Alcohol in The Muslim Worlds

Historicizing the forbidden The recurrent claim that Islam forbids alcohol is, in a narrow, legal sense, a relatively new idea. It is not paradoxical to put it this way. Religious condemnation and social proscription constitute two different realities. The latter makes little sense without a sufficiently coercive apparatus for enforcement, an application that has been rigorously facilitated by modern state-building processes. It is not our intention to gloss over the rich body of normative te..