Alcohol-fueled Islam

audace12

Which could be the differences between OTL Islam and and a Islam in which Allah for some reason decided not to ban alcohol in his revelation to Mohammed?
I suppose that troops that conquered so many territories in the first centuries of islam would have been less disciplined but in the long run the society would have been less strict and more similar to the catholic one.
 

Tyr

Islam never gets out of Arabia with its soldiers all dying in the desert.
There was no 'message from Allah', telling dark-ages Arabs not to drink alcohol is just common sense.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Leej said:
Islam never gets out of Arabia with its soldiers all dying in the desert.
There was no 'message from Allah', telling dark-ages Arabs not to drink alcohol is just common sense.
Click to expand...
Good thing then that the Egyptians, Persians, Jews, etc., all had religious taboos on alcoholic drinks, or they would never have got anywhere.

Seriously now, one possibility that was once suggested by Leo IIRC, was to interpret the ban to only apply to wine, keeping beer halal.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Seriously, if you read some of the accounts of Muslim historiographers, you'd get the opinion that they were all big drinkers. The prohibition against alcohol was one more honored in the breach. In fact, one of the most popular genres of early Islamic poetry was the xamriyya or wine poem.

I don't see how things would change very much, except to make Islam less a source of amusement to heavy-drinking cultures, which brings us back to Islamic Slavs and Vikings.
 

Bulan

Considering the fact that Arak, a hard spirit with 80 vol. alcohol levels, is extremely common among middle-eastern Arabs and originated in the middle-east, (and a variation of it, raki, is considered a national drink in Turkey), kind of shows that the production of alcohol and it's consumption in societies that is was allowed prior to Islam, didn't change much. So they didn't have wine. Wine wasn't that wide-spread in the non-Latin Christian world (that is, the Germanic and Slavic areas of Europe) anyhow.

Also without Islam we wouldn't have whiskey, cognac, vodka etc. because it was thanks to muslim alchemists who invented high-distillation methods that Europeans later on learned to create hard liqueurs with.
 

1940LaSalle

Bulan said:
Considering the fact that Arak, a hard spirit with 80 vol. alcohol levels, is extremely common among middle-eastern Arabs and originated in the middle-east, (and a variation of it, raki, is considered a national drink in Turkey), kind of shows that the production of alcohol and it's consumption in societies that is was allowed prior to Islam, didn't change much. So they didn't have wine. Wine wasn't that wide-spread in the non-Latin Christian world (that is, the Germanic and Slavic areas of Europe) anyhow.

Also without Islam we wouldn't have whiskey, cognac, vodka etc. because it was thanks to muslim alchemists who invented high-distillation methods that Europeans later on learned to create hard liqueurs with.
Click to expand...

Well, without the Arabs, at least: I believe that distillation was developed in the Arab world prior to the rise of Islam. Indeed, the very word for the class of compounds that make potable liquors potent--namely, "alcohol"--is derived from Arabic.
 

audace12

What are the most strict countries in proibithing alcool?I remember Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,at least in modern times.Perhaps their social structure would have been different.Fundamentalist muslims actually believe that alcohol is banned by the revelation of Allah.
 

Bulan

Saudi Arabia and generally most of the peninsula states are pretty strict on alcohol... but I think it's a pre-Islamic norm in those societies because even the bible mentions that nomadic tribes in the southern parts of Israel (ie the Negev desert and northern Arabian desert) were forbidden to drink wine as part of their codes of living.

I wonder how widespread was alcohol among Jews and Christians there before Islam took over.
 

Riain

Banned
In days gone by it was safer to drink beer, wine etc than water because the alcohol content killed the bugs in the water, water often gave people the 'bloody flux'. How did Muslims avoid this problem when they couldn't drink alcohol? Or was this just an ideal, to be followed when circumstances allowed but overlooked when practicality was needed? Perhaps if Muslims were allowed to drink grog they may have conquered the world due to better health.
 

Alcuin

Banned
Hendryk said:
Seriously now, one possibility that was once suggested by Leo IIRC, was to interpret the ban to only apply to wine, keeping beer halal.
Click to expand...

There's a scene in The Thirteenth Warrior where Antonio Banderas says his religion forbids him to drink fermented grape or grain... and one of the vikings gives him a horn of mead and says, "You're in luck, Arab, this is made from honey".
 

Alcuin

Banned
Riain said:
In days gone by it was safer to drink beer, wine etc than water because the alcohol content killed the bugs in the water, water often gave people the 'bloody flux'. How did Muslims avoid this problem when they couldn't drink alcohol? Or was this just an ideal, to be followed when circumstances allowed but overlooked when practicality was needed? Perhaps if Muslims were allowed to drink grog they may have conquered the world due to better health.
Click to expand...

Moslems also have rules about what water is okay to drink and what is not. They also drink coffee and tea, boiling the water before drinking.
 

Alcuin

Banned
Given that Saint Vladimir turned down Islam because he could not imagine anyone trying to forbid Russians from drinking... so perhaps if Islam allowed alcohol, the Russians may have converted to Islam.
 

M79

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the ban only apply to al-cohol made from grain and grapes only? If so it leaves a lot of opem territory...
 

Midgard

Leo Caesius said:
Seriously, if you read some of the accounts of Muslim historiographers, you'd get the opinion that they were all big drinkers. The prohibition against alcohol was one more honored in the breach. In fact, one of the most popular genres of early Islamic poetry was the xamriyya or wine poem.

I don't see how things would change very much, except to make Islam less a source of amusement to heavy-drinking cultures, which brings us back to Islamic Slavs and Vikings.
Click to expand...


I think in order to get the latter one needs to create an additional reason for them to convert - namely, they have not to be surrounded by Christian states of various persuasions with whom they may have dynastic, economic, and trade connections. That seemed to drive on the main causes of conversion - the necessity rather than attractiveness/unattractiveness of religion, Khazars notwithstanding. So, in order to have Islamic Slavs and Vikings, one needs to have Islam conquer more - perhaps Islamic conquest of Byzantium in the VIIth-VIIIth centuries is the best possible time to get it done, with appropriate butterflies proceeding from there.
 

Mike Stearns

Alcuin said:
Given that Saint Vladimir turned down Islam because he could not imagine anyone trying to forbid Russians from drinking... so perhaps if Islam allowed alcohol, the Russians may have converted to Islam.
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So a TL where Russia has a Sultan instead of a Czar? That'd be kind of interesting.
 

Midgard

Alcuin said:
Given that Saint Vladimir turned down Islam because he could not imagine anyone trying to forbid Russians from drinking... so perhaps if Islam allowed alcohol, the Russians may have converted to Islam.
Click to expand...

Well, there was also a question of incentives. Even if Islam allowed alcohol, one has but to consider who are Kiev's neighbors - most powerful of them Byzantium at the apex of the Macedonian dynasty, a major trading partner, and also territorially close. While the Byzantines were pragmatic enough to trade with non-Orthodox, any Muslim state that could be considered civilized for the time was quite ways from Kiev - too far to make a real impression on sufficient number of Russians as opposed to individual trader/ambassador or two, and was not a major direct trading partner, and not otherwise important in Kiev's daily affairs. So in reality, Vladimir's only realistic choices were Orthodoxy and Catholicism, at least if one takes into account location, economic connections, and possibility of dynastic ties (which he acquired via Byzantine marriage).
 

Keenir

Banned
Midgard said:
one has but to consider who are Kiev's neighbors - most powerful of them Byzantium at the apex of the Macedonian dynasty, a major trading partner, and also territorially close. While the Byzantines were pragmatic enough to trade with non-Orthodox, any Muslim state that could be considered civilized for the time was quite ways from Kiev - too far to make a real impression on sufficient number of Russians as opposed to individual trader/ambassador or two, and was not a major direct trading partner,
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by that logic, Kiev should have worshipped Odin for the next thousand years -- the Vikings were closer than the Byzantines were.

and not otherwise important in Kiev's daily affairs. So in reality, Vladimir's only realistic choices were Orthodoxy and Catholicism, at least if one takes into account location, economic connections, and possibility of dynastic ties (which he acquired via Byzantine marriage).
Click to expand...

also depending upon how much Vladimir valued the independence of his kingdom, and whether he wanted to risk it having to bow to a foreign Emperor (if Byzantium was that close, as you suggest, surely there was the fear in Vlad's heart of Byzantine troops marching through Kiev against him)
 

Berra

Reading the title I guessed that they not just allowed alchohol but that it was what was driving them. Imagine that, drunken muslims driving alcohol powered vehicles:D
 
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