KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 18 — Philip Morris Malaysia met Perlis Mufti Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin yesterday, with economist Muhammed Abdul Khalid also joining the meeting with the Muslim cleric in the latter’s office.
The media team of Mohd Asri, also known as Dr Maza, posted photographs of the visit by Philip Morris Malaysia managing director Naeem Shahab Khan, which it misidentified as CEO.
“The CEO of Philip Morris said that the major company is shifting from being a conventional cigarette manufacturer towards producing safer, cigarette-like products.
“I told him that if a product is clean, its side effects are not harmful or can be controlled, and there is no excessive wastage, then the product can be considered halal. Otherwise, the opposite would apply. A fairly lengthy discussion followed,” wrote the Media Team Dr MAZA Facebook page yesterday.
It’s unclear in what capacity Muhammed, who is also Mohd Asri’s cousin, had joined Philip Morris Malaysia’s meeting or if the economist had advocated on behalf of the tobacco giant.
Muhammed, who is also chairman of Allianz General Insurance Company (Malaysia) Berhad, previously spoke about health insurance issues in a 2025 inquiry by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), besides being visible on other health issues like non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and child malnutrition.
Naeem previously visited Federal Territories Mufti Ahmad Fauwaz Fadzil last March in the latter’s office in Putrajaya. Muhammed was also pictured in the tobacco company’s meeting with the Federal Territories mufti on March 17.
The Federal Territories Mufti Office subsequently announced that it was considering rulings or fatwa for “Shariah-compliant” alternatives to conventional cigarettes. Philip Morris doesn’t sell vapes in Malaysia, but heated tobacco products that heat real tobacco instead of burning it. Vapes contain liquid nicotine, not tobacco.
Clinical pharmacist Fahmi Hassan, who previously slammed the tobacco industry’s lobbying of religious authorities, pointed out that the Perlis Fatwa Committee had ruled vaping haram in 2022 and that the state government went on to ban vape sales in August 2025.
“Few offices in the country have as little reason to entertain a tobacco company’s ‘safer product’ narrative, which is what makes this particular visit worth pausing on,” Fahmi told CodeBlue in commenting on Philip Morris Malaysia’s visit to the Perlis mufti.
Citing Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), Fahmi pointed out that public institutions are meant to limit their engagement with the tobacco industry to what is strictly necessary for regulation, and to be transparent when engagement happens.
A landmark High Court ruling in a nicotine case compels the Malaysian government to comply with the WHO FCTC.
Although Mohd Asri’s remarks about tobacco alternatives were a conditional statement, Fahmi said such statements tended to resurface as talking points and would later sound official.
“A mufti’s office is built to weigh permissibility, not to adjudicate whether an aerosol delivery mechanism reduces carcinogen exposure, and that gap is what the industry is trying to occupy,” said the pharmacist.
“The ‘clean, controlled, no excessive waste’ framing deserves scrutiny on its own terms. Heated tobacco products still deliver nicotine and expose users to toxic emissions, including known carcinogens.
“The World Health Organization’s (WHO) position has not changed: there is no safe level of tobacco use. A product does not become clean because a company’s own economist says so in the same meeting where the company is trying to sell it.”
Fahmi also said the world has been here before, pointing out that the tobacco industry previously moved from unfiltered cigarettes to filtered ones on the promise of reduced harm. “Light” and “low-tar” variants were also introduced with the same promise.
“Both were eventually shown to offer no real reduction in risk, since smokers simply drew harder or covered the filter vents to get the nicotine they were used to, and regulators in multiple countries later withdrew or banned those descriptors because they had misled consumers into believing they were smoking something safer,” said the clinical pharmacist.
“Heated tobacco is the same pitch delivered a generation later, in a different packaging. The question is whether we are willing to accept that reassurance a third time, or whether the pattern itself has finally taught us something.”
