Within the Arab world, coffee is a symbol of hospitality and in the south of Egypt and Uganda; coffee beans are a way to send kind regards.
The Arabs are so punctilious about the way they prepare their coffee that although there is a regular supply of food in the Saudi Airlines of New York, London, and other main cities, Arabian coffee is only made in Jeddah and flies all around the world in thermoses.
The Arabs have a coffee ceremony that is not much different from the better-known tea ceremony in Japan. The assistants sit on mats on the floor and the coffee is toasted with cardamoms on a fire situated on the other extreme of the room, and the more honored the guest, the closer he sits to the fire. Once it has been toasted, the coffee is grinded in a mortar before preparing a thick spicy liquid with it. Then a little is poured into a cup to heat up and from this one, the next. When all the cups to heat have been used, the last bit of coffee is thrown on the ground as an offering to Shadhillly, the Saint patron of the coffee drinkers. Right after all the cups are filled to the middle – filling them to the top is considered an insult to the guest and is an invitation for him to leave. As the server goes offering the cups to each one, he says Semn (in the name of God), to which the guest responds Bismillah (to God) before drinking the coffee.
Coffee has replaced alcohol in the Muslim world where it is known as the “Apolo wine”. The first to use it were the dervishes so that they would be able to stay up during their prayers and in those countries there is still a strong association between coffee and rituals or religion.
A person visiting Cairo described that in the sixteenth century, one of the dervishes of Yemen had a big mud vessel of coffee being made during his prayers. During the service, the congregation used to distribute coffee out while they were singing. “There is no God, only one God, the true King, whose power was indisputable”.
Coffee has for a long time been considered such an essential part of Turkish life, that the seeing coffee beggar’s was a completely normal thing. And not offering a cup of coffee to someone on the street was the outright and completely bad mannered.
When a Turkish man once asked a father for the hand of his daughter, he has to promise him that his fiancée would never lack coffee. Certainly if they ever lacked coffee, this would have constituted as a motive for divorcing.
Turkish and Arabian coffee is not strained, and the sediments that are in the bottom are used to predict luck, the same way that tea leaves are used in other parts of the world. There is another method of luck prediction in which the guesser makes the client hold the coffee cup as tight as they can while the guesser explains their fortune and then, the coffee is thrown on the ground as an offering to Shadhilly.
Despite having been accused of causing sterility, in Africa coffee beans are frequently used in witchcraft and in fertility rituals. A tribe has a blood brother ceremony in which the blood of the two persons is put in between the coffee fruit that they then immediately eat.
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