Wine in Islamic land and poetry – Passing the prohibitions

Islam spread from Mecca in every direction and established itself from Andalusia to eastern Turkistan – modern-day Xingjian, China in a very limited period of time. As most of these places were also strictly under the administration following Islamic law, wine and other alcoholic drinks were possibly prohibited to drink or sell. But it was not necessarily followed in many parts of the Islamic civilization. There are various tales and stories of Muslims, including the great adventures of emperors who were drunkards. If not Muslims, the wine was produced and sold by other religious groups are Jews, Christians and Parsis/ Zoroastrians.

13 years after Muhammed S.A.W entered his prophethood, the consumption of alcohol was prohibited to Muslims. First, they were asked not to drink while it was the time for  5 daily prayers and then slowly slowly, it was prohibited completely. It is said that this was done to make it easy for a group of people for whom wine was inevitable. According to a few Islamic sources, there were five types of alcoholic drinks than what they were prepared from – dates, honey, raisins, wheat and barley. The third Khalifa, Umar ibn Khattab formulated new rules as the Islamic empire expanded more and more regions with the majority non-Muslim population to prohibit them from selling pork and alcohol. This strict law was only followed in the early Islamic period. As the rulers became less religious over a generation, the law was also loosened for various reasons. Records from courts show that traditional Jewish wine producers leased wine yards from the Mamluk and Ayyubid governments who had accumulated a fortune by taxing previously prohibited activities like the sale of alcohol, hashish, and prostitution among others.

Christian monasteries were spread wide across the middle east including Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Monasteries were famous for the wine they produced apart from other activities and festivals they held, in which Arab elites were constant participants. These monasteries also known as ‘Diyarat’ in Arabic were a centre for poetry recitals and competitions by drunk poetry enthusiasts who contributed a completely new section to the Arabic literature known as The Kitab-al-diyarah

In Persia, things were much more inflow and the wine was too as the agreements made by the Muslims and Zoroastrians had a lot of exemptions in them. That is why many of the Persian poets, whose poetry was very much spiritual, including Hafez of Shiraz and Abu Nawas – wine, wine drinking and also the people who sold it always came up as metaphors even when they did not clearly endorse it. Shirazi wine, different from the Shiraz (Australian) wine is the same wine that Hafez used in his poems as it was from his hometown. Apart from Shirazi, Ramian wine was popular in Persia. This was produced in Ramia, the capital of the province of Gulistan. Even though there weren’t Muslim producers of wine, the barrels were rolled down and wine flew freely in glasses and cups of the princes and poets of Persia. In one Persian legend, it is said that the wine was discovered by a girl who was rejected by the king, as she tried to kill herself by consuming some unknown spoiled residue of some rotting table grapes that smelled like poison. The Zagros mountains in the north of Iran have archaeological sites from where wine pots that date back to the Neolithic ages and Beer pots that 3000-3500 years have been excavated.

The wine was also present in the Darbars (courts) of Muslim kings in India including the sultans in the 11th century to the Mughal Shehshahs in the 15th century. There were Urdu poets like Mirza Ghalib and Khan Shabab who wrote the poem in wine and around wine.

A portrait of Hafez of Shiraz

It can also be noted that wine was served at restrooms and cafes along the famous trade routes from China and India through Arabia and Persia including the Silk Road through Central Asia. There are also instances in which wine was being transported in Urus or Small wooden ships in the Arabian sea between south India, West Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula apart from ships crossing the Mediterranean including The Cyprus island and Sicily during its Islamic period.

Over time, as Empires disintegrated and smaller countries and kingdoms came up in the region –many countries have lifted the prohibition but many still maintain it. It is illegal to brew, keep, sell and drink alcohol in many countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Iran, etc. But in Arab and Persian poetry, the wine still makes its way and as time passed more and more including women poets like Azar Nafisi and Saher Khalife, other iconic Arab poets of modern times like Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani and Urdu poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi has kept on writing about it.

Even though the wine had a presence in Middle Eastern poetry, Coffee stayed as the king of the beverages in poetry and culture - thanks to prohibitions and punishments for alcohol consumption in the region.