Hashish in Egypt

Egypt has used hashish for eight or nine hundred years and has been trying to stop for at least six hundred. The habit arrived with Sufi mystics and became part of the life of the café; the campaign against it runs from medieval rulers who had users’ teeth pulled out to a modern law that allows the death penalty for trafficking.^[1]

How it came

Hemp was grown in Egypt for rope long before it was grown as a drug. Hashish is said to have been brought by “mystic Islamic travelers” from Syria in the twelfth century, under the Ayyubid dynasty. In the thirteenth century its use by Egyptian Sufis is documented, and so is a plant described as Indian hemp, grown in gardens.^[1]

About 1525 a rabbi of Cairo, David ibn Abi Zimra, wrote that people in Egypt ate cannabis leaves “and are inebriated thereby, and they say that it makes one happy”.^[1]

Eaten, drunk and smoked

Form	What it is
Eaten	In the early centuries hashish was eaten. A report of 1925 describes it “mixed with sugar and cooked with butter and flavoring” into sweets called manzul, maagun and garawish
Drunk	French soldiers in 1800 noted a beverage made from hemp
Smoked in the gozah	The gozah is the traditional Egyptian water pipe. In a study published in 1971, 89.4% of the selected prisoner users reported smoking without oral consumption; the water pipe was the commonest method
Mixed	Bosa combined cannabis with darnel; a water-pipe blend added henbane

The figures come from M. I. Soueif’s 1971 study of 850 male cannabis users imprisoned in 1967–68, compared with 839 non-user prisoners. Another 9.3% combined smoking with oral consumption. These are descriptions of a selected prison sample, not estimates for all Egyptians.^[2]

In his 1975 chapter, Ahmad M. Khalifa describes shared sessions with a supervisor called the Sultan, who took the first draw from each fresh load. An attendant tended the water, fire and pipe as it passed around the circle. This records one account of sociability under prohibition, rather than a protocol followed by every smoker.^[3]

Six centuries of bans

When	Who	What they did
14th century	The authorities	Users could be punished by having their teeth pulled out
1800	The French army of occupation	Banned smoking hashish and drinking it, after their own soldiers took to it for want of alcohol. Cafés that sold it were boarded up and their owners jailed
1868	The Egyptian government	Forbade cannabis and its preparations, one of the first modern national bans
1874		Taxed imports, though possession stayed illegal
1877	The Ottoman sultan	Ordered all hashish in Egypt destroyed
1879	The khedive	Banned imports
1884		Banned cultivation
1960	The republic	Law 182: long prison terms for possession, and the death penalty for trafficking

None of it worked, and officials said so. In 1892 the British head of the customs reported that prohibition had only produced smuggling and that hashish was too widely used to stamp out; a law to license and tax it on the Indian model was drafted and shelved.^[1][4]

What officials believed

Two views competed for half a century, and both were British. John Warnock, who ran Egypt’s asylums from 1895, attributed more than a quarter of his male patients’ madness to hashish. In the 1920s Egypt’s delegate told the League of Nations that hashish caused most of the country’s insanity, and Egypt pressed for international control of cannabis.^[4]

Thomas Russell, head of Cairo’s police, told the League of Nations in 1930 something different: that hashish was the vice of the city slums and did comparatively little harm, and that the few smokers in the villages were regarded as a joke, like the village drunk in England.^[1][4]

The historian Liat Kozma reads the campaign as more than a health measure: a centralising state’s wish to civilise its lower classes, and concern for the country’s image abroad.^[1]

Now

The law is severe and the custom is open. Trafficking can bring death, and possession of small amounts a heavy sentence. Yet enforcement against smokers is often lax, and in many parts of the country hashish is smoked in local cafés without concealment. The crop is grown in Sinai and Upper Egypt, where seven million plants were destroyed in one year, 1994.^[1]