The End of Shisha?

Almasry Alyoum 

October 20, 2009 

Egypt

The sun is just breaking across Cairo and few people are out and about. It is Friday. At a middle-class Zamalek café, elderly men enjoy the morning air’s crispness as their conversations blossom and discuss the weeks political and sports stories. Each pause in the chatting, a plume of gray smoke billows from their mouths, pulling in the flavor that accompanies a drag of shisha, or water-pipe, smoke. 

“You hear about what they are doing across the country about shisha?” says Khaled Mounir, a 64-year-old retired accountant. “You can’t go to the local cafes any more because they are being shut down.” His friend, Amir, shakes his head in agreement. Each man has been coming to the Goal café for years, but this Friday, there are a handful of other middle-aged men also puffing away at their pipes.

“We can’t go to our usual place we go in the morning for coffee and shisha because they aren’t serving shisha any longer, something about the swine flu and the government taking precautions,” reveals Ahmed Amin, a former lawyer, who believes the shutting down of the ahwa will do little to stem the flow of the virus.

“It is just another rash decision taken that will hurt the average person and the government is overreacting like they have done on many occasions,” says Amir, who until this point, has remained largely silent. “I think they need to educate people and teach local cafes about hygiene and that stuff instead of just going in and shutting it down.”

This is exactly what has happened, and the closing of shisha cafes has not been limited to only Cairo. In Mansoura, reports of prohibitions on the Egyptian pastime have been flowing in telling of closures of the city’s cafes ability to serve shisha.

“People here in Mansoura say Shisha is completely prohibited,” Mohamed el-Gohary wrote on his IRCPresident Twitter account Thursday. Back in downtown Cairo, the popular Borsa – Stock Exchange – area once lined with Egyptians and foreigners alike, taking drags and blowing out clouds of smoke, is more empty than usual. The reason, there is no shisha.

“I went there last week with some friends from out-of-town and wanted them to have a nice experience puffing away on the shisha, but when we got their we were told that because of the swine flu, there was no more shisha,” said American study abroad student Mark Williams. He admitted that he didn’t mind the ban, but “it was so abrupt that it took everyone by surprise.”

The government has been quick in their attempts to curtail the spread of the H1N1 influenza, commonly known as swine flu although world health officials have repeatedly stated the virus does not pass from pigs to humans. Here in Egypt, after the initial report of the outbreak in Mexico and the United States, all pigs were culled, sparking massive criticism both domestically and globally over what World Health Organization officials called “rash.”

Then, in September, the government closed down all schools and universities, fearing that by allowing students to return would allow for a possible outbreak among students. Schools were reopened in early October after the delay.
The health ministry has repeatedly stated it is doing everything in its power to ensure that Egyptians remain safe and the H1N1 virus does spread across the country in large numbers like it has in other countries.

“We are doing what we can in order to make certain that there is not a widespread outbreak of the virus because this is our responsibility,” a ministry official told Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition on Sunday morning.
“The reason shisha is being cut back is because of the poor conditions that often come with the local cafes that people go to. Swine flu can spread quite easily in the pipes if they are not cleaned properly, so we decided that in order to keep people safe from getting sick that these places be shut down, but at this time we have no intention of closing the places where they clean the pipes and use the medical hoses,” the official added.

For the elderly men in Zamalek, at one level they agree with the ministry’s decision to close down the ahwa, saying that they agree with the government’s assessment.

“These places are not clean and have not been for years, which is why we have been coming here,” adds Mounir. Their frustration is with how these sort of things are carried out by the government.

A coffee shop in a down town alley reported that policemen came into their café, broke the shishas by smashing the glass water holders and fined them thousands of pounds.

“Just like when they all-of-a-sudden decided to kill all the pigs, there was no warning and people didn’t have a say. It will hurt Egyptians livelihoods greatly and I am certain that it will cause more pain than what the government knows or cares about,” believes Amin.

For now, at least, if Egyptians and foreigners want to puff away on their water-pipe, the place to do it is the upscale, clean cafes in the more affluent areas of Cairo and the rest of the country.

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