The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Ishmael said he knew a man who could not only change traveler’s checks but also obtain European passports, something I was most definitely in the market for. We popped over. The electricity was out, as usual, so there was neither light nor fans. Traditionally dressed Yemen men squatted amid piles of rubbish, counting cash and sipping tea, their cheeks bulging with qat, while their wealthier Saudi customers strutted and tugged at the cuffs of their Western dinner jackets, the better to display their heavy gold watches. I handed a stranger my check, and it began a circuit of the room hand by hand. There was a burst of excitement, and the moneychanger snatched it away from one man and threw it into a box, only to immediately pull it back out, grab two huge stacks of bills, and pass the combo over to me, yelling I should sign. Nobody asked for my passport.

  A man gestured I should sit on the floor next to him. I began to count, but there was not enough light to see the bills’ value. My neighbor lit his cigarette lighter and began helping me tally the money, constantly stopping to exchange comments with any of the dozens of men that kept stepping over us. Another stack of notes was handed through the crowd and placed at my side. All this was done with the strange casual rhythm I’d come to associate with qat.

  The money was fine. But it turned out Ishmael’s moneychanger knew nothing about European passports.

  “Talk to my other friend,” Ishmael suggested before he headed out to “do business.” He gestured to the stranger who’d been counting my money. Apparently he was the passport expert. Two nationalities were available—new Greek or used German.

  I asked about price.

  He shrugged. “As you like,” he said. “You help me, I help you.”

  I was still straining to see what my new friend looked like, but all I could see in the darkened room was a head of henna-dyed hair. Another Afghani.

  “Help?” I asked cautiously. “What kind of help?”

  It seemed false passports were a sideline with him. His main business was smuggling political refugees to higher-paying countries. If I wanted a passport, I had to help him in a smuggling operation. I would have to fly to Frankfurt, with a stopover in Dubai. The refugee, who wanted to relocate to Germany, would get a ticket on the same flight. His ticket, however, would terminate in Dubai, and while on board we would exchange boarding passes. I would then disembark in Dubai while he, staying on the plane and using my pass, would continue on to Germany, thus avoiding having his passport being checked for a German visa. He would then destroy my ticket and all personal identification and present himself to the German authorities to claim asylum. Under the German constitution, he could not be turned away

  “And it is all true,” the man assured me. “That is what is so beautiful about this lie. He is a refugee. In India.”

  “So he wants to work in Germany?”

  “Of course! To help support his wife and children.”

  “Like you,” I said, “I wish only to help. How much do I get paid?”

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  Three hundred dollars, I thought. Not much. But an EEC passport would be quite handy.

  “Plus the passport,” I added. “Preferably French.”

  He nodded.

  “And you pay for the tickets,” I threw in.

  “Of course. And a ticket to wherever you want to go after Dubai.”

  That was easy, I thought; there must be something wrong.

  “What happens if I get caught?” I asked.

  “Happens? What you mean?”

  “By the police.”

  “Police? Why police? What is crime? You buy ticket, you give it to a friend.” He shrugged. “We have a saying: al-ibaha al-asliya. ‘If it is not forbidden, it is allowed.’”

  Segue heaven! This was exactly the same argument that coffee lovers used in the early 1500s when religious bigots made having a cup of joe a crime. This might seem ridiculous, but one has to remember how closely associated coffee was with the mystical Sufi sect. Al-Shadhili of Mocha was a Sufi, as was al-Dhabhani in Aden, and, while Sufism is Islamic, it is so in the same way a whale is a mammal—just barely. Traditional Muslims use neither music nor dance in their ceremonies. Sufis use both. Sufism is an unusually heterogeneous religion, ostensibly Islamic but actually stemming from an earlier tradition. People have written volumes trying to explain it, but the best way to understand is via this old story told in the Middle East.

  A Persian, a Turk, a Greek, and an Arab are discussing how to spend their last shekel.

  “I want ouzo,” cried the Greek.

  “I want angur [wine],” argues the Persian.

  The Arab and the Turk do the same, demanding wine in their own languages. A fight is about to break out. Just then a Sufi wanders by, listens, and asks that they give him their money. They do, and he soon returns with a bunch of glistening grapes.

  “My ouzo!” cries the Greek.

  “No —it’s my angur!” says the Persian. Ditto for the Turk and the Arab. All art happy, for they have been given what they asked for, but in a higher sense.

  In this parable wine represents the intoxication of God which Sufism seeks in its purest and most universal form. It also implies that the Sufis like an occasional drink. They’re essentially the hippies of Islam, so, when the Sufis started using coffee in their religious ceremonies in the holy city of Mecca around 1480, it was a bit like lighting up a joint in the Vatican.

  The first suppression of coffee began June 20, 1511, when the head of Mecca’s religious police, a Mamluk Muslim named Kha’ir Beg, noticed a group of men swallowing some drink “in the fashion of drinkers swallowing an intoxicant” late at night near the Holy Mosque. When he approached to investigate, the men extinguished their lanterns. Mr. Beg soon learned that the men had been drinking qahwa, a drink that he was told was consumed in places similar to taverns.

  The next day he convened a hearing of religious scholars to decide whether this new drink was legal under Islamic law. The official objections to coffee were threefold. One, it was an intoxicant and so, like wine, forbidden. Two, the Sufis’ preprayer cup of joe was passed hand to hand, an act also associated with drinking alcohol. Three, it was roasted to the point of “carbonization,” a process forbidden in the Koran. Islamic law, Shari’a, is essentially the Koran, which specifically forbids alcoholic fermented drinks. Coffee was clearly not a fermented fruit beverage, so the zealots at the hearing claimed it was illegal because “it excites the mind.” A pot of coffee was brought in so the judges could try it for themselves. This, of course, was much too simple for this bunch of Poindexters, all of whom refused to sample the devilish brew.

  Mr. Beg had apparently foreseen this and brought out two doctors to testify to the drink’s horrific effects, according to the eighteenth-century manuscript Chrestonathic Arabe. Here the plot thickens, for, reported a contemporary, the two doctors were actually in cahoots with Mr. Beg and had promised him “great glory and rewards” if he could get coffee banned. Big surprise, they testified that coffee caused mental alterations in the drinker and was therefore a type of “wine.” Others at the hearing claimed that coffee clouded their judgment. One fool even said he found it indistinguishable from wine, only to be promptly whipped for confessing he had tasted alcohol.

  The argument for keeping coffee legal was the same that my Afghani passport counterfeiter gave—al-ibaha al-asliya, a Hanafi principle of Islamic jurisprudence which stipulates that whatever is not explicitly forbidden in the Koran is allowed. When the conservatives argued that Mohammed had meant to ban all intoxicants, coffee lovers pointed out that, although the cup did have psychological effects, so did garlic, and that the traditional Islamic definition of intoxication was “when one is incapable of distinguishing man from woman, or heaven from earth.”

  The whole trial was a staged event with a political agenda. Mr. Beg and the two doctors were part of the ruling conservative Mamluk coalition, which frowned on the Sufi belief in a religious ecstasy, or “intoxication,” during which there is one-
to-one communication with God. The Sufis’ use of coffee as an intoxicant epitomized this thinking. The drink was passed hand to hand from their sheykah, or priest, thus symbolizing its role as a sanctified intoxicant. The Sufis even had a term for the religious high associated with coffee, marqaha. The implication that there was no need for an imam—a cleric—or a mosque, did not sit well with the authorities.

  Coffee was banned throughout Mecca. Bags of beans were burned in the streets, and anybody found drinking it was beaten on the spot. The ban was later scuttled, only to be reinstated in Mecca in 1525 and Cairo in 1539, with each suppression growing increasingly violent, until the vicious Turkish suppression of the 1600s.

  Of course, I wasn’t sure whether medieval Islamic jurisprudence would carry much weight with Interpol if they caught me smuggling refugees across international borders. But it was something to think about.

  Java

  He who drinks only a little qahwa, he will not go to Hell

  Sixteenth-century Sufi saying

  THE BAFFLING LACK OF JAVA that had plagued me on my first day in Sana’a continued throughout my stay. Lots of stalls, simple huts manned by maniacal Arabs, but not much coffee, or at least what I’d thought of as Arabic joe. I’d expected something along the lines of Turkish coffee, strong and muddy. But a cup of Yemen is a different fish. Here the coffee, while strong and clear, is only one flavor in a delicate melange of cloves, cardamom, sugar, and water. It strikes the Western palate as rather pallid at first, but I came to love its fragrant delicacy. It is made in two ways. One is called shatter, made by steeping a heaping tablespoon of spiced, ground coffee in hot water. This is generally favored in the afternoon. In the mornings sugar and coffee are boiled together in the long-handled pot, called the ibrik, and served piping hot. The resulting concoction is, however, far removed from the traditional Turkish brew, a difference that illustrates the nations’ contrasting temperaments. Turkish coffee is like a clenched fist in a cup—tight, bitter, and black. The Yemen version, which comes glowing golden in a large glass tumbler, is a lighter, more whimsical brew, and deliciously sweet (except at funerals, at which the addition of sugar is forbidden). Milk is rarely used.

  Instead of coffee, many Yemenites drink qisher, a beverage brewed from the husk of the coffee bean instead of the seed. This is the historic coffee drink of Yemen. “People of distinction have another method that does not use the bean, but the bark and flesh,” wrote Jean de La Roque in 1715. “When well prepared they claim that no other beverage is comparable.”

  The apparent line of development, from Ethiopia’s leaf-based kati to qisher, has caused some to speculate that our modern bean-based brew evolved because these earlier bases were too perishable to transport. I found qisher rather dull, although drinkable when flavored with ginger, when it is called mazghoul. The closest thing we have to it in the West is a German ordeal called blumchenkaffee, “flower cup,” because it is so weak one can see the floral design on the bottom of the mug.

  “Ahh, but you must have good qisher,” said Ibraham. He gestured dismissively to the cup before me. “This is just made by my boys. Young people have lost the art.”

  We were seated on floor cushions scattered about his muffraj, the top-floor room reserved for entertaining guests in traditional Yemeni homes. Ibraham’s muffraj, however, was on the ground floor and boasted a satellite TV, since he’d recently turned his home into a hotel.

  It was my third visit. He described to me again the traditional method of brewing, which can involve up to a dozen different pots of qisher, some bitter, some sweet, some long brewed, which are then blended carefully to create the perfect cup. There was one family, he said, whose women were renowned throughout Yemen for their qisher. I asked if I could perhaps meet them. Unthinkable, he said. A woman of Sana’a show a foreign man how to cook qisher? Well then, I asked, could he get me the recipe? Equally inconceivable. Just their names, maybe? Everything was impossible. But there was a café he knew that had good qisher. Nothing as exquisitely mind-bending as this family’s. Ahh, that was qisher! But good, good enough for a foreigner.

  “Once you have had it, you will see,” he said. He gave me directions to this legendary café one more time. Again he drew the map, as he had on the other two occasions, neither of which had helped me to find the place.

  “You, I think, will never find it,” he concluded.

  “Why don’t you take me there?” I begged.

  “Impossible.” He gestured to the TV. “Today is busy day. Tomorrow.”

  “Well, then tell me the name of a place I can find.”

  This called for a conference with a friend in Arabic. Ibraham suddenly slapped himself on the head.

  “Of course! My friend knows,” he said. “You must look for the old men.”

  “What?”

  “Go in the morning after first prayer and look around the mosques. Wherever you see lots of old men drinking, there you’ll find the best qisher.”

  Look for the Sign of the Old Men, I thought. Near the mosques. Made sense. After all, cafés grew up around mosques so the faithful could stay conscious during services.

  “The best is made after first prayer,” he said. “Remember, the older the men, the better the qisher.”

  “What time is first prayer anyhow?”

  “Not so early. Maybe five A.M.”

  Five in the morning! Was it worth it? And why after prayer? If cafés had developed as a way of keeping the faithful conscious for the Word for God, why was everybody drinking in them after services? This, I was told, was the final compromise in the Islamic campaign against coffee, at least in Yemen. The faithful were to refrain from getting wired until after the first morning prayer, thus allowing the Word of the Prophet to reach their hearts unpolluted by devilish stimulants. And if you had to have a cup first thing, you should do as they did in Istanbul during the 1600s, crying out as you downed the brew, “Soul, retire into some corner of my body or leave but for a while that you may not be contaminated by this substance.”

  That’s the story I was told. And it was true that there was a noticeable difference between the qahwa served in the morning and in the afternoon. Those morning cups were a good fur-raising jolt. In the afternoon, when most people were chewing qat, the light brew, shatter, was poured. Most drank qisher.

  THE PASSPORT SCHEME WAS EVAPORATING. IT TURNED OUT THAT I actually first had to fly to Sri Lanka to meet the refugee. There, another Afghani, who owned a travel agency, would supply me with the tickets for Dubai. I was beginning to get the picture, and it looked suspiciously like me sitting in the most terrorist-infested city in the world for a few weeks while someone’s cousin, or friend’s cousin, or friend’s cousin’s friend’s cousin, hunted around for cheap tickets. Oh, it would happen. Eventually. Bismillah.

  “I have to get out of this country,” said Gulab. “I go crazy.”

  Gulab was an Iraqi archeology professor turned draft dodger who I’d met at the café where I ate bean sandwiches, foul, for breakfast, like most of the refugees I met here, he hated Yemen; the people were too backward, too dirty, the food was awful. Blah, blah, blah. I thought everyone was supernice and the food quite tasty. The environs safe. I walked about the winding, unlit alleys of the old city until the wee hours of the morning without a worry (perhaps because criminals are still crucified here). Unfortunately for Gulab, Yemen was one of the few countries still granting visas to Iraqis in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The other two were Romania and Libya. Libya was fine with Gulab, lots of oil-rig work, but no international airline would land there since Khadaffi had refused to cooperate in the Lockerbie bombing investigation. So Gulab had been obliged to come to Yemen or Romania, or be drafted. He’d chosen Yemen because he’d heard its Sudanese embassy sometimes granted Iraqis transit visas. This would allow him to land in Khartoum, from which point he could theoretically walk to Libya, albeit through some of the most war-torn real estate around. It was a popular route for peace-loving Iraqis. He personally knew se
veral other academics who had mysteriously disappeared while making the trek.

  He was definitely in a tough spot. I tried to cheer him up by telling him that the Sudanese people were renowned for their hospitality. I even showed him the page in my guidebook where it said so. But he was inconsolable. He just kept saying how he would “go crazy” if I didn’t help him get out. Word was out that I ran an international refugee-placement service.

  “It’s so dirty I can’t believe,” he kept nagging as he followed me about the old quarter. “If I have to stay I go crazy.”

  I soon eluded him. The electricity was out, as it was every night, but the suq continued by candlelight. Silversmiths polished curved daggers, men made water pipes. Everywhere there were piles of myrrh and incense. As I wandered through the claustrophobic alleys, I thought about my impending journey along the coffee trail. Once purchased in Mocha or Bay al-Faqih, most beans were brought by boat to Jedda in Saudi Arabia. Some think, however, that the earliest shipments went via the ancient spice routes through the famous desert landscapes of the Empty Quarter, and hence to Mecca. I had to decide which of the two routes I should, or could, follow.

  Suddenly I heard a roar of excitement. The electricity had returned. Literally every window in Old Sana’a is made of stained glass, with up to forty windows in a single building. The effect, on those rare nights when the electricity worked, was magical. I unexpectedly stumbled upon one of the city’s open gardens. The starry sky sprang open above me, and everywhere I looked were the ghostly mud skyscrapers, their windows glittering like jewels, all green and red and blue and amber. Prayer calls swirled out from every alley.

  I decided to follow the spice routes through the Empty Quarter.

  My plans changed the next day when I found a postcard waiting for me at Sana’a’s central post office. It was from Yangi, a Rajasthani art forger I’d met in Calcutta. “Remember,” his message read. “We shall always be friends of the heart. Paris waits.”