What is the History of alcohol in Pre-Islamic Arabia?

by VANSMACK

Was Wine or beer common? What plants did they use to ferment alcohol, Dates?

CptBuck

Unfortunately you're going to run into serious sourcing issues.

The traditional religious Islamic sources, which were first written down about a century after the death of Muhammad, have a relatively obvious polemical purpose in depicting pre-Islamic Arabia as entirely debauched society until Mohammed arrives. They call the entire era the "Jahiliya," the "time of ignorance." So the extent of consumption is probably up for debate.

Two things are less debatable. One is that Muhammad (apparently) received revelation at first to permit wine, and then those verses were "abrogated" to forbid it. Muslims deny that there is any rhetorical evolution of thought in the Quran (because it's the revealed word of God,) but as historians it's relatively safe to assume that alcohol was widely enough consumed that to deny his followers alcohol cold turkey from the outset would have been a problem.

The second is that the hadith that I'm familiar with generally agree that the alcohol overwhelmingly would have consisted of date wine.