Protocols of Treating Dining Guests

One of the basic traditional protocols of dining is that the host and hostess should wait on the dining guests, and are to eat only when all their guests’ needs are satisfied. It is the custom, too, that the host and hostess should urge their guests to eat more of the food, and should not accept ‘no’ for an answer. Here is what an Abbasid poet said about this (al-Warraq):