Fatima Cigarettes was a brand of cigarette

Cigarette

A cigarette is a small roll of finely cut tobacco leaves wrapped in a cylinder of thin paper for smoking. The cigarette is ignited at one end and allowed to smoulder; its smoke is inhaled from the other end, which is held in or to the mouth and in some cases a cigarette holder may be used as well...

 produced in the United States by the Liggett & Myers

Liggett Group

Liggett Group , formerly known as Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, is the fourth largest tobacco company in the United States. Its headquarters are located in Durham, North Carolina, though its manufacturing facility is 30 miles to the west in Mebane, North Carolina...

 (L&M) tobacco

Tobacco

Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...

 company. The brand dates to the 19th century, and was marketed as an exotic blend of Turkish

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 tobaccos. The name Fatima, a common Turkish or Arabic woman's name, helped bolster the Turkish image. Before around 1950, the package design included a stylized image of a veiled Middle Eastern woman.

The brand is perhaps best remembered today by old time radio buffs. In the late 1940s, L&M converted the brand to a king-sized version and began an extensive radio advertising campaign. Fatima was the sole sponsor of the early years of the Dragnet

Dragnet (series)

Dragnet is a radio and television crime drama about the cases of a dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, and his partners...

radio series. The creator and star of Dragnet, Jack Webb

Jack Webb

John Randolph "Jack" Webb , also known by the pseudonym John Randolph, was an American actor, television producer, director and screenwriter, who is most famous for his role as Sergeant Joe Friday in the radio and television series Dragnet...

, voiced a number of on-air pitches for the brand and appeared in print advertising as well. There was also a short-lived mystery anthology series called Tales of Fatima

Tales of Fatima

Tales of Fatima was an old-time radio show from 1949 starring Basil Rathbone, who had by that time become famous for his long run portraying the world's most famous sleuth in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes....

, hosted by Basil Rathbone

Basil Rathbone

Sir Basil Rathbone, KBE, MC, Kt was an English actor. He rose to prominence in England as a Shakespearean stage actor and went on to appear in over 70 films, primarily costume dramas, swashbucklers, and, occasionally, horror films...

. (Anecdotally, a Boston pharmacist who had smoked Fatima's for years, after WW II noted a lack of Turkish tobaccos and wrote the manufacturer with his concerns. They apologized and sent a carton of some other brand they manufactured, even more lacking in any exotic leaf.)

The brand's old-fashioned image caused it to lose market share from the mid-1950s onward, and L&M eventually phased it out by around 1980.