Alcohol in Islamic MideEast - Ambivalence and Ambiguity
Alcohol in Islamic MideEast - Ambivalence and Ambiguity
Alcohol in Islamic MideEast - Ambivalence and Ambiguity
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 withand builds its main argument ona 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 Islams formal proscription of the consumption of
alcohol and the draconian punishment for violators of the baneighty
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 regimesthe 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 (865925; better known
1
Felicitas Opwis, Shifting Legal Authority from the Ruler to the Ulama for Drinking
Wine during the Saljuq Period, Der Islam, 86 (2009), 667, 778.
Francois Clement (ed.), Les vins dOrient. 4000 ans divresse (Nantes, 2008), introd., 8.
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 religions 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,
Egyptexcept during Ramadanand Indonesia, allow for its (restricted)
sale and consumption.
The Islamic world is far too large and complex for generalizations to have
any validity, yet one is struck by the similarities throughout its history and
across the lands where it came to prevail, in the manifestations of drinking
and in the ambivalent approach to alcohol, most clearly expressed in attempts
to keep up the appearance of sobriety in the face of reality. The first part of this
essay will discuss some of these similarities, the customs and traditions that
transcend geography and time to form cultural patterns. The second part will
focus on the central lands where Islam became the dominant faith after its
great conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Within that zone I will
single out two early modern states, Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire,
with the aim of comparing and contrasting their respective drinking customs
in order to identify the extent to which these conformed to traditions carried
over from earlier times and to what extent these reveal new, early modern
consumption patterns. The third part, focusing on the nineteenth-century
Ottoman state and Qajar Iran, will explore the effects on alcohol consumption resulting from the intrusion of trade-based capitalism and the concomitant adoption of western-style modernization by these countries elites. The
essay concludes with a survey of the divergent trajectories with regard to
drinking taken by the two modern countries that emerged from these
states, Turkey and Iran.
Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (Albany, NY, 2001), 89ff.
Ibid., 66.
5
Devin J. Stewart, Islamic Legal Orthodoxy. Twelver Shiite Response to the Sunni Legal
System (Salt Lake City, 1998), 47.
6
Ker Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, and Ancient Babylonia, etc. etc. during the
Years, 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820 (London, 18212), 3478.
7
Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Princeton,
2000), 4812.
4
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. Edward
Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1927), 910.
9
Reinhold Lubenau, Beschreibung der Reisen des Reinhold Lubenau, ed. W. Sahm, 2 vols.
(Konigsberg, 1914, repr. Frankfurt a/M, 1995), 1, 260.
10
Jean Chardin, Voyages du chevalier Chardin en Perse et en autres lieux de lOrient, ed. L.
Langle`s, 10 vols. and atlas (Paris, 181011), III, 218; IV, 6970.
II
In the Arabian Peninsula, where wine was hardly indigenous, Islams formal
ban on alcohol was of little consequence. Elsewhere, the spread of new faith
hardly interrupted a long tradition of alcohol consumption. This is certainly
true for two vast areas that were initially conquered and that were also among
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Patrick McGovern, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic
Beverages (Berkeley, 2009), 82.
Jean Bottero, Boisson, banquet, et vie sociale. In L. Milano (ed.), Drinking in Ancient
Societies: History and Culture in the Ancient Near East (Padua, 1994), 113.
Edgar Weber, Le vin dans la tradition arabo-musulmane, in Clement (ed.), Les vins
dOrient, 5483.
See P. A. Norrie, The History of Wine as a Medicine, in Merton Sandler and Roger
Pinder (eds), Wine. A Scientific Exploration (London and New York, 2003), 2155, esp.
356.
Ibid., 64.
Christiane Lange, Justice, Punishment, and the Medieval Muslim Imagination
(Cambridge, 2008), 56, 82, 185, 227.
19
20
21
22
23
Francois Clement, Vignes et vins dans lEspagne musulmane, in Clement (ed.), Les vins
dOrient, 87.
Heine, Weinstudien, 127.
Hildebert Isnard, La vigne en Algerie. Etude geographique, 2 vols (Paris, 1947), I, 2612,
265.
Ehsan Yarshater, The Theme of Wine-Drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early
Persian Poetry, Studia Islamica 13 (1960), 43.
Dick Davis, Wine and Persian Poetry, in Najmieh Batmangelij, From Persia to Napa.
Wine at the Persian Table (Washington DC, 2006), 62.
From Andalusia in the far west to Khorasan on the eastern marches of the
Islamic empire, wine drinking flourished in the classical age of Islam. Spain,
with a climate and soil that allow the grape to grow almost everywhere, had a
viticulture going back to the sixth century BCE.19 The Omayyad rulers of Spain,
including the most famous one, Abd Al-Rahman III (r. 91261), were known
for their fondness of wine. The eleventh-century king of Grenada, Badis,
remained in his palace, engaged in drinking, for such a long time that
people thought he had died. And the last of the so-called Party Kings of
Seville (in reference to their divisiveness, not their lifestyle) Muhammad
ibn Abbad al-Mutamid (r. 106991), ruler as well as poet, sought oblivion
in wine as the invading Almoravids stood at the gates of his city.20 In North
Africa Islam managed to erase virtually all traces of Christianity, yet proved
unable to eradicate a long-standing tradition of viniculture and viticulture.
Medieval Arab authors describing the region mention the production of wine
made of dates, of honey and dry raisins. As elsewhere, Jews were often the ones
who engaged in the trade of all kinds of fermented drinks.21
In the eastern half of the empire, encompassing modern Iran and
Afghanistan, matters were little different. The rulers of the Saffarid and
Samanid dynasties, the first to seek autonomy from their Abbasid overlords,
are known for the gusto with which they and their entourage indulged in
wine-drinking.22 Modern Persian poetry, which originated at the courts of
these rulers, is replete with vivid references to wine bibbing, its rituals and its
symbols. Mystical (Sufi) poetry, much of it written in Persian as well, is even
more drenched in wine. Its wine-related metaphors, most powerfully expressed by Hafez of Shiraz, include the handsome cupbearer as the object
of desire, the refraction of the ruby red wine in the goblet as a symbol of divine
radiance, the wine shop, meykhaneh, standing for the realm of angels, and
the libertine image of the free-spirited Sufi drunk who spills wine on the payer
mat to show his contempt for clerical bigotry and hypocrisy. It is not always
easy to distinguish between the metaphorical use of wine and references to the
real thing, yet often the literal meaning seems to be the only plausible one.23
III
The rulers of the dynasties that came to rule the Middle East from the tenth
century were either ethnic Turks or Mongols hailing from the steppes of
Central Asia. Both groups were known for their bibulousnessalbeit
mostly involving kumiss, fermented mares milk, in the case of the
Mongols.27 Their drinking patterns, combined with the Islamic tradition
already in place, were carried over into Safavid Iran, named after the dynasty,
the Safavids, which ruled the country between 1501 and 1722, and to a lesser
extent, the Ottoman Empire, which expanded from its fourteenth-century
western Anatolian origins to become the largest, most powerful and longestlasting Muslim state in the early modern period.
The early Safavids exemplify a type of pre-modern elite drinking combining ancient pre-Islamic traditions with the customs of the Central Asian
steppes and, following the introduction of numerous Georgians and
Armenians as slave soldiers and bureaucrats, the rites and rituals of
Christianity. The head of a wild tribal warrior band, revered by his followers
as an incarnation of the divine, and espousing a form of Twelve Shiism
suffused with pre-Islamic semi-pagan customs and rituals, the first Safavid
shah, Shah Ismail (r. 150124), drank copiously, in public, banquet-style,
24
25
26
27
See Nina Ergin, Rock Faces: Opium and Wine. Speculations on the Original Viewing
Context of Persian Manuscripts, Der Islam 90:1 (2013), 6599.
Davis, Wine and Persian Poetry, 59.
See Kay Kavus ibn Iskandar ibn Qabus, A Mirror for Princes. The Qabus nama, trans.
Reuben Levy (New York, 1951), 5760; and Nizam al-Mulk, The Book of Government or
Rules for Kings. The Siyar al-Muluk or Siyasat-nama, trans. Hubert Darke (Richmond,
Surrey, 1960, repr. 2002), 119.
For Mongol drinking, see Antti Ruotsala, Europeans and Mongols in the Middle of the
Thirteenth Century. Encountering the Other (Helsinki, 2001), 11029.
28
29
30
31
For more on alcohol in the Safavid period and, in general, in Iranian history, see Rudi
Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure; Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 15001900
(Princeton, 2005), chs. 2, 3, and 6; and Rudi Matthee, The Ambiguities of Wine in
Iranian History: Between Excess and Abstention, in Florian Schwarz, Ralph Kauz, and
Bert Fragner (eds), Wine in Iranian History (Vienna, 2014), 130.
Pietro della Valle, Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, 2 vols, ed. Gancia (Brighton, 1845), I, 668.
Abul Mafakher b. Fazl Allah al-Hoseyni Savaneh-negar Tafreshi, Tarikh-e Shah Safi, ed.
Mohsen Bahramnezhad (Tehran, 1388/2010), 223; and Matthee, The Pursuit of
Pleasure, 523.
J.-B. Tavernier, Les six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier en Turquie, en Perse et en Indes
(Paris, 1678), 579; Fasai, Farsnameh-ye Naseri, 2 vols paginated as one (Tehran, 1367/
1988), 477.
32
33
34
35
Mohammad-Yusof Valeh Esfahani, Khold-e barin. Iran dar zaman-e Shah Safi wa Shah
Abbas-devvom, ed. M. Naseri (Tehran, 1380/2001), 480.
Tavernier, Les six voyages, 544.
Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 8590.
Ibid., 924.
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
indulgence in the Ottoman Empire as much as in Iran).36 The German chaplain Franciscus de Billerberg (Franz Billerbeck), who spent time in Istanbul in
the 1580s, called Murad III (r. 157495) a teetotaller as well.37 He also contradicts Busbecq, who attributed the good order in the sultans military to an
absence of intoxicating drinks in the regular army.38 The troops of Murads
father, Selim II (r. 156674), De Billerberg insists, could not be compelled to
abstain from wine.39 Indeed, alcohol consumption seems to have been rife
among the Ottoman soldiery, most notably in the ranks of the notoriously
unruly Janissaries.40
Other than consumption by dervishes, about which we have limited information, and with the exception of conditions in the Balkans and Greece, the
use of alcohol in the Ottoman Empire among civilians was largely confined to
the cities. In the Balkans the old tradition of wine drinking continued with
little noticeable abatement, even in the countryside, with the interesting twist
that Muslims in Bosnia seem to have obeyed the wine prohibition prescribed
by the Sharia while considering raki, an anise-flavoured spirit distilled from
grapes, to be permitted by Islam. Sarajevo was home to twenty-one taverns in
the second half of the eighteenth century.41
But even in urban centres, the nature of drinking was determined by the
type of inhabitants. The Ottoman Empire was fundamentally different from
Iran in that a large percentage of its originally Christian population never
converted to Islam. This was particularly true in the Balkans and on Aegean
islands such as Naxos and Mytilini (Lesbos) and Chios, which supplied most
of the wine consumed in Ottoman lands, but also in the port cities such as
Istanbul and Izmir. Since dhimmis were officially exempt from liquor laws,
alcohol might be obtained wherever they dwelled. Hence taverns, meyhanehs,
watering holes tucked away in side alleys and run by indigenous Greeks,
Armenians, or Jews, were predominantly found in port cities and invariably
located in the Christian part of town.42 In 1829 all of the 554 taverns in
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
And, Istanbul in the 16th Century, 188; Boyar and Fleet, A Social History of Istanbul, 195.
zlem Kumrular, The Role of Wine in Ottoman Society. A Collective Vice: Restrictions
O
zlem Kumrular, The Ottoman World, Europe and the
and Disobedience to the Laws, in O
Mediterranean (Istanbul, 2012), 188; and Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture
and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London and New York, 2000), 215.
Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age
(16001800) (Minneapolis, 1988), 129ff.
boozing of the Janissaries, taking bribes to allow the latter to indulge.50 Most
sultans proscribed alcohol and, with it, controversial consumables such as
coffee and tobacco at one point or another during their reign, whether upon
acceding to the throne, or in order to propitiate the heavens during natural
disaster or on the eve of a military campaign, motivated by religious fervour,
pressured by the ulama, mindful of the approach of old age and the reckoning
in the hereafter, or, simply seeking to maintain public order. Suleyman thus
forbade the public sale of wine in the 1540s, making it difficult even for nonMuslims to obtain any.51 Similar bans were issued by his successors, Selim II
(156674), Murad III (157495), Mehmed III (r. 15951603), Ahmed I
(r. 160317), and Murad IV (162340). The latter, an alcoholic himself,
was particularly severe in his reaction to public drinking, killing violators
encountered during incognito nocturnal outings with his own hand. The ban
on drinking issued during his reign was part of a larger offensive known as the
Kadzadeli movement. Named after Kadzade Mehmed (15821635), a
preacher from the provinces who in 1631 rose to become the highest religious
state official, the Kadzadeli movement long after its founders death continued to exert pressure on the state to act against improper practices associated
with its main target, Sufism, not just drinking but smoking and musicmaking as well. In 1662, following a terrible fire in Istanbul and an outbreak
of pestilence, disasters that the ulama blamed on unislamic practices, the sale
of wine was prohibited within the walls of Istanbul, comprising the Muslim
quarter of the city. Eight years later, the ban was tightened by being extended,
first to any neighbourhood that housed a mosque, and next to private use
even among non-Muslims.52 Naturally, such bans proved unenforceable, and
soon wine-drinking and selling resumed.
The frequency and sequential nature of these decrees indeed suggest that
they were largely incantatory. The ban Sultan Selim III (r. 17891808)
decreed upon his accession to power in 1789 foundered in the face of creative
circumventionwith Muslim males disguised as non-Muslim women
sneaking drinks into their homesbut failed above all for economic reasons.
The people of the Aegean islands, deprived of income, filed numerous petitions protesting their loss of livelihood. Most important was the loss in much
IV
Alcohol and the venues where it was consumed could never be agents of
change in the Islamic world. Taverns fundamentally differed from coffeehouses because wine was fundamentally different from coffee (and tobacco),
both of which conquered the world long after the emergence of Islam. When
they were first introduced, coffee and tobacco sparked lively debates about
their commensurability with religious norms and values, in Islam as much as
in Christianity. Eighteenth-century European coffeehouses (and taverns),
venues where commercial transactions took place and news was collected
and distributed, were incubators of capitalism and modern politics. Over
time, coffeehouses in the Middle East played a similar modernizing role
in the sense that they contributed to the creation of a cultural public
sphere separate from the mosque.54 Taverns, however, never assumed that
function, could not assume that function. They had no chance to nourish
their own distinct social life, for their raison detre, drinking, invited just
denial and repression, or at most connivance.55
53
54
55
Cengiz Kirli, The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 17801845
(Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 5862.
rs,
For the Ottoman case, see, besides Kirli, The Struggle over Space; Ilay O
Coffeehouses, Cosmopolitanism, and Pluralizing Modernity in Istanbul, Journal of
zkocak, Coffeehouses:
Mediterranean Studies, 12 (2002), 11945; Selam Akyazici O
Rethinking the Public and Private in Early Modern Istanbul, Journal of Urban History
33 (2007), 96586; and, arguing that the Ottoman coffeehouse was a heterotopic space
rather than a public venue conforming to Habermass model, Alan Mikhail, The Hearts
Desire: Gender, Urban Space, and the Ottoman Coffee House, in Dana Sajdi (ed.),
Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee. Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 2007), 13370.
James Grehan, Smoking and Early Modern Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in
the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), American Historical
Review, 111 (2006), 1375.
needed state revenue. Spirits taxes were a problematic issue, for to impose
them was to acknowledge, indeed, encourage the use of alcohol, which is why
they were abolished soon after being introduced in the seventeenth century.
Drinking proved to be too lucrative a source of income for the state, though,
and by the late eighteenth century the (reinstated) tax on alcoholic beverages
was a major source of revenue for the Ottoman state. Pragmatism, in other
words, tended to prevail: people, and certainly dhimmis, were left alone in
their drinking as long the public order was not disturbed, and rulers often
effectively stimulated consumption for the tax revenue it yielded, even if they
would never advertise this inclination.53
56
57
58
This does not mean that the onset of the modern age in the form of a
creeping growth of European influence on the lifestyle of the elite classes did
not help change drinking practices in the nineteenth-century Ottoman
Empire and in Qajar Iran; it didalbeit in different ways.
As elsewhere in the Muslim world, in the Ottoman Empire water remained
the customary drink of the Anatolian heartland, and any changes that
occurred in consumption patterns left most parts of the empire, especially
Arabia, totally unaffected. The availability of alcohol in port cities such as
Istanbul, Alexandria, and Izmir increased with the growth of the expatriate
European population in the nineteenth century. Expanding trade relations
and the signing of commercial treaties with European powers brought in new
western drinks, such as rum and champagne, enabling non-Ottoman subjects
to open up taverns as well. The modernizing Sultan Mahmud II (r. 180839)
set the tone for more open elite consumption of alcoholic beverages. Robert
Walsh, Irish chaplain to the British embassy in Istanbul in 182027, observed
how under this ruler the former curtailing practices had become restrained,
and how the sultan himself, though formerly a very temperate man, [had]
adopted the use of wine as one of the European customs to which he has made
such approximations. He called Mahmud particularly fond of champagne,
adding that a bottle was set beside him every day at dinner, and noted that
Ottoman officials drank as freely as any of the company during receptions
given by European ambassadors, always preferring a large goblet and never
mixing their drinks with water.56 A preference for European spirits thus
became a marker of modernity for the upper classes taking their cue from
the palace. Mahmud IIs successor, Sultan Abdulmecid (r. 183961), a gentle
sybarite, would visit representatives of the Christian community of Izmir,
occasions where alcohol was served in a semi-public fashion, and was sometimes too drunk to stay on his horse.57 It was mostly French wines, especially
Bordeaux, which gained some popularity in the late nineteenth century, even
if its clientele was mostly limited to foreign residents and rich Ottoman citizenswho were said not to like French wine and only to put it on the tables to
show off their sophistication.58 Wine, meanwhile, never caught on in the
Turkish heartlanddespite the fact that at the turn of the twentieth century
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
the sole defenders of a rudderless population fleeced by a succession of rapacious rulers. Most importantly, the Qajars lacked the religious legitimacy of
the Safavids, who had turned Iran into a Shii country, or, for that matter of
the Ottomans who, ruling over Mecca and Medina, boasted the title of protectors of Islams two holy shrines.
As a result the Qajars, in order to establish their religious credentials,
adopted sobriety or, at least, moved their drinking into the inner palace.
Some, such as Mohammad Shah (r. 183448), may even have been teetotallers. In a reflection of how far Iranian kingship had moved away from the
open-air bacchanals of the Safavids, Naser al-Din Shah, the longest ruling
Qajar monarch (184896), liked to drink a glass or two of Bordeaux for
dinner or, to calm his nerves, in anticipation of public executions.68 By
then, a public ceremony organized by the palace which included the distribution of soup had long replaced the raucous drinking fest of the Safavid
Qizilbash.
This does not mean that the Qajar elite stopped boozing. Indeed, there is
ample evidence that the ruling classes, especially in rural and tribal areas like
Kurdistan and Khorasan, continued to drink with abandon.69 Much of this
was done in traditional fashion. Ritter von Riederer, an Austrian adviser who
spent time in Iran in the 1870s, noted that an Iranian would observe religious
rules as long as others watched him but do whatever appeared to him as
comfortable and pleasurable as soon as he was in the privacy of his home.
Drinking in private was among these activities. The state, Ritter von Riederer
added, followed time-honoured conventions by punishing only those drunks
who caused a public nuisance, and never bothered to intervene with indoor
drinking parties, even if in the end all were lying about.70
Much of Qajar drinking remained traditional, seeking to reconcile public
censure and private craving by way of self-fashioning. The Russian S.
Lomnitski, an engineer who resided in Iran at the turn of the twentieth century, includes an anecdote in his perceptive travelogue that is as amusing as it
is informative in describing an example of such self-fashioning according to
changeable circumstances. He recounts how he was among the guests at a
drinking party at the residence of a wealthy Iranian where clerics were in
attendance. Before bringing out alcohol, the owner of the house ordered
71
72
73
74
something and the hats to be brought in. A tray filled with hats was brought
in, and each of the clerics took one and put it on his head, declaring that he
was now no longer a mullah but a private person, after which they set out to
play Islamically forbidden gamescheckers, chess, cardswhile availing
themselves of the something; which turned out to be an array of alcoholic
drinks, including vodka, cognac, wine, and liqueurs.71
Also traditional but with a new twist, was the defiance displayed by some
drinkers, who in their taste for alcohol recall the libertine, anti-clerical attitude of traditional high-minded Sufis claiming a private moral sphere that is
so powerfully articulated by Hafez and his fellow poets. New in the Qajar
period was not so much the contempt these showed for the increasingly
abrasive ulama who felt no longer restrained by a forceful ruler capable or
willing to rein them in, as the self-conscious stridency with which they flouted
the laws of the Prophet, exhibiting a modernizing, western inflected disposition. Flaunting ones drinking became an explicit political statement, displaying a modern attitude by way of heaping scorn on obscurantist clerics
and their cant, and as such it was part of a social ferment in nineteenthcentury Iran that bred forms of radicalism such as the Babi movement as
well.72
Among the ruling classes European liquors gained in popularity in the
same process that affected the Ottoman Empirethat of a growing entwinement with the outside world by way of tastes and the imports that fed them.
This includes the type of alcohol people consumed as well as the ambience in
which it was enjoyed. The nineteenth century witnessed the introduction of
new types of high-percentage alcoholic beverages into Iranbeyond Russian
aquavit which had been known since Safavid timesas part of the countrys
ongoing incorporation into the global market.73 A century and a half after
Chardin, James Baillie Fraser pointed to an Iranian fondness for potent stuff,
suggesting by way of explanation that the pleasure of drinking consists, not in
the gradual exhilaration produced by wine and conversation among companions who meet to make merry, but in the feelings of intoxication itself; and
therefor a Persian prefers brandy, and deep potations, because these soonest
enable him to attain that felicity.74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
Lady Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London, 1856), 157.
Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, Zendegi-ye tufani (khaterat) (Tehran, 1379/2000), 45.
Walther Kuss, Handelsratgeber fur Persien (Berlin, 1911), 121.
Archives des Affaires Etrange`res (AAE, French National Archives, Paris), CP, n.s., Perse
49, Notes sur Guilan, fol. 57.
Ibid., Notes sur les consequences economiques de la guerre en Guilan, fols. 5 and 27.
Kuss, Handelsratgeber, 121.
AAE, Corr. Politique (CP), n.s., Perse 47, Rapport sur le mouvement commercial de
lannee persane bars-il, 21 mars 1902 a 20 mars 1903. For conditions in the Ottoman
Empire in this period, see Georgeon, Ottomans and Drinkers.
European wines, which seem to have entered the Iranian market quite a bit
later, were still far from ubiquitous by mid-century. The British Resident
Justin Sheil at that time called the Iranians extremely fond of European
wines, yet added that, still none among them, even the richest, are willing
to undergo the expense of its conveyance from Europe. They satisfy themselves with the thin growth of their own vineyards, quantity compensating for
quality.75 In keeping with a trend among the Ottoman upper classes, a fairly
large number of Iranians had meanwhile taken to the Russian habit of consuming zakuska, hors doeuvre, accompanied by vodka.
Russian influence was especially paramount in northern Iran, evolving
around the time of the Constitutional Revolution (190511) into outright
military occupation. In the late nineteenth century, as Russias influence on
Iran grew, the import and consumption of arak increased so that by centurys
end more was said to be consumed in Tabriz than in Tbilisi.76 By the first decade
of the twentieth century Russias influence had made vodka quite common in
the north.77 A report about the latter province from the early 1920s, when Gilan
was under Russian control, insists that alcoholism was rampant among the
regions Armenian and Russian inhabitants and that a predilection for the best
wines and spirits prompted a search for good French wines, cognacs, and
liqueurs among the well-to-do classes.78 The French consul in Rasht at the
time added that much of the wine consumed in Gilan came from Russia and
that alcohol was sold clandestinely in coffee houses in the province.79 Cognac,
too, entered Iran at the time, from India as well as from France and Greece. The
other popular drink among upper-class Iranians was champagne. Fantastic
prices were paid for this luxury item. French and German wines and liquors
were imported for the same clientele. By now, beer, too, was consumed by the
most affluent Iranians, but even more so by resident foreigners. In the north
Russian beers were most common; German and English and even some
American brands prevailed in the south.80 In 1902 a total of 134,634 bottles
entered the country, 121,130 of which originated in Russia.81
82
83
84
85
http://www.turkishmuse.com/2011/01/war-against-alcohol-in-turkey.html
Asia Times, 26 August 2009, Turkeys beer-swillers get hammered.
The Guardian, 23 Dec. 2005, Alcohol the battleground in east-west conflict.
Hurriyet Daily News, 23 Sept. 2012, Turkish AKP alcohol law raises question marks.
Rules and regulations concerning the sale and consumption of alcohol vary
widely from country to country in the modern Islamic world, ranging from
secular Syria, where alcohol is freely available, to Pakistan and Malaysia,
where only non-Muslims can obtain alcohol by presenting proof of (religious) identification, to absolute interdiction in Saudi Arabia. The level of
official secularism, that is, the degree to which the official religion does not
inform the legal system, generally determines the availability of alcohol.
For most of the twentieth century Turkey and Iran followed the secular
model. In keeping with Ataturks vision and preference, the republic of
Turkey became not just a secular state but one in which religion was deliberately marginalized. In 1926 the sale and consumption of alcohol by
Muslims was made legal, and for the remainder of the twentieth century no
legal restrictions were imposed on either, so that drinking alcohol became
socially accepted. Turkey nonetheless continued to be a nation of light
drinkers, and women by and large still abstained. The majority of Turks
who do imbibe prefer beer, which accounts for some 60 per cent of total
consumption, with the average person consuming 0.8 litres in 2005, or spirits,
meaning raki, at 0.5 litres per person. Wine, by contrast, is hardly drunk
at all.82
Things began to change with the coming to power of the Justice and
Development Party (AKP for Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi) in 2002. Since
2005 the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has waged a campaign to
limit the supply and consumption of alcohol. It has become much harder
to obtain and renew liquor licences and, citing the need to protect family
values, municipalities have outlawed drinking in government-owned hotels,
restaurants and cafes.83 Proposals have also been made to ban alcohol in city
centres by limiting the sale and consumption to restricted areas, alcohol
ghettoes, on the edge of towns. By 2005 alcohol bans were in place in 61 of
Turkeys 81 provinces.84 Proposed changes in labour legislation call for the
right for companies to fire anyone who shows up having had anything to
drink. In September 2012 a law took effect that bans the sale of alcohol and
cigarettes by breaking its packaging or dividing them, which, critics say,
effectively prohibits the sale by the glass in restaurants.85 In April 2013
Erdogan declared ayran, a salty mixture of yoghurt and water, rather than
raki the national drink of Turkey, and a month later the Turkish parliament,
86
87
88
The Economist, 1 June 2013, Alcohol in Turkey. Not so good for you; Hurriyet Daily
News, 9 Sept. 2013, Restrictions on alcohol sale go into effect today in Turkey, at
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/restrictions-on-alcohol-sales-go-into-effect-todayin-turkey.aspx?PageID238&NID54074&NewsCatID344; and Emre Kizilkaya,
Turkeys new prohibitions lead to underground alcohol market, al-Monitor, 17 Sept.
2013.
Hurriyet Daily News, 10 May 2010, AKP, Alcohol and government-engineered change in
Turkey; Ibid., 29 Oct. 2010, Turkish consumers dazed by another alcohol tax increase.
For the role drinking has assumed as a symbol of resistance for many secular Turks, see
Tim Arango, Resisting by Raising a Glass, New York Times, 9 June 2013.
citing public health reasons, passed a bill that would ban retail sales of alcohol
between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., halt all advertising and promotion of alcoholrelated products, and forbid the sale of liquor within 100 metres of schools
and houses of worship. In September 2013 the bill became law. Its restrictions
quickly led to the emergence of an underground alcohol market in the form of
late-night delivery services.86
The state has been most consistent in curbing availability by dramatically
raising taxes. In 2002 the government instituted a special consumption tax
TV) on alcohol, raising VAT on alcohol from the regular VAT rate of 18 to
(O
48 per cent, with a further increase to 63 per cent in 2009. Severely criticized
for this policy, the government in 2010 eliminated this impost on some
alcoholic beverages, such as wine, only to add a lump-sum tax on each
bottle. The tax on beer, meanwhile, went up by almost 800 per cent between
2002 and 2010. The price of raki, which remains the national tipple, in the
same period has quadrupled to some 35 TL, or almost $20 for a 700 cl bottle.87
These tax hikes have made a glass of beer or raki exorbitantly expensive, on
par with Scandinavian countries, and, taking into account the moderate purchasing power of most Turks, the most expensive in the world, putting alcohol out of reach for most. The result is that Turkeys per capita consumption,
already very low by international standards, has dropped by one third in the
last few years, and that the number of cafes and restaurants selling alcohol was
reduced by 21 per cent between 2005 and 2008. This creeping social transformation has also pitted secular Turks who uphold the right of citizens
to make their own lifestyle choices against their more traditional fellowcitizens who believe that drinking is a sin and should be outlawed by the
state, reflecting a general debate in Turkish society about the role of religion in
public life that in the late spring of 2013 erupted in confrontation and
violence.88
Twentieth-century Iran evinces initial convergence with Turkish patterns
followed by a sharp turn in policies with the establishment of the Islamic
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
Willem Floor, A Fiscal History of Iran in the Safavid and Qajar Periods 15001925 (New
York, 1998), 4056.
Hoseyn Makki, Tarikh-e bist saleh-ye Iran. Kudeta-ye 1299, 3 vols (Tehran, 1323/1944;
repr. 1358/1979), I, 2989; and Jafar Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemai-ye Tehran dar qarn-e
sizdehom (Tehran, 3rd edn, 1378/1999), vol. 4, 3789.
Shahri, Tarikh-e ejtemai-ye Tehran, vol. 4, 3801.
National Archives, London, FO, E8057/8057/34, Ndeg314, Persia. Annual Report, 1922.
XII - Medical Affairs. (2.) Sanitary and Allied Questions, 64.
Floor, A Fiscal History of Iran, 407.
AAE, Corr. Commerciale, Tehran to Paris, 8 Jan. and 10 Feb. 1927, fols. 65ff.
AAE, CP, n.s. Perse 62, fol. 116.
Tableau generale du commerce avec les pays etrange`res pendant lannee 1305 (Tehran,
1927), xi/2, Importations.
97
Peyk-e Saadat-e Nesvan 1:3 (Esfand 1306/Ramazan 1346), repr., ed. Banafsheh Masudi
and Naser Mohajer (Berkeley and Creteil, 2012), 46 (1346 in new edn); and Salnamehye Pars 1314/1925, 88, 89.
98
Baladiyeh-ye Tehran. Devvomin salnameh-ye ehsaiyeh-ye shahr-e Tehran/Deuxie`me
annuaire statistique de la ville de Teheran, 19251929 (Tehran, 1310/1930).
99
Friedrich Rosen, Oriental Memories of a German Diplomatist (London, 1930), 139.
100
http://www.darioush-shahbazi.com/index.php?optioncom_content&taskview&id
314&Itemid12
101
Rosen, Oriental Memories, 139.
102
104
Merhnaz Samimi, Iran opens first alcohol rehab center, al-Monitor, 25 Oct. 2013, at
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/iran-alcohol-permit-rehab-center.
html.