A cafe in Damascus (Photo by Emily O'Dell)
Innocent games…resembling checkers, hopscotch, and chess, are played there. In addition, mullahs, dervishes, and poets take turns telling stories in verse or in prose. The narrations by the mullahs and the dervishes are moral lessons, like our sermons, but it is not considered scandalous not to pay attention to them…A mullah will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the coffeehouse, and begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, and chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods. It often happens that two or three people talk at the same time, one on one side, the other on the opposite, and sometimes one will be a preacher and the other a storyteller. — Jean Chardin (d. 1713)
In the souq of the Old City of Damascus, there are a number of small tables set up in front of the cafes and shops for shoppers and pilgrims to stop for a quick–or luxurious–cup of coffee. Most people don’t realize that coffee’s origins go back directly to Sufi history in Africa and the Middle East. Since it’s too late for me to explain it in a blog post, you can read more about the mystic origins of coffee in this BBC article as well as in this post, which focuses more on the adjudication of coffee in Islamic law under the Ottomans…
