Alcohol and intoxicants are forbidden

Muslims affirm that wine and, by the reasoning of the jurists, all intoxicants are forbidden. The Quran moves from calling wine a thing with both benefit and greater sin (2:219) to commanding believers to avoid khamr as an abomination of Satan's handiwork (5:90-91). Classical jurisprudence extended the ruling from grape wine to every substance that clouds the intellect, citing the prophetic maxim that what intoxicates in large amounts is forbidden in small. The concern is the protection of the aql (reason), counted among the essential aims the law exists to safeguard.

Exegetes read the ban as unfolding across three distinct revelations rather than announced all at once: after 2:219 first noted wine's mixed benefit and harm, 4:43 next forbade approaching prayer while intoxicated, and only 5:90-91 pronounced the final, comprehensive prohibition, a sequence classical scholars of Quranic legislation cite as the clearest instance of tadarruj, graduated law-giving, in which a society long accustomed to a practice was weaned from it in stages rather than confronted with an abrupt command. Reports describe Umar ibn al-Khattab repeatedly praying for clearer guidance on wine between the earlier, more ambivalent verses and the final ban, a tradition later commentators cite as evidence the graduated revelation responded to a real and gradually deepening community concern.

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.