Smoking and "early modern" sociability: the great tobacco debate in the Ottoman Middle East (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries).

IN APRIL 1699, an unusual disturbance broke out in the streets of Cairo. As part of the annual pilgrimage caravan, which escorted Muslim pilgrims through the Sinai Desert to the holy cities of Arabia, a solemn procession was conveying a new silk covering destined for the Ka ba, or Sacred Shrine, in Mecca. Among the most notable participants were a group of North Africans, who created an uproar as they moved through the streets. Fired by religious zeal, they insisted on applying their own brand of Islamic morality to the crowd of onlookers. In choosing targets for chastisement, they were very specific, beating all the people whom they found smoking tobacco. As the tumult grew, they made their decisive mistake. Seizing a member of a local paramilitary group, they smashed his pipe, and during the ensuing quarrel, went so far as to hit him over the head. The crowd had apparently seen enough. Even as soldiers rushed to the scene, the “people of the marketplace” took matters into their own hands and began attacking the North Africans. The violence ended only with the arrival of a Janissary officer, who hauled the North Africans off to prison.1 Looking back on this incident from a very different time and place, with our own concerns and passions about tobacco, it is hard not to be struck by the deep emotions that smoking, even then, was capable of eliciting. Walking around Middle Eastern towns today, one could never imagine that such struggles ever took place. Nearly everyone has now accepted smoking as a public freedom. Few people would dream of condemning it as a moral scourge, or of banishing it from the streets and markets. If smokers today hear medical warnings about the dangers of tobacco, they remain oblivious to the acrimony that it once unleashed. This tolerant consensus did not emerge all at once. After its first arrival in the Ottoman Middle East at the end of the sixteenth century, tobacco would ignite intense debates about its legality and morality. The altercation in the streets of Cairo highlights these divisions in opinion. Invoking religion and morality, the rowdy North Africans were determined to put an end to smoking, and felt justified in using extreme measures. On the other side, the “people of the marketplace” completely denied this presumptive right to intervene in the affairs of others or to act independently on behalf of religion. To make their point, both camps were willing to come to blows. Why had tobacco become the subject of such bitter controversy? As contempo-