What
bitter engineer describes is not in fact proper
Arabic coffee but a common
Israeli bastardisation. Very few people these days bother brewing their coffee properly while at home, and of course at work or in the field one often lacks the means to do so.
This type of coffee is known simply as "black coffee" or "mud coffee" for the muddy residue it leaves in the glass. Because it is so easy to make and is usually drunk black, it's very popular with people who spend a lot of time in relatively rustic surroundings - soldiers, archaeologists, builders, hikers etc. These people also tend to drink it not from mugs but from sturdy thick glasses, which are less likely to break in a backpack and also lend themselves easily to cleaning with sand rather than water (which is often a luxury in the Israeli desert).
To make it, simply spoon a heaped spoon of coffee into a glass and pour boiling (boiling, children, I can't stress this enough) water over it. Now, I never believed it till I saw it, but for some reason, if you add the sugar in with the coffee, you get an unpleasant grainy floatage which can be avoided by putting the sugar in after you've made the coffee and let it settle a bit. Strange but true.
Some sick and twisted people do drink mud coffee with milk, but I think it's disgusting, especially towards the end of the glass when the milky liquid mixes with the actual "mud". Yuck.