While there is still disagreement about who first cultivated the coffee plant in Yemen in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, it seems that this took place in around the mid-15th century CE. It is of course the berries of the coffee plant, a kind of shrub or small tree, that enclose the seed, and it is this — the coffee bean — that, once roasted, ground, and steeped in water, is used to make the now ubiquitous drink of coffee.
According to Arab tradition, Sufi groups in Yemen discovered that drinking coffee, in Arabic qahwa, could raise levels of alertness and stamina, useful when carrying out religious rituals that could go on into the early hours. Having made this discovery, they began to profit from it, and within a few years coffee had established itself as the refreshment of choice across the region.
Nobody drank coffee at the courts of the Umayyad or Abbasid Caliphs, and there is no coffee-drinking in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, which are otherwise full of all manner of foodstuffs from every part of the then known world. However, by the middle of the 17th century coffee and the cafés in which it was drunk were a feature of most Middle Eastern societies, with visitors to the region eagerly sampling what is still often called “Turkish” coffee.
Prepared by boiling ground coffee in a little water and allowing the grounds to settle in the bottom of the cup before drinking, this method of preparing coffee is still used today in cafés across the Middle East region, often with plenty of sugar added to take the edge off what for coffee-drinkers used to other methods of preparation can be quite a strong brew.
They may be more used to filtered coffee, in which the water is either forced or dripped through the coffee grounds, producing an altogether thinner brew, or even instant coffee made from freeze-dried coffee reconstituted with hot water — the kind of thing doled out across the world in now ubiquitous coffee machines.
However, whatever form of coffee people choose to drink the world over, its origin is the same. The seeds or beans of the coffee plant, first grown in the Ethiopian highlands before making their way to Yemen and from there across the Arab world, are today at the heart of a multi-billion-dollar global business that is essential to providing a morning — or later — caffeine hit to millions worldwide.
Yet, while coffee originated in the Arab world, little is grown there today, and while some coffee may still be grown in Yemen — associated with the famous mocha variety of coffee named after the Yemeni port of Mukha — and Ethiopia, the plant itself long ago went global, with first Southeast Asia and Latin America, particularly Brazil, providing most of the world’s needs, along with, later, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Even so, coffee is still an essential part of many Middle Eastern and Arab lifestyles. While tea with mint is perhaps a more standard offering in the Maghreb countries in the west of the Arab world, in the east and in Turkey the offer of a cup of usually Turkish coffee is still an essential preliminary to many social situations, with its absence being immediately felt.
Perhaps even more important than coffee are cafés, for centuries a fixture of Middle Eastern streets. These fulfil functions that show little sign of disappearing even as some, particularly younger, coffee customers may prefer more international forms of coffee to the traditional Turkish drink.
Even if they may in some cases prefer to drink filtered coffee to that made by the traditional method in the Arab world, they are still likely to spend time in cafés — which continue to provide the functions that they always have as places of social gathering, of work, possibly now on computer, and to mull over the day’s events, not necessarily now through reading newspapers, but through discussing the latest posts or tweets.
ORIGINS: So familiar do such places feel that perhaps few people ask themselves when they started to become a fixture of Egyptian and Arab streets. But, of course, Arab cafés like other institutions have a history, one that can tell us much about changing lifestyle habits across the region.
Living in Cairo for seven years in the middle of the 19th century following several earlier visits, the English orientalist Edward Lane was a regular customer in Egypt’s cafés. It was probably there that he recruited the informants who told him about the lifestyles of the city’s population, information that ended up in his famous book Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. It was probably there, too, that he did much of the research that went into his famous Arabic-English dictionary — a monumental achievement that he almost single-handedly managed to complete to the letter qaf, the 21st of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet.
In his book, Lane repeats the accepted story that coffee, discovered by Sufi groups in Yemen, was imported into Egypt at the beginning of the 16th century, from where, “about half a century later”, it found its way to the capital of the then Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. “Formerly, it was generally prepared from the berries and husks” of the coffee plant, he says, but now “it is prepared from the berries alone, freshly roasted and pounded.”
“Cairo contains above a thousand ‘kahwehs,’ or coffee-shops,” Lane says, “generally speaking, a small apartment, whose front, which is towards the street, is of open wooden work in the form of arches. Along the front, excepting before the door, is a mastabah, or raised seat of stone or brick two or three feet in height and about the same in width, which is covered with matting, and there are similar seats in the interior on two or three sides. The coffee-shops are most frequented in the afternoon and evening… [and] coffee is served by the kahwegee (the attendant of the shop) at the price of five faddahs a cup.”
Unfortunately, Lane, usually so punctilious, does not tell us what a faddah was worth. At the time Manners and Customs was written in the mid-1830s, Egypt was transitioning from the Ottoman currency of piastres and paras to a new system, introduced by Mohamed Ali, of pounds, piastres, and paras. Presumably, since he says that the Cairo coffee-shops were mostly frequented by “the lower orders and tradesman”, the coffee was inexpensive.
Cairo’s cafés were not the only places where coffee was drunk. In an earlier chapter of his book on “Domestic Life”, Lane says that in the houses of the “higher and middle orders” of Egyptian society most people eat little or nothing for breakfast, aside from perhaps a fateerah, “a kind of pastry saturated with butter, made very thin, and folded over like a napkin,” or fuul medammes (fuul — bean stew), eaten “with oil or butter and generally a little lime-juice”. However, all of them drink at least one cup of coffee, “made very strong and without sugar or milk”.
“In preparing the coffee, the water is first made to boil; the coffee (freshly roasted and pounded) is then put in and stirred; after which the pot is again placed on the fire until the coffee begins to simmer, when it is taken off, and its contents are poured out into the cups while the surface is yet creamy. The Egyptians are excessively fond of pure and strong coffee thus prepared.”
Lane’s account, dating from the early decades of the 19th century, will be immediately familiar, with, for many people, little or nothing having changed. This is so even if his account, like those of other writers earlier and later, seems to imply that traditional café culture was for men only. There is no mention of women customers in Cairo’s coffee-shops.
Another aspect of traditional coffee culture that Lane does not mention is the habit, later made famous in films and songs, of telling fortunes from the coffee grounds that remain in a cup of Turkish coffee after it has been drunk. Perhaps this was more widespread in Turkish culture than Egyptian at the time that Lane wrote, though it is the 20th-century Egyptian singer Abdel-Halim Hafez in his song Qariat Al-Fingan (the fortune-teller), a rendition of a poem by Syrian writer Nizar Qabbani, who has made it most famous.
While the Arab traditions are united in saying that coffee originated among Sufi communities in Yemen, they can differ on the date at which it began to spread across the wider region. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests a date in the first quarter of the 16th century for the spread of coffee to Cairo and probably a little later to Damascus, Aleppo, and Istanbul, no doubt helped by the Ottoman conquest of Mameluke Egypt and Syria in 1517 CE.
It seems that at first the new drink was eagerly seized upon, with customers including merchants, students, and others, as well as some men of religion. According to one Western authority on the coffee culture of 16th-century Istanbul, the cafés set up for the consumption of coffee “attracted gentlemen of leisure, wits, and literary men seeking distraction and amusement, who spent the time over their coffee reading or playing chess or backgammon, while poets submitted their latest poems” to the approbation of their friends.
Unfortunately, this new style of sociability soon attracted the attention of the authorities, worried that cafés were places where “current politics were discussed [and] the government’s acts criticised and intrigues concocted.” Edicts were issued against the coffee-houses by the Ottoman Sultans Murad III and Ahmed I, but it was not until the reign of Murad IV (1623-1640) that they were finally banned, even if coffee could still be bought on a take-away basis as long as it was not consumed on the premises.
This situation apparently continued until into the 18th century, so much so that when no less a person than Antoine Galland, famous for his French translation of the Thousand and One Nights that introduced this mediaeval Arab story collection to the European public between 1704 and 1717, turned his attention to coffee in a treatise on the subject written in 1699, he reports that coffee in Istanbul can be bought and consumed as a take-away product but not drunk in a public café.
Galland’s book on coffee, De l’Origine et du progrès du café, has recently been republished in an illustrated edition by Orients Editions in Paris, and in it one reads that coffee, originally cultivated in Yemen, made its way first up through the Hejaz before crossing to Egypt and arriving in Cairo.
According to Galland, the then Mameluke Sultan Qansur Al-Ghuri took a comparatively relaxed attitude towards coffee-drinking, and it was only after the end of his reign — he was killed fighting against the Ottomans in 1517 — that coffee made its way to Istanbul.
CAFÉ CULTURE: The social aspect of café culture is of course still well-known today, even if generally it does not now attract official disapproval. Many people today will have a favourite café, somewhere to go to after work perhaps, to meet friends, or to work in a more relaxed ambiance than is to be found in a library or office.
Many towns and cities are also famous for their cafés, among them Paris, where it is said that the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his novels and essays sitting in a café in the central district of St-Germain-des-Prés, or Vienna, where writers and artists are said to have rubbed shoulders with scientists and politicians in the city’s cafés during the final years of the Habsburg Empire before World War I.
Cairo, too, is famous for its cafés. Everyone will know the ancient Fishawi’s Café in Khan Al-Khalili in Islamic Cairo, its traditional ambiance drawing on its location in an ancient part of the city just a stone’s throw from the Al-Azhar Mosque. Then there are the cafés of Downtown Cairo, some of them set up by foreigners in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and drawing from the first a mixed or cosmopolitan clientele.
Such cafés include Groppi’s on Talaat Harb Square, Groppi’s Garden, originally on Adli Street, and Café Riche on Talaat Harb Street leading to Tahrir Square. Thanks to their fame and central position, there can be few accounts by visitors to Cairo in the first half of the last century at least that do not mention time spent in Groppi’s or Groppi’s Garden café. Café Riche, occupying the same premises since it was opened by originally Greek proprietors in the early 20th century, long served as a meeting place for many of Cairo’s writers and intellectuals, as can still be seen today in the photographs, many of them signed, that adorn its walls.
Writers in particular often thrive in cafés, and there can be few modern writers at least who have not either written parts of their works in cafés or used them as the settings for their works. Sartre certainly seems to have thrived on the mixture of sociability and anonymity that cafés provided, often to be seen writing his novels in a corner of the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots in central Paris where he might be persuaded to open up to a group of friends.
Egypt’s writers and intellectuals have also been drawn to cafés in a similar way, with Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz being possibly the best-known example. While Mahfouz may not have written his works in Cairo’s cafés, he certainly used them as stopping-off points on his daily routine and as places in which to gather with his friends in the evenings for literary meetings.
There are many stories of Mahfouz, as regular as clockwork, stopping off at the Ali Baba café in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the early morning to read the papers and drink a cup of coffee on his way to work, in his later years at Al-Ahram. His literary nadwa, a kind of discussion circle, would meet closer to home in the evenings, at first in Abbasiya and then in Giza.
Many of Mahfouz’s novels also use cafés as settings, whether traditional or modern depending on the characters described or the situations he was trying to create. Who can forget Kirsha’s café in Zuqaq Al-Midaq, for example, the centre of the social life of Midaq Alley in the old part of the city but a place that Hamida, one of main characters, is trying to escape? Who can forget, either, the cafés that begin to appear with increasing frequency in the Cairo Trilogy, notably as the families move out of the older districts of Cairo as the trilogy develops?
Coffee earlier had led to the economic development of Yemen, and, with it, large parts of the Middle East. That was not the motive of those who began to develop coffee-drinking as a sort of universal habit, practiced as much in the home as in the public location of the café, but slowly it began to change society in unplanned ways.
This seems to have been the case for Yemen, and then for other countries too, as a result of the swift development of the coffee trade beginning in the early 17th century. According to one Western authority, “as early as 1609, the ships of the English East India Company were sent to Mukha in Yemen to inquire about trading possibilities” in coffee. In 1616, Dutch traders “managed to obtain very favourable commercial terms from the [ruler of Yemen the] imam.”
By the 1660s, Yemeni coffee was being sold in London by the East India Company, and by the 1690s it was being imported on a regular basis to the rest of Europe by the Dutch.
This led to a transformation of the economy of the region, such that by 1690 some 298,816 pounds of coffee were being exported from Yemen through the Red Sea by the East India Company alone, worth the then astronomical sum of 9,821 pounds sterling. “One of the by-products of the coffee trade was a very large influx of precious metals, largely silver, into the Red Sea area, which enabled traders to import luxury goods from India and elsewhere.”
However, this unexpected windfall was not to last. “By the end of the 18th century, when a Turk or an Arab drank a cup of coffee both the coffee and the sugar had been grown in Central America and imported by French or English merchants.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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