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How coronavirus challenges Muslims’ faith and changes their lives

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As the world faces the greatest disruption of our lifetimes, Muslims throughout the world are also grappling with the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the Islamic cultural, spiritual and theological dimensions offer Muslims myriad ways of coping.

Adapting to new social norms

Muslims have relatively large families and tend to maintain extended family relations. Prophet Muhammad encouraged Muslims to keep strong family ties. The Quran inspires Muslims to be generous to kin (16:90) and treat the elderly with compassion (17:23).

These teachings have resulted in Muslims either living together as large families or keeping regular weekly visits and gatherings of extended family members. Many Muslims feel conflicted about the need to apply social distancing on one hand and the need to be close to family and relatives for comfort and support. Tighter restrictions on movement in some parts of Australia (NSW and Victoria) mean Muslims, like everyone else, are not allowed to visit extended family anymore.

One of the first changes brought about by social distancing has been to the Muslim custom of shaking hands followed by hugging (same gender) friends and acquaintances, especially in mosques and Muslim organisations. After a week or two of hesitation in March, the hugging completely stopped, making Muslims feel dismal.

Visiting the sick is considered a good deed in Islam. However, in the case of COVID-19, such visits are not possible. Checking up on those who are sick with phone calls, messages and social media is still possible and encouraged.

Cleanliness is half of faith

One aspect of coronavirus prevention that comes very naturally to Muslims is personal hygiene. Health organisations and experts promote personal hygiene to limit the spread of coronavirus, especially washing hands frequently for at least 20 seconds.

Islam has been encouraging personal hygiene for centuries. The Quran instructs Muslims to keep their clothes clean in one of the earliest revelations (74:4), remarking “God loves those who are clean” (2:222).

More than 14 centuries ago, Prophet Muhammad emphasized “cleanliness is half of faith” and encouraged Muslims to wash their hands before and after eating, bath at least once a week (and after marital relations), brush their teeth daily, and to groom their nails and private parts.

Additionally, Muslims have to perform a ritual ablution before the five daily prayers. The ablution involves washing hands up to the elbows, including interlacing of fingers, washing the face and feet, and wiping the hair.

While these do not completely prevent the spread of disease, they certainly help reduce the risk.

An interesting detail is that Muslims are required to wash their genitals after using the toilet. Even though Muslims use toilet paper, they are required to finish cleaning with water. This requirement led to some Muslims installing bidet sprayers in their bathrooms.

Closure of mosques and Friday services

Congregational prayers in mosques are important for Muslims in instilling a sense of being in the presence of the sacred, and a sense of being with other believers. Accordingly, they line up in rows with shoulders touching. This arrangement is extremely risky during a pandemic. Australian mosques are now closed because of coronavirus.

Deciding to skip optional daily congregational prayers was not too difficult for Muslims, but stopping Friday prayers has been more challenging. Friday prayer is the only Muslim prayer that has to be performed in a mosque. It consists of a 30-60 minute sermon followed by a five-minute congregational prayer conducted just after noon.

Stopping Friday prayers on a global scale has not occurred since it was introduced by Prophet Muhammad in 622, after he migrated to the city of Medina from the persecution he and his followers endured in Mecca.

Iran was the first to ban Friday prayers on March 4. While countries like Turkey and Indonesia tried to continue Friday prayers with social distancing, it did not work, and soon the entire Muslim world closed mosques for prayer services.

Fortunately for Muslims, the closure of mosques does not mean they stop daily prayers altogether. In Islam, individual prayers and worship play a greater role than communal ones. Muslims can pray five times a day wherever they are, and often home is a place where most praying takes place.

The void left by ending of Friday sermons in mosques has been filled to some extent by Friday sermons offered online.

Effect on Ramadan and the annual pilgrimage to Mecca

Two of the five pillars of Islamic practice are the fasting in Ramadan and the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Ramadan is only three weeks away. It starts in the last week of April and goes for a month. During this month, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and marital relations from dawn to sunset on each day of the month. This part will not be affected by COVID-19.

What is affected are the evening breaking of fast dinners (iftar) and daily evening congregational prayers (tarawih). Muslims generally invite their friends and family members to these dinners. In Western countries, the invitations include non-Muslim acquaintances as well. Islamic organizations have already announced the cancellation of iftar dinners.

The three-day end of Ramadan festive celebrations (eid) will also be limited to family that live together.

The impact on pilgrimage is far greater.

The minor (and optional) Islamic pilgrimage (umrah) happens throughout the year, intensifying near Ramadan. With Iran a hot spot for coronavirus, Saudi Arabia suspended entry to Iranian and all other pilgrims as early as February 27.

The main pilgrimage (hajj) season occurs in late July. Although there is the possibility of the spread of the virus slowing by July, a pilgrimage involving more than two million people from just about every country on earth would almost certainly flame the virus into a second wave. Saudi Arabia is likely to cancel the main pilgrimage for 2020.

In the 14 centuries of Islamic history, pilgrimage has not been undertaken several times because of war and roads not being safe. But this is the first time in pilgrimage may be called off due to a pandemic.

As pilgrims reserve their spot and pay the full fee months ahead, the cancellation of hajj would result in losses of savings for millions of Muslims and cause massive job losses in the pilgrimage industry.

The balance between precaution and reliance on God

An early debate in Muslim circles around coronavirus has been a theological one. Muslims believe God created the universe and continues to actively govern its affairs. This would mean the emergence of the virus is an active creation of God.

So like some other religious groups, some Muslims argue that coronavirus was created by God to warn and punish humanity for consumerism, destruction of the environment and personal excesses. This means fighting the pandemic is futile and people should rely (tawakkul) on God to protect the righteous.

Such thinking may help in reducing the sense of fear and panic such a large-scale pandemic poses, but it can also make people unnecessarily complacent.

The vast majority of Muslims counter this fatalistic approach by arguing that while the emergence of the virus was not in human control, the spread of disease certainly is. They remind us that Prophet Muhammad advised a man who did not tie his camel because he trusted in God: “tie the camel first and then trust in God”.

Prophet Muhammad sought medical treatment and encouraged his followers to seek medical treatment, saying “God has not made a disease without appointing a remedy for it, with the exception of one disease—old age”.

Further, Prophet Muhammad advised on quarantine:

If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; if the plague outbreaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place.

Sometimes affliction inevitably comes our way. The Quran teaches Muslims to see life’s difficult circumstances as a test — they are temporary hardships to strengthen us (2:153-157). Such a perspective allows Muslims to show resilience in times of hardship and tribulation, with sufficient strength to make it to the other side intact.

In times like this, some people will inevitably lose their wealth, income and even their lives. Prophet Muhammad advised the grieving that property lost during tribulations will be considered charity, and those who die as a result of pandemics will be considered martyrs of paradise.

As Muslims continue to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, they, like everyone else, are wondering how their lives might be changed afterwards.

—

Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you want to help in the fight against COVID-19, we have compiled an up-to-date list of community initiatives designed to aid medical workers and low-income people in this article. Link: [UPDATED] Anti-COVID-19 initiatives: Helping Indonesia fight the outbreak
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.

 

Source: https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/04/02/how-coronavirus-challenges-muslims-faith-and-changes-their-lives.html

The true story of Fatima al-Fihri, the founder of the world’s first known university

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Forgotten Women is a series dedicated to giving women of history the exposure they deserve. This week, we’re paying tribute to Fatima al-Fihri, a woman who established the concept of a university as we know it today.

It’s all thanks to Fatima al-Fihri that universities around the world exist. After founding the world’s first known university, the University of al-Qarawiyyin, a centre of higher education, it ultimately paved the way for modern universities around the globe.

What did she do? 

Fatima al-Fihri was a Muslim woman from Tunisia who founded the first known university more than 1,000 years ago: the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. Guinness World Records acknowledges it as the oldest existing and continually operating educational institution in the world.

Much of the information about al-Fihri’s early life is lost to time, but we do know that she was born into a wealthy merchant family who prized education – even for women. Fatima and her sister, Mariam, were well schooled and devoutly religious. In the early 9th century, the al-Fihri family, along with many other Arabic people, left Tunisia and emigrated to Fez – considered a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis by the standards of the time. When her father died, Fatima inherited his fortune. The sisters then decided to invest the money in something that would benefit their local community.

“Al-Fihri’s idea for an educational hub spread throughout the world in the Middle Ages”

In AD859, al-Fihri decided that a place of higher learning was much needed in the city and founded the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University, naming it after her hometown. She oversaw construction of the building – 30 metres long with a courtyard, prayer hall, library and schoolrooms.

In the beginning, the educational part of al-Qarawiyyin offered courses in religious instruction and the Qur’an, but its curriculum gradually expanded into Arabic grammar, mathematics, music, medicine and astronomy, and then began conferring degrees on its graduates. The university swiftly became a famous spiritual and educational centre, visited by scholars and intellectuals from all over the world. Al-Fihri attended lectures there until her later years.

Why was she a trailblazer?

Al-Fihri established the concept of a university as we know it today. Her idea for an educational hub that provided opportunities for advanced learning spread throughout the world in the Middle Ages, resulting in the founding of Europe’s oldest institutions in the following centuries, including the University of Bologna (founded 1088) and the University of Oxford (founded around 1096).

What influence has she left behind today? 

After al-Fihri’s death, the institution continued to be extended. The mosque became the largest in Africa, with a capacity of 22,000. Al-Qarawiyyin university is still going strong – alumni include Fatima al- Kabbaj, one of its first female students, who later became the sole female member of the Moroccan Supreme Council of Religious Knowledge.

The Forgotten Women series is part of Stylist’s Visible Women campaign, dedicated to raising the profiles of brilliant women past and present. See more Visible Women stories here.

Illustration: Bijou Karman 

Images: Unsplash 

Source: https://www.stylist.co.uk/visible-women/fatima-al-fihri-founder-world-first-known-university-this-weeks-issue-430/224181

Is there room for critical thinking in Islam?

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To be Muslim is not to be politically asleep, but rather to be in a permanent state of critique.

Nothing is more satisfying than the conviction that your enemy lacks the ability to think critically. What could be more gratifying than the idea that the person you are fighting is trapped in an airlock of unreflection? It blesses your struggle, redeems your cruelty, legitimises your violence. If a definition of humanity is the ability to think for oneself, then what could be wrong with fighting the unfree?

The modern pairing of Islam with the incapacity for critical thought is a fairly old gesture – the Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz said Muslims were so fatalistic they wouldn’t even jump out of the way of carts. Over the past fifteen years, however, the internet has enabled and amplified a panoply of voices with this view.

From the digital rooftops, a thousand voices are shouting down Islam as a space inimical to any form of rational reflection: millionaire right-wingers masquerading as free-thinkers such as Bill Maher, Eton-educated “voices of the people” such as Douglas Murray, sophisticated hate-distillers such as Ann Coulter and her not-so-bright British version, Katie Hopkins … even Greek classics professors-turned-Islam experts such as Tom Holland have joined the fray.

Some of the historical acrobatics involved in this gesture are awe-inspiring. Any academic would be laughed out of the room if they suggested St Augustine was somehow complicit in the bombing of abortion clinics, or that the medieval Hohenstaufen culminated in the Third Reich, or that the Renaissance never happened. Almost on a daily basis, however, confident, context-defying lines of continuity are drawn for Islam across centuries and continents, monocausally linking the Ottomans to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), or seventh century theology to attacks on shopping malls. In these re-writings of history, contrary or problematic episodes (such as the vast contribution of the Islamic world to geometry, astronomy and the vocabulary of science in general) are not just left out – anyone even trying to mention them is mocked as a naive, idiot liberal. It’s a wonderful age to be alive.

I often wonder what can be done against this collective dumbing-down of an entire faith. Patiently repeating points and examples from history – in the manner of explaining something difficult but obvious to an eight-year old child – does not seem to go very far in combatting a million views on Youtube. Raising consciousness is not enough – there almost seems to be a will not to know here, a decision to remain in the foetal warmth of a particular narrative. When a Western, best-selling public intellectual openly laughs at the idea of “Islamic inventions”, and garners online 10,000 likes in doing so, it is difficult to see what benefit the provision of empirical facts can provide. Large sections of our society seem to be locked into certain fantasies about Islam and the West – and how we are going to unlock those fantasies remains as unclear as ever.

Not that scholars have given up. Irfan Ahmad’s latest book, Religion As Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (2017), offers an interesting opposition to the West-and-the-rest narratives of an European Enlightenment radiating outwards from Greece and Germany into the backward corners of a darker world. Positing the Prophet Mohammed as “a critic of the Meccan social order”, Ahmad constructs an alternative genealogy of the verb to critique (tanqid/naqd), one which is not by any means dismissive of Greek/pre-Islamic/Western traditions, “but which at the same time can’t be subsumed within them”. It is a welcome move that intelligently and articulately condenses the work of previous scholars (Talal Asad, Gayatri Spivak, J G A Pocock) on two important points.

First of all, it demonstrates the extent to which the Enlightenment was an “ethnic project” – an ethnic project, moreover, which was in constant need of an enemy. When Kant spoke about the space of philosophy to be defined, he often alluded to the space of Europe, whose boundaries needed to be patrolled. Secondly, the tired linking of the critical with the secular – and “uncritical” with the religious – is something Ahmad’s book goes on to rigorously deconstruct. Perhaps a touch controversially for some, he declares: “Against the reigning doxa, which views Islam and critique as mutually exclusive domains … I propose we begin to think of Islam as critique; indeed, Islam as permanent critique.”

To be Muslim, in other words, is not to be politically asleep, or passively receptive to a divine will, but rather to be in a permanent state of critique. Not everyone will be politically comfortable with some of the choices Ahmad has as examples of this critical tradition (Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, is given a central chapter), but the gesture he makes – developing an alternative genealogy of critical thought in the Urdu Islamicate traditions of South Asia – is a valuable one.

To be fair, there is another aspect to this issue we have not yet touched upon. The critical tradition of Islam might well be compared with a city which is under attack on two fronts – from without, and from within. In addition to a certain relentless Western reduction of Islam to an unreflective cult, there are those within the Muslim world would wholly reject some of its most famous philosophers and critical thinkers as un-Islamic. The late Shahab Ahmed’s monograph What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (2015), in this respect, stands interestingly alongside Irfan Ahmad’s book as a parallel attempt to re-define the parameters of the Islamic world – and, implicitly, its relationship to both the Western and the secular. Although Shahab Ahmed’s focus on activities such as wine drinking lends it a different tone from Religion As Critique, both books share a frustration with narrow definitions of the Islamic tradition. In Shahab Ahmed’s case, this is a desire to expand the idea of being Islamic well beyond the “putative centrality” of jurisprudence which most convention seems to define the religion by; in Irfan Ahmad’s book, a similar belief in the value of everyday experience – “the practice … of the nonscholarly and commoners” as Ahmad puts it – is given as much weight as the pronouncements of the ulema in deciding what an Islamic critical tradition might be.

These debates will go on. In closing, it might be worth ending with the words an Arab philosopher wrote in the city of Damascus, just over 800 years ago. Words which demonstrate (if you’ll forgive my anachronism) a remarkable pre-psychological awareness of the extent to which we personally construct the God we worship:

“… you will see no one who worships an unmade God, since man creates in himself that which he worships and judges. When a person sees something of the [divine] Real, he never sees anything but himself.”

The writer is Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), and the extracts are two lines taken from his Futuhat, written at some point during the 1220s. Of course I am ripping these words out of context, and yet the sentiment they express – the God we pray to always reflects us, even comes out of us, in some way or another – is a suspicion to be found across Jewish and Christian traditions too (Maimonides, Meister Eckhart). Eight hundred years ago, a keen epistemological querying of religious experience was already at work. Admittedly, the goal of this querying was not a secular demolition of God, but a purer experience of the divine; not the exposure of God as a psychological illusion, but a clearer demarcation between what we imagine God to be, and the thing that lies beyond it. Some might call this a deferred critical thinking: critical thought put to the ultimate service of the uncritical. It’s a fair charge – people are entitled to their opinion. But there must be something valuable in trying to remember that lines like these were being written in Damascus, and Cairo, and Cordoba, centuries before Gramsci, Marx and Descartes. And certainly 800 years before Youtube.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/room-critical-thinking-islam-180406080925909.html