“The leaves and capsules of hemp, called in Egypt “hasheesh”…The habit is now very common among the lower orders in the metropolis and other towns of Egypt. The preparation of hemp used for smoking generally produces boisterous mirth. Few inhalations of its smoke, but the last very copious, are usually taken from the gozeh [a water pipe with a hollow reed as the draw stem and often with an old motor oil can as the base, used more commonly by the poor, in contrast to the glass base and woven flexible hose type pipe used by the upper class] .
After emission of the last draught from the mouth and nostrils, commonly a fit of coughing, and often a spitting of blood, ensues. Hasheesh is to be obtained not only at some of the coffee shops, there are shops of a smaller and more private description solely appropriated to the sale of this and other intoxicating preparations- they are called “mahshesh’ehs”. It is sometimes amusing to observe the ridiculous conduct and to listen to the conversation of the persons who frequent these shops. They are all of the lower orders.”
-Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), Edward Lane
Hash in my first time in Cairo was sold by the qirsh weight (an old piaster coin, one hundredth of an Egyptian pound) in the back streets of Darb al-Ahmar [Red Quarter], one of Cairo’s inner-most districts with the highest population density, oldest dwellings, and most twisting blocked alleys and mental map maddening cul-de-sacs of the whole city.
In 1979 I knew no mahshesh’ehs, I probably would not have been welcome in one anyway to order up a hash pipe, so it was easier to buy an qirsh of hash on the street and take it to a coffee house and ask the mu’allim, or waiter (literally “teacher”) to set me up with a gozeh and a load mixed with mu’assal, a plug of vegetable glycerol-rubbed tobacco (literally “honeyed”).
I don’t remember ever coughing or spitting blood, although I still can taste the gozeh’s Mobil motor oil dregs, because no doubt the water pipe was doing its job correctly to cool the smoke before it hit my throat. I also don’t remember having any ridiculous conversations, in any language- although speaking first year Arabic under such conditions would probably have seemed extremely funny- when high- it was more likely I gently nodded off after jotting a new vocab word or two in my notebook.
But I do remember repeatedly calling out, Ya mu’allim, Ya mu’allim, O Teacher, in my attempt to call over the waiter to refreshen my pipe’s dying lump of charcoal. And all of us, straight tobacco and hash smokers alike, called him over at the same time, as if to make a mockery of his divided attention and skilled hand at reviving the pipes, so that the coffee house’s tight confines echoed with this beseeching student chorus, located as we were right outside the back wall of Al-Azhar mosque and university, Islam’s oldest and most venerable, where a different type of teaching taught by a different type of teacher offered a much different lesson.