Cofee History
The earliest credible evidence of
either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of
the 15th century, in Yemen's Sufi monasteries.
Coffee beans were first exported
from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland
and began to cultivate the bean. The word qahwa originally meant wine, and
Sufis in Yemen used the beverage as an aid to concentration and as a kind of
spiritual intoxication when they chanted the name of God. Sufis used it to keep
themselves alert during their nighttime devotions. A translation of Al-Jaziri's
manuscript traces the spread of coffee from Arabia Felix (the present day
Yemen) northward to Mecca and Medina, and then to the larger cities of Cairo,
Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantinople. By 1414, the beverage was known in
Mecca, and in the early 1500s was spreading to the Mameluke Sultanate of Egypt
and North Africa from the Yemeni port of Mocha.[10][16] Associated with Sufism,
a myriad of coffee houses grew up in Cairo (Egypt) around the religious
University of the Azhar. These coffee houses also opened in Syria, especially
in the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, and then in Istanbul, the capital of the
Ottoman Empire, in 1554. In 1511, it was forbidden for its stimulating effect
by conservative, orthodox imams at a theological court in Mecca. However, these
bans were to be overturned in 1524 by an order of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan
Suleiman I, with Grand Mufti Mehmet Ebussuud el-İmadi issuing a fatwa allowing
the consumption of coffee. In Cairo a similar ban was instituted in 1532, and
the coffeehouses and warehouses containing coffee beans were sacked. During the
16th century, it had already reached the rest of the Middle East, the Safavid
Empire and the Ottoman Empire. From the Middle East, coffee drinking spread to
Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the
Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas.
Similarly, coffee was banned by the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church some time before the 18th century. However, in the
second half of the 19th century, Ethiopian attitudes softened towards coffee
drinking, and its consumption spread rapidly between 1880 and 1886; according
to Richard Pankhurst, "this was largely due to Emperor Menilek, who
himself drank it, and to Abuna Matewos who did much to dispel the belief of the
clergy that it was a Muslim drink."
The earliest mention of coffee
noted by the literary coffee merchant Philippe Sylvestre Dufour is a reference
to bunchum in the works of the 10th century CE Persian physician Muhammad ibn
Zakariya al-Razi, known as Rhazes in the West, but more definite information on
the preparation of a beverage from the roasted coffee berries dates from several
centuries later. One of the most important of the early writers on coffee was
Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, who in 1587 compiled a work tracing the history and
legal controversies of coffee entitled Umdat al safwa fi hill al-qahwa عمدة الصفوة في حل القهوة. He reported that one Sheikh, Jamal-al-Din
al-Dhabhani (d. 1470), mufti of Aden, was the first to adopt the use of coffee
(circa 1454).
Category: coffee history
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