Imposing smoking bans in places such as Turkey, Iraq and Syria was once thought impossible. 40% of Turkey’s adult population are smokers, whilst cigarettes are estimated to kill 55 Iraqis a day. In Syria, it is thought that 60% of the adult male population smoke, along with 23% of women. All three countries have, however, introduced or moved to introduce smoking bans in public places over the last 12 months, with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad signing the Syrian ban into law yesterday. All, it must be admitted, has not gone smoothly. In Turkey, one restaurant owner was shot dead by an angry smoker when he told the offender to stub out his cigarette, whilst the proposed Iraqi ban is still stuck going through Parliament. In Egypt, where smoking either cigarettes or the thick, acrid maasel sheesha is seemingly part of the way of life, could and should such a ban ever be enforced? In the UK, my home country, and as a non-smoker I generally supported the ban when it first was introduced way back in 2007. It was nice to come back from a night on the town without feeling cloaked in the lingering stench of cigarettes, nice to eat a meal in a restaurant without the interrupting taste of second hand Marlboro Light, nice to sip a beer in the local pub without your eyes left stinging red from the clouds of days old smoke that had become an unavoidable feature of UK establishments. The UK’s ban was blanket, also including shisha, and while this sadly resulted in a few shisha cafes closing down, I would argue that there are now more places to smoke apple, mint and melon flavored water pipe than there were before the ban. In my home town of Manchester, shisha cafe owners showed a great sense of initiative (if not perhaps of structural safety) and promptly knocked down an entire wall of their cafes, or even two, thus creating an officially “outdoor†and entirely legal place to smoke shisha, cigarettes, or whatever else takes your fancy. Egypt can’t, and shouldn’t, avoid a smoking ban forever – surely there will be a ban on smoking, as in Syria, within the next 10 years – but it will be a bittersweet day when it finally comes. In Egypt some of my favorite places are shabby and shaabi bars and cafes, run down and yet full of life, where smoking is no longer an annoyance but almost like background music. There is plenty of academic research showing the historic importance of coffee shops, where people go to smoke and drink coffee as a social forum for debate and the interchange of ideas, and a smoking ban would surely put this culture irreversibly in danger. Would age-old treasures such as al-Fishawi’s, or the Ghurfa Tagareea in Alexandria be able to survive? It would also see an end to my much loved after-dinner shisha. In my brazen hypocrisy, I think that whilst cigarette smoke is probably annoying to other eaters in a restaurant, a post-meal grape or mint flavored shisha is something to be savored. As much as I would miss these experiences, however, Egypt should not wait too long in introducing new laws in a bid to combat its addiction to the smoke. New laws governing smoking are finally being introduced around the globe, Egypt will not be exempt. The sooner the government realizes this and acts, the better. BM
