Westerners taste, arabs get drunk

For the last few decades, studies on food have developed a sustainable rhythm. Disciplines such as anthropology, history, and semiotics have lately shown many interesting aspects of that good, and enabled us not only to understand the role food occupies in the construction of social and interpersonal semiosis, but also its paramount place in the semiosphere. Food is related to taste, body, interpersonal relations, identity, values, etc. because it constitutes a cultural marker of the highest interest in interpersonal relations. Food can reveal many things about the identity, the culture, and the psychology of the Other. Nevertheless, when that Other belongs to another culture, the grasp of all these elements becomes problematic since it calls to mind and reveals two types of prejudices. The first is about culinary practices of the Other, and the second is about the culture’s own culinary practices. This has a great interest for us from a semiotic perspective since it allows us to question culinary discourse specificities and the significations constructed around such a complex culinary phenomenon such as wine.

The texts chosen herein constitute a small corpus of western travel narratives from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The question is: what happens when food is represented in a poetic form, like a travel narrative, under its various forms? More precisely, what happens when a problematic element, like wine, is represented in pilgrimage narratives, historical commentary, and travel narrative?

The objective of this article is to track the different representations of wine in travel narratives under its various forms, as well as the different, explicit or implicit codes at work, which will reveal a crossroad of thematic elements about Islam, Christianity, pleasures, body, self, and Other.

Let us begin by recording the importance of food in religious literature. The three monotheist religions start, as we know, life and civilization from a culinary misunderstanding. Adam, the father of humanity in Christian mythology, did not really measure the importance of god’s dietary prohibition. Moreover, food appears in many other contexts in the three holy books of these religions.This interest has continued in travel narrative which was, at the beginning, very much influenced by religious literature where food is the marker of religious identity, not to say of identity tout court. Mary Douglas (1966), a pioneer in this domain, revealed the semantic background of this religious identity in her seminal work Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo.

In Medieval travel narrative, wine is among these fundamental markers of religious identity. Western travelers were particularly attentive, not to say intrigued by the situation and the place of wine in Arab-Muslim society; they did not understand why Arabs were very much attracted by wine in spite of its being rigorously forbidden by Islam. In his fifteenth century Journal of pilgrimage, Louis de Rochechouard offers advice to pilgrims, among which we find one concerning wine:^[1]

Au moment de l’offertoire, le père gardien^[2] nous fit de nombreuses recommandations. Tout d’abord il a absous ceux qui étaient rentrés en terre sainte sans licence pontificale, ensuite il nous a exhortés à l’amour fraternel…en troisième lieu, concernant les périls rencontrés habituellement par les pèlerins, il allait de soi que nous devions nous déplacer tous ensemble en prenant garde à nos bourses, et que nous devions cacher notre vin, parce que les Sarrasins l’apprécient beaucoup. (Rochechouard, 1461 [1997]: 1139)

At the offertory, the father keeper gave us various recommendations; he, first, absolved those who entered the holy land without pontifical license; then he called upon us to brotherly love … thirdly, concerning perils faced by pilgrims, it was obvious that we should move by groups, caring for our money and being obliged to hide our wine, because Saracens enjoyed it too much.

This anecdote is amazing; indeed, it reveals that wine is among the objects most enjoyed by Muslims. In other passages, the traveler neither understands the clandestine nature, nor the success of this drink, despite the strict monitoring and punitive measures taken against anyone caught drinking wine. Research into the reasons behind the paradox of wine in Islam reveals both a real desire to understand and the irresistible temptation to depreciate the Other. In Rochechourard’s narrative, we find the following passage:

Les Sarrasins qui habitent en Syrie, en Egypte, en Berbérie et jusqu’à l’Asie Mineure sont des gens bestiaux. Ils servent la loi de Mahomet et le Coran. Cependant contrairement à leur loi, ils boivent du vin, j’en ai vu plusieurs le faire, quand ils n’ont pas de vin, ils font bouillir des raisins qu’ils ont en grande abondance, et avec lesquels ils font un assez bon vin. (Ibid., 1165).

The Saracens, who live in Syria, Egypt, and Barbary to Minor Asia, are brutish people. They serve the law of Muhammad and the Koran. However, contrarily to their law, they drink wine; I have seen too much of them do it. When they have no wine, they boil raisins they possess in great quantities and make a quite good wine.

Wine continues to intrigue western travelers both by the paradoxical relationship that the Saracens maintain with this drink and by its prohibition. In fact, travelers did not understand the sense of this prohibition and attempt to find explications in many fictions on the subject. It is often the occasion to use topoi such as those of discovered manuscripts, stories or tales all linked to Prophet Muhammad. All those stories constitute variations on the same theme: trapped by wine, Muhammad decided never to drink it.

We find numerous stories like that: monks decided to make Muhammad drunk in order to steal his sword, to kill someone with it, and to succeed in making him believe he is the killer:

Mahomet prit son épée, la tira du fourreau et la vit ensanglantée. Il crut donc qu’il était vrai qu’il avait tué le moine. Aussitôt il prononce la promesse de ne plus jamais boire du vin, ni lui ni les autres païens. Et ainsi ils s’en gardent par peur, mais non par dévotion: là où ils en trouvent, ils s’y noient. (Emmanuel Piloti, 1420 [1997]: 1243).

Muhammad takes his sword, pulls it out from its scabbard, and sees it bloodied. He believed that he had killed the monk. Immediately, he makes the promise to never drink wine, neither him, nor the other pagans. Therefore, they did not drink it by fear, not by devotion: wherever they found it, they got drowned in it.

Another legend related to Muslim wine prohibition reactivates an old story attributed to Muhammad using two famous characters of Muslim cosmogony. It is about Haruth and Maruth, two celebrated angels adept at black magic. The form of narrative in all these stories is laborious, but at that time, authors appreciated digressions and all kinds of stylistic burden. We reproduce here a part of that story because of its symptomatic value about the maintenance of religious prejudice:

La raison pour laquelle ce porc de Mahomet a interdit le vin se trouve dans la Doctrine de Mahomet. Il y avait deux anges, Baroth et Maroth, envoyés par Dieu sur terre pour gouverner et instruire le genre humain. Ils interdirent trois choses, tuer, juger injustement, boire du vin. Au bout de quelque temps, ces deux anges parcoururent le monde entier et une femme d’une très grande beauté vint les trouver. Elle était en procès avec son mari et invita les anges à dîner pour qu’ils soutinssent sa cause. Ils acceptèrent. Elle apporta avec les plats des coupes de vin, leur en offrit, insista pour qu’ils en prisent. Que dire de plus ? Vaincus par la malice de cette femme, ivres, ils acceptèrent de révéler ce qu’elle leur demandait, que l’un lui apprit les paroles qui leur permettaient de descendre du ciel et l’autre celles qui leur permettaient d’y remonter. Quand elle les sut, elle monta aussitôt au ciel. A son arrivée, Dieu fit son enquête et fit d’elle Lucifer, la plus belle des étoiles, comme elle avait été la plus belle des femmes. Quant aux anges, Dieu les convoqua et leur demanda de choisir entre un châtiment en ce monde, ou dans l’autre. Ils choisirent ce monde et furent jetés, tête la première, attachés à des chaînes, dans le puits du diable où ils resteront jusqu’au jour du jugement. Voilà ce que raconte ce faussaire, fils aîné du démon. (Symon Semeonis, 1330 [1997]: 979)

The reason why that pig of Muhammad had forbidden wine is in the proper doctrine of Muhammad. There were two angels, Baroth and Maroth, who were sent by god to govern and instruct humanity.^[3] They prohibited three things: to kill, to misjudge, and to drink wine. Sometime later, these two angels travel around the world when a very beautiful woman visited them. She was in trial with her husband and invited the two angels to dinner. They accepted. She brought cups of wine with the plates she offered to them and insisted that they drink some. What else is there to say? Beaten by the malice of that woman, they got drunk and agreed to grant her requests: one taught her the formula of coming down from the sky; the second showed the formula of climbing to it. As soon as she got that, she climbed to Heaven. God made an inquiry and transformed her into Lucifer, the beautiful star, as she was a beautiful woman. As for the two angels, God convoked them and asked them to choose between a punishment in this world and another in the afterlife. They chose this world and were dumped, headfirst, attached to the chains, in the devil’s well where they would remain until judgment day. This is what that faker, the oldest son of the devil, is saying.

The theme of prohibited wine allows the Other to explicitly condemn a bad concept of wine, and to implicitly celebrate a good one based on self-control, brotherly love, etc.

Let us remember the passage above where two contexts of wine were opposed: the Christian one, founded on sense and the sacred, and the Muslim one, founded on hypocrisy and non-sense.^[4] This finally allows the traveler to support a discourse of truth on wine. The reference of that discourse of truth is implicitly linked to the last supper. Wine remains linked to Jesus, who consecrates it as a symbol of sacrifice, sharing, and communion. This is why western travelers invent all these stories about Muhammad when they talk about wine in Islam. The discourse on wine is a discourse opposing two cultures of wine, two communities, and two representations of that drink. This is to say how passionate the language and thinking about wine was until the fifteenth century, because of the paramount presence and the influence of the religious model.

At the same time, in many travel narratives, we find a certain desire to describe varieties and differences regarding culinary practices. This imposes on the travelers to relativize more their judgments, indeed to moderate their references and their certainties. This is apparent in the following excerpts:

Les Grecs célèbrent la messe avec du pain et du levain […] les Arméniens diffèrent peu des Latins […] comme les Grecs, ils mangent de la viande seulement deux fois par an, le vendredi.(Ibid. 1152)

Greeks celebrate mass with bread and leaven [...] Armenians are a little bit different from Latins [...] As Greeks, they eat meat only twice in a year.

Les Druses habitent entre Rac et Beyrouth. Ils ne croient pas en Mahomet mais en l’Evangile et ne mangent pas la viande de porc ; on les appelle Sarrasins. Ils ont une religion secrète sur laquelle ils ne veulent pas s’étendre. Ils boivent du vin ouvertement.(Louis de Rochechouart, [1461] 1997: 1164)

The Druses live between Rac and Beirut. They do not believe in Muhammad but in the Bible and they do not eat pork; we call them Saracens. They have a secret religion they do not speak about. They drink wine openly.

Les Raphati habitent à côté du Liban, ne croient pas aux disciples de Mahomet, mais en Mahomet seul. Ils sont hostiles aux Sarrasins et ne mangent pas dans de la vaisselle. (Ibid. 1164)

The Raphati who live near Lebanon, do not believe in Muhammad’s disciples. They are hostile to Saracens and do not eat on plates.

Les Arabes habitent en Syrie, en Egypte, en Berbérie jusqu’en Asie Mineure de part et d’autres du Jourdain, et vivent comme des bêtes sauvages […] ils vivent de rapine de lait de chamelle et de viande, sont couverts de vêtements l’été, ne boivent du vin d’aucune sorte. (Ibid. 1165)

Arabs live in Syria, Egypt, and Barbary to Asia Minor and Jordan’s edges; they live like wild beasts […] They live on stealing camel milk and meat; they wear a lot of clothes in the summer and do not drink wine of any kind.

As we see, the quotations reveal the variety of culinary uses, sometimes contradictions, and paradoxes concerning the same food in the same culture. More interesting, this kind of culinary Babel convinces western travelers of the existence of other culinary practices, variety, and in fact of the relativity of all that.

As we know, the sixteenth century was a period of big change: it marks the end of the Crusades, the beginning of great western expansions, and the discovery of America.^[5] In this context, the Other and the Other’s food became the object of new significations. The Arabs and Orientals are not characterized pejoratively as we have seen above; their food and drink are grasped less in a polemical or passionate way; that, in a way, is an attempt to track the variety and to understand it. Travel narratives of that epoch note that a meal or a drink could be different from one community to another even if they belonged to the same and global culture. The same significant change concerning topographies of food, however, is established by these narratives. Jerusalem is no longer the only sacred place linked to biblical reminiscences. Other places became interesting and generated more curiosity. Belon (1578)[2001]), for example, provides a detailed description about the beer produced in Turkey and called poska. The drink, made of barley and millet, was inexpensive and easy to make: just take grains of barley and millet, whole or split, cook them in a big boiler until they form a thick paste, and then add water.

Concerning other drinks in Turkey, Galland (1678) mentions briefly the Turkish wine paradox. He writes that Turks do not themselves make wine, but rather buy it from Christians. That is to say that the discourse on wine progressively shifts froma focus on the wine paradox to discourse, revealing a net predilection for diversity, variety, and differences:

Les autres nations boivent du vin, et en quantité, aussi bien que de l’eau de vie, le vin se recueille du pays et la plupart des marchands achètent le raisin pour le faire eux-mêmes chez eux [….] les juifs ne boivent pas du vin fait par les Chrétiens –il faut qu’il soit fait par eux-mêmes chez eux – et disent que leurs Hakhams ont été obligés de faire cette défense, tant à Smyrne qu’en d’autres lieux [...].(Antoine Galland, 1678 [2002]: 148–149)

The other nations drink too much wine, as well as brandy.Wine is produced at home, and most merchants buy raisins and make it themselves at home. […] Jews do not drink wine made by Christians. It must be produced by them at home.

In Turkey, travelers, like Galland, admire other drinks that later became very famous. Such is the case of coffee, called cahvé and cherbet, a kind of cocktail made of fruit juice, ice, and spices. There is an unlimited variety of compositions. For rich people there are, for example, cocktails made of millet or roses. For modest people the most popular remains Cherbet made of raisins.

It is of a paramount interest to speak about the importance of a newly discovered drink such as coffee. In fact, the discovery of coffee sheds light on new practices, and gives rise to new representations of places linked to this drink. Totally unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century, coffee was introduced unequally, and progressively imposed itself, giving rise to new topographies and in particular revealing new ways in Arab drinking practices.^[6] When we read, for example, about the first French expedition to Yemen, we measure the importance and the need to have that ingredient. Coffee in this area was solicited for its mercantile value, but also for its symbolic value. In Laroque’s (1714) narrative, coffee operates like an ideological mediator and reveals itself as an active agent of a new imaginary, essentially characterized by indolence, relaxation, and pleasure. Western readers discover, at the same time of the translation by the same Galland of Les mille et une nuits, long descriptions of Arab ways of preparing, drinking, and enjoying coffee, and long nights passed discussing, praying, or meditating with coffee.There are not only new representations around that drink, such as philanthropy and spirituality, but a total change that affects even wine itself. For the first time in travel narratives, such as Galland’s or Laroque’s, coffee is preferred to wine because it promotes more attention on the Other, more exchange; indeed wine was seen as conducive to perfidy and deceit.^[7] It is really a rare case in that literature where new individual signifiers contest and amend very powerful, rooted, and well established signifiers, such as those related to wine.

When we read French travelers having visited Morocco in the nineteenth century, we are struck by two things. The first is that the majority of them were accompanying French officials and subscribing one way or another to the French expansionist ideology of that time, an ideology manifested always with euphemistic forms, such as “protectorat”, “mission civilisatrice et culturelle” (cultural and civilizing mission), etc. The second thing that strikes us is that the discourse on Moroccan food is closely linked to the ideology evoked above. As we shall see, the discourse of wine does not escape from that strategy of the two opposite worlds: the world of civilization and the world that could be civilized.

In most narratives of that epoch, the evocation of wine is linked to the description of the Jewish ghetto called Mellah. In the brothers Taraud’s narrative, for example, the authors narrate many anecdotes of wine during their visits to Mellah. They record how Jews were the only ones allowed to produce wine in Morocco, and the various paradoxical situations that reality engenders. This situation seems of great interest to the authors, but contrary to the other narratives, it constitutes the starting point of individual signifiers proper to the brothers Taraud – signifiers orientated more toward aesthetics and philosophical concerns and adopting the form of confession or an intimatetone:

J’y ai passé moi aussi, bien des heures dans ce vermineux Mellah entraîné par le mystérieux attrait qu’exerce sur moi la vie juive. Un attrait au fond assez pareil à celui qui emporte les fassis vers le cabaret clandestin. Non pas que j’éprouve, comme lui, du goût pour la maia, qui n’est qu’un affreux tord-boyaux, ni que j’aie l’envie de séduire la femme du cabaretier, mais à moi aussi ce Mellah versait sa liqueur extravagante.(Frères Taraud, 1930: 190)

I have passed too many hours in that vermin Mellah, led by the mysterious attraction Jewish life exerted on me. An attraction, in fact, equal enough to that which takes the Fassi to the clandestine cabaret. Not because I like Mahia, which is just a rotgut, nor the desire to seduce the tavern keeper’s wife, as Fassi does, but for me, too, that Mellah was pouring its extravagant liquor.

The confession expressed here by the enunciator I and by me too is not only a kind of effusion, but also the occasion to focus on Jewish Cabaret and Mahia in order to track the semiosis of that drink. The topography of drink in Mellah sounds like an artificial paradise, contagious flowers, or poisonous pleasures. For once, the traveler and the Fassi seem close, but it is just a detour, an ephemeral encounter. The concession introduced by not because expresses the author’s desire to specify that it is not about the same tastes; the drunkenness sought by the Fassi, painted in a highly pejorative way, (see the redundancy expressed by “horrible rotgut”), is not similar to what the traveler is looking for: it is about mystery, attraction, and extravagance. The other is looking for aesthetic sensation, as the implicit reference to Baudelaire’s world confirms. Indeed the Fassi is looking for drunkenness and adultery. Finally, the apparent closeness culminates in a confrontation between two uses of Mellah and of the drink it offers (Mahia), a confrontation between an immoral use and another one, which is mysterious, esthetic, and quite philosophical.

Another example of what we can now call the morals of wine is given in the descriptions of drunken nights organized by some Moroccan swingers. These nights were described in the following:

Suivant la Quaïda, vers les neufs heures du soir, les négresses apportent une douzaine de bassins de cuivre, coiffés de capuchons de paille, sous lesquels se tiennent au chaud les couscous, les poulets et les ragoûts. Invités, musiciens, chirat tout le monde s’installe autour des tables basses, où les plats passent tour à tour. Quand les gens d’une table ont pris avec les doigts ce qui leur convenait, le plat est emporté à la table voisine, d’où il passe à une autre, et à une autre encore, jusqu’à ce qu’il ne reste plus rien [….]

Les fillettes font circuler le verre de vin à la ronde, en le faisant tinter d’abord contre leur boucle d’oreilles, dans ce geste rituel qui semble avoir pour effet de monter en alcool, et de plusieurs degrés, le breuvage épais et noir. Ah dans ces nuits de Fez, que devient la loi du prophète ? En voyant l’état frénétique où le vin jette tout ce monde, comme on comprend que Mahomet ait mis ses adeptes à l’eau.(Frères Taraud, 1930: 194)

As usual, at around nine o’clock, the Negro girl carries a dozen basins of copper covered by straw caps, under which lay warm couscous, chicken, and stews. Hosts, musicians, shikhats, everybody take a seat around the tables where plates circulate. When the hosts of a table take what they need with their fingers, the plate passes to the next table and so on until there is nothing left […]

Girls circulate the cup of wine after sounding it against their earrings; this ritual gesture seems to increase the alcoholic content of the thick and black beverage. In these nights of Fez, what about the law dictated by Muhammad? Seeing the frenetic state in which the wine has put all these people, now we understand why Muhammad had decreed water for his disciples.

The passage begins with the term la Quaïda, which means the rule, the use, or, according to connoisseurs, that which refers here to the Moroccan swingers. It is structured by two types of food, which can be considered fully as actants: the plates and the cup of wine. The former pass from one table to another, rather from fingers to others, communicating a paramount aspect: an absolute sharing and the denial of any type of limit on the intimate. The latter is closely linked to females, in particular their earrings, and opens a fetishist and alchemist dimension (contact with the girls’ earrings and the term beverage). The last exclamation of the travel came, however, as a reactivation of the moral of wine and denouncing once again the total lack of self-control (consider the implied “frenzy”). The evocation of Muhammad once again records a kind of curse specific to Muhammad and his community, transforming the description of a simple local drunken night into a universal received truth.