Kâtip Çelebi also has an essay about tobacco in that book. He told how Sultan Murad VI outlawed tobacco smoking because of the danger of fires. Istanbul was always at risk for conflagrations and the fire of 1633 destroyed much of the city; tobacco was outlawed shortly thereafter. Even though the fire was not caused by a smoker but started in the shipyards where caulking was going on.
"People being undeterred … gradually His Majesty’s severity in suppression increased, and so did the people’s desire to smoke, in accordance with the saying, ‘Men desire what is forbidden,’ and many thousands were sent to the abode of nothingness.
While the Sultan was going on the expedition against Baghdad, at one halting-place fifteen or twenty leading men of the Army were arrested on a charge of smoking, and were put to death with the severest torture in the imperial presence. Some of the soldiers carried short pipes in their sleeves, some in their pockets, and they found an opportunity to smoke even during the executions." :rolleyes:
“After the Sultan’s death, the practice was sometimes forbidden and sometimes outlawed, until the Sheykh al-Islam, the late Baha’i Efendi, gave a fetwa ruling that it was permissible, and the practice won renewed popularity among the people of the world.”
Kâtip Çelebi is an interesting thinker. He hates the reek of tobacco — he calls it “the noxious effects of the corruption of the aerial essence”, which is the best description of tobacco smoke I’ve ever seen. He knows it’s bad for health. But he argues that the law should not forbid it. For one reason, experience has proved that it’s impossible to prevent people from smoking, so why make a law that can’t be enforced?
“In his own house every man may do as he pleases. Then, if the rulers interfere, they will be taking on themselves more than they should:
‘What work for the censors within a man’s home?’”
For another thing, he argues the principle in Islamic law that “permissibility is the norm.” He is for the maximum possible leniency in Islamic law:
"The following course is preferable: not to declare things forbidden, but always to have recourse to any legal principle that justifies declaring them permitted, thus preserving the people from being laden with sins and persisting in what has been prohibited." 
An eminently sane and reasonable approach to legislation. I only wish the U.S. government, with their insane and destructive “War on Drugs,” could read this wonderful little book and come to their senses.