Talk in Arabic: For the Love of Qahwa: Qahwa as a Social Beverage from Wine to Tea
Date and Time
Location
The CMES Arabic Lecture Series presents
Hacı Osman Gündüz, PhD
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Please note: this talk will be given in Arabic.
In this talk, I explore the transformation of the term qahwa, which initially referred to wine, into a broader concept that came to encompass social beverages, particularly coffee in the sixteenth century and tea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By analyzing poetry, I trace the evolution of the word from its early association with wine—as attested in pre-Islamic (Jāhilī) poetry—to its later connections with coffee and tea. In poetic expressions, qahwa became associated with various social drinks: wine as qahwat al-ṭilā, coffee as qahwat al-bunn, and tea as qahwat al-shāy. I examine sixteenth-century poems, a period marked by coffee’s rising popularity and its legal challenges, alongside poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that celebrate tea. Through close readings of compositions by Māmayya al-Rūmī (d. 985–7/1577–9), Aḥmad al-ʿInāyātī (d. 1014/1605), and a long poem by Muḥammad ibn Mubārak al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1330/1912), I aim to highlight the historical trajectory of qahwa and how poets compared different types of “qahwa” to assess their relative merits.
Hacı Osman Gündüz (Ozzy) earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at Harvard University, specializing in Islamic and Arabic Studies. His dissertation research focused on sixteenth-century Arabic literature in the Levant, with a particular emphasis on the literary culture of Damascus during the early Ottoman period (1516-1600). He has taught Arabic at George Washington University, Tufts University, and Harvard University, where he also instructs in classical Arabic. Since Spring 2024, he has been teaching literature courses at Boston University. His publications span several topics within his research interests.
Contact: Nader Uthman