Legacy of the Books of Filāḥa back to top]

Future Farming 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.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 soil 47 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.