Fanning the coals
Clearing the stem.
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Clearing the stem.
Tobacco was banned long before Murad IV: Catholic popes from the 1570s, an English king in 1604, and the Ottoman Empire from 1632 or 1633.
In 1575, one of the earliest documented bans linked to tobacco came from the Catholic Church: a decree forbidding the use of tobacco in any church in Mexico. In 1590, Pope Urban VII spoke out against smoking in any building belonging to the church, threatening excommunication for anyone who "uses tobacco in the porch or inside the church — chewing it, smoking it in a pipe, or sniffing it in powder"; in 1624, Pope Urban VIII imposed similar restrictions.
Secular authorities joined in almost as quickly: in 1604, King James VI and I of England and Scotland published the anonymous treatise "A Counterblaste to Tobacco," which later led to higher tobacco taxes in England. Tobacco was alarming rulers well before it ever reached Istanbul.
In Istanbul, the ban was pushed onto the ruling elite by the Kadızadeli movement, named after the preacher Mehmed Efendi Kadızade: it demanded an immediate ban on coffee and tobacco as intoxicating substances and won the backing of Sultan Murad IV, who reigned from 1623 to 1640.
Istanbul's coffeehouses were shut down, and smoking became a crime punishable by death. Sources disagree on the exact year: a scholarly article by historian James Grehan, based on Ottoman chronicles, cites 1633, while the Wikipedia article on Murad IV cites 1632. The exact year of the decree remains disputed, and there's no reason to pick one arbitrarily.
Historians give different explanations for the motive behind the ban — it's a matter of debate, not an established fact: at least three reasons are cited — practical (fires in wooden Istanbul), political (coffeehouses as breeding grounds for conspiracies), and social (elite anxiety over the mixing of classes in coffeehouses).
This is the most valuable part of the story, because it's the part most often distorted in popular retellings.
A documented fact, based on the chronicle of the court historian Mustafa Naima, "Tarih-i Naima" (Naima himself was born roughly 15 years after these events, so he wrote not as an eyewitness but as a historian of the next generation): the sultan personally made secret tours of the city and oversaw the enforcement of the new laws "with merciless severity" — smokers caught in the act were executed on the spot. The executions continued during military campaigns too: during the Iraq campaign, Murad IV ordered them carried out on the march between the front and the capital as well.
But two legends that circulate widely in popular articles without any source citation don't appear at all in the vetted sources — neither in Grehan's article nor in the Wikipedia article on Murad IV: that the sultan personally disguised himself as a beggar or a dervish to catch smokers, and that smokers had their lips cut off as punishment. The first story has been repeated by blogs and tabloids without ever naming who first wrote it down or when; the second finds no support whatsoever — not as fact, and not even as an attributed legend. Both details should be read as later embellishments of an already harsh, well-documented story.
Enforcement of the centralized ban was uneven: the closure of coffeehouses apparently never reached the empire's Arab provinces. And the chronicler Katib Çelebi, who accompanied the army as a scribe on the Iraq campaigns, testifies that while some smokers were caught and executed, their comrades in the ranks secretly smoked pipes hidden in their sleeves or smoked in latrines — out of the officers' sight.
The inconsistency of Ottoman policy itself is telling: in 1633, according to the historian Dimitrie Cantemir, Murad IV legalized alcohol even for Muslims, only to change his mind in 1634, banning it himself and introducing the death penalty for that offense too. The campaign against smoking was part of a broader, inconsistent personal policy of prohibitions, not a single isolated decree against tobacco.
By 1650, roughly a decade after Murad IV's death in 1640, the centralized ban was formally repealed and tobacco was legalized again. As early as 1654, Katib Çelebi openly proposed a kind of "sin tax" on tobacco, but official policy only shifted to taxing tobacco in 1691 — amid military defeats on the Austrian front and the treasury's need for revenue.
Local attempts to repeat the ban were made in the Arab provinces more than once, but none of them lasted long:
None of these campaigns won public support. For more on how different regions developed their own, quite different approaches to smoking hookah, see the article "Regional Hookah Traditions."
Murad IV's ban was not unique — it was part of a broader wave of Islamic states reacting to a new commodity. Safavid Iran (around 1610) and the Mughal Empire in India (1617) introduced their own anti-tobacco laws at roughly the same time.
A little-known fact: Russia, under the early Romanovs, banned tobacco for 70 years starting in 1627, and the ban was only lifted toward the end of the 17th century — according to historian Matthew Romaniello (this account draws on a summary of his monograph, not the book itself). A ban on smoking in the streets remained in force in Russia until 1865.
Urban smoking bans appeared in Europe soon after the Ottoman experience: in Bavaria, Electoral Saxony, and parts of Austria in the late 17th century, in Berlin in 1723, in Königsberg in 1742, and in Stettin in 1744. All of them were repealed during the revolutions of 1848.
By the 19th and 20th centuries, the reason behind bans was increasingly fire safety rather than morality, and later, health. In 1876, the Old Government Building in Wellington, New Zealand — the second-largest wooden building in the world — became the first building anywhere with a formal smoking ban, precisely because of the fire risk.
A separate chapter is the year 1941: Nazi Germany banned smoking in all universities, post offices, military hospitals, and NSDAP institutions. That same year, on Adolf Hitler's direct order, the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research was founded under Karl Astel, and anti-smoking campaigns continued until the regime's end in 1945.
After the war, the logic behind bans shifted decisively toward public health. In 1975, the U.S. state of Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act — the first U.S. state law restricting smoking in most public places (initially requiring non-smoking sections in restaurants, but exempting bars); a full ban in the state's bars and restaurants took effect only on October 1, 2007. On March 29, 2004, Ireland introduced a nationwide smoking ban in all workplaces — one of the first such bans in the world — and on June 1, 2004, a similar law took effect in Norway.
That same logic — health rather than morality — is behind today's rules for hookah venues too: ventilation, carbon monoxide control, limits on session length. For more on this, see the article "Safety: Carbon Monoxide, Ventilation, and How Long to Smoke."
What year did Murad IV ban smoking and close Istanbul's coffeehouses?
Sources disagree: a scholarly article by historian James Grehan cites 1633, while the Wikipedia article on Murad IV cites 1632. The exact date remains disputed.
Is it true that Murad IV personally executed smokers disguised as a beggar?
What's documented, based on Naima's chronicle, is that the sultan made secret tours of the city and had smokers executed on the spot. The detail about disguising himself as a beggar or dervish doesn't appear in any vetted source — it's a later embellishment.
Were smokers' lips cut off as punishment under Murad IV?
No. This story is often repeated as legend, but no mention of it — either as fact or as an attributed legend — was found in any vetted source.
Why did Murad IV's ban ultimately fail to hold?
Enforcement was uneven, smokers hid even near the site of executions, and by 1650, roughly a decade after the sultan's death, the ban was formally repealed.
When did the rationale for smoking bans shift from religious to medical?
Gradually, over the 19th and 20th centuries: from fire safety (Wellington, 1876) to public-health laws like the 1975 Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act and the nationwide bans in Ireland and Norway in 2004.
Related topics: the origins of the hookah itself are covered in the article "The History of the Hookah," and how to behave at a hookah lounge today is covered in "Hookah Etiquette: What's Customary and Why."