HOOKAH HISTORY AND SHISHA SMOKING INFORMATION
A hookah is a glass water pipe used for smoking various different material from pure tobacco to sweetened, fruit flavored tobacco mixes that often contain no real tobacco at all. Typically a hookah has a single hose or stem from which the smoke is pulled through the pipe, bubbling up through the water vase at the bottom of the pipe and out through the mouthpiece at the end of the hose. Hookah pipes can have two or more hoses attached in group smoking situations. Hookah pipes originated in India, and gained great popularity during the reign of the Ottoman empire. A hookah works by filtering the smoke through water, the smoke is typically produced through evaporation and not burning as the coals do not ordinarily come into contact with the smoking mixture but are used to heat it.
Hookahs are also known under a variety of other names from culture to culture such as a shisha, nargile, arghileh, okka, kalyan, gewat suckre, or ghalyan. Narghile originates from the Persian word for coconut, which is what the first ever hookahs were made from. The word Shisha is typically used in the West to refer to the smoking mixtures that go into the hookah pipe but in other cultures it is used to refer to the pipe itself. Shisha comes from the Persian word for glass, but the confusion may arise from the fact that in Arabic the word hashish has not only been used to refer to cannabis resin, but also to the dried leaves themselves. Hookah itself may stem from Arabic uqqa, meaning small box, pot, or jar. Both names refer to the original methods of constructing the smoke/water chamber part of the hookah. In Armenia, Albania, Bulgaria Cyprus, Greece, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Romania and Syria hookah is referred to as Narghile, with the letter “N” being dropped in Arabic pronunciation.
In Iran the hookah is referred to as ghalyoun or ghalyan and in India and Pakistan it is referred to as huqqa, the word hookah has probably stuck most in the English language from colonial times where British people would have first sampled the Indian huqqa. While hookah is used around the world nowadays the word “shisha" is still used to describe water pipes in Arab countries as well as Egypt and the Persian Gulf.
