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The current pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of the world we live in. But is it unprecedented? Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, Dean of Cambridge Muslim College, shares his perspective on this humbling phenomenon, one which is not unfamiliar in our Islamic tradition. He also highlights the beauty and healing of our religious practice and provides helpful suggestions on how to remain connected as Muslims.
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Read the transcript: https://cambridgemuslimcollege.ac.uk/...
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SHA’BAN 1441 / APRIL 2020 Bi’smi’Llahi ’r-Rahmani ’r-RahimTaking a normally familiar stroll through Cambridge’s city centre I find myself rather staggered by the difference these two weeks have made. The little roads call to mind the way Sundays used to be: they are nearly deserted; but this particular day of rest will stretch on for weeks and months, and it is likely that at least some of these shuttered shops and restaurants will 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 Muslima 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’, toeing a yellow taped line, and not only from obedience; no-one wishes to stand too close to Azrail, the Angel of Death. The consumer carnival, the Mardi Gras of our product-addicted age, is over; this feels like a 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 imsak of capitalism, whose Belshazzar’s Feast has abruptly broken up; as for the daytime visitor to a stunned city centre, much is off-limits; as a Ramadan hadith tells us, the devils are chained, sufidat al-shayatin. The wary shoppers are interested not in nice things but in survival; old habits of absentminded browsing seem absurd. Our Prime Minister, baring his hedonist’s 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 bus, 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 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 of 19A PERSPECTIVE on the PA N D E M I C ABDAL HAKIM MURADupon the poor. 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 vampirize, 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. 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 in the mouse and the elephant genre. The Holy Prophet, whose entire message is a challenge to the love of dunya and fear of death, was born in the Year of the Elephant; how often we repeat that sura, 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 Sira 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. Faja’alahum ka-asfin ma’kul. 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 al-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-Qahharand al-Muntaqim, 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 poorand broken-hearted: ana ‘inda’l-munkasirati qulubuhum.The Qur’an 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 unequalled hoarding of wealth by the global one percent. 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 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. W hat 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. And again, let us recall the heroic standing of Abraham in the court of Nimrod. This comes in the surat al-Baqara: “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. of 29“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 then Abraham comes, and when he is asked the same question, he says, “Rabbiy alladhi yuhyi wa-yumit”, My Lord is He that gives life and death. Thrown out from the tyrant’s presence and returning to his family, Abraham fills his food sacks with sand, so that at least for a while they will think that he has brought them something , and be consoled. He falls asleep; and when Sara 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: faba’atha’Llahu ‘alayhi ba’uda, fadakhalat fi mankharihi. 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 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‘da’ 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 twenty thousand 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 health care, provided generously by waqfs: I like this description of one medieval Egyptian hospital, written by the historian Lane-Poole: “Cubicles for patients were ranged round 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 reader of the Koran afforded the consolations of the faith. Rich and poor were treated alike, without fees, and sixty orphans were supported and educated in the neighbouring school.” Historians agree that the modern-day hospital in fact originated in the Islamic world: 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 waqfiyya 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 signed, 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, the generous one.” of 39
Although I disagree with a few things, this is by far the very best I have heard in ages! I really wish there were a God to listen to Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad and bring the change necessary as humans are hopeless! But, it will become worse because our imagination stopped to the creation of God and then went back to sleep. But, the evil ones never sleep!BAFS
THE MILD FLU VIRUS IS NOT THE KING OF THE WORLD, BUT W.H.O., BILL GATES MAFIA, UN AGENDA, FREEMASONS, UN AGENDA 21 AND THE CFR ARE THE KINGS OF THE WORLD!
Dr. Tim Winter, b.1960, is University Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and is dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for British mosques. He is a Director of Studies at Wolfson College, and is a holder of the Pilkington Teaching Prize at the University of Cambridge. He’s been described as Britain's most influential Muslim thinker by The Independent.
In 2006 he published Abraham's Children, co-edited with Bishop Richard Harries and Rabbi Norman Solomon.He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (2008).
His most recent book is Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions (2012).
Dr. Tim Winter’s articles have appeared in The Independent, the London Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Catholic Herald, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Prospect. He is also a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's ‘Thought for the Day’.
As a Muslim myself, I’ve often been troubled by the predominately negative media coverage associated with Muslims around the world, as well Muslims in my home country, the UK. I reached out to Dr. Winter because he is a man of profound knowledge and someone I believe is capable of addressing and answering my questions.
We discuss, among other things, the importance of training British born Imams to address the “ideological emergency” that British Muslims face today; the internet as a “very poor replacement” for seeking authentic knowledge; and the roots and causes of extremism as well as the reasons behind the rise of the far-right.
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