From François Georgeon, the eminent Ottoman historian who has given us a first-rate biography of Sultan Abdülhamid II (2003) and, more recently, the wonderfully evocative Le mois le plus long. Ramadan à Istanbul (2017), comes another well-researched and engagingly written study—an examination of the place and role of alcohol in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, from the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia to the reign of Atatürk.
Alcohol sits at the heart of Islam in Georgeon's study, the way sex sat at the heart of Victorian Britain for Michel Foucault, present through its presumed absence, ubiquitous yet rarely mentioned other than in winks and whispers. Like Muslims anywhere and through time, Ottoman Muslims found myriad ways to evade their faith's formal ban on wine, engaging in casuistic arguments to justify their drinking habits. What helped, the author reminds us, is that most Turks adhered to the Hanafi madhhab, Islam's most lenient school with respect to alcohol, making allowances for a moderate intake of nabīdh, wine not made from grapes. Alcohol, although proscribed, was allowed to flow so long as it did not threaten the social order, and it had to flow because it brought in indispensable tax revenue. Drawing on a plethora of sources, Ottoman historiographical works, foreign reports and travelogues, and belles lettres, poetry above all, Georgeon develops this thesis in a wide-ranging exploration of an empire that, at its height, stretched from Tunisia to the Caucasus and from Bosnia to the Hejaz, including some of the world's oldest sites of viticulture.
Chapter One, “Héritages,” explores the basics, the origins of the Ottoman acquaintance with alcohol, and the way society dealt with it. The Turks, Georgeon argues, came from Inner Asia with their own booze, qumiss, fermented mare's milk, but were also heavily influenced by pre-Islamic Iranian drinking customs of which they learned at the tenth and eleventh-century courts of the Samanids and the Ghaznavids. Their conquest of Anatolia and the Balkans next familiarized them with a mostly Christian culture to which the grape was integral and where drinking was common. Small wonder then that, despite Islam's formal rejection of alcohol, viticulture and viniculture suffered but did not disappear under the Ottomans. Jews and Christians, almost half of the empire's population, were allowed to produce and sell alcohol, and even though Muslims were not supposed to either purchase or consume it, they were always essential customers. Most people drank, if they drank at all, in the privacy of their homes. Muslims would only frequent the Christian- and Jewish-run drinking establishments stealthily, fearful of the punishment that awaited those who were caught. And then there was the ultimate factor, valid for all time: wine generated tax revenue for the state. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the first recorded ban on the manufacture and use of alcohol was only issued in the mid-sixteenth century, under Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-66).
Chapter two considers the Ottoman empire at its early modern height, expansive, pluralistic, stretching from Algeria and Syria to Hungary, all ancient and storied wine-growing regions. Alcohol followed this multiplicity in its various manifestations, ranging from wine to boza, a lightly alcoholic millet or cereal-based beverage favored by the poor, to rakı, an anise-flavored spirit distilled from grapes, another type of alcohol not mentioned in the Qurʾan and thus deemed acceptable by many Muslims. This chapter takes us to the epicenter of Ottoman drinking, “Christian” Istanbul, Galata and Pera (modern Beyoğlu) across the Golden Horn, a suburb filled with hundreds of bozahanes and meyhanes, run by Greeks but frequented by all once darkness fell. Georgeon explains the distinction between licensed taverns, gedik, and clandestine ones, koltuk, the latter operating under a don't-ask-don't-tell regime, taxed and tolerated by the authorities so long as they did not disturb the social order. There was also the ayakli, the ambulant vendor, invariably an Armenian, who catered to boatsmen and porters along the waterfront. Elsewhere in the empire, alcohol was available wherever Christians or Jews dwelled.
In keeping with custom across the Muslim world, drinking was something for the elites and the lower classes, the former from a sense of entitlement, the latter from a sense of being irredeemable. The middling groups typically abstained. Sultans routinely imbibed, and some, such as Selim II (r. 1566-74), named sarhoş or mest, the sot, drank themselves to death. Many high officials, including provincial ones, bibbed as well. Foreigners called Turks generally abstemious yet portrayed the ones who did drink as intemperate. They praised the army for its disciplined sobriety yet in later times pointed at the janissaries as notorious topers.
Chapter three, on repression and transgression, further elaborates on the way the state interacted with society with respect to alcohol. The (unwritten) rule was clear and simple. The muhtesib the subaşı and the ases, the authorities tasked with the surveillance of the meyhanes, made the rounds at night and connived in exchange for bribes. Ottoman rulers varied in the extent to which they imbibed, in a kind of generational alternation, with an indulgent ruler often succeeded by an abstemious son and vice versa. Some were determined to root out drinking—occasionally at the pain of death, as was the case under Osman II (r. 1618-22). Most proscribed alcohol, at times with other controversial consumables such as coffee and tobacco, at one point or another during their reign, upon acceding to the throne, to propitiate the heavens during natural disaster or on the eve of a military campaign, pressured by the ulema, mindful of the approach of old age and the reckoning in the hereafter, or simply in an effort to maintain public order. In many cases public bans coincided with private sultanic indulgence. Taverns operated until they were forced to close, after which they soon were allowed to open again, according to the adage that the law of the sultan was valid for three days. The mid-seventeenth century Kadızadeli movement temporarily put the kibosh on drinking (and smoking). Matters reverted to their “normal” state during the early eighteenth-century so-called Tulip Era Period and especially the second half of the same century, a period of war and economic malaise. Tax income, after all, paid the salaries of high officials, who also drank. This chapter also pays attention to the place of wine in Ottoman literature, in Bacchic poetry and the comic stories of the legendary alcoholic Bekri Mustafa, who is commonly associated with the reign of Murad IV (1623-1640).
Chapter 4 is devoted to the changes set in motion in the early nineteenth century with the reforms of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-39), beginning with his elimination of the hard-drinking janissary corps in 1826. The ruler and his courtiers began to mingle with Western diplomats, attending dinners and receptions where alcohol was served. The non-governmental elite followed suit, many adopting alcohol and Western ways of consuming it as a token of modernity. The state more and more engaged in regulation rather than (periodic) proscription. The Treaty of Baltalimanı of 1838 gave Britain commercial advantages, allowing its nationals, including Ionian Greeks and Maltese, to run taverns. Despite Ottoman opposition, these now reached into the Muslim parts of the city. The Tanzimat next gave dhimmis equal rights, at least on paper, affording them greater freedom, including the freedom to be active in the liquor business. As public life saw an increase in non-religious education and growing wealth and their corollary, diminishing social control and more room for personal choice in outward behavior, a growing army of bureaucrats gravitated toward rakı, locally produced, relatively cheap and low on the list of Islamically prohibited drinks. Modern drinks such as Cognac and Champagne made their appearance. Beer, too, was introduced, by Germans; the first brewery was built in the late 1880s, and soon brasseries and beerhalls opened in Izmir and Istanbul. Alcohol also became “medicalized” in this period, approached from a health and hygiene rather than a religious perspective. A real meyhane culture developed, with snacks, mezze, its own jargon, and the habit of carrying drunks home in baskets—hence the expression küfe ile getirilmek (to be brought home in a basket). It is unclear, the author states, if all this was a trickle-down process, from the elite to the middling classes, or a horizontal spread, from dhimmīs to Muslims. Either way, the trend is clear: on the eve of the First World War, Istanbul counted more than 700 taverns, and some 350 alcohol-serving restaurants and brasseries, many of them located in the city's “Muslim” quarters.
The momentous changes that took place during the transition from empire to republic between 1908 and 1923 are the topic of Chapter 5. With the loss of the Balkans, the Greek islands, and Thrace, the Ottoman Empire was deprived of most of its best wine-growing areas. As the empire suffered debilitating war and occupation, a coalition of traditional Islamic elements and progressive, secular nationalist forces, unified in resentment, began to target Greeks and Armenians as profiteers, even traitors to the nation. Foreign troops occupied Istanbul between late 1918 and 1923. The influx of thousands of thirsty Allied soldiers led to a proliferation of drinking establishments in the capital. A wave of refugees from Bolshevik Russia resulted in yet more cafés and restaurants where foreign officers and Turks in tuxedos sipped Champagne over dîner dansant. Prohibition, inspired by the American Volstead Act of 1919, was adopted by the provisional republican government, operating from Ankara. In October 1923, as the foreign troops were in retreat, the anti-liquor laws came to Istanbul and thousands of taverns, beerhalls and cafés were forced to close, throwing the city's thriving liquor business into disarray. Georgeon narrates all these events and developments at a fast clip, with verve as well as precision.
How the Turkish Republic that rose on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire dealt with alcohol after the prohibition was repealed in 1924, is discussed in Chapter 6. Proscription gave way to regulation and taxation and eventually to a government monopoly. The liquor industry suffered in the process, not least from the departure of over one million Greeks, the main wine experts and owners of bars and restaurants. In due time, the country's viticulture was revived, yet modern Turks never warmed to wine, which today mainly caters to tourists. Instead, they took to rakı, Atatürk's favored drink, which became associated with patriotism, secularism, and Anatolian virility. Beer, long associated with foreigners, was touted as wholesome in the early republic and became indigenized with the opening of a “national” brewery in Ankara in 1934. The chapter concludes with a masterful exposé on Atatürk's drinking habits, his nocturnal sessions, Atatürk sofrası, where booze flowed and lips were loosened, and the way these gatherings have been described and in part embellished by those who participated.
Georgeon is careful and nuanced in his conclusions. Continuity is king: alcohol has been produced and consumed by “Turks” since the early days of the Ottoman Empire. People in the western province and in the coastal areas always drank and still drink more than those living in the interior and in eastern Anatolia. Drinking has been most prevalent among the elites and the lower classes, the latter favoring, first boza, later rakı and, in modern times, increasingly beer. And most importantly, those who accuse Westerners of having pushed Turks into drinking ignore or willfully overlook a long history of voluntary Muslim drinking. Many of these conclusions would be valid for Muslim drinking in general.
The book effectively ends, in a somewhat desultory manner, with the death of Atatürk in 1938. Skipping six decades, it concludes with an epilogue on conditions under President Erdoǧan written by two historians of modern Turkey. This is a pity, for the last three decades of the twentieth century, and especially the 1980s and 1990s, when Turkey opened to the world and embarked on a neoliberal course, saw major change in the place of alcohol in society.
Fact-filled and fast-paced, Au pays du raki is a perfect example of how to write a scholarly book that is also accessible to the non-specialist reader. It is richly informative as well as a joy to read.
