Perhaps not since Egypt built the great pyramids of Giza,or more recently tamed the Nile with the Aswan High Dam,has the government embarked on as challenging a national project: wiping out smoking in public places. 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. 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. It wont work, said Ahmed Mabrouk,28,who took long,slow drags from a water pipe in the El Fishawy Cafe,nestled in the winding alleys of the Khan. People love smoking shisha. Egypt,like many developing countries,has a smoking problem. Tobacco is cheap,and pastimes are few. A pack of Cleopatra cigarettes costs 45 cents,making smoking an affordable pursuit. Shisha,brought to Egypt by the Ottoman Empire,has been here only about 200 years,a nanosecond for an ancient society,but long enough to have been embraced as part of the culture. Poor people smoke on the street and in alleys; wealthy people sit in cafes and restaurants. Reliable statistics are notoriously difficult to come by in Egypt,but there is growing sentiment in the government that the political benefits that come from cheap tobaccokeeping people happy and their hands busyhave been offset by a recognition that the health costs associated with smoking are a burden on the state,health officials said. In 2007,Parliament banned smoking in public places. The law was never enforced. Some say that the population suffers lots of problems,and if we prohibit this,they will reject it, said Dr. Aisha Aboul Fotouh,a consultant to the Health Ministry. Health officials warned in 2006 that the communal aspect of smoking shishafriends sharing the same pipe and shopkeepers reusing the same water between customerswere conduits for passing tuberculosis. The WHO said that in Egypt,31.6 per 100,000 people had the disease in 2005,and the rate of new cases that year was estimated at 25 per 100,000 people. The warning,like the law,was ultimately unheeded. So this year health officials decided to turn to Egypts main power: the National Democratic Party,the governing political party of President Hosni Mubarak. The party delivered. It set an example by having,for the first time,a smoke-free gathering for its recent annual convention. But it also hit on a way to persuade people to put down their pipes. While the country was in a panic over swine flu,caused by the H1N1 virus,having already shut schools and culled hundreds of thousands of pigs,the government began telling people that shisha was being banned to prevent spread of the flu. If you tell them that shisha is harmful,they say See you later, Assad said. But they are so worried about H1N1,if you tell people they can get H1N1 from shisha,they will stay away from it. True? Eh, Mabrouk said,flicking his hand dismissively as he smoked in El Fishawy Cafe. Not even swine flu could come between Egyptians and their shisha,it seemed.
