No-smoking, please!

Known for being soft for anything Syrian dating back to the first half of the 20th century, I was recently talked into buying an empty pack of women’s cigarettes, from the 1940s, called Khanom (a word inherited from Ottoman Turkish, which means Madam). That was when public smoking became “cool” for liberal Damascene women, a symbol of emancipation from male-dominated Syrian society.

The pack carried the image of an Audrey Hepburn look-alike, with a seductive look and perfect body. The words read, “Be a Twentieth Century Woman: Smoke Khanom!” Syrian women – and men – have come a long way since then. Both sexes now smoke cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos, and the infamous Turkish pipe, or shishah. Nobody asks for an ID at Syrian coffee shops, and young boys and girls, sometimes at the tender age of 12-15, can spend hours puffing away on a shishah, flavored with apples, grapes, peach, mint, watermelon, or a combination of the above!

There are companies that offer shishah delivery (a trend started in Beirut), right to your home, and collect them 24-hours later, for a price of 200 SP ($4). According to studies, there are 100 million Turkish pipes smoked per day in the Arab world. This does not include those that are made at home, and only reflect those sold at public venues. Most people train themselves to believing that smoking shishas is “harmless” since they do not inhale the smoke, pointing to the clouds they make while puffing away as proof, although doctors confirm that one shishah is equivalent to an entire pack of cigarettes.

Domestically, according to recent health studies, there are a staggering 30 million cigarettes extinguished per day in Syria, which has a population nearing 20 million. Earlier this year, the Syrian government finally passed a law inhibiting smoking in Syria. The law, expected for the second half of 2009, will prevent any venue licensed as “restaurant” from presenting Turkish pipes. Only coffee shops will be able to present shishas, and even then, they will be heavily taxed.

In the Arab world, the Emirates has a smoking ban, and so does Bahrain, which implemented it in February 2008. Turkey passed a similar law back in 1997. Finland had it since 1995, and more strikingly, Israel has had a smoking ban since 1983! Syria is taking big steps towards combating smoking, which will yield grand results, if implemented in a proper manner. The Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies, for example, has recently won an award as the Best Medical Institute in the Arab world. The award is sponsored by Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the deputy ruler of Dubai, to provide an incentive for the development of research and health education in the Arab world.

Why do people smoke? When people are angry, they are customarily given a cigarette by friends, to relieve stress. Coinciding with mass smoking is a rising trend in Syria of an unbelievable amount of foul language, heard on the streets of Syria. You even hear little children on the street using big words that were learned at school, or even more horrendously, at home. This is new to Syria. It is destructive, wrong, and very vulgar. Somehow, people think it is “cool” and “funny” to use foul language, or in some cases, “descriptive.”

Can we find a relationship between more smokers, and more bad temper in Syria? To a certain extent they are related, and this reveals boiling tension in Syrian society; stress released by puffing away on a Turkish pipe. Children are fed up with their parents; parents are fed up with their children. Citizens are critical of the government, and the government is critical of citizens. Employees are fed up with their boss, and the boss is fed up with his staff, and so on.