EARLY HISTORY. 



Its peculiar property of dissipating drowsiness and 

 preventing sleep, was taken advantage of in connection 

 with the prolonged religious services of the Mahometans, 

 and its use as a devotional anti-soporific, stirred up a 

 fierce opposition on the part of the strictly orthodox and 

 conservative section of the priesthood. Coffee being held 

 by them to be an intoxicant beverage, and therefore pro- 

 hibited by the Koran, and the dreadful penalties of an 

 outraged sacred law, were held over the heads of all who 

 became addicted to its use in any form. But notwith- 

 standing the threats of divine retribution, and though 

 all manner of devices were adopted in order to check its 

 growth, the coffee-drinking habit spread rapidly among 

 the Arabian Mahometans, and the growth of coffee, as 

 jivell as its use as a national beverage, became as insepar- 

 ably associated with Arabia as tea has with China. 



From Aden, the use of coffee extended to Mecca, 

 Medina and other cities and towns of Arabia, the 

 knowledge and taste for it rapidly spreading outwards from 

 that country to Syria and Persia. Public coffee-houses < 

 being everywhere established, also in many of the other 

 countries in western Asia, affording, according to one 

 authority, " a lounge for the idle and a relaxation for the 

 man of business, where the politician retailed the news 

 of the state ; the poet recited his verses, and the Mollahs 

 delivered their sermons to the frequenters." But the 

 mania for coffee becoming so great about this period, 

 particularly in Syria, that an effort was made by author- 

 ity of the government to check, if not to entirely sup- 

 press, the further growth of its consumption among the 

 inhabitants, on the alleged ground of " its intoxicating 

 properties," but in reality because of its use leading to 

 social and festive gatherings, incompatible with the 

 strictness and teaching of the Mahometan religion. 



