While sitting on your divans, with a cup of coffee, its  beautiful aroma wafting through the air, did you ever wonder at its origin.

Today we see huge coffee cafés  dominating the streets, Starbucks, London diary, Costa,Caffe Nero etc filling up the plaza like shops in a bazaar.

Coffee nowadays have become such an integral amenity  in life that it isn’t uncommon to see people driving to their offices cum a cup of steaming coffee in their hands, or at a beach cafe with humanity at its large trying out different flavours of espresso and macchiato, or sleep deprived college students sipping their latte as if they were lifesavers against the onslaught of technical and foreign terminology that is hurled at them.

Just like every famous commodity has a legend to recount, coffee too retains a tale to narrate

Well here goes the amazing story of coffee,

In the kaffa region of Southern Ethiopia, an arab man named khalid was tending to his goats, when he noticed that his animals had become livelier after eating a certain berry.

So he boiled the berries and conjured the first coffee drink. The first record of this drink was in Yemen ,where the beans were exported to Yemen from Ethiopia, where sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions.

Coffee spread quickly through the Arabian Peninsula. In the mid 14th century, coffee cultivation reached Yemen.

By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645.

It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London.

The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

We see the journey of coffee across the oceans azure, lands yellow and white, evolving from a humble origin in the distant land of Ethiopia to one of the fastest selling commodity in the world.

To think that entrepreneurs earn millions of dollars from a vendible discovered by a simple Muslim man who was  sinply tending to his goats.

Coffee although a jewel of its own  isn’t the only treasure found by Muslims, but glorious Islamic history recounts sagas on the discovery of many more goods that one could otherwise never have envisioned to have a Muslim origin.

“I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women