Ottoman Empire & Alcohol


Yes, wine drinking was quite a common occurrence in all parts of the empire, whose production and consumption was largely done by non-Muslims, who were generally allowed to produce and sell them to their own kind. Alcohol consumption was mainly confined to cities, with some exceptions like in the Balkans and Greece where alcohol was consumed in the countryside. In the Balkans, the old-age practice of drinking wine continued even in the countryside, with exceptions in the Muslim community. For example Bosnian Muslims obeyed the wine prohibition proscribed by the government, but considered raki, a spirit distilled from grapes to be lawful for consumption. Sarajevo was home to around 21 taverns in the second half of the 18th century. In 18th century Izmir, taverns were kept open all hours, day and night and it also contained a large number or koltuk, a small or mobile tavern, whose numbers reached 800 in the middle of the 19th century. In Aleppo there were greater restrictions because of the prevalence of drunkenness, but wine consumption continued in private homes and Han al-gümrük, hostels for non-Muslims and foreign travellers. In Damascus, local Christians and Jews were allowed to make and drink wine within the bounds of discretion. Most of Damascene wine were made in villages, especially Saydnaya located to the north of Damascus. Grapes were the basis of all alcoholic drinks, either fermented as wine or arak. In Egypt, the Coptic population distilled arak from dates, while local Greeks produced tafia made from molasses and sugar canes. The Muslim population of Egypt just like most Muslims of the empire also drunk boza, a beer-like drink made of fermented millet and of low alcoholic content. And finally, Istanbul, especially the non-Muslim quarters of Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera were famous for its taverns. According to Evliya Çelebi, in the 16th century the city boasted some 1,060 taverns, 100 of which were ran by Jews. While those in Galata were owned by Greek Orthodox, there were also Muslim owners who ran wine houses in different parts of the city. By 1829 the city had a comparatively modest number of 554 taverns. Bozahanehs, Boza houses were also quite numerous and frequently visited by Muslims of Istanbul as an easier and slightly more lawful alternative to taverns and wine.
Taverns, being mostly ran and visited by non-Muslims can be easily found in non-Muslim neighborhood and side alleys, away from mosques or Muslim residences. Muslims also occasionally frequented taverns, but they did so stealthily, fearful of the punishment that awaited those who were caught. However, we have evidences that pointed out that at least in Istanbul, Muslims frequenting taverns were seen as a normal occurence. For example 17th century book Treatise on Strange Events noted that Muslims drank wine, caroused with Christians and Jews, and owned taverns. Another example was a shari’a scribal record from the same era, where Ibrahim Çelebi son of Ali and his wife came to court to demand blood money from Nikita Merkuri, the Orthodox Christian owner of a tavern in an unspecified Christian neighborhood of Beşiktaş. Knife-wielding Ahmed had murdered their son Mehmed while the two were sitting at the tavern with Abdullah, Mustafa, a velvet carpet dealer named Mahmud, and the stonemason Amr. The fact that 5 Muslim men were sitting at a tavern in a Christian neighborhood before the conversation became heated and knives were drawn is not commented on by the scribe, nor does it appear to concern the religious magistrate handling the matter.
Of course the prevalence of alcohol consumption did not sit well with some sultans, who viewed them as vices and causes of moral corruption. Sultans prohibited alcohol and controversial consumables such as coffee and tobacco at one point or another during their reign in order to seek blessings during natural disaster or on the eve of a military campaign, motivated by religious fervour, pressured by the ulema, mindful of the approach of old age and the reckoning in the hereafter, or simply seeking to maintain public order. Süleyman I first forbade the public sale of wine in the 1540s, making it difficult even for non-Muslims to obtain any. Similar bans were issued by his successors, Selim II continued his father’s ban, Murad III continued it too, having previously banned wine houses only in Muslim areas, Mehmed III banned it, when in Ramazan of that year all wine found in the wine houses was destroyed and the doors of the wine houses sealed, Ahmed I, and Murad IV also banned it, with the latter had all wine houses closed. Murad adopted a tough stance over this, just like his stance on most things. If he came across any drunk during his tours incognito at night, he personally killed him. Mehmed IV banned it in 1670-71, influenced by Kadizadeli thoughts he extended the bans, first to any neighbourhood that housed a mosque, and next to private use even among non-Muslims. It was again forbidden in 1689 by Süleyman II, when Küfri Ahmed Efendi, the tax collector on wine, was killed. Selim III also struggled to ban it, with only limited success. The frequency and sequential nature of these decrees proved that these bans were largely ineffective and effort at quashing the consumption of and trade in alcohol amounted to merely short-lived, symbolic measures that ultimately failed. This was mostly because of economic reasons. Taxes on alcohol were a lucrative source of income, one that the Ottoman state couldn’t ignore. Campaigns in Hungary on 1596-97 made Süleyman reverse his ban on alcohol, ban imposed by Ahmed I in 1617 reduced state revenue that he reversed the ban, and Mehmed IV reversed the ban in 1687 after the War against the Holy League had deprived the state of its treasury. Additionally, bans on alcohol also impacted local economy, as many relied on it for income. In Galata, for example, the fish market sold fish for those frequenting the wine houses. Fruit sellers too sold fruits for patrons of the taverns, while alcohol sellers and makers definitely benefited from selling every kind of alcohol imaginable. The police force also earned a living from fees they collected from extorting fines from every Muslim they caught drinking. So in the end, pragmatism tended to prevail, as people, and certainly non-Muslims, were left alone in their drinking as long the public order was not disturbed, and rulers often effectively benefited from the tax revenue generated from alcohol consumption, even if they would never explicitly support or allow it.
Source:
Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East: Ambivalence and Ambiguity by Rudi Mathee

A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet

Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe by Marc David Baer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc9BvFOF9Ww&pp=ygUUIFNrw6lwc2lzbGFtaWNhIHdpbmU%3D

https://academic.oup.com/book/49401/chapter/416650401
Rulers alternated between abstemiousness and raging alcoholism. They might ban alcohol depending on personal predilection, to propitiate the divine or in the face of imminent war, but anti-alcohol campaigns were typically half-hearted and temporary, and they invariably ran up against the need for the fiscal revenue that the alcohol trade yielded.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2022.2007585
Alcohol played a role in all of this. Military dependence and defeat brought hard-drinking Westerner soldiers to Islamic capitals – the French to Cairo in 1798, and to Algiers in 1830; the French and the British to Istanbul during the Crimean War of 1853-56 and again in 1918-23, in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire; the French again in Lebanon in the 1860s; and the British once more to Cairo in 1882. New commercial agreements combined with improved communications also enabled the importation of alcohol, including new types such as cognac and champagne. As early as 1839, 247 barrels of beer and 400 gallons of brandy were brought to Izmir from England; the United States that year furnished almost 100,000 gallons of rum to the same city; and from France came 4,350 bottles of champagne and an equal number of bottles of wine.Footnote8 By the turn of the twentieth century, Istanbul alone imported wines from France and Germany, mostly Bordeaux and champagne, worth some 2 million francs.Footnote9 Qajar Iran, tenuously connected to the sea and devoid of roads, let alone railroads, was much harder to access as a consumer market. Yet a Swiss company in about 1860 imported several hundred bottles of French wine and spirits, Bordeaux, cognac, champagne, which sold within a few days, even though the fine liqueurs among them carried the hefty price tag of one tuman or almost $90 today, per bottle.
Similar change was afoot in the Ottoman urban centers. In Izmir, the first beer house opened its doors in 1846; Istanbul followed suit in 1850, and by the mid 1890s the capital had its own brewery and boasted more than 30 beer houses.Footnote25 By that time, mostly Christian Galata and Pera, north of the Golden Horn, and more specifically the Grande rue de Péra, now İstiklâl Caddesi, the mile-long artery that runs through it, was in the process of becoming the center of modern entertainment. Following the terrible fire of 1870, the city’s mostly wooden houses had given way to brick structures, roads were paved, and gas light made its appearance. Especially the latter innovation, later replaced by electricity, imbued the city’s modernity with light, creating a phantasmagoric atmosphere around the various new hotels that were constructed once the Orient Express linked Paris directly to Istanbul in 1889, the Pera Palace and the Grand Hôtel de Londres (1892), the Bristol (1893), and the Tokatlian (1895). Modern drinking establishment known as gazinos also sprang up at this time. Furnished with tables and chairs and open to men and women, they offered ‘modern’, European-style entertainment involving singing and orchestral music. Non-Muslims, Greeks above all, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by modernity, ran these venues and controlled much of the liquor trade.
https://academic.oup.com/book/39860/chapter-abstract/340028979?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
Drinking and viticulture were widespread throughout the empire, though the trade was often in the hands of non-Muslims. The Ottoman liquor traffic even became integral to the European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was among the drunkest leaders in world history, yet Atatürk and the secular Turkish government in Ankara embraced prohibitionism as a means of denying badly needed alcohol revenues to the Christians occupying their lands—most notably the British controlling Istanbul and the Greeks around Smyrna. Turkish prohibition expanded across Anatolia, as Atatürk liberated Turkey’s occupied territories. Only in 1924, with the end of foreign occupation, was the Kemalist prohibition rescinded, and replaced with a national alcohol monopoly, in which the financial benefits of the liquor trade would accrue to the Turkish state, not to foreigners.

On Alcohol and Hanafism:

“According to the opinion of Imam Abu Hanifa and Abu Yusuf, which is reported and known in the books of the Hanafis, and the strong opinion of Imam Muhammad, every intoxicating drink except grape wine is permissible.”

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  1. When Lady Montagu (1717) sees Ahmed Bey, whom she met in Belgrade, drinking wine comfortably, she asks him how he reconciles his belief with this action. Ahmed Bey also says that the Prophet’s words are actually a wise warning for the common people who do not know how to drink properly.
  1. In foreign testimonies regarding the alcohol use of Muslim Turks, it is evident that the Turks go to extremes in drinking. French traveler Jean de Thévenot (d. 1667) says that there is no religious difference between one glass and ten glasses, and states that the Turks drank until they fainted.

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