Black Gold. Antony Wild
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we now know as coffee was slow, and these varieties continued in parallel, as indeed they still do. Coffee did not spring into the world as a fully-fledged double espresso to go.
At the time of the visits of the Treasure Fleets, the Ethiopian Highlands were within the trading range of the merchants of Aden and Mocha, and Sufi missionaries also ventured across the Red Sea. It would seem perfectly plausible for a Sufi, inspired by what he had seen of tea drinking amongst the Chinese visitors, to learn what he could of the manufacturing process from them. Aware from his own learning that none of the plants in the conventional Arab pharmacopoeia had the characteristics he sought, he may have taken the opportunity of a missionary trip to Ethiopia to experiment with various endemic plant types there, and settled on coffee and qat as the most interesting. At this stage, in imitation of the Chinese, only the leaves of the coffee plant were used for the infusion, but as they contain less than 1 per cent caffeine, they might not have been sufficient for his ecstatic purpose. However, these things vary considerably according to brewing method and quantities used. Weight for weight, tea contains twice the quantity of caffeine as Arabica coffee, but as the volume of vegetable matter used is much less than half, the net effect is less caffeine in the final beverage. Coffee leaves could thus have been brewed ‘strong’ to provide a high caffeine yield, but this would have made the drink itself unpalatable. It is significant that qat loses much of its potency when its leaves are dried; thus as a tea it does not have a particularly interesting effect. This is why Yemenis today favour the chewing of the fresh green leaves, and perhaps also explains why qat has only recently started to find a wider public with the invention of airfreight.
It is at this point in coffee’s history that a number of real people finally begin to peer from behind the purdah screen. When the first European merchants came to Yemen in the early seventeenth century, they were naturally very curious about the origins of the coffee that they had come so far to buy. Amongst the stories they were told by the local traders were many that were obviously fantastic, including those of fabulous multi-coloured coffee birds and plague-ravaged princesses. Interestingly, the story of Kaldi and his dancing goats was not amongst the stories recorded by the Europeans. This tale of the discovery of coffee is so favoured in our times that it has assumed the status of established fact. It involves a goatherd, Kaldi, who sees his flock eating coffee cherries and then dancing. Kaldi likewise eats and dances, and then tells the abbot of a nearby monastery of his discovery. Angered by what he regards as a diabolical substance, the abbot throws some cherries on a fire; the resulting aroma, however, convinces him that they must be of divine origin, and he makes an infusion of the beans which he gives to his monks to help to keep them awake during night prayers. The omission of the Kaldi story from those told to the earliest Europeans is a clear indication that it was probably the later invention of a coffee house storyteller. Some of the stories, however, concerned genuine historical Sufi leaders, of whom sufficient is known to be able to evaluate whether they could have instigated the hypothetical scenario of the Sufi missionary in Ethiopia outlined above.
The first candidate is one dear to the heart of the coffee trade, ‘Ali Ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, patron saint of the coffee port of Mocha. As an English sailor named William Revett reported in 1609: ‘Shaomer Shadli was the fyrst inventour for drynking of coffe, and therefore had in esteemation’. It is understandable that the town which owed much of its wealth in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to coffee should seek to associate its prosperity with its pet saint, whose tomb is one of the few fine buildings that remains there. However, he died in 1418, and while it is conceivable that he may have been in Aden when Zheng He visited the year before, it is unlikely that he would have been able to make a trip to Ethiopia, returning with the newly invented tea substitute, before he died. In addition, the earliest descriptions by the historians Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad al-Shardji and Mohammed al-Sakhawi of the life of Shaykh ‘Umar fail to mention his discovery of coffee, which after all would have been a very distinguished addition to his curriculum vitae. Finally the Shadhilaya Sufi order from which he derived his name was founded in the thirteenth century and was known for its orthodoxy and sobriety, and the writings of the order make no mention of coffee.
The second contestant is Mohammed bin Sa’id al-Dhabhani, also known as Gemaleddin, who was both a Sufi and a mufti (religious leader) in Aden. Although he died in 1470, somewhat late to have met Zheng He in 1417, he would have been alive in 1433 when the seventh voyage picked up an envoy from Aden who, upon his return from China, may have furnished the necessary details concerning tea production. Alternatively, tea drinking may have been a recognized practice in Arabia using precisely the tea which it is recorded that the Treasure Fleet carried for trading purposes. Upon the cessation of the Chinese visits after 1433, tea would have been impossible to obtain, and a substitute could have been sought. The most intriguing thing about the al-Dhabhani story as recorded by al-Djaziri is that it specifically refers to the fact that he had visited Ethiopia as a missionary and had learnt about the benefits of coffee drinking there. As well as being a religious leader, Gemaleddin was also a renowned man of science. There is some speculation in early European writings, unsupported by primary sources, that Gemaleddin gave coffee his mufti’s seal of approval in 1454, and that his endorsement led to the rapid spread of coffee drinking in the Sufi community.
The third candidate is Abu Bakr al-’Aydarus, another Sufi who was patron saint of Aden. However, he died in 1508, which would appear to be quite long after coffee drinking had become established amongst the Sufis, as can safely be determined from the historical and archaeological record.
The persistence of such legends identifying the first coffee drinker as a Sufi master in the era shortly after the arrival of the Chinese Treasure Fleet bearing tea, the mutual interest in the materia medica of the Arabs and the Chinese, and the active presence of Sufism in the region all suggest that there may be a new, compelling version of the tale of the discovery of coffee to replace the time-worn myth of Kaldi. Although it is conjecture, the story is extrapolated from known facts and involves historical figures, all of which is a distinct improvement on that of the goatherd. Its hero is the Mufti of Aden, Gemaleddin, to whom we will ascribe the not unreasonable age of three score years and ten at his death in 1470.
As a young man, Gemaleddin was in Aden when the Treasure Fleet of Zhe Heng arrived at the port in 1417. He was struck by the description of the Chinese drinking an infusion they found refreshing called tea, made with dried leaves mixed with hot water. Gemaleddin later became a Sufi and a scholar respected in matters of both science and religion. In his early thirties he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he met a Sufi who described how he had seen the Sufis drink tea in China to help them stay awake during night prayers. Gemaleddin heard that another Treasure Fleet from China was at that moment on its way to Jiddah, the nearest port to Mecca, and so he hurried to meet it. As he was by now a man of great distinction, he was welcomed aboard the flagship by the fleet’s commander, Hong Bao, where he drank tea with the dignitaries, noted its stimulating effect, and questioned them closely about the origins of the tea plant and the methods of drying the leaves. The description of the tea plant did not correspond with that of any plant he knew of in Arabia, and it appeared that the growing conditions required for tea would make it ill suited to the region. Gemaleddin wondered whether he might somewhere find a plant with similar properties if it could be infused in the same way. Having previously decided to go on a missionary expedition to Abyssinia, he began to look out for any as yet undiscovered plants which might have the desired effect. From Arab slave traders bringing captives from the Oromo tribe in the west of Abyssinia he learnt of a plant there called bun, which was supposed to make goats very lively when they ate it. He went to the Oromo, discovered coffee, and tasted infusions of the leaves, which he dried in the manner described to him by the Chinese. He noted that the stimulatory effect of the drink was very similar to that of Chinese tea. He also took samples of the cherries of the coffee bush back with him to Aden. The flesh of the cherry made a more palatable and stimulating drink than the leaves, and so Gemaleddin developed the drink called qish’r, which is still widely drunk in Yemen today, often flavoured with ginger. Gemaleddin encouraged his disciples to drink qish’r and it became a part of Sufi ritual; but, versed as he was in the mysterious science of alchemy, he continued to experiment and was struck by the enormous changes that took place in the rejected stones at the heart of the coffee cherry when they were roasted on a pan. These pale green, tasteless, and unpromising beans transformed