Smoking Revisited: Rights, Difficulty, and the Image of Muslims

Some among any gathering are heavy smokers, and this may be the first time the point has been put so harshly to those who smoke — without singling any one of them out. It remains harmful all the same, and the sharīʿah does not sanction it. A smoker's own wife could say as much, lying beside him at night: the breath itself is disgusting, and this is a matter of ḥuqūq al-ʿibād, the rights owed between people. On the Day of Judgement, Allah (swt) will bring the two together, and she will have a case to bring against him. Smoking is not an intelligent thing to do, yet it remains a habit, like so many other sins that take root, genuinely difficult to break. That it is difficult is not in question — but it is not impossible, and it takes a real decision, together with an honest reckoning of the consequences: not only the harm a smoker does to himself, but the harm done to those he loves and to the people around him. This is reason enough to give the habit up.

Consider, too, the image so often attached to Muslims and to Middle Eastern people generally — a shīshā or a nargile in one hand and a belly dance on the other side. Is that really the image Islam and Muslims wish to project? Even the shīshā itself is said by some to carry no smoke at all, only a different flavour in the water pipe — whatever the truth of that, the question remains what exactly is being imitated. Watch a small child pretend to smoke, with sweets made to look like little cigarettes, and the instinct of any adult who sees it is to stop the habit forming at all — no parent would let a child near a fake cigarette of that kind. Adults deserve the same caution about themselves. The heaviest smokers in the world are Muslims: in Indonesia, remarkably so; in Malaysia, remarkably so — and, remarkably, it is a habit actively encouraged there rather than checked. May Allah (swt) help this ummah.