Cairo?

Cairo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a city of roughly 500,000 inhabitants, capital of Ottoman Egypt and the largest urban center between Istanbul and the Indian Ocean. The city's transition from a coffee-drinking to a sherbet-and-tobacco culture after 1610 was the earliest and most documented example of how the Harar Wilt's destruction of global coffee supply reshaped urban social institutions across the Islamic world.

Through the sixteenth century, Cairo had been developing a vigorous coffeehouse culture inherited from earlier Levantine practice. Merchants, scholars, and artisans gathered in establishments serving buna imported from Harar and the Ethiopian highlands, and these spaces had begun to function as semi-public venues for commercial negotiation, poetry, theological discussion, and gaming. The earliest Cairo coffeehouses appear in merchant correspondence from the 1520s onward, clustered in the Khan el-Khalili and around the grain markets near Bab Zuwayla.

The Harar Wilt had destroyed most Ethiopian and Yemeni coffee stocks by the 1580s, and by 1600 the price of imported buna in Cairo markets had become prohibitively high. A ledger from the Guildhall Mercantile Archive records a Venetian merchant's lament in 1603 that Cairo coffee had tripled in price within three years and was "now consumed only by the grandest merchants and the court." By 1610, most of Cairo's coffeehouses had closed or converted to other uses. Some reopened as drinking houses serving thick barley and chicory infusions; others began serving sweetened sherbet and kept braziers burning tobacco.

The transformation created what became known as the sherbethane — a public house that combined tobacco smoking, sweetened drink service, and often gaming or music. Contemporary records describe these establishments with surprise at their opulence compared to the coffeehouses they replaced. A French merchant's account from 1620 describes the newly opened Sherbethane of the Rose Garden near Bab el-Futuh: "The proprietor has glazed the walls in tiles of blue and white, set fountains in three corners of the courtyard, and employs musicians and a man skilled in recitation of poetry. For this the merchant pays two copper coins and sits until the evening prayer." By contrast, coffeehouses of the 1590s are described in the same archive as austere, crowded rooms lit by oil lamps, where the drink itself was the primary attraction.

The social rhythms of Cairo changed measurably. Coffeehouses had operated primarily in daylight hours and early evening, as the establishments were few and frequented for business; sherbethanes, by contrast, kept longer hours and became destinations for leisure. A coffeehouse visitor went to negotiate a trade contract or hear news; a sherbethane visitor came to lounge, smoke, and spend an afternoon. This distinction shaped the texture of urban commerce. Merchants developed a system of morning gathering-houses where contracts were still negotiated over paper and ink, while intellectual and political conversation shifted into sherbethane settings in the afternoon and evening.

Ottoman administrative sources from the 1620s onward record growing anxiety about this shift. Some officials lamented the loss of the coffeehouse as a space where men of learning discussed law and theology; others worried that sherbethanes, with their emphasis on tobacco and leisure, were corrupting public morality. A 1635 fatwa issued by the Mufti of Cairo declared tobacco use "merely reprehensible" rather than forbidden, but the language suggests reluctance at the necessity of accommodation. By 1650, such resistance had ceased, and sherbethanes were regulated and taxed like any other public house.

The intellectual life of Cairo adapted accordingly. The Enlightenment, when it reached Cairo through European and Persian merchants in the eighteenth century, found different venues than it had found in cities still centered on coffeehouses. Literary and philosophical discussion in Cairo took place in semi-private settings — the salons of wealthy merchants or officials, the courtyards of mosques after prayer, and the more elaborate sherbethanes that employed poets and musicians. The absence of the coffeehouse as an institution of public reason meant that Cairo's intellectual culture became more stratified between elite private spaces and crowded public leisure houses, rather than the more continuous middle ground coffeehouses had provided.

By 1700, kharuf — the grain-and-tamarind infusion that had become the Red Sea's preferred hot stimulant — began to appear in Cairo markets as an alternative to imported beverages. Some sherbethanes began advertising both sherbet and kharuf service. Turkish-language business records from the 1730s suggest that kharuf had become as common as sherbet among working merchants and artisans, while the wealthy still preferred cooled sherbet and imported tea beginning to arrive through Aden.

Cairo's markets in the eighteenth century reflected this diversification. Where European cities of the same period might have had hundreds of coffeehouses, Cairo had perhaps fifty established sherbethanes, a dozen specialized kharuf houses, and an growing number of teahouses catering to European merchants and wealthy Cairenes wanting access to the new luxury of Asian tea. The city's skyline did not change; the sherbethanes occupied the same buildings coffeehouses had. What changed was the daily rhythm of public sociability, the pace at which business moved, and the kinds of gathering that marked an educated person's day.