The high and low culture of drinking

The lands that came to constitute the Safavid state in the sixteenth century had a long history of exposure to recreational drugs. As we shall see further below, in this region, several psychoactive substances were in common use throughout much of the medieval period. One of these popular drugs was alcohol, which was consumed in different ways by a variety of people and social classes. The broader area associated with the Iranian plateau was one of the first places in the world wherein wine was produced and consumed. This has been demonstrated in recent archaeological excavations which confirm that wine making took place in the Zagros Mountains as early as 3100–2900 bce.Footnote ¹⁶ Written historical records indicate as well that viniculture flourished in the Persian lands in ancient and pre-Islamic times. We know, based on a variety of Iranian sources, that the consumption of wine in royal courts and elite circles was quite extensive in this period.Footnote ¹⁷ Foreign observers also testified that a fully developed economy of wine consumption was already in place in this area by the second century bce. Chinese sources, for example, stress that ‘the grape, in like manner as alfalfa, and the art of making wine were encountered [for the first time] by the Chinese strictly among peoples of Aryan descent, principally of the Iranian family’.Footnote ¹⁸ In one case, we hear of the Chinese General Zhang Qian, who observed that, in the course of his travels through the eastern parts of Parthian Iran—that is, Fergana, Sogdiana, and Bactria—in 128 bce, he witnessed what appears to have been a well-established culture of wine making and consumption. He explained that ‘the wealthy among the people of Fergana stored grape-wine in large quantity up to ten thousand gallons for a long time, keeping it for several decades without risk of deterioration; they were fond of drinking wine in the same manner as their horses relished alfalfa’.Footnote ¹⁹ This evidently common, or even excessive, use of alcohol continued among many different sectors of society in later centuries.

With the arrival and expansion of Islam,Footnote ²⁰ whose mainstream interpretations discouraged, if not completely banned, the consumption of alcoholic beverages,Footnote ²¹ certain social and legal constraints may have hampered the popularity of wine and other alcoholic beverages among some social groups in the Iranian lands.Footnote ²² Ample evidence from the medieval period, however, indicates that many people continued to produce and drink alcohol. In fact, as one historian has recently pointed out, ‘[a]part from the ʿulamaʾ [that is, the religious scholars] and orthodox Muslims, wine drinking [along with indulging in other alcoholic beverages] was not viewed as a negative activity by [Iranian] society in general [in the period] prior to the Mongol invasion’ in the thirteenth century.Footnote ²³ That alcohol continued to be quite popular in the early centuries of Islam is demonstrated by many contemporary sources. One author who wrote about the culture of drinking in this period was, for instance, the eminent Arabo-Persian poet Abu Nuwas al-Hakami (756–814) who was part of the Persian-influenced milieu of Iraq in the eighth and ninth centuries. The poetry of Abu Nuwas celebrated wine drinking, pederasty, hunting, and other worldly pleasures that were an aspect of a meaningful life for him and many like him in the early days of Islam.Footnote ²⁴ The Bacchic wine poetry (khamriyyat) of Abu Nuwas, which was composed in Arabic, was read widely in Iran and soon came to serve as inspiration for many Persian writers who were based in royal courts and were equally preoccupied with wine and other worldly pleasures.Footnote ²⁵ Some examples of this earliest of medieval Persian literature has been analysed by one scholar who has emphasized that Persian poetry from the tenth and eleventh centuries is replete with wine imagery and explicit references to drinking bouts:

The writings of Abu Nuwas and the poets who followed him, in other words, reveal in no ambiguous terms that court poets and their regal patrons in the early centuries of Islam were preoccupied with drinking. This was in fact an indispensable element of their shared culture inherited from pre-Islamic times.Footnote ²⁷

Historical records in the medieval period go beyond the habits of the literati and the ruling elites, however. We have, for example, a variety of sources that emphasize the consumption of alcohol among other social groups such as the wealthy notables, the antinomian Sufis, the working-class population, some learned legal and religious scholars of Islam, and the non-Muslim communities which did not have religious or legal reasons to refrain from drinking.Footnote ²⁸ Many references to wine in the medieval period occur, in the first place, in the didactic literature of the Fürstenspiegel (‘mirrors for princes’). This advice literature was produced often for the education and edification of young princes, notable families, and religious audiences. A typical early example of this genre is the famous eleventh-century Qabusnama, which was composed by the ruler of a small principality in northern Iran. In a key section of the book, the author wrote about alcohol consumption and discouraged his son (who was his primary reader) from drinking. He explained:

What an excerpt such as this allows us to see is how conflicted some people's opinion and attitude were when it came to the consumption of alcohol. Drinking did not necessarily negate one's piety, but there was concern over excessive drinking and appearing intoxicated in public. These words suggest as well how inevitable drinking was for the notables and the lesser elites of certain age group in medieval Iran. The casual reference to the countryside and suburban gardens where feasts and entertainment were arranged and Bacchic festivities took place shows, too, a wider culture of drinking in which distinguished personalities of a given area often participated. Other sources confirm these points.Footnote ³⁰

Moving beyond the political and social elites, we see that some Sufis and mystically oriented communities were likewise attached to alcohol in the medieval period. Contemporary evidence for this phenomenon is similarly quite extensive. But a good place to start is the writings of the thirteenth-century poet Muslih al-Din Shirazi (1210–91), better known as Saʿdi. One of the astute social critics of medieval Iran, the author suggested in several instances in his work that drinking wine was not infrequent among the wayfarers of the mystical path. In one story from his Bustan, for example, we learn about a person who finds some Sufis accustomed to intoxication. Out of religious zeal, the protagonist tries to expose the Sufis to the public by broadcasting their supposed vice. He goes around the city, and draws people's attention to the Sufis: ‘Take note of these Sufis who have drunk wine. / They have [even] pawned their rags to obtain mulled wine’. Ordinary as it seems to have been for some mystics to drink, the generality of people do not attach any weight to this news and in fact ignore the main character's overzealous public shaming. As the protagonist continues to magnify what he considers to be the grievous sins of the Sufis, he is himself exposed and shunned in the city for his preoccupation with other people's purported transgressions.Footnote ³¹ References such as this which abound in the religious, mystical, and didactic literature of the medieval period show two things at once. They indicate, on the one hand, that wine and other alcoholic beverages were not always understood as spiritual drinks, but that some Sufis enjoyed both earthly and other-worldly intoxication. On the other hand, we get a sense that the generality of people who often interacted with these Sufis displayed remarkable acceptance of intoxication in public.

To illustrate this point further, we may refer to another example, this time a story from Tazkira al-awliyaʾ of Farid al-Din ʿAttar Nishaburi (1145–1220)—one of the well-known of the early hagiographers of Sufi saints. In this anecdote, we hear about the life of a great Sufi master, identified as Shaykh Abu ʿAli Daqqaq, who had a popular khanaqah (Sufi retreat) and a large number of disciples and students around him:

The moral and spiritual significance of it aside, the story suggests several things about the culture of drinking in medieval Iran. It reveals that the consumption of beer and, by implication, other alcoholic beverages was not uncommon among Sufis and saints in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. It shows as well that selling beer in close proximity to a popular religious institution and as a result close interactions between a beer seller, his customers, and Sufi students and devotees were not considered religiously or spiritually questionable practices. The account illustrates, furthermore, that, besides wine, there were cheaper drinks such as beer (fuqqaʿ) which average people enjoyed on a daily basis. In different ways, both of the stories cited above demonstrate as well that piety, spirituality, and alcohol were not perceived as contradictory by the many people who read these popular works or interacted with intoxicated Sufis throughout their lives.

Going beyond the literature on Sufis, we have historical evidence that points to the routine consumption of wine among ordinary people. The fourteenth-century iconoclastic poet and satirist Nizam al-Din ʿUbayd Zakani (1300–71), for example, implied in many of his vivid depictions of the everyday life of different groups in society that wine consumption was not infrequent among the elites, the Sufis, and the commoners alike. In one anecdote, the author mocked a ‘typical’ youth from Khurasan who was interested in wine so much that he neglected filial duty:

Notwithstanding the critical tone of the anecdote and its overarching purpose which was didactic and thus dismissing of the behaviour of the protagonist, the story suggests that consumption of alcohol was by no means limited to the parties of the elites and the Sufis. Ordinary and nameless people, especially the youth, were avid consumers of wine (and other alcoholic beverages) as well.

This sentiment is shared in other historical writings that afford glimpses of the everyday life of average people. In many of these sources, we have the repeated reference to fuqqaʿ, which was a cheap carbonated alcoholic beverage that was made from barley or raisins and that was drunk cold. Fuqqaʿ was evidently a favourite beverage of the middling and lower classes in society, while its distribution and sale appear to have been controlled by the working and underclass population. This point is, for example, illustrated in a story cited in Chahar maqala of Nizami Samarqandi (fl. 1110–61)—a notable and learned author of the twelfth century. The narrative gives the oft-repeated and well-known account of the mistreatment of the epic poet Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi (940–1020) by his contemporary and sometime patron Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (r. 1002–30). We are told that, when the king was displeased with the completion of the renowned poet's magnum opus, he sent an insignificant sum, by way of a regal gift, to Firdawsi. The award was meant to be an insult and perhaps even a veiled threat rather than well-deserved recognition of the decades-long endeavour Firdawsi had undertaken to complete his monumental work. The story goes that, upon receiving the news that he was humiliated and censured by a paltry sum of 20,000 silver dirhams, Firdawsi ‘was very distressed’. Still he collected the award out of courtesy or more likely because of concern over his own safety. ‘He then proceeded to the [local] bathhouse, washed himself, drank some ale (fuqqaʿi), and then distributed that award money between the bath attendant and the beer seller’ who was based inside the bathhouse.Footnote ³⁴ The great poet is said to have then fled from his native land in order to evade capture and likely abuse. In this anecdote, the casual mention of the beer seller at the local bathhouse, just like the beer seller at the door of the local khanaqah noted earlier, suggests that the sale and consumption of this beverage were not unusual phenomena in towns and cities of medieval Iran. The reference to these public spaces where people of different walks of life gathered frequently to clean, pray, and socialize indicates as well that the elites and the non-elites both partook in the consumption of this beverage.

That fuqqaʿ was an ordinary part of the everyday life of many different social groups is also attested in other contemporary accounts. In one story from Mantiq al-tayr by ʿAttar Nishaburi, for instance, we learn about a respected and wealthy man who falls in love with a ‘child’—or more likely a ‘teenage’—‘beer seller’ (fuqqaʿi kudaki) and sells all he has in life to buy beer from him. He wants, in other words, to have reasons to be in close proximity to the young beer seller, to please him continuously, and to receive something from him. His love of the boy and his addiction to beer the boy is selling grow together. They eventually bring the wealthy man to utter destitution. In such a state, he continues to enjoy beer and the company of the beer seller: ‘Whenever he would receive some bread / he would give it all to buy some beer’.Footnote ³⁵ Eventually, someone asks him about the meaning of love and the radically altered circumstances of his life. His response is:

Stories such as this, which are not uncommon in the literature of the medieval period, reveal that beer selling and drinking constituted a mundane aspect of the social life of ordinary people (including the wealthy, the poor, and the underclass population). They also suggest that the consumption of alcohol was seen in certain quarters to be synonymous with detachment from the world and in fact a manifestation of mystical or, for that matter, earthly love.

Similarly, the popular literature of the pre-modern period, which gives a better sense of the life of average people, affirms that the consumption of alcohol was not limited to the upper classes. This is perhaps best shown by the epic romance known as Samak-i ʿayyar, which dates to the twelfth century (or possibly earlier) and which is one of the most important sources we have for the reconstruction of the social history of Iran in the immediate centuries after Islam.Footnote ³⁷ This lengthy prose narrative, which appears to have originated in the milieu of itinerant folk storytellers (who themselves generally came from the middling layers of society), gives a detailed picture of ‘chivalrous’ brotherhoods and sisterhoods that constituted an important feature of the everyday life of the common people in many towns and cities of Iran in the pre-Islamic and medieval periods.Footnote ³⁸ Members of these fraternities, who were known as ‘ʿayyars’, drew their new recruits often from the lower classes in society; they then initiated them in ceremonies that included ‘shadi-khvari’ (‘blissful drinking’ or ‘drinking to happiness’). In these and other frequent bouts and festivities, the duration of which sometimes extended for days, drinking alcohol was common among both male and female ʿayyars. As one scholar has pointed out, ‘taking the oath with wine was the central ritual of the ʿayyars, so much so that taking the oath with the “cup of the men” ... or its equivalent, oaths with the “cup of friendship” ..., was likewise central to the praxis of the ʿayyars’.Footnote ³⁹ The following excerpt—one of many depicting wine drinking throughout this extended narrative account—shows a typical oath ceremony where drinks function as the solidifier of the oath of brotherhood. In this scene, Niyal b. Sanjabi, a newly recruited ʿayyar, takes an oath with Samak, the protagonist of the story, and his companion, Surkhvard:

Similar references to drinking bouts occur in another epic romance known as Firuzshahnama. The only extant version of this lengthy prose account is based on the narration of a certain Muhammad b. Ahmad Bighami, who is likely to have flourished sometime in the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴¹ The following selection provides a typical example of the scenes where wine functions as an indispensable part of the daily life of the characters in this story. In the case below, Akhi Saʿdan, a young ʿayyar who is also a cook by profession, entertains Firuz Shah, the protagonist, who finds himself one night in desperate need of taking refuge with Akhi Saʿdan:

As this excerpt and the one from Samak-i ʿayyar illustrate, popular heroes of the medieval Persian folk literature enjoyed regular, in fact excessive, drinking in their daily lives. To them, the act of consuming wine was a symbol of chivalry and brotherhood, even as it provided the opportunity for recreation and indulgence. These accounts, which are accurate reflections of the culture of the streets in the pre-modern period, reveal in no uncertain terms that the consumption of alcohol was not limited to the elites, but rather it was equally part of the everyday life of other social classes in medieval Iran.

The evidence provided so far seems to suggest that the amount of drinking along with the volume of alcohol production was quite a lot in pre-modern times. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the scale of output and consumption appears to have expanded even further.Footnote ⁴³ Alcohol had now become a major industry in the Iranian lands. This was evident in the large quantity of wine that was produced in the Safavid state every year. The southern city of Shiraz, for example, which was by no means the only centre of production, recorded an annual output of around 200,025 batmans (around 4,125 tons), which was a considerable amount by any global standard at the time.Footnote ⁴⁴ A large quantity of this wine from Shiraz and elsewhere was consumed domestically, but a certain percentage was exported to other countries. By the early modern period, in other words, Persian wine had found a niche in the global market and had become a key export commodity for the Iranian state.Footnote ⁴⁵ As the seventeenth-century French merchant traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier explained, ‘some 2,000 hl, approximately one-quarter of the total production from Shiraz in 1666, was for export to the Indies’, for instance.Footnote ⁴⁶ The ever developing nature of the wine industry by the Safavid period can also be seen in the apparent change in the patterns of packaging, shipment, and quality control. People started, for example, to use bottles, as opposed to barrels, jars, or urns, for wine storage and transportation; we are told that bottles were ‘packed in cases so carefully that they only rarely broke’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The new techniques that undergirded the production, storage, and transportation of wine were not in use for the export market alone. Domestically, too, wine had become an important consumer good. This development was perhaps most visible in the emergence of a distribution network in each city that included one or more sharab khanas (wine shops or taverns) where different types of alcoholic beverages, including wine, were openly sold and consumed. Moving beyond wine, we see that other alcoholic beverages were also available in the Safavid market. In most urban centres, there existed one or more buza khanas (beer houses) where buza—a type of intoxicating drink that was made from rice, millet, or barley—was enjoyed by people from different walks of life.Footnote ⁴⁸ Distilled beverages had also become fashionable in these public venues. An early sixteenth-century historian described one particular type of spirit, which was known as arak (ʿaraq) and drew a good deal of popular interest. It was ‘a type of liquor that was transparent just like water; its main characteristic was its heat and fire; and it looked like melted crystal’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Depending on the availability of the raw material in a given locality, arak could be produced from grapes, raisins, apples, pears, or dates. Yet another popular beverage was called tahu, which was obtained from distilling wine. The point is that wine and beer, whose output and consumption likely increased with time, functioned in a wider drinking culture by the early modern period.Footnote ⁵⁰ There were now a variety of wines and alcoholic beverages that people enjoyed in different parts of the country.Footnote ⁵¹

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Persian drinking culture had long been associated with the leisure and indulgence of the middling and upper layers of society. But lower classes and rougher elements in the urban areas were now partaking in it as well. It was not uncommon, for example, to see antinomian Sufis, street toughs, and those who frequented brothels (bayt al-lutfs), game houses (qumar khanas), or music houses (qavval khanas) visit wine shops and beer houses. Street wrestlers, jesters, jugglers, and magicians; people who attended the parties of pederasts, musicians, and male prostitutes; or those who organized and bet in street games—contemporary sources identify a few of these popular games as chess, backgammon, wolf fights, bullfights, ram fights, cockfights, and pigeon racing—were other regular attendees of these venues. Some of the people who visited wine shops and beer houses also took part in street fights and disorderly drinking parties in public. It was this aspect of the drinking culture, connected as it seems to have been with the low culture of the streets, sexual indecency, and public disturbance, that made it most objectionable to the authorities; it also incensed the orthodox clerics, who had some religious and legal reasons for their opposition. Instances of intermittent bans on drinking and wine production thus abounded in late medieval and early modern times. One gets the impression, however, that, beyond religious orthodoxy—which has been extensively written about—there was an element of concern with regard to the expansion of alcohol consumption in society and its growing connection with sexual misconduct and social disorder that was behind the occasional implementation of these bans.Footnote ⁵² Such association of wine with ‘crime’ may have been limited to specific venues (for example, wine shops, beer houses, and certain neighbourhoods), social groups (that is, the working and rougher classes in the urban areas), and circumstances of consuming alcohol in public (for example, pederasty and alcoholic consumption were evidently not unrelated).Footnote ⁵³ More ‘refined’ manners of drinking among the middling and upper classes continued to present probably a more respectable cultural strand that could have redefined and rehabilitated the image of wine consumption in society.

Occasional interdictions of drinking and wine production notwithstanding, the consumption of alcohol was integrated fully into a much broader imperial economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We know this because we have records of the Safavid state levying taxes on the owners of wine shops and beer houses.Footnote ⁵⁴ That the state was interested in regulating the alcohol industry (not just at the point of productionFootnote ⁵⁵ but more importantly at the sale and distribution levels) suggests that consumption of this substance was formally recognized as legitimate in society, and that it had become an integral part of the revenue structure and the economy of the state in the early modern period.

To suppress distress and generate euphoria

Alcohol was by no means the only recreational drug consumed in the Iranian world in the medieval and early modern periods. People were also intimately familiar with opiates, whose presence in the region went back centuries. We know, for example, that, as early as 3400 bce, the opium poppy was cultivated in lower Mesopotamia and its psychoactive properties were known in various population centres across West and South Asia. Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, as well as Greeks and Indians had sophisticated understanding of the physiological effects of opium on the body and the mind, and used this substance for a variety of medicinal, anaesthetic, mystical, and occult purposes.Footnote ⁵⁶ This wider regional acquaintance with the poppy was in all likelihood shared among the Persians as well, who were at one point in control of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and parts of Greece and India. There was also a good deal of commercial exchange between different population centres of West and South Asia in antiquity which facilitated the transfer of a highly portable drug like opium. We know, for instance, that, by the second century bce, opium was imported along with spices, slaves, perfumes, and precious stones from India into Parthian Iran.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whatever the scale of opium production and exchange before Islam, it is likely that, with the establishment of the earliest caliphate in the seventh century and in the context of the heightened circulation of people, commodities, and ideas across the broader Middle East during this time, the production, trade, and consumption of this substance expanded even further.Footnote ⁵⁸

By the tenth century, the poppy was probably cultivated in different parts of the Iranian lands. This point may be gleaned from several references to opium in one of the earliest and most detailed lists of cultivars in Persian that dates back to the second half of the tenth century. The author, a certain Abu Mansur al-Haravi, who was both a physician and a pharmacologist, spoke of two different types of the opium plant—namely ‘white’ and ‘black’ ones—and compared the psychoactive properties of their extracts with ‘Mandragora’ (yabruj), ‘wild lettuce’ (kahu-yi kuhi), and ‘cannabis’ or a cannabis-like substance (bang). He explained that opiates in general and opium more specifically have ‘a lot of benefits’ for all sorts of illnesses, and then enumerated a number of different methods his contemporaries employed in order to consume opium. One particular manner of consumption was to add opium, cinnamon, and pepper to ‘very old wine’, and take it the way most people consumed their wine. Such references and the sheer number of ways opium had come to be used seem to indicate that the substance had been integrated, for some time, into a culture that saw its medicinal and recreational functions as interconnected.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is perhaps against this background that we should understand the often indignant references to the seemingly ‘inappropriate’ consumption of opium that we find in some contemporary didactic works. One such remark occurs in the Zoroastrian Middle Persian text Arda Viraznamag, which condemns the evidently not-so-uncommon recreational use of opium in society. A religious and doctrinal text at its core, the Arda Viraznamag, like many Zoroastrian works, underwent successive redactions. The book is thought to have reached its final form in the ninth or tenth century.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this detailed narrative of an extra-terrestrial journey to Heaven and Hell, Arda Viraz, the principal character of the account, encounters a woman who is punished quite severely for what appears to be her inappropriate use and distribution of opium:

It seems unlikely that the woman in the above excerpt was thought to be liable for such a harsh sentence because she had promoted opium for some medical purpose alone. Contemporary references such as this suggest, in other words, that, by the tenth century, or possibly earlier, opium was no longer consumed for its healing properties only. Some had come to use it in ways that the more conservative elements in society considered harmful and abusive.

The number of such remarks in the original sources increased exponentially in the eleventh century. This may have been because of the heightened visibility of the drug in society compared with the previous centuries. The literate classes who composed most of the contemporary accounts appear to have been exposed more than ever before to a rising culture of opium consumption in this period.Footnote ⁶² A close reading of these references, in any case, seems to indicate that the substance had long come to be used for both medicinal and recreational purposes. When, for example, towards the end of his life, Avicenna (ʿAbu ʿAli Sina) (980–1037), the great philosopher and physician of medieval Iran, was plagued by several different illnesses, we are told that one of his attendants added opium to the ‘Mithridate Concoction’ (maʿjun-i Mitruditus) that he drank regularly in order to contain his ‘epilepsy’.Footnote ⁶³ Such medical use of the drug was as fashionable as consuming it for its intoxicating properties. The latter is often suggested when contemporary sources compare the place of opium in society with that of wine. To cite one such case, we may refer to the work of the philosopher-poet Abu Muʿin Nasir-i Khusraw (1004–88) wherein opium appears frequently as a much stronger recreational substance. One representative line, for instance, comes from an ode about the human body and soul. In this searching meditation on the meaning of life, the narrator berates the body for having ambitions for an eternal life and blames his interlocutor for being intoxicated not with wine, but with opium: ‘Someone intoxicated with wine would not be like this because / it is clear that you are in this state and befuddled in this specific way by reason of opium’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such mention of opium consumption, symbolic and metaphorical though it may be, abounds in the poetry of Nasir-i Khusraw and his contemporaries. These literary references indicate that, in the context of the drug culture of the eleventh century, the audience of this poetry understood quite well the comparison that was drawn with alcohol.Footnote ⁶⁵

Moving beyond the poetry of the eleventh century, we may refer to Tarikh-i Bayhaqi, which is a remarkably detailed chronicle of the reign of Sultan Masʿud of Ghazna (r. 1030–41) and which affords a rare window on the culture and society of Iran in this period. A casual mention of opium use in this historical account reveals that the consumption of this substance for the purpose of stiffening courage and lessening anxiety may not have been infrequent in medieval battlefields and military conflicts. The reference in question comes from a description of the most important of the Ghaznavid expeditions against the invading forces of the Saljuq Turks in 1039, during which the author, a secretary in the Ghaznavid court, witnessed the king take some opium:

Read in the context of similar statements in other contemporary sources, the passage suggests that opium consumption was probably not uncommon in the Ghaznavid court, and among the rank and file of the Ghaznavid soldiers and subjects. The excerpt indicates as well that people such as the author of Tarikh-i Bayhaqi were likely familiar with the non-medicinal use of the drug. That opium was known and consumed in the Ghaznavid court and beyond is attested likewise in the poetry of Abu al-Hasan Farrukhi Sistani (980–1037), a prominent poet and panegyrist at the Ghaznavid court. In one ode praising a high-ranking personage—identified as ʿAzid al-Dawla Amir Yusuf b. Nasir al-Din—Farrukhi implied that opium consumption was an ordinary thing in court and among soldiers: ‘The opponents arrive to face the prince in the battleground / feeble like the intoxicated ones who had [a good deal of] opium’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Whatever the level of opium production and use in the eleventh century, the cultivation of the poppy and its trade and consumption expanded further in the later periods. This was the case particularly after the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the reign of Mahmud Ghazan Khan (1295–1304), for example, we know that a ‘special and “salutary”’ theriaca became popular in the Ilkhanid state that was known as taryaq-i Ghazani. By 1332, moreover, there had been enough opium produced in Iran that the Ilkhanid ruler, Abu Saʿid Bahadur Khan (r. 1316–35), was able to send ‘an envoy [to Yuan China] with a tribute of 88 catties [Chinese pounds] of theriaca [ta-li-ya]’Footnote ⁶⁹ designated specifically for the great khan in Beijing. This seems to be the first recorded case of sending Persian opium across long distances. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, furthermore, various groups of people who were avid consumers of alcohol in the Iranian lands had come to consider opium as a key instrument of indulgence and leisure.

The affinity that many saw between opium and alcohol was perhaps most clearly manifested in the particular ways people consumed the two. It was common, for instance, to have opium and wine together. This is illustrated in numerous instances in the Persian poetry from the medieval period. We shall refer to one representative example that comes from a lyric composed by Saʿdi. The poem is about the pretensions of overtly pious believers and the virtuous life of a tolerant but worldly mystic. In one specific line, the author depicts a festive atmosphere where the persona in the poem brings together a youthful beloved, a spiritual wayfarer, and an enlightened individual to celebrate their fellowship and mystical union. He notes: ‘We have brought the learned sage in a state of happiness and the Sufi whirling. / We have made the lover dance and have put opium in the wine cup’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Regardless of its broader meaning and implications, the line shows that people consumed opium along with wine and that the former was a key instrument of entertainment in such convivial settings. This point is implied likewise in a well-known lyric about love, self, and the path to a fulfilling life written by the fourteenth-century poet, Shams al-Din Muhammad Shirazi, better known as Hafiz (1325–89). In the following line, ‘the cup-bearer’ is in effect the embodiment of the ideal beloved while ‘the opponents’ are rivals of the poem's narrator in a quest for the attention and the affection of the beloved: ‘Of that opium that the cup-bearer cast in the wine, / the opponents have all but lost their heads and turbans’.Footnote ⁷¹ The metaphorical use of wine and opium in this line notwithstanding, the image that Hafiz conjures up is unmistakably drawn from the social atmosphere of the late medieval period.

The affinity that people saw between the two drugs could be seen in other manners of opium consumption as well. Many, for example, mixed opium juice with hempseeds and created a syrup called Faluniya, which appeared similar to an alcoholic beverage.Footnote ⁷² Another popular drink was made out of bruised opium capsules that had been ‘cooked’ in water and spices; the product looked and tasted like mulled wine. Opium juice was likewise mixed with honey, bezoar, zedoary, black pepper, saffron, Spanish chamomile, and still other spices. The result was a tonic that resembled wine and was called barsh.Footnote ⁷³ Such evident parallels between opium and alcohol had in effect turned the former to an accessory of the latter and its quasi-legal and less problematic equivalent. Since opiates, unlike wine and alcohol, were not explicitly mentioned in the canonical texts of Islam, it was possible for many consumers to contend that opium should not be the target of religious or legal censure. The affinity with alcohol thus allowed opium to find a suitable niche in society. Its ambiguous legal status, on the other hand, made any interdiction quite difficult, if not impossible. But this was not the only advantage opium had over wine and other alcoholic beverages. People also turned processed opium extracts to pills, paste, or powder, which they carried with themselves throughout the day. Opium was, in other words, a more portable drug that could be consumed with ease and speed just about anywhere. This was clearly not the case with more conventional drinks.Footnote ⁷⁴

Such qualities that opium possessed helped make it a sought-after consumer good. By the early sixteenth century, one gets the impression that the popular interest in the drug in certain parts of Iran had surpassed that in alcohol. There were now regions and communities whose collective opium consumption was so high that they had acquired a reputation for grappling with addiction. No such development had previously been recorded with respect to alcohol. Tabriz, for example, was known now to have a population that was by and large accustomed to opium. We are told that ‘most of the people’ in the city consumed the substance and, as one historical geographer noted sardonically, they appeared to have two radically different personalities as a result: ‘If one [tries to] speak with them in the morning, they [are without patience and] respond with irritation. But when they receive their [regular] portion of hilarity (kayfiyyat) in the afternoon, if they hear a hundred terrible things from someone, they respond softly and with humility’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Such societies of opium consumers only expanded in the later decades of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries. Now ‘a lot of people’ associated with the ‘seminaries’, the ‘Sufi establishments’, and the literary circles, as well as those who engaged in hard labour consumed the substance. Opium was also popular among the soldiers, the workers, the poor, and the elites.Footnote ⁷⁶ In major urban centres of the Safavid state, noted quite disapprovingly a certain Muhammad ʿAli Qazvini in the seventeenth century, ‘there is no one who is not polluted to some type of opiates’.Footnote ⁷⁷ For their part, though, people had a variety of reasons for turning to opium. Some used it to keep themselves awake while travelling, others to make themselves warm during winter. Some sought to increase their sexual drive, others to commit suicide. Some wanted to generate inner strength in themselves; others pursued a mind-altering experience that they thought helped them find inspiration for new ideas and discoveries, be they mystical or otherwise. There were also reports that some wished to generate personal happiness and euphoria, others to suppress their distress. As the Safavid physician, ʿImad al-Din Mahmud Shirazi (fl. sixteenth century), explained in a treatise on opium, ‘some people are addicted to opium because of this latter reason alone. They have a lot of pain and misery as a result of the [recent economic?] changes in life. They have recourse to opium in order to suppress their distress’.Footnote ⁷⁸

To sustain this growing popular demand in Safavid Iran, opium trade and output had likewise increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But ‘the popular interest in opium’ was at times so ‘extreme and high’ that it could not be addressed by the annual production in the country. In such cases, it was not uncommon to see opium sellers engage in price-gouging or adulterating their commodity.Footnote ⁷⁹ Still in a clear sign of an expanding opium industry, a nascent distribution network carried the substance from the countryside where it was produced to various towns and cities of the empire where the market was most lucrative. A group of specialized retailers (taryak furushan) had also emerged in the urban areas who were involved in the daily sale of opium; they would eventually organize their own autonomous guilds in major towns and cities of the country.Footnote ⁸⁰ By the sixteenth century, moreover, most urban centres had one or more kuknar khanas (opium dens) and maʿjun khanas (concoction houses) where customers enjoyed, among other things, drinks made out of opium extracts.Footnote ⁸¹ Like wine shops and beer houses, these establishments were subject to regular government taxation.Footnote ⁸² The production and sale of opium and its derivatives were, in other words, part of the formal economy of the Safavid state just as their consumption was an aspect of the everyday culture and economy of many households. Beyond the rising internal consumption, there may have been a foreign market for this burgeoning opium industry as well. Portable and highly valuable, the substance could have been exported to the regions neighbouring the Safavid state.Footnote ⁸³ The amount of export (if any) must have remained negligible, however. It was only in the nineteenth century that opium export (mostly to China) became significant enough to warrant mention in the contemporary sources.Footnote ⁸⁴

It was perhaps because of this growing economy and culture of opium use in the Iranian lands that there was intermittent opposition to the drug in the medieval and early modern periods. Some political elites and orthodox religious groups were concerned about the increasing popular interest in the substance and objected to the sale of opium derivatives in public. To a large extent, this opposition mirrored the one against alcohol; it appears to have been activated, at least in part, by the not-so-infrequent instances of sexual misconduct and social disorder that accompanied the public consumption of opium by the lower and rougher elements in society.Footnote ⁸⁵ Others had purely religious and legal grounds for their hostility towards the drug; this was because they considered opium a psychoactive substance quite similar to alcohol. These orthodox religious classes, in other words, objected to the use of all intoxicants in society. Ultimately, though, as one scholar has noted recently, being ‘not explicitly excoriated in the Koran, [opium] was so thoroughly indigenized [in Iranian society over the course of the medieval and early modern periods] that it barely provoked [continuous] religious … resistance’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Cooking bang in a mosque and other stories

Alcohol and opium were by no means the only recreational substances popular in the Iranian world in the medieval and early modern periods. People were also familiar with at least one other drug, that is, cannabis or a cannabis-like substance, whose consumption had a long history that went back to antiquity. The effort to document the story of this product is, however, frustrated by a glaring confusion that exists in many original sources from the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. While some careful scientific treatises, such as al-Haravi's tenth-century pharmacological work,Footnote ⁸⁷ differentiate clearly between cannabis (shahdana) and a cannabis-like substance (bang), many other historical sources use the term ‘bang’ (also ‘banj’ and ‘mang’) along with a variety of other names (such as shahdana and gargarinj) quite indiscriminately. It seems that they deploy these terms in order to refer to one or two products that were quite popular in the Iranian lands. The problem is compounded further by the fact that different varieties of cannabis and the cannabis-like plant (perhaps henbane?) were present in society throughout the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, and they all had different properties and usage. This unfortunate development—that is, the confusion over the precise meaning of terms such as bang—is not limited to the historical sources in Persian. The medieval Arabic literature has a similar problem with the uncritical but widespread use of the term banj.Footnote ⁸⁸ The challenge that the indiscriminate deploying of the above-noted terms (especially bang) presents thus makes it very difficult, perhaps impossible even, to chronicle the evolving consumption patterns of each of the plants and the substances taken from them separately. In our discussion below, we shall therefore specify whatever term our sources use—which is bang more often than not—in an effort to document the history of cannabis and/or a cannabis-like substance.Footnote ⁸⁹

With this caveat in mind, we may begin by stating that Iranians were familiar with cannabis in the ancient and pre-Islamic period. Herodotus, for example, mentioned that hemp was known to Scythians, who were a nomadic people of Iranian origin based in the steppe lands to the north of the Black Sea region during the seventh to the fourth centuries bce. They evidently consumed hemp for recreational and industrial purposes. ‘There is a plant growing in their country called cannabis’, the Greek historian explained, ‘which closely resembles flax, except that cannabis is thicker-stemmed and taller. In Scythia, in fact, it is far taller. It grows wild, but is also cultivated, and the Thracians use it, as well as flax, for making clothes’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The industrial use of hemp was indeed common among ancient Iranians. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that, as early as the beginning of the first millennium bce, hemp was used to make fabrics, strings, or ropes in the culture that flourished on the southwest of the Caspian coast. Similarly, hemp cord, along with other textile remains, has been found on the Iranian plateau dating back to the Parthian period.Footnote ⁹¹ In addition, several key Middle Persian texts that have pre-Islamic origins refer to bang (or ‘mang’) as a medicinal or an empowering drug. One explicitly notes that, when Ahriman, which is God's principal adversary in the Zoroastrian religion, attacked the creation, ‘Ohrmazd [that is, the creator God] gave the primordial bull a “medicinal” mang to lessen its injury’. The substance was also ‘an ingredient of the “illuminating drink” that allowed Wištāsp [an early believer and patron of the Prophet Zoroaster] to see the “great xwarrah” and the “great mystery”’ of the Zoroastrian faith. As one scholar has pointed out, bang was in fact ‘an integral part of the ecstatic practice aimed at opening the “eye of the soul”’Footnote ⁹² in the pre-Islamic religion of Iran. This point is perhaps most evident in the narrative account of the Arda Viraznamag where the principal character undertakes a spiritual journey to Heaven and Hell induced in part by drinking, according to customs, three cups of wine mixed with mang. The story gives the impression that the manner of consuming this substance was quite well established in the culture of Iran during this time:

When Arda Viraz is done performing the rituals and is ready for his mystical journey,

The culture of bang consumption was, in other words, developed to some extent in the pre-Islamic period. Still, with the passage of time, the use and exchange of this substance expanded further. By the ninth century, for example, the drug had become so popular that some orthodox scholars of Islam who resided in the eastern ʿAbbasid caliphate began to worry about its effects on believers and in society at large.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is from this point onwards that historical sources start to mention bang on a more consistent basis. Despite the emergence of some clerical opposition, the fortunes of the drug were on the rise in the Iranian lands. By the eleventh century, the substance had become an important instrument of indulgence and entertainment among the elites and commoners alike. This was perhaps most evident in the variety of ways people had come to enjoy the drug. Just as was the case with opium, having bang along with wine and other alcoholic beverages was now quite fashionable. This manner of consumption was a recurring trope in the Persian literature of the period.Footnote ⁹⁵ One representative verse in the poetry of Farrukhi Sistani reveals how this common method of use was referenced in the literary works of the eleventh century: ‘Before you, the most eloquent speakers remain speechless / just like someone who has taken bang with a cup of wine’. This line comes in the middle of an ode in praise of a high-ranking personage—a certain Amir Abu Yaʿqub Yusuf b. Nasir al-Din. It shows that the literati and the political elites of the Ghaznavid state, who constituted the primary audiences of poems such as this, were not unfamiliar with the meaning of the reference to bang. In fact, it is likely that they enjoyed the drug in their own frequent drinking bouts. A different way of taking the substance in this period was to ingest it on its own. This point is suggested in the contemporary sources by the recurrent statement of ‘eating bang’, which is then followed with no specific mention of other drugs that could have accompanied it.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet another form of consumption entailed cooking hemp leaves and mixing them with husked sesame and a sweetener such as sugar, honey, and date syrup. The product was made into a paste and eventually pills that could be taken at will. This method of use turned bang, just like opium, to one of the most portable and convenient recreational substances available in the Iranian lands.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such diverse manners of consumption and having it along with wine or in the style of opium indicate that, by the eleventh century, the recreational use of this substance was prevalent among several different groups of people. The growing public interest in bang resulted in the rise of several common ‘nicknames’ for the drug in this period as well. One popular term was ‘hashish’, which meant ‘the herb’. The nickname appears to suggest that the substance had become well known and quite fashionable in society, so much so that it now had a recognizable colloquial name.Footnote ⁹⁸

Whatever the level of consumption up to this point, historical evidence suggests that bang became even more popular in the Iranian world between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. We know, for example, that, during this time, antinomian Sufis were able to integrate hashish into their rituals and practices, and then export the substance to different parts of the Islamic ecumene. In their wanderings to regions neighbouring Iran, they introduced the drug, more specifically, to the like-minded communities in Iraq and the other centres of trade and pilgrimage in the west.Footnote ⁹⁹ Inside the Iranian lands, on the other hand, the consumption of bang had expanded by the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Historical sources from this period often attribute the expansion of drug use to the cultural impact of the Mongol onslaughts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The connections that people drew between the spread of bang and the advent of the new social and political order may have been grounded in the purported Mongol susceptibility to abuse drugs and stimulants, the overall negative image the Mongols had in Iran and the broader Middle East, and the historical tendency to blame them for what many sources considered a pernicious development in the region. But it could be possible as well that the nascent globalization that the Mongol empire facilitated across Eurasia brought about a heightened circulation of not just people, ideas, and more conventional consumer goods, but also drugs such as bang in and around the Iranian world. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in any case, the consumption patterns of bang were changing as well. We hear for the first time that people started to prepare the drug by mixing it with dairy products. It was now common to ‘cook’ bang leaves in milk and add some sweeteners to the tonic before taking it. Some Sufis also promoted a beverage that was made from diluted yogurt and hashish extracts. The product was a concoction that they called the ‘drink of [divine] unity’ (dugh-i vahdat).Footnote ¹⁰²

Much to the consternation of the orthodox religious groups, by the fourteenth century, sellers of bang and charas (the latter being the powder form of hemp leaves)Footnote ¹⁰³ had made their appearance in many towns and cities across the Iranian lands. People had also started to take the substance more openly. The audacity of the retailers and consumers is depicted often evocatively in the literature of this period. A case in point is the profane and irreverent writing of ʿUbayd Zakani. In one anecdote from his Risala-yi dilgusha, we find a nameless, ‘average’ person preparing bang in a mosque. He is presumably intent on enjoying the substance himself or alternatively giving it to other worshippers:

The comic and exaggerated tenor of the story notwithstanding, it implies that the response on the part of the conservative elements was often open hostility. Other historical sources from the fourteenth century tell us more about the nature of this growing opposition. For example, when a conservative dervish by the name of Shams al-Din ʿAli (r. 1347–51) came to power in the short-lived state of the Sarbadar dynasty in Khurasan, we are told that he took drastic measures ‘to stamp out prostitution and traffic in drugs and liquor’ that were evidently considerable across the region. Some ‘five hundred whores were thrown down a well’ in Sabzavar alone, even as he waged an unsuccessful campaign to eradicate wine and bang from the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ When ʿAli Muʿayyad (r. 1364–76, 1379–86), another zealous ruler of the Sarbadars, assumed power in the second half of the century, he underscored his religious fervour by making a show of his abstinence from bang and wine. Both drugs had evidently become very important to the culture of the ruling elites by this time.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The open hostility of the conservative elements in this period can be seen in the very strong language they used against the drug as well. A certain Muhammad Ibrahim Sarmadi (fl. 791? AH/1389? ce), for instance, compared the consumption of bang with incest and irreligion. ‘One [single] bite of bang’, he stressed, ‘is like fornicating with one's mother seventy times, and one who fornicates with one's mother once is like having destroyed the [sacred House of God] Kaʿba seventy times’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Despite such vehement opposition from certain orthodox religious groups, one gets the impression that some consumers took up bang because they thought it was technically ‘permissible’ in society at large. Just as was the case with opium, there was indeed no explicit reference to the substance in the canonical texts of Islam. It was hence possible for some to contend that the conservative groups had no justification for their opposition. This much was, for example, suggested in a work by a certain Saʿd al-Din b. Bahaʾ al-Din, who flourished sometime in the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries. The author composed a poetic disputation between bang and wine, in which the former mocks the latter with a series of claims that culminates in the following statement: ‘in the religious writings it has been repeatedly stated that it is you [that is, wine] that is forbidden [in society]; / it is you [not me] that is prohibited unequivocally by law, reason, and religion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A similar point was made by Khvaja ʿUbayd al-Din (d. 1285–86), a thirteenth-century author, who composed a separate poetic disputation between the two intimate drugs. In this case, bang taunts wine by saying that ‘it is on your face that is written the [Qur'anic verse] “Approach not prayers …” / and it is you that is known as the mother of all sins’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Notwithstanding the aesthetic and literary character of these poems, they reflected the position of certain consumers of bang in the late medieval period. The quasi-legality of the substance, in other words, appears to have made it into a more acceptable replacement for alcohol, at least in some social circles.

The connection that people drew between the two drugs could also be observed in the ways they prepared bang, which seem to have mimicked the appearance and effects of alcohol. Some, for example, ‘cooked’ hemp leaves in water or milk and then mixed the intoxicating tonic with different spices they liked. The product was something not dissimilar to mulled wine, which was quite popular in this period.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Others took bang with cold and diluted yogurt, which was not unlike having fuqqaʿ and buza. Brushing aside the religious justification for intermittent bans on intoxicants, some consumed bang and alcohol together. People, as we have seen earlier, dissolved bang extracts in alcohol as well or took pills of processed bang with a sip of wine. Bang consumption, in other words, appears to have been, just like opium use, an extension of alcohol consumption or at times a technically ‘legal’ equivalent to it. This affinity that people saw between the two drugs is suggested in many contemporary sources. The best examples, however, come from a new genre of writing that emerged in the late medieval period and that styled itself ‘poetic disputation’ (munazira) between bang and bada (wine).Footnote ¹¹¹ Two examples of this genre we have cited above. A third instance comes from the pen of the eminent Azeri poet, Muhammad Fuzuli, who completed his Turkish couplets, somewhat prosaically entitled Bang va bada, around 1508. A devout Twelver Shiite, Fuzuli may have dedicated this work to the Safavid Shah Ismaʾil I (r. 1501–24) whom he admired and supported politically.Footnote ¹¹² As a resident of Iraq for much of his life, the author must have felt relieved to have witnessed Ismaʾil capturing and then integrating Baghdad into a nascent Shiite empire. For this and other reasons, Fuzuli composed his poetic disputation in such a way that wine and its numerous virtues represented the champion of his faith while bang personified the character and qualities of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), who was the shah's arch-nemesis in the Sunni world. The polemic and sectarian subtext of this work notwithstanding, it illustrates once again the connection that people often drew between the two drugs. One also gets the impression that Fuzuli's overarching argument that wine was in every respect superior and preferable to bang displayed wider social concern for the ever more prominent place of the latter drug in society.

Regardless of such growing anxiety, the popularity of the substance remained a feature of the Iranian lands during the early modern period. By the sixteenth century, for example, the Safavid shahs and princes could not come of age without toying with the drug.Footnote ¹¹³ A case in point was Tahmasp I (r. 1525–76), who implied in his autobiography that he was an avid consumer of the substance. He noted that, when he was 20 years old, he resolved to abstain from wine, bang, other intoxicants, and what he considered to be promiscuous sexual liaisons. His repentance, which had a combination of personal and political reasons, was then celebrated in a memorable quatrain:

The cryptic references to ‘the emerald powder’ and ‘the liquid ruby’ were, as explained further below, euphemisms for bang and wine. The king was, in other words, acknowledging a period in his life when he was preoccupied with things that must have shamed him later in life. The popularity of bang in the early modern period was not, however, limited to the circles of the ruling elites. It was in fact the influence of the substance in society that concerned some Safavid rulers and statesmen who sought at different times to control bang consumption within their realm. This was, for example, the case with the issuance of a short-lived public ban on the use of this and other intoxicants by Tahmasp himself.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such edicts and restraints notwithstanding, the consumption of bang continued to expand. If some rulers interdicted intoxicants, others remained partial to them. To cite two of many Safavid shahs who were dependent on drugs, we may refer to Ismaʾil II (r. 1576–77), who was reported to have been addicted to Faluniya, which, as we observed earlier, was an infusion made of hempseeds and opium juice.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Safi (r. 1629–42) was likewise attached to heavy drinking and opium abuse, in which he took part with his courtiers on a regular basis.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Despite the issuance of intermittent bans on drug consumption, we know also that, by the Safavid period, there was one or more bang khanas (‘hemp’ chambers) in most urban centres of the country where people took part in consuming various derivatives of this substance in public. The appearance of these specialized retailers—along with bang and charas sellers that had emerged much earlier—indicated that a supply chain had now developed that could move bang from the point of production (presumably in the suburbs or the countryside) to major population centres of the Safavid state. Like wine shops, beer houses, opium dens, and concoction houses that we noted earlier, bang khanas were turned into an economic resource for the central government because they were subject to regular taxation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The production and sale of bang and its derivatives were thus part of the revenue structure of Safavid Iran, even as their consumption had become an aspect of the everyday culture and economy of many households in the country.

The taboo and the smoke

The integration of bang into several different spheres of Iranian culture notwithstanding, the popularity of the substance seems to have been most dominant among the lower and rougher segments of society. The antinomian Sufis, the street toughs, and still others who were thought to represent ‘the low culture’ of the street were evidently the most noted consumers by the late medieval and early modern periods.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This phenomenon eventually led to a negative reputation for the drug. Many, in other words, thought that bang was in effect below the station of upstanding members of the community or that of the social elites. When the latter did enjoy the substance openly, they were seen in an unfavourable light and as prone to excessive pleasure. In characterizing the reign of an early fifteenth-century ruler in Fars, for example, one historian stressed his inordinate attachment to bang, wine, opium, and taft (an intoxicating and hemlock-like plant), as well as his preoccupation with sex to have been the main reasons he could not establish order in his realm.Footnote ¹²⁰ In a similar vein, an increasing number of poets, writers, and historians in the late medieval and early modern periods considered bang an indelicate, dangerous, or nefarious consumable. This negative reputation is evident in the ways they often referred to the substance. Saʿdi, for instance, compared the drug unfavourably with wine and stressed that consuming it was below the station of a refined man:

The main point of this quatrain comes in the final hemistich, where the pun on the phrase ‘eat stone’ could also be translated as ‘hit by stone’. If this meaning of the closing phrase is considered, the last hemistich could then be an allusion to the possible maltreatment of bang users in society. In either case, it is clear that even a worldly thinker like Saʿdi had serious reservations about the value of a recreational drug like bang.

Such strong criticisms of consumers were not advanced only by the intellectuals and the literati. Throughout much of the periods under consideration, the orthodox religious groups were also quite active in pushing back against the growing influence of bang in the Iranian world. As noted earlier, they composed treatises that in part or in whole attacked the popular consumption of the substance. They also used their positions and connections in society, and their venerated institutions—from mosques and seminaries to holy shrines and beyond—to promote their views against bang. Although the conservative classes often advocated a blanket rejection of all intoxicants, they seem to have reserved their fiercest objections for bang, which they considered (perhaps more than alcohol and opium) to be degenerate, spiritually deadly, and connected to a series of social ills that included crime, sexual misconduct, and even political unrest.Footnote ¹²² The vehemence with which these elements opposed the drug appeared not unrelated to the association of bang with the threatening heterodox beliefs and practices of antinomian Sufis, who were some of the most noted consumers of the substance. Despite the hostility of the orthodox religious groups, these Sufis remained acceptable in society at large and even quite popular in certain quarters. For their part, the political authorities too attacked the popular consumption of bang in the late medieval and early modern periods. However, their opposition was at best intermittent and mirrored that against alcohol and opium. They appear to have been motivated to a large extent by the political upshot of bang consumption especially among the rowdiest elements in society.Footnote ¹²³

It seems that a combination of these and possibly other factors eventually made bang into a cultural taboo of sorts. This was evident, for example, in that the more ‘respectable’ classes who were still interested in the substance—that is, some among the literati, the mainstream Sufis, and the social elites—began to have it in private or in small groups of intimate friends. To be discreet when consuming the drug became the norm, it seems, as indicated in the following directions by Awhad al-Din Kirmani (d. 1166 or 1238), the great Sufi poet of the twelfth century:

It was against this background that many poets, writers, and historians started to employ a wide range of literary devices to convey the nature of their experience with the substance.Footnote ¹²⁵ In the late medieval and early modern periods, there were few authors like Kirmani who could openly celebrate consuming bang. People who wrote negatively of the drug did refer to it openly. But those who wanted to mention its virtues had vague, elliptical, or euphemistic references to it.Footnote ¹²⁶ Such allusions varied greatly, but they seem to have stressed the green colour, the evidently Indian background of the plant—Cannabis indica may have had its origins in South Asia—or alternatively a secret, exotic, and inexplicable quality that many attached to its substance. Terms and phrases such as the ‘weed’ (sabzak), the ‘parrot’ (tuti), the ‘green parrot’ (tuti-yi sabz), the ‘mysteries’ (asrar), the ‘leaf of mystical vision’ (varaq al-khayal), the ‘parrot that divulges mysteries’ (tuti-yi guya-yi asrar), the ‘master sayyid’ (aqa-yi sayyid), the ‘emerald’ (zumurrud, zabarjad), the legendary ‘Rustam's green tent’ (khiyma-yi sabz-i Rustam), the ‘divine water of life’ (ab-i Khizr), and the like were some of the common expressions that invoked the image of bang in contemporary literature.Footnote ¹²⁷ The following line from the opening of the lyric by Hafiz that was cited earlier is a case in point: ‘O parrot who utter [divine] mysteries! / May your beak never be devoid of sugar’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Although written ambiguously, the poem, it seems, was meant to celebrate the mystical properties of bang.

In the rich lexicon of vague and inoffensive expressions that referred to bang, the connection between the latter and the emerald was manifestly very close. This association led ultimately to the development of a double meaning for the term huqqa (that is, ‘hookah’), which originally meant a casket or a round box that served as the container of emeralds and other precious stones but, by the late medieval period, had come to denote a receptacle for bang and other psychoactive substances.Footnote ¹²⁹ The term would soon be used to refer to the water pipe—one of the most popular devices for the consumption of tobacco and a key symbol of modern consumer culture under the Safavids—whose bowl-like base appeared like a holder of jewels or a container of recreational drugs. It is also possible that the smoking device that came to be known as the hookah was developed first for the consumption of bang in the late medieval period. One historian has, for example, pointed out that the poetry of the pre-modern period appears to provide some of the earliest allusions to the smoking of bang with a water pipe. A quatrain in the work of the fourteenth-century Timurid poet, Sadr al-Din Rabiʿi Bushanji, seems to be one of the first known textual references to the device:

Following Edward G. Browne's interpretation of these lines in his literary history of Iran in the medieval period, we could read the last two hemistiches of the poem as alluding to the smoking of bang, the latter being compared to emeralds, while the fiery pipe bowl of the hookah is likened to a ruby casket.Footnote ¹³⁰

It is of course not implausible that the recreational use of bang in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries involved the smoking of the drug—at least on occasion and in certain quarters—and not just ingesting it. Indulgence in the fumes of hempseeds and other substances appears to have had a long history among various Iranian people and tribes. In the fifth century bce, Herodotus reported that ‘the Scythians take cannabis seeds, crawl in under the felt blankets, and throw the seeds on to the glowing stones. The seeds then emit dense smoke and fumes, much more than any vapour-bath in Greece. The Scythians shriek with delight at the fumes’.Footnote ¹³¹ Smoking was likewise popular among the Massagetae, who were a nomadic people of Iranian origin based in the east of the Caspian Sea, in the southeast of the Aral Sea, and between the Oxus and the Jaxartes Rivers. ‘They have … discovered a kind of plant’, Herodotus explained,

It appears, in other words, that the practice of smoking was not uncommon among Iranians in the ancient period. Archaeological evidence seems to corroborate this, as it shows that hemp-inhaling equipment was in use in the Pazyryk kurgans far to the east in the Altai mountains.Footnote ¹³³ It is possible that this ancient legacy of smoking was carried into the medieval period in certain parts of the eastern Islamic lands. Making use of the fumes of burned plants was indeed not uncommon in Iran throughout these centuries. The smoke of burned Resedas, junipers, Boswellia, amber, tamarisks, and incense, to give just a few examples, had a variety of medical, sanitary, and cultural purposes in the medieval period.Footnote ¹³⁴ Similarly, the smoke of bang was used for medicinal and possibly other purposes. This is suggested, for example, in a sixteenth-century medical treatise on opium which explains that ‘the smoke’ of bang was used commonly to subside toothache and other oral pain and complications.Footnote ¹³⁵ Such use of the smoke of bang could justify the otherwise inexplicable association that exists in medieval Persian poetry between hashish and fire. One representative example that suggests a link between the two comes from the work of the twelfth-century poet, Awhad al-Din Anvari (1126–89). In a panegyric ode that praises a high-ranking official in the Saljuq state, he recorded the following line: ‘Your wrath and your enemy are like fire and hashish. / Your love and your hatred are like virtue and sin’.Footnote ¹³⁶ In another panegyric ode, he likewise wrote: ‘The life and wealth of the enemy are burning and melting day and night / just like fire in hashish and salt in water’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73), the great Sufi poet of the thirteenth century, saw a similar connection as well. In one story from his Masnavi, we hear about a royal clown who generates a great deal of public agitation and disturbance in an attempt to convey a rather trivial report to the king. Upon learning about the contents of his message, the monarch responds: ‘For this little unworthy [news], oh you buffoon! / You have put fire in this land and in this hashish’.Footnote ¹³⁸ These references, in other words, point to a possible connection between hashish and fire that was readily understandable to the average readers in the medieval period.

A developing drug culture

In light of the above discussion, it is possible to conclude that, by the early sixteenth century, a well-developed culture and economy of recreational drug use had taken root in Iranian society. This consumer culture revolved around the mass production of and the ever-widening demand for a number of psychoactive substances, the most important of which were alcohol, opium, and bang. These recreational drugs were associated closely with one another, as they were often taken together or appeared similar to one another. A variety of spices (such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, and pepper), stimulants (such as sugar or taft), and appliances (such as the hookah or the dishes of opium and bang) were also used for the preparation of and indulgence in these products. This culture of drug use had emerged slowly over the course of the previous centuries and was embedded in a diverse social environment. The rich, the poor, and those from the middling layers of society had all integrated these substances into their lives. Many social groups, in other words, depended on these consumables as their key apparatus of entertainment and leisure. It was in part because of their increasing influence in society that alcohol, opium, and bang drew growing opposition from the religious and temporal authorities. Despite their objections, however, more and more people succumbed to the seductions of these recreational substances. The spread and popularity of global drug foods such as coffee and tobacco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should thus be understood against the backdrop of a society that had developed an elaborate culture and economy of recreational substance use in the medieval period. When introduced in the Safavid state, the new drugs were hence not rejected as ‘alien’ products. Instead, they appeared in so many ways similar to alcohol, opium, and bang, and, as such, somewhat familiar and safe. People took up the new drugs, and considered them to supplement or replace the older substances with which they were more familiar. In the process, the old and new drugs forged an ever-thriving market that shocked and worried once again the more conservative elements in society.

The connections that people drew between the old and new substances are perhaps best illustrated in the case of coffee, which was initially considered to be a variety of wine. The common terms for coffee in fact testified to this link. ‘Qahwa’, the Arabic word for the beverage that came to be used in Persian as well, was a term that had been given previously to ‘a form of wine that was bitter’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Another term that people started to use for the new substance was the ‘wine of Arabs’ (khamr al-ʿArab). Many also thought that the two drinks were similar in terms of their effects. Just like wine, coffee was thought to reduce pain and bring about joy and gladness of heart and, just like wine, it soon became an essential element of all ‘festive parties’ (majalis-i uns) among the elites and the non-elites.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The association between the two drinks, moreover, led some to consider coffee an appropriate substitute for wine—a beverage that continued to draw some opposition from the orthodox religious classes.Footnote ¹⁴¹ From very early on, most people understood that coffee was not intoxicating and, as such, they thought its use was religiously permissible. Some jurists and religious scholars had in fact sanctioned its consumption.Footnote ¹⁴² This development encouraged the popular interest in the new substance as a replacement product for wine. As the Austrian envoy, Georg Tectander, reported in a likely reference to coffee, Iranians began to drink ‘boiled water with all kinds of spices’ as an alternative to wine, which some considered to be forbidden.Footnote ¹⁴³ When the seventeenth-century Safavid poet, Mirza Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi, stopped consuming wine, opium, and other common intoxicants, he too turned to coffee and found a more refined company in the coffeehouses.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The close association between coffee and wine can also be seen in the opposition of some people to the new beverage. With the expansion of popular demand for coffee, certain men and women began to caution against the harmful consequences of the new substance for social reproduction. They pointed out that coffee had an adverse impact on the ‘sexual appetite’ of people and caused the ‘reduction of fluid’ from both men and women. One popular line that was evidently recited in public (perhaps in certain city quarters or on the streets) stressed this matter very clearly: ‘That black-faced thing which is called coffee (qahva) / hinders sleep and cuts [sexual] desire’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Those who opposed the new substance for this reason preferred the original wine as a more appropriate social drink.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Others like Hakim Qazi Yazdi, on the other hand, thought the very opposite. Favouring coffee over wine, he cited a number of cases in which individuals, after having coffee, experienced drowsiness or an increase in their sexual drive.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Varied as these references and testimonies tend to be, they nonetheless show that coffee and wine were seen as somehow connected to one another. One in fact replaced or supplemented the other.

People, in addition, drew links between the properties of coffee, opium, and bang. Some consumers like ʿImad al-Din Shirazi considered coffee to have much benefit for the body while it caused ‘addiction far less than the opiates’. In an attempt to manage his own opium addiction, Shirazi described that he introduced into his diet coffee and other concoctions, which he thought could manage his withdrawal symptoms.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Others thought that ‘coffee could [actually] cause the stopping of opium addiction’,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ which had become evidently a common problem in society by this time. People also noted the similarities that existed in the ways opium, bang, and coffee were made and served. The manifestly identical methods of preparation involved ‘boiling’ in water the specific substance along with some choice spices. This common manner of preparation prompted many to start putting opium or bang in their coffee pots while brewing the daily dose of their favourite beverage.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Alternatively, they would take their pills of opium or bang along with coffee just as they used to take them with wine.

Such connections between the older drugs and coffee soon turned the earliest coffeehouses into an extension of taverns, opium dens, and ‘hemp’ chambers. The same social groups that frequented those spaces now started to visit the new public venues that had proliferated across the Safavid state.Footnote ¹⁵¹ This development is implied or pointed out in many contemporary sources. A case in point is the writing of Muhammad ʿAli Qazvini in the seventeenth century, who considered coffeehouses (especially those in Isfahan) to be filled with opium, bang, and tobacco addicts, as well as those who engaged in gambling and other ‘unseemly’ conduct. In a style that echoed back to the eleventh-century Qabusnama, he cautioned his son to stay away from these places:

Such sentiment, which was by no means limited to Qazvini, showed that the consumption of coffee was now taken up by many who simultaneously (or previously) enjoyed the older substances. Coffee, nonetheless, attracted more ‘refined’ consumers as well—that is, people who did not necessarily attend taverns, opium dens, or ‘hemp’ chambers. It was not uncommon to see poets, writers, storytellers, religious scholars, philosophers, artists, and musicians in the coffeehouses as well. Even the Safavid shahs and princes, their domestic guests, and special foreign dignitaries could be entertained in these venues.Footnote ¹⁵³ Such open mixing of different classes of society was not ever possible in the spaces associated with the older drugs. It was as if coffee, with its socially appropriate position, had forged one of the few public spaces where a balance of the low and high culture of early modern urban society could be maintained.

But coffee was not the only new substance that was linked to the old drugs used widely in society. People likewise drew parallels between tobacco and the more traditional substances. Some medical authorities such as the seventeenth-century physician Husam al-Din Machini believed that tobacco was beneficial for most people and did not have all the threatening properties of alcohol, opium, or bang.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The common people, on the other hand, seem to have thought that the new substance was a less addictive, dangerous, or scandalous alternative to the older drugs, and yet it had their most important and beneficial qualities. They, for example, believed that the new product calmed the nerve in times of distress and served as an appropriate accompaniment to recreation and leisure. One folk poem that had become popular during this time illustrated this point more clearly. It announced: ‘To ward off sorrow you should smoke tobacco; / you should find a beautiful companion and smoke [it] with her’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The line harked back to some of the literary references to wine, opium, or bang in the medieval period that stressed the benefits or the specific manner of consuming these drugs. Some people, in addition, recognized a special affinity between tobacco and bang. The two drugs appeared similar to one another in their very methods of consumption; they both could be smoked rather than ingested. This resemblance prompted some to refer to tobacco as ‘hashish’, especially when the new substance was just beginning to make its way in society. The seventeenth-century religious scholar Sayyid Niʿmat Allah Jazaʾiri (d. 1112 AH/1700–01), for instance, noted in his work that his contemporaries consumed a product they called ‘hashish’ and yet some also referred to it as ‘tutun’ (the latter being a variety of tobacco that was smoked with portable pipes rather than hookahs). In distinguishing between tobacco and bang, Jazaʾiri pointed out that ‘this type of substance was not in use in the past and only in this century [that is, the eleventh century ah] has come about …. [More precisely] this [drug] came about in the first decade after the [Islamic] millennium [namely the years from 1591 to 1602]’. Suggesting that people in Iran were not unfamiliar with the practice of smoking, he then went on to say that certain old smoking ‘devices’ had been found in ancient ‘wells and [historical] excavations’, but these instruments may or may not have been designed for the consumption of tobacco.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The implication was, in other words, that they may have been used for another consumable such as hashish. Such careful differentiation between the two drugs notwithstanding, many people continued to see them as similar or complementary. This affinity soon prompted some to begin smoking tobacco and bang together.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ This development was reported in a number of contemporary sources including the travel account of the Englishman John A. Fryer, who observed in 1676–77 that Iranians often smoked tobacco mixed with leaves and flowers of bang.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The connections between tobacco and the older drugs were quite strong when it came to alcohol as well. We know, for example, that, in certain circles, the two substances often accompanied one another. When, in 1584, Muhammad Khudabanda (r. 1578–87) arrived in Tabriz, to cite one specific case, he witnessed some ‘ignorant youths’ who engaged in disorderly conduct in the city. We are told that they would overindulge in ‘wine and the water pipe’ and, while drunk, they would commit ‘mischief and villainy’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Similarly, the story of the folk hero Husayn Kurd Shabistari—developed and set during or immediately after the reign of ʿAbbas I (1588–1629)—has a number of scenes where wine, distilled alcohol, tobacco, and bang are consumed together.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In addition, people took up smoking because, for religious or personal reasons, they wished to stop having wine.Footnote ¹⁶¹ This was the case with the seventeenth-century poet, Mirza Muhammad ʿAli Saʾib Tabrizi, who composed a short literary piece on the subject in which he explained:

People like Saʾib and the characters of the story of Husayn Kurd were not few in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other words, replacing alcohol with tobacco was not uncommon just as it was not unusual for people to have them both together.

Anthropologist Peter Weston Black has argued that the culture of tobacco use in many early modern societies developed because of its ties with ‘a larger cultural complex [that involved] other drug substances’.Footnote ¹⁶³ In different societies, several stimulants and substances were ‘joined together with tobacco’ to form what Black calls ‘recreational drug complexes’. These cultural and economic arrangements, he has shown, served a two-fold function. They not only facilitated the incorporation of key foreign psychotropic substances into the local and indigenous ‘systems of [cultural] meanings’. They also afforded them a vital economic niche because they connected the early modern global drugs to the consumption patterns of several popular native drugs. The commercial and cultural importance of such links between several different stimulants and products is also stressed by anthropologist Sidney Mintz. In his influential work on the history of sugar, Mintz has shown that its consumption facilitated the development of popular demand for a number of other commodities such as tea, coffee, and chocolate.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Historian Jan de Vries has gone even further in this line of thought and has argued that such ‘consumption bundles’ were crucial for the expansion of consumerism in the early modern period. New or old consumables on their own and separate from one another did not have as much influence in society as when they were embedded within the world of goods that allowed people to obtain and use them together.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In medieval and early modern Iran, the drugs that were often bought, sold, and consumed in close association with one another were alcohol, opium, and bang. By the early sixteenth century, these products had formed a cultural system that involved still other substances, intoxicants, and commodities. When tobacco and coffee were introduced in the country, they benefited greatly from this entrenched consumer culture. People drew intimate connections between the old and new drugs and the very methods, reasons, and occasions of their use. This affinity brought about a process that anchored the new products in older consumption patterns and helped indigenize them in the Safavid state. To borrow from Black once again, we can state that the already-established recreational drug complex in the late medieval and early modern periods expedited the process that integrated the new substances in society. Swiftly accomplished as it was, the social embeddedness of coffee and tobacco in turn expanded further the cultural and economic value of recreational drugs in Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A consumer revolution

The introduction of the new global drugs in the early modern period thus led to a cultural pull of psychoactive substances that had no precedent in the country. Whereas, in previous centuries, people enjoyed a variety of more familiar recreational products and whereas they consumed a considerable amount of them, they now used so many and so much of the available substances that the scale of drug consumption dwarfed anything formerly known.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Much of this popular enthusiasm for various psychoactive consumables rested on the concurrent and mutually reinforcing use of coffee and tobacco. While the new substances served as accessories to or replacements for older drugs and while many consumed them all together, coffee and tobacco had their own intimate and productive relationship from the start. This was evident in that most people who were addicted to one had also taken up the other. As early as the first decade of the seventeenth century, for example, we see coffee and tobacco accompanying one another in public, usually in the coffeehouses that had just multiplied in the Safavid urban centres. By the middle of the century, a significant section of the social elites, the middling classes, and the working population had begun having the two products together. When the German envoy, Adam Olearius, was travelling in north and central Iran in 1636–37, for instance, he noted that ‘[t]here is hardly any Persian, what condition or quality soever he be of, but take Tobacco’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ He stressed that ‘[t]his they do in any place whatsoever, even in their mosqueyes’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Giving a detailed description of the Persian manner of preparing coffee, he then added that the two new substances were in many places inseparable: ‘They Drink [coffee] with their Tobacco’Footnote ¹⁶⁹ almost all the time. Likewise, in the aforementioned story of the folk hero Husayn Kurd Shabistari, we find a number of scenes where coffee and tobacco are served simultaneously; they both appear to be an integral part of the kind of diversions the working and underclass population enjoyed several times a day.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ This is confirmed as well by the observations of the French merchant traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who witnessed popular consumption of the new drugs together during his extensive travels in Iran in 1631–64. He explained:

Such addictive use of coffee and tobacco could probably not have happened without a popular craze that created the urge for both of them at the same time and bolstered their simultaneous consumption. The mutually supporting relationship of coffee and tobacco continued throughout the remainder of the early modern period. By the end of the seventeenth century, this association had become even more entrenched. The affinity between the two drugs eventually led to the making of a social environment where people found—as one widely current aphorism stressed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—‘coffee without tobacco [to be] like meat without salt’.Footnote ¹⁷²

Notwithstanding the inseparability and marriage of the new substances, there was from the outset more public interest in tobacco than in coffee. The popular demand for the latter was, to be sure, quite a lot in certain areas. Qazvini wrote disapprovingly of Isfahan and other urban areas, for example, where ‘people would not have anything less than ten to fifteen cups (piyala) [of coffee] per day …. They [senselessly] imitate[d] one another [in having this beverage] … and they ha[d] [it] regularly without any reason’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Widespread as it was in the Safavid capital and in many towns and cities, coffee nevertheless had limited success among certain groups in society such as women and people living in the countryside.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The use of tobacco, by contrast, was common among both men and women and across the socio-economic spectrum. There was really no social barrier that the substance could not cross. As early as the first decades of the seventeenth century, tobacco had, in fact, come to rival basic food items on the table of the poorest classes in society, and this remained the case throughout much of the Safavid period and after. As Fryer observed, the poor ‘have they but a Penny in the World, the one half will go for Bread and dried Grapes or Butter-milk, and the other for Snow and Tobacco’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ One factor that played a crucial role in the development of such popular enthusiasm for the new substances was what historians of Europe identified as imitation. Owning water pipes, smoking tobacco, and drinking coffee gave the downtrodden classes a chance to share in the habits, taste, and behaviour of the elites and the upper classes. This was more so with respect to tobacco, which had become very fashionable in Iran throughout this period. It was as if the consumption of tobacco in and of itself gave a sense of upward mobility to the poor. However else the urban poor may have been exposed to tobacco, it seems for some that their work provided one such opportunity. In this regard, Tavernier pointed out that

Such preoccupation with tobacco and its appurtenances was not limited to the city folks. The poor in the countryside had too adopted the practice and taste of their peers in the urban areas. When the domestic production of the new product expanded from the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the rural population—especially in the many provinces that now cultivated the tobacco plant—could no longer resist the lure of the new substance; they also succumbed to the surging tobacco craze that raged across the Safavid state.

This unusual appeal of tobacco across the geographic, demographic, and socio-economic spectrum is also reflected in the writing of Husam al-Din Machini in the seventeenth century, who stressed that

In his Hadiqa al-Shiʿa, which was written in the first half of the seventeenth century, the religious scholar ʿAbd al-Hayy Razavi Kashani disclosed likewise that ‘in our time there are but very few people who are not addicted to the water pipe. There is in fact no house or marketplace—belonging to the Muslims or the non-Muslims—that is devoid of water pipes’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The transformation in the culture of drug consumption that tobacco with no small help from coffee and other substances forged was hence nothing short of a psychoactive revolution. Everyone now seemed to have developed some interest in recreational psychoactive products, especially tobacco and coffee. The secret to the popularity of the new drugs was evidently this capacity to appeal to a cross-section of Safavid society. This was most conspicuous with respect to tobacco, which alone contributed much to revolutionizing not just substance use, but also consumption patterns in early modern Iran. Unlike bang, tobacco was not associated with marginal groups in society. More like opium, coffee, and alcohol, but clearly far more successful, tobacco had a vast drawing power in the country. The charm and allure of the drug were such that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the scale of its consumption overshadowed the demand for all other recreational substances. Tobacco had also accomplished what various drugs in use had not done for centuries. It had become an essential good—something necessary to be had along with basic foodstuffs, in just about all households including those of the urban poor and the peasants. The meaning and use of no other psychoactive substance had ever before or have since morphed so rapidly and so thoroughly in Iranian society.

The success of tobacco, accompanied as it was with that of coffee, had no doubt something to do with their very qualities. The new drugs seemed at once exotic and familiar, for example. They were similar to, but not nearly as dangerous, scandalous, or intoxicating as, alcohol, opium, or bang. They were clearly foreign and curious, and yet could be consumed in an indigenous fashion. Some people also believed that the new drugs had a variety of medical benefits. Tobacco, for instance, was thought to be a cure for many chronic illnesses, particularly those such as leprosy that affected skin.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ More importantly, however, there was no significant legal or religious opposition to the new substances. Although there was some early and occasional hostility to coffee and tobacco, the shahs and the clerics who objected to their consumption soon yielded to the growing popular interest. By the mid-seventeenth century, in fact, many from the ruling and religious classes had themselves succumbed to the allure of the new products.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ That, unlike bang and wine, coffee and tobacco were not perceived to be intoxicating did much to undermine the emergence of oppositional consensus among the authorities and the orthodox clerics. There were as many people in positions of power who were hostile to the new drugs as there were enchanted with them. Equally crucial with respect to tobacco was the fact that a certain amount of ease and speed distinguished its consumption from the use of coffee, alcohol, and perhaps even other drugs. Like pills of opium and bang, tobacco appeared peripatetic and required no more than the most rudimentary instruments. This was not the case with more stationary drugs like coffee and alcohol. The mobile nature of tobacco use and its legality helped make the substance a social glue—a public consumable unlike any others. Smoking tobacco was thus possible and common on the streets, at the court, and in the presence of the shah, or for that matter in the bazaars, seminaries, mosques, and bathhouses.Footnote ¹⁸¹ It could be had while riding, walking, working, resting, or under any other circumstances.Footnote ¹⁸² The portable nature of tobacco consumption allowed even soldiers to smoke while on duty, just as they used to eat opium while in the battlefields; they were said to have ‘brought their water pipes to the army and carried them with them during campaigns’.Footnote ¹⁸³ In brief, while opium and other older substances shared some of these qualities, they did not possess them all at once in the way tobacco, and to some extent coffee, did.

The broad appeal of the new drugs was also related to their progressively declining prices over the course of the seventeenth century. These products had to be affordable before the majority of people could develop habits of obtaining and consuming them. We know, for example, that the cost of coffee decreased significantly over the course of this period due mostly to competition between the inter-regional merchants and wholesalers who imported and then distributed the substance inside the Safavid state.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Although a comparable set of data does not exist for tobacco, it is not unlikely that a similar trend could have developed in the early to the middle decades of the seventeenth century when tobacco was imported into the country by the same merchants and wholesalers. Besides competition, the expansion of tobacco farming throughout the century no doubt contributed to the development of lower prices as well. Because the tobacco plant was adaptable to many environmental circumstances, tobacco farming soon flourished in just about all parts of the Safavid state. That its cultivation and harvest were not inordinately complicated also encouraged landowners and peasants to expand their output.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The production of tobacco ‘throughout all Persia’Footnote ¹⁸⁶—which contemporary sources tend to stress—must have cut the expenses attached to currency exchange, shipment, duties, and a long line of middlemen involved in the import of tobacco from India, the Ottoman empire, or elsewhere. By the end of the seventeenth century, one may surmise that, for the average consumer, tobacco had become cheaper per unit of consumption than coffee. This was due to the fact that, by then, the former was produced domestically while the latter was almost entirely imported. The decreasing prices of tobacco more than coffee—and possibly more than other recreational drugs—in turn must have encouraged wider consumption of this substance.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Having emerged for a variety of reasons, the considerable pull of tobacco and coffee soon led to the unfolding of a new form of consumerism that some contemporaries found distasteful and objectionable. Opposed to the wasteful habits of smokers, Jazaʾiri, for example, pointed out that ‘people spend lavishly on building various devices for [their] tobacco consumption and make use of a lot of decoration and ornamentation, so much so that the total cost of various accessories [that they possess at any given point in time] would reach some 30,000 dinars’Footnote ¹⁸⁸—a substantial sum at the time. This sentiment was shared by Qazvini as well, who wrote:

What is most striking about this passage is not just the fact that it provides a window on the magnitude of tobacco use at this early stage of its introduction in Iran. It is also that we learn about the consumption of other goods that tobacco manifestly encouraged. From charcoal and glass to elaborate pipes and hookahs, there were a series of commodities whose consumption the new drug had first increased and then normalized. There was also an unprecedented level of self-indulgence associated with the consumption of the new recreational substances in this period, which was thought by some to come at the expense of caring for others and entertaining them. For people like Qazvini and Jazaʾiri, to consume tobacco thus meant to ‘waste’ a great deal of financial resources and to be desensitized to some of the prevailing norms and traditions in society. However, to consume the new substance meant something quite different to the majority of people who so willingly spent their hard-earned money on tobacco and its many accompaniments. What worried social critics was, in other words, a new cultural turn that promoted an ever-widening scale of consumption and that rendered this nascent materialism—accompanied as it was by a growing sense of individualism—as something that was socially proper and morally unobjectionable.

Tobacco and its accessories aside, the consumption of other drugs had likewise become overwhelming in the early modern period. This development worried the likes of Qazvini, who saw coffee, opium, and other psychoactive products as even more harmful and threatening than tobacco. He explained:

The change in the consumption of psychoactive products that people like Qazvini opposed was thus quite radical. To them, the scale and normalcy of modern drug use and the new consumerism that was associated with it must have seemed incomprehensible. Nothing could have explained this cultural turn better than a profound change in the very temperament and humoral balance of people that was itself caused by a combination of the new and old drugs. Critics such as Qazvini thought as well that the modern consumption of recreational substances and other commodities had led to the destruction and deadening of people's bodies and souls. It was as if excessive self-gratification had led to an increasing abandonment of restraint in society. That was why people could not help themselves but would rather continue to indulge in such destructive behaviour.

To the more uptight elements in the country, the new collective interest in psychoactive products was offensive particularly because of the economic distress and the widening wealth gap they were seeing around them in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In his critique of popular drug consumption, Qazvini thus went on to speculate about the cause of the economic challenges the Safavids and others across the Middle East were experiencing. He linked the latter to the excessive consumption of recreational substances, especially tobacco:

Implied as it is in the passage, the emergence of a new form of consumerism that tobacco symbolized was by no means limited to the Safavid state. It was shared across large sections of the Islamic ecumene. The new interest in spending in both Iran and beyond was unlike anything people had known before. For this reason, some like Qazvini thought that this level of drug use had something to do with another phenomenon that was equally new, namely the declining economic conditions of many households, countries, and kingdoms across the broader Middle East. Qazvini and others like him may have overdrawn the relationship that they saw between consumerism and economic decline. We now know, however, that they were both processes that were connected to the burgeoning globalization of trade and economies in the early modern period. We know as well from better data that we have on Europe in this period that the trade in and the acquisition of consumer goods did sometimes increase under terrible economic difficulties. In fact, as one scholar has put it, rising consumption in society ‘sometimes occurred in times of general depression and decline or failing family fortunes’.Footnote ¹⁹³