Use of Alcohol by the Ancient Arab

Drinking wine was deeply rooted in the nature of the Arab before the dawn of Islam.  No house was free from it and majority of the people was addicted to it.  The Arab women prepared it and men praised it in their poetry.  They considered it advantageous because they extracted huge profits by dealing in wine.

            The history of the pre-Islamic Arab world reveals that alcoholic drinks had become indispensable for the life of the Arabs.  Heavy drinking and the generous serving of alcoholic drinks were the signs of magnanimity for which the individual and the tribe received great honours  and praise.  Ancient Arab poetry and other literature is replete with praises of drinking wine and gambling as signs of manhood and chauvinism.   Alyashkari,  an ancient Arab Poet says:

When I am drunk I an the Lord

            Of Persian palaces of marvel ;

            When I wake up, I am the Lord

            Of my little goat and camel.

            I love her (the goat) and she loves me.

            So camel loves her, she too loves.

            In fact the sale of wine was so customary that the Arabic word ‘tajir’ which literally means merchant, had become synonym for the wine-sellers.  The shops and bars of these wine-merchants remained open throughout the day and the night and were clearly designated with special flags.  Thus the Arabs developed a rich taste for different kinds of locally extracted and imported alcoholic drinks.  They formulated hundreds of words to describe different types of wine regarding their origin, the degrees of their alcohol concentration, the fruits from which they were extracted, the way they were fermented, their effect on the drunkard, the degree of their purity, their colour, their taste, and many more qualities.

            The Arabs had also perceived natural insight into the psychic effects of alcohol intake and the individual differences between people in this respect.  For example, Al-Nuwairi refers to an old man to whom some friends complained about the excessive drinking of his three sons.  “Describe them to me when they are drunk,” said the old man.  They answered, “When drunk the first one becomes very aggressive.  He attacks his friends and tears their clothes.  The second vomits making his clothes dirty.  As for the third one, he is the best.  He becomes extremely quiet and polite.”  The old man’s comments were, “the first and second will eventually become dry, but the third will never stop drinking!”

            So it was only natural for the men who grew up in this alcohol saturated environment, and who were brought up in such a romantic society which placed great competitive emphasis on price, with such deep seated feelings of insecurity of real and imagined dangers, to seek this pride with security in the fantasy of alcoholic intoxication.

            From the quotations given above, it appears that from the beginning of the world to the time of the Holy Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) wine-drinking was not declared as unlawful.  On the other hand wine was even held as an essential part of some of the religious ceremonies and it was regarded as an hallowed and beneficial thing.

            It was left to Islam, and Islam alone, to condemn this curse in unequivocal terms and ban its production, sale and consumption.