The Coffee Poets of 16th-Century Islam-by Nizar F. Hermes

The Coffee Poets of 16th-Century Islam-by Nizar F. Hermes

Source:Thuppahis

The early modern Islamic world was embroiled in a bitter controversy over coffee. Much ink was spilt by poets on both sides.

He was living in Damascus in the 16th century, at a time when the city was engulfed in fierce debate over a dark, aromatic beverage that was transforming the Islamic world. The controversy was rooted in linguistic, theological, and social anxieties. The word for coffee, qahwa, was, in medieval Arabic texts, used as a poetic synonym for wine, a substance declared forbidden in the Quran. For some jurists, this semantic proximity raised important questions: how could coffee share a name with an intoxicant yet not be considered one? One anti-coffee poem, by Nur al-Din al-‘Imriti (d.1485), condemned the drink:

Praise be to God, who forbade people
to indulge in all forms of intoxicants,
and in all that harms the mind, religion, and body,
and in all that leads to corruption and peril.
Know that the renowned coffee
is repugnant and exceedingly bitter.

Others, including the scholar Ahmad ibn Yunus al-‘Aytawi (d.1616), Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi’s archenemy, went further, denouncing coffee as a dangerous innovation. They regarded both its stimulating effects and the social settings in which it was consumed – the new coffeehouses – as deeply suspicious. These lively spaces of conversation, storytelling, satire, games, music, and poetry resembled, in the eyes of their critics, the wine taverns, places where social boundaries and hierarchies blurred in potentially unsettling ways.

Yet long before coffeehouses opened their doors in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, first in Mecca and then in major cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul, the drink had a deeply spiritual life. One of the finest windows into this early period is provided by the Cairene scholar ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri (d.1570). His influential treatise ‘Umdat al-safwa fi hill al-qahwa (‘The Reliance of the Elite Regarding the Permissibility of Coffee’) offers an insight into coffee’s history: crucially, he preserves early narratives about coffee’s discovery and devotional uses in Yemen. These medieval and early modern traditions attribute coffee’s first use to Yemeni Sufi sheikhs in the mid-15th century, who sought a substance capable of sustaining their nocturnal devotions, Quranic recitation, and practices of spiritual vigilance.

Later chronicles credit figures such as ‘Ali ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili (who died in the early 15th century), Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani (d.1471), and Abu Bakr al-‘Aydarus (d.1508) with recognising the remarkable properties of the roasted bean. For these Sufi masters, coffee was not an indulgence but a spiritual instrument: an aid to concentration and mystical discipline. These accounts – many preserved by al-Jaziri – present coffee as both religiously and medically beneficial. It warms the body, strengthens digestion, calms the humours, dispels lethargy, and heightens spiritual attentiveness. Whether accurate or embellished by devotional storytelling, these narratives reveal how coffee first entered Islamic consciousness not through commerce or fashion, but through Sufi piety, long before it reached the bustling markets of Mecca, Cairo, or Damascus.

By the early 1500s coffee had become the subject of heated debate across the Islamic world. Scholars, preachers, political authorities, and poets clashed over its legitimacy in cities stretching from Adrianople (modern day Turkey) to Aden (Yemen). The dispute became so intense that it spilled into public policy, producing intermittent bans, burnings of coffee supplies, and the forced closure of coffeehouses. Mecca saw an early ban in 1511, when the Mamluk governor Kha‘ir Beg declared coffee an intoxicant and prohibited its use. Cairo witnessed a similar crackdown in 1539 under Ottoman governor Davud Pasha, who ordered the closure of coffeehouses and confiscation of beans. Under Sultan Murad IV in Constantinople (1623-40) coffeehouses were destroyed as dens of sedition.

It was amid this turbulence that Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi emerged as one of coffee’s most brilliant defenders. A jurist trained in Islamic law and steeped in classical poetic tradition, he recognised that coffee symbolised a broader cultural transformation. Instead of answering critics with rigid prose, he composed a series of poems in diverse forms, including strophic poetry (muwashshahat) and didactic poetry (urjuzat) – blending legal reasoning with sensual imagery:

Employ induction and investigation
and subject coffee to scrutiny as a wise person would
Try it under the cover of darkness
and assess its qualities according to its true nature.

Coffee, he argued, was the precise opposite of wine: enlivening and sharpening rather than clouding. His most striking innovation was transforming the classical Arabic wine ode into a coffee ode. Where earlier poets such as Abu Nuwas (d.814) compared wine to rubies and morning light, al-Tunisi described coffee as a ‘black pearl’, a ‘dark-lipped beauty’, and a fragrance drifting across Damascus like musk. His verses made a subtle but powerful argument: pleasure itself is not sinful – only intoxication is.

By the late 16th century, coffee had become a prized commodity in Red Sea and Ottoman trade networks, exported through the Yemeni port of Mocha (al-Mukha), which later gave its name to the Italian mocca. From Mocha, the bean travelled via merchants to the Eastern Mediterranean and onward to Europe. When the drink reached Venetian quays and English ports, clerics and moralists denounced it as ‘the bitter invention of the Muslim infidel’, a ‘Moorish potion’, and even ‘the Devil’s drink’. It is reported that, after tasting coffee around 1600, Pope Clement VIII said, in response to a petition urging him to ban coffee and condemn it as ‘the black beverage of the devil’ because of its Islamic associations:

Why, this drink of Satan is so delicious, we shall cheat the devil by baptizing it. It would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall make it a truly Christian beverage!

By the late 18th century Europe had undergone a remarkable transformation. Coffee – once feared – became the emblem of Enlightenment sociability, fuelling salons, scientific debate, political critique, and revolutionary thought. The shift was captured memorably – if also somewhat rhetorically – by Thomas Jefferson, who hailed coffee as the ‘favorite beverage of the civilised world’, and who was known to sip it at Monticello while pondering how to deal with ‘the Barbary coast’, the homeland of Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi, who championed the bean with a poetic zeal that few could match.

Nizar F. Hermes is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia.