ABSTRACT
Food and coition, or consumption and sexual consummation, are obviously linked, for instance in the Arabic expression al-aṭyabān, ‘the two good (or nice) things’. But for these, life is not worth living and one might as well be dead: ‘If those two good things have eluded you, you should not care/when that day comes upon you that you used to fear.’ 1 Al-Ghazālī deals with them together in one of the forty ‘books’ of his Revivification, entitled ‘Breaking the Two Lusts’ (Kasr al-shahwatayn). 2 Food and sex are two of the three ‘fleshly delights’ of this world in a saying attributed to the pre-Islamic poet Ta’abbata Sharrā and others: ‘I have never enjoyed anything as much as three things: eating flesh, riding on flesh and rubbing flesh against flesh’. 3 Ibn Zuqqāʿa (d. 816/1414) describes in a short poem that, when ill, he was revived by the combination of a female visitor and food, ‘… because I am a man who loves women and a loaded table’ – perhaps with an arch allusion to the fourth and fifth suras of the Koran (entitled ‘Women’ and ‘The Loaded Table’, respectively). 4
