A Perspective on the Pandemic
By Abdal Hakim Murad | 2026-01-13T19:57:21.029151+00:00 | Topic: Iman
A Perspective on the Pandemic
By Abdal Hakim Murad
Opening
Reference: Traditional Islamic opening
A Changed World
Taking a normally familiar stroll through Cambridge's city centre, I find myself, subhanallah, rather staggered by the difference these two weeks have made. The little roads and lanes call to mind the way some days used to be.
They are almost deserted, but this particular day of rest will stretch on for weeks and months, and it's likely that at least some of these shuttered shops and restaurants may never trade again. I step over the prone and huddled homeless, still sleeping in their bags. This most dismal sight seems to be the only one which has remained unchanged.
At the chemist's shop, a Perspex shield protects the pharmacist not only from deadly coughs and sneezes, but also from insults. A minimum-wage Muslimah who works in a supermarket tells me that some customers throw their coins at her or fly into a strange and panicky rage. The sad, nervous queue attempts social distancing, towing a yellow-taped line, and not only from obedience.
No one wishes to stand too close to Azrael, the angel of death.
The End of the Consumer Carnival
The consumer carnival, the Mardi Gras of our product-addicted age, is over. This feels like some kind of morning-after, a hangover.
We used to reach happily for the goods in the shops which shone and sparkled before our entranced and childish eyes. Now we hesitate and touch gingerly, reluctantly, as though touching the skin of a corpse. I press the keys on the ATM, wondering if my hands, instruments of so much heedless taking in past years, are now carriers of my own demise.
A twenty-pound note, the most recent banknote to be plasticised, may be a filthy lucre which can kill us. We want to sanitise it. The thrill of wealth is over.
The world is fasting in a certain way. This is an imsac of capitalism, whose Belshazzar's feast has abruptly broken up. As for the daytime visitor to the stunned city centre, much is off-limits.
As a Ramadan hadith tells us:
(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 1899, Sahih Muslim Hadith 1079)
"The devils are chained."
The wary shoppers are interested not in nice things, but in survival. Old habits of absent-minded browsing seem absurd.
Reflecting on Divine Wisdom
So heaven has given us to live in interesting times. We are entering the gravest global crisis in many decades, and it is right for Muslims to reflect, taking advantage of these newly long and quiet days. But before we do so, let us self-quarantine from the panicky and sensational media.
Let us click away and block up our ears against the second-rate fumbling politicians. Let us look from our windows upon the eerie emptiness of the streets and consider what God might mean by this. Even the atheist brain knows ours for a time of hubris.
We madly ravage and violate nature and walk upon the moon. Every other species cringes from us as ecosystems die. Our gamed financial system is increasingly parasitical upon the poor.
Humanity as Disease
From our human perspective, COVID-19 is an infection which disorders our world, but seen from the world's perspective, humanity itself has, over the past age, become a still more deadly disease. Like a fungus or a hookworm, we suck the blood of the host, multiplying insanely until the ecosystem itself, the planet which we vampirise, starts to sicken and die.
Bani Adam, released from the natural restraints urged by religion, has itself become a disease in its planning and its wisdom, no more intelligent than a microbe.
We have become a Qarun virus. And now God's world is paying us back with this invisible miasma which makes us afraid even to inhale. Putin and Trump, masters of nuclear arsenals, are staggering back from its influence, discovering, perhaps, the Naqshbandi rule of Khush Dar Dam, mindfulness in every breath.
The Year of the Elephant
So small an enemy to have overthrown our world, too tiny to see, the corona literally a crown, this microscopic flimsy protein, this almost nothing, is now king of the world. In this divine irony, we remember old fables of the mouse and the elephant genre.
The Holy Prophet, whose entire message is a challenge to love of dunya and fear of death, was born in the year of the elephant:
"Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?"
How often we repeat that surah as though it were a nursery rhyme. But Abraha the tyrant remains a perennial symbol of the arrogance which seeks to displace the things of God. The Seerah writers tell us that the birds which rained clay pellets upon him and his army also brought a disease, so that their flesh started to rot on their bones while they still lived.
It was a kind of terrible ebola eating them alive. Microbes then, which are part of the symphony of the world's balanced ecosystem, also belong to the army of God. At times they serve us through the divine names Ar-Razzaq, Al-Latif.
Our stomachs and intestines are crawling with them, and without them we could not digest our dinners. On the land they then break down dead matter and return it to the soil. They limit populations naturally, maintaining the balance, mizan of creation, in which every species has the right to its space.
But at other times, no less necessary for the balance, they serve the divine names Al-Qahhar and Al- Muntaqim, the Compeller, the Avenger.
Divine Justice Against Oppression
And thus did Allah use them to strike down the oligarch Abraha and his elephant, his commandos and his marines. Allah says that He is with the poor and broken-hearted.
The Quran makes us uneasy with its uncompromising prophetic arguments against status, pride and the hoarding of wealth. The Shariah, with its zakat and its inheritance laws, aims to break up fortunes, smashing them with the hammer of God's justice.
By contrast, the parasitic modern schemes of homo economicus have led to a historically unequalled hoarding of wealth by the global 1%.
The Stories of Truth Confronting Power
And so the great Quranic stories of truth confronting power tell us again and again that Pharaoh is overthrown not by another superpower, but by a mere prophet in rags, a member of a despised subject race made up of imported labourers and immigrants, a man who has even doubted his ability to speak clearly.
Barefoot he stands before the throne of Memphis, defying the magicians of the autocratic state whose wealth is directed insanely to the creation of marble mausoleums for the rotting dead. The autocrat turns away in scorn, and the plagues of Egypt fall upon his land.
What power can his Minister of Defence marshal against the frogs, the blood, and the infection which covers him and his people with festering boils? Again, the smallest members of nature's kingdom are used by Providence to strike against a destructive and unjust megastructure of oppression and pride.
Abraham and Nimrod
And again, let us recall the heroic standing of Abraham in the court of Nimrod. This comes in Surah al- Baqarah:
"Have you not beheld the one who disputed with Abraham about his Lord because Allah had given him sovereignty? When Abraham said: 'My Lord is He that gives life and death,' and he replied: 'I give life and death.' The commentators record Nimrod at that point, displaying his power by proudly and hardheartedly pardoning a prisoner and executing another, a ruler's godlike power of amnesty.
And Abraham said: 'Allah brings the sun from the east, so bring it you from the west.' And thus the one who disbelieved was refuted, and God does not guide the unjust people."
The tafsir authors mention that the populace would come to Nimrod and affirm him as their Lord, Rabb. He would then give them food. And when Abraham comes and is asked the same question, he says:
Then Abraham, thrown out from the tyrant's presence and going back to his family, fills his food sacks with sand, so that at least for a while they would think that he has brought them something and be consoled.
He falls asleep, and when Sarah, his wife, opens the sacks, she finds them filled with the finest grain. As for Nimrod, the chronicles mention that while he was dispensing this form of justice, a mosquito or a gnat crawled into his nostril. It bit him, and this caused him such excruciating torment that he started to hit the walls of his palace with his head until, after years of pain, he died.
The point, of course, is, again, that the smallest creatures can overthrow the proudest human hubris. And in our time, it is the virus that wears the crown and the mighty who are helpless and humbled.
Islamic Medical Tradition
Look at the politicians across Europe who have persecuted the honourable traditions of Islam. It is they, now, who are forced to wear the niqab.
Plague and pestilence are nothing new or surprising for Islam. Look in our texts, and we find that waba', defined as an epidemic, and i'adah as contagion.
And medieval Islam knew perfectly well that the result could be a massacre. Ibn Battuta, describing the Black Death in Cairo, records that 20,000 people a day were dying, and the imams would cry out: "Shahada, shahada."
The reference, no doubt, was to the Bukhari hadith that says:
(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 2830)
"Those who stay in a plague-stricken land, reckoning that nothing can befall them save Allah's decree, will receive a reward equal to that of martyrs."
But because Muslims value medicine, and their founder himself prescribed remedies, there was healthcare, provided generously by waqfs.
I like this description of one medieval Egyptian hospital written by the historian Lane Poole: "Cubicles for patients were ranged around two courts, and at the sides of another quadrangle were wards, lecture rooms, library, baths, dispensary, and every necessary appliance of those days of surgical science.
There was even music to cheer the sufferers, while a reader of the Quran afforded the consolations of the faith. Rich and poor were treated alike, without fees, and 60 orphans were supported and educated in the neighbouring school."
Historians agree that, in fact, the modern-day hospital originated in the Islamic world.
The Islamic Approach to Death
There is a good account of this in Aramco World magazine, entitled "The Islamic Roots of the Modern Hospital," which is easily found online, and which all medical professionals, I think, ought to read. The article begins with a quote from the Waqfiyah, the founding document of the hospital of Sultan Qalaun:
"The hospital shall keep all patients, men and women, until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the hospital, whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate. There are no conditions of consideration and payment, none
is objected to or even indirectly hinted at for non-payment. The entire service is through the magnificence of God, Allah, the Generous."
The hospital then, the Dar-e-Shifa or Bimaristan, is one of Islam's gifts to the West, emerging from a culture in which compassion but also medical professionalism were highly valued.
So much overlap and commonality between the influencer and the influenced. And yet that culture differed from our own in one key respect.
Pre- modern Muslim medics and ulama who thought about contagion assumed a social world in which human expectations from life and dunya were modest. Terrors about death and a love of abundance are more the sunnah of Nimrod and Pharaoh. They are the way of Abu Jahl, not that of the seal of the messengers.
As the poets say, they reflect the materialism of the donkey, not of the Jesus who rides it. Our modern attitudes to death are very unrealistic, evasive and stressful. Atheist beliefs, which have themselves spread like a virus thanks to the unclean matter which has accumulated in our hearts, persuade many that clinical death is the end of ourselves.
As the Quran describes such people:
"They say, it is only our life of this world, we die and we live, and only time kills us."
Such people are tragically terrified of death.
In fact, this forms the major terrorism which dismays humanity in our age, the wicked threat of a meaningless and eternal nothingness. In the old Arabia, the Jahili Arabs had no confidence in life after death. But the man of praise, in his saddest moment of confronting them, was told:
"The next world shall be better for you than this."
And in Surat al-A'la:
"You prefer this worldly life, but the next life is better and more permanent."
Death is a normal and natural part of our frail human reality, and its decree proceeds from an inexorable divine name, al-Mumit, the slayer. Pre-modern humanity saw it on every hand and knew how to cope.
Death as Gift to the Believer
Rituals helped a good deal, but even more healing was the awareness of the divine wisdom and mercy. So the man of praise said, remarkably:
(Sunan at-Tirmidhi Hadith 1609)
"The precious gift to the believer is death," because he or she moves on from this disappointing world to the world of pure mercy and meaning.
True, the Holy Prophet also tells us not to hope for death:
(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 5671, Sahih Muslim Hadith 2680)
"Let none of you hope for death," for our ending is to be by his decree, not our preference. We simply accept it calmly as an entire expression of the divine wisdom.
This is one reason, no doubt, why believers enjoy better mental health outcomes than atheists.
British Muslim Heritage
A 2013 Daily Telegraph article noting the intrinsicality of religious belief to human beings proposed that atheism itself should be classed as a mental illness. But it is a widespread infection with ugly psychological symptoms, and in modern Britain this is showing. The monstrous cruelty of atheist beliefs is revealed never more sharply than by the suffering of relatives as they receive the news that a loved one has died in an ICU.
A void replaces a soul, there are no timeless rituals, there is not the glimmering of hope. Our British Muslim heritage offers much inspiration here. Its story begins with Abdullah Quilliam's heroic community in 19th century Liverpool, in a rough time and place where hostility and threats were even more widespread than they are today.
But Quilliam believed in traditional Islam and the spirit of what he called Islamic resignation runs like a leitmotif throughout his writings. For instance, he writes his characteristic poem, "The Last Journey":
"When the clouds are dark and dreary, at the close of mortal way, when with faltering footsteps weary, I am going home to stay, ever more to stay.
Then I think of loved ones parted, from me now fall many a day, and I feel quite blithe-hearted, I am going home to stay, ever more to stay. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, at least so the poets say, and there'll be no parting yonder, I am going home to stay, ever more to stay.
Though alone the path I travel, though my mortal powers decay, my feet tread upon sure gravel, I am going home to stay, ever more to stay.
Be it late, or be it early, comes the call I must obey, cheerfully I'll meet it fairly, I am going home to stay, ever more to stay."
Another author of that early age of our community was Amherst Thyssen. I like his poem on the Holy Prophet and Hazrat Abu Bakr as they sheltered in the cave from the murderous Qurayshi gangs attempting to prevent the hijra by murdering them.
The poem takes its cue from the Quranic record:
"The second of the two, when they were in the cave, when he said to his companion: 'Do not be sad, Allah is with us.'"
"Will he we live, no mortal power can take our lives away, will he we die, to him we pass, no need to feel dismay.
O may we thus through life's rough voyage with all its tempests cope, make God the rock whereon we cast the anchor of our hope. Come wheel to him we give the praise, come woe on him we rest, in death is bliss to hearts assured, whate'er he sends is best."
The Religion of Submission
For Thyssen and for the forerunners of our British Muslim community, Islam is quintessentially the religion of submission. Not only to God'samr taklifi, the commandments of shariah, but his amr takwini, his command which shapes every event in the world, including the command which says that we must die.
Ours is pre-eminently and proudly the religion of tawakkul, of rida, of taslim. Thus the wali, the truly Muslim person, is of those whom:
"They fear not, neither do they sorrow."
For God has commanded us to say:
"Nothing will afflict us other than what God has written for us."
So we mourn our dead, and this is a natural and a healing reflex, and we believe in medicine, but we do not panic. Death is a natural part of the glorious system of God's universe, with its cycles of birth, growth, flourishing, fertility, and death, a creation which contains jalal as well as jamal, rigour as well as beauty.
As Ibrahim Haqi, the Turkish poet, writes: "What comes from thee is good for me, the rose's blossom or the rose's thorn, a robe of honour or my deathly shroud, good is thy gentleness, good is thy rigour."
Divine Trust and Surrender
Hence the modern wailing of the world which we hear all around us, including that of the Amalekites of our age, like Donald Trump, who is clearly terrified that a mosquito might crawl up his nose, is not a chorus we can join. Instead we instinctively say:
"Allah is enough for us and an excellent guardian."
Or we say:
"We belong to Allah and to him shall we return."
Many years ago I used to ride shared taxis which hurtled alarmingly between the cities of Jeddah and Medina. They were usually ramshackle conveyances packed with Yemeni workers, and on a number of occasions we narrowly escaped the angel of death.
I remember one night with a driver pushing 150 kilometres per hour on the clock, a herd of camels suddenly ran across the motorway in front of us, with perhaps a 10% chance of survival. The driver reacted instantaneously, steering us through a narrow gap between the stampeding animals and we lived.
"Ya Allah," said all the passengers as death suddenly rushed towards us, and then "subhan Allah," afterwards the event seemed hardly significant.
Shortly afterwards, stopping at a Saudi motorway service station, I saw an old man sitting on the concrete, selling framed Quranic calligraphy. He had only one text:
"Every soul shall taste of death."
He would not do good business at a welcome break on the M15, I think. But for Muslims, death is simply another aspect of the human experience, a decree from his wisdom, its manner and time determined by the best of judges.
Economic and Social Impact
The current khawf and khuzn, this epidemic of fear and sorrow which are paralysing our supposedly blasé and sophisticated world, are not only about death, however, but about the frailty, the precariousness of dunya as well. The FTSE All Share Index has dropped to the floor, 35% in the red and counting.
Unemployment is growing ten times as fast as it did after the 2008 financial crisis. Businesses are folding and dying. The poor and helpless on zero-hours contracts and gig-economy jobs are already facing hunger.
This will fall heavily on our community. Tandoori restaurants and taxi businesses are very vulnerable. Failed asylum seekers and the visa-less can even be denied healthcare.
As usual, the weakest and the poorest suffer most. But this is Ishmael's fate. We live on the wrong side of the Gaza wall.
Again, we reflect that in an age of spiralling inequalities and titanic arrogance, God is always with the weak, the hungry and the despised. The Holy Prophet himself prayed to be resurrected among the destitute.
Our Relationship with Dunya
We need our basics from dunya. We have the right to our qut, our daily bread. But the mad love of consumption, which has become modern man's lethal addiction, is hateful to heaven.
The Quran says:
"Know that the life of this world is only a game and a play, and adornment and boasting among you, and rivalry in wealth and children... And the life of this world is only the enjoyment of beguilement."
Our product addiction is murdering Mother Earth, hence our idea that humanity is itself a disease, killing its planetary host. We are all the Qarun virus.
But it is killing our souls and our societies as well. The believer is not much given to shopping, although she or he takes pleasure in treating guests well. The Holy Prophet's home was so simple that his door was not made of wood, but of a simple length of sackcloth.
He says:
"Be in this world as though a stranger or a traveller."
So the believer in isolation is further from dunya. There is a detachment and he reviews some of the key benefits of khalwa or uzlah, remembering the possibility of experiencing clear-heartedness when distractions and worldly pleasures are at arm's length.
The Opportunity of Retreat
The Blessed Virgin saw the angel when she was on her own in the desert, and the same angel came to the best of creation when he was alone, (يَتَحَنَّتْ) in the cave of Hira.
Our moment then is an opportunity to reactivate the honourable and richly rewarding Islamic customs of khalwa and uzlah and i'tikaf. Perhaps if Mr Hancock's predictions of an unlocking at the end of April come true, it will be a 40-day retreat.
Literally, a true quarantine, an arba'een, a chillah. During this time, the atheist materialist world will be suffering from boredom, fear and financial anxiety. Its dilemma is clear: either leave people in their homes or revive the economy.
The fear of death and the fear of poverty are two agitated giants clashing in their hearts. To the extent that we have internalised our Islam, we will not suffer much from such clashes or from such fears. The future belongs to Allah, not to man.
All is his, and we travel into it as he decrees. Meanwhile, we are experiencing this quarantine from dunya.
Spiritual Retreat and Growth
I like the book of the German Muslim author Michaela Özelsel, "Forty Days," which is the diary of a 40- day solitary retreat. She records how each day brings increasing self-knowledge and gratitude and amazement at the nearness of Allah Ta'ala and a sense of life and of creation as a pure and unmerited and astonishing gift.
I like the way her spiritual guide recites prayers as she enters the apartment where she is to perform this chillah, before closing the door with the traditional phrase that he says to her: "Yumshak gajsin, may it pass softly and easily."
For many people, their confinement is irksome, and the purity of spiritual concentration seems like an unrealistic hope. Children fight and need exercise. We miss our friends. And this, the greatest pain, in Ramadan we are likely to miss the timeless majesty of our taraweeh prayers.
Our hearts miss the mosques. And in this distance we learn how much we need the beautiful and healing forms of our practices. And we realise also, with sorrow, how impoverished must be the life of the godless.
Islam Without Mosques
But Islam has no priesthood and no consecrated churches. The Chosen One tells us that one of the Khasais, the special characteristics of his Ummah, is that:
"The whole earth has been made a mosque for me."
In almost every home there is someone who can lead the prayer, even in a basic way. The fasting can proceed in a fully shariah valid manner. Our zakat al-fitr can still be paid. Islam is entirely doable in our seclusion.
Seizing the Opportunity
So let's relearn the traditions of seclusion, uzlah, and let's not waste time but seize the opportunity. We can read books more than we ever did before. How good a friend is a book when friends are unavailable.
As we spend our days in peaceful detachment and our hearts calm down, in an uncanny way we can establish a feeling of connection with the souls of scholars of past ages by respectfully engaging with their works. We can in some mysterious sense become their disciples. We can enjoy their company.
In the same way we must establish the salah strongly in our homes, remembering the prophetic commandment that our houses must not become like graves, but must be brought to life by Salat. The Adhan should be recited loudly and on time. We should log on to live Quranic recitation rather than simply listen to recordings.
We can take online Islamic classes and systematically learn things we should have known long ago, especially the basic obligations. This can be a lifetime opportunity to increase in ilm, to catch up on what we should have done before and to taste the unique blessings of increased amal.
Times of Fitna
In times of fitna, particularly amid the seditions and sorrows of the end times, the prophetic instruction is firstly to break your swords and to become like a piece of furniture in your house.
The intention should be to avoid the distractions of the tumultuous outside world. In many countries, for instance, the temptations of the treacherous glance in the underdressed summer months, the risks of improper conversations, of backbiting and slander, or pointless shopping expeditions and extravagant restaurant meals.
But our Imams, including Imam Ghazali, emphasise that the intention must primarily be to keep others safe from our own evils, not to be safe from theirs.
By self-isolating, we avoid infecting other people with our bad habits and our poor adab. We now inflict less harm upon the world.
Concluding Prayer
So we ask Allah, perhaps on the night of the middle of Sha'ban itself, that this opportunity for retreat be for us a blessed time of sabr and of shukr, of tawakkul and taslim, and that he decree a blessed outcome.
We were all running too fast after dunya and we need to stop and draw breath for a while. May we enter Ramadan, therefore, in a calm and well-prepared state of prayer and attentiveness to our duties and at the presence of Allah Ta'ala.
May it be the best Ramadan of our lives, free of laziness and full of constructive family love, forgiveness, prayer and the gaining of knowledge.
May this self-isolation end as Ramadan always ends, not with a sense of release, but with a sense that a spiritual and special time has been experienced and will be missed. And we will pray too for mercy upon our dead and for greater taqwa in our hearts.
And we will pray that the mighty will be humbled, that the dead hand of materialism will be lifted from a frantic and greedy and stressed Bani Adam, and that this will be a time of reflection and return to haqq,
not only for the ummah, but for all of humanity, which has suffered from its own sins for too long and craves the merciful, guiding restoration of its heart by the grace of heaven.