Early Modern Era · 1511
Coffee (Cafés)
Sin, Sedition and Intoxication
Long before coffee was respectable, it was dangerous. In June 1511, Kha'ir Beg — the muhtasib (the market inspector and moral overseer appointed by the authorities) of Mecca under the Mamluk Sultanate — convened a council of jurists from the Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanafi schools, three of the four main traditions of Sunni Islamic law. He also produced two Persian physicians to testify against the drink. The council declared coffee an intoxicant comparable to wine and ruled it haram, meaning forbidden by religious law. Coffeehouses were shut, and offenders were flogged and paraded through the markets.
The ban collapsed quickly. Within months Cairo's Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, who happened to drink coffee himself, overturned it. Kha'ir Beg was dismissed the following year and later executed on embezzlement charges. Anti-coffee feeling kept flaring up: Cairo's coffeehouses were sacked in 1532, and the scholarly argument over whether qahwa (an Arabic word for coffee that doubled as a poetic term for wine) counted as a forbidden intoxicant rumbled on until Ottoman authorities mostly settled the matter in the mid-16th century.
Despite the recurring alarm, the "wine of Araby" spread across the Islamic world and beyond. The jurists weren't wrong that coffeehouses would reshape public life. They became places for conversation, commerce, and eventually revolution. The threat to mosque-centred civic life was real; so was the opportunity it opened.
The ban collapsed quickly. Within months Cairo's Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, who happened to drink coffee himself, overturned it. Kha'ir Beg was dismissed the following year and later executed on embezzlement charges. Anti-coffee feeling kept flaring up: Cairo's coffeehouses were sacked in 1532, and the scholarly argument over whether qahwa (an Arabic word for coffee that doubled as a poetic term for wine) counted as a forbidden intoxicant rumbled on until Ottoman authorities mostly settled the matter in the mid-16th century.
Despite the recurring alarm, the "wine of Araby" spread across the Islamic world and beyond. The jurists weren't wrong that coffeehouses would reshape public life. They became places for conversation, commerce, and eventually revolution. The threat to mosque-centred civic life was real; so was the opportunity it opened.