The ""Waterpipe"" Neologism

 PITHY SENTENTIOUS RECAP HERE

 
Read Most recent comments (June 16, 2008) on this hot issue, published in the Harm Reduction Journal:

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““WATERPIPE””: A CONFUSIONIST PARADIGM

First, it would not have been  very professional, in a story supposed to have an “anthropological” side, to use a “word” (““waterpipe””) that the local people do not use in their daily life [5]. I read somewhere that it would have been funny to imagine a naïve anthropologist asking smokers in a Syrian coffee-house: What about your “galyûn bi-l-mâ‘” practice, the literal translation of the ““waterpipe”” neologism !  Not to mention the related problems with the made-in-the-USA questionnaires blindly imported and translated into Arabic…[6]

The truth is that ““waterpipe””, is a “word” not found in dictionaries and inexistent in key languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc. or even in scientific English. In contrast, “hookah” and “narghile” can be found in dictionaries and “shisha” has been widely used for ages in the Arab world. Therefore, the use of such a word for all situations, in space and time, is methodologically wrong because the pipe and the smoking products are not the same from one country to the other, from one community to the other, etc. As a simple example, the shisha smoked today by young people in the USA is used with a flavoured tobacco [or no-tobacco]-molasses based mixture called tobamel (tobacco plus “mel” for “honey” in Latin) or mu‘essel (i.e. “honeyed”, in Arabic) in Arab countries. Now, this product is completely different from the pure moistened tobacco (called tutun) smoked in a madâ‘a by the Yemeni Jews described by Rakower and Fatal in their famous study. Consequently, extrapolation of findings between both above cases is not appropriate. Unfortunately, this has been done and resulted in frequent bias. As a conclusion, the word “waterpipe” should be avoided in studies unless extreme and quick simplification is needed. Since contemporaneous hookah smoking bridges between continents and languages, the selection of the right vocabulary remains of utmost important, particularly in questionnaires. Hanna’ study is a model in this field [7].

And my particular comment will be on lung cancer because the pseudo-scientific results about other diseases have already been addressed in the past. The Indian referred to study (by Gupta and colleagues) is absolutely not reliable for many reasons given in previous publications . As for the Chinese reference (by Lubin et al), and about which the US-Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies has already published very serious errors in the same supposedly « peer-reviewed » Tobacco Control journal [3], it is all the more ludicrous that the Chinese water pipe is a tiny device used with a Lilliputian bowl of tobacco and no charcoal ! How come, in these conditions, researchers worthy of this name can compare it with the Middle Eastern shisha ? These comparisons actually die hard because these people have been making use of the  clannish ““waterpipe”” nominalism which implies that all ““waterpipes”” of the world are the same. Any hookah (narghile, shisha) user knows that this is a childish functionalism (the almost uniquely distinctive feature of a hookah would be water) and unscientific reductionism…

The two hegemonic journals in the field of tobacco issues (Tobacco Control and Nicotine and Tobacco Research impose to authors, for obvious purposes, the use of this clannish unscientific nominalist and reductionist neologism.

[6] E-Letter to the Editor: Syria, Lebanon, Tobacco Research in General and Narghile (Hookah, Shisha) Smoking in Particular. Tobacco Control 2006 (8 June). A critical analysis of the following study: Ward KD, Eissenberg T, Rastam S, Asfar T,Mzayek F, Fouad MF, Hammal F,Mock J, Maziak W. The tobacco epidemic in Syria. Tobacco Control 2006;15;24-29.

http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/15/suppl_1/i24#544

[7] Chaouachi K. The narghile (hookah, shisha, goza) epidemic and the need for clearing up confusion and solving problems related with model building of social situations. TheScientificWorldJOURNAL: TSW Holistic Health &Medicine 207 (7): 1691–6.

http://thescientificworld.com/SCIENTIFICWORLDJOURNAL/toc/TSWJ_ArticleLanding.asp?jid=0&FromPage=Main&ArticleId=2820&navFrom=Main&From=Result

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To start with, problems have stemmed not only from the linguistic diversity of the studied object but also from a reductionist and nominalist approach that developed through the use of the neologism “waterpipe”, a word not found in dictionaries and inexistent in key languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc. or even in scientific English. In contrast, “hookah” and “narghile” can be found in dictionaries and “shisha” has been widely used for ages in the Arab world. Therefore, the use of such a word for all situations, in space and time, is methodologically wrong because the pipe and the smoking products are not the same from one country to the other, from one community to the other, etc. As a simple example, the shisha smoked today by young people in the USA is used with a flavoured tobacco [or no-tobacco]-molasses based mixture called tobamel (tobacco plus “mel” for “honey” in Latin) or mu‘essel (i.e. “honeyed”, in Arabic) in Arab countries. Now, this product is completely different from the pure moistened tobacco (called tutun) smoked in a madâ‘a by the Yemeni Jews described by Rakower and Fatal in their famous study [4]. Consequently, extrapolation of findings between both above cases is not appropriate. Unfortunately, this has been done and resulted in frequent bias. As a conclusion, the word “waterpipe” should be avoided in studies unless extreme and quick simplification is needed. Since contemporaneous hookah smoking bridges between continents and languages, the selection of the right vocabulary remains of utmost important, particularly in questionnaires. Hanna’ study is a model in this field [7].

[7] Chaouachi K. The narghile (hookah, shisha, goza) epidemic and the need for clearing up confusion and solving problems related with model building of social situations. TheScientificWorldJOURNAL: TSW Holistic Health &Medicine 207 (7): 1691–6.

http://thescientificworld.com/SCIENTIFICWORLDJOURNAL/toc/TSWJ_ArticleLanding.asp?jid=0&FromPage=Main&ArticleId=2820&navFrom=Main&From=Result

Furthermore, the equivalent Arabic word or its translation simply does not exist. Narghile is widely used in Turkish, Arabic, Persian and many Latin languages. Together with “hookah”, and contrary to other words, it can be found in academic English dictionaries. In countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where the present study was carried out, “Shisha” fits perfectly. In fact, and against the background of its world growing popularity, “Shisha” is, in the opinion of local and native experts, the best candidate for a world scientific consensus (Al-Belasy 2006). Finally, it is worth noting that the Egypt-based regional bureau of the World Health Organization has published a second report on the “hazards of shisha smoking” (WHO-EMRO 2007])

Al-Belasy F. The Issue of Nomenclature: In Reply (18 June). E-Letter to the Editor about: Ward KD, Eissenberg T, Rastam S, Asfar T, Mzayek F, Fouad MF, Hammal F,Mock J, Maziak W. The tobacco epidemic in Syria. Tobacco Control 15: 24-29; 2006.

http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/15/suppl_1/i24#576

WHO-EMRO (World Health Organisation - Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office) and ESPRI (Egyptian Smoking Prevention Research Institute)(2007). Shisha Hazards Profile "Tobacco Use in Shisha - Studies on Water-pipe Smoking in Egypt". Cairo (14 March). ISBN: 978-92-9021-569-1. 84 pages. Prepared by Senior editors: Mostafa K. Mohamed, Christopher A. Loffredo, Ebenezer Israel et al.

About the word “water-pipe” 

CHAOUACHI Kamal. eLetter to the Editor: Syria, Lebanon, Tobacco Research in General and Narghile (Hookah, Shisha) Smoking in Particular. Tobacco Control 2006 (8 June). A critical analysis of the following study: Ward KD, Eissenberg T, Rastam S, Asfar T,Mzayek F, Fouad MF, Hammal F,Mock J, Maziak W. The tobacco epidemic in Syria. Tobacco Control 2006;15;24-29.

TC: http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/15/suppl_1/i24#544

We are afraid this word is misleading and deepens the gap between scientists and the true world of hookah users. Please refer to our critique of a paper in the columns of this same journal (22). Indeed, we are quite sure that our colleagues will never use, in a related study or questionnaire into Arabic, “galyûn bi-l-mâ‘ (or galyûn mâ‘î), which are, as they may know, laughable literal translations of “water-pipe”.  We are sure they would use the words “narghile” or “shisha” (“hookah” if they were in India or Pakistan). Indeed, they will understand that it would be funny to imagine a naïve anthropologist asking smokers in a Syrian coffee-house: What about your “galyûn bi-l-mâ‘” practice ?

Indeed, in this field where tradition and the sociocultural context meet so closely with pharmacology, it is of utmost importance to use the language the people use then reflect this in our publications. Further to a comprehensive analysis of the world linguistic variations and the higher observed prevalence for some of them, we concluded that three terms are highly relevant: narghile , hookah and shisha (2). These words can be found in any good English academic dictionary. Shisha is now used internationally because of the global hookah craze whereas “waterpipe”, we are afraid,  is no hypostasis. More, we have noted how this word creates bibliographic noise in databases since it also refers to household infrastructure plumbing equipments… Certainly the artefact is a “water-pipe” in a chemistry laboratory (9). However, once you are in the street or in a domestic setting, it is a hookah, a narghile, a shisha and even much more. This stresses, once more, the importance of a scientific discipline like anthropology whose object is not the study of folklore.

(22) CHAOUACHI K. Letter to the Editor: Some Misconceptions in a Good Alert Paper. Tobacco Control  2006 (18 Jan.). A critical analysis of the following study: AFIFI-SOWEID Rima. Lebanon: water pipe line to youth. Tobacco Control 2005;14:363-4.

tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/14/6/363-a#479

FROM the above: Then, the word "water pipe", in the title and elsewhere, is not appropriate. It is used only in a certain orientalist or neo-orientalist literature,(1) just like the sometimes disparaging "hubble-bubble" (2). If you enter a café in the Middle East or in Europe and North America nowadays, and order a "water pipe" or a "hubble-bubble", in most cases you will not be understood. So, let us use the words people use in the real human world we are interested in, as scientists serving the public health.

-"(N)arghile" is widely used in the Middle East: from Turkey to Iran via Lebanon, Syria, etc. -"Hookah" is quite common in Asia (India, Pakistan, etc.) and the English- speaking world. -"Shisha" fits first the North of Africa: countries such as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and now Morocco but it is also common in the Arab-Persian Gulf region and now, thanks to the world hookah craze, in every part of the globe (3).

REFERENCES

(1) CHAOUACHI Kamal. Culture matérielle et orientalisme. L'exemple d'une recherche socio-anthropologique sur le narguilé, Arabica (Paris III Sorbonne et EHESS), 2005. [Engl.: Material Culture and Orientalism. The Example of a Socio-Anthropological Research on Narghile]

(2) CHAOUACHI Kamal. Le narguilé. Anthropologie d'un mode d'usage de drogues douces [Engl.: An Anthropology of Narghile: its Use and Soft Drugs], Ed. L'Harmattan, 1997, 262 pages.

(3) CHAOUACHI Kamal. The Recent Development of Hookah Use in the World : a Serious Epidemic or just a Passing Fad ? The Need for a Socio- Anthropological and Medical Approach. IFSSH (International Forum for Social Sciences and Health), World Congress "Health Challenges of the Third Millenium". Istanbul, 21-26 Aug. 2005. Published by YEDITEPE University, Dept. of Anthropology, Aug. 2005, tome I, pp. 360-1.

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From the Observatory on Hookah or Health

Wednesday, August 08, 2007: Libya Now Victim of ““Waterpipe””™ Contamination. Another Twist of the “Bulgarian Nurses” Series ?

http://narghile.blogspot.com/2007/08/libya-now-victim-of-waterpipe.html

““Waterpipe”” ™ is a dangerous nominalism for the world public health! It has produced the biggest confusion in the field of hookah (shisha, narghile) studies. Let’s remind oblivious people how. Such a ludicrous nominalism (see Letter to Dir. WHO) has led the great majority of researchers to take one pipe for another, one product for the other, etc. The scenario is always the same. A team of “researchers” publishes a paper in which they happily cite studies on ““Waterpipe”” ™ carried on -let's say...- in China, Yemen or India or any other part of the world. However, they don’t tell anybody that the ““Waterpipe”” ™ there is completely different from the shisha in their own country (USA or Europe for instance). They don’t say (simply because they don’t understand the whole thing) that the smoking product (and, hence, the chemistry of smoke) is different (or simultaneously used with others), etc. No, they state that smoking out of a ““Waterpipe”” ™ causes all kinds of cancer (lung, stomach, etc.) because the cited studies would have established this fact. This is not science. This is reductionism and a caricature of complexity. Beyond, this becomes global obscurantism.

A long list of misled authors of publications on this issue could be drawn right now. Just have a look at a striking example here . Even official “experts” who were appointed by WHO (the World Health Organization) to prepare reports on hookah (narghile, shisha, ““waterpipe””™) smoking could not distinguish between a burning and a heating process (1st Erroneous Report), between smoking products (2nd Erroneous Report) and even between hookah and cigarette smoke (American Lung Association Erroneous Report French INPES Experts Campaign)... And, recently in France, ""top" "experts"" take a Shish-Kebab for a Shisha ...

Even Dr Sebastian THOMAS, the new ““waterpipe””™ “expert” from Libya, talks of reverse smoking without realizing that this is totally irrelevant in the case of shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking. This is because he refers (wrongly, from a bibliographical viewpoint) to a study in India (firstly cited by us) about the influence of temperatures on tar carcinogenicity. However, this has nothing to do with hookah (shisha, narghile) smoking.

It described another type of smoking in India. Indeed, do shisha smokers put the bowl of tobamel in their mouth to inhale its smoke ? Apart from this, none of the teams who authored the biased publications defended by Dr Sebastian THOMAS paid the least attention to the importance of temperatures. We were the first (Year 2000) to emphasize their central role (notably by mentioning the Maillard reaction for instance). All these matters were considered as taboo.

Let’s repeat: for many reasons, the word Shisha is now used everywhere in the world. Professor Al-BELASY, son of a café owner in Egypt (and author of a study on shisha in which he shows that he perfectly knows what he is talking about), has also insisted on this aspect. However, his opinion was not taken into account because he is not a member of the [““waterpipe””™] club behind the WHO publications. In the Indian subcontinent, the word used for centuries has been 'hookah'. However, hookah has been used mainly for tumbâk, jurâk and similar products. Shisha is the new device adapted for tobamel, the fashionable tobacco (or tobacco-free)-molasses based smoking mixture that is swamping the world. There are different kind of devices and smoking mixtures used at the same time and, most important, the chemistry of smoke is different in each case. So, ““waterpipe””™ is highly confusing. In Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and many other languages, the word ““waterpipe””™ simply has no existence.

Such a nominalism is all the more curious that the world “experts” and this newbie in Libya are not studying the Indian hookah (with pure tobacco or a kind of jurâk) but are all concerned (perhaps more by questions in relation to funding than to public health) by the same product: tobamel, the tobacco (or tobacco-free)-molasses based product that is smoked in a shisha. In India, for instance, local people make a clear distinction between the hookah (mainly used with pure tobacco) and the newly-arrived shisha which is used with the tobamel. The same in Yemen where the local narghile, called Madâ‘a, is one thing and the Shisha another one. Do we have to give other examples from many other parts of the world ? For a poor man of these countries, it is as clear as the sun. For these highly paid official and stubborn “experts”, it is not.

““Waterpipe””™ is a Code ! Our attention was drawn these last years by some independent researchers who didn’t maintain any special relations with the global “anti”-Tobacco machine (WHO, the Globalink network, the Tobacco Control and Nicotine and Tobacco Research journals and the whole series of tobacco IGOs and NGOs)[note that the latter are not separate entitites but depend on the decisions of a handful of known influent people, so you can get a picture of this democratic system..]. Our friends were therefore interested in the topic and were planning to submit a manuscript to so-called “peer-reviewed” journals (of course controlled by the above). They were surprised to be soon urged to use the ““waterpipe””™ trademark even when they insisted (some of them were of Lebanese and Egyptian descent) that the words (n)arghile, shisha and goza were the ones used in their respective native countries, those their studies focussed on. They understood that this was the condition for their papers to be “considered” for publication. Otherwise, they would be rejected, a priori. You see, what « peer-reviewers » of these journals are checking is not the serious errors or the flaws in a manuscript but the vocabulary used by their authors. This is a code, a police code. Accepting this code means that you will become a “member of the Club” (not to say other ugly words…). Anyway, the above researchers were generally deceived and some of them told us they were literally shocked by these unethical practices in science.

CONCLUSION
The aim of the “not debatable” use of ““waterpipe””™ is to let ignorant people accept biased models for shisha (hookah, narghile) smoking: for instance that of a crazy unrealistic smoking machine in a laboratory of a US-American University in Beirut. They don’t want to work with real smokers because they know that the reality of shisha (smoking) will show that their fear-arousing slogans (1 narghile Equals 200 Cigarettes, etc.) are wrong.

As a conclusion, ““waterpipe””™ is not an innocent and “useful” word. It is a registered trademark (that of a clan, of researchers, of journals, of funding organizations) to maintain ignorance, fear, confusion, to get more funds for more biased studies. This is another facet of the Neo-Orientalist epidemic.