Arab food markets
The term ‘Arabian cuisine’ is a tie that binds diversity. Across North Africa, the influence is Arabo-Berber with Turkish overtones. In Egypt, people still enjoy dishes shown in the wall paintings of the tombs of the pharoahs. In the valleys and plains of the Fertile Crescent, irrigated by the Jordan, Tigris, Orontes and Euphrates rivers – where civilisation began - vegetarians can enjoy an abundance of vegetables, cereals, herbs and oils. That’s as it should be, because it is where many of the crops we know today were first domesticated and purposely cultivated. Meat lovers would relish a meal in the neighbouring deserts, where necessity has forged a cuisine among the nomadic herders that is based on char-grilled meat, lightened by coffee flavoured with cardamom. And anyone who likes spice and the heat of chilli in their food would choose the easternmost part of the Arabian peninsula, which feasts on spices shipped in from India.
The scent of exoticism is sharpened in the food markets of the region once known to Europeans as Arabia, where whole streets are given over to shops and stalls which specialize in a particular kind of food. In these narrow-fronted shops, goods are stacked to the roof, overflow onto the pavements, and dangle from the shop facades and the ceilings of the covered streets of the markets. Shoppers stroll and stop at leisure. Before buying, they touch, sniff and squeeze the goods jammed into wooden crates, piled high on market stalls or crammed into sacks. Shopkeepers barter and gossip and loudly advertise the day’s best bargain, echoing the cries of traders down the millennia.
The most evocative streets are those of the spice markets, where the air is scented with sweet-smelling rose petals and dried plants and seeds, and the atmosphere is thick with irony and perfumed air. There is a vivid sense that this has gone on for many hundreds of years. Lady Macbeth’s famous line, spoken as guilt overcomes her and written more than four hundred years ago, comes to mind: “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
Old Damascus vies with Aleppo for the title of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city.
Both are mentioned in Eblaite tablets from the third millennium BC. But in its suq al-bzouriyya, the street is as generously wide as the thoroughfares of a contemporary shopping mall. Dubai is unrivalled as the world’s fastest moving, most international free trade zone, but its spice alleys are a throwback to the past, a medieval labyrinth with sidewalls barely an arm’s span apart.
With some regional variations, spice markets reveal the binding similarities in the otherwise differing regional cuisines. Fish markets are smellier places than spice markets, as would be expected - but they are all the more fascinating for the dazzling displays that mark out the difference between one place and another. They are particularly interesting to someone coming from Malta. Dubai’s fishermen dip their nets into the Persian Gulf. Syria’s nets go into the Mediterranean, pulling in an entirely different catch. Yet even a dish that has its own distinctive taste carries the flavour of an entire cuisine. Arab food markets are no different. You need to experience a bit of each to make sense of the whole range.
Fish in Dubai
Along the coast of the United Arab Emirates, fish is a dietary mainstay because it is a readily available source of protein in a zone where keeping animals for meat is difficult and expensive. Dubai, at the upper end of the northern coast on the Arabian Gulf, was originally a small fishing settlement surrounded by desert sands. It became a busy port of call on the ancient trade route between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the first stirrings of what it is today. Dhows from the Far East, China, Ceylon and India would sail up the creek that slashes through Dubai. While their cargo was unloaded onto the docks, traders in the nearby markets haggled over the selling-price.
After oil was discovered there in 1966, Dubai was rapidly transformed into an international business centre and tourist destination. Until then, rice and fish had been the standard noon-time meal. Eating fresh fish late in the day was considered taboo, possibly a safeguard against food poisoning in a place where a high atmospheric temperature makes it a particular risk. Fish caught in the early morning would go off by evening in such great heat. Despite refrigeration, the habit persists. Preserved fish, known as cheseef (sun-dried) or mal-lah (salted, as any Maltese would know through translation), was produced for delivery to inland areas. The practice eventually evolved into an industry that had its own separate market.
Although its food landscape is now international, Dubai’s bountiful fish markets, of which there are several, trade in fresh fish from the Gulf, some still caught in traditional hadra and sakar nets. The largest and busiest of the fish markets is the one in Al Shidagha, next to the bustling and colourful greengrocery market, which is staffed by stall holders from India and Pakistan, selling everything from exotic tropical fruit to the homely potato. At the nearby fish market, most of the fish, including metre-long sharks, are sold intact. Buyers can have the fish cleaned, gutted and butchered after they are bought and paid for, in a designated area where benches for waiting customers have been thoughtfully provided, separately labelled for men and for women, who sit apart.
Markets
There are two kinds of market, or suq. The perambulatory kind is similar to the ones we see in our own towns and villages on particular days of the week. The permanent suq, akin to the old-time covered food market in Valletta, is the heart of an Arab town or village, and the forerunner of the commercial shopping district. It is organised according to rules that go beyond profit. A suq groups together shops that sell the same sort of thing, so a large suq is made up of several smaller ones. It is not unusual to find a gold suq alongside a spice and soap suq, and a suq of textiles, weavers and dyers adjacent to one that sells fish and another selling fruit and vegetables.
Traditionally, the streets of the market are covered or roofed over, shielding shoppers and traders from heat and rain. This was a practice used by the ancient Greeks, who ranged their shops along a covered walkway. A mosque at the centre of the market usually determines the position of the shops. Those whose activities are cleaner and therefore closer to God are placed nearer the mosque. Those that relate to unclean activities are placed further away. The permanent suq includes cafés and small restaurants, amenities not found in the perambulatory type. Unlike the commercial shopping areas in the Western world, suqs tend not to include dwellings, though they may contain small hotels, derivatives of the funduq or inns, which used to accommodate the caravanserai of merchants.
Corinne Vella and Ondrè Camilleri travelled to Dubai courtesy of Emirates Airlines. Emirates flies to Dubai from Malta four times a week. The airline operates flights to Syria and Jordan via Dubai. A taxi from Amman in Jordan to Damascus in Syria takes around four hours, including the completion of border control procedures. Call Emirates Airlines on 2369 6455 for more information and reservations.