Another great lunch at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan. Which reminds me, I meant to talk about alcohol in Pakistan. This article by Heather Carreiro gave a good overview:
https://matadornetwork.com/…/guide-to-drinking-and…/
It probably tells you something about how little I drink (even though I’m getting ready to release a cocktail cookbook) that I didn’t really know anything about alcohol in Pakistan before this trip. I didn’t even think about it until we went out for cultural sightseeing on Wednesday, and I was surprised to see no alcohol options on the menu at either the Pakistani restaurant we went to for lunch, or the fairly high-end Western food restaurant we went to for dinner.
I grew up in a Sri Lankan diasporic culture that was pretty low on alcohol — some of the men drank at parties, the women mostly didn’t, and though my parents kept some alcohol on hand for guests, they didn’t drink on their own at home at all.
I remember one point in my early 20s when I attended a Sri Lankan event in a restaurant / bar (in London, I think), and the men magnaminously asked if I’d like a drink, expecting me to perhaps get a wine cooler — when I ordered a whiskey sour, I got unexpected stink-eye from several of the older men (which mostly amused me).
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I looked into it a little more: “After its independence in 1947, Pakistani law was fairly liberal regarding liquor laws. Major cities had a culture of drinking, and alcohol was readily available until the mid-1970s when the Bhutto government introduced prohibition for Muslim citizens. Since then, Pakistan’s majority Muslim population has been unable to legally buy alcohol, and advertising for alcoholic beverages has been outlawed.” (Carreiro)
(Muslims make up roughly 97% of Pakistan’s population.)
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t get alcohol. Many people do drink alcohol in private — you can get bootleggers to deliver you alcohol. Many families don’t drink at all, though, so I wouldn’t assume there’d be alcohol at a party. And if you do drink, you may face some social stigma and judgement. (I’m now imagining going to a faculty party here in Chicago, and boldly asking if anyone had any heroin or cocaine they wanted to share…)
NOTE: “Homemade alcohol in Pakistan has been the cause of many deaths and debilitating injuries such as blindness. It is often made with methyl alcohol and can be tainted with other chemicals. If you’re offered some of this Pakistani moonshine, I’d suggest declining even if it seems like an excellent way to bond with local villagers. Seriously, almost every time I picked up a local newspaper in Lahore I read reports of people dying or getting very ill from these sketchy alcoholic concoctions (“Alcohol Deaths Spotlight Pakistan’s Drinking Culture”).” (Carreiro)
You can also get alcohol legally (if you’re non-Muslim) at restaurants in five-star hotels, and they usually have a small shop were beer and liquor is sold — wine is less of a thing there currently.
If you do break the law, I’m a little unclear on the punishment — at one point, 80 lashes was on the books, but I’m not sure that’s still enforced — “Even though no Pakistani has been awarded the punishment of whipping for consuming/selling alcohol ever since 1981, in 2009 the Federal Shariat Court declared that whipping for this offence (ordered by the 1979 Prohibition Ordinance) was ‘un-Islamic’. The court also maintained that drinking alcohol is discouraged by the Muslim holy book but it has not out-rightly forbidden it. The court said it wasn’t ‘haram’.”
That’s from this great pictorial history: https://medium.com/…/spirits-having-flown-a-pictorial…
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None of this was a big deal for me — it just surprised me. I’m not a big drinker normally — I might go weeks or even months without an alcoholic drink, without missing it. I do like wine at dinner parties.
I’ve lived in semi-dry places before — in the three years I was in Salt Lake City for grad school, you had to be a member of a ‘private club’ in order to buy hard liquor, and while beer was served in restaurants, it was 3-2 beer, with a lower alcohol percentage than regular beer, so you’d have to drink a lot more to get drunk. (Beer that contains 3.2% alcohol by weight (equivalent to about 4% ABV)).
And of course, much of the U.S. has dry or semi-dry counties, and you often can’t buy alcohol on Sunday all over. We aren’t immune to religion-influenced liquor laws.
Overall, I think the main relevant fact for our workshop organizers is that if they do this again, they might want to check with any teachers they bring in whether they regularly drink alcohol, and make sure they’re aware of the situation in Pakistan, so they can plan accordingly. (Is there anything to stop you buying a few bottles of whiskey in the airport duty-free and bringing them in, as a non-Muslim? I don’t think so…)
As an interesting (and irritating) side note: “In 1955 Sri Lanka passed a law prohibiting adult women from buying alcohol. In January 2018, Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera announced that the law would be amended, allowing women to legally consume alcohol and work in venues that sell alcohol. The legalization was overruled by President Maithripala Sirisena several days later.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition
