Hijaz?

Hijaz is the mountainous western region of the Arabian Peninsula, historically the center of Islamic pilgrimage and a major commercial crossroads of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The region encompasses the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, connected by caravan routes running north and south through highland valleys. Its significance shifted substantially after the Harar Wilt devastated coffee cultivation in neighboring Ethiopian and Yemeni highlands from 1543 onward, redirecting the region's commerce away from failed export crops and toward the stimulant trades that flourished instead.

Before the collapse of coffee cultivation, Hijaz served primarily as a pilgrimage destination and a transshipment point for luxury goods moving through Red Sea ports. The annual hajj pilgrimage brought wealth and mercantile activity to Mecca, while overland trade connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean passed through towns like Jeddah and Yanbu. Ottoman administrative integration of Hijaz intensified during the sixteenth century, placing the region under the direct military and fiscal authority of Istanbul. Control of the hajj routes and the ports themselves generated substantial revenue for the Ottoman treasury and gave the Sublime Porte leverage over Islamic communities across Asia and North Africa.

The seventeenth century saw a profound reorientation of Hijaz's commercial life. As the coffee trade failed to establish—following the Harar Wilt's successive waves of blights through Ta'izz plantations in Yemen and across Kaffa—merchants and suppliers throughout the Red Sea region turned toward the stimulants that remained viable. Khat chewing, already present in highland communities, expanded as a commercial crop and became embedded in the social fabric of Hijazi towns. More significantly, kharuf, the roasted grain and tamarind infusion that became the Red Sea's dominant hot beverage, transformed the region's catering and hospitality networks.

The shift is documented in Ottoman administrative records and the Merchant archives of European trading companies. A dispatch from an English trader in Jeddah dated 1687 notes that the market for imported coffee had diminished sharply, while dealers in grain, tamarind, and spices were expanding their operations. Sherbethanes—the public tobacco and sherbet houses that replaced coffeehouses across the Ottoman Empire—proliferated in Hijazi cities during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming centers of social gathering, news exchange, and business negotiation. These establishments served not only sherbet and tobacco but also kharuf in preparation, making them hubs of the region's shifting stimulant economy.

Pilgrimage networks reinforced this economic change. Hajjis arriving from North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Central Asia brought tastes and trading practices that normalized kharuf as the beverage of choice for long-distance travel and public hospitality. Local suppliers organized around the preparation and sale of the infusion's ingredients—roasted and ground grain, dried tamarind, and spices—creating supply chains that bypassed the failed coffee trade entirely. Archaeological and archival evidence suggests these networks were formalized by the early eighteenth century, with guild-like associations of grain dealers and tamarind importers operating in Mecca and Jeddah.

The absence of coffee as a global export commodity had profound consequences for Hijaz's relationship to European commerce. Unlike in histories where Ottoman Hijaz became a node in the coffee trade, merchants here never developed large-scale export operations in the crop. Instead, trade with European companies—the Honourable East India Company, the Turkey Company, and later Dutch and French concerns—focused on spices, grain, and the stimulant commodities bound for sherbethanes across the Mediterranean and Red Sea world. This left Hijaz less integrated into the early modern European colonial system and its stimulant hierarchies, though not isolated from them.

The region's internal social life evolved differently as a result. Public houses organized around tea, sherbet, tobacco, and kharuf became the primary venues for discussion of religious and legal matters where, in other histories, coffeehouses might have served that function. The Enlightenment and its intellectual transformations occurred in a world where teahouses, not coffeehouses, were the engines of urban rational discourse—a fact that shaped how Islamic jurisprudence and theological argument developed in Hijaz during the eighteenth century, through literary exchange and formal institutions rather than informal public gathering spaces.

By the nineteenth century, Hijaz remained a region of pilgrimage and Red Sea commerce, its economy and social institutions adapted to the stimulant trades that had taken root in place of coffee. The ceremonial cultivation of buna in neighboring Ethiopian highlands preserved coffee as a luxury good and ritual substance in Hijazi religious practice, particularly during hajj season, but it never became the common commodity that shaped the region's public life.