How have people used plants?

This lesson asks you to describe how people from different cultures, including Indigenous peoples, use plants for food, shelter, medicine and clothing. The museum offers only one piece: farming as a source of food. Medicine, shelter, clothing and the plant uses of Indigenous peoples your class must bring from elsewhere. ¹

Farming is a way of living from plants. Think of the foods you eat in a day and trace each one back to the plant it came from.

In the record, al-Maraghi presents farming as the oldest way of making a living. He follows Ibn Khaldun, who calls it the simplest of crafts and the closest to nature ^{2 3}. Al-Maraghi says Islam urges farming as the source of food for people and animals, and warns against working land taken by force ³. He adds that land left idle for three years may be farmed by another person, if the ruler gives leave ⁴.

Al-Maraghi calls farming the source of food for people and animals. If a town's farmers stopped for one year, who would notice first, and why?

• Agriculture in Islam: what al-Maraghi says about farming, idle land and water.
• Ibn Bassal's soil, water and crop assessment: a farmer's handbook that sorted waters and kinds of land.

List five foods from your kitchen and write the plant each one came from. Then read the record Agriculture in Islam and compare: which of your foods fit the source of food for people and animals that al-Maraghi describes?