Tag: Coffee

Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head!

by Adam Cole

Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement.

But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword.

Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense.

Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning.

Adam Cole/NPR Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning.

The sultan was so intent on eradicating coffee that he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with a hundred-pound broadsword. Unfortunate coffee drinkers were decapitated as they sipped.

Murad IV’s successor was more lenient. The punishment for a first offense was a light cudgeling. Caught with coffee a second time, the perpetrator was sewn into a leather bag and tossed in the river.

But people still drank coffee. Even with the sultan at the front door with a sword and the executioner at the back door with a sewing kit, they still wanted their daily cup of joe. And that’s the history of coffee in a bean skin: Old habits die hard.

Wherever it spread, coffee was popular with the masses but challenged by the powerful.

“If you look at the rhetoric about drugs that we’re dealing with now — like, say, crack — it’s very similar to what was said about coffee,” Stewart Allen, author of The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, tells The Salt.

In Murad’s Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would inspire indecent behavior. As the bean moved west into Europe, physicians rallied against it, claiming that coffee would “dry up the cerebrospinal fluid” and cause paralysis.

Perhaps the bawdiest argument against coffee was “The Womens [sic] Petition Against Coffee,” published in England in 1674. Brimming with innuendos that would make Shakespeare blush, the six-page manifesto blamed coffee for every type of impotence.

The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd

Adam Cole/NPR The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd.

One of the more repeatable passages:

… the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands that they are become as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

Monarchs and tyrants publicly argued that coffee was poison for the bodies and souls of their subjects, but Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — says their real concern was political.

He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government.

– Stewart Allen

“Coffee has a tendency to loosen people’s imaginations … and mouths,” he tells The Salt.

And inventive, chatty citizens scare dictators.

According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

“He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,” says Allen.

Coffee fueled dissent — not just in the Ottoman Empire but all through the Western world. The French and American Revolutions were planned, in part, in the dark corners of coffeehouses. In Germany, a fearful Frederick the Great demanded that Germans switch from coffee to beer. He sent soldiers sniffing through the streets, searching for the slightest whiff of the illegal bean.

In England, King Charles II issued an order to shut down all coffeehouses after he traced some clever but seditious poetry to them. The backlash was throne-shaking. In just 11 days, Charles reversed his ruling.

“I think maybe he recalled that they had beheaded his father,” Pendergrast says. “He didn’t want to stir up too much trouble.”

And so coffee took its place in the center of culture. Where so many other underground movements — religious, political, even musical — were squashed, coffee managed to go mainstream.

According to legend, even the Pope Clement VIII couldn’t resist coffee’s charms. After inspecting the drink, he remarked to his skeptical advisers, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Papal advisers told Pope Clement VII that coffee was the antithesis of communion wine. He disagreed, and laid the foundation for the strictest of Catholic traditions: coffee hour

Adam Cole/NPR Papal advisers told Pope Clement VII that coffee was the antithesis of communion wine. He disagreed, and laid the foundation for the strictest of Catholic traditions: coffee hour.

So to all you caffeine-fasters and New Year’s resolvers, I say good luck. I hope you have more discipline than the pope and more strength than the Ottoman Empire.

via Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! : The Salt : NPR.

January 18, 2012
Turkish coffee house talk could teach the world a thing or two

As Turkey’s coffee culture arrives in London, it provides an opportunity for proper discussion about culture and politics

Kaya Genç

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 November 2011 10.30 GMT

A traditional Turkish coffee is served at a coffee house in Istanbul. A traditional Turkish coffee is served at a coffee house in Istanbul. Photograph: Fatih Saribas/Reuters

The coffee house was invented almost five centuries ago, in Istanbul. But it wasn’t Turks who turned the concept into a global business model, it was the Americans. While Turkish waiters kept on serving traditional coffee and water pipes to their loyal customers at cheap prices, Americans designed menus full of delicacies and calories, decorated their coffee houses with comfy chairs, and offered free Wi-Fi. Nevertheless they will still find it hard to convince loyal Turkish coffee addicts like me into giving up our die-hard drinking habits: for us, the siren logo represents terrible coffee consumed over comfortable furniture and the flavour of Turkish coffee remains indispensable.

It is good news for us, then, that Turkish coffee culture has now pitched up right in the centre of London: a few weeks ago, Kahve Dünyası (“The Coffee World”), our tardy response to the Starbucks model, opened in Piccadilly Circus. The chain was established as late as 2004 in Istanbul’s Eminonu district, where the first ever coffee house opened its doors in 1555. Many Turks have fallen for Kahve Dünyası’s traditional but also conveniently modern ways: there are 68 types of coffee on offer as well as an extensive chocolate collection. Orders are taken by a waiter and not at a counter, and the Turkish coffee will arrive at your table the way you like it: plain, or with little, medium or lots of sugar.

The Piccadilly branch even has a guidebook for those not sufficiently acquainted with Turkish ways of drinking coffee. The thick foam at the top you should enjoy at length, but avoid telve, the grounds left at the bottom of the cup. Many people drink the glass of water habitually served on the tray afterwards, but traditionally the water used to be drunk beforehand, in order to refresh your palate.

When I visited a Costa in Piccadilly last summer, I was struck – and annoyed – by the lack of attention paid to the customers. Of course, for US-style coffee chains, this has always been the deal: serve the customers with cheap coffee and leave them alone with their gadgets afterwards. But it is also easy to see what is lost when they are silently caressing their iPads: in Turkish coffee houses one finds a more noisy atmosphere, but also a real sense of community.

Once ideal places for Istanbul’s multicultural population who converged there to discuss current affairs, Turkish coffee houses are still spaces for conversation rather than work. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate, made use of them in his monumental My Name is Red, where meddahs (storytellers) come together, telling vivid stories which make up chapters of the novel. Their stories are erotic, clever, funny and pointedly mocking of the country’s politicians. It is no surprise then that Istanbul’s coffee houses were closed by the authorities in the 16th century: spending too much time in them made people less virtuous, the authorities believed.

Turkey’s coffee houses are reminders of how liberty and conversation once triumphed in Ottoman culture, only to be suppressed later by authoritarian force. What a sight it would be one of these days to see the Turkish president Abdullah Gül, in London for a state visit, and his host the Queen discussing the future of Europe over a cup of Turkish coffee. Gül could tell a story or two about his own country’s experiences: how his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, quickly became a symbol of resistance in geographies as diverse as Palestine, Egypt and Syria, and how the Turkish economy continued to grow in these troubled times. Not a single Turkish bank went bankrupt due to the euro crisis that struck Europe.

The older generation of Turkish diplomats used to have a peculiar way of dismissing popular demands in the country: they would label them “coffee house talk”. But Erdogan’s coffee house talk approach seems to have worked: over the past decade, national economic output tripled and average incomes doubled under a secular model that blends European and Islamic values.

Turks didn’t invent democracy, and there are plenty of signs that the country is still working out what the term really means (just look at the latest arrests of Kurdish politicians). But our coffee houses, in Istanbul or London, are good locations to discuss it, as they have been for the past five centuries.

via Turkish coffee house talk could teach the world a thing or two | Kaya Genç | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

November 25, 2011
Coffee – the nectar of Sufism

by Kathleen Seidel

Most coffee drinkers today are probably unaware of coffee’s heritage in the Sufi orders of southern Arabia. Members of the Shadhiliyya order are said to have spread coffee drinking throughout the Islamic world sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries CE. A Shadhiliyya shaykh was introduced to coffee drinking in Ethiopia where the native highland bush, its fruit and the beverage made from it were known as bun. Many believed this Sufi was Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali ibn Umar who resided for a time at the court of Sadaddin II, a sultan of southern Ethiopia. ‘Ali ibn Umar subsequently returned to Yemen with the knowledge the berries were not only edible, but they also promoted wakefulness. To this day, the shaykh is regarded as the patron saint of coffee growers, coffeehouse proprietors and coffee drinkers; in Algeria, coffee is sometimes called shadhiliyye in his honour.

The beverage became known as qahwa – a term formerly applied to wine – and ultimately to Europeans as “The Wine of Islam.” It became popular among the Sufis to boil up the grounds and drink the brew to help them stay awake during their night dhikr. (Roasting the beans was a later improvement developed by the Persians.) Coffee drinkers even coined their own term for the euphoria it produced: marqaha.

The mystic theologian Shaikh ibn Isma’il Ba Alawi of Al-Shihr stated that when imbibed with prayerful intent and devotion, coffee could lead to the experience of qahwa ma’nawiyya (“the ideal qahwa”) and qahwat al-Sufiyya, interchangeable terms defined as “the enjoyment which the people of God feel in beholding the hidden mysteries and attaining the wonderful disclosures and the great revelations.”

It soon became apparent coffee’s benefits could be extended to the workday and the local economy as well. The southern Arabian climate was ideal for coffee cultivation and the ports of Yemen, particularly the port of Mocha, became the world’s primary exporters of coffee.Coffee’s use spread to Mecca where, according to an early Arab historian, it was drunk in the sacred mosque itself so that there was scarcely a dhikr or mawlid where coffee was not present. Coffee spread throughout the Islamic world by way of pilgrims, traders, students and travellers. Al-Azhar became an early centre of coffee drinking and a certain amount of ceremony began to surround it.

Over time, coffee even acquired an angelic reputation. According to one Persian legend, it was first served to a sleepy Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel. In another story, King Solomon was said to have entered a town whose inhabitants were suffering a mysterious disease; on Gabriel’s command, he prepared a brew of roasted coffee beans and thereby cured the townspeople.

By the early 16th century CE, coffee drinking moved to the secular sphere and a new institution evolved that transformed social life throughout the Islamic world. And coffeehouses supplied more than beans; they had the expertise to prepare the brew, the necessary equipment and a convivial milieu in which to enjoy it. Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Egypt during the late 16th century CE, actually built coffeehouses as a public works project, garnering him great political popularity. In the mid-17th century, two Syrian businessmen, Hakm and Shams, introduced coffee to Istanbul, established the city’s first coffeehouses, made a fortune in the process and established a new and profitable arena of economic activity. Evliya Efendi wrote of the coffee-merchants of Constantinople: “The Merchants of coffee are three hundred men and shops. They are great and rich merchants, protected by Shaikh Shadhili… ”

Throughout the first few centuries of its history in the Islamic world, coffee’s popularity engendered great controversy. Many were suspicious of the effects of caffeine and the gatherings in which it was consumed – they seemed debauched to some and subversive to others. Coffeehouses competed with mosques for attendance and as unsupervised gathering places for wits and learned men, provided spawning grounds for sedition. The wags of Istanbul jokingly called the coffeehouses mekteb-i ‘irfan, “schools of knowledge.” Efforts were launched and persisted for at least a hundred years to declare coffee an intoxicant forbidden by Islamic law.

During Ramadan in 1539 CE, Cairo’s coffeehouses were raided and closed, although only for a few days. Soon after coffeehouses achieved popularity in Constantinople, Sultan Murat IV closed them all and they were to remain dark until the last part of the century. But as soon as the Sultan’s edict went into effect, the coffeehouse patrons, their money and their social life went elsewhere: “In Brussa there are 75 coffeehouses frequented by the most elegant and learned of the inhabitants. All coffeehouses, particularly those near the great mosque, abound with men skilled in a thousand arts…” writes Efendi.

Opposed by well-educated coffee-drinkers from the highest ranks of the religious and political hierarchy, who did not look fondly upon innovative, legal prohibitions, the moralists fought a losing battle. The “tavern without wine” offered a respectable gathering place for men to socialize and entertain away from home and business was especially brisk during Ramadan when proprietors made extra efforts to draw crowds with storytellers and puppet shows.

Despite coffee’s eventual secularization, the fondness for it in Sufi circles and the motives for its use were not lost. Helveti dervishes were among those who enthusiastically drank coffee to promote the stamina needed for extended dhikr ceremonies and retreats. Once coffee was readily available throughout the Ottoman Empire, it became a fixture of daily life in the Helveti dergahs.

In Persia, coffeehouses evolved into hotbeds of lasciviousness and political dispute soon after they were introduced. Shah Abbas I responded to this situation by installing a mullah in the leading Isfahan establishment; he would arrive early in the morning, hold forth on topics of religion, history, law and poetry and then encourage those assembled there to be off to their work. A pious ambience was thereby promoted, an example was set for other coffeehouses and a potentially volatile social milieu was somewhat controlled. Poets and mystics occasionally took up permanent residence; for example, Molla Ghorur of Shiraz settled in Isfahan in his old age and established himself at a coffeehouse, which soon became a gathering place for those seeking spiritual guidance.

By the end of the century, coffee was fashionable throughout Europe and its cultivation and use subsequently spread to North and South America. Wherever it has been introduced, it has become a symbol of hospitality and a vehicle of sociability. The current resurgence in popularity of the coffeehouse is undoubtedly a response to the marketing efforts of coffee producers and enterprising restaurateurs. It may also contain a longing for the sort of companionship the Shadhiliyya dervishes enjoyed 600-years-ago, as they gathered to remember Allah and passed the cup from hand to hand.

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Adapted from Serving the Guest: A Sufi Cookbook by Kathleen Seidel © 1999, 2000. Visit the Rumi Rose Garden Cafe & Market, 3660 E. Hastings St., Vancouver, 604-558-4455. www.rumirose.com

September 1, 2011