Abdal Hakim Murad – A Perspective on the Pandemic
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AI: Transcript ©
Taking a normally familiar stroll through Cambridge's city
centre, I find myself, subhanAllah, rather staggered by
the difference these 2 weeks have made.
Little roads and lanes call to mind the
way Sundays used to be.
They are almost deserted, but this particular day
of rest will stretch on for weeks 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 Muslimer who works in a
supermarket tells me that some customers throw their
coins a towel 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 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 pressed 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 £20 note. The most recent banknote to
be plasticized
may be a filthy lucre which can kill
us.
We want to sanitize it. The thrill of
wealth is over.
The world is fasting in a certain way.
This is an imsek of capitalism,
whose Belshazzar's
feast is abruptly broken up. As for the
daytime visitor to the stunned city centre,
much is off limits. As a Ramadan Hadith
tells us, the devils are chained.
The
wary shoppers are interested not in nice things,
but in survival.
Old habits of absent minded browsing seem absurd.
Our Prime Minister,
bearing his hedonist soul, has closed the bookshops
but kept the off licenses open, but even
they do not seem to be busy.
Many people are polite and caring, but everyone
is chastened,
subdued,
sober,
watchful.
Of course this sudden crash is falling differently
upon different heads. For the old my absent
minded sneeze may bring a terrible death.
For the young men who are standing together
and laughing waiting for their bass the risk
seems trivial,
and what young blade worth his salt shuns
a risk? This game of Russian roulette that
they play every day is new and edgy,
and they feel immortal,
Blithely confident that they at least will be
standing for the same bus next year.
So heaven has given us to live in
interesting times. We're entering the gravest global crisis
in many decades.
And it's 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 2nd rate fumbling politicians.
Let us look from our windows upon the
eerie emptiness of the street
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 gained financial system is increasingly
parasitical upon the poor.
From our human perspective,
COVID-nineteen
is an infection which disorders our world. But
seen from the world's
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 vampirize, starts to sicken and die.
And the 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 coronavirus.
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 Nakshbandi rule of Ghosh Dardam,
mindfulness in every breath.
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.
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 Arlazakh,
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 served the divine names Al
Qahar and Al Montakhim,
the compeller, the avenger,
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 Sharia 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 unequaled hoarding of
wealth by the global 1%.
And so the great Qur'anic 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 laborers 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 the destructive
and unjust megastructure
of oppression and pride.
And again, let us recall the heroic standing
of Abraham in the court of Nimrod.
This comes in the Surat Al Baqarah.
Have you not beheld the one who argued
with Abraham about his Lord, God having given
him the kingdom?
And 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 hard heartedly 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 mentioned that the
And then Abraham comes and when he is
asked the same question he says,
my lord is he that gives life and
death.
Thrown out from the tyrant's presence and going
back to his family,
Abraham 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 miraculously 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.
Look at the politicians across Europe who have
persecuted the honorable 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 that 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 1 medieval Egyptian
hospital
written by the historian Lane Poole.
Cubicles for patients were ranged around 2 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 constellations of the faith. Rich and
poor were treated alike without fees, and 60
orphans were supported and educated in the neighboring
school.
Historians agree that in fact the modern day
hospital originated in the Islamic world. There's 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 Qalaon.
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 Darasifa
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 Olamat 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 Jahad,
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,
This is in Surah Al Jathia. It means,
they say it is only our life of
this world. We were dead 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 Surah 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, El Mumeet the slayer.
Pre modern humanity saw it on every hand
and knew how to cope. 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,
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.
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.
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 William'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, but
the close of mortal way,
when with faltering footsteps weary,
I'm going home to stay, evermore to stay.
Then I think of loved ones parted from
me now full many a day, and I
feel quite blithe hearted.
I'm going home to stay,
evermore to stay.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, at least
so the poets say, and there'll be no
parting yonder.
I'm going home to stay,
evermore to stay.
Though alone the path I travel, though my
mortal powers decay, my feet tread upon shore
gravel,
I'm going home to stay,
evermore to stay.
Be it late or be it early comes
the call I must obey.
Cheerfully I'll meet it fairly.
I'm going home to stay.
Evermore to stay.
Another author of that early age of our
community was Amherst Thiessen.
Unlike 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 Qur'anic
record.
The second of the 2, 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 dismayed.
Oh, may we thus through life's rough voyage
with all its tempest cope. May God the
rock whereon we cast the anchor of our
hope.
Come weel 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.
For Thyssen and for the forerunners of our
British Muslim community,
Islam is quintessentially the religion of submission.
Not only to God's Amr Takhlifi,
the commandments of Sharia, but his Amr Takhweeni,
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 Ridah,
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,
rigor 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 honor, oh my deathly shroud.
Good is thy gentleness.
Good is thy rigour.
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, Hasbun
Allah wanaamalwakeel.
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
narrowly escaped the angel of death.
I remember one night with a driver pushing
a 150 kilometers
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.
You Allah,
said all the passengers as death suddenly rushed
towards us and then
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. It's manner and
time determined by the best of judges.
The current
this
epidemic of fear and sorrow which are paralyzing
our supposedly blase 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 through
the floor.
35%
in the red and counting. Unemployment
is growing 10 times as fast as it
did after the 2008 financial crisis.
Businesses are folding and dying.
The poor and helpless
on 0 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 list 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
spiraling
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.
We need our basics from Dunya. We have
the right to our court, 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 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 traveler.
So the believer in isolation
is further from dunya. There is a detachment
and he revives some of the key benefits
of khalwa or odsla,
remembering the possibility of experiencing clear heartedness when
distractions and worldly pleasures are at arm's length.
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, yet a handeth
in the cave of Herah.
Our moment then is an opportunity to reactivate
the honourable and richly rewarding Islamic customs of
Halwa and Ozla and Iartikaf.
Perhaps if mister 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
a
chilla. 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 2 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're experiencing this quarantine from Dunya.
I like the book of the German Muslim
author Michaela Ozelsell
40 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 Chilla,
before closing the door with the traditional phrase
that he says to her, yumushakgelsin
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 Tarawih 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 realize also with sorrow
how impoverished must be the life of the
godless.
But Islam has no priesthood and no consecrated
churches.
The chosen one tells us that one of
the Hasa'is,
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
Shari and valid manner. Azakat al Fitrah can
still be paid. Islam is entirely doable
in our seclusion.
So let's relearn the traditions of seclusion, ozlah.
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
prayer strongly in our homes,
remembering the prophetic commandment that our houses must
not become like graves, but must be brought
to life by solet.
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, Faratahyan.
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.
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 al Ghazali, emphasized
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.
So we ask Allah, perhaps on the night
of the middle of Sha'aban itself, that this
opportunity for retreat be for us a blessed
time of Sabr and of Shukr, of Tawakkul
and Teslim,
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 t'a'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 merciful guiding restoration of its
heart by the grace of heaven.
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