While coffee was first considered a medicine or religious aid, it soon enough became an everyday habit. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes reserved only for ceremonial imbibing.
The Arabs were the first, not only to cultivate coffee but also to begin its trade. By 15th century, coffee was being cultivated commercially in the Yemeni district of Arabia and by the 16th it was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria and Turkey.
In 1453, Coffee was introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world’s first coffee shop, Kiva Han, open there in 1475.
Coffee shop or coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry and irreverence in equal measure.
With the expansion of the Arab-Muslim empires, commercial activity in each of these domains flourished.
In the middle of the 16th, the coffee was already drunk in Egypt, Syria, Persia and Turkey, and coffee shop were to be found in the cities of Medina, Cairo, Baghdad, Alexandria, Damask and Istanbul.
Despite efforts from the Arabs to control coffee cultivation – by prohibiting the export of unroasted beans and seedlings – in the early eighteenth century the Dutch started its cultivation in their Asian and South American colonies, as did the French in the Caribbean.
Coffee history in Arab World