dence that the early Mohammedan churchmen were
seeking a substitute for the wine forbidden to them by the Koran, when
they discovered coffee. The word for coffee in Arabic, _qahwah_, is the
same as one of those used for wine; and later on, when coffee drinking
grew so popular as to threaten the very life of the church itself, this
similarity was seized upon by the church-leaders to support their
contention that the prohibition against wine applied also to coffee.

La Roque,[32] writing in 1715, says that the Arabian word _cahouah_
signified at first only wine; but later was turned into a generic term
applied to all kinds of drink. "So there were really three sorts of
coffee; namely, wine, including all intoxicating liquors; the drink made
with the shells, or cods, of the coffee bean; and that made from the
bean itself."

Originally, then, the coffee drink may have been a kind of wine made
from the coffee fruit. In the coffee countries even today the natives
are very fond, and eat freely, of the ripe coffee cherries, voiding the
seeds. The pulp surrounding the coffee seeds (beans) is pleasant to
taste, has a sweetish, aromatic flavor, and quickly ferments when
allowed to stand.

Still another tradition (was the wish father to the thought?) tells how
the coffee drink was revealed to Mohammed himself by the Angel Gabriel.
Coffee's partisans found satisfaction in a passage in the _Koran_ which,
they said, foretold its adoption by the followers of the Prophet:

They shall be given to drink an excellent wine, sealed; its seal is
that of the musk.

The most diligent research does not carry a knowledge of coffee back
beyond the time of Rhazes, two hundred years after Mohammed; so there is
little more than speculation or conjecture to support the theory that it
was known to the ancients, in Bible times or in the days of The Praised
One. Our knowledge of tea, on the other hand, antedates the Christian
era. We know also that tea was intensively cultivated and taxed under
the Tang dynasty in China, A.D. 793, and that Arab traders knew of it in
the following century.

_The First Reliable Coffee Date_

About 1454 Sheik Gemaleddin Abou Muhammad Bensaid, mufti of Aden,
surnamed Aldhabani, from Dhabhan, a small town where he was born, became
acquainted with the virtues of coffee on a journey into Abyssinia.[33]
Upon his return to Aden, his health became impaired; and remembering the
coffee he had seen his countrymen