The World of Caffeine

by Weinberg, Bennett Alan, Bealer, Bonnie K.

  Blount’s howler was passed along by Robert Burton (1577–1640), an Elizabethan divine, George Sandys (1578–1644), an Anglo-American poet and traveler, and James Howell (1595–1666), the first official royal historian of England, and with this pedigree entered the arcana of coffee folklore. Putting the Sparta story aside, we should notice Blount’s evocative account of the Turks in their preparatory customs and convivial consumption of the black brew. The social scene Blount sets is almost eerily similar to coffeehouse ambiance in most parts of the world today.

  Perhaps even more far-fetched than the putative Spartan coffee were the efforts to discover coffee stories in the Old Testament. George Paschius, in his Latin treatise New Discoveries Made Since the Time of the Ancients (Leipzig, 1700), wrote that coffee was one of the gifts given David by Abigail to mollify his anger with Nabal (I Samuel 25:18), even though the “five measures of parched grain” mentioned were clearly wheat, not coffee beans. Swiss minister, publicist, and political writer Pierre Etienne Louis Dumont (1759–1829) fancied that other biblical references to coffee included its identification with the “red pottage” for which Esau sold his birthright (Genesis 25:30) and with the parched grain that Boaz ordered be given to Ruth.20

  Because in the Middle Eastern world, no less than the European, caffeine-bearing drinks have invariably been regarded as drugs before they were accepted as beverages, it is not surprising that a number of early Islamic legends celebrate coffee’s miraculous medicinal powers and provide coffee drinking with ancient and exalted origins. The seventeenth-century Arab writer Abu al-Tayyib al-Ghazzi relates how Solomon encountered a village afflicted with a plague for which the inhabitants had no cure. The angel Gabriel directed him to roast Yemeni coffee beans, from which he brewed a beverage that restored the sick to health. According to other Arab accounts, Gabriel remained busy behind the heavenly coffee bar until at least the seventh century; a popular story relates how Mohammed the Prophet, in this tradition supposed to have been stricken with narcolepsy, was relieved of his morbid somnolence when the angel served him a hot cup infused from potent Yemeni beans. Another related Islamic story, repeated by Sir Thomas Herbert, who visited Persia in 1626, held that coffee was “brought to earth by the Angel Gabriel in order to revive Mohammed’s flagging energies. Mohammed himself was suppose to have declared that, when he had drunk this magic potion, he felt strong enough to unhorse forty men and to posses forty women.”21 Al-Ghazzi, whose tales place the first appearance of coffee in biblical times—and who was aware that his grandparents had never heard of the drink—explains that the ancient knowledge of coffee was subsequently lost until the rediscovery of coffee as a beverage in the sixteenth century.

  In other Islamic folk accounts, which may have some factual basis, a man named “Sheik Omar” is given credit for being the first Arab to discover the bean and prepare coffee. D’Ohsson, a French historian, basing his claims on Arab sources, writes that Omar, a priest and physician, was exiled, with his followers, from Mocha into the surrounding wilderness of Ousab in 1258 for some moral failing. Facing starvation, and finding nothing to eat except wild coffee berries, the exiles boiled them and drank the resulting brew. Omar then gave the drink to his patients, some of whom had followed him to Ousab for treatment. These patients carried word of the magical curative properties of coffee back to Mocha, and, in consequence, Omar was invited to return. A monastery was built for him, and he was acknowledged as patron saint of the city, achieving this honor as father of the habit that soon became the economic lifeblood of the region. In another version of this tale, Omar was led by the spirit of his departed holy master to the port of Mocha, where he became a holy recluse, living beside a spring surrounded by bright green bushes. The berries from the bushes sustained him, and he used them to cure the townspeople of plague. Thus coffee and caffeine established his reputation as a great sage, healer, and holy man.22

  Coffee to Coffeehouses: Marqaha and the Slippery Slope

  ‘Abd Al-Qadir al-Jaziri (fl. 1558) wrote the earliest history of coffee that survives to this day. As unconvinced by the Omar stories as modern scholars are, he provided several alternative accounts of coffee’s inception in Arabia, of which the first, and probably most reliable, is based on the lost work of the true originator of literature on coffee, Shihab Al-Din Ibn ‘Abd al- Ghaffar (fl. 1530). According to Jaziri, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar explained that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while living in Egypt, he first heard of a drink called “qahwa” that was becoming popular in the Yemen and was being used by Sufis and others to help them stay awake during their prayers. After inquiring into the matter, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar credited the introduction and promotion of coffee to “the efforts of the learned shaykh, immam, mufti, and Sufi Jamal al-Din Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Sa’id, known as Dhabhani.”23

  The venerable Dhabhani (d. 1470)24 had been compelled by unknown circumstances to leave Aden and go to Ethiopia, where, among the Arab settlers

  he found the people using qahwa, though he knew nothing of its characteristics. After he had returned to Aden, he fell ill, and remembering [qahwa], he drank it and benefited by it. He found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigor. In consequence… he and other Sufis in Aden began to use the beverage made from it, as we have said. Then the whole people—the learned and the common— followed [his example] in drinking it, seeking help in study and other vocations and crafts, so that it continued to spread.

  A generation after ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, Jaziri conducted his own investigation, writing to a famous jurist in Zabid, a town in the Yemen, to inquire how coffee first came there. In reply, his correspondent quoted the account of his uncle, a man over ninety, who had told him:

  “I was at the town of Aden, and there came to us some poor Sufi, who was making and drinking coffee, and who made it as well for the learned jurist Muhammad Ba-Fadl al-Halrami, the highest jurist at the port of Aden, and for… Muhammad al-Dhabhani. These two drank it with a company of people, for whom their example was sufficient.”

  Jaziri concludes that it is possible that ‘Abd al-Ghaffar was correct in stating that Dhabhani introduced coffee to Aden, but that it is also possible, as his correspondent claimed, that some other Sufi introduced it and Dhabhani was responsible only for its “emergence and spread.” ‘Abd Al-Ghaffar and Jaziri are in accord that it was as a stimulant, not a comestible, that coffee was used from the time of its earliest documented appearance in the world. More than this we may never discover. For the astonishing fact is that, although all the Arab historians are in accord that the story of coffee drinking as we know it apparently begins somewhere in or around the Yemen in a Sufi order in the middle of the fifteenth century, additional details of its origin had already been mislaid or garbled within the lifetimes of people who could remember when coffee had been unknown.

  In any case, the spread of coffee from Sufi devotional use into secular consumption was a natural one. Though the members of the Sufi orders were ecstatic devotees, most were of the laity, and their nightlong sessions were attended by men from many trades and occupations. Before beginning the dhikr, or ritual remembrance of the glory of God, coffee was shared by Sufis in a ceremony described by Jaziri Avion: “They drank it every Monday and Friday eve, putting it in a large vessel made of red clay. Their leader ladled it out with a small dipper and gave it to them to drink, passing it to the right, while they recited one of their usual formulas, ‘There is no God, but God, the Master, the Clear Reality.’” 25 When morning came, they returned to their homes and their work, bringing the memory of caffeine’s energizing effects with them and sharing the knowledge of coffee drinking with their fellows. Thus, from the example of Sufi conclaves, the coffeehouse was born. As coffeehouses, or kahwe khaneh, proliferated, they served as forums for extending coffee use beyond the circle of Sufi devotions. By 1510 coffee had spread from the monastaries of the Yemen into general use in Islamic capitals such as Cairo
and Mecca, and the consumption of caffeine had permeated every stratum of lay society.

  Although destined for remarkable success in the Islamic world, coffee and coffee-houses met fierce opposition there from the beginning and continued to do so. Even though the leaders of some Sufi sects promoted the energizing effects of caffeine, many orthodox Muslim jurists believed that authority could be found in the Koran that coffee, because of these stimulating properties, should be banned along with other intoxicants, such as wine and hashish, and that, in any case, the new coffeehouses constituted a threat to social and political stability.26 Considering that coffee was consumed chiefly for what we now know are caffeine’s effects on human physiology, especially the marqaha, the euphoria or high that it produces, it is easy to understand the reasons such scruples arose.27

  Perhaps no single episode illustrates the players and issues involved in these controversies better than the story of Kha’ir Beg, Mecca’s chief of police, who, in accord with the indignation of the ultra-pious, instituted the first ban on coffee in the first year of his appointment by Kansuh al-Ghawri, the sultan of Cairo, 1511. Kha’ir Beg was a man in the timeless mold of the reactionary, prudish martinet, reminiscent of Pentheus in Eurypides’ Bacchoe,28 someone who was not only too uptight to have fun but was alarmed by evidence that other people were doing so. Like Pentheus, he was the butt of satirical humor and mockery, and nowhere more frequently than in the coffeehouses of the city.

  Beg, as the enforcer of order, saw in the rough and ready coffeehouse, in which people of many persuasions met and engaged in heated social, political, and religious arguments, the seeds of vice and sedition, and, in the drink itself, a danger to health and well-being. To end this threat to public welfare and the dignity of his office, Beg convened an assembly of jurists from different schools of Islam. Over the heated objections of the mufti of Aden, who undertook a spirited defense of coffee, the unfavorable pronouncements of two well-known Persian physicians, called at Beg’s behest, and the testimony of a number of coffee drinkers about its intoxicating and dangerous effects ultimately decided the issue as Beg had intended.29 Beg sent a copy of the court’s expeditious ruling to his superior, the sultan of Cairo, and summarily issued an edict banning coffee’s sale. The coffeehouses in Mecca were ordered closed, and any coffee discovered there or in storage bins was to be confiscated and burned. Although the ban was vigorously enforced, many people sided with the mufti and against the ruling of Beg’s court, while others perhaps cared more for coffee than for sharia, the tenants of the holy law, for coffee drinking continued surreptitiously.

  To the rescue of caffeine users came the sultan of Cairo, Beg’s royal master, who may well have been in the middle of a cup of coffee himself, one prepared by his battaghis, the coffee slaves of the seraglio, when the Meccan messenger delivered Beg’s pronouncement. The sultan immediately ordered the edict softened. After all, coffee was legal in Cairo, where it was a major item of speculation and was, according to some reports, even used as tender in the marketplaces. Besides, the best physicians in the Arab world and the leading religious authorities, many of whom lived in Cairo at the time, approved of its use. So who was Kha’ir Beg to overturn the coffee service and spoil the party? When in the next year Kha’ir Beg was replaced by a successor who was not averse to coffee, its proponents were again able to enjoy the beverage in Mecca without fear. There is no record of whether the sultan of Cairo repented of his decision when, ten years later, in 1521, riotous brawling became a regular occurrence among caffeine-besotted coffeehouse tipplers and between them and the people they annoyed and kept awake with their late-night commotion.

  In 1555, coffee and the coffeehouse were brought to Constantinople by Hakam and Shams, Syrian businessmen from Aleppo and Damascus, respectively, who made a fortune by being the first to cash in on what would become an unending Ottoman love affair with both the beverage and the institution.30 In the middle of the sixteenth century, coffeehouses sprang up in every major city in Islam, so that, as the French nineteenth-century historian Mouradgea D’Ohsson reports in his seven-volume history of the Ottoman Empire, by 1570, in the reign of Selim II, there were more than six hundred of them in Constantinople, large and small, “the way we have taverns.” By 1573, the German physician Rauwolf, quoted above as the first to mention coffee in Europe, reported that he found the entire population of Aleppo sitting in circles sipping it. Coffee was in such general use that he believed those who told him that it had been enjoyed there for hundreds of years.31

  As a result of the efforts of Hakam and Shams and other entrepreneurs, Turks of all stations frequented growing numbers of coffeehouses in every major city, many small towns, and at inns on roads well trafficked by travelers. One contemporary observer in Constantinople noted “[t]he coffeehouses being thronged night and day, the poorer classes actually begging money in the streets for the sole object of purchasing coffee.”32 Coffee was sold in three types of establishments: stalls, shops, and houses. Coffee stalls were tiny booths offering take-out service, usually located in the business district. Typically, merchants would send runners to pick up their orders. Coffee shops, common in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, were neighborhood fixtures, combining take-out and a small sitting area, frequently outdoors, for conversationalists. Coffeehouses were the top-of- the-line establishments, located in exclusive neighborhoods of larger cities and offering posh appointments, instrumentalists, singers, and dancers, often in gardenlike surroundings with fountains and tree-shaded tables. As these coffeehouses increased in popularity, they became more opulent. To these so-called schools of the wise flocked young men pursuing careers in law, ambitious civil servants, officers of the seraglio, scholars, and wealthy merchants and travelers from all parts of the known world. All three—shop, stall, and house—were and remain common in the Arab world, as they are in the West today.

  Photograph of Café Eden, Smyrna, from an albumen photograph by Sebah and Joaillier (active 1888-c. 1900). The sign in the foreground reads “Jardin de L’Eden.” This café is typical of top-of-the-line establishments located in the better neighborhoods of the larger cities throughout the Levant. (Photograph by Sebah and Joaillier, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, negative #s4–142210)

  But the debates over the propriety of coffee use did not end with Beg’s tenure or the proliferation of the coffeehouse. Two interpretive principles continued to vie throughout these debates. On the one side was the doctrine of original permissibility, according to which everything created by Allah was presumed good and fit for human use unless it was specifically prohibited by the Koran. On the other was the mandate to defend the law by erecting a seyag, or “fence” around the Koran, that is, broadly construing prohibitions in order to preclude even a small chance of transgression.

  The opponents of coffee drinking continued to assert their disapproval of the new habit and the disquieting social activity it seemed to engender. Cairo experienced a violent commotion in 1523, described by Walsh in his book Coffee: Its History, Classification, and Description (1894):

  In 1523 the chief priest in Cairo, Abdallah Ibrahim, who denounced its use in a sermon delivered in the mosque in Hassanaine, a violent commotion being produced among the populous. The opposing factions came to blows over its use. The governor, Sheikh Obelek [El-belet], a man wise in his generation and time, then assembled the mullahs, doctors, and others of the opponents of coffee-drinking at his residence, and after listening patiently to their tedious harangues against its use, treated them all to a cup of coffee each, first setting the example by drinking one himself. Then dismissing them, courteously withdrew from their presence without uttering a single word. By this prudent conduct the public peace was soon restored, and coffee was ever afterward allowed to be used in Cairo.33

  A covenant was even introduced to the marriage contract in Cairo, stipulating that the husband must provide his wife with an adequate supply of coffee; failing to do so could be joined with other grounds as a basis for filing a suit
of divorce.34 This provision shows that, even though banned from the coffeehouses, women were permitted to enjoy coffee at home.

  Around 1570, by which time the use of coffee seemed well entrenched, some imams and dervishes complained loudly against it again, claiming, as Alexander Dumas wrote in his Dictionnaire de Cuisine,35 that the taste for the drink went so far in Constantinople that the mosques stood empty, while people flocked in increasing numbers to fill the coffeehouses. Once again the debate revived. In a curious reversal of the doctrine of original permissibility, some coffee opponents claimed that simply because coffee was not mentioned in the Koran, it must be regarded as forbidden. As a result coffee was again banned. However, coffee drinking continued in secret as a practice winked at by civil authorities, resulting in the proliferation of establishments reminiscent of American speakeasies of the 1920s.

  Murat III, sultan of Constantinople, murdered his entire family in order to clear his way to the throne, but drew the line at allowing his subjects to debauch in the coffeehouses, and with good reason. It seems that his bloody accession was being loudly discussed there in unflattering terms, insidiously brewing sedition. In about 1580, declaring coffee “mekreet,” or “forbidden,” he ordered these dens of revolution shuttered and tortured their former proprietors. The religious sanction for his ban rested on the discovery, by one orthodox sect of dervishes, that, when roasted, coffee became a kind of coal, and anything carbonized was forbidden by Mohammed for human consumption.36 His prohibition of the coffeehouse drove the practice of coffee drinking into the home, a result which, considering his purpose of dispelling congeries of public critics, he may well have counted as a success.