How does that expression go..."The only thing medieval Muslims liked more than complaining about people drinking wine, was drinking wine"?^1 The writers fuming about street parties in thirteenth-century Cairo would certainly have agreed.

The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (985-1021) gave total prohibition a try. But when he "vanished" (as it were) in 1021, his sister Sitt al-Mulk took over. One of the first things she did was re-legalize wine.

There's more to the story than that, obviously. Al-Hakim's ban on alcohol was just one part of a series of what he saw as religiously motivated reforms. He banned music in public, and he sharply oppressed Egypt's Jewish and Coptic Christian populations. Al-Hakim had gradually developed a hard-line interpretation of his religion over the course of his rule, under the influence of his adviser Bardawan. Then a religious movement decided he was semi-divine, and he may or may not have believed them.

But even during al-Hakim's attempted prohibition, local governors in places like Damascus were permitting the sale and purchase of wine anyway.

Sitt al-Mulk's reforms of al-Hakim's reforms, too, were much more in depth. She restored a lot of seized property to Jewish and Christian Egyptians, for example, and stamped out the prohibitions on public performance of music, women in public, and so forth.

She also probably ordered the assassination of the Damascus governor who had always allowed wine, so there is that.

The other infamous example of (attempted) alcohol prohibition in the medieval Islamic world is the Almohad dynasty in high medieval North Africa and al-Andalus (Iberia). Ibn Tumart, sort of the father of the Almohad movement, was dead-set against wine. Later tradition is filled with anecdotes (true or not) of him, personally, overturning wine barrels or smacking people with his staff.

As Allen Fromherz translates it, there's even one anecdote in which he yells at a group of enslaved men for drinking. They snap back at him, "Who made you the morality police?" Ibn Tumart stares them down and declares, "God and his Prophet."

As with al-Hakim, but without the claims of semi-divinity and with a much longer implementation, the Almohad crackdown on wine was accompanied by a lot of other harsher moral measures and oppression of Jews and Christians. (Didn't stop the Almohads from hiring mercenaries of any and all religions. But, you know, the rest of 'em.)

In general, though, the thing to remember about alcohol prohibition in the medieval Islamic world is--Muslims weren't the only people there. Sure, sometimes Muslims themselves were not allowed to purchase/sell wine to each other, either by law or by peer pressure.

But there were Greek Christians, and there were Latin merchants, and there were travelers to bribe as go-betweens. And European Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, for their part, drank a WHOLE lot of wine.

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I should add that the use of wine and drunkenness in Islamic religious poetry, as a trope, should be taken as allegory rather than Tales from a Madrasa Dorm. The struggle to put the, let's call it the experience of God, into words isn't unique to a single religion or era. Christian writers from late antiquity onwards have used what some people interpret as erotic (and others as baldly sexual) allegories to describe encountering God--including (presumably) lifelong-celibate authors.

I have a brief answer on medieval women writers and bridal mysticism, if you're interested in exploring that idea further.

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^1 It's actually: "The only thing medieval historians like more than complaining about historical inaccuracies in movies about the Middle Ages, is movies about the Middle Ages."

I have a related question. Is there any indication that the initial prohibition against alcohol, specifically during prayer, was related to efforts to combat pagan ritual uses of alcohol? For instance, in Ancient Egypt, the "festival of drunkenness" was a yearly feast in which drunkenness was a way of communing with gods. I get the sense that alcohol use, much like other drugs in antiquity, was not so secular as it is today, and was an important part of pagan ritual practice. Was the Islamic prohibition against alcohol possibly seen as a countermeasure against "false belief", and pagan heresy?

This answer will look at the wine culture in the Ottoman Empire, it's economic significance, and why the prohibition of wine ultimately failed.

The Sultan's Drink of Choice

I'd like to open my answer with a quote that I find pretty fitting of the early Ottoman Empire. As recorded by the French traveler Bertrandon de la Broquière, who visited the Ottoman court in 1433, the Ottomans were, well, less than thrilled about the idea of giving up alcohol:

"A year ago a Moor came to preach and said that all who drink [alcohol] are breaking the commandments of the Prophet and are not good Saracens. He was immediately thrown into prison and then banished from the country."

(From The Voyage d'Outremer by Bertrandon de la Bro, as cited in Lowry's Impropriety and Impiety Among the Early Ottoman Sultans (1351-1451))

While it's not entirely clear if he was banished for simply advocating against drinking, we do know that the early Ottoman sultans were notoriously fond of alcohol. We even have records of the Genoese gifting wine to Orhan around 1351. The sultans' taste for the drink is supported from several different contemporary sources. One such source was the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos, who, while campaigning alongside Bayezid I, in 1391, wrote:

"Above and beyond all this, should we not mention the daily hunting, the dissipation at meals and afterwards, the throngs of mimes, the flocks of flute players, the choruses of singers, the tribes of dancers, the clang of cymbols, and the senseless laughter after the strong wine? Is it possible for those who suffer through all this not to have their minds dulled?"

(From Dennis' The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus - Text, Translation, and Notes, as cited in Lowry's Impropriety and Impiety Among the Early Ottoman Sultans (1351-1451))

Furthermore, Manuel II's other letters also support the idea that the Bayezid I often drank wine. Alongside Manuel II, the contemporary Byzantine historian Doukos also noted the Ottoman's taste for wine. Later, the Ottoman historian Mustafa Âlî, when referring to Selim II, said "[he] was by day and night . . . found fuddled and drunk by feverish intoxication." (Cited in Dursteler's Bad Bread and the "Outrageous Drunkenness of the Turks": Food and Identity in the Accounts of Early Modern European Travelers to the Ottoman Empire.)

The Short-Lived Attempts to Regulate Wine

While Selim II enjoyed wine - perhaps a bit too much - it was actually his father, Suleiman the Magnificent, that attempted one of the first prohibitions of alcohol in the empire. And, I say "one of the first," because there were many attempts by later sultans to prohibit alcohol in some manner. Often, these attempts were only temporary and certainly many of these attempts were met with limited success.

Nonetheless, Suleiman "prohibited all Muslims from consuming alcoholic beverages and ordered to burn ships which bring those alcoholic beverages." (From Koyuncu and Tabakoglu's Alcohol Consumption in Ottoman Istanbul According to Zecriye Tax Records: 1792-1828.) However, it is unclear how this was enforced or if it was enforced at all.

Later sultans periodically banned alcohol, shut down wine houses, and put restrictions on the wine trade. However, this was always met with mixed results. For example, the later Murad IV, in 1670 “abolished the office of commissioner for wine, ordered the razing of taverns in greater Istanbul, and imposed a ban on the sale of wine, not only causing financial loss to the treasury but also penalizing the Christians and Jews who handled the lucrative trade.” (From Finkel’s Osman’s Dream.) Limiting the wine trade often carried negative economic consequences, which often made it hard to justify.

And, as claimed earlier, these attempts at banning alcohol were almost always short-lived. By 1688, we have evidence that wine was already being taxed again and by 1690 the grand vizier, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, had revoked the tax on wine. However, this came with the caveat that all wine had to be exported from the Ottoman Empire and subject to an export fee. We can look at this as an attempt to curb the drinking of wine in the empire. But, once again, these edicts were largely ineffectual at actually doing so, as we have a myriad of evidence that people continued to drink.

The Wine Economy

The economic consequences of actually shutting down the wine trade would have been devastating. The truth was that many people relied on the wine trade for their livelihood - whether that be growing grapes, trading wine, or selling it in wine houses. And, wine production was not a localized trade that could be easily cracked down upon. We have evidence that places in Anatolia, such as Bursa; the Aegean Islands, especially Crete; Crimea, as evidenced in Kefe; and Bosnia all produced wine under the Ottomans.

So, not only would the wide-scale banning of alcohol be difficult and affect numerous local economies, the Ottoman Empire would have surely suffered through being unable to collect significant tax from this lucrative business. A tithe was generally placed on wine production, while an export and import tax was generally placed on trading it. This constituted for a significant amount of the government’s revenue.

For example, in Kefe, "Grapes were the single most valuable tax source in the agriculture of the province. They provided the treasury with one-fifth (21.4%) of the taxes paid by the local population (108,672 akges out of 505,963 akges)." (From Halenko's Wine Production, Marketing and Consumption in the Ottoman Crimea, 1520-1542.) While he refers to them as just grapes here, Halenko convincingly argues that these grapes were used for wine production.