There’s a block in New York City’s Nomad neighborhood that, for me, serves as a portal to different locations and occasions. Sometimes I’m transported to a Boston house I inhabited in my 20s; on different strolls, a cave-like café in Amman. A terrace in Cappadocia, a glittering Dubai rooftop, an opulent Chicago nightclub, a stretch of Tunisian desert, a buddy’s yard in Austin—I’ve traveled to all of them on my quick stroll dwelling from the subway, carried by the nostalgic whiffs of scented smoke drifting from the glossy hookah lounge on twenty eighth Street.
When I began researching Mystic Mist: The Rituals of Huqqa, a brand new ebook I wrote for Assouline, I spotted how a lot this informal pastime I took with no consideration was rooted in a wealthy heritage spanning centuries and continents. The trendy patrons of a hookah lounge on a terrace in the shadow of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa; the teenagers I noticed taking selfies round a hookah at Istanbul’s Ciragan Palace; the buddies sharing a pipe on a sidewalk in Cairo; the males establishing a hookah on a sand dune in the Saudi desert—they’re all carrying on a convention that started in the royal courts of Mughal India earlier than touring to Iran, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, and, finally, the West. At each cease alongside its winding journey, I realized as I spoke to historians, professors, journalists, and fans round the world, the hookah grew to become ubiquitous. “Like drinking coffee, the social habit became greater than the act of smoking itself,” says Tara Desjardins, curator of South Asia at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
Courtesy Assouline
Assouline
Mystic Mist: The Rituals of Huqqa
Legend has it that revered Turkish architect Mimar Sinan positioned a hookah underneath the dome of the Sülemaniye Mosque to check its acoustics. In 18th-century Calcutta, English lawyer William Hickey famous in his memoirs, “Here everybody uses a hookah, and it is impossible to get on without. [I] have frequently heard men declare they would much rather be deprived of their dinner than their hookah.” And as the Orientalist motion grew in the 18th and nineteenth centuries, Europeans had been recognized to pose for portraits donning lavish Ottoman-inspired outfits and holding a hookah.
Mystic Mist traces the hookah’s historical past by a trove of historic work, classic images, and bejeweled vintage hookahs residing in museum collections round the world, in addition to film stills from Casino Royale, Barbarella, Matrix Reloaded, and Alice in Wonderland. There’s additionally unique images by Condé Nast Traveler contributing photographer Oliver Pilcher, who chronicled up to date hookah tradition in Dubai.
As a teetotaler, hangouts at hookah lounges throughout school in Boston or in New York’s East Village in my 20s had been a means for my buddies and me to take pleasure in nights out with out ringing up an infinite tab of Diet Cokes at a bar. Nights spent huddled round a communal hookah pipe grew to become such a fixture of my youthful years that I even transformed an unused sunroom in a Boston house into my very own hookah parlor, full with plush flooring cushions, silky jewel-toned curtains, and latticed lanterns. The hookah—or shisha, nargile, argileh, or hubbly-bubbly, because it’s additionally recognized—stays a fixture throughout components of Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, and in addition in diaspora communities in the West. “Smoking shisha thousands of miles away from one’s ancestral lands becomes an act of self-preservation and a way to hold onto traditions that may feel at risk of slipping away,” says journalist Zahra Hankir.
Today it’s simply as frequent to search out hookah being smoked in a car parking zone in Beirut as it’s at glamorous venues like HuqqA, a gaggle of luxurious lounges throughout the Middle East that partnered with Assouline on Mystic Mist. “HuqqA isn’t just a place to smoke shisha, it’s a place to feel something,” says cofounder Enis Ersavasti. “From the second you stroll in, it’s not nearly the smoke—it’s about the setting, the folks, the ritual.
If you’re seeking to partake on this life-style, chances are high you gained’t should enterprise very far—fashionable hookah lounges and nondescript holes-in-the-wall abound in cities round the world, from Little Egypt on London’s Edgware Road and inside New York City’s Astoria to energetic swaths of Marseille, São Paulo, Dearborn, Michigan, Berlin, and different cities with massive Arab diaspora communities. If you determine to strive it your self, get able to settle in for some time and make a number of new buddies. Evenings round a hookah are something however rushed: Conversations stretch out and deepen as you linger over the flavors, replenish the coals, and take leisurely puffs of apple or watermelon tobacco from a shared waterpipe quietly effervescent at the heart of all of it.