Cannabis Literature in the Middle East During the 1910s

Context: what the decade inherited

By 1910, Middle Eastern writing on cannabis already had a thousand-year literary backbone. Medieval Arabic authors like Ibn al-Bayṭār (13th c.) and al-Maqrīzī (15th c.) had described hashish use, and 19th-century European travelers had layered Orientalist imagery on top of it ^[1][2]. The 1910s did not produce a new literary movement around cannabis. Instead, the decade is best understood as a hinge: older pharmacological and poetic traditions were fading, and a new regulatory and journalistic register was taking over Strong evidence.

Egypt is the center of gravity for documentation. Hashish import had been formally banned in 1879 under the Khedival government, and enforcement intensified through the 1890s and 1910s under British occupation ^[3]. This shaped what got written: less Sufi poetry, more customs reports, court records, and newspaper coverage of smuggling.

Arabic-language writing in Egypt and Greater Syria

The Arabic press in Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut expanded rapidly in this period. Papers such as al-Ahrām and al-Muqattam periodically covered hashish seizures, court cases, and debates over the drug's social effects, though cannabis was a minor topic compared to politics and the First World War Weak / limited. No major Arabic literary work from the 1910s takes hashish as its central subject in the way medieval risāla treatises did.

Medical and pharmacological writing continued in a quieter register. Arabic translations and adaptations of European materia medica circulated in Ottoman-administered schools, and references to qinnab (cannabis) and ḥashīsh appeared in pharmacy curricula, generally reproducing European pharmacological framings rather than indigenous Galenic ones Weak / limited. Specific named 1910s Arabic monographs on cannabis are not well attested in modern scholarship; claims of such works should be checked against actual library catalogs.

Ottoman Turkish and Persian sources

Late Ottoman Turkish writing on esrar (hashish) in the 1910s exists mainly in police gazettes, customs records, and short newspaper items. The Ottoman state had long taxed and intermittently restricted hashish, and the collapse of the empire during World War I disrupted both production and documentation ^[4] Weak / limited.

In Persia (Iran), cannabis (bang, charas) remained part of folk medicine and Sufi practice, but the 1910s — coinciding with the Constitutional Revolution's aftermath and Anglo-Russian intervention — produced little new literary treatment of the drug that survives in mainstream bibliographies. The richer Persian cannabis literature belongs to earlier centuries Strong evidence.

European Orientalist writing about Middle Eastern hashish

Much of what English- and French-speaking readers 'know' about 1910s Middle Eastern cannabis comes not from Middle Eastern authors but from European observers writing about the region. The most influential 1910s-era source is the work compiled around the League of Nations precursors and the Egyptian government's submissions to the International Opium Conference at The Hague (1911–1912), where Egypt successfully pushed for hashish to be considered alongside opium ^[3][5]. Egyptian delegate Mohamed El Guindy would later (1924, at Geneva) make the more famous anti-hashish case, but the groundwork was laid in the 1910s.

European medical literature in this decade — for example, articles in French colonial medicine journals — described 'hashish insanity' among Egyptian users, framing cannabis as a public-health threat Disputed. These reports were influential but methodologically weak by modern standards, often based on asylum admissions where cannabis use was recorded but not shown to cause the underlying illness ^[6].

Myths to be careful about

Several claims circulate online about 1910s Middle Eastern cannabis literature that do not hold up:

• 'Famous 1910s Cairo hashish poets.' The hashish-themed Arabic poetry usually cited (e.g. verses attributed to Ibn al-Wardī or anonymous medieval poets) is medieval, not 1910s Strong evidence.
• 'The Hague 1912 banned hashish.' The 1912 Opium Convention did not schedule cannabis; Egypt's lobbying only resulted in a non-binding recommendation. Cannabis was first internationally scheduled at Geneva in 1925 ^[3][5] Strong evidence.
• 'Sufi orders openly published hashish manuals in this decade.' No such published manuals from the 1910s are documented in standard bibliographies No data.

The honest summary: the 1910s matter less for what was written in the Middle East about cannabis than for how Middle Eastern governments — especially Egypt — began arguing on the international stage that hashish was a problem requiring global control. That diplomatic framing, more than any literary text, is the decade's lasting contribution to cannabis history.

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