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| Though smoking is still a very popular habit in Iran, formerly Persia, lawmakers there implemented a tobacco smoking law which banned smoking in all outdoor and indoor public places, places of work, and while on public transport.– Public domain image of hookah smoking in Persia |
THE WEED IN PERSIA… AN ORIENTAL LAND, SAID TO BE THE SMOKEN'S PARADISE.
The Persian's Social Position Shown by the Number and Value of His Pipes
The Eternal Water Pipe – The Etiquette of Smoking
Persia is the smoker's paradise. In the first place, tobacco is cheap; fourteen pounds of it in the cured leaf cost from three to ten shillings. There is no middleman or manufacturer to mix, chop, scent, flavor and adulterate it. The grower cures it and packs it in bags of skin. In these bags the merchant sells it to the retailer; and then the smoker, pipe in hand, samples the various lots, and purchases from a pennyworth to a bagful, as seemeth to him good.
There are various kinds of tobacco in Persia: the leaf tobacco, which is smoked in the kalian, for hubble-bubble; the Kurdish tobacco, which is almost white, and consists of the leaves and stalks of the plant coarsely pulverized. This is a very fragrant pipe tobacco, and may be obtained mild or excessively strong, and it is smoked in chibonques or in the Arab short clay pipe. The only recommendations of the Arab pipe are its cheapness and its portability. It is a simple tube of clay about six inches long, with a bore an inch in diameter; it is constructed in the middle, and bent at nearly a right angle. It is essentially the poor man's pipe. Crammed with a Kurdish tobacco, of which it will hold half an ounce, it is passed from hand to band until it is smoked out.
In the north of Persia and in the capital the papiros, or cigarette, is rapidly gaining ground; the commonest Samsoon tobacco is used as a rule, or a very similar article grown in Ghilan and rather superior to it. But the real national pipe of Persia is the kalian. Among the merchant and tradesman class the kalian is over between the lips. The peripatetic vender of smoke is seen in Persia in every place where men congregate for business or pleasure. Even at executions the criminal will ask for and receive a farewell whiff of the eternal water pipe before he is blown from a gun. I have seen a man undergoing the long agonies of crucifixion seeking solace in the kalian.
THE PERSIAN AND HIS PIPES
The social position of the Persian is shown by the number and the value of his pipes. The pipebearer to a great man is a highly paid domestic, who may have in his care from fifty to a hundred pipes, varying in value from £5 to £500. The pipes of the King and of the Royal Princes are often made entirely of gold incrusted with a profusion of gems; the middle and upper classes generally content themselves with kalians whose reservoirs and stems are of solid silver, the bowl only being of gold ornamented with gems or enamels.
The religious classes mostly affect a kalian of the simplest kind; the water reser voir being a wide mouthed bottle of course porous clay, the stem being composed of curiously turned wood stained a bright crimson, and the bowl made of a black porcelain resembling ebony in appearance. But in the privacy of their own harems, the holy men do not disdain to smoke the costly pipes of their wives; for everybody smokes in Persia - old men and maidens, young men and children - and the old women are the most inveterate smokers of all.
Among the middle classes the water reservoir is often composed of glass, elaborately cut and often decorated with the florid colored and gilt ornamentation which Turkish art has rendered familiar to us. These glass reservoirs, for which there is an enormous market throughout Persia and central Asia, are made in Russia. Rose water is frequently used in place of the vulgar fluid; rose leaves, tiny rosebuds, and the immature fruit of the almond or plum are tossed into it, and as the smoker at each inhalation sets the liquid in violent motion, a pleasant sight is thus offered for his contemplation, much resembling the pretty toys that may be seen in some of the filter shops in London. In the hot weather, a porous clay reservoir is affected by all classes, as it is supposed to cool the water that purifies the fragrant smoke; they will even ice the water. The water is changed every time the pipe is lighted, and is itself not without its uses; for it is an ever handy and never failing emetic – useful thing in a country where poisoning is not infrequent.
ETIQUETTE AND PUNCTILIO
Probably the Persians are the most poetical as well as the most practical people in the world. All through the summer the stems of their pipes are decorated with circles of tiny moss rose buds; or, the interstices having been filled with grass seeds or grains of corn, the pipe is handed to the smoker covered with rows of sprouting verdure an inch and a half long. This decoration of pipes is part of the duty of the pipe bearer or of the ladies of the harem, and the pipe bearer's office is no sinecure. He has several stocks of tobacco of varying quality.
The etiquette and punctilio of pipe smoking are endless. When a visitor is offered a pipe, and there is not a second one, he declines it at once; his host must smoke first. This, if the entertainer be much superior in position, be will actually do, but otherwise ho declines, and the guest, having first offered the pipe to the other visitors, who decline it as a matter of course, proceeds to smoke, and then it is handed round to everybody in order of rank.
No business in the east can be done without the smoking of many water pipes; it forms a large portion of the enjoyment of the Oriental bath, it fills up the pauses of conversation, and, when a man is at a loss for an answer, it gives him time to think. The very sound of the bubbling water in a hot country is soothing to the ear. That it is not smoked in Europe is probably due to the fact that he who would smoke the Persian water pipe would need to keep a Persian servant to fill it for him. - Foreign Letter, 1887
🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia
