French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have once mused, “A strong cup of coffee makes me wake up and gives me warmth, abnormal power, and amusing pain as I prefer suffering to being unconscious.” It has also been said that the French Revolution began in a café, the Café Royale in Paris, when a revolutionary leapt onto a table and shouted to the surrounding crowds to make their way to the Bastille. Cafés have clearly played an important role in world history. But what is the history of the café? Who was the first to discover coffee? Which nation was the first to turn the coffee bean into a drink, and where and when was the first café established? According to the Description de l'Egypte,written by a group of scholars at the time of the French campaign in Egypt at the end of the 18th century, a café at that time in Egypt was a place where men would recharge their energies by sitting down and consuming a drink that was thought to protect them from the heat of the sun. There were no alcoholic drinks served at these places. In these cafés, storytellers would tell all kinds of tales. There was music and sometimes acting and exaggerated hand gestures. There were also clown performances that aimed to entertain the Turks who lived in Egypt at the time. During the Muslim feasts, especially the Eid Al-Adha, cafés would be crowded with people who had gathered to hear music, stories, and poetry. Just as in the cafés of today, unemployed young men would play games like chess. The French writers described the components of a café at that time: a one-storey building with arabesque windows and columns supporting the ceiling. A typical café had seven or eight straw carpets, chairs made of straw and wood, 15 coffee pots, 15 coffee cups, and 15 copper lids for the cups. Such places were usually surrounded with gardens. In addition, a café needed 25 to 30 paras (the currency at the time) worth of wood per day for the fire and a pound of coffee worth 40 paras, as well as two waiters and a manager. At the time of the Khedive Ismail, in the late-19th century, the cups were quite like the ones that are used today, made of porcelain with small handles. Tareq Galal is a researcher in the field of café history. “While it is not certain where the first coffee shop was built, the first café as we know it today was a bench in the street with people serving coffee nearby or at the doorsteps of homes or even at home.''Says Galal. “The Arabs were the first people to build coffee shops. It is believed that the first to establish cafés were the Sufi sects who would drink a type of caffeinated drink called qat and then coffee, which they thought would help them in their prayers. “Coffee in Egyptian culture has long been the main drink in the country's households, and it is what is used to greet visitors even today. In classic Egyptian films, each house has its own coffee-making set composed of a coffee jar, a sugar jar, a copper spoon, small glass or porcelain cups, and a small gas heater [sebertaya] on a copper tray.” During Ottoman rule, during the holy month of Ramadan, Egypt's cafés would close their doors during the day and open them after sunset. There were also cafés for each profession, with doctors sitting in one café, for example, and builders in another. Galal gives an account of how cafés were important to the lives of Egyptians at the time. “In 1880, according to the writer and engineer Ali Pasha Mubarak, there were 1,067 cafés in Cairo, most of them in Azbakeya, which had 202 cafes; Bulaq, which had 160; Gamaleya, which had 142; and Abdeen, which had 102 cafes. These coffee shops would serve the same oriental drinks they serve today like zangabeel [ginger],kerfa[cinnamon], coffee and tea,” he said. According to Galal, drinking coffee was a subject of debate at first. “The Arabs originally banned coffee like wine, as to them it was responsible for changes in the human body that were like drunkenness. This is why for many years there were debates over the issue. “First, there was a debate over the coffee powder, then the café, the place one sits in to drink coffee, and then the shisha[hookah], which was what related coffee drinking to smoking and made it a controversial habit.” In a café, social differences tend to disappear, the rich sitting next to the poor and the educated next to the illiterate. In his book Eastern Cafés, the French author Gérard-George Lemaire says that the residents of cities like Baghdad, Istanbul, Cairo, Salonica, Alexandria, Damascus and Athens often worried about whether a café was a place they should be seen to be going to. In some Arabic dictionaries the word qahwa(coffee) was even a synonym for the word khamr(wine). According to the 18th-century historian Al-Gabarty, a sheikh in the Bab Al-Khalq district in Cairo forbade coffee drinking and asked his followers to burn all the coffee beans they found. However, this seems to have been a minority view because by the 18th century there was no general ban on coffee and people were allowed to drink it in public. The habit of sitting in cafés could, however, still be a source of concern as the Ottoman sultan Mourad IV banned coffee drinking because of worries about social disorder, as did the early 19th-century Egyptian viceroy Mohamed Ali Pasha. In Europe, King Frederick the Great of Prussia started a campaign against coffee at the end of the 18th century to defend the local beer industry. Even in Ethiopia, coffee was at times forbidden for religious reasons. According to The Devil's Cup: the History of the World According to Coffeeby British author Stewart Lee Allen, a shepherd in Ethiopia realised that one of his goats was very active after eating the beans of a certain plant. Eating them himself, he discovered that they helped him stay up all night to finish his prayers. The first people to use coffee routinely, Allen says, were probably the Oromo tribes in the kingdom of Kufa, now eastern Ethiopia, which explains the name. However, they did not drink coffee in the way that we do today, preferring to crush the beans and mix them with a sort of ghee. This would then be eaten. Another story says that the origins of coffee lie in Yemen in the city of Mocha, a port that has been connected to coffee for more than a thousand years. This is where the name of the famous coffee drink comes from. If this is true, the Ethiopians were the first to discover coffee beans, while the Arabs were the first to make a drink out of them. It is said that a Yemeni sheikh, Ali Ben Omar Al-Shazly, was the first to introduce coffee to the Arabian Peninsula. Some sources, however, say that another Yemeni, Gamal Al-Din Ben Said Al-Dahbani, should be credited with the export of coffee. Coffee was introduced into Egypt at the time of the Ottoman conquest, at the beginning of the 16th century, when street vendors would serve the drink to customers. Later, cafés were established, especially in the districts of Al-Hussein and Al-Azhar. These also functioned as libraries where students could either copy books or buy them. Later still, cafés were used by literary figures and others as meeting places. In 1965 the government decided to transform some cafés into distribution centres for food, textiles and clothing. In 1966, some cafés set up makeshift schools, especially in Alexandria and Cairo's Sayeda Zeinab district. Lectures were organised under the auspices of the then Socialist Union and the social services department at the Al-Khediveya School. In the 19th-century, according to Galal, cafés were places for political and cultural discussion, though today they are mostly places for leisure. Nevertheless, there are still cafés that demonstrate the rich cultural and political life of our ancestors. Akram Al-Fishawi is the owner of the famous Al-Fishawi café in the Al-Azhar district of Cairo. He is the seventh generation of the family to own the café. “It belonged to my ancestor, who opened the café in around 1810,” he says. “No one who visits Al-Hussein fails to visit the café. We have hosted movie stars like Shadia, Samia Gamal, and Farid Al-Atrash, writers like Naguib Mahfouz, who wrote some of his famous novels in the café and was born in the same district, as well as the novelist Gamal Al-Ghitany who is a frequent visitor, and the poet Ahmed Ramy. The late presidents Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Al-Sadat also visited us, as did the scientist Ahmed Zuweil.” According to Al-Fishawi, the café has had an indirect role in the cultural life of the nation. “Al-Azhar academics used to talk about their teaching in the café, with everyone being allowed to listen. Today there are similar discussions in which people are also allowed to learn,” he says. Al-Fishawi says the café tries to reflect the traditional culture of the area. “We are trying to preserve the culture of the café, which represents Arab culture. We serve the same drinks we have always served, and we have kept the traditional décor. We are trying to preserve what our ancestors have handed down to us. “We have whole families visit without being disturbed, and in the 1960s we introduced the radio to customers who would sit and listen to Umm Kulthoum concerts all night. We were also the first to have a 24-hour service, and we still do today,” he says. Another famous Cairo establishment is Café Riche, in the downtown district. Abbas Mahmoud, who was responsible for its recent renovation,narrarates the story of the café; “Café Riche was established in 1908,” Mahmoud says. “Its first owner was an Austrian man, who sold it to a Frenchman, who then had to leave during the First World War and sold it to a Greek. It was the last Greek owner who was largely responsible for the subsequent fame of Café Riche. “The café has a strategic location off Talaat Harb Square, and when it was founded it was near the Qasr Al-Nile Police Station, as well as the offices of the British commander of the Cairo police. When the former Savoy Hotel was taken over by allied forces in the First World War, the café became an important meeting place for journalists and others. “Later, Egyptian patriots came to the café to meet journalists and explain the cause of Egyptian independence so that they could spread the Egyptian cause around the world. That was the beginning of the café's role as a gathering point for intellectuals.” Café Riche also had a patriotic role to play in the history of Egypt, according to Mahmoud. “After the 1919 Revolution, the Wafd Party was established. The café had a basement at the time that was typical of buildings of the sort. “When the owner found out that the Wafd was looking for a place to print their anti-British publications, he offered them this basement. If there was a police raid, the owner would give a special signal to the printer downstairs, who would then leave by the back door.” Café Riche at this time was also important for the country's cultural life. “The owner at the time set up a small theatre in what used to be the garden next to the café, and the first troupe to act there was Aziz Bek's, in which Mohamed Abdel-Qoudous and journalist Rose Al-Youssef once acted. Sheikh Abu Al-Ella Mohammed, Umm Kulthoum and Mounira Al-Mahdeya all also sang there,” Mahmoud said. “On a different note, the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used to visit the café when he was a student in Egypt. But so did writers like Bahaa Taher, Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi, Amal Donkul, Ahmed Fouad Negm, and Mohamed Hamam.” Mahmoud spent ten years renovating the caféin the 1990s, preserving the Egyptian style of the basement and the French style of the café. He put oriental sofas in the ground floor and placed the original printing machine used by patriots in a glass case. Today, more than a century after its opening, CaféRiche is a popular port of call for anyone visiting Cairo.ac
