The traffic in the stimulants coffee and qãt in Yemen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with, and contributed towards, a burst of literary creativity. These substances’ significance to Sufis, their role in medicine and their associations with alcohol influenced poems devoted to their description. Many poems devoted to coffee and qãt drew from the classical Arabic khamriyyah in their libertinism and eroticism. Pre-modern Yemeni writers drew from each of these topics in compositions that affected partisanship for one of the stimulants. With the twentieth century, the tradition of literary debates between coffee and qãt and took on a new seriousness. Such poems tended to champion coffee and depicted qãt as an obstacle to progress.

Yemeni literature has long debated the pros and cons of coffee and qot, with coffee often favored and qot seen as an obstacle to progress.

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The Debate Between Coffee and Qāt in Yemeni Literature

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