The Amhara and Tigray/Tigre Orthodox Christian populations initially regarded coffee with suspicion for two main reasons:
Religious association: Coffee was tied to Muslim trade networks and Sufi gatherings in Harar and along the Red Sea. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church sometimes discouraged its consumption, seeing it as “Muslim drink” and even “heretical.”
Cultural unfamiliarity: Highland diets and beverages were different, and coffee didn’t play a role in their social rituals at first. In the 16th–18th centuries, accounts describe coffee being consumed mostly in Muslim-majority eastern towns (Harar, Zeila, Berbera) and coastal trade centers, not in the Christian highland heartland. By the late 18th and especially the 19th century, coffee drinking spread into highland Ethiopia through trade, intermarriage, and urbanization. The Amhara and Tigray eventually developed the elaborate coffee ceremony we know today — in some ways outdoing its original Muslim introduction by turning it into a highly ritualized social practice. Once adopted, it became so ingrained that its earlier rejection is now almost forgotten in popular memory.
It's ironic now they claim it as their own invention
