"WOULD anyone like a cigarette?”

Sheikh Abdul Aziz offers a packet of L&M Blue Label cigarettes to his guests after Friday prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque not far from his house on the Via Dolorossa in the Old City. He lights one and takes a deep breath.

His visitors are surprised. They do not expect the 60-year-old leader of the Naqshabandiyah order in Jerusalem to be a smoker.

“Isn’t smoking makruh (not a Muslim religious prohibition but