Black Gold

If hard evidence of ancient coffee trading or use has remained elusive, written sources are no more helpful. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that cinnamon originated in African swamps guarded by bats and was used by giant birds to build their nests, that fat-tailed sheep in Arabia needed wheeled wooden carts to carry their fat tails, and that cannabis was used as a ritual purifier; but on the subject of coffee he was overwhelmingly reticent. Opium was used extensively in religious ceremonies in Minoan Crete, but not coffee. The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, a first-century AD Greek compendium of the Red Sea trade, makes no mention of it amongst the contemporary Ethiopian exports of ivory, tortoiseshell, ostrich feathers, spices, aromatics, and ebony. Although there have been extensive excavations in the city of Aksum, the centre of an Ethiopian empire that reached its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, it has not been shown that coffee was either consumed or traded from there. This is despite frequent mentions of Aksum and its activities in Graeco-Roman and Byzantine texts, and rather undermines the common contention that it was the Aksumites who introduced coffee to Yemen, which they ruled at intervals between the third and sixth centuries. Fragmentary archaeological evidence of Aksumite trade with distant China in the third century AD has been found, but, of trade in coffee grown a few hundred miles away, none.

While the record is thin concerning coffee in Ethiopia, it is bafflingly obscure elsewhere in the ancient world. If coffee were to be found there, Egypt would be the first place to look, being just downstream (albeit 1500 miles and four cataracts of the Nile) from coffee’s highland home. When the first humans originally migrated from Ethiopia in about 100,000 BC, they ventured north into Egypt and thence to the Near East. This pioneering band died out, and it is only when a second batch left the Highlands in 80,000 BC and crossed the lower Red Sea into Yemen that the common ancestry of all non-African humans was established. The fact that over a period of the next 5000 years humans made their way from Yemen, first to India and thence to Java and Sumatra, describing in slow time coffee’s later onward march, is a compelling prehistorical curiosity.

If there had been coffee use in early Ethiopia, it is highly probable that the Egyptians would have learnt about it. They were frequently supplied with slaves from that area, along with gold and cattle, by their southern neighbours, the Nubians, and the 25th Dynasty, around 600 BC, was the result of the Ethiopian conquest of Egypt. That the knowledge of coffee somehow failed to make it down the Nile would suggest that, despite its availability, coffee was not in use in Ethiopia at that time. Recent analysis of mummy remains has tended to confuse matters further. It would appear that while caffeine is not to be found in the hair of the deceased, traces of cocaine and nicotine are. The idea of the ancient Egyptian aristocracy tooting and toking may come as something of a shock to an orthodox view of life on the banks of the Nile, but the real mystery is that both coca and tobacco are native bushes of the New World, and in ancient times the Americas supposedly remained to be discovered for another two thousand years. The competition to identify the earliest Old World travellers to the New is certainly hotting up and the ancient Egyptians make a distinguished addition to the roster; but from the point of view of this study, if they were prepared to travel across the Atlantic for cocaine and nicotine, one wonders why they ignored the caffeine that could be found up the Nile?

It may be the case that knowledge of coffee travelled to ancient Greece. Some classicists have maintained that nepenthe, which Homer tells us Helen brought with her out of Egypt and used to alleviate her sufferings, was coffee: ‘She mingled with the wine the wondrous juice of a plant which banishes sadness and wrath from the heart and brings with it forgetfulness of every woe.’ However, this seems a somewhat inadequate description of the effects of caffeine, which in excess can make its consumers edgy and irritable. Others identify coffee with the ‘black broth of the Lacedaemonians’ – a position maintained by a welter of seventeenth-century scholars including George Sandys (the poet and explorer), Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), and Sir Henry Blount (the traveller). Their notion remained in general currency until one Gustav Gilbert determined with great conviction in 1895 that the ‘black broth’ was ‘pork, cooked in blood, and seasoned with salt and vinegar’. This sounds a concoction far more suited to the Lacedaemonians, better known as the Spartans.

There have been claimed sightings of coffee in the Old Testament, including in the presents Abigail made to David, the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright, and in the parched grain that Boaz ordered to be given to Ruth. Some have suggested that Pythagoras’ prohibition on the consumption of beans was aimed at coffee, but it seems more likely to have been the result of his dislike of wind, of both bodily and mental origin. In conclusion, while speculating on the subject has provided hours of harmless amusement to many, there is no confirmed reference to coffee in the Egyptian, biblical, or classical literatures.

Given the fact that the coffee tree produces tempting red cherries, it is easy to imagine that some pioneering individuals attempted to eat them raw. The flesh of the cherry is pleasant to eat, but humans would find chewing the two green beans that make up the stone of the cherry hard work. It is unlikely that early man, with a reasonable selection of foods available, would have been bothered. Although the cherries contain some caffeine, most is to be found in the bean, which would probably have been spat out, and the full effects would have gone relatively unnoticed.

The spread of farming, however, introduced to Ethiopia a more determined masticator. By about 8000 BC the early Fertile Crescent farmers had domesticated a number of the tractable animals that surrounded them, including the goat. These spread within a few thousand years from their Fertile Crescent roots to Egypt and thence up the Nile to the Ethiopian Highlands. While sheep and cattle are contentedly pastoral in their eating habits, goats are notoriously destructive eaters and tend to range wider for their foraging. Unlike birds, which plants use to spread their seeds via their digestive systems, woolly-haired animals spread seeds that adhere to their coats, leaving them free to chew into oblivion any plant, fruit, or seed that comes their way. Goats’ stomachs are fully equipped chemically to deal with vegetable matter that other mammals would simply pass. Thus it is quite possible that it was the domesticated goat, observed perhaps by an accompanying human, that first experienced the raw caffeine hit of a chewed green coffee bean. This is purely conjecture, however.

If Egyptologists, classicists, and biblical scholars have failed to pinpoint the use of coffee in their respective literatures, neither have Arabists fared any better, despite the fact that coffee drinking first arose amongst the Sufis in Arabia Felix, now Yemen. Until the use of coffee became fairly widespread in the sixteenth century, the references to it remain obscure, and no material evidence exists alongside the texts to help prove that coffee was the substance referred to. For example, the renowned Persian physician Abu Muhammad ibn Zakiriya El Razi (known more commonly as Rhazes), who lived between AD 865 and 922, describes a beverage he calls bunchum as being ‘hot and dry and very good for the stomach’. Although it is difficult to resist the obvious suggestion that bunchum is the same as bun, the Arabian and Persian word for coffee berry, other scholars have identified it as some sort of root. Nonetheless, the reference to bunchum in the works of Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’), the influential Bokharan physician (AD 980–1037), is sometimes held to be a description of coffee: ‘It is hot and dry in the first degree, and according to others, cold in the first degree. It fortifies the members, it cleans the skin, and dries up the humidities that are under it, and gives an excellent smell to all the body.’ Many scholars dispute the attribution, however, and there is no supporting archaeological evidence whatever to show that coffee was prepared or consumed at the time. Neither does the description make mention of the most obvious feature of coffee – the effect of the caffeine upon the nervous system.

However, this does not mean that the obscure terms used in these early descriptions should be lightly dismissed. While European culture had, since the sack of Rome in AD 455, gone into the dramatic decline known to history as the Dark Ages, Middle Eastern culture, by contrast, was flowering, with an added impetus provided by the new religion of Islam. In the fields of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and astrology, as well as the arts, the Muslim world was significantly in advance of its European contemporaries. The description used by Avicenna may seem fanciful, but the terms made sense within a coherent, applied medico-scientific structure, derived, at least in part, from knowledge of the ancient world that had been lost to the Western purview with the destruction of the Library at Alexandria in AD 391. The remains of what was known as Alexandrian syncretism – the holistic amalgam of ancient Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Kabbalistic, and Roman and Greek esotericism alongside pre-Socratic and Neoplatonic philosophy and that of early Christianity – had been preserved by scholars at the sacred town of Harran in southern Turkey. The Hermetic school at Harran became a strong influence on emerging Islamic science and mathematics, as well as alchemy. Rhazes was a noted exponent, and both he and Avicenna exhibited the polymathic traits that characterized the alchemist through the ages – in equal measures poet, astronomer, philosopher, musician and physician. Alchemy was only superficially the search for a way to turn base metals into gold: it was, more importantly, a spiritual quest for the transmutation of the human soul. Science, art, and philosophy were brought equally into the service of this perfectionism.

The Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam who came to prominence in the second century after its foundation, were influenced by alchemy. ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold’, it was recorded. The word ‘sufi’ derives from the Arabic for wool, reflecting their simplicity of dress. Although the sect came about as a reaction to the perceived worldliness of early Islam, members did not believe that a practitioner should withdraw from human society. Sufi ‘orders’ were not like the closed monastic orders of Christendom; adherents continued to work and enjoy family life, and, as a result, most of their prayers and rituals took place at night. The general character of Sufi practice involved the communal singing of poetry; the ritual repetition of the divine name; a veneration for saints, many of whom were shaykhs, or former leaders of Sufi orders; and the ritual visits to the tombs of such saints.

Spread by proselytising shaykhs, by the twelfth century Sufism had reached Yemen. There, in the late fifteenth century, it would appear that the Sufis were the first to adopt coffee drinking. Not only did coffee assist in enabling devotees to stay awake during their night rituals, but the transformation of the coffee bean during roasting reflected the alchemical beliefs in the transformation of the human soul which lay at the heart of Sufism. Coffee worked both at a spiritual and a physical level.

The arrival of Sufism in Yemen is a matter of historical record. The same cannot be said about the arrival of coffee. By the end of the sixteenth century the mountains of Yemen were producing a significant proportion of the world’s coffee, and it would be natural to assume that it had been introduced from Ethiopia across the Red Sea in earlier times. This is not the case.

Pre-Islamic Yemen was a wine-growing area, and alcohol thus appears to have been tolerated. Its diversity and wealth of crops and cultures made Yemen a society that was highly cultivated in both senses, and even after the introduction of Islam it remained a dominant cultural force in Arabia. However, despite the ebbing and flowing of power and religious influence from across the Red Sea, and despite archaeological evidence of the introduction of crops such as sorghum from Africa into Yemen in the pre-Islamic period, there is nothing to suggest that coffee had found its way from Ethiopia at this early stage. Rather as Aksum itself seems to have been unfamiliar with either the plant or the beverage, the regions into which the Ethiopian empire periodically expanded remained in caffeine-free ignorance.

Islam was quickly embraced by the Yemenis, but the country later became fragmented into a number of states and kingdoms that periodically waxed and waned: only the rule of the Shi’a Imams was sufficiently stable to forge an enduring dynasty, the Zaydis, which lasted over a thousand years until the revolution of 1962, at which time their rule extended over the whole of what is modern day Yemen. However, throughout the Zaydi epoch, independent states flourished that were influential in their time. The most significant of the independent dynasties was that founded in 1228 AD by ‘Umar Ibn ‘Ali Ibn Rasul. His kingdom was centred on Ta’izz in the south of the country, and there, for two hundred years, the arts, sciences, and trade flourished and Sufis first made their appearance in Yemen. It is during this Rasulid period that the first tantalizing rumours of coffee and its handmaiden qat can be heard from behind the purdah screen of history.

The town of Ta’izz is situated on the northern slopes of Jabal Sabir – at 3006 metres, one of Yemen’s highest mountains – on the road that leads up from the southern end of sweltering Tihama, where the port of Mocha is found, to the airy highlands and Sana’a, the capital, to the north. The town was the capital of the Rasulids until their demise in 1454. Their interest in science, astronomy, poetry, and architecture made the kingdom a natural haven for Sufism, and early in their rule a number of important shaykhs such as Shadhili came to the city. Sufism had an important proselytic dimension, and missionaries passed through Ta’izz on their way to Mocha and Aden, and thence to Africa. One noted Sufi missionary, Abu Zarbay, is credited by legend, in the confusing way that legends have when it comes to such matters, either with having introduced qat to Yemen in 1430 from the town of Harar in Ethiopia, or with having founded Harar itself, where what are considered amongst the very best qat bushes still grow. There is an anecdotal story that the Rasulid kings’ interest in botany led to the introduction of qat and coffee plants in the environs of Ta’izz. It is true that they imported fruit trees and flowers from places as far away as India, and compiled detailed astronomical data to help farmers determine the correct seasons for planting and harvesting. However, a register of plants compiled for the Rasulid King himself in 1271 lists interlopers such as cannabis and asparagus, but there is no sign of imported coffee or qat. Ibn Battuta, the renowned Moroccan explorer whose traveller’s feats far eclipse those of the Polos, visited Ta’izz, and this usually meticulous chronicler fails to mention either coffee or qat in dispatches from the city in 1330. Thus whilst in the Rasulid era the association of Sufis with these stimulating plants had acquired some additional folkloric momentum, our struggle to find actual coffee stains on the tablecloth of history remains frustrated.

3 (#ulink_7d3355dd-d79a-56ce-a423-0edcb642dc9b)

ENTER THE DRAGON (#ulink_7d3355dd-d79a-56ce-a423-0edcb642dc9b)

potus niger et garrulus

(‘the black and tongue-loosening drink’)

ANON.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the archaeological evidence shows that ritual coffee drinking was widespread amongst the Sufis in Yemen. What caused them to adopt a drink derived from a hitherto unknown plant from neighbouring Ethiopia? Curiously, to understand the genesis of coffee drinking, it is necessary first to look at tea; at China, where it originated; and at the trade links between China and the Middle East.

Before the fall of Rome, the Arabian Sea played an enormous role in world history, and once the Romans and Greeks sufficiently mastered the Red Sea and the monsoon (a word derived from the Arabic mawsim, meaning season) they were able to trade with India and Ceylon. After the fall of their respective empires, and with the rise of a hostile Islamic Turkish empire, which effectively blocked all the sea routes from the West to the Orient, Europeans were rarely seen east of the Red Sea. Nonetheless, the Arabian Sea was awash with trading and colonizing activity, some conducted in boats like those which, as Herodotus had observed, were made with planks sewn together with coir, and oiled with whale blubber to soften the wood in case of unforeseen encounters with coral reefs. From further afield came wakas – double outrigger canoes – in which the Waqwaqs of Indonesia braved the ocean voyage from Indonesia to Zanj (‘Land of the Negroes’ or East Africa) laden with cinnamon, and thence sailed to the previously uninhabited island of Madagascar, where they settled from the fifth century onwards. Arabian and Persian ships frequently visited Sirandib – the ‘Isle of Rubies’, now known as Sri Lanka or then known as Ceylon – and convoys sailed to China, the ‘Land of Silk’. This was the longest sea voyage then regularly undertaken by man: one Persian captain famously made the round trip seven times. The city of Chang’an on the Yellow River had two million residents by the seventh century, and was a great market for ‘western’ goods such as sandalwood from India, Persian dates, saffron and pistachios, Burmese pepper, and frankincense and myrrh from Arabia. Slaves from Africa could also be bought, and the Chinese even at this early stage had a good understanding of the peoples of Zanj, even being aware of the Somali herdsmen’s habit of drawing blood from their cattle and mixing it with milk to drink. The principal Chinese exports were silks and porcelain, the latter by this time being shipped by Persians from the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (Canton). A maritime Porcelain Route evolved that vied in importance with the better-known Silk Route across Central Asia – porcelain, for obvious reasons, being less suited to overland freight. Ports along the Porcelain Route were valued according to their use of standard weights and measures, their safety and their non-interference in commerce: a maverick sultan could jeopardize this fragile web of trading links that spanned the East. The spread of trade went hand-in-hand with the spread of Islam, which underpinned a faith-based commercial network that guaranteed probity of dealings and a community of interests. The legacy of this can be traced today in the Hawali banking system, whereby large sums of money can be ‘transferred’ internationally by no more than a letter of authority. A comparable system did not evolve in Europe until the rise of the Knights Templar. As Islam spread, Indonesia, the Spice Islands, and the Philippines fell under its sway. Only the Chinese remained completely unconverted, although substantial Muslim populations settled in Chinese cities – Guangzhou had 200,000 Arabs, Persians and other Muslim residents in the seventh century.

A little-recognized incentive to the creation of this maritime empire of faith lay in the fact that Muslims had to pray three times a day in the direction of Mecca, a prayer which for its proper execution depended, of course, on the sure knowledge of the whereabouts of that sacred city. When the first Arab traders tentatively colonized parts of the coast of Zanj, they built unsophisticated wooden mosques which frequently can be shown to have been misaligned: only later, when the ports and their trade were more secure, were stone mosques built in the Arab style with the required alignment to Mecca, achieved by use of the magnetic compass and the astrolabe and an understanding of the stars. Thus the fundamental ritual of Islam was a significant encouragement to the science of navigation, and the concomitant spread of faith and commerce. This was reinforced by the necessity for the faithful to make the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives, with the result that the Muslims were highly motivated and experienced travellers over long distances. Had Christianity evolved similar rituals in connection with Rome or Jerusalem, the necessary navigational skills and equipment might have been developed earlier. Ironically, Jerusalem had been the geospiritual target of early Islamic prayer until Mohammed made the former pagan site of Mecca (the Ka’ba having been worshipped there previously for many centuries) into the proper focus of Islamic prayers by decree in AD 624. As it was, the compass had been originally invented by the Chinese but discovered again by the Arabs: the astrolabe was their original invention, along with early clocks, theodolites, and instruments for measuring the apparent movement of a star by an observer who had himself changed position. Islam was structured in such a way that it not only encouraged science, but positively required it. By contrast it took the rise of sea-borne mercantilism in Europe in the seventeenth century to provoke intense interest in astronomy and navigation: the observatories of Paris and London were set up with the principal aim of solving the problem of longitude.

Islam having established a bridgehead in China, it was inevitable that the Sufis should also turn up there. Indeed the Emperor invited a group of Sufi astronomers to Peking in the 1270s to assist in the setting up of an observatory. The presence of Sufis in south China seems to have influenced Japanese Buddhism, leading to Zen Buddhism, which, like Sufism, focuses on ‘masters’ and illustrative tales from their lives. The Sufis, and the Muslim population in general, would have been widely exposed to the Chinese habit of drinking tea, which had been established for at least a thousand years – it is recorded that there were over a hundred water-powered tea mills in the first century AD. Surprisingly, there is no mention of tea consumption in Middle Eastern sources until a reference in Giovanni Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550–9), citing Hajji Muhammed, a traveller in the Caspian region, who thought that if the Franks and Persians had known about tea they would have given up rhubarb. Marco Polo, usually an inveterate chronicler, made no mention of tea at all. Nonetheless, it is tempting to suppose that the Sufis, who were inclined to embrace enthusiastically anything that could bring them closer to God, would have experimented with tea drinking in China, and may have adopted it as part of their rituals.

What is certain is that the celebrated Treasure Fleets sent out by the Ming dynasty Yongle Emperor into the Indian Ocean contained, amongst silks and porcelain and other trading goods, tea. The fleets were the most impressive ever seen, with hundreds of vessels of which the largest were nine-masted, 400-feet long and 160-feet wide juggernauts. Their ostensible mission was to extract tribute and assert the hegemony of the Middle Kingdom over the known world, principally the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Envoys were brought back to Peking to pay their obeisance to the Emperor, accompanied by exotic animals such as the giraffe brought from Malindi and presented to the Emperor in 1414 and which was believed by the Chinese to be the legendary qilin, a sacred animal that would appear only in times of great prosperity. As well as putting on an awesome display of the might of the Dragon Throne and trading in Chinese goods, the Treasure Fleets (there were seven voyages between 1405 and 1433) were missions of discovery that prompted a sudden increase in the Chinese knowledge of plants and medicines, and of the lands from where they came. It seems that from the Chinese understanding of tea, which had initially been valued for its medicinal effects, the notion of infusion – the steeping of plant matter in boiling water to extract the desired essence – had developed. This deceptively simple discovery was spread through the popularization of tea.

The Treasure Fleets were led by the Admiral Zheng He, the ‘Three Jewelled Eunuch’. His father had been a Muslim soldier from Yunnan province who was caught up in the fighting at the break-up of the Mongol Empire. In 1381 he was killed, and his son was taken into captivity and castrated in the Chinese manner, an excruciating variant that also involved the removal of the penis. Eunuchs were highly prized at court, being considered not only immune to the charms of the imperial harem but also particularly loyal to the ruling Emperor. Zheng He rose rapidly to prominence in the service of the prince of Yan, Zhu Di, who was campaigning against the Mongols in the northern steppes. An able commander and an imposing figure, Zheng He stood by Zhu Di when he usurped the Dragon Throne from his nephew, and was the natural choice for leader of the Treasure Fleets, upon which most of the highest positions were held by eunuchs. Both his father and grandfather were ‘Hajji’, meaning that they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Zheng He’s religion was an asset in the Indian Ocean.

The fifth voyage under Zheng He called at Aden in 1417, then part of the Rasulid kingdom of Yemen. It was an extremely wealthy port, and the sultan grandly ordered that only those with ‘precious things’ could trade with the Chinese. Whether tea was sold to the Arabs is not recorded, but it can be reasonably assumed that Zheng He and his officers would have drunk tea either with or in the presence of visiting merchants and dignitaries. The awesome majesty of the Treasure Fleet would have given the visitors particular reason to note the customs and behaviour of their distinguished company, and the concept of infusion to create a beverage would have been dignified by association. The stimulatory effects caused by the caffeine in tea may likewise have been noted and discussed. After the sultan had presented lions, zebras, ostriches, and another qilin for the Emperor’s collection, the voyage then went on to Malindi and the coast of Zanj. It is almost certain that the Rasulid monarch in Ta’izz, having great interest in exotic plants and Chinese porcelain, would have paid attention to any reports of the Chinese drinking tea.

The seventh and last voyage in 1432 had a more extensive impact in the Red Sea: Zheng He, ill and exhausted, eschewed the opportunity to make the Haj and instead sent the fleet of more than 100 ships and 27,000 men to Hormuz and beyond with his deputy, the eunuch Hong Bao. Unable to land at Aden as a result of local fighting, he secured the permission of the Emir of Mecca to sail up the Red Sea to the port of Jiddah, where the Chinese were received with due honour. As well as their usual interest in trading, a translation of an Arab text Hut yaw fang (‘The pharmaceutical prescriptions of the Muslims’) had appeared in China to intense interest there, and particular attention was paid to the acquisition of Arab drugs and medicines. The use of aloes (a purgative and tonic), myrrh (for the circulation), benzoin (a gum that aids respiration), storax (an anti-inflammatory), and momocordia seeds (for ulcers and wounds) was recorded. It is significant that at this stage there is no mention of coffee: both the Chinese and Arabs would have had good cause to have analysed its properties if it had been a known substance at the time. It seems that knowledge of coffee was still confined to the Ethiopian Highlands. Qat is likewise absent from the pharmacopoeia.

Although there are Chinese reports of Mecca and Medina, they are surprisingly cursory: with Zheng He at Calicut and in failing health, the precision of purpose seems to have left the voyage. He died on the way back to China in 1433 at the age of 63, and was buried at sea. The returning fleet carried an ambassador from Aden, and yet another giraffe, and although pleased with the outcome, Zhu Zhanj, the Emperor since 1426, who was of a more introspective Confucian turn of mind than his grandfather, never subsequently authorized another voyage. Confucius believed that a healthy Chinese state should be able to provide for all its own needs, and that active involvement in foreign trade was beneath the divinely ordained dignity of the Middle Kingdom. It was for this reason that China had remained a relatively closed nation throughout its history, and why the Treasure Fleets were such a dramatic aberration. Once Confucianism regained the high-ground, the shipyards closed down, and the country turned in on itself again.

A Sufi missionary, Shahkh Shadomer Shadhili, is reported to have introduced qat to Ta’izz in 1429, and, whether or not it is true, the date is significant, as it is at around that time that the Chinese were present in the Arabian and Red Seas – the fifth and seventh Treasure Fleets of Zheng He. If the Yemenis had been introduced to tea as a result of these visits, either by experience, by report, or possibly by purchase, and if the emerging Sufi community was already familiar with its stimulating properties by repute, then the scene is set for the necessary discovery of infusions based on dried leaf material with similar properties to tea. The Sufis were eager to embrace chemical assistance in order to get closer to God, and help was at hand.

Tea leaves in China were made in a number of ways: the three most common, green, oolong, and black teas, were produced by differing combinations of sun-drying, pan firing, rolling, fermenting, and final firing. The coffee industry today is curiously coy about the fact that the current way of preparation is one of only many ways, and that coffee can also be a tisane or tea: an infusion of dried vegetable matter in hot water. Ethiopians, as we have seen, still sometimes drink a coffee made from the leaves (as opposed to cherry or bean) of the coffee plant. For one, amertassa, green coffee leaves are allowed to dry naturally in the shade, then infused. The other, kati, is made from leaves that have been pan fired. The use of dried leaf material in this way is very similar to tea, and kafta, a drink made from the dried leaves of the qat plant, is likewise related. Furthermore, in Yemen and other parts of Arabia today it is common to find kish’r, which is an infusion of the dried coffee cherry from which the beans have been removed. These cherries are sold in the markets in open sacks alongside green coffee beans, and are as much in demand. Kish’r has a pleasant, light fruity flavour with hints of its smoky coffee origins, but has more in common with a herbal infusion such as verbena or melise. Coffee cherry has also been detected in the manufacture of a cheap instant coffee. The evolution of these coffee teas through the use of the roasted bean into the beverage we now know as coffee was slow, and these varieties continued in parallel, as indeed they still do. Coffee did not spring into the world as a fully-fledged double espresso to go.

At the time of the visits of the Treasure Fleets, the Ethiopian Highlands were within the trading range of the merchants of Aden and Mocha, and Sufi missionaries also ventured across the Red Sea. It would seem perfectly plausible for a Sufi, inspired by what he had seen of tea drinking amongst the Chinese visitors, to learn what he could of the manufacturing process from them. Aware from his own learning that none of the plants in the conventional Arab pharmacopoeia had the characteristics he sought, he may have taken the opportunity of a missionary trip to Ethiopia to experiment with various endemic plant types there, and settled on coffee and qat as the most interesting. At this stage, in imitation of the Chinese, only the leaves of the coffee plant were used for the infusion, but as they contain less than 1 per cent caffeine, they might not have been sufficient for his ecstatic purpose. However, these things vary considerably according to brewing method and quantities used. Weight for weight, tea contains twice the quantity of caffeine as Arabica coffee, but as the volume of vegetable matter used is much less than half, the net effect is less caffeine in the final beverage. Coffee leaves could thus have been brewed ‘strong’ to provide a high caffeine yield, but this would have made the drink itself unpalatable. It is significant that qat loses much of its potency when its leaves are dried; thus as a tea it does not have a particularly interesting effect. This is why Yemenis today favour the chewing of the fresh green leaves, and perhaps also explains why qat has only recently started to find a wider public with the invention of airfreight.

It is at this point in coffee’s history that a number of real people finally begin to peer from behind the purdah screen. When the first European merchants came to Yemen in the early seventeenth century, they were naturally very curious about the origins of the coffee that they had come so far to buy. Amongst the stories they were told by the local traders were many that were obviously fantastic, including those of fabulous multi-coloured coffee birds and plague-ravaged princesses. Interestingly, the story of Kaldi and his dancing goats was not amongst the stories recorded by the Europeans. This tale of the discovery of coffee is so favoured in our times that it has assumed the status of established fact. It involves a goatherd, Kaldi, who sees his flock eating coffee cherries and then dancing. Kaldi likewise eats and dances, and then tells the abbot of a nearby monastery of his discovery. Angered by what he regards as a diabolical substance, the abbot throws some cherries on a fire; the resulting aroma, however, convinces him that they must be of divine origin, and he makes an infusion of the beans which he gives to his monks to help to keep them awake during night prayers. The omission of the Kaldi story from those told to the earliest Europeans is a clear indication that it was probably the later invention of a coffee house storyteller. Some of the stories, however, concerned genuine historical Sufi leaders, of whom sufficient is known to be able to evaluate whether they could have instigated the hypothetical scenario of the Sufi missionary in Ethiopia outlined above.

The first candidate is one dear to the heart of the coffee trade, ‘Ali Ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, patron saint of the coffee port of Mocha. As an English sailor named William Revett reported in 1609: ‘Shaomer Shadli was the fyrst inventour for drynking of coffe, and therefore had in esteemation’. It is understandable that the town which owed much of its wealth in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to coffee should seek to associate its prosperity with its pet saint, whose tomb is one of the few fine buildings that remains there. However, he died in 1418, and while it is conceivable that he may have been in Aden when Zheng He visited the year before, it is unlikely that he would have been able to make a trip to Ethiopia, returning with the newly invented tea substitute, before he died. In addition, the earliest descriptions by the historians Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad al-Shardji and Mohammed al-Sakhawi of the life of Shaykh ‘Umar fail to mention his discovery of coffee, which after all would have been a very distinguished addition to his curriculum vitae. Finally the Shadhilaya Sufi order from which he derived his name was founded in the thirteenth century and was known for its orthodoxy and sobriety, and the writings of the order make no mention of coffee.

The second contestant is Mohammed bin Sa’id al-Dhabhani, also known as Gemaleddin, who was both a Sufi and a mufti (religious leader) in Aden. Although he died in 1470, somewhat late to have met Zheng He in 1417, he would have been alive in 1433 when the seventh voyage picked up an envoy from Aden who, upon his return from China, may have furnished the necessary details concerning tea production. Alternatively, tea drinking may have been a recognized practice in Arabia using precisely the tea which it is recorded that the Treasure Fleet carried for trading purposes. Upon the cessation of the Chinese visits after 1433, tea would have been impossible to obtain, and a substitute could have been sought. The most intriguing thing about the al-Dhabhani story as recorded by al-Djaziri is that it specifically refers to the fact that he had visited Ethiopia as a missionary and had learnt about the benefits of coffee drinking there. As well as being a religious leader, Gemaleddin was also a renowned man of science. There is some speculation in early European writings, unsupported by primary sources, that Gemaleddin gave coffee his mufti’s seal of approval in 1454, and that his endorsement led to the rapid spread of coffee drinking in the Sufi community.

The third candidate is Abu Bakr al-’Aydarus, another Sufi who was patron saint of Aden. However, he died in 1508, which would appear to be quite long after coffee drinking had become established amongst the Sufis, as can safely be determined from the historical and archaeological record.

The persistence of such legends identifying the first coffee drinker as a Sufi master in the era shortly after the arrival of the Chinese Treasure Fleet bearing tea, the mutual interest in the materia medica of the Arabs and the Chinese, and the active presence of Sufism in the region all suggest that there may be a new, compelling version of the tale of the discovery of coffee to replace the time-worn myth of Kaldi. Although it is conjecture, the story is extrapolated from known facts and involves historical figures, all of which is a distinct improvement on that of the goatherd. Its hero is the Mufti of Aden, Gemaleddin, to whom we will ascribe the not unreasonable age of three score years and ten at his death in 1470.

As a young man, Gemaleddin was in Aden when the Treasure Fleet of Zhe Heng arrived at the port in 1417. He was struck by the description of the Chinese drinking an infusion they found refreshing called tea, made with dried leaves mixed with hot water. Gemaleddin later became a Sufi and a scholar respected in matters of both science and religion. In his early thirties he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he met a Sufi who described how he had seen the Sufis drink tea in China to help them stay awake during night prayers. Gemaleddin heard that another Treasure Fleet from China was at that moment on its way to Jiddah, the nearest port to Mecca, and so he hurried to meet it. As he was by now a man of great distinction, he was welcomed aboard the flagship by the fleet’s commander, Hong Bao, where he drank tea with the dignitaries, noted its stimulating effect, and questioned them closely about the origins of the tea plant and the methods of drying the leaves. The description of the tea plant did not correspond with that of any plant he knew of in Arabia, and it appeared that the growing conditions required for tea would make it ill suited to the region. Gemaleddin wondered whether he might somewhere find a plant with similar properties if it could be infused in the same way. Having previously decided to go on a missionary expedition to Abyssinia, he began to look out for any as yet undiscovered plants which might have the desired effect. From Arab slave traders bringing captives from the Oromo tribe in the west of Abyssinia he learnt of a plant there called bun, which was supposed to make goats very lively when they ate it. He went to the Oromo, discovered coffee, and tasted infusions of the leaves, which he dried in the manner described to him by the Chinese. He noted that the stimulatory effect of the drink was very similar to that of Chinese tea. He also took samples of the cherries of the coffee bush back with him to Aden. The flesh of the cherry made a more palatable and stimulating drink than the leaves, and so Gemaleddin developed the drink called qish’r, which is still widely drunk in Yemen today, often flavoured with ginger. Gemaleddin encouraged his disciples to drink qish’r and it became a part of Sufi ritual; but, versed as he was in the mysterious science of alchemy, he continued to experiment and was struck by the enormous changes that took place in the rejected stones at the heart of the coffee cherry when they were roasted on a pan. These pale green, tasteless, and unpromising beans transformed into brown polished nuggets with an overwhelmingly delicious aroma and a bitter but alluring flavour when ground and boiled. The change to the coffee bean represented on a physical level the transformations that Sufism wrought upon the human soul, and the fact that coffee enabled adherents to remain awake during their night prayers was further proof of its spiritual qualities. The drink was also as black as the Ka’ba, the sacred black stone at Mecca to which all Muslims must make the Haj. Gemaleddin’s learning and piety had uncovered a mysterious substance that assisted the Sufis in their communion with God.

Hence coffee stands before us finally unveiled, discovered by an alchemist who identified in its transformation the means of bringing men closer to God, in the same way that the use of communion wine, which is variously forbidden and allowed in different branches of the Christian ritual, has underlying it much of the same transformational thinking. That the Sufis should have adopted a similar ritual use of a communal drink is not surprising, and the fact that coffee is known as the ‘Wine of Araby’ also takes on another dimension of meaning in this context.

The way in which coffee was eagerly adopted by Sufism illumines the alchemical element in the new myth. We have seen that ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold.’ Even those who do not like the flavour of coffee usually concede that it has a peculiarly seductive aroma when freshly roasted, and when the beans are broken up by grinding or pulverizing they release a new set of aromas that are if anything even more beguiling. The transformation of coffee from dull, sublunary vegetable matter into a substance of almost divine aroma and extraordinary flavour is a compelling symbol of what alchemy and its Sufi followers wished to achieve with their spiritual quest. In every sense, then, coffee brought them closer to God and it became a vital component of their communal prayers.

The ritual use of coffee is itself a hypothesis, but one supported by archaeological evidence, the first that we have come across in our peregrinations around coffee’s prehistory. Excavations at Zabid have shown that initially (c.1450) coffee was almost certainly served amongst the Sufi community at their dhikrs (communal worship, usually at night) from a ladle dipped into a glazed bowl named a majdur. Previously, this sort of pottery had not been glazed, which suggests that coffee was deemed of higher importance than other liquids. Shortly afterwards, smaller glazed bowls started to be produced at Haysi, a nearby town. These would have been passed around from person to person, replacing the ladle. Significantly, these small bowls bear striking resemblance in shape to the Chinese porcelain tea-drinking bowls of the same era, and some have rudimentary imitations of the classic blue and white Chinese patterns. The passing around of coffee was one of the reasons why it was banned in Mecca in 1511 as sharing was associated with alcohol consumption. Some Sufi sects today still pass around a drinking bowl of coffee in connection with events of particular importance such as the funerals of members.

Sufis did not live a cloistered existence, and the reason why their dhikrs tended to take place at night was that many of their numbers followed a normal life of work and family during the day – hence the value ascribed to coffee as a means of staying awake during prayers. As they lived amongst the community it would seem that the new habit of coffee drinking was rapidly disseminated amongst the population as a whole. Again the best evidence for this comes from archaeology; within a hundred years the Haysi potteries had evolved an individual coffee cup of the size and shape of a modern demitasse, or the smaller Turkish findjan. This would suggest that coffee consumption had spread from ritual to individual domestic consumption. Its wildfire spread through Islam, however, was the result of geopolitics: the growth of the coffee trade depended upon the relative security of the Red Sea and its ports, and a unified political and spiritual rule that allowed coffee to be quickly adopted.

It happened that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when coffee drinking was first becoming established in Yemen both ritually and domestically, coincided with the first flush of the Ottoman empire. In 1517 at Cairo, having already conquered Constantinople and most of the Balkans in the previous century, the Ottomans under Selim I finally defeated the Mamelukes, who had been the rulers of Egypt and the Levant for the previous 250 years. The Ottomans had thus acquired, along with the holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina, the Caliphate – the spiritual leadership of Islam. The Mamelukes were originally a soldier-slave élite from southern Russia and the Caucasus. Driven from Egypt by the advancing Ottomans, a large number made their way to Yemen in 1516 where they settled in the Tihama, the desert coastal plain – it is said that they chose Yemen because they knew that qat was plentiful there. They finally succumbed to the Ottomans, who had taken Aden in 1538 and themselves started to occupy the Tihama, although they did not take inland San’a for another ten years.

It was during the Mameluke rule in Mecca that the spread of coffee attracted its first serious obstacle, in the form of the ban imposed on it by Kha’ir Bey, who was the Pasha of the city as well as the muhtasib, the inspector of markets. On 20 June 1511, outside the mosque, he spotted a number of men drinking what appeared to him to be alcohol in buildings resembling taverns; he made enquiries and found that it was in fact a new beverage, coffee, being drunk in rudimentary coffee houses. To confuse matters, there are some indications that it was actually qish’r coffee that had reached Mecca, not yet the roasted bean form, bun. Additionally, the dry coffee cherries which made qish’r could be lightly roasted before brewing, producing sultana coffee, and the word kafta, by which coffee was sometimes known, was applied as much to a decoction made of the leaves of qat as to one made of coffee beans. It can be seen that there was probably a reasonable requirement for an authoritative clarification of exactly what was what, and what was permissible. Clearly the habit of drinking some form of coffee-based decoction had moved up the Red Sea coast in the thirty years or so since it had become established in Yemen, but it had not until this time been subjected to the catechism, and its novelty represented something of a puzzle to Islamic orthodoxy. Because of the strict prohibition on any form of intoxication, coffee was a genuinely sticky issue which required a ruling. Kha’ir Bey was the first man to attempt to provide it.

He rapidly assembled a team of learned men, doctors, clerics and ‘men on the street’. The issues they were called upon to consider, which are reported in the mahdaf’ or minutes of the meeting of jurists at Mecca, were the application of core Islamic concepts to coffee; regarding things not expressly forbidden (sunna) in the Qur’an that were permissible unless harmful to the body; regarding khamr (wine) and the idea that ‘every intoxicant is khamr and every intoxicant is forbidden’ as it rendered men ‘incapable of distinguishing a man from a woman or the earth from the heavens’; regarding jaziri ta’ assub or a fanatical non-textual conviction based on an exaggerated sense of piety; regarding ijima, or communal acceptance; and regarding marqaha, the specific intoxication brought about by coffee. The coffee houses themselves also needed to be considered: were they, as had been suggested, centres of music, gambling, and mixing of the sexes? The fact that coffee was passed around, although ritually in a dhikr, evidently evoked the alehouse. There were many issues for discussion: even its most virulent detractors could hardly claim that the result of drinking coffee met the definition of intoxication, yet it undoubtedly had some effect. The inherent moderating influences of Islam demanded that it should not be banned on the basis of an exaggerated sense of piety, yet perhaps coffee was harmful to the body? Medical opinion was sought on the basis of the humour system and its degrees – the first representing food; the second, food and medicine; the third medicine; and the fourth, poison. Coffee, it was found, was ‘cold and dry’ and heightened melancholia.

The debate and the people who took part are usually characterized in Western coffee histories as superstitious and irrational, whereas the Western heroes of the coffee saga (de Clieu, Franz Georg Kolschitsky, and Francisco de Mello Palheta, amongst others, whom we shall meet in these pages) are treated as romantic, swashbuckling figures. We have seen that Islam had been the torch-bearer of science and culture during the European Dark Ages, but as soon as the West started to overtake it in the last five hundred years of the second millennium, history, as much as any other field of endeavour, was skewed to represent the natural superiority of European, Christian ways over those of the benighted unbelievers. Many popular historians view the genuine issues and debate surrounding the introduction of the new beverage in Islam with, at best, levity and at worst an underlying contempt. It is easy to forget that coffee is a powerful drug, and that its cultural assimilation was by no means preordained. Islam, by virtue of geography, was at the forefront of the process of weighing up its advantages and disadvantages. The intellectual approach involved theology, science, polemic, and even poetry – in Yemen a literary genre emerged that pitched coffee and qat against each other in imaginary dialogue:

Qat says: They take off your husk and crush you. They force you in the fire and pound you. I seek refuge in God from people created by fire!

Coffee says: A prize can be hidden in a trial. The diamond comes clear after fire. And fire does not alter gold. The people throw most of you away and step on you. And the bits they eat, they spit out. And the spittoon is emptied down the toilet!

Qat scoffs: You say I come out of the mouth into a spittoon. It is a better place than the one you will come out!

Hashish and tobacco were similarly scrutinized when they arrived in the Middle East at the end of the sixteenth century. Alcohol had long before been the subject of controversy: the Qur’an refers (47: 15) to ‘rivers of wine … delicious to the drinkers’ but its prohibition is based on verses 5: 90–1. The continuation of that prohibition into the present day is a recognition of the weight of the authority of the initial debate. Western laws that today license alcohol and tobacco consumption but prohibit hashish and opium use have likewise emerged from a cultural consensus, a combination of science, social pragmatism, and superstition. If coffee were to be introduced to the West today, it is hard to imagine that it would get the approval of the regulatory authorities – as it was, coffee caused fierce controversy when it was introduced to Europe during the seventeenth century, and there were doubts about its suitability in Christendom. Unsubstantiated reports have Pope Clement VIII giving coffee his blessing on the basis that such a delicious drink should not be the exclusive preserve of Muslims.