There’s a block in New York City’s Nomad neighborhood that, for me, serves as a portal to other places and times. Sometimes I’m transported to a Boston apartment I inhabited in my 20s; on other 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 friend’s backyard in Austin—I’ve traveled to them all on my short walk home from the subway, carried by the nostalgic whiffs of scented smoke drifting from the sleek hookah lounge on 28th Street.
When I started researching Mystic Mist: The Rituals of Huqqa, a new book I wrote for Assouline, I realized how much this casual pastime I took for granted was rooted in a rich heritage spanning centuries and continents. The stylish patrons of a hookah lounge on a terrace in the shadow of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa; the teens I spotted taking selfies around a hookah at Istanbul’s Ciragan Palace; the friends sharing a pipe on a sidewalk in Cairo; the men setting up a hookah on a sand dune in the Saudi desert—they’re all carrying on a tradition that began in the royal courts of Mughal India before traveling to Iran, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, and, eventually, the West. At every stop along its winding journey, I learned as I spoke to historians, professors, journalists, and enthusiasts around the world, the hookah became 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.
Legend has it that revered Turkish architect Mimar Sinan placed a hookah under the dome of the Sülemaniye Mosque to test its acoustics. In 18th-century Calcutta, English lawyer William Hickey noted 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 movement grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans were known to pose for portraits donning lavish Ottoman-inspired outfits and holding a hookah.
Mystic Mist traces the hookah’s history through a trove of historical paintings, vintage photographs, and bejeweled antique hookahs residing in museum collections around the world, as well as movie stills from Casino Royale, Barbarella, Matrix Reloaded, and Alice in Wonderland. There’s also original photography by Condé Nast Traveler contributing photographer Oliver Pilcher, who chronicled contemporary hookah culture in Dubai.
As a teetotaler, hangouts at hookah lounges during college in Boston or in New York’s East Village in my 20s were a way for my friends and me to enjoy nights out without ringing up an endless tab of Diet Cokes at a bar. Nights spent huddled around a communal hookah pipe became such a fixture of my younger years that I even converted an unused sunroom in a Boston apartment into my own hookah parlor, complete with plush floor cushions, silky jewel-toned curtains, and latticed lanterns. The hookah—or shisha, nargile, argileh, or hubbly-bubbly, as it’s also known—remains a fixture across parts of Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, and also 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 just as common to find hookah being smoked in a parking lot in Beirut as it is at glamorous venues like HuqqA, a group of luxury lounges across 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 moment you walk in, it’s not just about the smoke—it’s about the setting, the people, the ritual.
If you’re looking to partake in this lifestyle, chances are you won’t have to venture very far—trendy hookah lounges and nondescript holes-in-the-wall abound in cities around the world, from Little Egypt on London’s Edgware Road and within New York City’s Astoria to lively swaths of Marseille, São Paulo, Dearborn, Michigan, Berlin, and other cities with large Arab diaspora communities. If you decide to try it yourself, get ready to settle in for a while and make a few new friends. Evenings around a hookah are anything but 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 bubbling at the center of it all.