From the outset, the soundtrack sets the tone: the soundtrack of the film Midnight Express puts the listener in the mood. From ancient Egypt to today’s Afghanistan, from the Abbasid dynasty to Bashar Al-Assad, via the “French connection” immortalized by Hollywood, it’s a journey through time and space offered by RFI in its summer series on The Amazing History of Drugs in the Near and Middle East.
Historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, who published a book on the subject in January, offers a dive in five episodes (one every Sunday until September 3) into the thousand-year-old history of cannabis, poppy and their derivatives ( hashish, opium, heroin…).
Episode 1 (“From Antiquity to the Advent of Islam”) first explores the religious dimension. How the Quran, after (more or less) succeeding in anathematizing alcohol – drunkenness “troubles the mind of the faithful” – never managed to eradicate the “grass of the poor” – in Arabic hashish. How the disciples of Zoroaster (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) could not do without ephedrine, which caused “psychedelic-like visions”, says the historian – not without admitting that we do not know much about this religion “initiatic and elitist”. How in Palestine, in the remains of the Kingdom of Judah (from 931 to 586 BC according to the Bible), Israeli archaeologists found traces of the use of hashish for religious ceremonies.
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Among Muslims, from Baghdad to Cairo, these popular drugs quickly acquired a political dimension, under the influence of the Sufi brotherhoods, in opposition to the elite of the Ottoman Mamluks. “It’s both a mystical consumption, a class contestation and the affirmation of an Arab identity”, summarizes Mr. Filiu, for whom “the 20th and 21st centuries have invented absolutely nothing! “.
In Damascus, a sheikh, Ibn Taymiyya, wrote in the Middle Ages a treatise on hashish, “the absolute evil”. His book will inspire supporters of total prohibition – and the most intransigent Salafists – to this day. The Shiites are not left out: in Persia, chronicles recount the extent of opium addiction. An ayatollah will lead a veritable crusade against narcotics, alcohol and… Sufism.
No more than the Ottoman Empire, the colonial powers, both in the Gulf and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will succeed in eradicating the cultivation (in every sense of the word) of these drugs. After the fall of the virulent prohibitionist Mullah Omar, the Americans reestablished the Afghan warlords and, with them, poppy cultivation. A precious economic resource that will not escape the Taliban when they return to power in 2021…
France, the leading cannabis-consuming country in Europe, is also part of this “amazing story”. The film The French Connection, by William Friedkin (1971), highlights the chemists of the Corsican and Marseille mafias, very talented in transforming the opium produced in Turkey into heroin. Its success will contribute to the dismantling of this French network… in favor of a Sicilian Mafia! With raw material this time from Lebanon.