Black Gold. Antony Wild
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.
The result of the Mecca debate was that Kha’ir Bey banned the consumption of coffee in that city, and reported his action to the Mameluke Sultan in Cairo, where it appears that coffee was already well established, inevitably, amongst the Sufi community. The Sultan ordered Kha’ir Bey to rescind the ban, and eventually the hapless Pasha lost his job for unrelated reasons. The Mameluke Sultans had waged a constant battle against taverns, but for the time being the coffee house was not tainted by association. After the Ottomans took Cairo in 1517, the two doctors who had given evidence in support of the ban in Mecca were arrested and cut in two at the waist on the orders of Selim I, who died in 1520. Coffee, from being an ecstatic in the service of the Sufis, rapidly spread throughout the newly united territories, acting both as an engine of social cohesion and a valued internal trading commodity. It was adopted by the Khalwatiyya, confrères of the élite bodyguard of the Sultan, and the approval of coffee by the Court Physician to Suleiman in 1522 further secured its position. Ottoman support for coffee drinking was by no means unwavering, however: a succession of prohibitions ebbed and flowed around the Empire. Banned again at Mecca in 1526, coffee houses in Cairo were smashed up in 1535 as a result of the preachings of al-Sunbati and reinstated by the judge Ibn Ilyas. In 1539, again in Cairo, night watchmen imprisoned any coffee house customers they found, and a prohibition order arrived in Cairo from Istanbul in 1544, but was enforced only for a day.
The intense controversy provoked by the growth of coffee consumption throughout the Ottoman Empire became one of the intellectual and literary obsessions of the sixteenth century. Coffee, increasingly secularized, became a powerful social force, in that people now had a reason to be out at night other than the performance of their religious duties. Traditional patterns of hospitality were broken as the coffee house started to replace the home as a place of entertainment; strangers could meet and converse, and men of different stations in life could be found sharing the beverage. In addition, of course, coffee by its nature was a powerful aid to intellectual dispute and clarity of thought, as well as providing the means whereby debate could be prolonged into the night. These factors combined to make coffee potentially subversive in the eyes of not only the religious authorities, but the secular ones as well. The increasing assertiveness of the Ottomans in the Red Sea trade, their possession of Yemen and, in 1555, parts of coastal Ethiopia, gave them greater access to the coffee entrepôts that sustained the coffee habit that had spread throughout the empire and beyond to Persia and the Moghul empire. Coffee had truly been adopted as the drink of Islam. But it was Constantinople, capital of Suleiman the Magnificent’s eponymous empire, that witnessed the great flowering of Ottoman coffee culture.
Introduced by two Syrian merchants, Hakim and Shams, in 1555, coffee drinking in Constantinople took off so quickly that by 1566 there were six hundred establishments selling coffee, from splendid coffee houses to the humblest kiosk. The best were located in tree-shaded gardens overlooking the Bosporus, with fountains and plentiful flowers, and provided with divans, hookahs, carpets, women singers hidden behind screens, storytellers, and conspicuously beautiful ‘boyes to serve as stales [prostitutes] to procure them customers’. The coffee was brewed in large cauldrons, and might be flavoured with saffron, cardamom, opium, hashish, or ambergris, or combinations thereof. Opium and hash were also smoked widely, along with tobacco. As there was no restaurant culture at the time in ‘unhospitall Turkie’, the coffee house was, other than the reviled tavern, the only place to meet friends outside the home, discuss politics and literature, play backgammon or chess and perhaps gamble. Foreign merchants seeking trade, newlyqualified lawyers seeking clients, and provincial politicians seeking advancement would all congregate there. The coffee house was an integral part of the imperial system, providing a forum for the coming together and dissemination of news and ideas, just as it was to do later in Europe. On the domestic level, the Sultan and other wealthy householders employed a special official, the kaveghi, to take care of all coffee matters. The Sultan’s coffee service (both animate and inanimate) was naturally the most sumptuous: golden pots on golden braziers were held on golden chains by slave girls, one of whom gracefully passed the finest porcelain cup of coffee to the Sultan’s lips. While the cares of state were thus soothed in the seraglio, wives of lesser mortals could legitimately claim that the lack of coffee in the household was grounds for divorce.
Other cities of the empire did not necessarily emulate the splendid coffee houses of the capital. Those of Cairo quickly attracted a low-life reputation, as they were filled with ‘dissolute persons and opium eaters’, and were used for the procurement of boys. Which is to say that they were in essence very similar to the coffee houses of Constantinople, but less beautiful and the clientele more conspicuously seedy. Because of their vicious reputation, the knives came out for the Constantinople coffee houses in 1570, with the clerics taking the lead role, spurred on by the fact that the mosques were emptying. The same issues were dusted down: whether coffee was an intoxicant, whether it was charcoal and thus forbidden, and whether the coffee houses were dens of iniquity. As it happened, the coffee houses were prohibited, but merely went underground. In the meantime, street coffee vendors continued to ply their trade. The interplay between secular laws imposed by the Sultan and the religious law of Shariah left scope for intervention by both sides in the coffee debate according to their particular needs at any time. Even when it was classed with wine by decree in 1580, its consumption was so widespread that there was no alternative but for the authorities to turn a blind eye, and eventually religious opposition was countermanded.
More serious was the secular threat under Amurath IV. The Grand Vizier Kuprili determined that the coffee houses were hotbeds of sedition, hosting political opponents to his unpopular war with Candia. He banned them outright, with offenders punished first by a severe beating and then, if caught again, by being sewn up in a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus. Even this picturesque fate was not enough to deter hardened coffee drinkers, and eventually Kuprili was forced to relent. It is noteworthy that the taverns, which technically were forbidden under Islam, were allowed to remain open during the time of Kuprili’s ban. This underlines the very different nature