Read more: Who speaks for Muslims in Britain?
Locked in the vaults of the V&A is a beautiful brass jug that reveals a hidden history of Islam. The jug comes from Khorasan province, Iran and dates from the late 15th century. Inlaid with silver, its clover-leaf design encapsulates the harmonious aesthetic of Islamic art. Engraved round its neck are four religious invocations: “To Allah belongs might… power… victory… strength.” I recently had the privilege of holding the cool, heavy jug in my hands and could imagine a medieval Muslim lifting it to his lips, reading the holy words, before taking a deep draught of wine—for this is a mashrabe or Islamic wine jug.
Both western observers of Islam and orthodox Muslims might be surprised to see the sacred and profane overlap so brazenly. Everybody knows that Islam forbids alcohol consumption. Such is the taboo that the Iranian Ministry of Culture announced recently that to counteract a “western cultural onslaught,” it was banning all mention of the word “wine” from books. If Muslims do drink, they are seen as either ignoring or subverting prevailing religious norms. Yet our wine jug is both expressly Islamic—see the references to Allah—and a vessel for something banned by Islam. Can we account for the contradiction? And in doing so, can we learn something about the heated contemporary debates around Islam?
The Pakistani-American academic Shahab Ahmed highlights similar wine jugs in his 600-page What is Islam? (Princeton University Press), published posthumously at the end of last year. Ahmed argues for a new way of looking at Islamic history that emphasises its variety across time and space—what he calls the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex.” Too often, he says, scholars of Islam have thought that the canonical texts—the Quran and the hadith (stories about the Prophet Muhammad)—firmly seal the religion’s boundaries. If a certain cultural practice contradicts those texts—wine-drinking, for example—it cannot be truly Islamic. Ahmed acknowledges the importance of the canon. But he argues that two other sources of Islamic authority should be given equal weight.
The first source is what Ahmed, in his academic way, calls the “Pre-Text.” By this he means the spirit behind the letter—the divine wisdom encoded within the Quran, for example, as opposed to its literal meaning. This is the same spirit Sufis try to access through ecstatic rituals. The second source he calls the “Con-Text.” By this he means the wide-ranging history of interpretation that has developed over the last 1,400 years. He does not only mean legal scholars laying out the sharia (though they have their place); but also influential philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), ethicists such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and poets such as Rumi and Hafez. The last two in particular were incredibly popular both among intellectual elites and the general populace.
So adopting Ahmed’s tripartite definition could wine-drinking ever be regarded as being Islamic? Kathryn Kueny’s The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam identifies the “often ambivalent discussions over wine and alcohol that appear in Islamic texts.” Some Quranic verses expressly forbid intoxicants. In 5: 90-91, wine-drinking is grouped with gambling, idol-worship and divination as “abominations from the acts of Satan,” from which mankind should abstain. So far so orthodox. But in 16: 67, wine seems to be one of God’s bounties: “And in the fruits of the date-palm and the grape-vine you obtain an intoxicant and good food. In this are signs for those who understand.” Muslim scholars have long debated the order in which these verses appeared and whether more prohibitive verses superseded earlier ones. There is general agreement that the settled Qu’ranic view is expressed in 2: 219, where regarding “wine and gambling,” it is said, “there is both great sin and great profit for men. But the sin is greater than the profit.” Even here, though, there is a degree of ambivalence.
The Prophet, regarded as the model Muslim, abhorred alcohol. According to one hadith, he said: “Whoever drinks wine in this world, will not drink it in the next.” Here drunkenness signals a lack of moral control and an affront to a Muslim’s dignity. Yet the Prophet is drawing on Quranic verses that promise rivers of wine as a heavenly reward for believers. So wine does have a “Pre-text,” or spiritual-metaphorical meaning, that lends it greater significance than other forbidden victuals in the Quran—there will be no bacon sandwiches in Paradise. As we shall see, poets and artists would later take up this wine metaphor.
What about the “Con-Text” or tradition of interpretation? Ahmed points out that drinking was often praised by mainstream Muslim writers. In the 9th century, Abu Zayd al-Balkhi wrote a foundational work of medical literature, The Welfare of Bodies and Souls, which claimed that wine engendered “an abundance of happiness, animation, openness, stimulation, self-contentment, generosity, and freedom from cares and sorrows.” Ibn Sina, one of the earliest Muslim philosophers to absorb Greek learning, was apparently in the habit of throwing parties at which alcohol was served. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s classic work on ethics—which Ahmed describes as “the most influential—that is, most widely copied, read and re-worked—book of political theory… until the modern period”—dedicated a whole chapter to the manners of wine-drinking. (If a man is feeling light-headed he should leave right away advises Tusi. “Once he has vomited, he may return to the party.”)
The seeming paradox of our Islamic wine-jug now starts to makes more sense. Drinking was, in Ahmed’s words, “prohibited in legal discourse, but positively valued in non-legal discourse—especially amongst social and political elites.” The question arises, though, that if the term “Islamic” is stretched to accommodate two such opposing views does it retain conceptual coherence? Should we perhaps call drinking a “culturally Islamic” practice or even a “Persian” or “Arab” one? Ahmed insists we shouldn’t. For him, one of the distinctive characteristics of Islam—up until the modern period, at least—is its ability to comfortably contain multitudes.
A striking visual embodiment of Ahmed’s argument is a painting by Sultan Muhammad, that 16th-century genius of the Herat school. “The Allegory of Worldly and Otherworldly Drunkenness” illustrates a couplet by Hafez about angels drinking heavenly wine. But as we can see there is much more than allegorical drunkenness going on here.
On the ground level, wine is distributed to intoxicated party-goers. A man in pink has hurled off his turban and is kissing the foot of a surprised prince; a pair of men—one in bright yellow, the other in bright blue—dance raucously together; above them, a worse-for-wear gentleman in green is following Tusi’s advice and leaving the party early. Along the left side of the painting, our eye follows a drinking gourd being raised up to a man in blue, next to a balcony where a refined couple sup elegantly. They know how to handle their drink. Rising to the top, angels pass each other divine wine cups. At the centre of the painting is the poet Hafez himself, reclining with a book and a half-empty bottle beside him. The allegory isn’t hard to unravel: earthly pleasures are a pale reflection of heavenly ones. In the words of Rumi: “Hark, oh heart! Be not deceived by every intoxication! / Jesus is drunk with God, but his ass is drunk with barley.” But as the painting’s uninhibited portrayal of drunk Muslims shows, the drinking metaphor would have no resonance unless the audience knew what it was like to be drunk, either through experience or observation.
Ahmed embraces such provocative paradoxes. But What is Islam? is more than an intellectual game. It makes a passionate intervention in the debate over Islam in the modern world. At the end of the book, Ahmed laments that so many Muslims are unaware of the rich ambiguity of their own culture—preferring to settle for the certainties of doctrine and law. Western analysts of Islam fall into the same trap, mistaking what is normative in canonical or legal works for what is universal, and paying insufficient attention to how the “Text” has been interpreted over time.
Though Ahmed only briefly touches on it, his book is also relevant to the problem of extremist violence, terrorism and the rise of Islamic State (IS). Very often Islamist extremists, especially those brought up in the western world, are unable to accommodate multiple identities and steer clear of paradox: they prefer clean lines and irrefutable arguments. (It’s not a coincidence that the IS flag is black and white.) They justify their actions using certain parts of the “Text”—martial Qu’ranic verses or Prophetic stories—while ignoring both the spirit behind the letter (the Pre-Text) and the history of interpretation (the Con-Text). Their view has much in common with the Wahabbi vision of Islam as practised in Saudi Arabia. Ahmed cites the Saudi destruction of historical sites in Mecca. They have pulled down mosques and mausoleums built by earlier Muslims and replaced them with the arid symbols of their own power: hotels and malls. Effectively, the Saudis are trying to destroy all other forms of interpretation, so theirs is the only one left standing.
In a much-shared piece from The Atlantic last year, the journalist Graeme Wood wrote that: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” He cited their frequent allusions to theology and their idealisation of the early Islamic conquests. Certainly there are Islamic texts that favour conquest and punishment, dominance and power. (To muddy the waters further the religious engravings on the Khorasan wine jug can be interpreted as battle cries.) And IS undoubtedly draws on such texts to justify their crimes. It is pointless to pretend they are not Muslims; they are, although of a very peculiar kind.
IS declares that any Muslim—Shia or Sunni—that does not pledge allegiance to its “caliph” is an apostate and thus deserving of death. This position is, as far as I know, unprecedented in Islamic history. On the other hand, our wine jug, Sultan Muhammad’s painting and Hafez’s intoxicating poetry have been a consistently embedded part of Islam. Which leads me to declare, in the spirit of Ahmed, that Islamic State is considerably less Islamic than drinking wine.
What is Islam? was Shahab Ahmed’s first book. It appeared around the same time as the Harvard academic died in September from leukemia at the age of 48. Given the crisis afflicting Islamic intellectual life right now, it feels a bitter blow to lose this brilliantly original thinker. (His study of the Satanic Verses incident will be published by Harvard next year.) We can be grateful, though, that Ahmed managed to complete this extraordinary work. Scholars from east and west will be under his influence for years to come.
Locked in the vaults of the V&A is a beautiful brass jug that reveals a hidden history of Islam. The jug comes from Khorasan province, Iran and dates from the late 15th century. Inlaid with silver, its clover-leaf design encapsulates the harmonious aesthetic of Islamic art. Engraved round its neck are four religious invocations: “To Allah belongs might… power… victory… strength.” I recently had the privilege of holding the cool, heavy jug in my hands and could imagine a medieval Muslim lifting it to his lips, reading the holy words, before taking a deep draught of wine—for this is a mashrabe or Islamic wine jug.
Both western observers of Islam and orthodox Muslims might be surprised to see the sacred and profane overlap so brazenly. Everybody knows that Islam forbids alcohol consumption. Such is the taboo that the Iranian Ministry of Culture announced recently that to counteract a “western cultural onslaught,” it was banning all mention of the word “wine” from books. If Muslims do drink, they are seen as either ignoring or subverting prevailing religious norms. Yet our wine jug is both expressly Islamic—see the references to Allah—and a vessel for something banned by Islam. Can we account for the contradiction? And in doing so, can we learn something about the heated contemporary debates around Islam?
The Pakistani-American academic Shahab Ahmed highlights similar wine jugs in his 600-page What is Islam? (Princeton University Press), published posthumously at the end of last year. Ahmed argues for a new way of looking at Islamic history that emphasises its variety across time and space—what he calls the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex.” Too often, he says, scholars of Islam have thought that the canonical texts—the Quran and the hadith (stories about the Prophet Muhammad)—firmly seal the religion’s boundaries. If a certain cultural practice contradicts those texts—wine-drinking, for example—it cannot be truly Islamic. Ahmed acknowledges the importance of the canon. But he argues that two other sources of Islamic authority should be given equal weight.
The first source is what Ahmed, in his academic way, calls the “Pre-Text.” By this he means the spirit behind the letter—the divine wisdom encoded within the Quran, for example, as opposed to its literal meaning. This is the same spirit Sufis try to access through ecstatic rituals. The second source he calls the “Con-Text.” By this he means the wide-ranging history of interpretation that has developed over the last 1,400 years. He does not only mean legal scholars laying out the sharia (though they have their place); but also influential philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), ethicists such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and poets such as Rumi and Hafez. The last two in particular were incredibly popular both among intellectual elites and the general populace.
So adopting Ahmed’s tripartite definition could wine-drinking ever be regarded as being Islamic? Kathryn Kueny’s The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam identifies the “often ambivalent discussions over wine and alcohol that appear in Islamic texts.” Some Quranic verses expressly forbid intoxicants. In 5: 90-91, wine-drinking is grouped with gambling, idol-worship and divination as “abominations from the acts of Satan,” from which mankind should abstain. So far so orthodox. But in 16: 67, wine seems to be one of God’s bounties: “And in the fruits of the date-palm and the grape-vine you obtain an intoxicant and good food. In this are signs for those who understand.” Muslim scholars have long debated the order in which these verses appeared and whether more prohibitive verses superseded earlier ones. There is general agreement that the settled Qu’ranic view is expressed in 2: 219, where regarding “wine and gambling,” it is said, “there is both great sin and great profit for men. But the sin is greater than the profit.” Even here, though, there is a degree of ambivalence.
The Prophet, regarded as the model Muslim, abhorred alcohol. According to one hadith, he said: “Whoever drinks wine in this world, will not drink it in the next.” Here drunkenness signals a lack of moral control and an affront to a Muslim’s dignity. Yet the Prophet is drawing on Quranic verses that promise rivers of wine as a heavenly reward for believers. So wine does have a “Pre-text,” or spiritual-metaphorical meaning, that lends it greater significance than other forbidden victuals in the Quran—there will be no bacon sandwiches in Paradise. As we shall see, poets and artists would later take up this wine metaphor.
What about the “Con-Text” or tradition of interpretation? Ahmed points out that drinking was often praised by mainstream Muslim writers. In the 9th century, Abu Zayd al-Balkhi wrote a foundational work of medical literature, The Welfare of Bodies and Souls, which claimed that wine engendered “an abundance of happiness, animation, openness, stimulation, self-contentment, generosity, and freedom from cares and sorrows.” Ibn Sina, one of the earliest Muslim philosophers to absorb Greek learning, was apparently in the habit of throwing parties at which alcohol was served. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s classic work on ethics—which Ahmed describes as “the most influential—that is, most widely copied, read and re-worked—book of political theory… until the modern period”—dedicated a whole chapter to the manners of wine-drinking. (If a man is feeling light-headed he should leave right away advises Tusi. “Once he has vomited, he may return to the party.”)
The seeming paradox of our Islamic wine-jug now starts to makes more sense. Drinking was, in Ahmed’s words, “prohibited in legal discourse, but positively valued in non-legal discourse—especially amongst social and political elites.” The question arises, though, that if the term “Islamic” is stretched to accommodate two such opposing views does it retain conceptual coherence? Should we perhaps call drinking a “culturally Islamic” practice or even a “Persian” or “Arab” one? Ahmed insists we shouldn’t. For him, one of the distinctive characteristics of Islam—up until the modern period, at least—is its ability to comfortably contain multitudes.
A striking visual embodiment of Ahmed’s argument is a painting by Sultan Muhammad, that 16th-century genius of the Herat school. “The Allegory of Worldly and Otherworldly Drunkenness” illustrates a couplet by Hafez about angels drinking heavenly wine. But as we can see there is much more than allegorical drunkenness going on here.
On the ground level, wine is distributed to intoxicated party-goers. A man in pink has hurled off his turban and is kissing the foot of a surprised prince; a pair of men—one in bright yellow, the other in bright blue—dance raucously together; above them, a worse-for-wear gentleman in green is following Tusi’s advice and leaving the party early. Along the left side of the painting, our eye follows a drinking gourd being raised up to a man in blue, next to a balcony where a refined couple sup elegantly. They know how to handle their drink. Rising to the top, angels pass each other divine wine cups. At the centre of the painting is the poet Hafez himself, reclining with a book and a half-empty bottle beside him. The allegory isn’t hard to unravel: earthly pleasures are a pale reflection of heavenly ones. In the words of Rumi: “Hark, oh heart! Be not deceived by every intoxication! / Jesus is drunk with God, but his ass is drunk with barley.” But as the painting’s uninhibited portrayal of drunk Muslims shows, the drinking metaphor would have no resonance unless the audience knew what it was like to be drunk, either through experience or observation.
Ahmed embraces such provocative paradoxes. But What is Islam? is more than an intellectual game. It makes a passionate intervention in the debate over Islam in the modern world. At the end of the book, Ahmed laments that so many Muslims are unaware of the rich ambiguity of their own culture—preferring to settle for the certainties of doctrine and law. Western analysts of Islam fall into the same trap, mistaking what is normative in canonical or legal works for what is universal, and paying insufficient attention to how the “Text” has been interpreted over time.
Though Ahmed only briefly touches on it, his book is also relevant to the problem of extremist violence, terrorism and the rise of Islamic State (IS). Very often Islamist extremists, especially those brought up in the western world, are unable to accommodate multiple identities and steer clear of paradox: they prefer clean lines and irrefutable arguments. (It’s not a coincidence that the IS flag is black and white.) They justify their actions using certain parts of the “Text”—martial Qu’ranic verses or Prophetic stories—while ignoring both the spirit behind the letter (the Pre-Text) and the history of interpretation (the Con-Text). Their view has much in common with the Wahabbi vision of Islam as practised in Saudi Arabia. Ahmed cites the Saudi destruction of historical sites in Mecca. They have pulled down mosques and mausoleums built by earlier Muslims and replaced them with the arid symbols of their own power: hotels and malls. Effectively, the Saudis are trying to destroy all other forms of interpretation, so theirs is the only one left standing.
In a much-shared piece from The Atlantic last year, the journalist Graeme Wood wrote that: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” He cited their frequent allusions to theology and their idealisation of the early Islamic conquests. Certainly there are Islamic texts that favour conquest and punishment, dominance and power. (To muddy the waters further the religious engravings on the Khorasan wine jug can be interpreted as battle cries.) And IS undoubtedly draws on such texts to justify their crimes. It is pointless to pretend they are not Muslims; they are, although of a very peculiar kind.
IS declares that any Muslim—Shia or Sunni—that does not pledge allegiance to its “caliph” is an apostate and thus deserving of death. This position is, as far as I know, unprecedented in Islamic history. On the other hand, our wine jug, Sultan Muhammad’s painting and Hafez’s intoxicating poetry have been a consistently embedded part of Islam. Which leads me to declare, in the spirit of Ahmed, that Islamic State is considerably less Islamic than drinking wine.
What is Islam? was Shahab Ahmed’s first book. It appeared around the same time as the Harvard academic died in September from leukemia at the age of 48. Given the crisis afflicting Islamic intellectual life right now, it feels a bitter blow to lose this brilliantly original thinker. (His study of the Satanic Verses incident will be published by Harvard next year.) We can be grateful, though, that Ahmed managed to complete this extraordinary work. Scholars from east and west will be under his influence for years to come.
