FETHIYE, Turkey - Some religions are
closely associated with drug-taking.
Rastafarianism is famous for its use of marijuana,
or lamb's bread as it is known, to help achieve
oneness with God, Hindu sadus (itinerant
holy men) regularly use bhang (a liquid
form of marijuana extract), and certain
shamanistic traditions use peyote and datura to
induce trances and hallucinations to facilitate
communication with the spirit world.
Hemp
seeds, discovered by archeologists in Pazyryk,
southern Siberia, have been dated to around the
same time as use by the
Scythians of cannabis (on the
Black Sea coast) was recorded by Herodotus in the
5th century BC.
The three religions of the
Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are not
well known for having drug cultures associated
with them, so it comes as something as a surprise
to learn that Islam, perhaps the most puritanical
of the three, has a strong undercurrent of
marijuana use throughout its long history.
The issue of substance abuse, intoxicants
and Islam rose to the Turkish media's attention
recently when police carried out a raid on the
home of private citizen Nazif Kamil Orde in
Istanbul for the benefit of current-affairs
documentary program Arena. They smashed
their way into the home of the man newspapers have
nicknamed "the junkie teacher" - Esrarc Hoca - a
self-styled imam who interspersed his lessons on
Islamic philosophy with some strong tokes on a lit
joint and encouraged the young followers sitting
around his living room to do likewise. He extolled
the virtues of cannabis and said no one could make
him stop - smoking was his duty to God.
The headlines screamed "A joint in one
hand, the Koran in the other", and more than
32,000 people have watched the video clip of him
being arrested broadcast via the Web on Hurriyet
Video. Esrarc Hoca's behavior has largely been
interpreted as the actions of a drug pusher trying
to drum up business, and he has made himself
somewhat of a joke to serious media pundits with
such over-the-top statements as "My child will
learn to roll joints and smoke at the age of six,"
"How can you outlaw weed? God orders us to smoke
it," and "Friends, you can't take away the gun on
a Muslim's belt, the horse beneath him or the
joint in his hand." However, his behavior and
statements do raise the issue of whether cannabis
is haram (forbidden by Islamic law).
Generally in orthodox Islam, conservative
scholars deem cannabis an intoxicant and
therefore, according to the Hadith, it is
classified as haram (as is coffee). The
Hadith is the book of sayings of the Prophet
Mohammed, which states: "If much intoxicates, then
even a little is haram." There are
dissenting voices, however, who say that the word
used in the Koran itself is khamr - which
means "fermented grape" - and that this
classification doesn't cover use of marijuana.
Liberal Muslims believe that opposition to
cannabis on religious grounds in Islamic countries
has in essence been based on narrow-minded dogma
that seeks to regulate all private pleasure in the
name of religion.
Certainly some Islamic
countries are closely associated with dope smoking
and cultivation (Afghanistan, Lebanon, Indonesia,
Egypt and Morocco, for example) but its use is
often for recreational purposes and largely takes
place among the lower classes. In Turkey, while
cannabis use is not tolerated by the police or
state, there is a smoking culture and a well-known
saying, helal ottur, gunah yoktur ("it's a
holy weed that carries no sin"). The intoxicant
use of cannabis may in fact have permeated Islamic
culture because alcohol is forbidden to adherents
of Islam. Andre Malraux wrote in Man's
Fate: "There is always a need for
intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish,
the West has woman."
Cannabis use for
explicitly spiritual purposes is most common among
Sufi believers, who are the most mystical of
Islam's adherents. According to one Arab legend,
Haydar, the Persian monk who founded the Sufis,
came across the cannabis plant in AD 1155 in the
Persian mountains.
Under normal
circumstances he was a reserved and quiet man, but
when he returned to his monastery after eating
some cannabis leaves, his disciples were amazed at
how talkative and animated he seemed. They cajoled
Haydar into telling them what he had done to make
him so full of spirit, and then they went out into
the mountains and tried the cannabis for
themselves. The Sufis' religion gives great
importance to direct communion between God and
man, and it is believed that cannabis is used as a
sacrament - an aid to enlightenment.
The
most famous Muslim users of cannabis are the
Hashishin, from whom our modern word "assassin"
stems. These men were a warrior sect who lived in
the mountains of Afghanistan and waged a guerrilla
war of political murder. Based on Marco Polo's
tales of the Old Man in the Mountains, who duped
his followers into carrying out evil deeds so they
could enter the earthly paradise he had shown them
under the influence of drugs, it is traditional in
the West to believe that the Hashishin first
consumed cannabis and then set about slaying their
opponents.
However, Ernest Abel, in his
book Marijuana: The First 12,000 Years,
claims that Marco Polo never identified hashish as
the drug used by the Assassins and that
historically cannabis and its derivatives have
never been equated with violence in the Middle
East.
In modern times the mujahideen used
marijuana during their war against the Russians in
the 1890s, but they made use of it to keep them
going on their interminable marches across the
frozen mountains of Afghanistan and not to inspire
blood lust.
The use of cannabis by Muslims
is as unlikely to die out as is the use of
cannabis by any other group. Although religion
dictates abstinence, the human spirit has always
sought out methods to escape mundane reality, and
smoking joints is a relatively harmless and cheap
way of freeing one's mind for an afternoon. As for
the Esrarc Hoca and his interesting announcements
on the laws dictating the use of marijuana, he may
well have been smoking weed's stronger and more
psychoactive cousin, skunk.
Fazile
Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought
up in London. She moved to Turkey in 2005 and has
been writing full-time since then.
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