The relatively relaxed attitude to alcohol in the earlier centuries of Islam may have been due to doubts, in the days before the religion had hardened into rigid orthodoxy, as to whether the Qur’an actually prohibits the consumption of alcohol or merely recommends moderation and/or abstinence. The goal has been to create an Islam that both conforms to national values, notably secularism, and is immune to the radical interpretations that have gained a footing in certain parts of the Muslim world. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Certainly Isis, like al-Qaida, has fashioned a grandiose imaginary system in which it pictures itself as conquering and defeating the west. What organisations like al-Qaida and Isis provide is a script. The Nice killer, for instance, was first described as mentally ill and later as an Isis militant whose crime had been premeditated. The strength of Isis is to play on our fears. Muslims believe it was originally built by Ibrahim (Abraham) on a site made holy by the first man, Adam. We ask ourselves what Islam wants, what Islam is, without for a moment realising that this world of Islam does not exist; that the ummah is at best a pious wish and at worst an illusion; that the conflicts are first and foremost among Muslims themselves; that the key to these conflicts is first of all political; that national issues remain the key to the Middle East and social issues the key to integration.

Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of the Nazi Empire conquered by the Soviet Red Army, and Yugoslavia became one party communist states and the project of coercive conversion continued. This caricature has been reinforced since Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, where the Islamist party has imposed a de facto ban on alcohol, though bootlegging has become a popular, if risky, pastime. Although alcohol is generally considered to be haraam (forbidden) in Islam, only the most conservative countries actually impose a legal ban on it. This is not just a recent “innovation”, as conservative Muslims might believe. Numerous prominent Muslims throughout the ages drank alcohol. Regardless of whether this is the case or not, devout Muslims have every right to consider alcohol haraam and not part of Islam the religion. As we have seen, it does not mobilise the masses, and only draws in those on the fringe. But the reality is that Isis’s pretension to establish a global caliphate is a delusion – that is why it draws in violent youngsters who have delusions of grandeur. I have my own opinions, but rather than take sides and get caught up in a debate that seems to have no end in sight: I will take this opportunity to present a documentary that has one goal in mind: PEACE.

What should be the ultimate goal of sentencing and incarceration? Successive governments since the 1980s have tried to create a brand of Islam particular to France, with the dual objective of integrating the country’s Muslim minority and fighting Islamist extremism. Can a French government effort to remake a religion succeed without buy-in from the country’s diverse Muslim communities? DRIVE THEM OUT of your communities. Although he was considered to be the greatest Arab poet ever during his lifetime, Nuwas has fallen out of favour with the modern Muslim reader. In the wider Arab and Muslim context, booze is widely available. There is a temptation to see in Islam a radical ideology that mobilises throngs of people in the Muslim world, just as Nazism was able to mobilise large sections of the German population. Christianity enjoys the support of more than 2 billion people all over the world, making it the single largest religion on planet earth. The French theologian Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), from a Roman Catholic point of view but taking into account the work of Protestant biblical critics, found the essence of Christianity in the faith of the developed church, which could not be found simply by trying to discover the nature of the historical Jesus.

The Catholic clergy was persecuted by the Paris Commune of 1792 to 1795 and by some of the Représentants en mission. Some hadith (traditions of the prophet) even suggest that Muhammad may have actually drunk mildly alcoholic beverages. They do not affect the west’s military capabilities; they even strengthen them, by putting an end to military budget cuts. Even caliphs, such as the Abbasid ruler Haroun al-Rashid of One Thousand and One Nights fame, were reputed to indulge, despite their title of “commanders of the faithful”. Lane also alludes to the fact that boozing was even more common in earlier centuries, before the introduction of tobacco and coffee as substitutes. Each one is specific, but there is a striking common thread that runs through the mass murders perpetrated by disaffected, nihilistic and suicidal youths. The boundaries between a suicidal mass killer of this sort and a militant for the caliphate are understandably hazy. The suicidal mass killer is unfortunately a common contemporary figure. Common grace is the universal grace that every person can experience because our God is so faithful, good, kind, and unconditionally loving. We can divide these forms into five models: the theocratic model, the absolute-secular model, the separation of state and religion model, the established church model, and the acknowledged religions model.