The caliph who had people flogged for selling molokhiya

In Fatimid Cairo, in the first years of the eleventh century, a group of people were beaten and paraded through the streets for selling a leaf vegetable.¹ The offence was trading in mulukhiyya, and it was prosecuted alongside the sale of fish without scales. Nobody here was regulating a market. The order had come from the caliph.

The caliph was al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, sixth of the Fatimids, who ruled Egypt from 996 until his disappearance in 1021. Somewhere in the Islamic year 395, which ran from October 1004 to October 1005, he issued a decree concerning foodstuffs. It forbade mulukhiyya. It also forbade jirjir, the green that English calls rocket or arugula, along with scaleless fish and fuqqa, a fermented barley drink.¹

The reason the chronicles give

The chronicle tradition is unusually forthcoming about the motive, and it is not a culinary one. Mulukhiyya was banned, in the translated words of the decree, because it had been much loved by Muawiya b. Abi Sufyan, the first Umayyad caliph and the arch enemy of Ali and the Shia. Jirjir was outlawed for its association with Aisha.¹

Read that way the decree stops being eccentric and becomes legible. A Shia Ismaili ruler was reaching into the kitchens of a majority-Sunni city and removing from them the foods that carried the names of the opposing side. The vegetable was not the target. Its patron was.

You will find a different explanation nearly everywhere else: that al-Hakim banned molokhiya because it was an aphrodisiac. I went looking for that claim in the scholarly literature on his reign and could not find it attached to the decree at all. It is worth stating plainly, because it is the version that has propagated furthest, and because the sourced reason is considerably more interesting than the invented one.

What historians have not settled is the larger question of what al-Hakim was doing. His reign produced a long series of prohibitions, reversals and executions that his biographer says continues to defy explanation.¹ Whether the food decrees were the arbitrary acts of an unstable ruler or pieces of a coherent programme is a live argument, and this note is not going to settle it either. The enforcement, at least, is not in doubt. The measures against fuqqa, mulukhiyya and scaleless fish were tightened over time, and people were flogged in public for breaking them.

There is one detail in Walker's book that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Among the caliph's grooms there was a stablemaster who went by the odd name Mulukhiya, and the only reason anyone knows this is that al-Hakim at one point ordered his execution.¹ A man walking around the palace stables carrying the name of the vegetable the caliph had criminalised, preserved in the historical record by nothing except the order to kill him. Walker does not connect the name to the sentence, and neither will I.

The reason the Druze give

Most food bans die with the ruler who made them. This one did not, because al-Hakim did not stay a caliph. To the Druze, who emerged during his reign and have never forgotten him, he is a figure of an entirely different order, and the prohibition came with him.

The Lebanese anthropologist Fuad Khuri recorded the practice and, more valuably, the explanation its own community gives for it. The Druzes of Lebanon do not eat a very popular dish called mulukhiya, he wrote, simply because it is popular. They hold that al-Hakim, their divine leader, tabooed it precisely because of people's weakness for it.²

That is a different account from the one in the chronicles, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing in this whole story. The historian's version is sectarian: the dish is renounced because of who loved it. The living version is ascetic: the dish is renounced because you love it. One is about a seventh-century quarrel. The other is a discipline against appetite, of a piece with what Khuri describes as a deliberately simple and unpretentious life.

The two are not as far apart as they look, and Khuri supplies the bridge himself in the same book: among the Druze, the personal names Bakr, Umar, Aisha, Muawiya, Yazid and Marwan are also taboo.² The same figures whose foods were banned in 1004 are the figures whose names go ungiven to children. One gesture, performed in two media: on the plate and on the birth certificate.

Not the food of kings

Almost every account of this plant will tell you that mulukhiyya means royal, from Arabic muluk, kings, and that a pharaoh or a caliph was cured by it and gave it the name. The etymology does not survive contact with a lexicon.

The word is a borrowed Greek plant name. Liddell and Scott give malache, with the variant molochē, as the mallow, Malva silvestris, attested in Epicharmus, Antiphanes and Dioscorides.³ Molokhiya is that word, carried into Arabic and worn down by centuries of use, and the resemblance to muluk is an accident that later speakers found a story for.

The better part is where the Greek word itself comes from. The lexicon derives malache from malasso, to soften, for the plant's emollient property.³ The oldest surviving name for this vegetable is not about kings at all. It is about the slime.

The pharaoh half of the story fails too, and it fails on physical evidence rather than on argument. Food: The Gift of Osiris, the standard survey of ancient Egyptian food, contains exactly one archaeological Corchorus specimen, and the caption under it reads: seeds of Corchorus olitorius, found at Kom Ouchim, Roman Period.¹² Kom Ouchim is Karanis, a Greco-Roman town in the Fayum. The same authors write about the plant in the present tense, as currently a popular leaf plant in Egypt and the Near East, and their index entry for Corchorus sends you to the Fatimid prohibition. The oldest molokhiya anyone has dug up in Egypt is Roman, some three thousand years later than the story needs it to be.

The softening one

That slime has since been characterised, and it earns the name. In 1995 a Japanese group isolated the acidic polysaccharide from the water-soluble mucilage of dried Corchorus olitorius leaves, sold in Japan as moroheiya, at 3.0 grams per 100 grams of dried leaf. It is 65 per cent uronic acid, built from rhamnose, glucose, galacturonic acid and glucuronic acid.⁴ Later work names the architecture: a rhamnogalacturonan-I backbone carrying galactan side chains and some linear glucan, at a molecular weight around 51 kilodaltons.⁵

So the texture that divides every table where this dish is served, the one that people either love or refuse outright, is a pectic polysaccharide of the same broad family as the pectin that sets jam. Greek named the plant for that molecule roughly two thousand four hundred years before anyone worked out what it was.

One plant, two domestications

Corchorus olitorius sits in the Malvaceae, the mallow family, which is where the Greek name was pointing all along; it was filed under Tiliaceae until DNA work in the early 2000s placed the genus in the Grewioideae within Malvaceae.⁶ Its origin is African. The greatest morphological variability sits in African accessions, and Asian material nests inside African populations, particularly North and East African ones, which is the signature of a plant that travelled rather than one that arose twice.⁷ A separate microsatellite study places the origin in equatorial East Africa and concludes it was domesticated in India, while explicitly failing to support the Indo-Myanmar origin that older accounts assert.⁸ A 2019 analysis proposes peninsular India as a possible secondary centre and hedges every word of it.⁹

The split is the thing. In Africa and then Egypt and the Levant, this plant was domesticated as a leaf to eat. In India it was domesticated as a stem to strip, and it became jute, the fibre of sacking and rope and the mills of Bengal. Genome work on the two cultivated jute species finds post-domestication bottlenecks around two thousand years ago.¹⁰ The same species became a vegetable on one continent and a fibre on another, and hardly anyone who eats the leaf has occasion to connect it with a sack of grain.

The division runs inside the plant too. The leaves are food. The seeds carry cardenolides, cardiac glycosides of the same broad class as the compounds in foxglove, including olitoriside;¹¹ jute seed is a documented cause of suspected poisoning in cattle.¹⁵ Nobody cooking molokhiya has ever needed to know this, because nobody cooks the seed.

One last piece of chronology puts the decree in its place. The dish turns up in the Kanz al-fawaid, an anonymous Egyptian collection from the Mamluk period, in at least two recipes: meatballs with jute leaves, and a meatless mulukhiyya built on sesame oil, mastic, cinnamon and onion.¹³ A second translator, working independently, renders that meatless recipe with the same four ingredients, which is good evidence the text really says what it appears to say.¹⁴ Chopped jute leaves dropped into a boiling broth is recognisably what people cook now. The collection is dated to the middle of the thirteenth century by one translator and to the fourteenth by another, and either way it is two and a half to three and a half centuries younger than the ban. Al-Hakim criminalised molokhiya well before anyone I can find wrote down how to make it.

A thousand and twenty years after the decree, molokhiya is a national dish in Egypt, where the same survey that dated those Roman seeds also records a popular saying: molokhiya and soft bread ruined the barber.¹² That is the sort of thing people say about food they cannot leave alone, which is the same appetite the Druze renounce it for. It is cooked with coriander and garlic across the Levant, and folded into chicken and rice in the Palestinian version in this index. The ban failed completely in the place it was issued. It survives only where it stopped being a ban and became something a community does on purpose, in the Chouf and the Golan and the Galilee, where a household will pass the dish along untouched and give you a reason no chronicle records.