"Geert Jan van Gelder's God's Banquet surveys the many and varied ways in which food appears in classical Arabic literature, including pre-Islamic poetry, the Koran, Islamic poetry and tales, the Thousand and One Nights, and popular genres such as the adab-anthologies and satires. Focusing more on dishes than foodstuffs, on concoctions rather than ingredients, van Gelder is concerned with how food is depicted, as well as how literary texts are shaped by the theme of food." "God's Banquet also investigates the representations of stereotypical diets to distinguish different types of people - contrasting, for examples, Sufis and Bedouins, princes and peasants, aesthetes and "women of easy virtue." More unusual subjects, such as the roles of various dishes in dream interpretation, as well as the idea of the text itself as a sort of banquet, also receive witty and lucid treatment in van Gelder's expert hands."--BOOK JACKET.