The Flower of Paradise: The Institutionalized Use of the Drug Qat in North Yemen

John G. Kennedy's The Flower of Paradise, The Institutionalized Use of the Drug Qat in North Yemen, published by D. Reidel in 1987, is a scholarly ethnography examining qat chewing's central place in Yemeni social life, including its documented use within Sufi devotional vigils, a religious dimension most other writing on qat, which tends to treat it only as a social stimulant, does not address. Kennedy conducted the underlying fieldwork himself in North Yemen. Its strength is that direct ethnographic fieldwork specifically attentive to qat's religious as well as social role, filling a gap in the wider literature. Its limit is its age, nearly four decades, during which qat use and its regulation in Yemen have changed considerably amid the country's subsequent conflicts, so a claim about qat's current social or legal standing needs more recent sources alongside this study of its historical and religious dimension.