Islam

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Islam

Though news of tobacco may have reached the Eastern Hemisphere shortly after Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492, it took until the early seventeenth century for smoking—mostly in the form of the water pipe—to become popular among the people of West and South Asia.

Medical Interest

In the Middle East, as in many places around the world, tobacco in the early stage of its introduction aroused medical interest, provoked moral rebuke among clerics, and caused economic anxiety on the part of bureaucrats. Like their counterparts in the West, Muslim physicians discussed the effect of smoking on physical health. Controversy surrounded the alleged effects of smoking on the body. Following the humoral pathology of traditional Galenic medicine, which remained normative in the Islamic world well into the nineteenth century, tobacco was classified as a hot and dry substance, and as such it was believed to be salutary for people with a humid disposition. Some even saw it as a universal medicine against a variety of diseases, while others believed that it weakened the brain. Similar to European beliefs, tobacco smoke was thought to repel pestilence. Overall, however, in Islamic lands tobacco never gained the medicinal reputation it enjoyed in early modern Europe.

Theological Scrutiny

Muslim scholars, on the other hand, were highly preoccupied with the potentially detrimental effects that smoking had on piety and propriety. The moral and religious debate that erupted in the Middle East is similar to the discussion tobacco sparked in the West, but aspects of it are different. Unable to find references to tobacco in the Koran, the Muslim book of sacred writings, some theologians declared it impermissible. Others used analogical reasoning to determine whether smoking was permitted or should be condemned and banned as contrary to religion. Because tobacco did not resemble any of the forbidden substances mentioned in the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad, proscribing it was not a simple matter. Nor was it easy to "prove" that tobacco in itself was bad, or harmful to one's health. One way of arguing for restriction, therefore, was to equate tobacco with the foul things that the Koran declares forbidden, to associate it with the "avoidance of things evil," or to argue that the Prophet, who appreciated sweet odors, would certainly have loathed tobacco's offensive smell.

In Shi'ism, the minority variant of Islam that in 1501 became the state religion of Iran, tobacco inspired similar debates. A number of Iranian theologians wrote treatises that discuss the religious status of tobacco smoking, weighing the potential health benefits ascribed to it by some doctors against possible religious objections. Arguments for and against tobacco were often made in the context of the controversy between the representatives of orthodoxy, who rejected tobacco, and members of Sufi orders, who embraced smoking, often mixing tobacco with hashish for the hallucinatory effect. In Iran, most of those who spoke out against the habit seem to have adhered to Akhbarism, a theological school of thought that relied heavily on the Koran, and the sayings of the Prophet and the Shia Imams (prayer leaders).

Bans on Smoking

In the seventeenth century, Muslim authorities issued decrees that outlawed smoking. Following clerical disapproval, they often presented prohibitive measures as a return to the true faith. However, their motives typically went beyond mere piety and involved fears of social unrest. The Mughal shah Jahangir (reigned 1605–1627) banned smoking in 1617, convinced that its consumption created "disturbance in most temperaments" (Sangar). Similar motives are recorded in the Ottoman Empire, where tobacco was first proscribed in the reign of Sultan Ahmad (1604–1617), who issued numerous bans on tobacco and the places where it was smoked. Of his successors, Sultan Murad IV (1623–1640) was most vehement in his opposition to smoking. He used tobacco's status as innovation as an argument against it, but appeared mostly concerned with the presumed undermining of order and discipline by those who frequented tobacco shops, and with political opposition by the Janissaries, who owned many of these establishments. In 1627 a ban was issued on tobacco cultivation in Ottoman territory. Six years later the sultan, possibly persuaded by Istanbul's Friday mosque preacher KaDizadeh Mehmet Efendi, used a large fire that destroyed thousands of houses in Istanbul as a pretext to outlaw smoking and to close all coffee shops. Many who were found smoking were executed.

In Safavid Iran during the 1500s and 1600s, governmental attempts at curbing tobacco occurred under Shah Abbas I (1587–1629) and Shah Safi I (1629–1642). The former seems to have been motivated by a personal dislike for tobacco as well as concerns about the waste it represented. He outlawed the use of tobacco because his soldiers spent too much of their pay on smoking, punishing offenders by having their noses and lips cropped. The same ruler is also known to have ridiculed his smoking courtiers by offering them ground horse manure, claiming it was a special tobacco from the town of Hamadan. His successor, Shah Safi, rescinded the ban shortly after taking power, presumably in an attempt to gain legitimacy among his people, who by this time had massively taken to smoking. Yet the same ruler banned tobacco several times himself, for reasons that remain unknown.

Everywhere, tobacco restriction was temporary and unable to stop the advance of the herb. Even clerical authorities came to realize that fighting tobacco was an exercise in futility. As one Iranian cleric observed in the late seventeenth century, "The water pipe is so well known in east and west that its removal is no longer possible. In former times a ruler proscribed it everywhere and ordered the execution of addicts, and people were indeed killed on its account, but all to no avail." (Jafariyan). Even an otherwise uncompromising Akhbari theologian such as Muhammad Baqir Majlis (d. 1699) sanctioned smoking. Like many of those who spoke out similarly, he was an avid smoker himself.

With the triumph of tobacco as the drug of choice for the masses, the continuing debates about its religious status became largely academic and moot after the seventeenth century. Secular states, having discovered the easy tax revenue tobacco generated, followed the example of western governments by ceasing to oppose the use of tobacco and in many cases began to stimulate smoking.

The rise of puritanical movements occasionally reasserted the ban on what fundamentalist preachers continued to consider an ungodly innovation. An example is the rise of the puritanical strand of Islam known as the Wahhabi movement in the Arabian Peninsula at the turn of the eighteenth century, which was accompanied by a ban on all intoxicating substances, including tobacco. In the modern Wahhabiinspired state of Saudi Arabia, tobacco imports and smoking were banned from 1926 until 1960. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the late 1990s discouraged smoking. But these are anomalies, as was the clergy-led controversy over tobacco in late-nineteenth-century Iran known as the Tobacco Revolt. This movement did not target tobacco itself as much as the tobacco concession that the shah had given to a foreign firm, prompting the country's religious leaders to decry smoking as impermissible out of fear that non-Muslims would defile tobacco. The religious ban on smoking was lifted as soon as the shah rescinded the concession and, though some religious leaders continued to agitate against tobacco, smoking quickly resumed.

In the 2000s tobacco is hugely popular throughout the Islamic world, and the ban on smoking remains in place only during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, the antismoking measures that are taken or contemplated stem from medical rather than religious considerations.

See Also Christianity; Iranian Tobacco Protest Movement; Judaism; Mayas; Native Americans; Prohibitions; Regulation of Tobacco Products in the United States; Shamanism; Social and Cultural Uses.

? RUDI MATTHEE