by Iain Gately
And that was that.
Interestingly, this third and final directive was tested by some of the faithful: Was it permissible to drink only a little bit? No, Muhammad is reported to have answered: Any is too much. And besides, wine would be available in heaven. The Islamic paradise is described in some detail in the Koran and appears to have been designed to appeal to the ascetic inhabitants of a barren land. Good Muslims were encouraged to expect an afterlife of sensual excess, spent in a fertile Arcadia: “As for the righteous . . . theirs shall be gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed virgins for companions, a truly overflowing cup.” Anyone thirsty after a mortal life of abstinence could chose between “rivers of wine, delicious to drinkers,” and a packaged variety (“pure wine, securely sealed, whose very dregs are musk”), upon arrival in paradise. This was deferred gratification on a grand scale, far beyond the Christian version, which left the delights of heaven unspecified, beyond one’s being in the presence of God. Even the most visionary of Christian saints had lacked the confidence to depict their paradise as wet.
With such clear limitations to work with, Islam set about conquering the drinking world. Under the command of the caliphs, the lineal descendants of Muhammad or his generals, Muslim victories were numerous, rapid, and convincing. Within a hundred years of the death of the Prophet they controlled Egypt, North Africa, most of the Persian Empire, Sicily, Corsica, Spain, and Portugal, and had made incursions into France as far as Bordeaux. In accordance with their creed, their new subjects were offered the alternatives of the sword, the Koran, or of paying tribute. Those who converted immediately gained all the privileges and duties of being a Muslim. In some areas, notably North Africa and Persia, a majority of the population switched to Islam; in others, those who preferred taxation to circumcision remained in the majority, and laws were formulated to circumscribe their conduct.
The first version of the laws for non-Muslims resident in Islamic lands were set out in the Umar Pact made between the second caliph, Umar Ibn Khetib, and the Christians of Syria, in AD 637. The pact created the notion of a dhimmi—a Jew or Christian who lived under Muslim rule, paid a poll tax, and who was bound to observe its regulations. Surprisingly, in the light of the Muslim abhorrence of alcohol, dhimmis themselves were allowed to continue to drink, and to produce and sell wine to each other for sacred and secular purposes. In the Spanish town of Córdoba, for instance, there was a state-operated market for wine in the Christian quarter during the rule of al-Hakam I (AD 796- 823). As a consequence, the impact of a dry religion on mankind’s love affair with alcohol was not so colossal as might have been expected. Taverns continued to operate, albeit they were forbidden to serve Muslims. Although the pact of Umar was tightened up in subsequent versions (“They shall not drink wine in public, nor display their crosses or their swine”), alcohol remained available throughout the Islamic world.
With so much temptation at hand it is unsurprising that many Muslims succumbed to Satan’s wiles and took up or, in the case of converts, resumed drinking. Although pious sobriety was venerated, and examples of heroic restraint were held up to the faithful, including that of a cousin of Muhammad who, after being captured by Christians, was “celebrated for refusing, after an abstinence of three days, the wine and pork, the only nourishment that was allowed by the malice of the infidels,” and despite the prescription under Islamic law of eighty lashes for anyone caught drinking, alcohol, especially wine, was widely consumed, and even celebrated.
Muslim poets made a significant contribution to the philosophy of drinking. Collectively, their work gave a new face to alcohol. The composite portrait was drawn, in the main, in Persia, whose ancient relationship with wine had continued beyond its conversion to Islam. It pictured the act of drinking as one of defiance and as a pleasure made all the sweeter for being sinful. The master hand responsible for the best parts of the portrait, who registered every cup of wine that he drank as a vote in favor of Satan and against piety, was Abu Nuwas (c. 756-813), a decadent genius whose name means “curly locks” in Arabic. His mother was a Persian seamstress, his father an Arab soldier who had served in the campaigns of the caliph Umar. He studied the Koran at Basra, in Iraq, and spent the rest of his life, by his own admission, drinking, fornicating, and writing poetry.
His audience was huge. The Islamic world was united by a single language, Arabic, a lyrical idiom wonderfully suited to the expression of creative thinking. Arabic possessed pre-Islamic traditions of verse, including the minor genre of khamriyya, wine poetry, which Abu Nuwas adopted and perfected:
Drink the wine, though forbidden,
For God forgives even grave sins.
A white wine, forging bubbles when mixed—like pearls set in gold,
Such as was on the ark in Noah’s time—
Best of his cargo while the Earth was still awash.
The poet found his inspiration in the taverns of his native Basra, which were run by Jewish merchants, and in Egypt when in exile, where Christian religious orders supplied the drinks. He was especially fond of the young male acolytes who served the wine in Christian establishments. Indeed, he wrote of attending mass just so that he could fantasize over an altar boy as he drank communion wine, and succeeded in insulting both Christianity and Islam in the same poem:
I wish that I were the Eucharist which he is given or the chalice from Which he drinks the wine! No, I wish I were the very bubbles of wine! So that I might gain the benefit of being closer to him.
The poems of Abu Nuwas, and the writers who followed his example, are not only useful markers of attitudes toward alcohol under Islam in its heartland at its zenith, but also tell us the what, how, and where of Arab drinking. The what, for poets, was wine, of which they recognized four colors—red, white, amber, and golden. Some of it was naturally effervescent—Abu Nuwas wrote of a red variety that “shoots out sparks like rubies” and compared its bubble trails to falling stars. Wine was drunk mixed with water, often starting in the morning (“Quick to your morning drink and delight yourself, my man!”), and drinking binges lasted days, sometimes weeks. The beverage itself in Arabic was a she—the daughter of the vine. A good vintage could provoke not just the thirst, but also the lust of the poet:
I have become insane for [this] delicate virgin
Who is excessively violent in the glass and headstrong.
Virgin wines were thought to improve with age. When praising one such spinster, still “preserved for the day she is pierced,” Abu Nuwas dwelt on the traditional Arab association of age with wisdom:
She is so antique that were she to acquire
An eloquent mouth and tongue
She would sit like an elder among the people, upright,
And regale them with tales of ancient nations.
Finally, discrimination in the classical style was apparent in Islamic wine writing: Specific vintages were eulogized in the vivid language of a classical oenophile:
A wine both frisky and quiet
As if lines of Himyarite or Persian appear on its surface,
Which, with time, become almost intelligible. . . .
A pre-Islamic convention of khamriyya was the expression by the poet of a longing to die drinking, and this was the death rumored to have overtaken Abu Nuwas. Although he spent time in prison and in exile, Abu Nuwas was not just tolerated but accepted as a good Muslim during his life. He passed most of his years around the court of the caliphs in the new city of Baghdad (founded AD 762) and produced a number of panegyrics in praise of his rulers. These, combined with his habit of satirizing anyone who crossed him in perfect, memorable verse, probably saved him from execution. Moreover, his poetry is not devoid of repentance, and Islam is a forgiving religion to its adherents. According to legend, Abu Nuwas’s epitaph, which was embroidered on his shroud, was “My excuse, Lord, will be to admit that I have no excuse.”
In addition to contributing to the philosophy of drinking, the Islamic world introduced a practical innovation to the pastime that was t
o have a far greater impact than the concept that wine on earth was a sin. While Christian Europe trundled through the Dark Ages, Muslim scientists picked up where the Greeks had left off and made substantial contributions to medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry. The process of distillation was among their many discoveries. While Aristotle had worked it out in principle and succeeded in turning wine into water, it was Muslims who perfected its practice and who managed to extract alcohol from wine. The pioneer was Jabir Ibn Hayyan (721-815), known as Geber6 in the West, who is acknowledged to be the father of the science of chemistry. He established the principle of classifying substances by their properties and invented equipment and techniques for isolating them. His technical innovations included the alembic still, whose principles still govern the production of alcoholic spirits. Geber tried his still on various fluids, including wine, which he found released a flammable vapor that he described as “of little use but of great importance to science.” It is possible that the condensed vapor was put to good use by Abu Nuwas, who listed, among his other forms of liquid inspiration, a wine that “has the color of rainwater but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand.” Further research on the vapor was carried out by Al Razi (865-925), a Persian polymath who specialized in medicine. He described the process of distilling in his book Al Asrar (“The Secret”), and the isolation of a substance he called “al-koh’l of wine,” which translates literally as “mascara of wine”—koh’l was the powdered antimony Arab women used to blacken their eyelids. It was also slang for substances isolated by distillation, and it is in this sense—as the chemical soul of strong drinks—that it passed into use outside the Arabic-speaking world.
Muslim advances in science also contributed to mankind’s understanding of the effects of alcohol on the human frame. Al Zahrawi, Islam’s greatest surgeon (936-1013), despite working in a society where alcohol was prohibited, nonetheless had sufficient patients who were heavy users to identify its detrimental effects: It could be a cause of convulsions, apoplexy, dementia, partial and total paralysis, difficulties in articulation, gout, and “disturbances of the liver.” Notwithstanding such glum news, some scientific Muslims attempted to soften, or to qualify, the Koranic ban on drinking. Avicenna (980-1039), a Persian philosopher whose commentaries on Plato and Aristotle were the sources for the reintroduction of their thinking to western Europe, confessed to using wine as an aid to study: “When sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me.” He promoted Platonic views on alcohol and believed them to be as valid for Muslims as for Athenians: “To give wine to youths is like adding fire to a fire already prepared with matchwood. Young adults should take it in moderation. But elderly persons may take as much as they can tolerate.” The concept that old and responsible Muslims might enjoy unlimited access to wine was extended by Averroës (d. 1198), who attempted to reconcile Aristotle with Islam. Averroës claimed that the Koranic ban did not apply to him: “Wine is forbidden because it excites wickedness and quarrels; but I am preserved from those excesses by wisdom. I take it only to sharpen my wits.” By extension, any intelligent and reasonable Muslim should feel free to drink.
Such sentiments were shared by Omar Khayyam (d. 1122), the great Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. Renowned in his lifetime for his scientific work, Khayyam’s poetry, which he wrote in the Rubaiyat, or quatrain, form, is responsible for his posthumous fame. Much of it is in praise of wine and the pleasures of intoxication. His ethos, however, was very different from that of Abu Nuwas. He was not interested in portraying himself as a sinner or degenerate; indeed, he was entirely dismissive of faith. Drinking was the only truth:
Tonight I will make a tun of wine,
Set myself up with two bowls of it;
First I will divorce absolutely reason and religion,
Then take to wife the daughter of the vine.
Khayyam also ruled out the repentance Abu Nuwas had flirted with. Forget paradise and hell, heaven is here and now:
They say there is Paradise with the houris and the River,
Wine fountains, milk, sweets, and honey:
Fill the wine-cup, put it in my hand—
Cash is better than a thousand promises.
Finally, medical, rational, and poetical protests against the Koranic ban on alcohol were joined by theological objections. Islam had been riven by sectarianism since the death of its prophet, who had left no son and heir to guide his converts. Disputes as to who should succeed to the command of the faithful quickly resulted in the division of the Muslim world into Shias and Sunnis, the former of whom believed that spiritual authority devolved from the blood of the Prophet, in the shape of his daughter Fatima and her descendants, and that therefore only the fourth caliph, Ali, grandson of the Prophet, had been authentic, whereas the Sunnis held that the first three caliphs had been legitimate rulers. The once-united Arab lands fractured into smaller kingdoms, often at war with one another. In the midst of this turbulence, the Carmathian sect appeared. They were an offshoot of the Shiites and flourished between the ninth and eleventh centuries. They believed that spiritual leadership of the Islamic world should have gone to Ismail, the eldest son of the sixth iman, who had been passed over in the succession as a punishment for drinking wine. Since, in Carmathian eyes, Ismail could do no wrong, wine drinking could not be a sin, so they positively encouraged it. The Carmathians caused considerable disorder within Muslim domains, besieging Baghdad, sacking Mecca, and stealing the Kaaba. However, for reasons unknown, by AD 1050 they had melted away. The sacred stone was restored to the holy city, and wine to the list of sins.
At the same time as the ban on drinking was causing strife in the heartlands of Islam, it was denting its reputation abroad. In AD 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev, whose kingdom formed the nucleus of modern Russia, decided that his subjects should be united under a single religion. He sent to the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, requesting details of their faiths. The Muslims told him that they believed in one God, were circumcised, ate no pork, drank no wine, and would enjoy the carnal embraces of over seventy women each in paradise. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, “Vladimir listened to them, for he was fond of women and indulgence, regarding which he heard with pleasure. But circumcision and abstinence from pork and wine were disagreeable to him. ‘Drinking,’ said he ‘is the joy of the [Russians]. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’”
Vladimir chose Christianity, and Islam lost a potentially useful ally. The Dark Ages in Europe were over, and Europeans started to push Islam out of their continent. Battles raged across central and eastern Spain, and El Cid Campeador, astride his horse Babieca, put Muslims and their Christian allies to the sword from Barcelona to Valencia. In 1085, the Normans took Sicily, and with it the great still at the Medical School of Syracuse. Hitherto, the Christian world had been free of spirits. Thereafter, the secrets of their preparation spread gradually through Europe. Geber was translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in 1144. Al Razi was translated into the same language for Charles of Anjou in 1279. Although it took another century for spirits to escape the laboratories of alchemists and to reach to the public at large, the genie was out of the bottle.
7 BREWS FOR BREAKFAST
Christian Europe emerged from the Dark Ages as a heavy-drinking culture. Alcohol had the reputation of a saint. No medical prescription was complete without it, nor, indeed, was any meal. Mothers brewed ale for their children; alchemists used spirits in their search for the secrets of how to turn other substances into gold; priests held wine aloft in chalices and declared it to be the blood of Christ; and drunkenness, especially during the barbarian festivals that had been adopted by Mother Church, was regarded as a natural, indeed blameless, condition.
The difference between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward alcohol was a matter of mutual criticism when the two faiths collided in the course of the Crusades. Their official la
unch took place in AD 1095, at the Council of Clermont in France, when Pope Urban II called on all good Christians to venture forth against the Saracens, as those Muslims in present possession of the terrain where Christ had lived and died were known. Anyone who answered the call was offered a complete remission of all his sins and encouraged to distinguish himself by decorating his garments or shield with a cross. Hundreds of thousands responded, many of whom set off at once for the Holy Land, under the leadership of a hermit named Peter the Simple, and guided by a duck, a goose, and a goat. After massacring the Jews in various German cities, they themselves were slaughtered in Hungary and the survivors were finished off in Nicea. The First Crusade proper set off the following year and in 1099 achieved its objective with the capture of Jerusalem. There followed a further half dozen or so venturesover the following two hundred years, during which the Saracens gradually clawed back the Middle East from the infidel, culminating in 1291 with the fall of Acre and the withdrawal of the remaining Christians to Cyprus.