Egyptian authorities destroy cannabis fields and punish hashish users

Around 780 AH, corresponding to 1378–1379 CE, the emir Sudun al-Shaykhuni ordered cannabis plants uprooted in parts of Cairo and punished people who ate hashish. The account includes the extraction of teeth. This is a striking early suppression campaign, but neither its approximate date nor its geography supports the familiar claim that it was the world’s first cannabis ban.

A campaign in Cairo

Al-Maqrizi’s account, available in Silvestre de Sacy’s French translation, identifies searches in Djonëina in Bab al-Luq and in the direction of Bulaq. The emir ordered the plants found there removed and consumers arrested. Those established to have eaten the drug were to have their teeth pulled; the narrative says several people suffered that punishment.

The account concerns eating cannabis. It does not describe a modern campaign against marijuana cigarettes. Nor does the place-name identify an otherwise established emirate somewhere in Arabia: the translated passage places the searches within Cairo’s urban geography.

A date given approximately

The text says the action occurred around the year 780. Converting that Hijri year produces a span across 1378 and 1379, rather than an exact CE day. The database retains 1378 as the conventional starting year and states that uncertainty in the description.

Jamal Bellakhdar’s later study also places the emir in the Cairo region under the Mamluk sultans. This helps correct another common error: describing the campaign as an Ottoman prohibition. The political setting was Mamluk Egypt.

Reading a hostile witness

Al-Maqrizi’s language about consumers is openly contemptuous. His account moves from the punishment to a lament about later public consumption and what he regarded as the loss of virtue. Those judgements show how he understood cannabis and social order; they are not neutral descriptions of every consumer.

The same narrative acknowledges that public use returned. That makes it evidence of an effort to suppress a practice, rather than proof of its permanent elimination.

What later retellings add

Abel’s modern history gives a much more elaborate account involving resistance by growers, siege and destruction. The translated passage examined here directly supports uprooting, arrests and tooth extraction. It does not independently establish every detail of that larger narrative.

Earlier cultivation suppression at Cafour and Baybars’s prohibition also precede the episode. Its significance is the documented severity and location of the enforcement, not a defensible claim to absolute priority.^[1][2][3]