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Rudi Matthee, Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East: Ambivalence and Ambiguity, Past & Present, Volume 222, Issue suppl_9, 2014, Pages 100–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtt031
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Extract
Wine (khamr) has flowed in my veins like blood
Learn to be dissolute; be kind—this is far better than
To be a beast that won’t drink wine and can’t become a man.
(Hafez of Shiraz (14th c.))
Great is the difference between the Turks and the Persians, for the Turks, being by law prohibited, abstain from wine yet drink it covertly, but the Persians, now, as of old, drink openly and with excess.
(Thomas Herbert, 1627)
This essay starts with—and builds its main argument on—a paradox. Historically, most people, and certainly Muslims, inhabiting the world where Islam spread and became the dominant faith, did not drink. This was in accordance with Islam’s formal proscription of the consumption of alcohol and the draconian punishment for violators of the ban—eighty lashes; forty for women and slaves. 1 Water has always been their main beverage, women as a rule never drank, and fermented or distilled drinks were generally not readily available, least of all in the respectable public sphere. Throughout Islamic history, radical prohibition of drinking has often followed the rise to power of puritanical regimes—the North African Almoravids and Almohads in eleventh- and thirteenth-century Spain, respectively; the Wahhabis who haunted the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq in the early nineteenth century; more recently the clerics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet alcohol has always played a surprisingly important role in male elite circles in the Islamic Middle East. The very word alcohol is Arabic in origin, deriving from al-kohl , pulverized antimony used to darken the eye lines, and Muslim alchemists, most notably the Iranian Zakariya al-Razi (865–925; better known under his Latin name Rhazes) are credited with the invention of the process of distillation. Throughout history, Muslim rulers and their courtiers have consumed alcohol, often in huge quantities and sometimes in public view; the examples of ordinary Muslims violating their religion’s ban on drinking are too numerous to count; and, while alcohol is strictly forbidden in many modern Muslim countries, quite a few, from Tunisia and Turkey to Syria, Egypt—except during Ramadan—and Indonesia, allow for its (restricted) sale and consumption.
