Historically, coffee as a hot beverage was introduced to the world by the Sufi saints in 15th-century Yemen. They drank qahwa, the Arabic term for coffee, to stay awake during the night-long meditation and recitation zikr rituals (Ralph Hattox, 1985).
1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee.
Drinking coffee as a beverage is said to have originated in Yemen in the 15th century in Sufi Shrines. It was there that coffee berries were first roasted & brewed in a way similar to how the drink is prepared today.
Juan Valdez notwithstanding, coffee is an Islamic invention. According to the most popular story about its origins, sometime in the fifteenth century a goat-herding monk named Kaldi discovered coffee in the Kingdom of Ayaman (Yemen).
New disciplines emerged – algebra, trigonometry and chemistry as well as major advances in medicine, astronomy, engineering and agriculture. Arabic texts replaced Greek as the fonts of wisdom, helping to shape the scientific revolution of the Renaissance.
The Flying Machine – Move over Wright brothers and even 100 years before Da Vinci. The original inventor of flying was Abbas Ibn Firnas. In 857 AD, at the age of 70, Ibn Firnas made the world's first-ever flying machine from silk and eagle feathers and jumped from a mountain while strapped into it.
Coffee, windmills, carpets, soap and the fountain pen were invented by Muslims.
Drinking coffee in liquid form was invented by Sufis in Yemen as they believed it helped them on long pilgrimages to Mecca and worshipping late into the night. Coffee quickly spread across the Arab region, and became a staple in the majlis of bedouin tribes.
Although a beverage made from the wild coffee plant seems to have been first drunk by a legendary shepherd on the Ethiopian plateau, the earliest cultivation of coffee was in Yemen and Yemenis gave it the Arabic name qahwa, from which our words coffee and cafe both derive.
So, is coffee halal or haram? As already elaborated above, coffee is considered halal because it has no ingredients that can lead to drunkenness or inebriating effects. Also, all coffees are practically halal, including the well-known Luwak coffee, which comes from civet droppings.
Mecca and Islam
In 1511, Khair Beg, the Governor of Mecca, banned coffee as a dangerous drug that stimulated radical thinking in the people of the city. He believed that coffee was a dangerous intoxicant equal to wine, which is prohibited by the Koran.
Why is it called Arabica coffee? The name Arabica or Coffea Arabica is thought to have originated when coffee travelled from Ethiopia to Arabia in the 7th Century.
Nevertheless, Islamic scholars have tended to regard dogs' saliva as impure; practically, this means anything licked by a dog necessitates washing. Many Islamic jurists allowed owning dogs for herding, farming, hunting, or protection, but prohibited ownership for reasons they regarded as "frivolous".
Initially, the coffee beans were chewed up rather than ground, roasted and turned into a liquid. Some historians believe coffee was introduced to the Arabian peninsula circa 675 AD. It is certain that by the middle of the 15th century, coffee was in use in Yemen's Sufi monasteries.
Ethiopia is widely considered to be the epicentre of where coffee came from. If you've ever googled “coffee history”, you will have come across the famous story of how coffee was founded in Ethiopia by Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat herder, around 800 AD. He wandered over to his goats to see them acting very strangely.
The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking as the modern beverage appears in modern-day Yemen in southern Arabia in the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a manner similar to how it is now prepared for drinking.
Arabic coffee is yellowish brown in color because it is only briefly roasted giving it a higher caffeine and water content. Arabic coffee is always blended with cardamom and sometimes with cloves, saffron, cinnamon, and ginger.
The coffee has a long socializing history from the 9th century. It has made its way to Middle Eastern and Northern African regions during the 15th century and then traveled to Italy and other European regions as well as to America.
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Two cups of coffee should be served to one's friends. A third cup is for the enemy. The saying goes: 'The first cup is hospitality, the second is enjoyment, the third is for the sword.”
He explains that “qahwa” is the Arabic word for coffee.
The Prophet Mohammed popularised the use of the first toothbrush in around the 7th Century, using a twig from the Miswak tree. The twig not only cleaned his teeth but freshened his breath.
Islamic contributions to mathematics began around ad 825, when the Baghdad mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote his famous treatise al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa'l-muqābala (translated into Latin in the 12th century as Algebra et Almucabal, from which the modern term algebra is derived).
According to Islamic tradition, “the first thing God created was the pen,” and McWilliams emphasized the role of writing tools, often made of precious and exotic materials, in her talk. Calligraphy, she noted, also creates a sonic experience, as sharpened reed pens move gracefully across paper.