The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900 available in Paperback, eBook
The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900
- ISBN-10:
- 0691144443
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691144443
- Pub. Date:
- 07/26/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691144443
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691144443
- Pub. Date:
- 07/26/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900
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Overview
At once panoramic and richly detailed, The Pursuit of Pleasure examines both the intoxicants known since ancient times—wine and opiates—and the stimulants introduced later—tobacco, coffee, and tea—from multiple angles. It brings together production, commerce, and consumption to reveal the forces behind the spread and popularity of these consumables, showing how Iranians adapted them to their own needs and tastes and integrated them into their everyday lives.
Matthee further employs psychoactive substances as a portal for a set of broader issues in Iranian history—most notably, the tension between religious and secular leadership. Faced with reality, Iran's Shi‘i ulama turned a blind eye to drug use as long as it stayed indoors and did not threaten the social order. Much of this flexibility remains visible underneath the uncompromising exterior of the current Islamic Republic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691144443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2009 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Pursuit of Pleasure
Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900By Rudi Matthee
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11855-0
Introduction
THIS BOOK addresses the topic of drugs and stimulants in Iran's history as a dialogue between their status as part of material culture-as concrete, tangible consumables with a physical working-and the array of meanings Iranian's have attached to them over a period of four hundred years, in the belief that such an approach might reveal something significant about Iran-as a society at any given moment in that long period, as a society in process, and as a society interacting with the outside world.From ancient times until the present-day Islamic Republic, psycho-active agents have influenced Iranian social, political, and economic life in ways that range from the ordinary to the surprising and remarkable. Wine, which may have originated in Iran, was the drink of choice for Iranian elites in premodern times. Its consumption does not seem to have diminished much following the Arab conquest and the introduction of Islam in the seventh century C.E. Far from always being a private affair, inebriation at times diminished military vigor and the quality of political leadership. The wine-soaked defeat Shah Ismaìl suffered against the Turks in the battle of Chaldiran in 1514 illustrates this point as vividly as the fact that alcholism shortened the lives of several Safavid rulers.
The same is true for opium, which has been part of the Iranian landscape since Sasanian times and a popular drug since at least the Safavid period. Although people typically took a daily dose that was too small to render them incapable of going about their daily lives, excess did occur, and, as with wine, overindulgence among the ruling elite at times came at the expense of good governance. Most dramatically, the expansion of opium cultivation was a contributing factor to the terrible famine of 1869-72 that may have wiped out one tenth of Iran's population. Tobacco, tremendously popular almost from the moment it entered the country in the sixteenth century, three hundred years later became the centerpiece of a revolt that sparked the Constitutional Revolution, arguably the most far-reaching revolution in Iranian history to this day. Although coffee and tea can lay claim to no such fame, these beverages did not just become popular but also had a substantial part in fashioning new forms of sociability, and tea eventually triumphed as Iran's most popular beverage by far.
This book examines these various intoxicants, the ones that, in the words of a long-time foreign resident of seventeenth-century Iran, provided Iranians with damagh, gave them a "kick," got them into a good mood. By tracing their historical trajectory and the role they have played in Iranian society, it follows examples set by recent scholarship on narcotics and stimulants in other parts of the early modern world. The last two decades have seen a surge in attention to consumption, including the consumption of psychotropic substances, in early modern times. A fair share of the resulting scholarship has been devoted to the study of stimulants such as coffee and tea, which are no longer viewed as mere commodities in the "trade and consumer" revolutions but are now explored as emblems and symbols of religious practice, social relations, or political change. Alcoholic beverages and opiates, too, have begun to attract the attention of historians. Scholars have addressed their function in religious imagery and medical experimentation, examined their acceptance and distribution as indices of social class and status, or focused on governmental reactions to their widespread adoption, which ranged from legal prohibition to fiscal stimulation.
With the exception of the original areas of cultivation, South America for tobacco, Yemen for coffee and China for tea, the non-European world has received short shrift in this recent scholarship. Rudolf Gelpke's broad-ranging book on narcotics in East and West and Franz Rosenthal's more specific study on hashish in medieval Muslim society aside, drugs and stimulants, the context in which they were used and the ritual that surrounded them, have just begun to enter the consciousness of Middle East historians. The ones who have taken the lead in examining this aspect of daily life in the early modern Middle East are scholars of the Ottoman Empire. And coffee has received by far the most attention. The classic study on the subject, Ralph Hattox's book on the culture of its consumption in the Ottoman Empire, has recently been joined by studies of various other, mostly trade-related, aspects of coffee's rise to prominence. The history of tea, by contrast, the most popular beverage in much of the Middle East, remains largely unexamined. Remarkably, the same is true for wine. Peter Heine and, more recently, Kathryn Kueny, have addressed the important topic of alcohol in the Islamic world, but wine remains most readily associated with mystical poetry. With David Fahey, we may wonder why the paradox that many Muslims drink despite their religion's ban on alcohol has not excited the curiosity of researchers more than it has.
Focusing on Iran, the answer to this question, and the more general one concerning the dearth of scholarship on all psychoactive substances, will have to take into account the idealist tradition in the country's history, which is arguably as strong as if not stronger than in the case of Arab lands and the Ottoman Empire. The gravitational force of a culture that has tended to value and validate transcendence and essence over palpable, outer reality, has caused scholars of Iran, Iranians and Westerns alike, to privilege the study of the loftier, more spiritual pursuits of human existence over their interest in life's material aspects, including matters of production and consumption. Add to that the richness of Iran's cultural tradition and the relative poverty of socioeconomic documentation for any period prior to the modern age, and one begins to understand why the intoxicating effect of drug taking has agitated scholars mostly as a poetic metaphor.
By sending contradictory signals, the current intellectual climate in the West has been only partially helpful in remedying this situation. Recent trends in scholarship-a broadening of research topics, including socio-economic ones, and a turn to innovative cultural approaches-hold great promise for the field of Middle Eastern studies. Yet, as new vistas have opened up, historians also have faced the anxiety of being branded as "Orientalists," scholars who confuse the study of texts or, worse, texts written by nonnatives, with the study of reality and who use those texts to portray the East as a land of capricious rulers and static societies.
Highlighting alcoholism in court circles and widespread drug use throughout society might not seem the best way to subvert this latter image. It is indeed easier to ignore the voluminous firsthand literature on the topic, because it does not readily fit the image of an energetic society poised for modernity, and to argue, by way of justification, that much of this literature was written by uninformed foreign observers. I have chosen not to do so, in part because ignoring the topic evidently does not make it disappear, and in part because I believe that indigenous sources are as "tainted" for being biased as foreign ones-although for different reasons-and that there is therefore no inherent reason to privilege domestic voices over external ones. Indigenous sources may appear as more authentic to the society that produced them, but they also tend to present and represent a particular, elitist, selective version of reality, aside from yielding little information on issues of socioeconomic import. Proximity and intimate familiarity do not necessarily trump the reflective detachment of the eyewitness account by outsiders, especially not if the latter record their impressions and observations without a denigrating or overly moralizing tone, as those visiting Iran prior to the nineteenth century often did. Accounts of foreigners can thus find a place in a carefully constructed narrative that goes beyond societal stasis and dissolute elite behavior.
The issue of stasis can be summarily dismissed. Origins and early patterns invariably gave way to development and change. The very introduction and spread of the stimulants that entered Iran during the Safavid period, tobacco, coffee, and tea, signal a vibrant rather than an atrophying society. Not only was Safavid Iran being incorporated into a new global matrix of commerce and consumption; Iranians played an active role in its very formation by enthusiastically embracing the new consumables and adapting them to their needs and tastes.
It is admittedly more difficult to subvert the image of fainéant, drug-addled elites, but here, too, a more nuanced picture might be gained. The apparent contrast between the hard-working, disciplined early modern West and the languid, pleasure-seeking Orient created and nurtured by centuries of image-making and reiteration, has of late been undermined by a steady stream of studies that have burrowed deeply underneath the exterior of Western rationalism and bourgeois frugality to find rich layers of deviant social and sexual behavior. When dealing with early modern Middle Eastern society, there is no need to follow the tendency of this scholarship to hail such behavior for being subversive of the prevailing (and oppressive) moral order. To level the playing field, it might be rather more useful neither to follow the "traditional" approach nor to adopt the "new" approach-that is, neither to condemn nor to celebrate and romanticize similar behavior-both of which easily reinforce received notions by identifying drugs with Iranians and their entire culture. To avoid "essentialism" it seems more productive to follow a more functionalist approach by investigating the specific circumstances under which these substances came to play a role in society and how that role changed as circumstances changed.
Specificity, in turn, can be tested and, if need be, challenged through comparison. Tracing Iran's history to the pre-Islamic period takes the burden off Islam as the sole organizing principle of the country's culture and society. Synchronic comparisons, moreover, reveal that in some ways Iran was unique, in others operated in a regional world with which it shared an Islamic cultural idiom, and in yet other ways must be seen as an early modern society that was not that different from faraway countries of a different cultural disposition. It is important to remember in this context that, even as attitudes toward narcotics and stimulants have changed and continue to evolve, as Davenport-Hines says, "absolute sobriety is not a natural or primary human state." Their use is of all time and each society uses its own, but the consumption of legal and illegal substances may be greater in modern times and in the Western world than at any time and in any past society.
The Pursuit of Pleasure, then, seeks to join the literature on Europe with a panoramic, yet detailed study of stimulants that keep you awake, that help improve one's concentration-tobacco, coffee, and tea-and the inebriants, narcotics and hallucinogens that have a mellowing effect-wine, opium, and hashish-in early modern Iranian history along the lines of what scholars such as Schivelbusch and Courtwright have achieved for these consumables in the Western or a larger global context. Its aim is to inspire a wider examination of patterns of consumption and consumerism-consumption on a high level and on the basis of particular scales of values-in Middle Eastern history. It looks at these Genussmittel (lit. means of enjoyment), to use the evocative German term, with an eye to their material manifestation-their pharmacological properties and the accessories associated with their use-but, more important, views them as a prism refracting a variety of economic, social, and political issues. Drugs and stimulants will be discussed in their commercial context, paying attention to patterns of importation and distribution, but the study's larger objective is to offer a social history of ways in which Iranians have approached drugs and stimulants since 1500, adapting them to their cultural environment or adapting their cultural environment to them. It explores the circumstances under which wine and opium were transmitted from earlier times or, in the case of tobacco, coffee, and tea, newly introduced and disseminated, how they became integrated into people's lives, why people used them, which social groups were most affected by them, how they fashioned new patterns of recreation and sociability, and how, finally, they figured in the ongoing process of negotiation between institutions of authority-the state and the religious establishment-and society.
The book pays particular attention to a few specific questions and themes. The first concerns origins, antecedents, and (outside) influence. A distinction needs to be made here between, on the one hand, opium and especially wine, both psychoactive agents that had been part of Iranian society since ancient times, and the "new" stimulants, coffee, tobacco, and tea, on the other, which were introduced and gained popularity only some four hundred years ago. The use of the former goes back to pre-Islamic times, and even after the Arab invasion much of the merriment surrounding Iranian court life can be traced to inherited, non-Islamic cultural traditions. Banquets attended by rulers engaged in ceremonial drinking and enlivened by music-making and homoerotic dancing betray the influence of pre-Islamic Iranian beliefs and practices, in which the rite of drinking wine-a symbol for liquid gold and flowing fire-substituted for the even more ancient blood libation, and an ambience in which catamites abounded. Safavid society sanctioned the excessive drinking of its rulers with a widespread belief that, as the son of the Shiì Imam, the shah was exempt from the ban on drinking alcohol. As was true in many part of the world, opiates served as the only effective painkiller as well as a cure-all for a whole array of ailments and diseases, whereas various opium-laced electuaries were a favorite means for the elite to prolong and enhance sexual performance.
Other non-Islamic, external forces were at work as well. Beginning in the eleventh century C.E. an infusion of Central Asian Turco-Mongol traditions and customs involving excessive drinking and "loose" morals only reinforced such practices. Both traditions resisted the separation of the "clean" from the "dirty" encouraged by the "civilizing process" of normative Islam. The result was a society rich in paradox and ambiguity, led by a royal court legitimized in Islamic terms yet engaged in sexual revelry, the habitual use of opium, and heavy drinking.
In the sixteenth century, wine and opium were joined by tobacco and coffee, both stimulants that entered Iran as part of the so-called Commercial Revolution-the massive movement of goods and people around the globe that started with the European maritime explorations. As was the case in Europe, Iranians initially appreciated these products as medicinal agents, but they soon became very popular as stimulants consumed in an ambience of leisurely sociability. Tobacco conquered the country and both sexes within decades after its introduction. First adopted in Sufi circles, coffee took longer to find a wider consumer base and only became a common beverage with the introduction of the urban coffeehouse at the turn of the seventeenth century. Tea had long been known in Iran through overland contacts with China, but it, too, came to be accepted as more than a remedy for ailments following the sixteenth-century worldwide expansion of trade.
Modern scholars, enthralled or perhaps distracted by the forces of globalization and the attendant loss of visibility of productive forces in the Western world, have shown a growing fascination with consumption as an end in itself. This book makes a conscious attempt to link consumption to the dynamics of production and distribution, in the belief that a narrow focus on consumption at the expense of a careful consideration of underlying demand and supply factors severely distorts reality. A simple diffusionist model rarely accounts for the complexity of the spread of food and drink. In most parts of the world the popularity of coffee, tea, and tobacco was not simply the outcome of availability following Europe's exploration of the seas but, rather, of a complex interplay between supply and demand factors. The lifting of logistical obstacles is surely a precondition for dissemination beyond a tiny elite, but as the popularization of coffee in Europe demonstrates-after the initial introduction by immigrant laborers it took almost a hundred years for the drink to become a commercial success-not a sufficient one. Iran was no different. Matters of geography as much as issues of class and status having to do with outside influence determined the country's eventual preference for tea over coffee. It remains a mystery why the water pipe became the smoking vehicle par excellence in Iran and throughout the Middle East, although not in Europe, but one clue might be an "elective affinity" between the age-old usage of hashish and that of newly introduced tobacco.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pursuit of Pleasure by Rudi Matthee Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | ix | |
| Note on Transliteration | xi | |
| Preface | xiii | |
| Abbreviations | xvii | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Part I | Safavid Period | |
| Chapter 1 | General Overview: Iran between 1500 and 1900 | 17 |
| Chapter 2 | Wine in Safavid Iran I: Between Excess and Abstention | 37 |
| Chapter 3 | Wine in Safavid Iran II: Ambivalence and Prohibition | 69 |
| Chapter 4 | Opium in Safavid Iran: The Assimilated Drug | 97 |
| Chapter 5 | Tobacco in Safavid Iran: Pleasure and Proscription | 117 |
| Chapter 6 | Coffee in Safavid Iran: Commerce and Consumption | 144 |
| Part II | Qajar Period | |
| Chapter 7 | Wine in Qajar Iran: From Flouting the Religious Law to Flaunting Unbelief | 177 |
| Chapter 8 | Opium and Tobacco in Qajar Iran: From Pleasure to Cash Crop and Emblem of the Nation | 207 |
| Chapter 9 | From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran | 237 |
| Chapter 10 | Drinking Tea in the Qahvah-khanah: The Politics of Consumption in Qajar Iran | 267 |
| Conclusion | 293 | |
| Bibliography | 305 | |
| Index | 335 |
What People are Saying About This
"This excellent, well-written book is likely to become a classic work on the subject of drugs and stimulants both in Iran and the wider Islamic world. It will have a readership far beyond those individuals interested principally in Iranian or Middle Eastern studies. The author not only discusses the use of the commodities but he also analyzes the social practice of consumption, the persistent tension between social practice and religious norms exemplified by the use of and attitude toward wine, drugs, and stimulants, and the ways in which Iranian consumption was related to the shifting patterns of international trade."—Stephen F. Dale, Ohio State University, author of The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India (1483-1530)
This excellent, well-written book is likely to become a classic work on the subject of drugs and stimulants both in Iran and the wider Islamic world. It will have a readership far beyond those individuals interested principally in Iranian or Middle Eastern studies. The author not only discusses the use of the commodities but he also analyzes the social practice of consumption, the persistent tension between social practice and religious norms exemplified by the use of and attitude toward wine, drugs, and stimulants, and the ways in which Iranian consumption was related to the shifting patterns of international trade.
— Stephen F. Dale, Ohio State University, author of "The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India (1483-1530)"