The World of Caffeine (6 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
From Jaziri we also learn that gaming, especially chess, backgammon, and draughts, was, in addition to idle talk, a regular feature of coffeehouse life. Card playing, reported by travelers, may have been a later introduction from Europe. However, contemporary Islamic writers, a strait-laced group to a man, disapproved of such frivolous activities, even when no money was being wagered. One of the mainstays of coffeehouse entertainment spoken of by Moslem writers was the storyteller, an inexpensive addition to the enjoyment of the patrons that was more acceptable than either gossip or gaming to the exacting moral monitors of the day.
Musical entertainments, in contrast with literary ones, though also commonplace in coffeehouses, were regarded with more disfavor. The “drums and fiddlers”
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of Mecca’s coffeehouses were mentioned by Jaziri as one of their aspects offensive to Kha’ir Beg. Evidently sharing the belief of St. Augustine that music was a sensual enjoyment that threatened to divert attention from the contemplation of God, and as such was to be regarded as a subversive force among the faithful, the Islamic moralists of the day asserted that musical entertainments deepened the debauchery into which coffeehouse patrons habitually sunk. Secular music was considered dangerous in itself, but worse for the encouragement it gave to revelry. Especially damning was the early practice, taken over from the taverns, of featuring women singers. Even when they were kept from customers’ eyes behind a screen, their voices alone were thought to offer improper sexual stimulation, which, it was often charged, led to sexual disportment with the patrons. Later accounts make it clear that these temptresses were finally banished, leaving the Islamic coffeehouses strictly to the men.
Photograph of Palestinian or Syrian peasants playing backgammon while drinking coffee and sharing a hookah pipe at a recent version of the modest Arab coffee shops that have been traditional for several hundred years, from an albumen photograph, c. 1885–1901, by Bonfils, active 1864–1916. (Photograph by Bonfils, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, negative #s4–142209)
Even more corrupting than women, or so these Islamic thinkers believed, was the use of hard drugs by coffeehouse denizens. Jaziri deplores the mixing of hashish, opium, and possibly other narcotic preparations with what, in his judgment, was an otherwise pure drink. He says, “Many have been led to ruin by this temptation. They can be reckoned as beasts whom the demons have so tempted.”
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Another Islamic writer of the time, Kâtib Celebi, states, “Drug addicts in particular finding [coffee] a life giving thing, which increases their pleasure, were willing to die for a cup.”
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As to the intoxicating effects of coffee itself, which we now understand are a consequence of its caffeine content, Islamic opinion was divided in bitter controversy from at least as early as ‘Abd al-Ghaffar. Some moralists likened the
marqaha
to inebriation with alcohol, hashish, or opium. Other writers, including an unnamed predecessor of ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, found this identification preposterous, both in degree and kind. This unresolvable dispute was of practical importance in a society in which many prominent men were coffee users and in which indulgence in any intoxicant was grounds for severe punishment. In the end, caffeine triumphed in the Islamic world, and coffee was accepted as the earthly approximation of the “purest wine, that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason,” which the Koran teaches the blessed will enjoy in the world to come.
From the standpoint of modern secular taste, it is difficult not to find sympathetic an environment which presented the first informal, public, literary, and intellectual forum in Islam. Many of the conventions that were established in those early coffeehouses remain hallmarks of our coffeehouses today. Poets and other writers came to read their works; the air was filled with the sounds of animated colloquies on the sciences and arts; and, as in Pepys’ England and in so many other times and places, the coffeehouse became, in the absence of newspapers, a place where people gathered to learn and argue about the latest social and political events.
Because the coffeehouse is so important and coffee is so freely available today, we may be disposed to regard the Arab and Turkish attempts at prohibition as quaint and archaic. Such condescension would demonstrate an ignorance of similar efforts in later periods of history and a failure to recognize those in our own. The “caffeine temperance” movement has reasserted
itself, with greater or lesser effectiveness, in almost every generation. France, Italy, and England have recurringly witnessed men who sought to enlist the power of law to enforce their own disapproval of caffeine. In the
Year of the First Coffeehouses
| City | Yearc |
| Mecca | <1500 |
| Cairo | c. 1500 |
| Constantinople | 1555 |
| Oxford | 1650 |
| London | 1652 |
| Cambridge | early 1660s |
| The Hague | 1664 |
| Amsterdam | mid-1660s |
| Marseilles | 1671 |
| Hamburg | 1679 |
| Vienna | 1683 |
| Paris | 1689 |
| Boston | 1689 |
| Leipzig | 1694 |
| New York | 1696 |
| Philadelphia | 1700 |
| Berlin | 1721 |
United States in the early twentieth century, reformers such as Harvey Washington Wiley vigorously campaigned against the use of caffeine in soft drinks. Today such groups as Caffeine Prevention Plus, who use the Internet to promote their cause, and all sorts of meddlesome do-gooders would be happy to add caffeine to the list of highly regulated or banned substances. Americans, who live with the prohibition of marijuana, heroin, and certain pharmaceuticals in general use worldwide and who are witnessing serious efforts within our government to further control or ban cigarettes, should recognize elements of their own society when hearing the story of Kha’ir Beg.
There was nothing remarkable in the King’s Gardens [in Yemen], except the great pains taken to furnish it with all the kinds of trees that are common in the country; amongst which there were the coffee trees, the finest that could be had. When the deputies represented to the King how much that was contrary to the custom of the Princes of Europe (who endeavor to stock their gardens chiefly with the rarest and most uncommon plants that can be found) the King returned them this answer: That he valued himself as much upon his good taste and generosity as any Prince in Europe; the coffee tree, he told them, was indeed common in his country, but it was not the less dear to him upon that account; the perpetual verdure of it pleased him extremely; and also the thoughts of its producing a fruit which was nowhere else to be met with; and when he made a present of that that came from his own Gardens, it was a great satisfaction to him to be able to say that he had planted the trees that produced it with his own hands.
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—Jean La Roque,
Voyage de L’Arabie Heureuse,
1716
Europeans, as compared with the other peoples of the world, have historically demonstrated a strong inquisitiveness about the secrets of distant nations; they have been, in short, natural tourists. It is therefore no surprise that it was from returning travelers that knowledge of the habits of the Arabs and Turks was first brought to the capitals of Italy, France, England, Portugal, Holland, and Germany.
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These European travelers throughout the Islamic domains provide many vivid accounts of early coffeehouses.
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However, as Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), a German biographer and traveler, comments in
Travels through Arabia and Other Countries
in the East
(1792), many of the establishments they visited were situated in khans— combination inns, caravansaries, and warehouses—which served merchants and other travelers, and we should keep in mind that they may not have been typical of the coffeehouses catering to a residential population.
One of the earliest descriptions to reach Europe of the denizens of the coffee-houses of Constantinople was this dour assessment by Gianfrancesco Morosini, a Venetian traveler, in 1585:
All these people are quite base, of low costume and very little industry, such that, for the most part, they spend their time sunk in idleness. Thus they continually sit about, and for entertainment they are in the habit of drinking in public in shops and in the streets—a black liquid, boiling [as hot] as they can stand it, which is extracted from a seed they call Caveè… , and is said to have the property of keeping a man awake.
William Biddulph, an Elizabethan clergyman, shared Morosini’s disdain, observing that coffeehouse habitués of Aleppo were occupied exclusively with “Idle and Alehouse talke.”
Although many sipped coffee at tiny stalls or in spare public rooms, an atmosphere of luxury pervaded the grand coffeehouses, which were invariably located, according to the French coffee merchant Sylvestre Dufour, in the swankiest neighborhoods.
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Pedro Teixeira (1575–1640), a Portuguese traveler and explorer, describes one such place in Baghdad, where coffee was served in a place “built to that end”: “This house is near the river, over which it has many windows, and two galleries, making it a very pleasant resort.”
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The French traveler Jean de Thévenot (1633–67), in his
Relation d’un voyage
fait au Levant,
a book that helped convince his countrymen to regard coffee as a comestible instead of merely as a drug, tells us that the cafés of Damascus are all “cool, refreshing and pleasant” retreats for the natives of a parched region, offering “fountains, nearby rivers, tree shaded spots, roses and other flowers.”
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Outdoor enjoyment included resting on mat-covered stone benches and enjoying the street scene.
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He certainly found more to approve in coffeehouse conviviality than did Morosini or Bidduph:
There are public coffeehouses, where the drink is prepared in very big pots for the numerous guests. At these places, guests mingle without distinction of rank or creed…
When someone is in a coffeehouse, and sees people whom he knows come in, if he is in the least ways civil, he will tell the proprietor not to take any money from them. All this is done by a single word, for when they are served with their coffee, he merely cries, “Giaba,” that is to say, “Gratis!”
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Evidently little changed over the ensuing century, for D’Ohsson confirmed the picture of coffeehouse leisure, writing, “Young idlers spend whole hours in them, smoking, playing draughts or chess and discussing affairs of the day.”
Alexander Russel, in
The Natural History of Aleppo
(1756), describes the coffee-house use of hashish and opium in waterpipes, and other writers, such as Edward Lane, an English Arabic scholar, in his
Account of the Manners and Customs of
the Modern Egyptians
(1860), also testifies to these sordid indulgences. Niebuhr, blaming the stupefied languor of the coffee imbibers on intense tobacco use, comments:
In Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, the favorite of amusement of persons in any degree above the very lowest classes, is, to spend the evening in a public coffee-house, where they hear musicians, singers, and tale-tellers, who frequent those houses in order to earn a trifle by the exercise of their respective arts. In those places of public amusement, the Orientals maintain a profound silence, and often sit whole evenings without uttering a word. They prefer conversing with their pipe; and its narcotic fumes seem very fit to allay the ferment of their boiling blood. Without recurring to a physical reason, it would be hard to account for the general relish which these people have for tobacco; by smoking, they divert the spleen and languor which hang about them, and bring themselves in a slight degree, into the same state of spirits which the opium eaters obtain from that drug. Tobacco serves them instead of strong liquors, which they are forbidden to use.
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The Reverend R.Walsh was a senior member of the British diplomatic service stationed in Constantinople in the early nineteenth century. In his book
Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England
(1828), he describes a coffeehouse he visited while staying the night at an inn, typical of the sort of establishment that had been so often visited by earlier European travelers, on his way home: