Because even as cancer rates climb, the nation continues to spend more than LE 6 billion on tobacco products each year. From the ahwa baladi to five-star hotels, shisha is more popular than ever.
Jump to full article: Egypt Today "The Magazine Of Egypt" (eg), 2004-11-01
Author: Ingrid Wassmann
Intro: 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.
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.
. . .
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. . . .
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.
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