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Punishment
for Smoking and Drinking Alcohol
By
Sheikh Sayyed Ad-Darsh
former
Chairman of the UK Shari`ah Council
Question:
The Qur'an is very clear about the Hadd (punishment)
for murder, adultery, slander etc. Yet there are no clear
Hadd for smoking, drinking alcohol, etc. Please clarify.
?
Answer: "The
reason why there are strong actions against things like
murder and adultery is because these are crimes against
society. But you cannot expect Islam to be a religion that
carries a big stick for everything. There has to be an
area for the moral and spiritual upbringing of the person
in these circumstances, to let him or her become familiar
with things which are prohibited, and to develop moral
perception.
Smoking in the way we know it was not a common practice at
the time of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).
It came into fore in the last two centuries or so. So it
is a new development for the Muslim community and it took
the Muslim scholars great deal of time and effort to
consider the harmful effects of smoking, until they came
to the conclusion that it is Haram (prohibited). Once
again, abstention from smoking is left to the moral sense
of the person.
As for drinking alcohol, there is a specific Hadd for
that. In the early days of Islam, people who had stopped
drinking prohibited others and those who committed the
offence were lashed 40 times. They use to flail the
drinker with anything that came to hand - a piece of
cloth, a shoe, a stick - just to let the person feel that
he or she had indulged in something prohibited. Later on
when there was a complaint that people were returning to
the old ways of drinking, `Umar (may Allah be pleased with
him) consulted the Muslims around, and `Ali (may Allah be
pleased with him) said: "I think that drinking will
make a person lose his mind and consequently start abusing
others, uttering false accusations against them. So I
think he deserves the same punishment for a person who
falsely accuses other persons (Qadhif) that is 80
lashes." Henceforth, that became the standard of
punishment for drinkers to stop them from falling into
that."
Taken
from www.islamonline.net
http://www.islamonline.net/fatwa/english/FatwaDisplay.asp?hFatwaID=50429
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