This book explores the significance of alcohol in the Middle East and Maghreb as a powerful catalyst of social and political division. It shows that the solidarities and polarities created by disputes over alcohol are built on arguments far more complex than oppositions on religion or consumption alone. In a region in which alcohol is banned by Islamic rules, yet allows its production and consumption, alcohol has always been contentious. However, this volume examines the different forms of social authority ¿ religious, cultural and political ¿ to offer a new understanding of drinking behaviours in the Middle East and North Africa. It suggests that alcohol, being at the same time an import and product of local industry, epitomises the tensions inherent to the conforming of Islamic societies to global trends, which seek to redefine political communities, social hierarchies and gender roles. The chapters challenge common misconceptions about alcohol in this region, arguing instead that medical discourses on alcohol dependency hide stances on national independence in an imperialist context; that the focus on religion also tends to conceal disputes on alcohol as a social struggle; and that disputes on inebriation are more about masculinity than judging private leisure. In doing so, the volume presents alcohol as a way of grasping the power relations that structure the societies of the Middle East and Maghreb.

Elife Biçer-Deveci is a Postdoctoral Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK, and a Fellow of the Postdoc Mobility Grants of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Philippe Bourmaud is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary History at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 in France, and a member of the Rhône-Alpes Historical Research Laboratory.

Introduction:Part 1: Science and Politics.- Chapter 1 : Turkey's Prohibition in 1920: Modernising an Islamic Law.- Chapter 2 : Unknowable Social Problems or Competing Régimes of Truth ?.- Chapter 3 : Ordinary Drinking ? Place and Politics of Alcohol in Lebanon.- Part 2: Normative systems and negotiated interests.- Chapter 4: Alcohol and Religious Practices in Meknes (Morocco): Between Rejection and Compromise.- Chapter 5:Morocco, the most prohibitive of the French colonies (1912-1956)?.- Chapter 6: Drinking in Turkey: From a Social Coexistence to an Ideological Confrontation.- Part 3 : Contested spaces.- Chapter 7 : Drinking in Times of Change: The Hanunting Presence of Alcohol in Egypt.- Chapter 8: Production and Consumption of Alcohol in Ramallah: Steadfastness, Religion and Urban Rhytms.- Part 4: Chapter 9: Epilogue.