Sawsan Abu Farha (chefindisguise.com)
Mamoul (karabij or kurabiye in Turkey; klaysha in Iraq) are date- or nut-stuffed pastries in a shortbread dough of wheat flour, sugar and fat (now usually butter). Descriptions date back to Arabic cookbooks of the Middle Ages, and mamoul are among the traditional sweet offerings for the Ramadan iftar (nighttime meal) in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Made at home or commercially, they are decorated by hand or, here, by pressing into an incised wooden mold.
The love of sweetness goes back deep into the mists of history. Humans found sweetness in the saps that ran in plants, in fruits such as the dates prized by the desert Arabs, and above all in honey. In Antiquity, doctors from the Mediterranean to India praised golden honey as a panacea. It neither soured nor putrefied, and it conveyed this magic to other foodstuffs, preserving even perishable fruits from rotting. They described it as warm and moist, a perfect match for the temperament of the human body in the humoral physiology that ruled from Antiquity until the 17th century. Used in salves, medications and sweet confections, honey was both food and medicine. Over the centuries, imperial cooks in Babylonia, Rome and the successive Persian Empires created sweets—honey and butter mixed with toasted flours, fruits, seeds or nuts; leavened doughs drenched in syrup; smooth, starch-thickened puddings—all of which were gastronomic triumphs, aids to moral and physical well-being, and status symbols for the powerful.
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Written by Paul Lunde
The Hijri calendar
In 638 ce, six years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s second caliph, ‘Umar, recognized the necessity of a calendar to govern the affairs of Muslims.
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The Gregorian calendar
The early calendar of the Roman Empire was lunisolar, containing 355 days divided into 12 months beginning on January 1. To keep it more or less in accord with the actual solar year, a month was added every two years
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Read full and view more on:
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201406/2015.calendar.sweets.htm
PDF version of above article along with both calendars:
Note:
Converting Dates
The following equations convert roughly from Gregorian to hijri and vice versa. However, the results can be slightly misleading: They tell you only the year in which the other calendar’s year begins. For example, 2015 Gregorian begins in Rabi al-Awwal, the third month of hijri 1436, and ends in that same month hijri 1437.
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