Jeddah shisha smokers forced out of the Saudi city’s cafes

Smokers of the hubble-bubble water pipe have until Saturday to indulge their fondness for sweet flavored tobacco in Jeddah’s cafes as the Saudi city prepares to enforce a public ban on the habit. A law against smoking the pipes, known in Arabic as shisha, in public places has been in place for years in some other Saudi cities, but it is only now being implemented in Jeddah. “It’s a big problem for our cafe. More than 80 percent of our customers come to smoke shisha. Now they complain as soon as they walk through the door when we say we won’t have shisha,” said Ghassan Mohammed Mansour, the manager of Jeddah’s upscale Caffe Aroma in a phone interview. Businesses that flout the ban face increasingly hefty fines and ultimately closure if they are caught offering the pipes to customers. “At this moment we have good menus and good food, so we will try to bring in new customers by advertising our food, but still we lose,” Mansour said.