June 6, 2011
Beyond Orientalism
Though its forms and outcomes may be unpredictable and unstable, intercultural exchange is not a practical impossibility.
As a novelty, coffee was initially the object of some suspicion, as Nabil Matar shows in an inspired chapter of his Islam in Britain. While some claimed miraculous benefits from it, among its feared consequences were that it “causeth vertiginous headheach, and maketh lean much, occasioneth waking, and the Emirods, and asswages lust, and sometimes breeds melancholly.”
