Religious and medical scholars, and others, have made it clear that they are fully determined to confront this lethal habit and check its spread by demonstrating its numerous risks and defining Islam's stance on the subject.
Islamic rulings range from the obligatory, the recommended, and the permissible to the haram, all of which are ordained by God who says: None can command except God. (22:67). Scholars have defined a ruling as a divine injunction that concerns the acts of His adult responsible subjects, and the injunction may be imperative or optional.
When it is said that a religious ruling is God-ordained this means that it rests on a legal foundation acknowledged in the sharia: in other words, it is inferred from legally-recognized evidence and not from a purely mental attestation.
The duly recognized evidence for religious rulings are the Quran, the sunna, consensus and analogy. If a jurist is asked to give a ruling on a certain matter the first thing he does is to consult the Quran. Should he find no provision in the Quran with a direct bearing on the matter at issue he proceeds to consult the sunna of the Prophet PBUH. If he is still without the proper guidance the next legislative authority to consult is the consensus of opinion of scholars. If no consensus is available with regard to the matter in question he may use his own judgment based on analogy, but observing all relevant considerations.
Smoking is not specifically mentioned in either the Holy Quran or the sunna of the Prophet PBUH. A consensus of opinion on it was out of the question as smoking was unknown to the learned men at the time of the Prophet PBUH, and for a long time thereafter. For the same reason it was not dealt with by the founders of the four schools of Islamic fiqh, Imams Abu Hanifa, Malik, Al-Shafie, and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal. Smoking came to be known for the first time in the 16th century AD, through Spanish explorers who brought tobacco from the New World to their country, where it spread to various parts of the world, through France.
When Muslims came to know smoking in the late 10th or early 11th century of hijra, scholars endeavoured to formulate an opinion on it but they were unable to reach a consensus. Most of them ruled that it was haram; some did not go as far as that, judging it as reprehensible; others thought it to be permissible, while a last group withheld judgment (on the basis that they did not have at their disposal any provisions from the Quran or the sunna to guide them one way or the other).
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