The World of Caffeine (4 page)

Of course, if we were to find that the ancients
had
known about and used coffee, this lacuna would be filled in and the perplexity resolved.

Some imaginative chroniclers in modern times, uncomfortable with the possibility that their age should know of something so important that had been unknown to the ancient wise, have satisfied themselves that coffee was in fact mentioned in the earliest writings of the Greek and Hebrew cultures. These supposed ancient references, though exhibiting great variety, have one common element that mirrors the understanding of coffee at the time they were asserted: They present it primarily as a drug and measure its significance in terms of its curative or mood-altering powers.

Pietro della Valle, an Italian who from 1614 to 1626 toured Turkey, Egypt, Eritrea, Palestine, Persia, and India, advanced in his letters, published as
Viaggi in Turchia, Persia ed India descritti da lui medesimo in 54 lettere famigliari,
the implausible theory that the drink nepenthe, prepared by Helen in the
Odyssey,
was nothing other than coffee mixed with wine. In the fourth book of the epic, in which Telemachus, Menelaus, and Helen are eating dinner, the company becomes suddenly depressed over the absence of Odysseus. Homer tells us:

These wondrous effects sound more like those of heroin mixed with cocaine than of coffee mixed with wine. The word
“nepenthes,”
meaning “no pain” or “no care” in Greek, is used in the original text to modify the word
“pharmakos,”
meaning “medicine” or “drug.”
¹⁷
For at least the last several hundred years, “nepenthe” has been a generic term in medical literature for a sedative or the plant that supplies it; as such, it hardly fits the pharmacological profile of either caffeine or coffee. Nevertheless, the pioneering Enlightenment scholars Diderot and d’Alembert repeated Pietro della Valle’s idea in their
Encyclopédie
(much of which was drafted in daily visits to one of Paris’s earliest coffee houses). The fact that Homer tells us that the use of nepenthe was learned in Egypt, which can be construed to include parts of Ethiopia, together with the undoubted capacity of coffee to drive away gloom and its reputation for making it impossible to shed tears, may have helped to make this identification more appealing.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became fashionable for European scholars to continue, as della Valle had begun, in theorizing about the knowledge the ancients had had of modern drugs. Not everyone, of course, was convinced. Dr. Simon André Tissot, a Swiss medical writer working in 1769, acknowledges the value of coffee as stimulant to the wit, but warns that we should neither underestimate its dangers nor exaggerate its value: for “we have to ask ourselves whether Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, whose works will be a joy for all time, ever drank coffee.”
¹⁸
Many others, however, followed an imaginary trail of coffee beans leading back to ancient Greece. Sir Henry Blount (1602– 82), a Puritan teetotaler frequently dubbed the “father of the English coffeehouse,” traveled widely in the Levant, where he drank coffee with the Sultan Murat IV. On his return to England, he became one of the earliest boosters of the “Turkish renegade,” as coffee was sometimes called. He brewed a controversy when he repeated a gratuitous claim that the exotic beverage he had enjoyed in the capitals of the Near East was in fact the same as a famous drink of the ancient Spartans:

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

‘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

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:

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.