It is indeed pleasant to think that Kaldi was "fair," even if that is an immaterial detail.  And he very well may have been a shepherd too, I guess, aside from being a goatherd; but of course it was his goats who made the significant discovery.

The story as told in the Wikipedia article has a fruit-loopy style, with unnecessary and distracting auctorial flourishes.  One would love to edit it -- because the story itself is certainly worthwhile -- ; but that would hardly be right, because it is after all somebody's work.

But "imam from a monastery" cannot possibly be right.  Muslims do not have monasteries, Christians do.  And Ethiopia is an ancient Christian country, rightly proud of its distinctive Church.  At this point in its history, the number of Muslims is growing, it seems.  But that is a relatively recent development.  It was never conquered by Muslims, even though it was surrounded by countries with large Muslim populations.

So, in this case, one might want to edit the story, and change "imam" to "monk" or "abbot."

Whether Muslims, being commanded to eschew intoxicants of all kinds, include khat in the number of forbidden substances, I do not know.  But it is interesting that they glommed onto coffee pretty early on.  The coffee house became a great cultural institution of the cities of the Ottoman Empire.  It might very well be because of its religious connexion: the imam/monk in the story found coffee to be a useful aid in maintaining his prayerfulness and vigilance, and so Muslims too might have originally begun to drink coffee for that purpose.

The ever entertaining and brilliant popularizer of Zen and other Asian religions, Alan Watts, who as a child had been an altarboy in Canterbury Cathedral, but grew up to become a beloved guru in Sausalito, somewhere wrote this remarkable sentence: "As wine is to Christianity, and coffee is to Islam, so tea is to Buddhism."  That analogy is so crazy and over-the-top and plain wrong (e.g., Christians believe that in the eucharistic liturgy, the sacramental wine is actually mysteriously transformed into the salvific blood of God -- a claim that surely no Muslim or Buddhist has ever made about coffee or tea) that it must be allowed to remain as it is, a source of delight and amusement, and a perfect symbol of Watts's mischievous sense of humor.

But more seriously, it is worth remembering that before coffee became secularized (maybe already in the Ottoman coffee houses, but certainly in those Catholic countries of Europe where it was first introduced), its religious function, as an aid to mindfulness and prayer, was a principal characteristic.  And in that way, it may indeed be analogous to how Buddhist monks drink tea, to help them meditate more clearly.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

But the Somalis just love it. In fact, they love it so much, they will kill you over it. Gotta love the Somalis.

Victory in Pattani