What is Dokha?

With a history of over 500 years of cultivation and smoking in the Middle East Dokha is a traditional Arabic tobacco often mixed with dried flowers, herbs, spices and / or fruit. Some of the traditional Iranian and Turkish blends would also be mixed with the bark and leaves of indigenous plants.

Modern Dokha is simply 100% pure tobacco with no additives unlike other tobaccos, which are mixed with preservatives, chemical additives, herbicides and pesticides.

Dokha is available in hundreds of brands, flavours and strengths. Most sellers offer three main categories of strength – ‘hot’ (har), ‘warm’ (dafifi), and ‘cold’ (barid) with many additionally offering moderating strengths such as ‘extra-hot’, ‘over-warm’ and ‘over-cold’. These categories do not necessarily refer to the amount of ‘buzz’ a blend may give but to the comparative harshness of the tobacco.  Whilst it is accepted that the harsher a blend the more ‘buzz’ it may impart there are many ‘warm’ and ‘over-warm’ blends that deliver the maximum user ‘laf raas’ (Arabic for ‘head spin’).

An example of our dokha