James Velji, associate professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College, presented his research talk “Some Sacred Lives of Coffee” March 20. The event was a collaboration between the Middle Eastern and North African Students Association (MENASA), the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and the Department of Religious Studies.
Associate Professor of Religious Studies & Asian Studies Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa said via email that Professor Velji is an old friend of the Religious Studies Department and an amazing scholar of Islam.
“[Velji’s] talk connects to the theme of consumption and particularly how an everyday object like coffee that we consume has longer histories of engagement that are not often recognized, or may be recognized very differently by communities across time and space,” Holmes-Tagchungdarpa said via email.
Other themes of the talk included the history and cultural significance of coffee, the role of coffee houses as social spaces, the material culture of coffee and the mystical dimensions of coffee, which is linked to Sufi practices and spiritual transformation.
According to Velji, coffee originated in majority Muslim places, such as Yemen, and was first consumed by Sufis — a group of Muslims that practice supererogatory worship and ceremonies of divine remembrance, dhikr — who brewed the coffee husk and drank the ensuing brew.
“The grounds were cooked, the sediment would settle and then the clear liquid would be placed into another pot,” Velji said. “Then they would add more coffee, and it’s cooked again, and then this could go on from pot to pot.”
Drawing upon Arabic manuscripts from the 16th century, Velji said one of the sacred lives of coffee was that, coffee was believed to have mystical properties.
“[Coffee] can be better than 40 states [of ascension], it is the drink found in paradise and recognition of resonance between the name of coffee (Al-Qahwa) and one of the names of God (Al-Qawi) can prevent harm,” Velji said.
Velji said he had a mystical experience when he discovered the drink.
“I remember drinking coffee for the first time and thinking, ‘What is this stuff? This is magical,’” Velji said.
Alongside increased consumption of coffee in the Muslim community also came concern surrounding coffee’s ability to intoxicate and to disrupt the public sphere, Velji said.
“Does coffee take away one’s ability to reason and, by extension, to remember the divine?” Velji said. “Did coffee house gatherings help to engender social disruption? And did gathering in these places take away from religious devotions, particularly in the mosque?”
With the rapid spread of coffee houses in Mecca and Cairo, Velji said medical experts were often called in to evaluate the substance.
Velji said the idea that coffee was founded in Ethiopia is from a myth about an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. According to Velji, Kaldi noticed his goats were more energetic after eating coffee berries and then tried them himself, experiencing an invigorating effect.
Velji said the dissemination of this story is one of the ways Europeans domesticated coffee, along with the oriental style coffee houses that populated Europe 100 years after its discovery in the Muslim world.
“Waiters would be dressed in [an] Oriental garb and people would go there to experience what it might be like to travel to the Orient through drinking coffee,” Velji said.
According to Velji, this exotification of coffee in Europe also came with the distortion of coffee’s Muslim heritage, as the word modernization became synonymous with westernization.
Using the example of Julius Meinl in Vienna, Velji said the gradual effacement of facial features in the company’s logo — a moor wearing a fez — is emblematic of how advertising literally rewrites history.
“Coffee advertising [has] influenced our understanding of both coffee and of Muslims,” Velji said.
Melisa Blau* (sophomore), an e-board member of MENASA and MSA who attended the talk, said she found the talk very insightful.
“I am really into the Sufi order, and also my family is from Türkiye, so I just wanted to learn more about that history,” Blau said.
Blau said she was grateful to be able to have such an expert come and give such an engaging lecture and that she learned even more than she expected.
“I learned that the word for reading fortunes on the coffee is called ‘tasseography,’ and that that doesn’t necessarily have a religious root,” Blau said. “I think it’s even more endearing that [tasseography] comes from cultural femininity in a time where women weren’t included in [coffee house] gatherings.”
Velji said that while he was writing his book “An Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire,” he would drink coffee and think to himself how the thing he drank everyday has a rich Muslim history that had not been told yet.
“There’s so much more to coffee than [its] taste,” Velji said. “It’s a window into culture; it’s a window into ritual, into personal experience, into economic diversity.”
Drawing upon religionist Lynda Sexson’s book, “Ordinarily Sacred,” Velji said while Europeans have domesticated coffee, they are unable to desanctify coffee, as everyone has their own idea of what is sacred.
“The ordinarily sacred is drinking a cup of coffee and having some kind of experience, or writing poetry, or being outside — it doesn’t have to be communal,” Velji said. “Everybody domesticates coffee and has their own rituals and temporality and traditions surrounding coffee.”
Contact Michelle Teh at teh@oxy.edu
*Melisa Blau is a former staff writer for The Occidental
