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A comment on Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too?.

Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by dr_dshiv on Thursday May 18, 2023 @04:33AM (#35985373)
From the article:

…in al-Masʿūdī’s tenth-century Murūj al-Dhahab, a poem by the famous Abbasid poet of Baghdad Ibn al-Rūmī (d. 896) describes how to construct a sandwich, which he calls wasṭ (وسط), in which the stuffing is put between two layers of bread. Here is how he describes it:

    You, seeker of delicious food, take a couple of fine breads, round and thick,
    The likes of which no one has seen, Slice off the top crusts, 
    so that you make them thin.
    Spread on one, finely minced grilled chicken, delectable and delicate, 
    which a mere puff would melt.
    On this arrange lines of almond intersected with lines of walnut.
    Let its dots be cheese and olive, and its vowels mint and tarragon,
    Now take boiled eggs, and with their dirhams [egg white] 
    and dinars [egg yolk] the wasṭ adorn.
    Give it a dusting of salt, but not much; just what it needs.
    And inspect it with your eyes for a second or two, 
    for the eyes have a share in it, too.
    Look at it appreciatively until your eyes have their fill, 
    then cover it with the other bread, and eat it with joy.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by ManuelKiessling on Thursday May 18, 2023 @04:57AM (#35985547)
Say what you want about medieval times — folks knew how to sell a recipe.
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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by n4r9 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @05:13AM (#35985686)
> ... its dots be cheese ... its vowels mint ...

If like me you're wondering about "dots" and "vowels", my best guess is that it's an allusion to arabic script. Some letters have dots above or below them, and short vowels are sometimes represented by a slash or loop above or below the preceding consonant.

So the recipe is using a metaphor to effectively say "sprinkle with cheese".

See e.g. https://arabic.fi/lessons/vowels

The dinar/dirham for egg yolk/white is interesting as well. I think it's another metaphor rather than a direct translation. Those word are both used in the currencies of various countries around the Mediterranean - dinar (yolk) was originally a gold coin whereas dirham (white) was silver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirham

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by have_faith on Thursday May 18, 2023 @05:18AM (#35985729)
In poem form and yet still more informative that your average recipe website.
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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by groestl on Thursday May 18, 2023 @05:21AM (#35985745)
I'll import it into my Tandoor instance immediately :)
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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by ROTMetro on Thursday May 18, 2023 @12:36PM (#35990499)
Interesting that al-Rūmī like so much 'Arab Golden Age' or 'Islamic Golden Age' contributors was of Greek descent. I really wish the balkanizing narrative wasn't forced around this era of history I think humans would have found better understanding of each other and our connections/sameness rather than defining one specific and non-representative group running an empire of conquest as having 'uniqueness' 'specialness' and 'otherness' during this period of time. A lot of conquered people just get erased from history as if the people conquered in the name if Islam just one day became their conquerors. Why? How can we understand and learn from such strangely defined history? It would be like classifying the Sioux as European thinkers. We push that Arabs kept Greek knowledge alive when in a lot of cases it was greek knowledge that was already established in the region because the people that lived there were... Greek and the people keeping it were Greek. Then we call lands ran by Christian Germanic peoples and their religion ignorant/savage/anti knowledge because they lost this 'European' knowledge. So many traits being assigned by geography and losing all context of culture, understanding, or insight to fit a narrative.
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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by dr_dshiv on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:35PM (#35992213)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Rumi

“Greece” extended from Sicily to Afghanistan to Egypt. Hellenization incorporated a lot of different people. Then Islam incorporated a lot of different people.

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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by eli_gottlieb on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:56PM (#35992471)
>A lot of conquered people just get erased from history as if the people conquered in the name if Islam just one day became their conquerors. Why?

Because you'll be bombed or shot or invaded if you try to assert the authenticity of non-Muslim, non-Arab identities being native to the Middle East and North Africa.

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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by pipologist on Thursday May 18, 2023 @05:27PM (#35994288)
Arabs were open to other ethnicities and didn’t try to arabize them. This is apparent in Persia, Turkic countries, etc. The regions assimilating Arabic were regions which spoke Afro-Asiatic languages, from which Arabic also hails. Similar assimilation happened with Aramaic before it and Assyrian before that, even thousand of year prior to Islam.
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Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by eli_gottlieb on Friday May 19, 2023 @07:32AM (#36000428)
> Arabs were open to other ethnicities and didn’t try to arabize them. This is apparent in Persia, Turkic countries, etc.

Lol tell it to the 20th century, bud. They were fine with not executing a cultural genocide only as long as they could hold it over other groups that "we brought you Islam". Once Islamic empire stops being the unifying political force, all of a sudden you get pan-Arabism: Kurds and Imazighen have their languages banned, Jews are thrown out of the country, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by eternalban on Thursday May 18, 2023 @03:18PM (#35992749)
> A lot of conquered people just get erased from history as if the people conquered in the name if Islam just one day became their conquerors. Why? How can we understand and learn from such strangely defined history?

This is history as written by Europeans*, don't forget.

So the question is: why do we refer to e.g. Newton writing in Latin as an English scientist (and not Christian, or Latin) but anyone who wrote in Arabic is either an Arab or Muslim scientist. Now this may have started due to lack of information (before Europeans came to fully survey "Middle East") but it persists to this day. One can speculate to the possible reasons, of course, but it suffices to point out the pheonomena.

* Ibn Khaldun, the famous Arab historian, for example, did not have this issue (to his lasting credit):

https://sonsofsunnah.com/2011/11/12/ibn-khaldun-on-the-persi...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? by throwawayadvsec on Thursday May 18, 2023 @02:06PM (#35991824)
" and with their dirhams [egg white] and dinars [egg yolk] "

wait so some arab currencies are actually translated as egg white and egg yolks? :o

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