The Coffee Poets of 16th-Century Islam
The early modern Islamic world was embroiled in a bitter controversy over coffee. Much ink was spilt by poets on both sides.
No premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As he wrote in one of his ‘coffee poems’: ‘The status of the precious coffee of the pot has ascended,/as the full moon of her cup unveils in the darkness./How beautiful she is – resembling molten jet.’
He was living in Damascus in the 16th century, at a time when the city was engulfed in fierce debate over a dark, aromatic beverage that was transforming the Islamic world. The controversy was rooted in linguistic, theological, and social anxieties. The word for coffee, qahwa, was, in medieval Arabic texts, used as a poetic synonym for wine, a substance declared forbidden in the Quran. For some jurists, this semantic proximity raised important questions: how could coffee share a name with an intoxicant yet not be considered one? One anti-coffee poem, by Nur al-Din al-‘Imriti (d.1485), condemned the drink:
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