What’s in a hookah, asked the traveler to the Middle East?
Used to be water pipes in public cafes suggested the scenes of an Eastern landscape. Not so in many of the larger cities and college towns of the U.S. and Europe, where a combination of Middle Eastern restaurants, trendy cafes, and specialty smoking pubs feature the now fruity, inviting tobacco smells of apple, banana, and molasses. That is, until local smoking ordinances drive the practice underground. But more than a decade ago, hookahs were associated mostly with the Arab world. Even in nearby Turkey, the hookah (called narghile there) has had to undergo a fairly recent resurgence in popularity. Though it may not have gone away in the provinces or in certain Istanbul neighborhoods, the success of cigarette-smoking—and the associations of the practice with indolence in a society undergoing the mania of modernization in the Republican era—appear to have put it almost out of commission, until narghile became cool with the kids. In much of the Arab world, to my knowledge, the hookah, ca
