Against Tobacco and Intoxicants

Sikhs of the Khalsa affirm the prohibition of tobacco and intoxicants. The use of tobacco is one of the four cardinal prohibitions (kurahits) that an initiated Sikh must never breach, and the tradition's emphasis on a clear, disciplined mind and a pure body extends the concern to alcohol and other intoxicants. The Gurus taught that the true intoxication is absorption in the divine Name (Naam), by contrast with which substances that cloud the mind are rejected as obstacles to devotion and self-mastery.

Tobacco was a genuine novelty in Guru Gobind Singh's own lifetime, introduced to South Asia by European traders only in the early seventeenth century, and its prohibition among the newly formed Khalsa in 1699 is counted by historians among the earliest organized religious responses to the substance anywhere in the world; several hukamnamas, letters of command attributed to the Guru, single out tobacco by name as absolutely forbidden to initiated Sikhs in a way that later practice has never relaxed, in contrast to alcohol, which, though also prohibited by the Rahit, is treated by many lay Sikhs today as a matter of personal failing rather than a line of equally strict communal enforcement.