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• Antismoking Fight Proves a Pyramid-Size Task  

Anyone who has ever spent any time in a Cairo taxicab, restaurant, office, lobby, coffeehouse, cafeteria or university, or even at the zoo, knows just how ubiquitous smoking is. "There is a movement to be tobacco free in the whole world," said Ehab Assad, a tobacco control officer in the Egyptian Ministry of Health. "We cannot be away from this."

Mr. Assad said that as a first step the government late last month banned the shisha, or water pipe, in cafes of the crowded Khan el-Khalili marketplace. But just a few minutes after the government boasted of the ban, hawkers were swarming tourists at the Khan, waving restaurant menus, offering what else but shisha. They were selling apple-, orange-, lemon- and cherry-flavored, tobacco-filled pipes for 10 Egyptian pounds, or about $1.80.

Such is the early fate of the antismoking effort. Shisha is back in the Khan after a brief ban, and all around Cairo there is confusion as to what exactly the government is planning. "The End of Shisha?" read a headline last month on the news Web site Al Masry al Youm. So far, smoking continues unabated. . . .

"The main issue here is that we don't have democracy. Accordingly, our responsible ministers are not elected; accordingly, they don't really care about what they do to their own people," said Alaa al-Aswany, a best-selling author and social critic.

"I am telling you that the shisha will continue," he said.

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