On a cold Massachusetts night, millions of us reach for the same thing: a hot cup of coffee. Few of us stop to think that the drink in our hands began as a tool of worship. Before it was a breakfast habit, a study-session fuel or a Dunkin' order, coffee was something Muslim mystics in Yemen brewed so they could stay awake for prayer and the remembrance of God through the night.

That story runs straight through Massachusetts, from a license granted in Boston, Massachusetts in 1670, to ships from Salem, Massachusetts that sailed into the Red Sea port of Mocha around 1800, to a Yemeni coffee shop in Brookline, Massachusetts that opened this year.

A drink for the night vigil

Historians generally agree on two points. The coffee plant, Coffea arabica, is native to the highlands of East Africa, and the brewed drink took shape across the Red Sea in Yemen. The British Museum's guide to its exhibition Life in a cup: coffee culture in the Islamic world puts it simply: "Although the Coffea arabica plant is native to East Africa's highlands, the beverage has its roots in Yemen."

The earliest stories all lead back to the Sufis. Ralph S. Hattox, whose 1985 book Coffee and Coffeehouses is still the standard history of the drink in the medieval Middle East, notes that the sources disagree on many details but are "unanimous" on one: coffee's early use was tied to Sufi orders. He concludes that by about the third quarter of the 15th century, Yemeni Sufis were making a stimulating drink from the coffee bean.

Two names come up again and again. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the 16th-century writer 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri credited Jamal al-Din Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a jurist from Aden who died around 1470, with bringing coffee into Sufi circles after a period in Africa, "where it was drunk during night vigils for prayer and dhikr." Al-Jaziri also reported that 'Ali ibn 'Umar al-Shadhili, a shaykh of the Shadhiliyya order who died in 1418, popularized the drink at Mocha. Al-Shadhili became a kind of patron saint of coffee growers and coffeehouse keepers. In Algeria, shadhiliyya was still used as a word for coffee.

The Arabic name stuck, too. The British Museum guide explains that "coffee," kahve, café and Kaffee all come from the Arabic qahwa, a word that first covered a class of brewed drinks before it came to mean the one made from coffee beans.

From Mecca to Istanbul

Coffee did not spread without controversy. The Encyclopaedia Iranica records that it became so popular it was served even in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, "though not without arousing considerable opposition." Scholars argued for decades over whether it was permissible, and authorities tried more than once to ban it. The drink won. The first coffeehouse in Istanbul opened in 1554, and by the early 1600s, the British Museum notes, coffee was known from Morocco to India. Coffeehouses became places where, in the museum's words, "people of different backgrounds could socialise on an equal footing."

Through all of it, almost every bean came out of Yemen, and much of it left through Mocha (al-Makha), the port on the Red Sea whose name is still printed on café menus around the world.

A Boston license in 1670

Coffee reached New England by way of England, where coffeehouses were opening in the 1660s. According to the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth's Commonwealth Museum, "In 1670 Dorothy Jones received the first license in Massachusetts to sell 'coffee and cuchaletto' (chocolate)." The Colonial Society of Massachusetts adds that the Boston selectmen approved separate petitions that year from two women, Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard, "to keepe a house of publique Entertainment for the sellinge of Coffee and Chucalettoe."

Boston's coffeehouses later became famous. William H. Ukers' 1922 history All About Coffee describes the Green Dragon tavern on Union Street in Boston, Massachusetts as a coffee-house tavern where patriots met, and it quotes Daniel Webster calling it the "headquarters of the Revolution." After the Boston Tea Party, coffee also became a patriotic choice. In a 1774 letter quoted by the Commonwealth Museum, John Adams told Abigail, "I have drank coffee every afternoon since, and have borne it very well… Tea must be universally renounced."

Salem sails to Mocha

The most remarkable Massachusetts link came a few decades later, and it ran right back to Yemen. Salem merchants were already trading across the Indian Ocean when the ship Recovery, under Captain Joseph Ropes, reached Mocha in 1798. The Ship Registers of the District of Salem and Beverly say the Recovery "is said to have been the first American vessel to visit Arabia." In his classic The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that Mocha was so far off the usual shipping lanes that the Recovery "was given a reception similar to that of Columbus in the new world."

The trade grew quickly. By Morison's count, Salem imported two million pounds of coffee from Arabia in 1805. It was not without danger. In 1806, he writes, the Salem ship Essex, on a Red Sea voyage that called at Mocha, was captured by pirates and her crew killed. But the business went on. Morison tells how the Crowninshield family's ship America anchored off Mocha in late 1804, with the log noting "the Grand Mosque bearing E. by S.," and loaded coffee there and at Aden before heading home. When she came into Salem in 1805, the owners rowed out to meet her, and one of them shouted that he could smell coffee in her hold.

Salem's ties to the Muslim world did not end with coffee. Captain Ropes, according to the American National Biography, later sailed the America to Constantinople in 1809 and stayed ten months, described there as the first American vessel to call on the Ottoman Empire. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, which keeps the historic collections of Salem's East India Marine Society, holds a watercolor titled Coffee Ships at Mocha, about 1850.

A Yemeni cup in Brookline today

More than two centuries after the Recovery, Yemeni coffee is being poured in Massachusetts again. Arwa Yemeni Coffee opened this spring at 1333 Beacon Street in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, Massachusetts. Brookline.News called it the first Yemeni coffee shop in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe described crowds sipping Mofawer, a creamy cardamom coffee, and Jubani, brewed with warm spices and coffee husks. Owner Zaid Baara told the Globe he wanted "a place for a late-night hangout," an alternative to bars. Mass Halal profiled the shop in October, including what is and is not known about its halal status.

So the next time you sit down with a cup after 'Isha, or pour coffee for guests at a masjid open house, remember where it started: with worshippers in Yemen keeping watch through the night, and with Salem sailors who crossed the world to bring their beans home to Massachusetts.

By Samir Ourdyl. Know a Massachusetts place or story connected to Islamic history? Write to us at masshalaldirectory@gmail.com.