S2 Episode 5: The Five Attempts to Ban Coffee

What this episode covers

Coffee brings people together. It encourages conversations, stimulates thought, and provokes epiphany. Everyone seems to agree with this – or do they? It turns out that throughout history, not everyone has supported coffee or even believed it to be healthy. Sometimes these people have been motivated for political purposes. More often than not, however, fear of coffee, its effects, and those who popularize it, has been the chief reason people have attacked it. In this episode, I talk about five instances where state and religious leaders fought to outlaw or ban coffee. Subscribe to The Boise Coffee Podcast here . (Episode Transcript Below) The 5 Attempts to Ban Coffee throughout History Coffee brings people together. Whether it’s 2016 and estranged friends meet at a coffee shop to catch up on each others lives, or its 1780 and American revolutionaries are sharing political opinions over cups of coffee, that one fact seems to be irrefutable. Coffee encourages conversations, stimulates thought, and provokes epiphany. Everyone seems to agree with this – or do they? It turns out that throughout history, not everyone has supported coffee or even believed it to be healthy. Sometimes these people have been motivated for political purposes. More often than not, however, fear of coffee, its effects, and those who popularize it, has been the chief reason people have attacked it. In this episode, I’d like to talk about five instances where state and religious leaders fought to outlaw or ban coffee. We’ll start in Mecca in the early 16th century, and we’ll end at the end of the 18th century. Attempt 1: Mecca, 1511 In the early 1500s, Khair Beg, the young governor and chief of police of Mecca, learned that satirical verses were being written about him at coffee houses and shared openly. He, along with more conservative Muslims, pushed the idea that coffee was as much an intoxicant as wine – a beverage that is banned by the Koran. Khair Beg, a politician in every sense of the word, saw an opportunity to stop this sedition and undertook a campaign to show the destructive capabilities of coffee. Beg convinced two well known Persian physicians, as well as a host of coffee drinkers, to issue pronouncements about coffee’s intoxicating and dangerous affects to an assembly of jurists representing various schools of Islam. The jury ruled in Beg’s favor, and the young governor sent a copy of the findings to his boss, the Sultan of Cairo. In 1511 Beg outlawed coffee and coffee-houses within Mecca. At that time, coffee was widely used by Muslims to prepare for and stay awake during late-night prayer vigils; some even believed that the heightened sense of awareness brought them closer to God. Some of these Muslims were present during Beg’s coffee court and even went so far as to defend the drink on the record – but to no avail. After reading the results of the jury’s findings, Kansuh al-Ghawri, the Sultan of Cairo, was furious. Kansuh had appointed Khair Beg, and insisted that no ban could be instated without his prior approval. The sultan was likely a coffee drinker himself, and was surrounded by some of the best physicians the Arab world had to offer – none of whom agreed with Beg’s findings. History is a little unclear as to what transpired next; some reports indicate that the sultan lifted the coffee ban, charged Khair-Beg with embezzlement, and put him to death. Others say that the sultan simply replaced Khair-Beg with a new governor in the following year who wasn’t averse to coffee. Regardless, the world’s first recorded coffee ban didn’t last long. Attempt 2: Venice, 1600 While muslims in the early 1500s outlawed coffee on the basis that its effects were similar to wine, a century later Italian Catholics tried to outlaw it because it was seen as the opposite. Wine,

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