A lot of people think Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol. But how do you explain the fact that there's a genre of wine poetry in Arabic, and that a couple of caliphs wrote wine poems?

The fact is that Muslim law considers wine "disapproved" but not "forbidden." As a result, attitudes have vacillated over time between puritanism and tolerance, and even a certain amount of whoop-de-doo-ism. And there are all those poems.

Charles Perry is a widely published scholar specializing in the cuisine of the Muslim World. He majored in Middle East Studies at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley and studied at the Middle East Center for Arab Studies in Shimlan, Lebanon. Thereafter he pursued a career as a journalist, culminating in 18 years as a staff writer for the Food Section of the Los Angeles