Appropriately, Iran, then known as Persia, had helped introduce coffee to the west. When a party of Elizabethan travelers visited Persia in 1598 they saw people saw sitting, cross-legged and drinking ‘a certain liquor, which they do call Coffee, which is made of seede much like mustard seede, which will soone intoxicate the braine like our Metheglin’. As in 2015 coffee was used to calm the debate. Calm was certainly needed for as far back as the reign of Shah Abbas in the seventeenth century, a complex political relationship existed between Persia and the West.

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