A thread from my doctoral thesis on the verse in the Qur’an that apparently indicates that wine is permissible:

Q 16:67 reads “And from the fruit of the date palm and grapes, you derive from it inebriation (sakar) and a goodly provision (rizqan ḥasanan). Surely in this is a sign for a people who understand.”

The issue here is that inebriation seems to be mentioned as an example of God’s favours upon man, implying not only its permissibility, but even desirability! That flies in the face of the later prohibition of wine in the Qur’an (most clearly at Q 5:90-91).

The mufassirūn explored various strategies to overcome the difficulty, the best known (but by no means the only one) being that this verse was abrogated by later revelation that clearly made alcohol illicit.

But consider the verse in the context of the immediately preceding one:

66. And surely in the cattle there is a lesson for you: We give you to drink from that which is in their bellies, between waste matter and blood, as pure milk, palatable to those who drink.
67. And from the fruit of the date palm and grapes, you derive from it inebriation ...

Verse 66 describes how a single source, the cattle, produces both pure milk and detestable substances (blood and waste matter).

Similarly, v. 67 describes how a single source, whether date palms or grapes, produces both goodly provision and inebriation.

The two verses are parallel, with milk in v. 66 corresponding to goodly provision in v. 67, and waste matter / blood corresponding to inebriation.

The two verses taken together offer a clear condemnation of inebriation.

The broader lesson seems to be that the revelation that God sends down, which is compared to rain in the previous verse (v. 65), produces different outcomes within its recipients (see v. 64, which recognises the audiences ikhtilaf, or differing, regarding revelation).

Moreover, this is not a legislative passage per se, in that the prohibition of becoming drunk is not being proclaimed or argued for, but rather its undesirability must be assumed by the audience for the metaphor to work.

It is doubtful, however, that this assumption was universally held at this Meccan stage of the Prophet’s mission, as later Medinan proclamations show that questions about wine are still being settled; (Q 2:219, “They ask you about wine [khamr]”).

Therefore, Q 16:67 is plausibly seen as the first step in the eventual blanket prohibition against alcohol (Q 5:90–91). By creating a metaphor that works only when inebriation is understood negatively, it alerts the audience to what their attitude to drunkenness should be.