

How the Islamic world gave us coffee and democracy - gruseom
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/08/how-the-islamic-world-gave-us-coffee-and-democracy.html

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tygorius
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.

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gruseom
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.

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googoobaby
They don't seem to want their democracy back.

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jeremiep
Many people don't want it in north america either.

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.

