Hattox - Coffee and coffeehouses: the origins of a social beverage in the medieval Near East

I began writing this book some seven years ago as a short seminar paper at Princeton. Faced with the task of investigating the application of Islamic law to some specific question, I chose that of the prohibition of coffee. Starting with the knowledge that coffee was eventually found licit by the major schools of law, what remained was to examine the process of legal reasoning through which coffee was originally condemned, and how this condemnation was ultimately overturned. Several months of research led to the perplexing realization that coffee was eventually found licit because the original prohibition was not just faulty, but based on such flimsy claims that one had to wonder why they were put forward to begin with. If coffee itself patently fell within the group of legal beverages, there must be something with which it was associated that prompted all the furor. This work is an effort to discover what that something was.

A few methodological problems had to be tackled in dealing with the question. To begin with, while a fairamount of contemporary material exists concerning the coffee debate of the sixteenth century, which indeed forms the core of the work, much valuable material from a later age was found, and many of these works furnished detail that could be found in no other place. In light of this, I chose to depart in places from the sound principle of not judging the activities of a society by the writings about it from a later age. Lane's Manners and Customs, for example, suffers the dual disability of being of a much later time and of looking at the everyday life of Muammad Al's Egypt from an unabashedly European point of view. Nonetheless the detail Lane furnishes concerning the operation of coffeehouses in Cairo in his own day is simply too valuable to be overlooked. In those places where I do employ such later writers, I try to make it clear that we cannot necessarily interpret events of the sixteenth century by nineteenth-century evidence, and that such evidence must only be taken with this warning always in mind.

The focus of the work as well has some bearing on methodology. While archival materials have become the mainstay of studies concerned with the activities of states or officials, or with economic life, they are far more burdensome than fruitful to a work such as this, with its emphasis on mentalities, on the attitude of an entire society to the introduction of something entirely new to its fabric. The activities of the governments involved, and especially the economic impact of coffee in the Near East, deserve books of their own, and lie quite outside the scope of the present work.

I feel it necessary here to say a word or two about the system of transliteration I employ. For Turkish words, wherever possible, I prefer to use modern Turkish orthography, although at times I include extra diacritical marks to indicate the original spelling. For Arabic, I have tried to stick throughout to a somewhat modified version of the Libraryof Congress system of transliteration. I depart from this system in that, with nouns ending with a t marba that are not in construct with a following noun, I have chosen not to employ a potentially confusing (and to my mind ugly) final h. In addition, while I follow convention in dropping almost all inflectional endings from nouns, I have retained those denoting the indefinite accusative, particularly where this case is used adverbially. This ending I have retained in the form of a superscript an, for instance, majzan.

In the years since I began this work I have benefited greatly from the assistance of numerous institutions and individuals. First of all, I should like to acknowledge the help provided by the staffs of the following libraries, who provided me with microfilms and photocopies of manuscripts, and photographs of some of the illustrations used in this work: the Division of Rare Books, Library of Congress; the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, the Bibliothque nationale, Paris; the Escurial, Madrid; the Staatsbibliothek Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; the library of the Rijksuniversitet, Leiden; the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; New York Public Library; and Princeton University Library. Special thanks go as well to Paul E. Chevedden, UCLA; Martha Dukas, Boston Public Library; Edward W. Earle, California Museum of Photography; George S. Hobart, Library of Congress; Mary Ellen Taylor, Harvard Semitic Museum; and Kristin Kinsey, Suzzallo Library, University of Washington.

I should also like to express my gratitude to the many teachers, colleagues, and friends who offered bibliographical suggestions and valuable comments on the numerous draft versions of this work, particularly Avrom Udovitch, Charles Issawi, Norman Itzkowitz, Bernard Lewis, the late Rudolf Mach, Halil nalcik, Lawrence Conrad, PaulaSanders, and Shaun Marmon. Thanks also go to Grace Edelman of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton for her support during much of the writing of the dissertation on which this book is based.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge a special debt to three people who were of tremendous assistance during the final stages of the preparation of this work: Daniel Goff-man, for his copious comments and criticisms of the original manuscript; John R. Coogan, whose critical eye has, I hope, kept my prose from drifting too far toward the purple; and above all, Felicia J. Hecker of the University of Washington Press for the care, attention, and seemingly boundless energy she has put into preparing this work for publication.