ISLAM REMOVED FROM COFFEE’S HISTORY
Review of book on coffee’s history exhibits Eurocentric slant
THIS essay is not about Covid-19, but about coffee, of how the subject of the brew has been written, intoxicated with Eurocentric history. Recently, I encountered the comment of blogger Omer Aziz about a reviewer on the history of coffee. Adam Gopnik’s essay in The New Yorker brewed the rage in him.
Omer “felt a savage inner reaction to everything about it, the sort of feeling that post-9/11 experts likened to ‘Muslim rage’ and spent many pages analysing.” Gopknik was reviewing Jonathan Morris’s 2019 book,
Coffee: A Global History. Something is missing. It is not about Morris’ book, but on Gopnik’s review. Why with so many words spilled on the subject, and readers’ interest in the history, are Islam, Arabs, and Muslims excised from the narrative?”
His rejoinder, titled The Islamic History of Coffee, was written in the month of Ramadan. Despite the spiritual inducements “to forgive during this holy month, there is an especially vicious bone I have to pick with how the subject of coffee is written about.” To Omer, new books about coffee published every year will ignore the first and most essential fact about the history of everyone’s favourite beverage. That coffee was first discovered in 15th-century Ethiopia and quickly spread to Yemen. It was an Islamic invention.
First used by the Sufis as an aid for zikir and worship, coffee crossed all the cities of the Levant and Turkey long before it migrated to Europe. The Muslim world gave birth to the coffee house, later to be popularly associated with the European Enlightenment. Gopnik’s review was silent on the critical past.
Omer’s main argument is that Eurocentrism has corrupted writings on coffee. The English word coffee comes to us from the Turkish kahveh, itself from the Arabic Qahwah.
The letters of 16th-century Muslim travellers, uncredited first historians of coffee tell us that by the mid-1400s, a mysterious new plant is reported to grow in Ethiopia, then it moves on to Yemen where it is used for prayer. Coffee then spread northward to other parts of Arabia, including Makkah and Madinah, and onto larger cities like Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus and Constantinople.
In the process, we see a new social institution that would rock the foundations of politics for centuries thereafter: the coffeehouse. Since the first coffee shops in Istanbul in the 1500, the world went coffee-mad. Coffeehouses sprang up all over the Ottoman Empire, becoming forums for intellectual discussions, as well as successful commercial enterprises in their own right.
Poets and writers would pass through, and with everyone’s senses heightened, recite some choice verses or submit their work to critical examination. Heated debates raged about art, science, literature. These cafes were aptly called mektab-i-irfan, or schools of knowledge. Through Venetian merchants, coffee would eventually enter Christendom and take on a new life. Over time, Western thinkers would come to rewrite the story to de-emphasise and minimise Islam’s role in giving the world coffee. And like other troubling assumptions, this one continues to trail the writings on coffee until the present day.
Gopnik described coffee as “an alternative to alcohol — and spread from Turkey to points west, where the coffeehouse became the cockpit of the Enlightenment, and even up to little Iceland, where it became the national sacrament”. This annoys Omer, “no mention of Sufis, no mention of Yemen, no mention of Arabs.”
Gopnik, like many other writers and historians, is a product of milieu. A blinkered review, according to Omer. Our tastes, whether in literature or in coffee, are shaped by what our environs deem valuable. There may not be historical others. Our conceptions of the past then becomes warped and fabricated. Insignificant.
The European gaze, Omer mused is limiting, dulling, narcotising, for writer and reader alike. Omer has no problems with Morris or his book. Omer acknowledged that, Coffee: A Global History, “is not only not only thoroughly researched; it deals with the relationship between Islam and coffee right where it should”.
Morris is categorical when he stated that for the firs t200 or so years of coffee’s recorded existence, between 1450 and 1650, it was consumed almost exclusively by Muslim people whose custom sustained a coffee economy centred on the Red Sea.
It is easy to see Gopnik’s intellectual faults as Orientalism. Morris commented that coffee’s adoption across Christian Europe reflected the continent’s complex relationship with the Islamic Near East. Outbreaks of fascination with the “Orient” provoked interest in coffee. Its past has been wrongly reimagined.
My late grandmother would relate how the Qahwah was consumed and celebrated by the Arab and Peranakan Arab community in Batu Uban, Penang, in the 1800s. It was not European like my cup for breaking fast today. The unpretentious brew seeks anyone, quarantined and removed from the world in the nights of Ramadan. Drink it in the silence of isolation.