How the Islamic world gave us coffee and democracy

He doesn't say Islam invented democracy. He says that the rise of our Enlightenment variant of democracy was related to the spread of coffeehouses and the intellectual effects of coffee drinking, and that we inherited those two things from the Islamic world.

Re history of coffee he claims nothing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee doesn't say. In any case the topic is not who first drank it (do you know?) but who we got it from.

To me democracy feels like the illusion of choice. We're given one vote every four years and have to select between evil and evil.