New Statesman: Holy wine - the Koran and alcohol

VICTORIA MOORE on what the Koran says about boozing

Our best and bravest reporters have been despatched to the Afghan borders and other parts of the Middle East. I am told that formidable levels of wily on-the-hoof planning go into such missions, and not merely because of the obvious dangers.

"Being hot and frightened is one thing, but being hot and frightened and not able to have a good drink..." My seasoned reporter sucks in his breath.

He says that at the British Club in Lahore, one of the few places in Pakistan where it is possible to find alcohol, the worst sight you can be greeted by is a fridge-top on which there stands nothing but a miserable can of Tango or Coca-Cola, indicating that the alcohol delivery has been seized by bandits yet again.

For many non-Muslim westerners, the idea of anyone other than a recovering alcoholic voluntarily depriving themselves of drink is as alien as not breathing.

In nations where alcohol is forbidden, there are various slippery ways to evade the law. Expats in Saudi Arabia often prefer to knock back lighter-fuel-quality home-brew than go without, while visitors to Pakistan willingly sign forms declaring themselves alcoholics in order to get served.

A colleague who reported on the Gulf war says that the British troops took care to smuggle alcohol, usually whisky (more often than not in shampoo bottles, where it would escape detection), on to the front line. Slightly soapy Scotch was, unsurprisingly, much preferred to the "near beer" that was served officially.

But what does the Koran actually say about alcohol?

Some scholars argue that Mohammad's early teachings did not seek to prohibit alcohol at all. "We give you the fruit of the palm [date wine was a favourite drink in the Middle East] and the vine from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food," says the holy book.

Later, it adds a caveat.

"They will ask you concerning wine and gambling. Answer, in both there is great sin and also some things of use unto men, but their sinfulness is greater than their use."

And later still, it makes what I think most would consider a perfectly reasonable point. "Believers, do not approach your prayers when you are drunk but wait until you can grasp the meaning of your words."

Apparently, though, unruly Muslims continued to drink to excess. It is hard to imagine the sort of scenes that grip most British market towns at closing time on Friday nights being played out in the Middle East -- even one and a half thousand years ago -- but it is said that drunkenness in the community is what caused Mohammad to put his foot down. And put his foot down he did, pushing wine out of the hands of the gods, where believers from the ancient Greeks downwards have had it, and into those of the Devil. Or did he?

This is what the Koran says in its fourth, final and most damning instruction on alcohol: "Believers, wine and games of chance, idols and divining arrows are abominations devised by Satan. Avoid them that you may prosper. Satan seeks to stir up enmity and hatred among you by means of wine and gambling and to keep you from the Remembrance of Allah and from your prayers."

The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Wine offers the following points for consideration: first, that the sections of the Koran that forbid the eating of pork are worded much more unequivocally. Second, the word used in the above passage, khamr, is the Arabic generic term for wine, leaving great scope for interpretation -- particularly because some have claimed that Mohammad himself was partial to a drop of date wine, made for him by his wives.

There is one final irony. It is thought that distillation techniques were developed by Muslim alchemists striving to create magical elixirs. They taught them to the west and we promptly used them to transform base wine into spirits -- the very thing that is not, one might wilfully argue, expressly forbidden by the Koran.