MEN ARE SIPPING their evening tea in a tiny coffee shop off Cairo’s noisy, congested Tahrir Square. An old TV beams Al-Jazeera’s latest coverage of the war in Iraq. The tomcat of the next-door garage sleeps on one of the tired chairs. The waiter brings out a shisha, unwinds the pliable tubing wrapped around the body and hands the mouthpiece to his customer.

The middle-aged man in a wrinkled gray galabeya inhales deeply, slowly filling up his lungs. The coals glow against the dark maasal (molasses) and the water gurgles inside the glass bowl. Thick, whitish smoke leaks from the man’s mouth, dancing like a twisted ghost above his head.

Across town, in a trendy café in upper-class Maadi, a well-dressed woman wearing a hijab sits alone at a Nile-view table, talking on her mobile phone, flipping through a magazine and occasionally puffing on an apple-flavored shisha.

Over the past couple of decades, the water pipe has become omnipresent in daily life. Smoking shisha is no longer just a characteristic feature of Ramadan nights or the fetish of a few.

Shisha, first introduced here some 200 years ago by the Ottoman Turks, has steadily transcended all strata of society, age group and gender. From its traditional strongholds in the countryside and modest tearooms, the contraption has made its way into the glitziest venues of luxury hotels across the country and onto the menus of the capital’s swanky restaurants.

“Shisha used to be only in the ahwa baladi, the traditional coffee shops, for men alone, among the lower class,” says Madiha El-Safty, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

Matt Moyer/Egypt Today

Today, an increasing number are inhaling the molasses, including students, affluent professionals and even women. Is it simply a raging fad reaching its heyday? The result of smokers looking for a ‘safer’ or ‘less haram’ alternative to cigarettes? Or is it a growing addiction that is here to stay?

There is no one single answer to explain the astonishing spread of shisha, known in other parts of the Arab world as narguile, arguile or hookah.

“It is just a habit like cigarettes,” says Ahmed, a student from Nasr City, who says he smokes shisha only with friends at coffee shops. “It is a lot of work to prepare it at home,” he says.

During Ramadan, the fashionable and the moneyed gather mostly at expensive Ramadan tents to smoke a tuffah (apple-flavored tobacco although cappuccino and chocolate, among others, are rising in popularity), play some backgammon or other table games, and listen to Oriental music. Even at some of the capital’s more common ahwas, men and women can be seen puffing away side-by-side.

“It has become such a tradition to smoke shisha with friends during Ramadan,” says Zeinab, a coquettish 23-year-old hotel trainee who comes from a modest and conservative family. She prefers imported cigarettes to the water pipe, but makes an exception during Ramadan. “I feel happy when I see the shisha smoke coming out of my mouth. It’s as if I am a genie,” says the Cairo University graduate, contorting her arms in the air as if to imitate coiling smoke.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today

A recent AUC study conducted on 70 middle-class women in Greater Cairo found that 1621-year-olds are the most avid consumers of shisha, spending anywhere between LE 30 and LE 220 per month on their aromatic puffs. Graduate student Shahinaz M. Khalil administered her questionnaire at shisha parlors across the capital and followed up with one-on-one interviews.

“The women were sitting there in public, smoking shisha, but some simply refused to admit that they were actually smoking,” explains Khalil, still puzzled by the blatant denial of some of her interviewees.

As with any other habit, though, there are as many reasons for adopting it and patterns of enjoyment as there are people who puff.

Rami picked up his shisha habit two decades ago, but he still smokes only outside the house. For the past few years, on his way to work, he stops for a “morning shisha” at a modest coffee house tucked away in one of Zamalek’s affluent residential streets. “The morning shisha is to plan the day and to have my tea. The evening shisha is time out,” explains the 46-year-old investment consultant.

During these 10-minute pauses at the ahwa, the waiter always caters meticulously to Rami’s tastes. He knows to bring tea with naanaa (mint) and shisha tuffah. “The smell and smoke of the tobacco are soothing,” Rami exclaims enthusiastically, before pulling deeply on his water pipe.

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But he also goes for the ambience. “The coffee shop is a social event, especially on a football night,” comments the former member of the Egyptian national golf team. By now, Rami is quite familiar with most of the customers some regulars and others just passing through. He describes the eclectic crowd as well-heeled professionals, drivers, Gezirah Club personnel, gas pump employees, foreign and Egyptian teenagers “who think it is cool to skip school” and resident Eastern Europeans.

“Egyptians have much time,” says Isaak, an Egyptian tour guide, perhaps alluding to the country’s unemployment rate, “and they prefer to spend it in the coffee shop drinking tea or coffee.” He adds almost automatically: “When they see others smoking shisha, they do the same.” With a pinch of mischief, he also suggests that it may be an excuse for the men to spend time outside the house.

When Isaak takes tourists to visit old Cairo, they eventually stop in a local coffee shop for refreshments and shisha. Inevitably, during the tour, he talks about Mohamed Ali Pasha, the ambitious 19th century Albanian officer of the Ottoman forces who founded modern Egypt. Then Isaak also adds: “Mohamed Ali was the first to smoke shisha in Egypt in 1805.”

The middle-aged tour guide always smokes shisha at the coffee shop below his office on payday as a celebration with colleagues. “We sit together, discuss business and smoke shisha,” he says, noting that the rest of the time he sticks to cigarettes.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, approximately 48 percent of the country’s adult population smokes. “Egypt has the highest rate of tobacco consumption in the Arab world,” writes Research Professor Heba Nassar of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University, in an in-depth paper entitled “The Economics of Tobacco in Egypt,” published in March 2003 for the World Health Organization Free Initiative.

The water pipe has a controversial ancestral past. Some specialists believe it all originated in India when people first started smoking medicinal herbs and hallucinogenic drugs out of a hookah, a pierced coconut shell poked with a straw. Other researchers and tobacco historians speculate that it was the Persians who first introduced the concept of the water pipe for inhaling cannabis.

The controversy over smoking shisha is not only historical, but also religious. “There is no difference, as far as shariah is concerned, between smoking a cigarette, a cigar or shisha,” says Ali As-Sayed Al-Halawani, head of the shariah English department of Cairo-based IslamOnline. In his firm opinion, prominent scholars of Islam like Dr. Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, the former grand mufti of Egypt, “unanimously agreed that smoking in all its forms is totally forbidden.”

“Smoking is harmful to the smoker as well as to those around him,” stresses Al-Halawani, citing one of the Prophet’s sayings: “No harm should be inflicted or reciprocated in Islam.”

Al-Halawani believes that instead of banning shisha smoking, people must be educated about the health risks involved and about religion. Today, the streets of Cairo offer a dizzying number of ahwas. They range from closet one-table-two-chairs service and faded old timers’ hangouts, to posh, nouveau riche Nile-view cafés.

“There are different types of coffee shops, some trendy, some small, some big, some cheap, but all do good business,” explains Diaa El-Fishawy, grandson of the late founder of Cairo’s most famous 200-year-old café.

The women were sitting there in public, smoking shisha, but some simply refused to admit that they were actually smoking.

During Ramadan, on a busy night at El-Fishawy, the landmark coffee shop in the heart of Khan El-Khalili, they serve anywhere between 100 and 200 shishas at LE 3.50 a smoke. At Fishawy’s, Diaa has a knack for catering to his clientele. Some of the regulars keep their own shisha on the shelf of the coffee shop and simply carry along their mabsam, the detachable mouthpiece. But the real giveaway is the tobacco they choose. The common Egyptian, and in particular the older generation, sticks to maasal. Saeedis usually order zahloul, nachla or borg, the heavier varieties of maasal.

Diaa still remembers when Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz would pay his daily visit to the coffee house to smoke shisha and write. “He came every day and always sat at the same table,” says Diaa.

For Mahfouz, the memories run deep. He once explained during an interview with novelist and journalist Gamal El-Ghitani: “The time I spent sitting at Fishawy fertilized my thinking. The narguile stimulated my imagination and at every puff, I would picture a new scene in my mind.”

In Mahfouz’s book, Adrift on the Nile, a bunch of dissatisfied friends gather almost daily on a houseboat to complain and philosophize about their disenchantments in post-revolution Egypt. The sunset meetings take place around a water pipe, filled with hallucinogenic kif.

In the 1966 novel, Mahfouz often places the shisha at the center of attention: “Everything was ready. The mattresses were arranged in a large semicircle just inside the door to the balcony. On a brass tray in the middle of the semicircle stood the water pipe and the brazier for the charcoal.”

Ahmed El-Fishawy, who runs the old ahwa with his cousin Diaa, says smoking shisha helps him think through his worries. “When I have a problem, I like to go to the coffee shop and smoke tuffah,” he explains, carefully placing bits of coal on his hagar.

Some Egyptians admit to smoking shisha simply out of tradition. “I saw my father smoke shisha so now I smoke as well,” says 25-year-old Essam, who sells water pipes and their accompanying paraphernalia on Khan El-Khalili’s crowded Sekket El-Badestan Street.

“In Egypt, the rising popularity of shisha has to do with the fact that alcohol is no longer served and consumed in public like before,” notes AUC’s El-Safty. In her opinion, the drop of alcohol consumption in public coincides with the rising Islamist movement in the late 1970s early 1980s. “So probably shisha is a kind of replacement, a substitute for alcohol,” says El-Safty.

As El-Safty sees it, this growing social phenomenon is simply a case of acquired taste and is not a social indicator. “Conservative, veiled women also smoke shisha,” stresses the sociology professor.

Others would argue quite the opposite. According to Fatimah Al-Awa, who leads the World Health Organization’s anti-tobacco campaign in Egypt, less than five percent of Egyptian women smoked in 1997. Recent statistics suggest that figure is up to 10 percent.

“Smoking is associated with other ideas freedom and independence. It is a lifestyle, a total package,” commented Al-Awa in an interview last year.

“Egyptians like to smoke shisha sometimes to have fun and sometimes because they want to rebel,” explains Zeinab, before starting her afternoon shift at the front desk of a five-star hotel. She likes to think of her generation as better educated, more open-minded and fashionable. “Six years ago it became ‘à la mode’ for girls to smoke shisha in cafés here in Egypt. Now it is more stylish to smoke cigarettes,” adds the young woman, flicking the ashes of her cigarette.

Hanan, a cleaning lady and mother of two, grew up seeing only men smoke shisha, and she prefers it that way. Her husband, an English teacher, is a heavy cigarette and shisha smoker. “A woman cannot do everything like a man,” she says emphatically.

Nevertheless, she knows women who do smoke shisha. Her 43-year-old neighbor has been smoking every day for the past 10 years. She only uses maasal and only consumes it in the confines of her living room, not authorized by her husband to exhibit her habit in public. Hanan exclaims, imitating her neighbor’s disposition, “ana bahebaha! (I love it!)”

Hanan blames television for encouraging young people to smoke. “There is not one single tragedia or movie where the stars are not smoking, smoking, smoking cigarettes and shisha,” she says, deliberately emphasizing the verb. In her opinion, upper-class Egyptian teenagers smoke narguile because they think it is “modern” and “fashionable.”

Cigarette advertising has been banned from national television and radio since June 1981 under that year’s law number 52 “on the protection against the harmful effects of smoking.”

Contrary to the assertions of some, smoking shisha is hardly better for the body than cigarettes. Dr. Shaheer Farak, a pulmonologist and consultant physiologist at the Anglo-American Hospital in Zamalek, stresses that smoking shisha increases risks of emphysema and chronic bronchitis, among other respiratory diseases. “Because studies on shisha are still very rare, there is a lack of medical evidence, but it is definitely carcinogenic,” adds Farak.

Lately, the Ministry of Health and Population has been trying to raise awareness about the hazards particularly associated with smoking shisha. On the ministry’s website is the account of Hassan, a 35-year-old carpenter and father of three who nearly died of tuberculosis, probably from smoking the water pipe regularly.

Farak believes that most shisha smokers ignore the risk of contagious infections. “Actually, when you go to a café, they can fool you by giving you a new mouthpiece,” he says. In fact, the little plastic disposable mabsam does not prevent the spread of flu, tuberculosis or hepatitis. “If somebody coughs in the tube, it won’t stop at the mouthpiece. It will be in the tube itself,” warns Farak, who frequently receives patients with smoking-related ailments.

But medical warnings still have little resonance with smokers. Rami has just finished work and is savoring his second shisha of the day, discussing the news with some of the regulars at his favorite Zamalek café. He certainly is not prepared to give up his habit any time soon.

“Only if you give me a good reason,” he says with a grin. et