Egypt's Mufti declares hashish forbidden like alcohol

Ahmad Khalifa’s chapter, built on the National Center for Social and Criminological Research programme running since 1957 under Zeiwar then Soueif, treats Egyptian hashish as culturally conditioned mild use — functional, social, and sharply distinct from the addict end of the spectrum, where character and circumstance take over.^[1] The deep history frames everything that follows.

Sultans, teeth and poetry

Egypt’s hashish history probably runs back several hundred years, often explained by alcohol’s religious prohibition — an oversimplification, Khalifa warns.^[1] The historian Maqrizi (1364–1442) reports Sultan Nigm al-Din Ayyub ordering Prince Gamal al-Din to stop hashish planting in the Regouri Gardens; finding great quantities intact, the Sultan had the plants collected and burnt.^[1] At the turn of the fourteenth century another Sultan punished hashish eaters by pulling out their teeth — yet a quarter-century later consumption was public, eating fashionable, talk uninhibited.^[1] Modern Arabic historians place planting and use around the mid-twelfth century under the Ayyubids, following Syrian mystic emigrants; twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century poems praise euphoria, sociability, wit and amiability, note it was cheap, Islamicly unprohibited, undetectable and unpressed-by-feet — while adversaries listed submissiveness, debility, insanity, brain damage and prostitution.^[1]

From eating to the josah

The literature says hashish was eaten, pure, with mixtures coming later; modern Egypt smokes, and smokers count themselves more refined than eaters.^[1] Soueif’s 850-taker study found smoking prevalent in 89.4 percent — josah pipe 61.7, cigarettes 10.5, both 17.1 — oral-only 1.3 percent.^[1] The sample: convicted hashish-only prisoners of June 1967–March 1968, average age 39, 60 percent illiterate, none university graduates, a quarter skilled labourers.^[1] Use was social — 82.5 percent in groups — with city lone-takers (23.9 percent) far above rural (10 percent).^[1] Early onset predicted heaviness: 76 percent of pre-22 starters heavy users against 56 percent of later ones; early beginners carried family drug examples, dead parents and step-parents.^[1] First-time motives ranked conformity to friends (87.8), euphoria (86.6), curiosity (75.5), behaving like “real men” (72.5); 78.5 percent later wished to stop, for money first, then fear of punishment, health, status.^[1] Nearly a third had used opium; hashish users drank alcohol at 22.7 percent against 9.1 for controls.^[1]

The Sultan’s first drag

Sessions mixed professions, classes and schooling in brotherhood, following ritual: a supervisor, the Sultan, took the first drag of each new load, then the water-pipe circled; one man changed water, fed fire, loaded hashish.^[1] Folk song gave the pipe its function: “grouping” the beloved — belonging mattered more than any intoxicant, initiation serving conformity and escape from friends’ insinuations.^[1] Users felt superior to alcoholics and opium or cocaine users, whose drugs they judged addictive, maddening, identity-destroying.^[1] That folk theology met its official answer in 1940, when the Mufti’s fetwa prohibited hashish and every other drug on a par with alcohol.^[1]

Law without distinction

As early as 1879 Egypt legislated, first only against cultivation; penalties hardened to Law 182/1960, amended by Law 40/1966: death plus fines of three to ten thousand pounds for illicit import, export, production or manufacture, death or life hard labour for other commercial acts, three to fifteen years plus fines for personal possession.^[1] The law distinguished neither drug type nor quantity — hard and “softer” drugs alike — only offence types.^[1] Khalifa called the marihuana-as-narcotic classification with morphine and heroin irrational, hypocritical beside alcohol, and urged reclassification by danger with quantity-scaled offences, trafficking punished harder than personal possession.^[1] Enforcement and severity, he concluded, were no answer to misuse: control had to be rational, built on understanding the phenomenon.^[1]