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Farouk Mardam-BeyFarouk Mardam-Bey was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1944. As a food critic, his culinary chronicles and discourses on Arab cuisine have been published over the past decade under the pseudonym "Ziryab" in Qantara, the quarterly journal of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Ziryab: Authentic Arab Cuisine represents a compilation of his Qantara articles into a single volume. He is also co-author with Robert Bistolfi of The Treatise of the Chickpea (Sindbad-Actes Sud, 1998).
The historical Ziryab who is Mardam-Bey's culinary inspiration is a 9th-century native of Iraq whose erudition and influence with the caliph stirred resentments leading to his forced exodus to Cordoba, a seat of Islamic culture in Spain. Renowned as an extraordinary musician, poet, geographer and astronomer, Abu al-Hasan 'Ali ibn Nafi' -- nicknamed "Ziryab," or blackbird -- also gained a reputation as a gourmand and a leading arbiter for a new art of living. Ziryab taught the people of Cordoba the most elaborate recipes of Baghdad's cuisine, as well as the sequence of plates for an elegant meal. Ziryab inspired courtiers and city dwellers alike to transform the way they dressed, furnished their homes and cooked their meals.
"Knowing all that, I must have been very presumptuous... to have signed my modest culinary chronicles with the pseudonym Ziryab," Mardam-Bey writes in his introduction. "Now that I am taking the risk of compiling them into one book, I would like to thank Qantara... and all my readers for not holding this against me."
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