A brief history of Qahwa
A brief history of Qahwa
Or, would Saladin have served coffee?
A brief history of coffee.
I am editing a scene I’ve written in which Saladin is present. He serves coffee to his guests. Today, I’m wondering whether that is an anachronism or not.
In 1191, would Saladin have had coffee?
If you trust Wikipedia — and who doesn’t trust Wikipedia? 😉 — coffee was known in Mecca in the 15th century, originating from Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen. Sufi monasteries used coffee as an aid to meditation in the 15th century, and then spread into the Levant — the Holy Land, Palestine, whichever name you feel appropriate — in the 16th century. Also according to Wikipedia, coffee arrived in Italy in the latter parts of the 16th century, and then spread through Europe.
By that history, Saladin is a few hundred years too early. But let’s look a little harder.
The word coffee, in English, came from the Dutch word koffie, which itself came originally from the Arabic word qahwah, which is what Saladin would have called it, if he had it. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the word itself:
The word coffee entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish kahve, borrowed in turn from the Arabic qahwah. Medieval Arab lexicographers traditionally held that the etymology of qahwah meant 'wine', given its distinctly dark color, and derived from the verb qahiya, 'to have no appetite'. The word qahwah most likely meant 'the dark one', referring to the brew or the bean...Semitic languages had the root qhh, "dark color", which became a natural designation for the beverage.1
If we read the opening pages of Mark Pendergrast’s Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, we find this lovely poem:
O Coffee! Thou dost dispel all care, thou are the object of desire to the scholar. This is the beverage of the friends of God.
-"In Praise of Coffee," Arabic poem (1511)
This gives us a date in the 16th century. But if we keep reading, jackpot:
Once the Ethiopians discovered coffee, it was only a matter of time until the drink spread through trade with the Arabs across the narrow band of the Red Sea. It is possible that when the Ethiopians invaded and ruled Yemen for some fifty years in the sixth century, they deliberately set up coffee plantations. The Arabs took to the stimulating drink. (According to legend, Mohammed proclaimed that under the invigorating influence of coffee he could "unhorse forty men and possess forty women.") They began cultivating the trees, complete with irrigation ditches, in the nearby mountains, calling it gahwa, an Arab word for wine-from which the name coffee derives.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Mohammed lived during the 7th century, so here we have at least a legendary reference to coffee long before Saladin. Coffee rapidly spread throughout the Muslim world, and the Ottoman empire took over Yemen and turned coffee into an export crop. As Pendergrast relates, “At first Europeans didn't know what to make of the strange new brew. In 1610 traveling British poet Sir George Sandys noted that the Turks sat "chatting most of the day" over their coffee, which he described as "blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it." He added, however, that it "helpeth, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacrity."
The Muslim world had a long recorded history of usage of coffee well before the 15th century, going back to (at least) the 10th century — but not as a drink. It was used for a variety of personal hygiene tasks! Washing hands, as a deodorant, and to purify the skin.2 It is not hard to imagine the discovery that roasting and drinking it was a good thing, came long before the 15th century.
According to the City of Vienna’s “History of Coffee House Culture”, coffee houses were known in Mecca in the 12th century, and the first coffee house in Europe was in Vienna, opened in 1652.3
There we have it. From coffee’s legendary origins as the Ethiopian shepherd Kaldi found his goats dancing after having eaten coffee beans, to a coffee house in Mecca, to a Starbucks near you.
Did Saladin have qahwa? I cannot find any historical reference to it, and the dates of coffee history make it an ambiguous topic. But a scene with Saladin serving qahwa to his Crusader guests is too, well, delicious to pass up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coffee-history
https://www.wien.gv.at/english/culture-history/viennese-coffee-culture.html