Smoking: The Case Against It

The third is whatever is harmful to health in general, leading to deterioration and sickness — smoking's effect in causing cancer is a case in point. Someone might say that smoking has been called not ḥarām after all; the answer is to name one benefit of it. It is a social thing, comes the reply — people gather outside a building, smoke, and talk. That answer does not stand either: a person has no right to kill himself. Allah (swt) gave these lungs to breathe and to cleanse the air taken in, and nobody has the right to destroy them. A visit to a hospital, to see those dying of lung cancer after years of smoking, is enough to answer whether smoking does any good — it is a disgusting habit. There are times it is impossible even to stand near a person leading the prayer whose smell is so strong, the stench so overpowering, that the question naturally arises whether that person will answer for it on the Day of Judgement — nobody has the right to poison another's air, and still no one can name any good that comes of it.

And yet people still smoke. Shīshā and the nargile end the same way and are to be avoided just as much. Even granting, for argument's sake, that it is not technically ḥarām — no āyah names it, no ḥadīth names it — is it not isrāf, extravagance, waste? That in itself is ḥarām. It wastes scarce money that ought to go on children and family, money that belongs to them, spent instead on cigarettes — and how is that to be answered before Allah (swt), together with the damage it does to the body? These are questions worth serious thought before asking whether it is ḥalāl.

When tobacco first appeared in the world, some two or three hundred years ago, or even less, the scholars of the entire Muslim world, without exception, gave the fatwa that it was ḥarām, ḥarām, ḥarām. Later, once governments began to see an economic gain in it through taxation, some scholars were pressured into softening the ruling to makrūh, disliked — however a person prefers to classify it, smoking remains absolutely damaging and harmful. Yes, it is only a plant, only a form of vegetation — but its effect is plain enough to anyone who asks those who smoked for years and have since stopped. It is an addiction.

May Allah (swt) free this ummah from the addiction. In Australia, where government recognises the cost smoking places on the health system, laws now ban it in public places, in offices, in schools, and cigarette advertising has disappeared, alḥamdulillāh. Travel instead to the third-world countries — to Malaysia, to Indonesia, to Turkey, to Muslim lands generally — and the most frequent advertising of all comes from the tobacco producers, smoking the ummah out of existence, one might say, by degrees.

No intelligent person can simply surrender to this little white stick. Yes, it is addictive — the answer is to find a cure, to seek treatment, to bring the nafs al-ammārah under control. Whoever cannot overcome a small stick of tobacco has no hope of overcoming the greater desires of that same self. It is disgusting, at times, to see a brother with a beautiful beard and a beautiful white galabiya holding a cigarette beside the Kaʿbah itself, during Ḥajj, or a group of five or six covered sisters sitting together doing the same, yā Laṭīf — harming and killing themselves. And should a person die as a direct result of this habit, that is a charge of suicide as well. Islam forbids every form of vegetation of this kind.