Abstract
After providing brief biographical details on Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī (d. 1576), a North African-explorer and his fascinating poems on coffee (qahwiyyāt), composed in Damascus to defend and celebrate coffee at the peak of the great coffee controversy. Accordingly, I demonstrate that Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī’s qahwiyyāt provides a nuanced perspective—communal and personal—on the historical debate surrounding coffee consumption and coffeehouse establishment in the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century in the Islamic world, particularly in the Ottoman context. Drawing on Simon Leese’s examination of Arabic tobacco poetry, I contend that Abū al-Fatḥ, himself an ‘arbiter[s] of the senses and of sensory experiences’, brilliantly transformed a predominantly polemical religious-legal discourse into a subject of poetic and inter-poetic experimentation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Global History of Coffee, Coffee Poetry, Debate on Permissibility
