Esrar

Esrar is the ordinary Turkish word for cannabis, the drug rather than the plant, which is kenevir. A user is an esrarkeş, and a room where it was smoked was an esrar tekkesi. The word is Arabic, and in Arabic it means “secrets”. The first sense survives in esrarengiz, “mysterious”, made from asrār and a Persian word for stirring up.

How “secrets” came to mean hashish is not explained by the dictionaries. What they do show is that it happened early, among the wandering dervishes of medieval Anatolia, and that by the nineteenth century the word belonged to the coffeehouses and the police reports of Istanbul.

From secrets to the drug

The etymological dictionary of Sevan Nişanyan derives esrar from Arabic asrār, the plural of sirr, “secret”, from the root s-r-r. Its first Turkish quotation, from a translation of 1341, uses it in that sense: the secrets of the saints. The next, from the poems of Kaygusuz Abdal, whose death is traditionally dated to 1444, already means the drug. In it someone is forever esrār yiyüp, “eating esrar”, and shaving his beard.

Before tobacco arrived, cannabis was eaten in pastes and pills or its smoke inhaled; tobacco mixtures in water pipes came later. Şemseddin Sami’s 1900 dictionary called the user an esrarkeş, one who “draws” esrar, as on a pipe.

The dervishes’ green leaves

Kaygusuz Abdal was a poet of the Abdals of Rum, one of the antinomian dervish groups of late medieval Anatolia studied by the historian Ahmet Karamustafa. These dervishes shaved their heads and beards, wandered half naked, rejected the prescribed prayers and fasts, and openly used intoxicants. Karamustafa found the use of cannabis leaves “clearly documented” among the main groups he studied, the Qalandars, the Haydaris and the Abdals of Rum among them. Medieval writers credited the founder of the Haydaris, Qutb al-Din Haydar, with discovering the drug’s effect in Khorasan. Kaygusuz, Karamustafa writes, consumed hashish freely.

The Ottoman author Vahidi, writing about the Abdals of his day, described them carrying two leather pouches, one for flint and one for hashish, and explained their habit in their own terms. Adam, expelled from Paradise, had lived naked but for a leaf and fed on “green leaves”; so did they. Hashish, in this account, was a way to escape the unreal world of time and space.

Two cautions belong here. Karamustafa writes that it is possible the leaves had become a ritual among these dervishes, but that the sources are too thin to prove it. And these were small groups at the edge of religious life, condemned by many of their contemporaries. Their habits say nothing about Sufism as a whole.

Dens, guilds and names

John P. Brown’s The Dervishes; or, Oriental Spiritualism, published in 1868, includes the engraving “A Bektash Dervish Inhaling Hasheesh” on page 310. Its seated smoker illustrates how a nineteenth-century author represented hashish use among dervishes. It is an engraving, not a documentary photograph or evidence that every Bektashi followed the practice.

Later the word moved into the city. The seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi described a guild in Istanbul that prepared pastes, ointments and syrups from esrar in the shops of the Addicts’ Market near the Süleymaniye mosque. By the nineteenth century there were esrar tekkeleri. Despite the name, which is also the word for a dervish lodge, they were not religious houses but specialized cannabis-smoking coffeehouse rooms, also called esrar kahvehaneleri. These should not be confused with ordinary Ottoman coffeehouses serving tobacco. The İstanbul Ansiklopedisi entry records the name tekke for such rooms and describes a kabak made from a hollowed coconut shell, with a bowl and reed mouthpiece. Its account concerns specifically hashish-smoking establishments. In the Greek-speaking towns of Ottoman Anatolia the hashish dens were called tekédes, and they appear in the history of rebetiko.

Word	Meaning
esrar	Cannabis, hashish
esrarkeş	A user
esrar tekkesi, esrarhane	A room or house where it was smoked
beng	The usual word in Ottoman texts; compare bhang
haşiş	Hashish, the Arabic word, see hashish
gubar	A name for one processed form
kabak	A gourd water pipe
maslak, gonca, sarı kız	Popular Ottoman names, among many

A century of closures

The historians Rıdvan Kızılkaya and Asaf Özkan have traced the campaign against the dens in the Ottoman archives. It began long before modern drug law.

Year	Measure
1857	The government ordered the hashish dens in Istanbul’s coffeehouses closed
1858	The penal code forbade pharmacies to sell esrar and other drugs
1863	Coffeehouses and herbalists were forbidden to sell it
1906	Police ordered to clear the dens of the city
1913	A police regulation required any esrarhane to be shut on the spot, its pipes seized
1933	The Republic’s narcotics law put cannabis under state control

The dens kept reopening, in Tahtakale, Aksaray, Tophane, Galata and Üsküdar, and the newspapers of the early Republic were full of raids. Esrar remains the word that Turkish uses for the drug, in conversation and in the news, while the plant grown for fibre and seed is still kenevir.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}