Black Gold

A little-recognized incentive to the creation of this maritime empire of faith lay in the fact that Muslims had to pray three times a day in the direction of Mecca, a prayer which for its proper execution depended, of course, on the sure knowledge of the whereabouts of that sacred city. When the first Arab traders tentatively colonized parts of the coast of Zanj, they built unsophisticated wooden mosques which frequently can be shown to have been misaligned: only later, when the ports and their trade were more secure, were stone mosques built in the Arab style with the required alignment to Mecca, achieved by use of the magnetic compass and the astrolabe and an understanding of the stars. Thus the fundamental ritual of Islam was a significant encouragement to the science of navigation, and the concomitant spread of faith and commerce. This was reinforced by the necessity for the faithful to make the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives, with the result that the Muslims were highly motivated and experienced travellers over long distances. Had Christianity evolved similar rituals in connection with Rome or Jerusalem, the necessary navigational skills and equipment might have been developed earlier. Ironically, Jerusalem had been the geospiritual target of early Islamic prayer until Mohammed made the former pagan site of Mecca (the Ka’ba having been worshipped there previously for many centuries) into the proper focus of Islamic prayers by decree in AD 624. As it was, the compass had been originally invented by the Chinese but discovered again by the Arabs: the astrolabe was their original invention, along with early clocks, theodolites, and instruments for measuring the apparent movement of a star by an observer who had himself changed position. Islam was structured in such a way that it not only encouraged science, but positively required it. By contrast it took the rise of sea-borne mercantilism in Europe in the seventeenth century to provoke intense interest in astronomy and navigation: the observatories of Paris and London were set up with the principal aim of solving the problem of longitude.

Islam having established a bridgehead in China, it was inevitable that the Sufis should also turn up there. Indeed the Emperor invited a group of Sufi astronomers to Peking in the 1270s to assist in the setting up of an observatory. The presence of Sufis in south China seems to have influenced Japanese Buddhism, leading to Zen Buddhism, which, like Sufism, focuses on ‘masters’ and illustrative tales from their lives. The Sufis, and the Muslim population in general, would have been widely exposed to the Chinese habit of drinking tea, which had been established for at least a thousand years – it is recorded that there were over a hundred water-powered tea mills in the first century AD. Surprisingly, there is no mention of tea consumption in Middle Eastern sources until a reference in Giovanni Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550–9), citing Hajji Muhammed, a traveller in the Caspian region, who thought that if the Franks and Persians had known about tea they would have given up rhubarb. Marco Polo, usually an inveterate chronicler, made no mention of tea at all. Nonetheless, it is tempting to suppose that the Sufis, who were inclined to embrace enthusiastically anything that could bring them closer to God, would have experimented with tea drinking in China, and may have adopted it as part of their rituals.

What is certain is that the celebrated Treasure Fleets sent out by the Ming dynasty Yongle Emperor into the Indian Ocean contained, amongst silks and porcelain and other trading goods, tea. The fleets were the most impressive ever seen, with hundreds of vessels of which the largest were nine-masted, 400-feet long and 160-feet wide juggernauts. Their ostensible mission was to extract tribute and assert the hegemony of the Middle Kingdom over the known world, principally the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Envoys were brought back to Peking to pay their obeisance to the Emperor, accompanied by exotic animals such as the giraffe brought from Malindi and presented to the Emperor in 1414 and which was believed by the Chinese to be the legendary qilin, a sacred animal that would appear only in times of great prosperity. As well as putting on an awesome display of the might of the Dragon Throne and trading in Chinese goods, the Treasure Fleets (there were seven voyages between 1405 and 1433) were missions of discovery that prompted a sudden increase in the Chinese knowledge of plants and medicines, and of the lands from where they came. It seems that from the Chinese understanding of tea, which had initially been valued for its medicinal effects, the notion of infusion – the steeping of plant matter in boiling water to extract the desired essence – had developed. This deceptively simple discovery was spread through the popularization of tea.

The Treasure Fleets were led by the Admiral Zheng He, the ‘Three Jewelled Eunuch’. His father had been a Muslim soldier from Yunnan province who was caught up in the fighting at the break-up of the Mongol Empire. In 1381 he was killed, and his son was taken into captivity and castrated in the Chinese manner, an excruciating variant that also involved the removal of the penis. Eunuchs were highly prized at court, being considered not only immune to the charms of the imperial harem but also particularly loyal to the ruling Emperor. Zheng He rose rapidly to prominence in the service of the prince of Yan, Zhu Di, who was campaigning against the Mongols in the northern steppes. An able commander and an imposing figure, Zheng He stood by Zhu Di when he usurped the Dragon Throne from his nephew, and was the natural choice for leader of the Treasure Fleets, upon which most of the highest positions were held by eunuchs. Both his father and grandfather were ‘Hajji’, meaning that they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Zheng He’s religion was an asset in the Indian Ocean.

The fifth voyage under Zheng He called at Aden in 1417, then part of the Rasulid kingdom of Yemen. It was an extremely wealthy port, and the sultan grandly ordered that only those with ‘precious things’ could trade with the Chinese. Whether tea was sold to the Arabs is not recorded, but it can be reasonably assumed that Zheng He and his officers would have drunk tea either with or in the presence of visiting merchants and dignitaries. The awesome majesty of the Treasure Fleet would have given the visitors particular reason to note the customs and behaviour of their distinguished company, and the concept of infusion to create a beverage would have been dignified by association. The stimulatory effects caused by the caffeine in tea may likewise have been noted and discussed. After the sultan had presented lions, zebras, ostriches, and another qilin for the Emperor’s collection, the voyage then went on to Malindi and the coast of Zanj. It is almost certain that the Rasulid monarch in Ta’izz, having great interest in exotic plants and Chinese porcelain, would have paid attention to any reports of the Chinese drinking tea.

The seventh and last voyage in 1432 had a more extensive impact in the Red Sea: Zheng He, ill and exhausted, eschewed the opportunity to make the Haj and instead sent the fleet of more than 100 ships and 27,000 men to Hormuz and beyond with his deputy, the eunuch Hong Bao. Unable to land at Aden as a result of local fighting, he secured the permission of the Emir of Mecca to sail up the Red Sea to the port of Jiddah, where the Chinese were received with due honour. As well as their usual interest in trading, a translation of an Arab text Hut yaw fang (‘The pharmaceutical prescriptions of the Muslims’) had appeared in China to intense interest there, and particular attention was paid to the acquisition of Arab drugs and medicines. The use of aloes (a purgative and tonic), myrrh (for the circulation), benzoin (a gum that aids respiration), storax (an anti-inflammatory), and momocordia seeds (for ulcers and wounds) was recorded. It is significant that at this stage there is no mention of coffee: both the Chinese and Arabs would have had good cause to have analysed its properties if it had been a known substance at the time. It seems that knowledge of coffee was still confined to the Ethiopian Highlands. Qat is likewise absent from the pharmacopoeia.

Although there are Chinese reports of Mecca and Medina, they are surprisingly cursory: with Zheng He at Calicut and in failing health, the precision of purpose seems to have left the voyage. He died on the way back to China in 1433 at the age of 63, and was buried at sea. The returning fleet carried an ambassador from Aden, and yet another giraffe, and although pleased with the outcome, Zhu Zhanj, the Emperor since 1426, who was of a more introspective Confucian turn of mind than his grandfather, never subsequently authorized another voyage. Confucius believed that a healthy Chinese state should be able to provide for all its own needs, and that active involvement in foreign trade was beneath the divinely ordained dignity of the Middle Kingdom. It was for this reason that China had remained a relatively closed nation throughout its history, and why the Treasure Fleets were such a dramatic aberration. Once Confucianism regained the high-ground, the shipyards closed down, and the country turned in on itself again.

A Sufi missionary, Shahkh Shadomer Shadhili, is reported to have introduced qat to Ta’izz in 1429, and, whether or not it is true, the date is significant, as it is at around that time that the Chinese were present in the Arabian and Red Seas – the fifth and seventh Treasure Fleets of Zheng He. If the Yemenis had been introduced to tea as a result of these visits, either by experience, by report, or possibly by purchase, and if the emerging Sufi community was already familiar with its stimulating properties by repute, then the scene is set for the necessary discovery of infusions based on dried leaf material with similar properties to tea. The Sufis were eager to embrace chemical assistance in order to get closer to God, and help was at hand.

Tea leaves in China were made in a number of ways: the three most common, green, oolong, and black teas, were produced by differing combinations of sun-drying, pan firing, rolling, fermenting, and final firing. The coffee industry today is curiously coy about the fact that the current way of preparation is one of only many ways, and that coffee can also be a tisane or tea: an infusion of dried vegetable matter in hot water. Ethiopians, as we have seen, still sometimes drink a coffee made from the leaves (as opposed to cherry or bean) of the coffee plant. For one, amertassa, green coffee leaves are allowed to dry naturally in the shade, then infused. The other, kati, is made from leaves that have been pan fired. The use of dried leaf material in this way is very similar to tea, and kafta, a drink made from the dried leaves of the qat plant, is likewise related. Furthermore, in Yemen and other parts of Arabia today it is common to find kish’r, which is an infusion of the dried coffee cherry from which the beans have been removed. These cherries are sold in the markets in open sacks alongside green coffee beans, and are as much in demand. Kish’r has a pleasant, light fruity flavour with hints of its smoky coffee origins, but has more in common with a herbal infusion such as verbena or melise. Coffee cherry has also been detected in the manufacture of a cheap instant coffee. The evolution of these coffee teas through the use of the roasted bean into the beverage 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 into brown polished nuggets with an overwhelmingly delicious aroma and a bitter but alluring flavour when ground and boiled. The change to the coffee bean represented on a physical level the transformations that Sufism wrought upon the human soul, and the fact that coffee enabled adherents to remain awake during their night prayers was further proof of its spiritual qualities. The drink was also as black as the Ka’ba, the sacred black stone at Mecca to which all Muslims must make the Haj. Gemaleddin’s learning and piety had uncovered a mysterious substance that assisted the Sufis in their communion with God.

Hence coffee stands before us finally unveiled, discovered by an alchemist who identified in its transformation the means of bringing men closer to God, in the same way that the use of communion wine, which is variously forbidden and allowed in different branches of the Christian ritual, has underlying it much of the same transformational thinking. That the Sufis should have adopted a similar ritual use of a communal drink is not surprising, and the fact that coffee is known as the ‘Wine of Araby’ also takes on another dimension of meaning in this context.

The way in which coffee was eagerly adopted by Sufism illumines the alchemical element in the new myth. We have seen that ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold.’ Even those who do not like the flavour of coffee usually concede that it has a peculiarly seductive aroma when freshly roasted, and when the beans are broken up by grinding or pulverizing they release a new set of aromas that are if anything even more beguiling. The transformation of coffee from dull, sublunary vegetable matter into a substance of almost divine aroma and extraordinary flavour is a compelling symbol of what alchemy and its Sufi followers wished to achieve with their spiritual quest. In every sense, then, coffee brought them closer to God and it became a vital component of their communal prayers.

The ritual use of coffee is itself a hypothesis, but one supported by archaeological evidence, the first that we have come across in our peregrinations around coffee’s prehistory. Excavations at Zabid have shown that initially (c.1450) coffee was almost certainly served amongst the Sufi community at their dhikrs (communal worship, usually at night) from a ladle dipped into a glazed bowl named a majdur. Previously, this sort of pottery had not been glazed, which suggests that coffee was deemed of higher importance than other liquids. Shortly afterwards, smaller glazed bowls started to be produced at Haysi, a nearby town. These would have been passed around from person to person, replacing the ladle. Significantly, these small bowls bear striking resemblance in shape to the Chinese porcelain tea-drinking bowls of the same era, and some have rudimentary imitations of the classic blue and white Chinese patterns. The passing around of coffee was one of the reasons why it was banned in Mecca in 1511 as sharing was associated with alcohol consumption. Some Sufi sects today still pass around a drinking bowl of coffee in connection with events of particular importance such as the funerals of members.

Sufis did not live a cloistered existence, and the reason why their dhikrs tended to take place at night was that many of their numbers followed a normal life of work and family during the day – hence the value ascribed to coffee as a means of staying awake during prayers. As they lived amongst the community it would seem that the new habit of coffee drinking was rapidly disseminated amongst the population as a whole. Again the best evidence for this comes from archaeology; within a hundred years the Haysi potteries had evolved an individual coffee cup of the size and shape of a modern demitasse, or the smaller Turkish findjan. This would suggest that coffee consumption had spread from ritual to individual domestic consumption. Its wildfire spread through Islam, however, was the result of geopolitics: the growth of the coffee trade depended upon the relative security of the Red Sea and its ports, and a unified political and spiritual rule that allowed coffee to be quickly adopted.