Muʽassel
sticky tobacco mixture used in hookahs
Muʽassel (Arabic: معسل, meaning "honeyed"), or maassel, is a tobacco mix containing molasses, vegetable glycerol and various flavourings which is smoked in a hookah, a type of waterpipe. It is also known as "shisha".
Argilah or Argileh (Arabic: أرجيلة, sometimes pronounced Argilee), and shisha or sheesha (شيشة), is the common term for the hookah itself in the Arab world.
History
Although hookah pipes have been used for several hundred years, muʽassel is a recent invention, going back to the early 20th Century in Egypt. Before this, only lightly processed tobacco was smoked in hookah pipes. This form of tobacco needed to be mixed with water, squeezed, and molded prior to use. It was hard to keep lit and produced a strong harsh smell and taste with a potent nicotine delivery. At the end of the twentieth century, hookah was no longer a very popular way to smoke tobacco, and in the Middle East was popular mainly among older, Arab men who smoked it with friends in cafes. Young people became interested in hookah use beginning in the early 1990s when milder sweetened and flavored hookah tobacco, commonly called Muʽassel, first became available. This is made by fermenting tobacco with molasses, glycerine and flavoring agents, producing a moist and pliable mixture.
“Muʽassel” enters the record as sticky tobacco mixture used in hookahs. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Muʽassel, sticky and tobacco can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4116030. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Muʽassel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.