A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and Thou

Did Muslims drink wine in the Middle Ages?
Part IV—Omar Khayyam.
by Michael Isenberg.

Omar Khayyam was a towering figure in the Muslim World at the turn of the 12th century. We in the West know him mainly as a poet, author of the Rubaiyat, but he was also a scientist, a philosopher, a mathematician, the physician of princes, and the companion of sultans.

As the Royal Astronomer, he developed the Jalali calendar, which, with modifications, is still in use in Iran today, and is accurate to one day in 5,000 years. To put that in perspective, the Gregorian calendar we use in the West is accurate to only one day in 3,000 years.

But Omar’s learning was not limited to the physical sciences. His insights into the Quran and the Hadith were well-respected by scholars of Shari’ah such as Abu Hamid Ghazali. To this day, Ghazali is one of the most influential thinkers in Islam. We have a story about him and Omar from the historian Abu’l-Hasan Bayhaqi (d. 1169). Bayhaqi knew Omar; while still a teenager, his dad took him to visit the aging polymath in his hometown of Nishapur, Iran. According to Bayhaqi, Omar once explained some point “concerning a certain verse” (presumably of the Quran) to a group of people, including Ghazali. Ghazali was not an easy man to please, and didn’t always get along with Omar, but on this occasion he exclaimed, “May God increase such learned ones as you; consider me as one of your followers!” Granted, being something of dick, Ghazali then felt compelled to add that he did not expect such a stellar analysis from a scientist [1].

Needless to say, Muslims in general, and Iranians in particular, are proud to have such a brilliant and pious scholar and poet among their numbers. Omar’s beautiful mausoleum in Nishapur was rebuilt in the last century. It is set amid tall pine trees and colorful gardens in what is otherwise a brown and dusty town surrounded by brown and dusty farmland. The park rather stands out on the satellite image. Nearby are the Khayyam Planetarium and Khayyam Boulevard.

And yet, there’s a fly in the ointment: Wine. The oldest collection of Omar’s poems we have is the Ouseley Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, transcribed in 1460. Out of the 158 verses that appear there, 90 of them, by my count, or 57%, are about wine—something prohibited in Islam.

I began this series on Islam and wine by citing some of the verses in the Muslim scripture that prohibit the use of alcohol, but I also observed that the literature of the Middle Ages suggests that the prohibition was not very well enforced. In Part II, I backed that up with examples from the history books. Religious hardliners like Ghazali were not happy with wine shops all over town and drinking parties in the palaces. In Part III I wrote about how they struck back, with some success. Since I appropriated Omar Khayyam as the hero of my latest novel, The Thread of Reason, it seems fitting to wrap up the series with a question that has occupied biographers and historians for centuries: Did he drink?

For such an esteemed personage as Omar Khayyam to be as obsessed with wine as his poetry shows him to be is something of an embarrassment to Muslims.

Some condemned his verses. The historian Abu’l-Hasan al-Qifti (d. 1248) wrote that Omar’s poems “are inwardly like snakes who bite the Shari’ah.” [2]

But others attempted to explain them away, and these attempts began almost the moment Omar drew his final breath. The wine in the Rubaiyat, they said, should be interpreted symbolically. Numerous theories have been proposed as to what exactly it symbolizes, but the most common is that it symbolizes the joy of mystic communion with Allah. According to this theory, Omar was an adherent of the Islamic esoteric movement known as Sufism, and the wine in his poetry should be understood in that light, as it is for other prominent Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz. Thus, the question of what wine symbolizes in the Rubaiyat cannot be separated from the question of whether Omar Khayyam was a Sufi.

The theory is not entirely without merit. There are certainly many verses in the Rubaiyat where this interpretation would make sense. Consider one of the most famous:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
          Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! [3]

It’s certainly plausible, but by no means certain, that all the elements of Sufism are there. The wilderness is the dwelling of the holy man. Ishmael, Moses, Jesus—they all found Allah in the desert. The loaf of bread is the simple diet of the Sufi. The book of verses is his song. As for the jug of wine, it’s the ecstasy of communion with Allah, the ‘Thou,’ singing beside the ‘me.’

Further, Ahmad Ghazali (d. ca. 1123), who probably knew Omar, included some of Omar's verses in his Treatise on Preaching, a collection of Sufic verses and commentary [4]. Ahmad was the brother of the aforementioned Abu Hamid Ghazali and a prominent Sufi himself. That he included Omar's verses in such a collection suggests that he viewed Omar as a Sufi himself.

But there is no corroboration of that from Omar himself, or any of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries, unless you count Abbas Kayvan Qazwini’s claim that the ghost of Omar Khayyam visited him in a dream and told him it was so [5]. Indeed, it is unusual for someone who has dedicated his life to rational pursuits such as astronomy and mathematics to go in for mysticism. In the same passage where he compares the Rubaiyat to snakes, al-Qifti also tells us that even though “Sufis understood his poems outwardly and considered them to be part of their tradition,” when Omar “arrived in Baghdad, members of [a Sufi] tradition and believers in primary science came to him and began to socialize with him. He did not accept them.”

The debate continues into our own time. Robert Graves, better known as the author of I, Claudius, threw his hat into the ring when he agreed to collaborate with Omar Ali-Shah to publish The Original Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1968), based on a manuscript that had allegedly been in the Shah family for many generations and supported the Sufic interpretation. Alas, Shah never produced the original manuscript, and it is now widely believed that the whole thing was a hoax—of which Graves himself was the greatest victim.

Mehdi Aminrazavi of the University of Mary Washington took on the question in The Wine of Wisdom (2005), unquestionably the best Khayyam biography out there, and an indispensable help to me in writing both The Thread of Reason and this article. On the question of Omar Khayyam and Sufism, Dr. Aminrazavi concludes, “None of his biographers have alluded to his Sufi affiliation, and the one exception I have mentioned previously asserts that Sufis misunderstood his Ruba’iyyat and interpreted them as they wished,” i.e., the al-Qifti passage, cited above. Further, “For all we know, Khayyam neither had a Sufi master nor was he initiated into a Sufi tradition.” Both transmission of knowledge from a master and the initiation ritual are of great importance in Sufism, so their absence in Omar’s case is highly significant.

Although he doesn’t accept that Omar was a Sufi, and therefore the notion that wine in the Rubaiyat represents Sufic communion, Dr. Aminrazavi nevertheless argues for a symbolic interpretation, and indeed he took the title of his book from it: “Khayyam’s use of the concept of wine is as the ‘wine of wisdom,’ a philosophical image which enables one to come to terms with the merciless forces of nature through an all-too-human-wisdom.” Aminrazavi cites a number of verses in support of the wine of wisdom symbolism, including this one:

The mystery is great and the answers are rare
Wise men have searched but you should not care
          Make thy own heaven here with this moment and wine
For the heaven is a fairy tale, nothing but Air.

With all due respect to Dr. Aminrazavi, I disagree with the wine of wisdom metaphor, along with the Sufic metaphor. I believe that when Omar talks about wine in the Rubaiyat, what it symbolizes is…wine. I have two reasons for that. Regarding the first, consider the following, somewhat humorous verses from the Ouseley manuscript: #38,

I drink wine; my Enemies, high and low,
Say—“Do not drink it; ‘tis Religion’s Foe.’
          When I learned wine was a Foe, I answered—
“’Tis permitted to drink the Foe’s Blood, you know.” [6]

And #75,

I drink wine, and every one drinks who like me is worthy of it;
my wine-drinking is but a small thing to Him;
          God knew, on the Day of Creation, that I should drink wine;
if I do not drink wine, God’s knowledge was ignorance. [7]

In these verses, we see that Omar clearly views wine drinking as a sin. He knows it’s prohibited, but he drinks it anyway. He can’t help it. It’s foreordained. Fortunately, Allah is a loving god, and won’t judge him too harshly.

This notion that wine is weakness and sin recurs in seven other verses (#45, 62, 64, 78, 99, 104, and 118). It’s not consistent with the view that wine symbolizes mystic communion—which is not a sin (or at least a Sufi wouldn't say it was). I haven’t run across this angle in the poetry of known Sufis like Rumi. Nor is it consistent with the wine of wisdom—also not a sin in a religion which puts as high a premium on scholarship as Islam does. But wine equals sin makes perfect sense if it’s to be understood as simply plain old tavern-variety fermented grape juice.

The second reason I believe that wine means wine is not based on quite so scholarly an analysis. I’m rather fond of wine myself, and have some experience with it. Reading the Rubaiyat, I just get the gut feeling that Omar knows what he’s talking about.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon (and wine) and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, featuring Omar Khayyam, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): touriar.com, Google Maps

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[1] Bayhaqi, Abu’l-Hasan, Tatimah siwan al-Hikmah, Lahore (1351 AH), pp. 116-17 [2] Qifti, Abu’l-Hasan al-, Tarikh al-Qifti (History of the Scholars), Leipzig (1903), pp. 243-44. [3] Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 3rd ed. (1872), Edward Fitzgerald, tr., xii. Fitzgerald’s translations tend to be a little loose, and this is actually a composite of #149 and 155 in the Ouseley manuscript, but the Sufic elements I allude to are all there in the original. [4] Ghazzali, Ahmad, Risalah maw’izah, Tehran (1371 AH) Nourbakhsh, ed. [5] Qazwini, A.K. Sharh-i ruba’iyyat-i Khayyam, Tehran (1379 AH), M.R.M. Chahardehi, ed., p. 19. [6] Adapted by me from the translation in The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, Boston: L.C. Page & Co. (1898), Edward Heron-Allen, tr. [7] Heron-Allen translation, loc. cit.

The Source of Incalculable Danger in Respect of Hereafter

Did Muslims drink wine in the Middle Ages?
Part III—The Islamists Strike Back.
by Michael Isenberg.

As I wrote in Parts I and II of this series on Islam and drinking, readers of my historical murder mystery, The Thread of Reason are often surprised at how much wine the Muslim characters in the book guzzle down. “Isn’t alcohol forbidden is Islam?” they ask.

In no uncertain terms. But despite the ban, plenty of drinking went on. We know that from the historical chronicles of the time, which tells us of some wild parties in the royal palaces. Perhaps even more significantly, we know that from literature like the Maqamat of Qasim Hariri and The Thousand and One Nights, often a better source on daily life than the histories. The histories give us portraits of sultans and caliphs, and idealized portraits at that. The storybooks tell us about the lives of ordinary people.

Although drinking was widespread, there were plenty of orthodox Muslims, True Believers, who were unhappy about the situation. And they struck back. In 1092, when my book takes place, their undisputed leader was Abu Hamid Ghazali, head of the school of shari’ah (Muslim law) in Baghdad known as the Nizamiyya. Three years later, he suffered a nervous breakdown, left the Nizamiyya and wandered around Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia as a pilgrim and student of mysticism. When he returned to his native land of Persia, ten years later, he seems to have become a bit of crank. He spent a great deal of time writing books and letters of helpful advice to the rulers of the land, some solicited, some not. He was especially big on nagging them to repent their sins. And high on his list of sins requiring repentance was drinking.

Drinking comes up, for example, in Ghazali’s Book of Counsel for Kings (Nassihat al-Muluk), which was written at the request of the Sultan Sanjar, son of the great Malk-shah. In it, Ghazali condemns “continual backgammon-playing, chess-playing, wine-drinking, ball games and hunting,” as they “do not befit the king because they distract.”

A letter to one Mu’in al-Mulk was even more explicit. I haven’t found out anything about this individual elsewhere, but the title ending in “al-Mulk” indicates that he was a vizier—prime minister to a ruler. “May Mu’inul Mulk be warned against what one of his friends has told me these days,” Ghazali wrote.

The things reported to me against him are the source of incalculable danger in respect of Hereafter. So far as he is concerned, I have become extremely worried… You amuse yourself with drinking wine that blinds your eyes and heart to your duties towards your people and an understanding of the laws of human nature. I advise you to renounce drinking wine, even if it is so hard for you to sever your ties with the cruel and corrupt Government officials, for when personal sin is associated with cruelty, it is beyond human power to get them separated from each other, particularly in one’s old age drinking wine is one of the worst crimes… I sincerely hope you would despise wine and make up your mind to hate it for the rest of your days. (Letters of al-Ghazzali [Fada'il al-anam], Abdul Qayyum, tr., 1992)

I’m not sure how much influence Ghazali had on the vizier Mu’in al-Mulk or the sultan Sanjar (albeit I can’t help noticing that in this picture of Sanjar, from a 14th century illuminated manuscript, he's holding what appears to be a wine goblet).

But there is no doubt that Ghazali’s influence on succeeding generations, both on the subject of drinking and in many other areas, was immense. In the century that followed, the Muslim world saw a crackdown on the enforcement of shari’ah, as a new generation of rulers came to power who not only didn’t drink themselves, but were determined that there would be no drinking in their domains.

For example, the chronicle of ibn al-Athir tell us that a year into the reign of the caliph an-Nasir, who ascended to the throne in 1180, “there was much sinful behavior in Baghdad. The palace chamberlain set up a group to pour away intoxicating drinks and to arrest loose women.” (The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-ta’rikh, D.S. Richards, tr., 2006-2008).

An-Nasir got along very badly with Saladin, the sultan known to us in the west as the gentlemen who treated his enemy Richard the Lion-Hearted so chivalrously. But Saladin was also a dyed-in-the-wool jihadist and there was one thing at least that he and an-Nasir agreed on. Two years after an-Nasir’s crackdown on alcohol in Baghdad, Saladin’s government issued a diploma appointing a market official, called a muhtasib, in Aleppo. The diploma enjoined the muhtasib to enforce regulations on weights and measures and hygiene, prohibit usury, evict magicians and fortune tellers, prevent nudity in the public baths, and “as regards intoxicating beverages, let him seek them out and spill them on the ground, and let him apply the legal punishment to anyone who has drunk of them, as soon as the guilty party has regained his sobriety.” (Anne-Marie Edde, Saladin, 2011) The legal punishment was eighty lashes with a palm switch.

Not coincidentally, both an-Nasir and Saladin had right hand men who were students of students of students of Ghazali. Clearly Ghazali and the hardliners got their way in the end.

In the final installment of this series, I will take a look at a sometime friend of Ghazali, Omar Khayyam. In his collection of poems known as the Rubaiyat, there are numerous verses about wine, which begs a question that has been a source of debate among historians and biographers since he drew his final breath: did Omar drink it himself.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Public domain

Joyous Assemblies

Did Muslims drink wine in the Middle Ages?
Part II—Caliph Harun ar-Rashid and Ja’far the Barmakid.
by Michael Isenberg.

As I said in Part I of this article, readers of my medieval murder mystery, The Thread of Reason, often tell me how surprised they are by how much wine the Muslim characters in the book drink. “Isn’t alcohol forbidden in Islam?” they ask.

It most definitely is, and in the first installment I provided some of the relevant citations in the Quran and the Hadith. But I also explained that the prohibition was often disobeyed during the Middle Ages. Wine shops and drinking parties were frequent settings in the literature of the time such as the Maqamat of Qasim Hariri of Basra or The Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes the stories featured pious characters who expressed their disapproval. Other times the drinking parties were portrayed as just a normal part of life, deserving of no special comment. Even the highest official in Islam, the caliph, got into the act. In one of the stories in the Nights, Caliph Harun ar-Rashid (d. 809 AD), whose reign is considered by many to be the pinnacle of Islamic history and achievement, attended a raucous party, accompanied by his vizier Ja’far of the House of Barmak, and his “Sworder of Vengeance” Masrur the Eunuch. And although neither Harun nor Ja’far imbibed, the caliph seemed to have no issue with those around them doing so.

Harun ar-Rashid and the Poet, by Eloise-Caroline Huitel (1827-1896). This Western depiction takes some artistic liberties. The real Harun would never allow the women of his household to appear in the presence of unrelated men.

The Thousand and One Nights and the other literature of the time are important historical documents. They reflect the attitudes of their authors and they give details about daily life which are often lacking in more staid sources. But the bottom line is that they’re works of fiction, often markedly different from real life. For example, unlike their fictional counterparts, in real life Harun ar-Rashid and Ja’far the Barmakid drank plenty. Their escapades beautifully illustrate the spirit of the times.

Where alcohol wasn’t involved, Harun and Ja’far were pillars of orthodoxy. Harun was well-known for his pre-dawn prayers in the chapel of his palace. The chronicles place him leading the obsequies at the funerals of his father and brother. In The Thread of Reason I wrote about how Harun's vast charitable enterprises—his giving extended into the millions of gold dinars—were inspired by a nightmare about the Day of Judgment.

One theory as to why he moved his capital from Baghdad to Raqqa in Syria was that it was convenient to the Byzantine frontier, the better to wage jihad on the unbelievers. In our own century, ISIS also picked Raqqa as their capital, in order to garb themselves in reflected piety from Harun ar-Rashid. Harun made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, nine times in his life. Indeed he had the distinction of being the only caliph in history to personally lead both the hajj and the jihad in the same year (797). Indeed, he was so proud of these roles, he had a qalasuwa—a cap around which a turban is wrapped—made for himself, inscribed with the words Ghazi wa Hajj: warrior and pilgrim.

As for Ja’far, his reputation for mastery of the shari’ah was so great that the historian ibn Khallikan said, no doubt with some exaggeration, that he once, under Harun ar-Rashid’s supervision, issued a thousand legal opinions in a single night, and “not one of these decisions deviated in the least from what was warranted by the law.”

Harun and Ja’far were inseparable; so close that Harun had a robe made with two collars that they could wear together. Despite their reputation for orthodoxy, however, it seems there’s barely a story involving either of them that doesn’t involve some sort of drinking.

In The Thread of Reason, I describe the spectacular palaces that the caliphs built in Baghdad on the east bank of the Tigris River. The initial settlement in Baghdad was on the west bank, and in his book Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate, Guy LeStrange explains how the move across the river got started. It turns out it was thanks to Ja’far's drinking parties:

Yakut gives us the history of these palaces, and in the first place relates how Ja'far the Barmecide, being much given to wine-bibbing in the company of poets and singers, was frequently reproved by his father Yahya—at that time Wazir of Harun-ar-Rashid—for the scandal that he was creating. Ja'far professed inability to alter his ways, but in order to shun the observation of strict Moslems who abhorred wine and singing, he agreed to build himself a palace apart, for the celebration of his joyous assemblies, on the unoccupied lands to the south of the Mukharrim Quarter. Ja'far was at this time still the favourite boon companion of Harun-ar-Rashid, who showed much interest in the building, which was indeed so remarkable for its magnificence, that when all was completed an astute friend advised Ja'far to tell Harun that this palace was in reality built as a present for [Harun’s son] Mamun, and thus to avoid the well-known jealousy of the Caliph.

Ja’far was indispensable at the caliph’s own drinking parties—as was the caliph’s sister Abbasa. Alas, it was prohibited for Abbasa to be in the same room as Ja’far—a man to whom she was not related. Harun ar-Rashid solved that problem by means of marriage between the two, but he made it clear that it was to be a marriage in name only, never to be consummated.

In 803, Harun turned on the Barmakids. He ordered Masrur, his “Sworder of Vengeance,” who I mentioned previously for his role in The Thousand and One Nights, to execute the unfortunate Ja’far. Ja’far’s father Yahya and his brother Fadl were imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The reason for Harun’s betrayal of his once closest friend is one of the great mysteries of Islamic history. Even at the time, theories abounded. The most common is that Harun, who had become caliph at a very young age (probably twenty-one), and who therefore had to rely heavily on Yahya’s guidance, was chomping at the bit to get out from under Yahya’s shadow (shades of the relationship between the sultan Malik-shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk three centuries later). But there’s another theory: Harun lost it upon discovering that the sham marriage between Ja’far and Abbasa was not, in fact, a sham.

In any case, Ja’far’s reaction when Masrur came for his head gives us yet another bit of insight into Harun ar-Rashid’s habits. Ja’far was certain that when the order was issued, the caliph had to have been drunk.

Next installment: The hardliners strike back.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com