: : No Smoking : :

No Smoking, Please

By: Sheikh Muhammad al-Arifi

We should know that some Muslims may not have good Islamic knowledge, that’s why they’d do unlawful things. But they’d be ignorant of its unlawfulness. If one doesn’t guide such a person to what’s right, and if he doesn’t try to learn, he will keep being ignorant all the way.

However, some may know that a certain act is unlawful, but they insist on doing it.

In the month of Ramadan, I was invited to the breakfast meal, and there were a lot of people. We ate some dates and drank water, before offering the Sunset Prayer and did not finish our meal, one of the attendees took his pack of cigarettes, and was about to smoke a cigarette.

So I managed to stop him, and told him that after we observed fasting for that day, one should thank God, go offer Prayers, and be God-fearing instead of smoking.

But he argued that smoking isn’t unlawful at all.

I was surprised to hear that. I asked him to put off his cigarette, and that I’d give him 16 Quranic proofs, and 12 from the Hadiths showing it is unlawful.

This information seemed new to the man. Then I started to cite some proofs like:

“..he makes the pure things lawful to them…forbids them from the impure..”

And everyone agrees, be them Muslims or non-Muslims, that smoking is an evil thing.

Also, God says, “..But spend not wastefully..” This is about spending money on useless things, and not on any beneficial thing.

Also: “…and waste not by extravagance..” and “…do not kill yourselves..”

Or “..do not throw yourselves into destruction..” and many other examples.

After I gave him about 10 proofs proving smoking was unlawful, he said to me that he had already known that smoking was unlawful, but he couldn’t admit it because he couldn’t quit.

However, he managed to quit smoking.