BY MARK HAY
Rulers throughout Europe and the Middle East once tried to ban the black brew.
IN 1633, THE OTTOMAN SULTAN Murad IV cracked down on a practice he believed was provoking social decay and disunity in his capital of Istanbul. The risk of disorder associated with this practice were so dire, he apparently thought, that he declared transgressors should be immediately put to death. By some accounts, Murad IV stalked the streets of Istanbul in disguise, whipping out a 100-pound broadsword to decapitate whomever he found engaged in this illicit activity.
So what did Murad IV find so objectionable? Public coffee consumption.
Odd though it may sound, Murad IV was neither the first nor last person to crack down on coffee drinking; he was just arguably the most brutal and successful in his efforts. Between the early 16th and late 18th centuries, a host of religious influencers and secular leaders, many but hardly all in the Ottoman Empire, took a crack at suppressing the black brew.
Few of them did so because they thought coffee’s mild mind-altering effects meant it was an objectionable narcotic (a common assumption). Instead most, including Murad IV, seemed to believe that coffee shops could erode social norms, encourage dangerous thoughts or speech, and even directly foment seditious plots. In the modern world, where Starbucks is ubiquitous and innocuous, this sounds absurd. But Murad IV did have reason to fear coffee culture.
These crackdowns touched off in the 16th century because that’s when coffee reached much of the world. Coffee beans were likely known and used for centuries beforehand in Ethiopia, their point
of origin. But the first clear historical evidence of grinding coffee beans and brewing them into a cup
of joe dates—as the historian
Ralph Hattox established in his definitive tome Coffee and Coffeehouses—to 15th century Yemen. There, local Sufi Muslim orders used the brew in mystical ceremonies,
whether as a social act to foster brotherhood, a narcotic to produce spiritual intoxication, or a pragmatic concentration booster. The drink soon spread up the Red Sea, reaching Istanbul in the early 1500s and Christian Europe over the following century.
In response, reactionaries cited religious reasons to outlaw coffee. “There’s always an undercurrent of” conservative Muslims “who think that any innovation … that is distinct from the time of the prophet Muhammad should be quashed,” says Ottoman social historian
Madeline Zilfi. (Reactionary tendencies are not unique to Islam; later, in Europe, religious leaders asked the Pope to ban coffee as a satanic novelty.) Justifications included that coffee intoxicated drinkers (forbidden), that it was bad for the human body (forbidden), and that roasting made it
the equivalent of charcoal(forbidden for consumption). Other religious figures charged (maybe legitimately, maybe dubiously) that coffeehouses were natural magnets for licentious behaviors such as
gambling, prostitution, and drug usage. Others just thought the fact that it was new was reason enough to condemn it.
The first recorded coffee crackdown occurred in Mecca in 1511, when Kha‘ir Beg al-Mi‘mar, a prominent secular official in a pre-Ottoman regime, caught men drinking coffee outside of a mosque and thought they looked suspicious. The details of the crackdown are disputed, but he used religious justifications to order an end to all coffee sales and consumption. Later coffee crackdowns occured in Mecca (again), Cairo (multiple times), and Istanbul and other Ottoman areas.
By the late 18th century, though, more secular meeting places had emerged, and dissident groups were more entrenched. Shuttering coffeehouses was no longer a go-to dissent crusher, so the bans stopped—although rulers still posted spies in them to monitor anti-regime chatter, a practice some autocrats maintain to this day.
Murad IV, then, was an exceptionally brutal man. But he was not some insane reactionary. Instead, he and his peers speak to the power that a new commodity, such as coffee or tobacco, can have: Something as simple as creating a new culinary venue can wash away old mores and open up new spaces for engagement and thought. They speak to the horror and reactionary politics such innovations, such critical thoughts and challenges to accepted norms, can provoke.
Coffee culture won out against religious and political conservatism, though, and now we live in the world of Starbucks. And won’t it be surprising to see which social innovations stirring up apocalyptic prophecies today become as ubiquitous and uninteresting as the green mermaid logo a century or two down the road?
