My paper concerns how alcohol was perceived by the public in the late Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the armistice period (1912–1923). During this time, alcohol drinking, which had been largely accepted by Muslim populations, was increasingly regarded as a sign of social degeneration and traced back to the influence of Western culture. The concept of social degeneration through alcohol also served to stigmatise local Christian communities and was used as a justification for attempts seeking to make the nation ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Thus, the division in attitudes towards alcohol drinking and temperance was used to produce a ‘national’ distinction. In September 1920, alcohol ban was introduced in Turkey and revoked in 1926. With historical hermeneutical methods and discourse analysis based on the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, I analyse the publications and memoirs of the founding members of Green Crescent which was established in March 1920 to fight against alcohol in the Muslim society. I also use other articles in the local newspapers of Istanbul about alcohol. I will present my results on my study of the publication by Dr Milasl? Ismail Hakk? Bey (1870–1938), physician and author of several medical and religious books. Dr Hakk? used religious elements as well as arguments of Western origin based on eugenics and social hygiene for his statements against alcohol consumption. His understanding of the ‘alcohol problem’ in the Muslim society layers several phenomena: the West as a point of reference, and mobilisation of the nationalist independence movement alongside the construction of cultural differences and enemy images. He claims that with the birth of Islam, alcohol totally vanished from the Muslim culture, but medical books translated from Greek and Greek physicians contributed a great deal to the increase of alcohol consumption and addiction in the Muslim society. Dr Hakk? argued for the alcohol ban and based his views the two existing Weltanschauungen of his time: the religious understanding of the issue of alcohol, and scientific disputes regarding the social and moral degeneration caused by drinking. In the process of secularisation, religious leaders lost their authority in defining the norms of daily life and were replaced by a scientific community, which used elements from eugenics and social hygiene in order to establish their authority in the definition of daily life norms.