1The recurrent claim that Islam forbids alcohol is, in a narrow, legal sense, a relatively new idea. It is not paradoxical to put it this way. Religious condemnation and social proscription constitute two different realities. The latter makes little sense without a sufficiently coercive apparatus for enforcement, an application that has been rigorously facilitated by modern state-building processes. It is not our intention to gloss over the rich body of normative texts which, from the Quran and the hadith (the teachings of the prophet Muhammad and his companions, compiled in various canonical collections such as the Bukhārī over the early years of the Hegira), cast shame on the consumption of intoxicating drinks (Wensinck, EI2; Sheikh and Islam, 2018). On the other hand, the historical process of moving from these texts to the formulation of a restrictive legal canon governing the production and circulation of alcohol as well as its consumption, or the compliance with standards condemning alcoholic beverages in the name of Islam, has been a long process. The definition itself of the reason behind prohibition has been the subject of debates. Several centuries passed before consensus united the Islamic legal community in asserting that all intoxicating drinks were to be banned, and not just khamr (fermented palm or grape juice) to which the sunnah referred (Haider, 2013), and consumption by Muslims began to be punishable during the ‘Umar caliphate (Georgeon, 2021, 46). Despite this, an alternative tradition, present in Hanafism, reproves only wine while it condemns only drunkenness as an outcome of other alcohol consumption (Sheikh and Islam, 2018, 187).
2The formation of this normative consensus was accompanied by paradoxes, not least of which would have been the cultural promotion of inebriety, through Arabic poetry of Bacchic inspiration; eschatological promotion, through imagery of “rivers of wine flowing from paradise” (cf Chebel, 2008; MacDonald, 1966, 342 and 345) and ritual promotion, through Sufism or Bektachism, illustrated in this issue by Gianfranco Bria’s article on alcoholic beverages. If such promotion was largely subversive of religious injunctions, it could also be seen as an affirmation, sometimes symbolic, but sometimes real and heightened to the point of intoxication, of alternative paths within Islam, in the name of the search to be one with God (Geoffroy, 2010, 93-94). The religious condemnation of alcohol continues to be the subject of internal dispute.
3The debate revolves around both the finality of the proscription and the proscription itself. The extent of the ban, arising in the common effects of beverages of varying composition, has long been a matter of dispute. As Limor Yungman’s article in this issue reminds us, knowledge of distillation arose early in Islam, just as there arose a medical awareness of the effects of inebriety: the formulation of religious norms was supported early by scientific reflection. Such standards however, were modified over time with the evolution of knowledge: the religious and social disapproval of alcohol as an identified chemical substance producing known physiological effects, came even later, and was radicalized in the 19th century through knowledge of the fermentation processes and the identification of residual quantities of alcohol in foods and drink, greater than the product of three-day fermentation tolerated by the prophetic tradition (Armanios and Ergene, 2018, 180).
4As for the strict prohibition of consumption, despite ephemeral attempts often determined by a context of political crisis, it has long seemed an unattainable objective: it has only been since 1952 in Saudi Arabia (Smith, 2015, 234), the early 1970s in Libya and 1979 in Iran (Ghiabi, 2019, 51-54) that alcohol became strictly prohibited, including among institutions which, outside national sovereignty, constituted – and continue to constitute at least informally – the most important instrument for evading the restriction, including, first and foremost, embassies and petroleum concessions. Strictly banning alcohol was done not in the name of Islam, a religion whose normativity is adaptive and methodologically based on taking into account real social situations, but in the name of religious nationalisms.
5The normative influence of Islam, predominantly with regard to abstinence and the prohibition of alcohol, is undeniable. However, it is accompanied by the stubborn presence of this “indefatigable clandestine traveler”, circulating everywhere but out of sight and public reprobation, at night or in remote places, which is, according to Fernand Braudel: alcohol (Braudel, 1979, 640; cited in Georgeon, 2021, 15). To question the systematization of its moral disapproval into general prohibitions and further as public policy prescriptions invites us to study it in the context of the construction of imperial, colonial and state political structures in the Muslim societies. It was then that the production, circulation and consumption of alcoholic beverages came up against an intensified political will to control, and a political power administratively armed for this purpose. The establishment of norms inspired by Islamic law and the manipulations of these – by opposition, diversion, inversion or distancing – can be analyzed as Foucauldian devices: discipline (individual confrontation with the norm, until its internalization), security (modulation of macroscopic balances in the application of standards) and sovereignty (demand for the monopoly of force and the legitimacy to enact standards). Distinguishing between public and private spaces is indeed a matter of discipline, as shown, with a few minor exceptions, by Philippe Chaudat’s contribution to this issue. The condemnation of alcohol consumption was specific to public spaces: norms of proscription, enforced from the Sultanate of Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), pushed not only for privatization, but also for the marginalization of consumption to the edge of urban society (Işık, 2013, 58). The Bektashi drinking rituals studied by Nicolas Elias (2016) and here by Gianfranco Bria were also subject to discipline. The tax burden that weighed upon alcohol sales in the Islamic Empires of modern times sought to profit from products which the spirit of the law forbade but which the legislator tolerated insofar as outright prohibition revealed itself to be an impossible goal. It is a characteristic security device intended to differentiate among groups, where belonging to a religious community defines a legal identity for all. Through taxation and control over non-Muslim communities, the authorities were able to limit the elasticity of production conditions between different alcohols and alternative types of productions. In this way, taxes prevented the outright ban on manufacturing of alcoholic beverages imposed on Muslim producers under Islamic law from turning to their disadvantage. Finally, with the intensified globalization of the alcohol trade in the 19th century, various protectionist strategies were put in place, aimed at limiting the penetration of the domestic market by foreign productions and the emergence, caused by asymmetric geopolitical relations, of a situation of commercial dependence. Protectionist measures included customs tariffs, limited by commercial treaties and in the case of the Ottoman Empire by the Capitulations, as well as control of the rectification (fractional distillation) of alcohols, favoring the use of locally produced alcohols by foreign brands. These strategies helped to extend the spatial control of public authority and accelerate the building of territorial states in countries where statehood was late in coming, long in the making and hotly contested.
6All these reasons make it possible to understand why this issue, rather than applying a Foucauldian analytical grid as mentioned above, whose implementation has always been incomplete and fractal, proposes to decline the norms surrounding alcohol around histories, places, practices and policies: histories, because norms are not a timeless element to be applied across all eras, but a continuous construction and adaptation consistent with social evolution; places, because the norms relating to alcohol organize the use of spaces and contribute, in order to frame its globalized circulation, to the formation of an international, differentiated order according to the religious identification of countries; practices, because alcohol generates skills and rites that bind individuals and refer to prevailing social norms and their religious or worldly justifications; policies, because our study hypothesis is based on the thought that the processes of building the Empires and States that Muslim societies have known since the 15th century have intensified the normative pressure toward the control or prohibition of alcohol, depending on circumstances. Over time however, public policies directed against alcohol are less and less reducible to a simple religious injunction; indeed, the Islamic reference needs to be supported by “modern” and social justifications – including health, the public order, or, at a macroscopic level, economic independence.
7With this issue, we wanted to report on a dynamic field of study. Alcohol is a regular issue among societies across North Africa and the Middle East and takes the form of “public outcries for prohibition” or published cases of methanol poisoning. However, the scientific literature in the Arab and Muslim world has paid relatively little attention to this subject, as if the prejudice which makes Muslims necessarily abstinent had slowed down the process of research on the question. A glaring gap exists between research on the early and classical period of Islam, well studied from this point of view, and more recent periods, since the advent of the Ottomans and Safavids in particular. The research has focused on the subjective and perceived attributions of alcohol, present both in literature (in this case most often as a glorification of drink) and in legal disciplines where the norm against consumption of alcoholic beverage is the object of a gradual constitutive process which is never fully consensual.
8Important renewals of early studies of the modern and contemporary periods are underway. The most recent studies include several monographs published this year alone and a growing number of articles, journal issues and collective works, that underscore the complexity of standards systems.
9A first series of authors favors a product approach, and emphasizes specific geographies, the environmental conditions of production, the communitarized or inter-communal relations formed in the process of manufacture, sale or consumption, the relations of class and the incidence of the modes of exploitation, as well as the role of nationalisms and colonization.
10These studies tend to underline the conservative nature of winemaking. In his study of wine in colonial and postcolonial Algeria, The Blood of the Colony (2021), Owen White emphasizes class relations and the role of colonization in the development of colonial viticulture in Algeria. The book echoes the work, more drawn from economic history, by Omar Bessaoud (2013), but also works by Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen (2014, 2018) which analyze the conditions, particularly fiscal ones, that allowed the North African wineries to be among the most powerful in the world, before experiencing a spectacular fall in the 1970s due to a drop in local and global demand for these wines, but also because of the chaotic management of the departure of European wine growers at the time of decolonization.
11In the same field of colonial studies, Nessim Znaien analyzes the evolution of alcohol consumption in colonial Tunisia, and the articulation of public policies to control them. In Les raisins de la domination. Une histoiresociale de l’alcool en Tunisie à l’époque du Protectorat (1881-1956) (2021; for the pre-colonial period, see also Boujarra, 1990, and Akremi, 2016), Nessim Znaien highlights the first decade of the 20th century as a period of increased consumption, related at least in part to increased production. The First World War and the years immediately following constituted a golden age for prohibition, as colonial authorities pretended to exert social control in a display of respect for Muslim standards of alcohol consumption. The ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages to Muslim Tunisians, however, was never fully applied, if only for economic reasons, so that gradually the consumption of alcohol became commonplace, at least among males in the large cities of northern Tunisia. Other studies, such as Nina Studer’s 2015 study of the consumption of absinthe in Algeria, or Francisco Javier Martinez’ 2020 study of alcohol consumption in Tangiers complete the overview of the distribution of alcoholic beverages and the often limited attempts to control drinkers and drinking in Colonial North Africa.
12However, if we move away from the colonial world, questions of tenure and of production strategy shift the focus, from the construction of infrastructure and that of relations with metropolitan markets to adaptation to environmental conditions. This is emphasized, respectively by Suraiya Faroqhi in her study of viticulture around the Bosphorus (Faroqhi, 2019), and Onur İnal in his study of the production of grapes, and in particular, of raisins and figs in Anatolia (İnal, 2019). Their research relates the constraints arising from production considerations with constraints associated with the circulation of products. Malte Fuhrmann (2014) examines the production of beer along the coasts of the Aegean and Marmara seas, and places the success of this drink in a cultural history of the ports of the region, showing in passing that the supposed novelty of beer is relative: while Bomonti, the first major local brewery, located in the Feriköy district of Istanbul, released its first bottles in 1893, the equipment and raw materials to produce beer had been present from the 1830s. As happened with rakı, the assimilation of beer, in this case of the Pilsner type, to local tastes and its subsequent transformation into a quasi-national drink is a long-term process.
13The product-based approach is also reflected in recent work by François Georgeon, who is particularly interested in wine, in rakı and its aromatic variants (including mastika flavored with Chios mastic) and geographic variants (including ouzo, douziko, and arak) as well as fermented boza (2021, 54-60 and 152-154). The project however, is more general and broader in scope. The author combines a history of production techniques and sensitivities, and a political history of alcohol to question the adaptations of producers and consumers to changing normative contexts. In particular, the author highlights geographic differences in production, questioning the continuity of wine and wine alcohol production (for arak and rakı) to the present day. The question thus raised, that of the persistence of alcohol production, leads to a fundamental reflection on the social and legal organization of the Muslim world. In the Ottoman Empire, the production, sale and consumption of alcohol are among the activities which materialize the legal distinction that exists between multiethnic subjects of the Sultan. Islamic jurisprudence prohibits Muslims from both consumption and related economic activities. It allows production activities whose purpose is not unambiguously alcohol, such as viticulture. Non-Muslim alcohol producers, on the other hand, are tolerated so long as they do not involve Muslims. During most of the Ottoman period, this approach was hardly applied with regard to public consumption and was scarcely even possible in view of its cost to implement, that is in all matters except for the punishment of public drunkenness. In contrast, the exclusion of Muslims from production and sale of alcohol was maintained in practice until the end of the empire and beyond, with the exception of informal production and the proliferation of illegal bars in Istanbul between 1918 and 1922 (Georgeon, 2021, 214-215).
14The work of Rudolph Matthee, who first studied Iran but subsequently shifted to a general study of alcohol in the Middle East, emphasizes the cultural history of alcohol, particularly in the Court of Safavids. As in the work of François Georgeon, the accumulation of deviances associated with alcohol (especially the use of opium) on the one hand, and the social acceptability of consumption, or at least its tolerance among the elites, occupy a central place in these works (Matthee, 2014). By means of the further indignity that attaches to alcohol use in Muslim society, these authors demonstrate that alcohol consumption was governed by principles of respectability and therefore of class, in other contexts as well, as among the British society in the Victorian era where concern for working-class alcoholism was not so much about physiological consequences as it was about political implications. Some of the works discussed here have begun to explore the links between alcohol production or anti-alcoholism and local metamorphoses of the social question among Muslim societies. Even so, the subject remains largely to be investigated.
15An unbalanced geography emerges from the status report reflected in this issue: although recent studies have particularly focused on the Maghreb, Balkan and Anatolian areas give rise to much more developed production. Apart from Omar Foda’s 2019 book on the history of the Stella brand franchise and the distribution of beer in Egypt prior to the religious turn of the 1970s, little work has been done on the presence of alcohol in Egypt, and even less in the Arabian Peninsula or in the Levant. There can be no doubt that, as in Albania, the diversity of Islamic doctrine and practices particularly with respect to mystical tendencies has something to do with these discrepancies although the role of state institutions appears to be at least as important. Overlapping priorities in devising public action – securing urban food supply, civil service and military payrolls, respect for Islamic law, and from the nineteenth century, growing production incentives – unevenly effected the economy and culture of alcohol. State initiatives have contributed to placing alcohol at the heart of public controversies and protest movements, especially under colonial rule. In some countries however, restrictive policies were not the object of intense public debate. Consider for instance, Saudi Arabia where popular support for state choices was taken for granted, all the more so as prohibition measures were adopted in the wake of resounding scandals involving, among other incidents, alcohol consumption by figures highly placed in state administrations. Such a show of “clean hands” had little chance to lead to dissension in an authoritarian context. Even so, alcohol has not failed to become a public issue over time, raising doubts as to the merits of prohibitionist methods. Public policy responses to the effects of alcohol consumption have covered a range of measures, depending on the States. To that extent, we felt that our study of the norms relating to alcohol would be incomplete without consideration of the tensions arising from public policy, even today.
16In line with the work we have just mentioned and within the framework of a booming historiography of drinking studies (with the recent syntheses of the world history of alcohol by Hames Gina on the one hand, and Kim Anderson and Vicente Pinilla on the other hand), the aim here is to study alcoholic beverages through the prism of the multiple normativities that have been associated with them, as modern and contemporary processes of globalization have become apparent in Muslim worlds. The originality of this project consists in attempting to bring together the origin and function of these standards related to alcohol from several eras. We begin our reflection in the 15th century, with the constitution of the Ottoman Empire and the introduction of new forms of administration and renewal of jurisprudence along with the creation of new elites. We have adopted the broadest possible conception of “Muslim worlds”, thus embracing different branches of Islam (Sunnism, Shiism), different geographical frameworks (Mediterranean, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula) and different contexts (majority Islam, dispersed Islam). This panorama confirmed our feeling that the study of norms “from below” was fruitful, but that it only made sense if we read it in parallel with the long-term process of state building, beginning with the police powers and fiscal control which are, for most of the period we consider, the principle focus of public policies.
17The norms in question are first of all, those of the religious constituency, essential for the analysis of alcohol consumption in the Arab and Muslim society. It is not a question of considering the effects of a prohibition inherent in Islam, but of examining how Islamic norms are articulated and confronted with non-religious normative practices and ways of conceiving public policies permeable to other issues such as geopolitics or trade flows. From the beginning of our period, the question arises of the coexistence of communities for whom the use of alcohol is ritual, even imperative, with a jurisprudence which has as its primary concern the limitation and repression of such consumption, therefore of the production cycle of alcohol which is its precursor.
18Alcohol is a tool that produces and perpetuates changing forms of domination and dependence. At the same time it is central to multiple social regulations. By normativities or standards, we mean the threefold meaning as instrument of coercion, as a matter of ritual practices and finally, as a standardized product (food standards). It is a question here of studying the construction of various norms, of public life, of social status, but also of a matter of accounting for the different dietary rules concerned by alcohol, in the perspective of a co-construction between various groups and not simply as the result of a “top down” decision. Several themes have emerged through the various articles gathered here.
19We wanted to explore the reorganization of norms related to alcohol consumption, under the effect of the migratory processes highlighted by the article by Sabah Chaib, of the phenomenon of market globalization in the Middle Ages, apparent in the cookbooks studied by Limor Yungman, and of the strong contacts between Muslim, Christian and Jewish societies, similar to relations between Catholic clerics and Ottoman authorities highlighted by Vanessa de Obaldia. In turns chased by the power in place or left to a certain permissiveness depending on the period, alcoholic beverages seem to be the marker of religious movements, political contexts or social issues.
20The contributions collected here, distributed over a very long period, invite us to question the periodizations of changes in normative systems enshrined by historiography. The reign of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmoud II (1808-1839) has been given great importance in historiography, as has the reaction carried out in the first months of the reign of his successor Abdül Mecid. The latter’s mother is said to have acted quickly to empty the previous sultan’s cellars into the Bosphorus. The sequence of events revealed both deep tensions on the path of reform adopted by the late sultan, and the beginning of a new era of reform where, despite Abdül Mecid’s mother, alcohol was to become an integral part of the social and private life of reformist officials. 1839 did not however, mark a revolution in sensibilities. Changes in alcohol consumption are most often slow, and therefore difficult to periodize around a clean break. The same remark applies to successive European colonization from 1830. Not all notables and civil servants became drinkers, and drinking was not necessarily linked to an overall perception of reforms and relations with Europe. Repeatedly showcasing the colonial enterprise (Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon) in the 19th and 20th centuries, the promotion of “local” drinks such as certain wines, or spirits, was made to serve the economy and the “national novel” of certain independent States wishing to display their cultural openness and their capacity to accept all consumption practices (Tunisia, Egypt). Many independent heads of state however, wished to highlight their sobriety, as if to make a clean break with European influences (Gaddafi). Neither colonization nor modernization, nor even decolonization would constitute absolute breaks.
21The dimensions of memory and heritage were also taken into account in this issue. How are periods of permissiveness or prohibition, linked to pre-Islamic or Islamic periods, described in the memories and imaginations of contemporary societies? The questions of “modernity” or of attachment to “tradition” always refer to fantasized pasts but remain none-the-less factors of legitimacy for contemporary discourses. And alcohol, as Eda Çelik shows here, can leave a memory of conflict as well as social creativity in a “renewed” city subject to prohibition, like Ankara at the start of the Kemalist regime. The question of heritage also echoes the knowledge concerning alcohol manufacturing techniques, the transmission of these and their appropriation by different actors according to the times.
22Places to drink refer to the dichotomy between public space and private space. The place of alcohol in public space, or on its fringes as in Eda Çelik’s article, highlights strong geographic polarizations. It was then a question of examining the access of individuals to public space, particularly with regard to women. If access to private space is more difficult, for reasons of source, it was relevant to consider the representations of consumption in this sphere and the historical construction of a public/private dichotomy within Muslim societies, but also outside, in immigration studied by Sabah Chaib. The distribution of norms according to the place of consumption crystallizes the various administrative echelons at work whether local, regional, state or international. On a more global scale, places where drink is permitted also refer to representations and lived spaces associated with States deemed to be more permissive or, on the contrary, more prescriptive, and to the links that these States maintain between themselves on this issue. These places can be changing. They make it possible to follow the influences of migratory processes on the geographies of consumption, in particular through the impact that emigrant communities can have on alcohol consumption practices.
23Drinking practices raise the issue of sociability and the development of links between individuals, according to values attributed to drink, to gender, to social class as well as the times of consumption (night or day consumption for example). These practices make it possible more generally to investigate the history of taste and sensitivities, which goes beyond the utilitarian use of alcohol, as a matrix for social relations, and the standardized uses of drink as an element of religious practice.
24Finally, it is necessary to determine the extent to which the consumption, sale or production of alcohol lies at the center of specific public policies associated with religious concerns [in connection, for example, with the Nahda (awakening) or Islamic reforms such as those led by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī or Rashīd Ridā]; orsanitary concerns (the fight against adulterated alcohols, against alcoholism or the prevention of cardiovascular diseases); or economic concerns (taxation policies or, on the contrary, liberalization of certain alcohol production or trade activities); or political concerns (prohibition or permissiveness linked to issues of public control, or road safety). On many of these issues, the influence of reformism or articulation of a scientific approach to the treatment of alcohol as a public health problem, the contributions gathered here provide only partial answers; the exploration of the subject is still largely in the works. At the very least, the articles which follow show the fruitful nature of an approach which finds legitimacy in a religious norm for a regime with a plurality of norms and modes of public action, but which, confronted with denominational diversity or the polarization of opinion, must disregard this legitimacy and seek worldly and universalist justifications.
25The contributions that make up this issue illustrate successive moments in the history of alcohol. The articles are grouped according to the salient normative characteristics of those periods, rather than more awkward historical divides.
26A first moment is that of Islamic empires and “world-economies” (Braudel, 1967). Alcohol is essentially the product of local know-how, intended for local consumption. Limor Yungman, whose work focuses on the Iraqi space, shows that in this context, and in particular, that of the Mamluk and early Ottoman Sultanates, standardized and sophisticated habits and customs relating to alcoholic beverages continued to be formulated and circulated in manuscript form. Wine and alcohol belonged to the art of dinner party hospitality in Islamic countries, as did taste combinations. No doubt there was a strong class bias in this literature. It does, however, reflect the existence of social spaces in which some Islamic norms such as the length of fermentation, show some relevance. What Islamic tradition says is therefore more significant as a means of spicing things up than as a constraint in the codification of meals.
27Vanessa de Obaldia, for her part, examines interreligious contacts, and more particularly the relations between Western Catholic clerics, Ottoman authorities and French diplomacy in Istanbul, in the 17th and 18th centuries. Through a study of documents from the city’s Catholic convents, she shows that alcohol production, though accepted in principle, was in fact under constant renegotiation. The uncertainty stemmed from the definition of alcohol and wine as issues of public order: this concern led to occasional, though conclusive Ottoman interventions, and set in motion the entire normative apparatus that surrounded European religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, and in particular, the application of the Capitulations contracted with France. The right to produce alcohol was, like a clockwork mechanism, a norm within a norm, within a much broader Ottoman public policy goal, the overt application of Islamic law and respect for traditions, including in relations with non-Muslims.
28The second moment that emerges here is characterized by the intensification and superposition of several political, economic, and demographic dynamics of globalization: the processes of centralization, of state building and colonization, the commercial globalization prior to 1914 and the shadow cast before a new dynamic of globalization in the 1960s, and the intensification of migration.
29Abdülhamit Kırmızı examines one aspect of Ottoman reforms and the centralization that accompanied them. If François Georgeon was able to show the growing acceptability of alcoholic consumption in public in the Ottoman capital (2002), the same cannot be said about the provinces, especially during the Hamidian period (1876-1909) marked as it was by a vindictive Islamic chauvinism keen to display respect for traditional religious sanctions such as shame and opprobrium heaped upon drinkers. Based on his study of the careers of officials accused of drunkenness in the performance of their duties, Kirmizi shows that the imperial State intended to set an example through its representatives, all the while securing the loyalty of its officials by giving them the opportunity to reform and return to their duties. From the State’s point of view, the problem was not alcohol consumption but its interference with public service. This resulted in a proliferation of standards, based on geographic origins and social class with one standard for Istanbul and other large cities, even if drunkenness was not tolerated, and another standard in the provinces: one for the civil service, an integral part of the Ottoman elites, and another for all other drinkers.
30Normative allegations about drinkers are also at the core of Nina Studer’s article. Her object is at the edges of the norm, given that through the psychiatric treatment of alcoholics, the author departs from social and regulatory norms to focus on ultimate measures, i.e., on coercion and confinement. The psychiatric discourse draws in a web of common beliefs and conflicting social fears about alcoholism and the risk of confusion of norms owing to colonization: one of these ideas is the absence of alcoholism among an Algerian Muslim population, reputed abstinent, and the resulting social marginality of observed cases of alcoholism; another is the fear that alcohol would pervert the European population of Algeria and spread among the indigenous population in the country. These ideas are not endogenous, they reflect psychiatric or political images of the time, in metropolitan France and elsewhere, adapted to the Algerian context by specialists who are themselves European. The effect of these ideas was the persistent and severe shortage of psychiatric care for the Algerian population, among whom, in fact, alcoholism appeared to be an increasingly frequent condition unseen by the colonial authorities.
31The articles by Eda Çelik and Sabah Chaib examine the relationship between alcohol and demography, in particular the dynamics of migration. The first of these authors set out to paint a double portrait of the city of Ankara at the time when the Kemalist movement chose it as its capital and imposed prohibition there. The small town, at the heart of a wine-growing region, still populated by Greeks as well as Muslims, then became both a laboratory and a refuge: a laboratory, where efforts were made to put into action control institutions capable of enforcing prohibition in the rest of Anatolia, through publications in favor of prohibition, and implementation of regulatory provisions to make it applicable; a refuge, because Kemalists were divided on the merits of prohibition, and many of them were looking for places to consume despite the system of control. The article, borrowing from Henri Lefèbvre’s ideas of conceived space and lived space, uses alcohol as a key to show the implementation of the principles of urbanization and construction of urban collective imaginations in the emergent Turkish capital.
32The second author, for her part, explored cafés run by Algerians in metropolitan France beginning in the 1950s, and their lasting presence beyond the Algerian war. Based on a detailed analysis of license applications and archives relating to cafés and bars in a Parisian suburb, she shows a dissociation between a religious norm generally assumed to apply to bartenders by virtue of their origins, and an activity deemed contrary to this norm, but completely normalized in the metropolitan context.
33The third moment described in this issue relates to the future of standards and public policies on alcohol following a movement to re-Islamize societies in Muslim worlds beginning in the 1970s. While increasing restraints and anti-alcoholic discourses were then a political phenomenon, they were not the direct consequence of decolonization, but rather of the decreasing attractiveness of secular nationalisms which had been a dominant trend following independence.
34Gianfranco Bria conducted an anthropological survey in Albania, focusing on a region located at the periphery of the country, which brought to light a spiritual, ideological and regional shattering of norms relating to alcohol. Reactions and repositioning stemmed mainly from the communist past, rather than the predominantly Muslim composition of the country: as alcohol was normalized under the socialist regime, the authoritarian past prompted a rejection which led some to assert even more vehemently their attachment to the consumption of alcohol as a manifestation of individual freedom, while it led others, under the influence of a Middle Eastern da’wa, to reject both the secular communist past and the consumption of alcohol deemed impious. The scenario, however, is far from binary as this summary might suggest: the Sufi brotherhoods adopted very political positions on the subject, which led them to differentiated choices depending on location. Bektachism confirmed even more forcefully, its differences with mainstream Sunni Islam. In addition, the forms of re-Islamization of discourses and practices observed in the main urban centers differ from the practice of Islam on the outskirts, where worship is more likely to adapt to the faithful’s consumption and may even be integrated into Sufi rites.
35Elife Biçer-Deveci depicts a pivotal moment in the “culture wars” over alcohol, which intensified when the AKP came to power in Turkey in 2002. Through the parastatal organization Yeşilay (Green Crescent), founded in 1920 by scientists, mainly doctors and religious leaders worried about the conspicuous spread of alcohol consumption, she shows how the “Islamo-nationalist synthesis” which inspired the military regime in the years 1980-1983 applies to a given theme. Yeşilay’s anti-alcoholic militancy, led at the time by former soldiers loyal to the ideology of the regime, associated nationalism, Islamic norms and eugenics to condemn the misdeeds of alcohol as destruction of the country both from within and under the influence of foreigners. The motive concealed a paradox: that of an organization supported by the State, though not officially a State organization, which operated in accordance with the principles of neo-liberalism gradually making its way in the country and found itself confronting one of the icons of neo-liberal capitalism of the time, the EFES Breweries Group which displayed new neo-liberal and individualist values in its advertising campaigns alongside a nationalist discourse. Through analysis of the discourses and actors she was able to show the gestation of new systems of norms, both born of a neoliberal matrix, which inspired vehement public debates around alcohol after 2002.
36Finally, Philippe Chaudat studied a field which displays some similarity with Turkey, the provincial city of Meknes, in Morocco, which underwent notable demographic changes in the 20th century with the virtual disappearance of its Jewish community and is politically dominated by a pro-Western traditional Islamic order. Alcohol, legally restricted to commerce and consumption by non-Muslims though circulating like ordinary goods, has not given rise to the political confrontations chronicled in Turkey. Drink and the purchase of alcohol are activities that result from a process of negotiation with dominant religious norms, where the division between public space and private space is used not to prevent drinking, but to keep up appearances.
37The various authors tell us first and foremost that there is a plurality of norms and public policies with regard to alcohol in Muslim society, and that a common Islamic reference is not at all obvious, in fact quite the opposite. Norms change over time, especially those governing consumption in the public space; they can evolve towards liberalization as well as prohibition. Even so, prohibition seems too costly or inaccessible as an objective, even where it has been strictly enforced. The adoption of new prohibition laws in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, now comes with exceptions that are really part of the system being put in place. The World Health Organization (WHO) often serves as a smokescreen for these measures, yet, by seeking to impose a unified standard of abstinence, they automatically generate methods of misappropriation, and lead to forms of consumption which are among those condemned by WHO as having the worst consequences for one’s health. It is not so much Islamic law with all its intricacies regarding the subject, but the willingness of States to show their capacity for action and find worldly justifications for the policies that give rise to such entropic developments.
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