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 US$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 won’t work,” said Ahmed Mabrouk, 28, who took long, slow drags from a water pipe in the historic 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 US$0.45, making smoking an affordable pursuit in a country where half the population lives on less than US$2 a day.
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 tobacco — keeping people happy and their hands busy — have 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. One reason, health officials said, was that it was not clear who had enforcement responsibility. Another was the lack of political will. Yet another was the persistent and institutionalized inability of government agencies to communicate well and work together, health officials said.
“Some say that the population suffers lots of problems, and if we prohibit this, they will reject it,” said Aisha Aboul Fotouh, a consultant to the health ministry.
Health officials warned in 2006 that the communal aspect of smoking shisha — friends sharing the same pipe and shopkeepers reusing the same water between customers — were 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.
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