While the prohibition of wine is unanimous, the schools historically differed over the exact boundary for other substances, and modern discussion extends the same reasoning to narcotics. The ruling is bound up with the wider ethic of sobriety and lawful earning, since dealing in intoxicants is likewise censured. It stands beside the Sikh and some Christian temperance affirmations as one of several traditions that forbid intoxicants, though Islam grounds it specifically in Quranic command rather than in a general counsel of moderation.
The clearest classical divergence concerned nabidh, a lightly fermented date or raisin drink common in Kufa: early Hanafi jurists, working in a milieu where nabidh was widely consumed, permitted it in quantities that did not actually intoxicate, reasoning that the Quran forbids khamr specifically rather than every fermented beverage, while the Hijazi jurists who shaped the Maliki and later Shafii and Hanbali positions held that any amount of any intoxicating substance is forbidden regardless of the quantity actually consumed, a stricter reading that became the majority position across most of the later Muslim world. That same reasoning by analogy, extending a ban the text names for wine to substances the text never mentions, is what modern jurists invoke again for narcotics and other mind altering drugs unknown to the seventh century, so the historical Hanafi Hijazi divide over nabidh anticipates, in miniature, the wider debate over how far a rule stated for one substance reaches.