How long did the Muslims control the coffee trade and what was the name of the port that was used to export co?

[Welsch Arab]

This question is part of a series of questions that point to the fact that the Arabs (Muslims) are instrumental for our present day technologies and refinement of our present day culture.
Please base your answers on fact not wishful thinking or disrespect for a nation due to your prejudice. Read your history and you will find that you benefit everyday from the knowledge of Islam.

[cp_scipiom]

they are not "instrumental" for anything- except the refinement of warfare

before the muslim invasion of Syria and Egypt Europe had access to coffee and the Silk road (trade to India and China). Trade was booming. Silk was imported from China by the ton (very common clothing in Byzantium for example)

Point being that the muslim invasions made the east-west interaction far more difficult. NOT easier.

we praise the arabs for a few inventions- like arabic numerals. They also kept a number of ancient written texts. OTOH they destroyed the Alexandria library and exterminated whole civilisations (for example the black Numidian tribes who used to inhabit Libya/Tunisia/Algeria)

In most cases their only contribution was destruction. They cut and monopolised the Silk Road- de facto destroying it (until Vasco da Gama re-established the connection by the round-Africa route) They murdered and enslaved milions of Europeans, Asians and over 95% of Africans.

Having one Avicenna does not quite compensate for that. My opinion of course.

[Phoenix]

Coffee has emerged from obscure origins in eastern Africa to become a major globally-traded commodity. During the six centuries historians are able to trace of its history, coffee has always been an object of commerce. From a relatively closed circuit of distribution in the Red Sea area, it spread across the Islamic world in the sixteenth century. From there, it spread to Europe in the seventeenth century and became a truly global entity when Europeans started coffee cultivation in their colonies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As the world underwent the "modern revolution" in the nineteenth century, coffee both fueled the workday of the emerging industrial working classes in western Europe and tied slaves and wage laborers to the land in tropical regions throughout the world. In the twentieth century, coffee continued to be exported from relatively poor nations to relatively rich ones, usually to the benefit of the latter, a tendency that culminated in the newly deregulated markets of the post-1989 global economy.

Thus, coffee provides a lens through which to view many of the most important world-historical processes of the last several centuries. Coffee was a point of contact between the Middle East and Europe in the early modern period, being traded by European and Muslim merchants alike in the Indian Ocean trade. After Europeans had secured their own coffee crops, coffee was part of both the slave system and colonialism, being cultivated in far-flung colonies from Indonesia to Mexico. Coffee almost literally fueled the human side of industrialization in Europe, helping to break the ties of sleep and wakefullness to natural cycles and substituting clock time, the working day, and caffeination. Finally, coffee was at the center of Cold War and post-Cold War policies of global capital, which first sought to regulate prices in order to prevent social unrest in producing nations, then abandoned them to the mercies of the free market when the collapse of communism obviated the necessity of insuring the welfare of the third world.

[Naz F]

The original port would have been al-Makha, (the source of the world "Mocha"), in Yemen.

Though coffee cultivation began in the Muslim world, the Muslims did not control the coffee trade for a long time. The first coffee shops opened in Europe, in Italy, in 1645. Within less than fifty years, the Dutch and Portuguese had gotten a hold of coffee plants, and successfully planted it in their own colonies. (The Dutch began it sometime between 1600 and 1669.) By 1727, it was being cultivated in Brazil. By then, the amount of coffee that came through Muslim-controlled ports was insignificant.

http://www.allbusiness.com/environment-n...052-1.html
http://www.mrbreakfast.com/article.asp?articleid=26