to reflect the agricultural milieu of the
non-Arab, indigenous, pagan, rural population of northern and central Iraq (the ‘Nabataeans’)
around the time of the Muslim conquest, but includes material from the Greek Geoponica and
perhaps ancient Babylonian and Assyrian sources. Ibn Waḥshīya’s purpose, it seems, was to
preserve the traditional knowledge and beliefs of the Mesopotamian peasant in the face of
rapid Arabization, Islamization and urbanization.38 The Filāḥa al-Nabatīya is a vast, rambling
work of more than one hundred and fifty chapters of varying lengths, combining practical
agriculture with a large dose of astrology, magic, folklore, myth, and story. After an
introduction on his sources and the correspondence between plants and the heavenly bodies,
Ibn Waḥshīya begins with olive cultivation and attributes of the olive, then deals with water,
well construction, and irrigation techniques. There follows a section on all kinds of plants,
trees, and especially flowers such as narcissi, water lilies, violets, and so on, together with
curious information and superstitions about them. The next section deals with estate
management and the duties of estate owners, managers, and workers, including knowledge of
the signs of rain, the proper seeds for each time of year, an almanac arranged according to the
Syriac months, harmful and beneficial influences of winds, the stars, and different types of soil
and manures. Then follow chapters on the cereals, such as wheat and barley, culminating in
the making of flour and bread. Thereafter the text discusses legumes such as broad beans and
lupins, as well as onions, together with all sorts of historical and mythological details. The work
concludes with seven fairly long chapters on fruits and herbs and what may be made with
them, as well as the causes of differences in taste, colour, and smell among various plants, and
the changes they undergo. In all, over one hundred and fifty cultivated and wild plants are
described in detail.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

russafi.blogspot.com

The Tribunal of the Waters of the Vega of Valencia in 1885 (painted by Bernardo Ferrándiz
Bádenes), and today. Probably the oldest extant democratic institution in Europe, the Tribunal
of the Waters is thought to have originated in the 10th century under the caliph Abd al-
Rahman III. Each Thursday, the court, elected from among the irrigators themselves, meets
outside the Door of the Apostles of the Cathedral of Valencia (the site of the old mosque) to
settle disputes and discuss matters concerning irrigation in the Vega.

Legacy of the Books of Filāḥa[back to top]

Islamic agriculture transformed the medieval Middle Eastern, North African and western
Mediterranean lands and islands. Its legacy can be seen today in the landscapes, gardens,
crops, botanical diversity, and, especially, the systems, terminology and institutions relating to
irrigation (such as the celebrated Water Tribunals of Murcia and Valencia), found across the
Mediterranean world and transferred by Spanish colonists to parts of South and Central
America, the south-western United States, and even the Philippines. What is not so clear is the
role of the Andalusi Books of Filāḥa in this process and their wider influence on European
farming in general.

Did the Books of Filāḥa play a formative role in the Islamic agricultural revolution, or did they
simply reflect, rationalize and systematize what was already happening on the ground? Who
were they written for and what was their purpose? The question of readership is problematic,
and we must be wary of over-generalization, for though they are markedly similar in many
respects these works are not all the same and were written at different times, over a
considerable period. The answer may lie in their composite nature as part instructional
manual, part scientific treatise and part theoretical discourse, combining practical husbandry
and household economy with agronomy and botanical science based on prevailing humoural
theory. As didactic works it seems most unlikely that the Books of Filāḥa served as manuals for
the ordinary farmer, not only because of the limited number of copies that could have been
made in a hand-written age but because many of the cultural techniques they describe in
meticulous detail must already have been part-and-parcel of the tacit traditional knowledge
held by peasant farmers and smallholders everywhere - as Ibn Baṣṣāl points out, after his
description of various land types: “Of course, this is all well-known except to the most ignorant
labourer”. Moreover, given that the Books of Filāḥa were probably held in royal and private
libraries, accessible to only a few, it is difficult to believe that they were written with the small
farmer in mind. It seems much more likely that they (and the almanacs too) were composed
for the benefit of royal patrons, high officials, dignitaries and gentleman-farmers who were the
educated and enthusiastic owners of new estates and gardens, keen to experiment with new
crops and cultivars. Certainly many of the Books of Filāḥa pay close attention to the
preparation and levelling of new fields, the excavation of wells, and the reclamation of
marginal lands, suggesting that they were written with new land-owners in mind. Their
influence among the wider farming community is difficult to assess, but it is likely that any new
or alternative cultural methods they presented, especially concerning new crops, would have
been quickly disseminated by word of mouth and by emulation, from botanical gardens and
royal estates to neighbouring farms and market-gardens. Of one thing we can be fairly certain:
the late appearance of these works from the 11th century onwards seems to preclude any
pioneering role in the new agriculture, which began at least two centuries earlier. As scientists
and practitioners, the authors of the Books of Filāḥa may have been experts in the field,
perfecting techniques and advancing the cause, but it seems they followed in the wake of the
agricultural revolution rather than leading it. Yet in their painstaking instructions on the
cultivation of many new crops that were perhaps not widely known or grown at the time, they
surely contributed to its development.

From another perspective, as scientific treatises the Books of Filāḥa mirrored the works of
other sciences at the time, especially botany, chemistry and pharmacology, in endeavouring to
present a more systematic, empirical, and objective approach to agriculture and horticulture,
based on close observation, repeated experiment, and explanatory theory. In this role they
seem to be directed more towards the scientific and intellectual community, advancing
agronomy as a proper field of formal, scientific endeavour, and a subject worthy of study.

If the Books of Filāḥa played only a subsidiary role in the agrarian revolution they nevertheless
introduced Islamic agriculture, or rather that part of it preserved and codified in literary form,
to the wider European world. This knowledge passed into Christian Spain via a number of
translations, especially the 13th century Castilian translations of Ibn Wāfid and Ibn Baṣṣāl
during the reign of Alfonso the Wise. Ibn Wāfid’s treatise, in particular, inspired and informed
Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s Obra de Agricultura, ‘Work on agriculture’, first published in 1513.
Herrera, the father of modern-day Spanish agriculture, was in Granada by 1492 where for at
least 10 years he studied agriculture by observing the last of the Moorish farmers and reading
the translated Arabic Books of Filāha while working on several huertos or market-gardens.39
Hieronymus Münzer, a traveller from Nuremberg who visited the Iberian peninsula between
1494 and 1495, described the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada at Herrera’s time and
wrote admiringly of the agriculture of the Moors, especially the excellence of their cultivation
techniques, their irrigation methods, and the wide diversity of cultivated species and varieties,
organized into irrigated gardens within a notably tree-covered landscape.40 As the most
knowledgeable agronomist of his time, Herrera was approached by Fray Francisco Ximénez de
Cisneros, the Archbishop of Toledo and Grand Inquisitor, to write an agricultural instruction
manual to help improve farming in Spain, which was deteriorating rapidly with the expulsion of
Moors from the Peninsula. Ironically, it was Cisneros who ordered the burning of all Arabic
manuscripts in Granada, including, probably, agricultural works, and who was instrumental in
forcing many Moors from the land. Herrera’s Obra de Agricultura was immediately popular,
and since its first publication there have been eleven editions under this title and six editions in
Italian translation. In turn, Herrera’s manual influenced the agriculturalists Henri Louis Olivier
in France and Conrad Heresbach in Germany and there is evidence that it was known too in
what is now the south-western part of the United States, influencing the mixed farming
tradition of Indo-Hispanic farmers, which shows marked Arab influence, especially in matters
of irrigation.41 Although Ibn Wāfid is the only Andalusi agronomist cited in the Obra de
Agricultura, as one among many other sources, the work is nevertheless imbued with the
principles of Moorish agriculture, absorbed no doubt during Herrera’s early farming education
among the Muslims of Granada.

The end of Islamic civilization in Al-Andalus marked the beginning of agricultural decline in
Spain. In the late 16th century, Philip II’s secretary Francisco Idiaquez, recognizing the superior
farming skills of the Moriscos, descendants of the Muslims, lamented: “There is no corner or
plot of land that should not have been turned over to the Moriscos, for they alone were
capable of bringing about fertility and abundance in all the land and because they alone knew
how to cultivate it so well.”42 But it was not until the 18th century that the lost knowledge
contained in the Arabic Books of Filāha was rediscovered. Pedro Rodriguez Compomanes
(1723-1802), economic reformer under the Spanish king Charles III and one of the main
political figures of the Spanish Enlightenment, in his efforts to reinvigorate Spanish agriculture
arranged for the translation of Chapters XVII and XIX of Ibn Al-‘Awwām’s Kitāb al-filāḥa, on
land preparation and seed selection, and had them incorporated into the first Spanish
translation of the 1760 agricultural treatise of the French agronomist Duhamel de Monceau.43
Then in 1802 Josef Antonio Banqueri translated the complete work of Ibn Al-‘Awwām into
modern Spanish, along with the Arabic text, making it the first of the books of Arabic
husbandry to be published and made available to the wider European world.

Future Farming[back to top]

The historical value of the Arabic Books of Filāḥa, almanacs, and other agricultural works is
considerable. They not only document the minutiae of Islamic agriculture and the medieval
agricultural revolution but as a corpus they provide a longue durée view of pre-modern
agricultural knowledge and practice across a wide area of the Middle East and the
Mediterranean world - from Al-Andalus, Egypt, Yemen and Syria (and Iraq if we include the
‘Nabataean agriculture’), from the 10th century through to the eve of the modern. From
another perspective, as we have seen, they provide a detailed map for tracking the
transmission of knowledge from ancient times and from a multitude of diverse sources. In
addition, as an ethnographic resource they can serve to illuminate existing traditional farming
practice in various parts of the region, as Daniel Varisco has shown for the Yemen.

More important, in our view, is the relevance of the Books of Filāḥa to food production and
farming today, and to future sustainable agriculture. Mustafa Al-Shihabi in his article on Filāḥa
in the prestigious Encyclopaedia of Islam asserts that: “All the early Arabic (or other) works on
agriculture, being based on observation alone, are only of historical and terminological value.
It was only in the 19th century that, in Egypt, there appeared the first Arabic agricultural work
based on modern science.”44 This, however, is to deny the perennial knowledge contained in
the Books of Filāḥa - the accumulated knowledge of centuries - as if it had somehow been
rendered redundant and worthless by modern scientific agriculture. Equally mistaken is the
view that the so-called Arab agronomists were the enlightened, though primitive, precursors
of today’s agro-scientists, and that modern agriculture, like modern science, is in debt to the
Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth in both cases, for what the authors of the
Books of Filāḥa expound and document in great detail is none other than a holistic system of
potentially sustainable organic husbandry in marked contrast to the prevailing, and clearly
unsustainable, model of industrialized agribusiness, based on high chemical inputs and high
carbon outputs, monoculture, mechanization, and the maximization of short-term profit,
which is the product and goal of ‘advanced’ agro-science. Islamic husbandry and modern
agriculture lie at opposite ends of the ecological and sustainability spectrum. The system
described by the Andalusi agronomists has much in common with the various methods of
alternative farming practised today under such names as sustainable agriculture, organic
farming, permaculture, biodynamic farming, holistic agriculture, low-input farming, ecological
farming, and regenerative agriculture, which all have sustainability as their ultimate goal: the
ability to farm productively in perpetuity, without depletion of natural resources or harm to
the environment and without compromising the needs of future generations. In this light, we
should approach the Books of Filāḥa not simply as valuable historical sources but as beacons of
good practice that present a viable model for the future of farming.
This view is of course debatable and demands scrutiny, explanation and evidence. Very few
scholars have considered as a whole the system of husbandry presented in the Books of Filāḥa,
and much work remains to be done.45 However, the case as it stands is convincing. Here we
can do no more than introduce the rationale behind this conception and touch on one or two
aspects. Although in their details the Arabic agricultural books relate to a broadly
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern environment their underlying principles and key practices
are universal and applicable to all times and places, and while these fundamentals are not
articulated and explained in the current language of ecological or biological science, they are
nevertheless clearly recognizable. Foremost among these is the principle of return or
regeneration, of completing the natural cycle that is inevitably disrupted by growing and
harvesting food from the land. The authors of the Books of Filāḥa, drawing on the wisdom of
ages, are well aware of the danger inherent in all forms of agriculture - that of depleting the
very resource on which it depends, the fertility of the soil itself. Organic matter, plant
nutrients, minerals and trace elements removed from the soil in the form of crops must be
returned or replaced. The cycle of regeneration that maintains nature in a state of dynamic
equilibrium, the so-called balance of nature, must be protected to ensure continuity and
productivity.

All the Andalusi agronomists, to a greater or lesser degree, approach agriculture as the art of
balancing four basic ‘elements’ - soil, water, air, and manure/compost, corresponding to earth,
water, air and fire in the humoural system. These four elements are always in dynamic
relationship, so that a change in one affects all the others. Great emphasis is placed on the soil
or the land, and this is usually treated first in the Books of Filāḥa, before all other matters. As
Ibn al-‘Awwām makes clear: “The first consideration in farming is knowledge of the land/soil …
and whoever does not have this understanding lacks the basic principles, and in relation to
farming deserves to be treated as ignorant.”46 In their meticulous attention to soils the
Andalusi agronomists are at their most original. At least thirty different types of soil47 are
distinguished and categorized according to their various qualities, including fertility, organic
matter, acidity, structure, depth, permeability and water retention, these being ascertained in
the field by their texture, colour, taste, smell, soil fauna and, especially, by their natural
vegetation and characteristic indicator plants. The type and quality of the soil determines how
it should be prepared and cultivated, how it may be ameliorated, what should or can be
grown, and how it should be irrigated and manured, depending on the crop to be grown. The
best soil is “that which most closely resembles well-rotted manure, friable … fresh and
moist”,48 that is, one composed mainly of decayed organic matter, full of ‘nutritious juices’, an
expression which seems to refer to what is now known as humus, the dark, highly-complex,
colloidal, jelly-like substance that even today is often described as the ‘life-force’ of soil. All
lands and soil types, even inferior saline, sandy and acidic soils, are potentially useful and all
can be brought to life and improved by various means - by the application of special composts,
neutralizing earths, and marl, by proper drainage, by prudent tillage, and by the growing of
certain pioneer species. Ibn al-‘Awwām, for example, notes that repeated sowings of beet on
saline land will reduce, then eliminate, all salinity from the soil, leaving it in fine condition, free
from all defects.49 Thus it was not only the best but also the worst lands that were brought
into cultivation. In the Andalusi system the key to good husbandry seems to lie in the
painstaking preparation and improvement of the land. This is what could be called ‘soil first’
farming, in contrast to much modern agriculture that treats soil as little more than an inert
substrate for delivering industrially produced chemicals.
© BEGINNER'S LUCK / FLICKR

Pigeon towers near Gizah, Egypt.

Central to the process of soil-building and amelioration is the return of organic matter to the
land, for ‘the plant nourishes the plant’, either directly or indirectly, and the Books of Filāḥa
devote much attention to the preparation and application of all types of special manures,
composts, soil conditioners, mulches and dressings, each tailored to the soil and the crop to be
grown. These include the full range of animal dung and bird droppings (except that from pigs,
being ‘noxious’, and ducks, being too wet), desiccated and pulverized human waste, all manner
of plant material such as stems, leaves, roots, weeds, trimmings, straw and spent fruits, stable
litter, ash from the hammām, refuse and road sweepings, and silt dredged from wells and
canals. Nothing is wasted, even the urine of farm-workers being utilized. The best manures are
those from horses, donkeys, humans and, above all, pigeons and doves, raised in purpose-built
pigeon-towers. These various manures and plant materials are usually carefully measured,
combined and thoroughly composted for several years before being applied judiciously at the
appropriate time. For Gabriel de Herrera, it was this art of composting and manuring the land
which enabled the Moors of the Vega of Grenada to obtain harvest after harvest, continuously
and without interruption.50 The Arab agronomists also recommend the growing of
leguminous, nitrogen-fixing green manures such as vetch, clover, lupins and fenugreek to be
dug or ploughed in to replace lost nitrogen, and the use of deep-rooting plants such as alfalfa
to draw up minerals from the sub-soil. In the absence of sufficient supplies of compost and
manures, and in certain other circumstances, the age-old practice of resting the land or
fallowing is employed. Irrigation activates manures (as well as adding fertile silt if derived from
flood-waters) and ploughing allows air to enter the soil, aiding decomposition and encouraging
plant growth. The return of organic matter to the land to restore lost fertility lies at the heart
of traditional Islamic husbandry and today’s organic farming alike, whereas modern scientific
agriculture has more or less dispensed with it altogether, delivering plant nutrients and
minerals by artificial fertilizers alone.

As in most other agricultural systems, crop rotation plays an essential role in Andalusian
husbandry in order to avoid the build-up of pathogens and pests and the depletion of soil
nutrients that may occur when one species is grown continuously on the same piece of land.
Wheat and barley, in particular, should not be grown in succession for, as Ibn al-‘Awwām
makes clear, “these two cereals exhaust the soil when they are grown constantly and without
interruption”.51 Not only must they be alternated but should be preceded (and often
followed) by plants which restore to the soil its ‘nutritive vigour’, above all by the nitrogen-
fixing legumes, especially haricots, lentils, lupins, vetches, broad beans and chick peas.
Although of course the Andalusi agronomists knew nothing of the nitrogen-fixing symbiotic
bacteria in the root nodules of leguminous plants, they knew that “land that has grown
legumes is found to be in a superior condition to all others52”. Consequently, legumes of all
types and in all their varieties are treated in great detail in the Books of Filāḥa. Not only were
they an integral part of the farming system on account of their fertilizing qualities but as
protein-rich pulses they were also important in the dietary regime of medieval Spain, for both
people and livestock.

Another principle that emerges clearly from the Books of Filāḥa is that of diversity. A very large
number of crops and plant species were cultivated, to be eaten or otherwise utilized, including
many that have since fallen out of general use or been marginalized in southern Europe such
as rocket, purslane, sorrel, dandelion, alexanders, scorzonera or black salsify, spotted golden
thistle, milk thistle, comfrey, Spanish salsify, vetches, cow-peas, spelt, pearl millet, sorghum,
lotus tree, service tree or sorb, azarole, and the hackberry or nettle tree.53 It is worth recalling
that Ibn al-Awwam mentions 585 different crops and plants. This great diversity not only
provided a very varied and balanced diet for both humans and livestock, and supplied most of
the medicines and many raw materials for clothing and industrial processes, but also ensured
food security throughout the year by spreading risk in times of unseasonal weather and other
unforeseen events, when at least some crops would be likely to succeed. It also enabled an
almost infinite combination of ingenious crop rotations, inter-cropping, mixed cropping,
companion planting, and multi-storey cropping (tree crops under-planted with perennials or
annuals), employing a sophisticated understanding of plant associations, the sympathies and
antipathies among species, and of the different uptake of minerals among different species.
Importantly, such practices also avoided the build-up of crop-specific soil pests and diseases.
Diversity was also enhanced by the careful selection and breeding of a multitude of cultivars,
often specific to a particular locality and adapted to the local soil, environmental and climatic
conditions.

© ROBERT VAN DER HILST / CORBIS

The Barb or Berber horse of North Africa, a light riding horse with great stamina, which played
a major role in the breeding of the celebrated Andalusian horse.

As an integral part of a mixed-farming system, livestock both large and small provided all-
important manure, being kept as stall-fed animals or folded on fields of lucerne, Alexandrian
clover and field peas, or grazed on permanent meadows and pastures. The Andalusi
agronomists instruct on the care and breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, camels, horses, mules,
donkeys and dogs, as well as pigeons, geese, ducks, chickens, partridge, peacocks and bees.
Among the animals the horse is given pride of place, and among the birds, pigeons and doves,
which produced eggs, meat for the pot and highly-prized guano. Close attention is given to the
keeping of bees which provided not only honey but ensured the successful pollination of fruit
and field crops. It hardly needs saying that such purposeful diversity and complexity is poles
apart from the extreme specialization and simplified monoculture of much modern agriculture.

As a final point of interest, the Andalusi agronomists have much to say concerning plant pests
and diseases. First, Abū ’l-Khayr tells us that “the cause of a great number of diseases and
maladies which affect plants lies in the four elements - soil, water, air and manure”.54 In other
words, crop problems are most often due to a deficiency or excess in one or more of these
elements, setting up an imbalance that leads to disease or pest infestation. By inference, a
correct balance among the four elements produces healthy plants less susceptible to disease
and insect attack. This is exactly the approach taken by today’s organic farmers and gardeners
- most diseases and pests are the consequence of poor or incorrect growing conditions and can
be minimized by attending to these rather than resorting to chemical pesticides or fungicides.
Other preventative measures, as we have seen, included crop rotation, mixed cropping, and
companion planting. In the event of diseased or ailing plants, the Andalusi agronomists
recommend treating like with like. In the same way that ‘the plant nourishes the plant’, so also
‘the plant heals the plant’. Decoctions, fumigants, sprays, plasters and top dressings, often
incorporating leaves or other plant parts from healthy specimens of the same species, are
employed. Against insect pests, ants, locusts, and vermin that damage stored grain, hay, seeds
and fruits, the Books of Filāḥa provide the recipes for a battery of natural poisons, pesticides,
and repellents made of toxic, bitter, or purgative plants such as wild cucumber, colocynth,
black hellebore and henbane - and for extra insurance, a good many magical talismans.

This survey, the first to encompass all of the known medieval Arabic Books of Filāḥa and other
agricultural works, reveals a substantial body of literature that describes a pre-industrial
system of husbandry that was, by all accounts, immensely successful. The brief foray above
into some of the principles and practices of Islamic husbandry as applied in Al-Andalus shows
that it was an intensive, organic, mixed-farming system that supported a large population and
flourishing civilization for some four hundred years (and up to seven hundred years in the case
of Granada) without the aid of agrochemicals or any of the so-called advances of modern
scientific agriculture (and, we might add, with very low carbon emissions). For this reason,
above all, the Books of Filāḥa deserve our great admiration and merit closer attention.

A. H. Fitzwilliam-Hall / October 2010