Fanning the coals
Clearing the stem.
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Clearing the stem.
Hookah entered Persian, Mughal, and Ottoman culture no earlier than the late 16th century — so "ancient" quotes about it are impossible by the dates alone.
Tobacco reached Persia through Portuguese merchants and, it seems, through India and Turkey as well — around the turn of the 1590s and 1600s. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) initially banned smoking on pain of death and confiscation of property, but eventually allowed tobacco cultivation and taxed it; by the end of his reign, smoking ḡalyān and čopoq (pipes) had spread to every level of society. By 1617 tobacco was already being grown in Hamadan, and by 1637 the crop had reached Baghdad, Kurdistan, and Gilan. By the mid-17th century, hookah houses (qalyānkhāna) had become centers of urban social life in Iran — often located near main squares, as part of hospitality rituals. Under Shah Abbas II (1642–1666), hookah smoking was described as a "national addiction": wealthy households kept a dedicated hookah servant (qalyāndār).
In Mughal India, a widely repeated account links the arrival of the hookah to the court of Emperor Akbar (reigned 1556–1605): a court physician of Persian origin, Hakim Abul Fath Gilani, is said to have devised a way of passing smoke through water after the ambassador of Bijapur, Asad Beg, introduced smoking at the court in Fatehpur Sikri. There is no reference to a specific court chronicle backing this story, so the version remains widespread but not strictly documented.
In the Ottoman Empire, according to established historiographical tradition (tracing back to the chronicle of Ibrahim Pecevi), the first coffeehouses in Istanbul opened in the Tahtakale district in the mid-16th century — most often dated to 1554–1555. The chronicle itself could not be verified, but the date has become fixed in historiography.
Quotes attributed to Hafez about the hookah occasionally surface online — and they offer a convenient example of how dating checks work for literary attributions. Hafez of Shiraz died around 1390. Tobacco, without which neither the water pipe nor the object itself in its familiar sense could exist, did not reach Persia before the late 1590s. Between the poet's death and the appearance of the object attributed to him lies a gap of at least two centuries. Such an attribution is impossible on chronological grounds alone, no matter how plausible the quote sounds.
This is not an isolated curiosity but a working principle: for any quote about the hookah, the first step is to check the author's dates against the arrival of tobacco in their region. If a poet died before tobacco was known in their country, the quote cannot be genuine, however often it gets repeated.
A similar check reveals a genuinely interesting case — this time within a single publication. Encyclopaedia Iranica, in its article on the device itself (ḠALYĀN), cites an early mention of the hookah in a poem by Ahli Shirazi, who died in 1535, as early evidence. But the same encyclopedia's article on tobacco (TOBACCO) states that the ḡalyān device apparently did not exist before the 1560s — that is, after Ahli Shirazi's death — and cautiously suggests that his verses may have referred to smoking the seeds of another plant (tabḡ) rather than tobacco.
Two articles from the same encyclopedia contradict each other, and it is worth presenting that disagreement as it stands, without trying to pick the "correct" version: it is possible that the confusion around Ahli Shirazi is itself the source of some of the later legends about "poets who smoked hookah" — in the same vein as the stories about Hafez.
Coffeehouses in Ottoman Istanbul quickly became not just places for coffee but venues of verbal culture: patrons recited poetry, storytellers (meddah) performed, and verbal contests were staged. The flowering of Ottoman court ("divan") poetry coincided in time with the spread of coffeehouses across the empire's cities.
In 1633, Sultan Murad IV banned tobacco smoking (along with coffee), citing threats to public morality and health. After his death, his successor Ibrahim I lifted the ban and replaced it with a tax.
The Damascene Sufi scholar and poet Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (1641–1731) left direct testimony of how quickly tobacco entered daily life: in 1682 he wrote that tobacco had "become extremely famous in all the lands of Islam," that "people of all classes use it and indulge in it," and that he had seen "even five-year-old children taking it up." He also composed a legal treatise defending the permissibility of smoking — "al-Sulh bayn al-Ikhwan fi Hukm Ibahat al-Dukhan" ("Reconciliation Among Brothers Regarding the Permissibility of Smoke").
A domestic detail from the same period: in 1750, a Damascene resident described how, on the banks of the Barada River, there were more women smoking tobacco and drinking coffee than men doing the same — smoking in Damascus's public space was not solely a male practice.
The Eastern tradition is documented not by quotations but by objects and images with dates and known collections.
The site already has a piece on the hookah in 19th-century European art and literature — there, the hookah is most often shown through the eyes of an outside observer: as an attribute of an imagined "East" in the paintings of salon Orientalists and in travelogues. The Eastern tradition visible in Persian miniatures, Mughal manuscripts, and Deccani bidri work is arranged differently: the hookah is embedded in the internal life of the depicted society — a court reception, women's quarters, a scene of a dervish's asceticism — rather than presented as an exotic detail for an outside viewer. The difference is not about a "more authentic" depiction but about the vantage point itself: from within a culture or from outside it.
The chronology in this piece lines up with the general history of the hookah and with how tobacco reached the East along trade routes from the Caribbean to the Ottoman Empire — the same window of the late 16th to early 17th century. Where the words "narghile," "shisha," "hookah," and "hooka" came from, and how regional hookah traditions varied across the East, are worth reading about separately; the same goes for how the hookah lounge grew out of the Istanbul coffeehouse into a chain-style venue.
Did Hafez really write poems about the hookah?
No: Hafez died around 1390, and tobacco did not reach Persia before the late 1590s — the device could not physically have existed during his lifetime.
Is it known exactly when the hookah first appears in Persian poetry?
No: Encyclopaedia Iranica names an early mention in Ahli Shirazi (d. 1535) in one article, while another article in the same publication states that the ḡalyān device only appeared after the 1560s — after his death.
How did the hookah reach the Mughal court in India?
According to a widely repeated account, through Akbar's court physician, Hakim Abul Fath Gilani, in the late 16th century, though this version is not backed by a reference to a specific court chronicle.
Are there confirmed examples of the hookah in Ottoman or Urdu poetry?
No direct quotes have been found in the available sources, although coffeehouses and court poetry flourished at the same time in the Ottoman Empire.
How do Eastern depictions of the hookah differ from European ones?
In Persian and Mughal miniatures, the hookah is part of a society's internal life (court, home, asceticism), while in 19th-century European Orientalism it is more often presented as an exotic detail for an outside gaze.