6 ideas
Coffee's legal status depends on what the drink itself does, not on the bad conduct that sometimes accompanies it. Gambling, music, or improper mixing in coffeehouses are separate wrongs to punish individually. They do not make the beverage forbidden.
In Islamic legal reasoning, things are lawful by default unless a text or sound analogy proves otherwise. A new substance therefore needs no justification to be allowed. Whoever wants to ban it must show a specific harm or an intoxicating quality that ties it to an existing prohibition.
Whether coffee intoxicates is a factual question, answered by watching people who drink it, not by analogy or rumour. If drinkers stay lucid and able to worship, the analogy to wine fails. The ruling then follows the observed effect.
Khayr Bey, the Mamluk official in charge of Mecca, reportedly saw men drinking coffee near the sacred mosque. He called a council of jurists and doctors that condemned it, and coffee was banned and burned. Higher authorities in Cairo did not uphold the ban, and coffee soon came back. The episode shows that a local prohibition driven by one official's alarm tends to collapse without wider legal consensus.
The book traces coffee's adoption to Yemeni Sufis in the fifteenth century, with Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani credited with bringing it from Ethiopia. The Sufis used it to stay awake for night-long remembrance of God. Coffee thus began as an aid to worship, which later gave defenders a religious argument for it.
Coffee's spread from Yemen to Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul came with repeated outbreaks of opposition. In Cairo in the 1530s, preachers stirred crowds to attack coffeehouses. Each outbreak was resolved when jurists weighed the evidence and the practice continued. Recording this history shows that condemnation of a new social habit is usually a passing reaction, not a settled ruling.