Cigarette fatwa trend?

By Suhadi Cholil

Many ulemas may feel uneasy in facing appeals, including from the National Commission for Child Protection and from Minister of Health Siti Fadilah Supari, who have asked the Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI) to issue a fatwa (edict) declaring cigarette smoking haram. It is not an easy request as many ulemas are heavy smokers and the cigarette industry, directly or indirectly, provides great job opportunities.

What is the relation between cigarettes and a fatwa? Perhaps some people think there is none, but Indonesian discourse eventually shows the connection.

Let us move away from the controversial edict request and focus on the ethical role of religion in Indonesian society. It is true that smoking is very dangerous for human health, but is asking the MUI for a decree the right way to maintain human health?

In fact the MUI's fatwa-issuing history has had different degrees of impact. In some situations they were effective -- for other's, not.

The MUI's 1983 edict that birth control is permissible was perhaps the most successful fatwa in Indonesia Muslim society. This edict endorsed the government's promotion of birth control, against the opinion of some ulemas who prohibited the use of contraceptions and preferred instead that Muslims had more children.

Another powerful fatwa was the 2000 halal food labeling edict, including MUI's issuance of unlawful Ajinomoto (a brand of instant ingredient) with bacto soytone production processing.

There were also toothless religious edicts. Among others were its 2000 edict which prohibits female migrant workers from going overseas and another one in 2006 prohibiting short message service (SMS) quizzes. Although MUI has prohibited women migrant workers from going overseas without mahram (family man) or niswah tsiqah (trusted woman), the prohibition is largely ignored.

As seen by the recent increase in television programs using SMS quizzes (some Islamic television shows are also doing the same) as well as individuals, it appears this edict is also being ignored.

Will the cigarette edict -- if it is truly issued -- have a significant impact in the reduction of cigarette smoking in Indonesia? It is not easy to answer, but it is important to notice that not all of MUI's religious decrees are in fact an effective means for the public engineering of Indonesian Muslim society.

It's also important to note that the Indonesian cigarette industry provides many jobs. For example, Gudang Garam, a tobacco company in Kediri East Java, employs around 40,000 workers. A religious decree on prohibiting cigarette smoking will face a dilemma, i.e., support a health principle on one hand but work against social economical order on the other.

That is why, when MUI announced two weeks ago it would issue the fatwa, there were protests from tobacco farmers and cigarette companies. Tobacco farmers in Jember protested it due to loss of employment for farmers and workers in the cigarette industry.

On the same day, Garda Bangsa in Sumenep Madura, a youth wing of a traditional Muslim association, representing tobacco farmers in Madura, protested the proposed edict.

Issuing a fatwa prohibiting cigarette smoking without looking for ways to solve a possible unemployment problem exchanges one social problem for another one -- namely no jobs for many members of the working class.

The fatwa will provoke controversy within Muslim society itself. It is no secret that many kyais (traditional ulema) and santris (traditional pious Muslims) smoke a lot of cigarettes. If MUI issues the said edict, then the greatest challenge will be to change the smoking culture among the ulema themselves.

To an extent some local kyais and santris have economical connections with the cigarette industries as company owners or tobacco suppliers. In addition, the smoking tradition has been deeply rooted in Indonesian Islamic society for more than a century.

One last important point: It is a matter of fact that issuing a fatwa prohibiting cigarette smoking has become a popular trend in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other Middle Eastern Islamic countries. Therefore, perhaps we need to look at the relationship between this idea of issuing a fatwa and the current development of Middle Eastern "right wing" Islamic thinking in contemporary Indonesian society.

Perhaps what Indonesia needs is stricter law enforcement such as what is practiced in Singapore, rather than an edict declaring cigarette smoking haram.

The writer is a lecturer at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University and a Ph.D. Student at Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
He can be reached at suhadia@yahoo.com

The Jakarta Post Friday, 09/12/2008