Quote Originally Posted by EatYerGreens
We really need a knowledgable Muslim on the forum, to sort this one out!

You have to distinguish between religious strictures, as set out in the Koran (sp?) and mere 'cultural disapproval' of drinking, perhaps written into Civil Law, which would have been arrived at after generations of observing the deleterious effects of chronic drinking.

I get the impression that Muslims have, historically, been extremely resistant to changes in the wording of the Koran and wouldn't have made 'revisionist' changes to it, even if there was a strong motivation to do so. In other words, if it wasn't in there to start with, I don't think they'll have added it in later.

Also, by way of a sidebar, the spread of Arabic languages probably means the Koran hasn't suffered the kind of mis-translation alterations that certain parts of the Christian Bible are thought to have suffered from, where actual meanings of sentences have subtly changed where a single word had no precise equivalent in the secondary language. The resultant conflicting interpretations have been the source of arguments ever since. I think what we have now went from Aramaic (ancient Hebrew), through Greek, to Latin and then into various nation's languages in the later middle ages.
I have studied this subject at school and independently, so I will share my knowledge.

First of all, IIRC drinking is prohibited in the Koran, making it a point of no debate in Islamic law, since everything in the Koran is perceived to be the absolute truth. The wording of the Koran has remained the same since the days of the prophet and it should be recited in Arabic when used in prayer. However, there are differing interpretations of different passages in the Koran which have resulted in different schools of thought and even different sects, just like in Christendom. In addition to the Koran, Islamic law is based on examples and sayings from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. This has provided a huge collage of laws and precedents for laws, but sometimes the problem with it has been misinterpretation, conflicting laws within the texts themselves and their interpretations and the fact that most of these stories were collected several generations after the prophet had died. This latter fact means several of the texts may have been corrupted and (at the risk of being lynched by a pious Muslim reading this) completely fictitious. I'm no Islamic scholar or theologian, but this is what I have gathered from reading a few books on the subject.

To stay to the topic itself: Alcohol was prohibited after the spread of Islam, and I believe that officially it has been banned ever since. However, the less-pious Muslims and non-Muslim people in the Middle East have drunk alcohol almost all this time. We also tend to forget in our modern polarised world, where extremists make the front pages every day, that many medieval Muslim societies weren't half as strict about Islamic law as the Taliban or the Iranian government nowadays.