Tuesday, Jul 30, 2013

The first thing you see when you enter a Ramadan tent is a line of waiters waiting at a side entrance to replenish the shishas at people’s tables.

We were inside a massive tent that had been set up for people to enjoy their sohour and people were sitting around tables, chatting and whiling away their time.

There were ornate backgammon boards on corner tables for the patrons if they were so inclined. At one table, there were women playing cards and blowing smoke from the shisha and chatting animatedly. But a majority of people had their favourite pastime with them — their smartphones and they looked down at them in their palms intently.

If you paid a little extra you would be seated in an alcove on the side of the tent, which then became your own private majlis — a place where you sit, receive and entertain your guests.

At a side entrance, there was a line of harried costumed men bringing shishas from inside and waiters stood at strategic points waiting to refill them.

Every time the shisha needed fresh tobacco or coal, a waiter came and pulled out the plastic tube from where you would inhale and draw in smoke from the pipe to get the mixture going properly. He deftly blew out a dense, white fog of smoke, inserted the pipe and handed it back to the patron. One waiter had watery eyes, presumably from doing this frequently.

I read up a shisha blog and this is what it had to say about getting the temperature right for a great smoke: “For better smoke clouds with more taste, the shisha charcoal should be at cooler temperatures when the pipe is not in use and when your pull through the hose the coal should heat up and simmer the tobacco to give you a nice clean smoke.”

I am a rehabilitated smoker after many attempts at quitting and being in the midst of so many smokers was a bit disconcerting. I later looked up the net and found there were many myths surrounding the shisha. One is that it is not addictive or harmful as the water filters out the carcinogenics. The funny myth is that smoking a shisha is healthy as the tobacco mixture has fruit paste.

Shishas are a pervading past time in the Arab World and shisha lounges have spread across Europe and North America, wherever there is a large Arab expat community.

Recently, Pan-Arabia Enquirer, a satirical online newspaper, took this love of shisha to new heights. It ran a front-page story about a major airliner in the region preparing to offer shisha lounges on board its brand-new fleet.

The story went viral and it had half-a-million hits. To add authenticity to the story, there were pictures accompanying the story. One was of a stewardess offering a brightly-coloured shisha to a passenger, and the other was a waiter with shishas and aperitifs on top of a counter.

It quoted a press release saying the new service would provide Middle Eastern passengers with the sort of home comforts they had come to expect on the airline. “Those flying to the Middle East for the first time will get an opportunity to sample one of the true tastes of Arabia before they’ve even landed,” it said.

Passengers were advised that one could pre-order a shisha from the onboard menu while at their seat and retire to the lounge after the main meal.

There were tonnes of letters condemning the move. “Isn’t smoking banned on board an airplane,” asked one irate reader.

All this smoking and eating in the Ramadan tent confused a non-Muslim colleague who asked whether I would be eating sohour again at 3am after binging in the tent?

By Mahmood Saberi Senior Reporter

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