quality:correction, information:classification, linguistic:voice_change, structural:summarization
Historical transmission

The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee was used by Sufi circles to stay awake for their religious rituals. Accounts differ on the origin of the coffee plant before its appearance in Yemen. From Ethiopia, coffee could have been introduced to Yemen via trade across the Red Sea. One account credits Muhammad Ibn Sa'd for bringing the beverage to Aden from the African coast, other early accounts say Ali ben Omar of the Shadhili Sufi order was the first to introduce coffee to Arabia.

16th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami notes in his writings that a beverage called qahwa developed from a tree in the Zeila region located in the Horn of Africa. Coffee was first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen by Somali merchants from Berbera and Zeila in modern-day Somaliland, which was procured from Harar and the Abyssinian interior. According to Captain Haines, who was the colonial administrator of Aden (1839–1854), Mokha historically imported up to two-thirds of its coffee from Berbera-based merchants before the coffee trade of Mokha was captured by British-controlled Aden in the 19th century. After that, much of the Ethiopian coffee was exported to Aden via Berbera.

By the 16th century, coffee had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. The first coffee seeds were smuggled out of the Middle East by Sufi Baba Budan from Yemen to India during the time. Before then, all exported coffee was boiled or otherwise sterilized. Portraits of Baba Budan depict him as having smuggled seven coffee seeds by strapping them to his chest. The first plants from these smuggled seeds were planted in Mysore.

Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600 and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas.

In 1583, Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, gave this description of coffee after returning from a ten-year trip to the Near East:

A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.

Thriving trade brought many goods, including coffee, from the Ottoman Empire to Venice. From there it was introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600, despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink". The first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1647.