Hacker News Reader

The author's agenda in the article leads to some dubious claims. For example, I am not sure how Sufis bringing coffee from Ethiopa to the rest of the world justifies saying they "invented" it. Also, the ancient Athenians would seem to have a somewhat better claim for inventing democracy -- a millenium before Islam appeared.

View on HN

You're being unfair to the article, which is full of fascinating things.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com