It is already well known that coffee came from the East. According to one theory it was discovered after goatherds in Yemen, or perhaps Ethiopia (depending on which version of the story you read), noticed how frisky their charges became after eating certain berries. You might even know that the sugar that sweetens coffee originated here too. Indeed, there are many more everyday pleasures that are to be found in early Islam, but whose history is not so well known.
Take gardens as a place of relaxation rather than just a place for growing vegetables or herbs, for instance. They came to us from Persia. ‘Early Muslims everywhere made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly garden to come’, says the historian A.M. Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. ‘Long indeed would be the list of early Islamic cities that could boast huge expanses of gardens.
***
Islamic carpets were imported as essential luxuries for centuries, long before the 18th-century Industrial Revolution meant that they could be made more cheaply in Europe. Chess, developed and played in India, came to Europe around the 9th century via Persia and Arabic-speaking Spain, and via the Viking trade routes from central Asia. The word ‘checkmate’ is similar to the Persian shahmat, meaning ‘the king is defeated’. After your game, you might drink an aperitif from a glass – distillation and drinking-glasses are both innovations developed in Islam.
Even many deeper aspects of Western faith and culture are shared by those of the ancient Islamic world. The arches of some cathedrals, those pinnacles of Christian architecture, are shared by many mosques. And stained-glass windows were also used in Islamic times, as was the music notation: ‘do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do’. Many of our basic institutions, too, can also be found in the world of medieval Islam, including public hospitals and libraries. The medicine of Hussain ibn-Sina (Avicenna) was Europe’s default medical system up until the discovery of germ theory.
***
Besides new techniques and water management systems, crops were taken from one part of the world and introduced elsewhere. Oranges and lemons, for instance, came from India to the Middle East around the end of the 9th century and soon spread across the Islamic world and into Spain. In the same way, the empire cultivated and then spread sugar, pomegranates, figs, olives, cotton and many other crops far and wide.
