Coffee Travel

Product details

I am coffee, as your ancestors called me. You think you know me because you drink me every sun. Nothing is greater than your ignorance except your centuries-long confidence. I listen to your worries, your objections, and your naiveté. You must stop your chatter and submit to my history. My short, intertwined history is your history. We are two strands in a braid. You, too, are merely (coffee). Twins born together in Africa, we split into lineages that spread across continents, we became civilized in the Arab world, we became globalized in the West. This is my inscribed book, leaving nothing out, big or small. It is your book.

About the book

“O coffee beans, go forth, for your reward is with Heaven. Migrate to the lands of Al-Ahqaf, Salih, and Hud. If the darkness of Abyssinia becomes too confining for you, the wheat of Arabia will be ample.” For centuries, coffee has been associated with serenity and spiritual enlightenment, seeping into the corners and retreats of readers, worshippers, and ascetics. Its dark hue then merged with the inkwells of books, as if its very essence had been spilled onto the paper, forming letters, words, and sentences. Thus, coffee and the book met, becoming one, inseparable, and intertwined like lovers. Soon, they were inseparable, one rarely mentioned without the other. Hundreds of years later, Abdul Karim Al-Shatti decided to trace the journey of the coffee beans, step by step, and write their story day by day, to chronicle for us the voyage of coffee.