So this year health officials decided to turn to Egypt’s main power: the National Democratic Party, the governing political party of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Assad and his supervisor, Sahar Latif, the general secretary of the National Program for Combating Smoking, said they sent a letter to the party asking for political support.
The party delivered.
It set an example by having, for the first time, a smoke-free gathering for its recent annual convention, Assad said. 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.
“This is just going to give some people more authority now to go after those poor citizens who take out their daily worries with the smoke they blow out of their mouth,” said Saad Eddin Muhammad, 48, an electrician, as he stood in a tiny shisha house in the Zamalek neighborhood.
In response to the national party, five governors issued differing orders. In Alexandria, for example, health officials said cafes had one month to make plans before they had to end shisha smoking indoors. In Cairo, the governor banned shisha at the Khan, but relented under pressure from shopkeepers whose businesses were crippled, local merchants said. The compromise was that all water pipes were to be fitted with disposable tubes and mouthpieces, merchants said.
But the ban was reversed and health officials were not notified. The reversal was not the product of a government process, but a top-down decree, said political analysts and social commentators.
“The main issue here is that we don’t have democracy. Accordingly, our responsible ministers are not elected; accordingly, they don’t really care about what they do to their own people,” said Alaa al-Aswany, a best-selling author and social critic.
“I am telling you that the shisha will continue,” he said.
Latif and Assad of the health ministry are determined to make good on that 2007 law. They said they were training 100 inspectors to begin carrying out the law, first in places like hospitals, where there is apparently still a smoking problem, and then in cafes. Assad said they would offer incentive pay to prevent the inspectors from taking bribes to look the other way, a problem that plagues enforcement across the bureaucracy.
“It’s a difficult mission, but we try,” Latif said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MONA EL-NAGGAR
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