Coffee was long suspected in England because it was tainted with Islam

Evidence

Coffee-drinking originated in Yemen some time around the thirteenth century and spread throughout the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. Pococke is said to have been the first man in England to drink coffee. Those who were suspicious of the new drink claimed that it brought on his palsy. (The Arabauthor, for his part, warned that drinking coffee with milk might bring on leprosy.) For a long time coffee-drinking was to be regarded with great suspicion in some circles, as it was tainted with Mahometanism. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 170

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun viral-worthy oddity: coffee was once viewed with suspicion as a ‘Mohammedan’ drink and blamed for giving Pococke palsy.
• SEED: Article angle: the food-moral-panic history series—coffee as the opium of the seventeenth century, its Islamic taint.