An early-17th-century painting at the Chester Beatty in Dublin, Ireland depicts a lively scene inside a Turkish coffeehouse. Groups of men have gathered to play boardgames, listen to poetry and music, and, naturally, drink coffee.
The scene might not resemble most contemporary coffeehouses. But what is striking about the painting is its setting in the heart of the Islamic world, at a time when the drink was still seen as exotic in the Global North countries that are now most closely associated with specialty coffee.
In many ways, the painting captures one of the earliest versions of what would now be called “cafe culture.” It depicts a public space where ideas, art, and trade were freely shared, alongside cups of coffee.
Over a century before Europe’s first coffeehouses opened, in the 1650s, Southwest Asian countries like Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Egypt had already developed a thriving coffee culture. In his book, “A Brief History of Coffee,” Jonathan Morris writes that, “This was the world from which modern versions of the drink evolved and the foundations of the contemporary coffee house format laid.”
Without these Islamic world coffeehouses, there would be no Parisian salons, no London penny universities, and no modern cafe culture as we know it.
Coffee’s Sufi Origins
Coffee beans began their journey to the rest of the world from southern Ethiopia, where arabica coffee originated. Beginning in the mid 1400s, a hot beverage made from dried coffee husks spread first to Yemen, where it became known as qishr, Morris explains. The beverage soon gained popularity in Sufi circles, as the caffeine helped worshippers stay awake during the nightly ritual of dhikr.
Eventually, coffee was prepared using beans alone, and this preparation was called qahwa—still the Arabic term for coffee today.
Sufi saints later carried coffee beyond Yemen to the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. From these cities, it dispersed throughout the Islamic world via the annual Hajj pilgrimage. By the mid 16th century, merchants had gotten involved, transporting coffee through complex, long-distance trade networks.
With the beverage came a novel social institution: the coffeehouse. A 1511 report mentions tavern-like spaces in Mecca where people drank qahwa. Syria’s first coffeehouse opened in Damascus in 1530; by 1671, the city of Aleppo alone had more than 100 such establishments.
Two Syrian merchants established Istanbul’s first coffeehouse in 1544, and the Turks embraced it with such enthusiasm that, within two decades, the city was home to 600 coffeehouses, which eventually spread to smaller towns across Anatolia. By the early 1600s, coffee had reached Isfahan, the capital of Safavid Iran; Cairo and Alexandria in Ottoman Egypt; and, to a lesser extent, Delhi, the capital of Mughal India.
In a world organized around the mosque, workplace, and home, these proliferating coffeehouses became the “fourth place,” fostering new forms of social interaction. As Morris points out, “Now one could meet peers at a coffee house, and exchange hospitality on a more equal footing through the simple expedient of buying each other cups of coffee.”
Anyone who could afford a cup could enter, making coffeehouses meeting places for people from different backgrounds, occupations, and social classes. Artists, poets, and performers rubbed shoulders with merchants, academics, judges, and bureaucrats.
By bringing together diverse social groups, coffeehouses fostered intellectual debate but also fueled rumor and gossip, as news was exchanged, politics discussed, and governments criticized. Fearful that such unhindered interaction could spark subversive ideas and political dissent, religious leaders and rulers often attempted to ban them.
“When Khair-Beg, the young governor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee, like wine, must be outlawed by the Koran, and he induced his religious, legal, and medical advisers to agree. Thus, in 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were forcibly closed,” Mark Pendergrast writes in “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.”
A Brew for Every Region
Despite such restrictive attempts, coffeehouses continued to flourish, and with them came diverse methods of preparing, serving, and drinking coffee. The Turks preferred their coffee thick and dark: Roasted and ground coffee was boiled in water before the grounds were left to settle at the bottom, creating an almost opaque beverage. Arabic coffee, by contrast, was made from lightly toasted beans that were cooled, crushed, boiled, and then decanted, producing a semi-translucent brew.
In Iran, coffee was brewed with a wide range of spices, including cloves, nutmeg, and ginger. In Mughal India, it was infused with ginger and cardamon or steeped with rosewater and sugar candy. “In 18th-century Mughal Delhi, Arab ki sarai, an inn run by Arab traders, was famous for preparing sticky, sweet coffee,” historian Neha Vermani writes.
Each region, in turn, developed its own brewing and serving implements. In parts of the Arab world, coffee was first prepared in a copper-bottomed pot, then decanted into a small, pre-heated serving vessel with a long spout called a dallah. From there, the host would pour small cups, or finjans, for each guest. In Turkey, coffee was brewed in a small, long-handled pot called a cezve or ibrīq, and served in 3oz ceramic cups filled to the brim.
The accessibility of coffee culture, however, varied considerably across these regions. In Iran, under the Safavid Empire, coffeehouses were clustered in elite quarters of cities like Isfahan rather than penetrating all levels of urban society as they had in Ottoman Turkey. In Mughal India, qahwa khanas were even more limited—though present in cities like Delhi, these coffeehouses never achieved the widespread entrenchment seen elsewhere in the Islamic world.
In Iran, the practice of drinking coffee altered the rhythms of everyday life, especially in cities. By the end of the 17th century, Isfahan residents had adopted a new morning meal called taḥt al-qahva—literally, “before coffee”—writes historian Farshid Emami. “Many merchants and artisans working in the markets of Isfahan probably started their days in coffeehouses, with coffee and something sweet, in a manner that was becoming more and more cosmopolitan,” he adds. In Istanbul, meanwhile, many observers chose to break their Ramadan fasts with a coffee after sunset, and in Cairo, coffee fueled a vibrant nightlife while also drawing early-morning worshippers seeking their first cup of the day.
A major force behind coffee’s spread was the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. While Ethiopia remained the sole source of coffee initially, by the 1540s coffee was cultivated as a cash crop in the Yemeni highlands—then under Ottoman rule—for consumer markets in Southwest Asia and later Europe. For nearly two centuries, these farms were the only center of commercial coffee production.
During this time, the port city of Mocha in Yemen, near where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, became the hub of the global coffee trade, which was dominated by Arab and Turkish merchants. This was the route by which coffee first reached European cities like Venice, Paris, London, and Vienna. Curiously, the British East India Company established a presence in Mocha as early as 1618, sending coffee consignments to Mughal India more than 30 years before the beverage became available in Britain, Morris notes.
Europeans initially remained unimpressed. Living in Istanbul in 1601, Englishman George Manwaring found coffee neither pleasant to taste nor smell. English poet George Sandys described it as “black as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.” Though “outbreaks of fascination with the ‘Orient’ provoked interest in coffee,” Morris writes, Europeans remained ambivalent, largely because of the drink’s Islamic associations.
Europe ‘Discovers’ Coffee
That changed beginning in the 1650s, when Europe’s first coffeehouse opened in London, followed by establishments in Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, and Berlin. Many were founded by immigrants from the Islamic world. “Pasqua Rosee, an ethnic Armenian from the Ottoman city of Smyrna (now Izmir) opened London’s, and Europe’s, first documented coffee house sometime between 1652 and 1654,” Morris notes. Similarly, an Ottoman diplomatic mission to France likely sparked Parisian interest in coffee.
Like their Islamic predecessors, English coffeehouses seated patrons at long communal tables “without a suggestion of hierarchy,” Morris writes, creating alcohol-free, egalitarian spaces where anyone who could afford a cup could enter and linger. These “penny universities”—where a single penny bought coffee and access to conversation—reflected the same democratic impulse that had animated qahwa khanas a century earlier. In both contexts, caffeine underwrote a new kind of sociability: sober, intellectual, and conversational, a change from the intoxicated and boisterous atmosphere of taverns.
Over time, Europe’s cafes evolved into vibrant social institutions in their own right. Oxford’s first coffeehouse, which some sources suggest opened in 1656, drew customers like Isaac Newton and astronomer Edmond Halley. By 1664, London’s Grecian Coffee House—home to the newly founded Royal Society—was teaching customers how to prepare coffee, tea, and chocolate. Much like their Ottoman predecessors, these spaces blurred boundaries between commerce and culture, work and leisure. By the late 18th century, Paris alone had 1,800 cafes offering games, tobacco, and socializing across class lines, echoing the “fourth place” that had emerged in the Islamic world centuries before.
As European coffeehouses proliferated and Yemen’s coffee supply stagnated, European states—including the Dutch Republic, France, and Britain—looked to their colonies for new sources. Despite an Ottoman ban on exporting green coffee, European colonial enterprises like the Dutch, French, and British East India Companies smuggled seeds to colonies in Indonesia, Suriname, Sri Lanka, southern India, and the Caribbean, where local farmers and enslaved or indentured laborers were made to grow coffee.
By the first half of the 19th century, Java, Malabar, Ceylon, and Jamaican coffee had begun to dominate the market, while Red Sea coffee, formerly the world’s only coffee source, accounted for barely 3% of global supply, Morris writes. As European powers came to control both the commodity and its markets, the Islamic origins of coffee culture—and the coffeehouse itself—began to fade from collective memory.
Yet that lineage persisted, even as it was obscured. In Europe, as in the Islamic world, coffeehouses proved too valuable to suppress. When British officials proposed closing coffeehouses in 1666, they were reminded that the public relied on these spaces for unmonitored conversation. Just as Ottoman rulers and Meccan governors had discovered a century earlier, coffeehouses remained incubators of both dissent and discovery. The social architecture pioneered in 16th-century Istanbul—the communal tables, the mingling of classes, the fusion of gossip and intellect—had been transplanted to European soil, where it would continue to evolve even as its roots were forgotten.
That lineage extends to the cafes of the 20th and 21st centuries. When former CEO Howard Schultz reimagined Starbucks in the 1990s as a “third place” between home and work, he was unknowingly reviving the very concept Ottoman coffeehouses had pioneered. Today’s specialty coffee movement, with its emphasis on ritual and the origins of beans, circles back to the regional distinctions that once differentiated Turkish coffee from Arabic or Persian brews. The conversational hum of a Melbourne specialty cafe or a Brooklyn coffee bar owes something to the convivial murmur of coffeehouses in Ottoman Istanbul and Safavid Isfahan.
What began in the Islamic world as spaces where Sufi mystics sought spiritual alertness became the template for how much of the world now socializes, works, and builds community. The 17th-century Turkish painting in Dublin captures more than a historical curiosity—it shows the birth of a social institution that would reshape public life across continents, even as the memory of its origins faded from view.
Photo by Roman Denisenko on Unsplash
