Mokha

Mokha, historic town, southwestern Yemen, on the Red Sea and the Tihāmah coastal plain, long famous as Arabia’s chief coffee-exporting center and the source of the term mocha. It is the chief port on the northern approach to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and is situated about 45 miles (75 km) north of Perim (Mayun) Island, where the strait reaches its narrowest point. The nearby town of Dhubab, about 25 miles (45 km) south of Mokha, lies opposite Perim Island near the entrance to the strait.

History of coffee production

Tradition holds that Mokha’s was founded in the 14th century by Sheikh ʿAlī ibn ʿUmar al-Shādhilī, the leader of a Sufi order (tariqa) who is supposed to have brought coffee drinking to Arabia from Ethiopia across the strait. An important trade center through the 17th century, it was regularly visited by Indian traders, who traded finished metal products for Yemeni coffee and myrrh. It also dealt with Egyptian merchants, who sailed to Mokha on the summer northwesterly Red Sea winds.

Coffee for the European and Middle East markets was Mokha’s chief export from the 15th century. Trading establishments (known as factories because they were headed by commercial agents, or factors) were maintained there by the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and, briefly, the Danes and the French.

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Long under Ottoman suzerainty, Mokha was surrendered to the imam of the Zaydī Shiʿah, Muḥammad al-Muʾayyad I, in 1636. It prospered in the 17th and early 18th centuries; even the port of Zeila (in present Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden) became tributary to Mokha and its rulers until 1884. The Ottomans held the town again from 1849 to 1918. The conflicts between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire, and those between the Ottoman Empire and the Zaydī imams, contributed to the port’s decline, which was hastened by the development of coffee plantations on the island of Java (now in Indonesia) by the Dutch and by the rise of the South American coffee industry (early 18th century). The British moved their base of operations in the area from Mokha to Aden in 1839 and were followed by the other European trading nations. This sealed the fate of the port; Yemen’s trade thereafter was diverted either to Aden or to the Yemeni port of Hodeidah. One estimate puts the decline of Mokha’s population from about 20,000 in the early 1800s to about 1,000 in the 1930s. Most of the formerly fine public buildings, residences, and mosques are in ruins.

Modern port

The modern port was established in 1955 and came to serve as a minor logistics and military hub between the major commercial ports of Aden and Hodeidah. It is the coastal terminus of a highway leading eastward to Taʿizz, thence north, via Ibb and Dhamār, to the city of Sanaa, the national capital. The town was captured by Houthi rebels in September 2026 amid the Yemeni Civil War and the overlapping 2026 Iran war, during which Houthi forces sought to disrupt Saudi access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The offensive brought virtually all of Yemen’s Red Sea coast under Houthi control and gave Iran’s Yemeni ally direct access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Pop. (2004) 10,428.