Alcohol: No Exception for Moderation

Of the three, it is fermented drink that comes first for full treatment. The simple rule of the sharīʿah has already been given: every intoxicant is unlawful, in a small quantity or a large one. The argument heard so often, especially from young men, is: what about in moderation? Astaghfirullāh. Once in a blue moon, whatever that is taken to mean — there is a technical definition of a blue moon, though it need not detain us here. Or: it was a special occasion, surely Allah will not record it as a sin. The reply to that is direct: will Allah (swt) really change His own law because someone is attending a close friend's wedding, so that alcohol becomes permitted for that one day? Astaghfirullāh. What, after all, is the difference between drowning two hundred feet under the water and drowning two or three centimetres below the surface of a swimming pool? Either way the result is the same — loss of life, death. In exactly the same way, a small amount of ḥarām and a large amount of ḥarām are equal in the sharīʿah. There is no difference.

When Allah (swt) prohibited alcohol to a nation — the Arabs, who were famous the world over for cellars holding twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty years of wine — there was not an occasion on which it went unshared, much as in the West today, where a guest entering someone's home is offered alcohol as the host's finest offering; they drank heavily. Allah (swt) commanded the believers gradually, across three separate stages at three separate times, until it was made ḥarām in full. How that prohibition unfolded is not the present concern; what matters is that when it was made ḥarām, the Muslims were so ready, their īmān so complete, that the streets of Madīnah and of Makkah stank of alcohol for months afterward — every household bringing out its barrels, cracking them open, and pouring the contents into the street. The smell of fermented drink lingered for months.

Sayyidinā ʿAlī (karrama'llāhu wajhah) is reported to have said that if this little finger of his — this small finger — were ever to touch alcohol, he would not think twice before cutting it off. This is not to be misunderstood as though Muslims are meant literally to sever their fingers over contact with alcohol — cutting off one's own finger is itself ḥarām in Islam, and he says plainly that he would not actually do it. He is making a point, and exaggerating to make it: this is the difference between a companion of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and people today. A companion, in ʿAlī's own words, kept so far from the ḥarām that even a touch with his little finger would make him ready to cut it off, though he would not; today, told that something is ḥarām, people ask instead to think it over, to hold an academic discussion, to be convinced otherwise. Yet Allah (swt) calls it, in the Qurʾān, a filth that is the work of Shayṭān^*, and ḥarām it remains — a little of it or a great deal makes no difference, and the ruling itself cannot be changed by argument. A Muslim has no case to argue here at all; the proper response is āmannā wa ṣaddaqnā — we hear, and we believe and obey — and simply to continue abstaining from what is ḥarām.