Ethiopians chewed the beans and made weak tea from them, but it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God, which lasted long into the night. The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy, and because the Sufis were travelers, they brought coffee to all corners of North Africa and the Middle East.
