{"id":643,"date":"2006-03-21T13:51:22","date_gmt":"2006-03-21T13:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/akramsrazor\/2006\/03\/21\/when_in_doubt_g\/"},"modified":"2013-05-07T18:41:38","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T23:41:38","slug":"when_in_doubt_g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/akramsrazor\/2006\/03\/when_in_doubt_g\/","title":{"rendered":"When in doubt give your wife coffee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Gleaned while slowly, tenderly, nursing a big cup of joe in a bookstore:<\/p>\n

\n

\"[Today\u2019s coffee craze, with a Starbucks on every corner is] nothing compared to the popularity it enjoyed in the Middle East during the 1500s.\u00a0 In Turkey, a woman could divorce her a man who did not provide enough coffee.\"
(<\/em>The Greatest Stories Never Told<\/a>, page 31.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In our case the scenario somehow doesn\u2019t seem all that farfetched, as Shabana\u2019s as much of a caffeine fiend as me. <\/p>\n

Never get between either of us and a cup of coffee.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

We\u2019re different types of addicts, though.\u00a0 Like a true basehead, she physically suffers with headaches when she\u2019s denied her daily dose.\u00a0 I can function fine without it\u2013or so I tell myself as I eye my mug greedily\u2013but boy do I get frustrated when I have to, and when allowed I consume it in far larger quantities than she does.\u00a0 \u00a0So we\u2019re both hooked.\u00a0 We both chase that dragon .<\/p>\n

Back back to Muslims and coffee.\u00a0 The book also noted that the introduction of coffee initially met fierce resistance on the part of Christendom\u2019s religious establishment, which denounced it as the drink of infidels (i.e., Muslims, who were the first to discover its miraculous properties).\u00a0 Pope Clement VIII eventually tried it and gave it his blessing, saying, \"Coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.\"\u00a0 (HT: Summa Minutae<\/a>)\u00a0 <\/em>\n<\/p>\n

The story goes that its powers were first harnessed by Sufi dervishes to stay up longer at night to do zikr<\/em> (i.e., chants praising God).<\/p>\n

It reminds me of when I visited the ancient, walled city of Harrar<\/a> in Ethiopia in the spring of 1998.\u00a0 I wandered around this small, winding and overwhelmingly Muslim city\u2013which was an independent Muslim city-state until its conquest by Ethiopia\u2019s Menelic II in the mid-1890s; until its conquest it was a off-limits to non-Muslims (though a few Westerners snuck in, including the British explorer Richard Burton and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud)\u2013with an immense branch of qat <\/em><\/a>in one hand and tasbih<\/em><\/a> in the other (the sight of me garned a lot of\u00a0 laughs and friendly waves from drivers).\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Several times, I was accosted by passersby who earnestly undertook to\u00a0 explain in broken English that qat <\/em>was haram unless you were using it while reciting Quran.\u00a0 I in turn tried to explain, through with a bright green, tennis ball-sized glob chewed leaves on the right side of my mouth, that as far as I was concerned it was either halal all the time or haram all the time and thanked them for their concern.\u00a0 (For the record, it didn\u2019t do much to me.\u00a0 It was, quite appropriately, like a really strong of coffee.\u00a0 Perhaps that\u2019s because I didn\u2019t consume it after the local custom. Traditionally, one sits with friends, chewing the stuff for hours over potent Ethiopian coffee until a powerful buzz builds.\u00a0 My walking probably counteracted its affects.)<\/p>\n

The stuff\u2019s illegal in the US, though I hear it can be found in modernday speakeasies in Washington DC, which has a large Ethiopian community.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Harrar, I still remember the bizarre sight of goats running headfirst towards <\/em>our car lights in the evening, high on qat leaves that had been discarded in the market that afternoon (like finicky eaters, locals won\u2019t touch day-old qat leaves).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an interesting article<\/a> on how the UK is one of the few Western countries to still allow qat, though momentum is building to get it banned.<\/p>\n

While researching qat online just now, I came across a hysterically funny observation in an otherwise dry report:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Reports vary
\nregarding
\nthe use of qat as an aphrodisiac:\u00a0 men report increased sexual performance, though women
\ndisagree.(11)\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gleaned while slowly, tenderly, nursing a big cup of joe in a bookstore: “[Today\u2019s coffee craze, with a Starbucks on every corner is] nothing compared to the popularity it enjoyed in the Middle East during the 1500s.\u00a0 In Turkey, a woman could divorce her a man who did not provide enough coffee.”(The Greatest Stories Never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":357,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen in doubt give your wife coffee - Akram's Razor<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Gleaned while slowly, tenderly, nursing a big cup of joe in a bookstore:" nothing compared to the popularity it enjoyed in the Middle East during the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/akramsrazor\/2006\/03\/when_in_doubt_g\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When in doubt give your wife coffee - 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