No-Milk Chai · Spiced Black Tea

Sulaimani Tea

📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Milan G Mathew / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

It's the one hot tea sold across Sharjah's souks with zero milk at all — just lime, cardamom, and sometimes saffron — the opposite formula from the thick, milky karak sold a few stalls over.

Sulaimani is a clear, spiced black tea brewed with cardamom and cloves and finished with a squeeze of fresh lime, served without any milk. Sharjah's older coffeehouses and souk tea stalls, including the one inside Souq Al Arsah, pour it alongside gahwa as a lighter, tangier alternative to karak.

Why it's made this way: Sulaimani is a staple of Kerala's Malabar coast, and the UAE's large Malayali community made it a fixture of cafeterias and souk tea stalls as a lighter alternative to milky tea.