drinking the nargile

Still too busy for anything of substance, but this NYT article about the increasing popularity of shisha/nargile/hookah among college students here in the States made me smile. Particularly the repeated emphasis of the fact that it's tobacco they're smoking, not anything else. I have virtuously eschewed smoking of any sort since leaving Turkey, but I do miss the occasional indulgence, especially the sweet smell of the apple-molasses tobacco, and the pleasure of sitting at one of the outdoor nargile teahouses at Tophane or along the meydan near the Sultanahmet mosque. Burçak Evren's gorgeous book Ottoman Craftsman and Their Guilds has a great section on nargile-making in Ottoman İstanbul--each part, from the metal top (ser) and the crystal body/bottle (gövde) to the leather hose (marpuç) and the little clay tobacco bowl (lüle)--was manufactured by a specialist artisan.

Random linguistic factoid: in Turkish, you do not "smoke" a cigarette, you "drink" it (sigara içmek). I know Hindi/Urdu uses the same expression, and I think Arabic does as well--I imagine it may derive from the use of water-pipes for smoking. I wonder which other languages (Persian?) have this construction.

I have got a nargile of my own (mostly just used for the parties us denizens of the Middle East Centre would throw in the late bar), but like so many other things, it is languishing in a friend's house in Oxford. If I didn't need the luggage allowance for my books, I'd bring it back this spring. In the meantime, maybe a trip to one of the smoking-ban-defying cafes will be in order once these damned drafts are finished.