A chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee, honey in the prophetic medical tradition, and the effect both have had on a modern trade in high-value regional honeys.
Current status
Widespread living practice
Practised across a substantial area by many communities, and currently documented.
A living religious attitude with directly observable commercial consequences in the current honey trade. Both halves are present-tense and evidenced.
The sixteenth chapter of the Qur'an is named an-Nahl, the bee, and two of its verses describe the bee being instructed to take from the fruits and follow the ways of its Lord, and a drink of varied colours issuing from within it in which there is healing for people. It is a short passage with a very long reach: it establishes honey as a substance with divine sanction and an explicit association with healing.
Honey also features in the body of prophetic tradition concerned with medicine, which recommends it for a range of complaints. Together these give honey a religious standing in Islam that few foods have anywhere.
Religious esteem translates into market value. Sidr honey from Yemen and comparable honeys from the Arabian peninsula command some of the highest prices of any honey in the world, sustained by a demand that is partly religious and partly reputational. That demand has in turn produced a substantial adulteration and mislabelling problem, because a product with a high price and a hard-to-verify origin invites both.
It also supports the traditional log-hive beekeeping of Yemen and Oman, which is one of the few traditional keeping systems anywhere with an economics strong enough to sustain it without subsidy.
Islam is also not one tradition. Interpretive approaches to prophetic medicine differ substantially between schools and between periods, and this record describes a scriptural text and a widely held attitude rather than a single position.
The clearest instance anywhere of religious standing setting the market price of a food, and of that price sustaining a traditional production system.
That honey has the therapeutic effects attributed to it in religious tradition, or that Islamic interpretive traditions are uniform. The first is a clinical question answered elsewhere on this site; the second varies substantially by school and period.
Held and repeated within a culture, and interesting as culture. No mechanism is asserted.
Surat an-Nahl 16:69. A statement about what the text says and about a widely held religious attitude to honey.
What this does not claim: Any clinical effect. Evidence of therapeutic effect is assessed separately on the health pages against systematic reviews.
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
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