Use Ramadan to quit, anti-smoking team tells mosques in east London
Health outreach workers from Queen Mary University of London are visiting mosques to encourage people to beat the habit
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A top anti-smoking team is visiting mosques across east London to encourage people to use Ramadan to quit for good.
The annual campaign is delivered by Queen Mary University of London’s smoking cessation service across the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest, home to some of the UK’s largest Muslim populations. The team describes itself as “one of the leading smoking cessation research centres globally”.
“We get a lot of interest during our outreach events in mosques,” said Shohaib Ahmed, a stop smoking adviser working in Waltham Forest. “Ramadan is a month of reward and many people see stopping smoking as something rewarding for their health. It gives them courage and motivation.”
As well as abstaining from food and drink, fasting Muslims cannot smoke during the day.
Afzal Hussain stopped smoking six weeks ago with the help of the service. “Ramadan this year is a different experience,” he said. “Last year, I was craving cigarettes the entire day. I couldn’t wait to have one. Now I still get cravings but I am not waiting to smoke.”
Sabir Ahmed, administrator of the programme, said many people reach out to the service ahead of Ramadan each year so they can enter the fast smoke-free.
In 2023, 11.9% of adults in the UK were smokers. While rates of tobacco smoking in the UK have reduced by more than three quarters since 1974, when nearly half of adults smoked, it remains the leading cause of preventable illness and death.
NHS data covering the 2010s found that men from Bangladeshi (28%) and Pakistani (25%) backgrounds were among the most likely to be smokers, with higher rates than those of white British men (20%). Among women, however, rates were far lower in the same communities: 7% and 3% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women said they were smokers, compared with 17% of white British women.
A recent large-scale study by the University of Oxford found that Bangladeshi men suffered the highest rates of lung cancer in the country, while a different study showed that Brits from South Asian backgrounds had a 67% higher risk of suffering a heart attack and 29% higher risk of a type of stroke than white people.
“I started smoking before I was 18,” said Hussain. “I’m 35 now and over all these years my addiction had been getting stronger and stronger.
“I tried to quit before on my own and I made it 20 days, but then I picked it up again.”
The service has been a huge help, he added, as he is able to get encouragement from his adviser during his weekly meetings, as well as nicotine replacement patches, which he can use without compromising his fast.
As well as improving his health, Hussain said his decision to quit smoking also had a positive effect on his family and friends who are also now trying to stop. However, he worries that others don’t know about the availability of the service.
“I wish more people knew how successful the programme is,” he said.
In light of research on the detrimental effect of smoking, the British Fatwa Council ruled that smoking was haram in 2021.
“The aim of this fatwa is to encourage Muslims to give up smoking and adopt a healthy lifestyle,” wrote Dr Musharraf Hussain Al-Azhari, chief executive of the council at the time. He added that Ramadan was an ideal opportunity for smokers to build up resistance to smoking and strengthen their will against the temptation.
“These 30 days of fasting are really training in self-control and self-discipline,” he wrote. “Fasting is about leaving things. For the smoker, it is leaving smoking.”
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