Beer in Early Islam: A Ḥadīṯ Perspective

It is wine, mainly grape wine that dominates poetry and adab an-nadīm literature, it is wine and viticulture that attract attention as a symbol-laden beverage, as a prestigious drink, and as a high art of agriculture. There are vague attempts to praise beer in Arabic verses, but such beer poems are hardly known, were much less written down and, reflecting the more popular character of beer, and were most probably mainly written in dialect, not in classical Arabic. Facing this scarcity of sources, ḥadīṯ texts became a key source for the early period, whether collected in proper ḥadīṯ collections or as part of maġāzī literature or later historical works. This article investigates relevant passages in the six Sunnī canonical ḥadīṯ collections and the Muwaṭṭaʼ, as well as the four Šīʽī canonical collections.