“Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop’s Door: History of Alcohol in the Islamic World”

Book by Rudi Matthee

Review by: David Chaffetz 26 May 2023 Non-Fiction

Why are we surprised that, while Islam forbids wine, Muslims have been known to imbibe?  Doesn’t Christianity prohibit adultery? In Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop Door, Rudi Matthee  explores the contradiction between the formal ban on alcohol and the essential cultural role of  wine in Muslims societies over the ages. 

At first glance, the prohibition of wine appears straightforward. Islam’s scriptures consider wine  impure, drunkenness improper, and drunkards excluded from heavenly rewards. But historically  practices were more complicated. As long as drinking did not disturb the social order, eg tippling 

in private, religion tended to turn a blind eye. Drinking without getting drunk had the approval of  the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, dominant in Ottoman lands. Other traditions argued that only  grapes were to be avoided, allowing for date and fig wine, especially the distilled versions. Still  others taught that distillation removed impurities from grape wine, making raki a particularly  favored drink in Turkey. Scientists like Avicenna recommended wine for medicinal purposes,  turning it into an oft-sought after remedy. Many Muslims societies tolerated drinking, along with  other transgressive behaviors, for young men, with the expectation that age 40 would bring  repentance and sobriety. 

Tolerated or excused on the basis of manifold justifications, wine remained “integral … to  Islamic culture … putting it at the center of Islam, making it almost its defining issue,” writes  Matthee. This centrality resulted from three fundamental cultural factors

Islam arose and spread in a wine-drinking culture. The ancient Arab poets celebrated wine. In the  first lands conquered by Islam, Syria, Egypt and Iran, vineyards could be found everywhere. For  centuries the Muslims were a minority within the Muslim empire. They shared wine with their  Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish neighbors. Later, as more people converted to Islam, they did  not necessarily give up the bottle. This is especially true in the Balkans and in the Caucasus.  Even in Turkey, the Alevi sect is known for combining religious rituals with imbibing, perhaps  as part of a pre-Islamic practice.

This points to another important factor: wine itself enhanced religious experiences. Not just piety  and asceticism brought believers closer to the Godhead, but also intoxication. Wine was  frequently associated with love-making, which many Muslim poets and philosophers  characterized as training wheels for the mystical journey. For Hafez and many other Persian  poets, wine provided temporary and temporal ecstasy, while also acting as a potent metaphor of  mystical union with God. It “opens a universe beyond good and evil, unlocking the treasure box  of eternal wisdom and truth.” Matthee’s discussion of the role of wine in poetry and mysticism  moves beyond the cliched formulation of wine being either real or metaphorical, arguing it is  simultaneously both. 

More prosaically, wine-soaked sociability oiled the gears of society. Kings and their courtiers  frequently got drunk together, ensuring frankness and trust up and down the hierarchy. Many  East Asian cultures still use alcohol in this way. Matthee speculates that the Islam’s medieval  Turco-Mongol overlords brought with them the habits of the steppe nomads whose drinking  

bouts attained epic proportions. Most of Tamerlane’s descendants, for example, died from  drinking. An exception was Babur, who had the hardest time giving it up while establishing the  Mughal empire. 

Despite the Ottomans, Timurids and Safavids belonging to a tradition of hard-riding and hard drinking horsemen, as they grew in dignity and orthodoxy, several sultans and shahs tried to ban  alcohol. More often they died of cirrhosis. The doctors of religion had a point about drinking: it  brought down more than one ruler. The problem became more acute when the realms of Islam  were menaced by the imperialist powers. It’s not as if the Russians, French and British didn’t  drink. But their leaders tended not to spend the whole day in a drunken stupor. 

Modernizing critics attacked this feckless ruling class of pashas, mirzas and nawabs, trying to  rein in the centuries-old drinking culture. They were increasingly joined by fundamentalists, who  reminded everyone that Islam had forbidden wine in the first place. Rejection of alcohol became  an excuse for imposing a rigorist version of Islam. As a result, a certain amount of civility has  been lost. As Matthee puts it, “Modern Muslim fundamentalists exclusively focus on the textual  dimensions of Islam, as if they had inherited colonialism’s ignorance of the religion’s history of  diversity and tolerance.” Some of his most poignant observations concern recent history in  Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, where ostentatious liquor bans have not reduced alcoholism, but  simply driven it underground. 

Much of this book is a romp through 1,400 years of history and across 3,000 miles of territory.  This provides an element of exhaustivity that is exhausting, rather like an endless pub crawl. The  real interest of Matthee’s survey is his sensitive and nuanced exploration of the inner lives of  people with whom, though remote in time and place from us, we would have enjoyed sharing a  drink. 

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019).  His forthcoming book Horse Power will be published by WW Norton in 2023.