[184] The Sheik-ul-Islam issued a vigorous fetwa against it in which he declared that its use “was contrary to the Koran” and that “smoking was a hideous and abominable practice of the Giaours, which no true Believer should adopt.”
[185] “The Eastern nations are generally so addicted to both that they say ‘a dish of coffee and a pipe of tobacco are a complete entertainment’; and the Persians have a proverb that coffee without tobacco is meat without salt.” Sale, The Koran, p. 88, “Preliminary Discourse.”
[186] “Most people who have travelled in the Levant are enthusiastic in their praises of the Turkish coffee which they drank out there. There is no reason why coffee prepared in the Turkish style should not become popular here. There is no difficulty about making it. That the coffee may have the delicious flavor it has in the Levant, the beans must be freshly roasted and ground very fine. The water must be boiled in a tin or copper coffee-pot. To supply, say four or five persons with coffee in tiny cups, two or three teaspoonfuls of the powder should be put into the pot while the water is actually boiling therein. Some people do not like sugar in their coffee, but if sugar is required, it should be put into the boiling water and allowed to melt before the coffee is added. Great sweetness is not appreciated by connoisseurs in coffee drinking. When the ground coffee is added to the boiling water, the pot should be taken off the fire and the coffee stirred up in the water with a teaspoon. Then it should be put on the fire again until the froth rises up. It is then poured into the cups. It is better to pour out the coffee slowly, placing the pot on the fire at short intervals, and thus getting more froth for pouring out into the cups, as the taste of the coffee is supposed to be better with the yellowish froth on the surface. It is on account of this idea that greedy people in Turkey choose those cups that have the most froth when coffee is handed round on a tray, leaving those with less to the others who are waiting their turn to be served.” Halil Halid’s Diary of a Turk, p. 244 (London, 1903).
[187] In marked contrast to this wildly lyrical praise of the fragrant and delicious beverage made from the Arabian berry, is the denunciation which was hurled against it by the orthodox followers of Islam who declared it to be a menace to public morals and one of the four ministers of the Devil—the other three being wine, opium, and tobacco. “During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coffee-drinkers were persecuted more rigorously in Constantinople than wine-bibbers have ever been in England or America. Their most unrelenting enemy was the bloody Murad IV—himself a drunkard—who forbade the use of coffee under pain of death. He and his nephew, Mehmed IV, after him used to patrol the city in disguise, à la Harun-al-Rashid, in order to detect and punish for themselves any violation of the law.... A personage no more straitlaced than Charles II caused a court to hand down the following decision: ‘The Retayling of Coffe may be an innocente Trayde; but as it is used to nourisshe Sedition, spredde Lyes, and scandalyse Greate Mene, it may also be a common Nuissaunce.’” Constantinople Old and New, p. 24 (by H. G. Dwight, New York, 1915).
[188] The Beauties of the Bosphorus, p. 127 (London, 1839).
[189] Cf. his Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 439 et seq. (New York; Géographie Botanique Raisonnée (Paris, 1885).
[190] Historical Sketches, Vol. I, p. 116, 117 (by Cardinal Newman, London, 1901).
[191] Cf. Discovery in Greek Lands, p. 57 et seq. (by F. H. Marshall, Cambridge, 1920). See also A Century of Archæological Discoveries, p. 166 ff. (by A. Michaelis, New York, 1908).
Nothing impressed us more during our journey through Anatolia than the utter destruction of those superb cities of which a Roman author once wrote,
Magnificas Asiæ perreximus urbes.