By Roxani Margariti.
My first encounter with detached sharks’ fins was at a fishing village near Ra’s al-Khaymah in the homonymous emirate on the Persian Gulf. The sight left me perplexed and curious. Hanging from a line like laundered clothes drying in the sun and piled up in a wheelbarrow, amid a jumble of fishing gear and miscellaneous tools, were pieces of fishy flesh and skin.
My travel companion, a seasoned archaeologist who had worked in the UAE and elsewhere around the Arabian Peninsula for years, explained the drying shark fins and the global market feeding the culinary propensity for shark fin soup. I remember subsequently seeing finless shark carcasses strewn on the beach beyond the village huts, a disconcerting sight for someone who had caught glimpses of the formidable creatures (or at least their cousins) underwater—but I suppose also for anyone!
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/luke-white-damien-hirsts-shark-nature-capitalism-and-the-sublime-r1136828
Even to my untrained mind back then the shark fins, the bodies they had come from, and the livelihoods of this fishing village raised an obvious conservation conundrum. Killing large animals and then wasting most of their bodies for the purposes of extracting a relatively small part seemed intuitively and simply wrong.
But I could also see the importance of this bounty and potential source of revenue for the local fishermen and their families. The scale of exploitation, the drying clothes lines, even the wheelbarrow spoke of small-scale, artisanal production. And after all, the villagers’ own lives were visibly modest and unwasteful compared to urban excess in the rich cities not far from there.
Livelihoods here seemed to rely on patching together goat herding and fishing and balancing between the local and the global. Photograph Roxani Margariti.
Fast forward to the past decade, when shark finning has become a widely visible and pressing global issue, with legal ramifications.
Top predators and important balancers of the marine ecosystem, shark populations are rapidly declining due to overfishing and the deterioration of their habitats the world over. Several organizations are decrying the practice of finning and the waste it entails, and rightfully so. Governments and local jurisdictions have been moving to ban the sale of sharks fins (for an example from Columbia, where local interests and national legislation banning shark finning are at odds, see this recent article). In all this, it is important to note that finning, dramatic and mobilizing as it is, is only one part of a broader problem of overfishing; David Schiffman, author of an important book on shark conservation, has recently argued, that focusing exclusively on finning leads to misconceptions. It seems that singling out the admittedly repulsive practice of finning and linking it so tightly to “demand for shark fin soup in Asia,” risks stereotyping cultures and peoples and tends to overlook the possibility of sustainable harvesting and the needs and rights of populations in the global south, from Colombia to the Arabian peninsula.
Shark consumption did not start in the past decades, of course. We have already seen in Dimitra’s post about East Asian abalone and Minoan seashells that dried shark fins, along with sea cucumber and abalone, were sent in payment of debt from Japan to China in the 18th century. Ibn Battuta (d. 1369), whose excursions into fish-eating we paired with those of Archestratus in our very first post, provides a vivid glimpse of eating dried lukham along the coast of Oman. The passage is somewhat reminiscent of the long literary tradition that inhabitants of the shores of the southern seas as “ichthyofagi” or exclusive fish eaters (we’re planning a future post on this—stay tuned!). But Ibn Battuta provides eye-witness testimony of the fact that shark meat was valuable to local communities of the Arabian Peninsula since early times:
“The only means of livelihood for the inhabitants of this port [the port of Ḥāsik] is from fishing, and the fish that they catch is called lukham, which is like a dogfish (kalb al-baḥr, dog of the sea). It is cut open, dried in the sun and used for food; their huts also are built with fish bones, and roofed with camel hides.” (Ibn Battuta, Travels, transl. H.A.R. Gibb, vol. 2, p. 391).
In the marvelous Baghdadi culinary compendium authored by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq in the 10th century (published in English translation by Nawal Nasrallah with the title Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens), sharks do not feature, but whole fish often does. The chefs cooking for the Abbasid elite did not fail to include fins, tails, skins, and even tongues and lips of fish in their specialty recipes. A recipe that we might call “Fish three ways”—a roasted, poached, and fried whole-fish creation—is a case of zero waste in a conspicuous consumption setting!
Ibn Battuta’s word for shark, lukham (or lukhm), is one of those fishy words: it may denote a number of different species and is one of several generic names for sharks in Arabic. The same applies for the commoner word for shark in Arabic, which is qirsh. Furthermore, in the lexicon of the Kumzari language—the language of the region that we discussed in our post about stem and stern ornaments—we encounter no fewer than 15 terms glossed in English as shark: burqēb, čūk, dībē, jmēs, jubbē, kūlī, manqab, nāwukō, pēčak, qāẓum, qrādī, rējimī, tirxēnit, wāl, xiṣwānī. And as a delightful bonus, there’s a Kumzari word for shark sauce: qaššad!! The variety of terms reflects the variety of species present in the waters surrounding the Arabian Peninsula. Furthermore, some of the terms clearly derive from the other languages of Arabia’s forelands, especially Persian. The mixing of languages in the lexicon of fish names reveals the extent of contact between coastal people and the cultural relevance of the marine universe in their lives—a post about fish naming by Dimitra is in the works!
For Ibn Battuta, lukham is the regional Omani term for shark, which he glosses as “dog fish.” But the term can also mean a ray. Happily, if somewhat confusingly, sharks and rays are taxonomic cousins; they belong to the same subclass of fishes called chondroichthyes, also described as fish with lamellae gills, or elasmobranchs; these fish have cartilage instead of bones (thus the bones that Ibn Battuta notes as used in house construction on the coast of Oman must have been from other “fish,” perhaps whales! For a brief reference to whale bone constructions, see this earlier post). Interestingly, the encyclopaedic cosmographer and indexer of marvels Zakariyya al-Qazwini (d. 1278) suggests the taxonomic affinity of sharks and rays: in his description of noteworthy sea-creatures of the Persian Gulf, the sawfish, an impressive type of shark, is immediately followed by the stingray.
In the early manuscript of Qazwini’s work pictured above, the artist follows Qazwini’s taxonomic logic. First comes the image of what must be identified as the now extremely rare “narrow sawfish” (Anoxypristis cuspidata) or the “green sawfish” (Pristis zijsron; the text actually describes the color of the fish as ‘green’); then comes what looks like a generic sting ray, complete with the tail’s stinging spine, a feature described in modern zoological texts. The painters depicted the spine as an exaggerated hook on the animal’s tail; while the shape of the spine may not be rendered with scientific accuracy, the very fact of conveying such a detail is a delightful and intriguing glimpse of contact between distant realms: the shores of the Indian Ocean where knowledge was initially collected from fishermen and the ateliers of manuscript production in cosmopolitan centers like Baghdad and further afield through the ages!
Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi, channeling the knowledge of these earlier savants, provides a vivid if exaggerated description of the sawfish as a creature of the Red Sea:
“These sh’ib [he uses obviously unknown to him Arabic word for coral reefs] are a veritable big forest under the sea! In this forest lives the sawfish. Sawfish mercilessly swallow people who are shipwrecked and pearl divers looking for pearls. The sawfish is an accursed animal.”
More stories about man-eating fishes coming up in subsequent posts—stay tuned!
Finally, a few words about another special part of the shark and its elasmobranch cousins: their skin. We have already talked about shagreen, the processed shark or ray skin, in our post on aquatic leather. Its rough, pebbly texture and great strength was prized in the early modern period (and likely earlier) as an excellent material for sword handles and book covers. It was highly appreciated in both Asian and European contexts and its use is attested from the 16th into the 19th century.
In addition to prestige weapons and other elite objects, however, shark and ray skin in Japan appears in far less ceremonial but at least as important everyday contexts, such as the kitchen, where shark and ray skin functions as the rough surface of wasabi root grating boards!
Outside of Japan, I found out, such boards are available for sale online but are harder to find in brick-and-mortar stores. The board pictured was purchased at a specialty Japanese knife and kitchenware store in New York City. The shark-skin surface is pebbly and reassuringly rough, but without much experience or different samples to compare it with, I am not able to vouch that this is shark rather than ray skin. I can, however, confirm that it works beautifully! For other images of shark (or ray) skin graters, see this article where I first encountered the sharkskin wasabi boards.
Could the remarkable skin of the elasmobranchs have been used to make implements before the intensified globalized maritime contact that appears to correlate with its widespread use across Eurasia? It seems that the abundance of sharks and rays around the Arabian Peninsula and the fact that they had been used for food at least as early as the medieval period leaves that possibility open. It is a question worth asking—and one which will hopefully lead to future research! And it leads me back to where I started: shark fins are only a small part of a remarkable group of marine species that are threatened today. These creatures have served human needs in a wide variety of ways in the past. Sustainable harvesting is perhaps still possible and should be based on a full and balanced appreciation of both the bounty sharks and rays have to offer and their important contribution as living organisms to the marine environment.
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