In botanical language it is Saccharum officinarum, a name given to it by Linnaeus himself—Carl von Linné, the inventor of our modern classification system. This, and five related Saccharum species, are placed in the Andropogoneae tribe, along with sorghum and maize. Like other grasses, sugar cane has jointed stems and sheathing leaf bases, with the leaves, shoots and roots all coming from the stem joints. The world’s scriptures have few references to sugar. Sugar rates no mention in the Quran (which, as we will see later, is significant), and while both Isaiah 43:24 and Jeremiah 6:20 refer to ‘sweet cane’, which some people think might mean sugar cane, there are a number of other candidates. If we assume that sugar was intended where the Bible’s translators wrote of ‘sweet cane’, then the line in Jeremiah, ‘To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country?’, tells us that sugar cane did not grow around Palestine in Old Testament times.
