Pakistan certainly isn’t the only Muslim country that has been grappling with the influence of Muslim clerics. Despite the widespread bans in Muslim countries, many clerics continue to urge Muslims to continue prayer gatherings and be willing to die as martyrs if infected with coronavirus. In Canada, some Toronto area mosques have remained open despite the urging of the government and their own communities to close. The influence of foreign clerics has been blamed.
Although Pakistan has now started banning large public gatherings, it was one of the last countries to do so. Note again the influence of the Islamic revival movement Tablighi Jamaat, which aims to return Muslims to the practice of Islam as it was practiced in the days of Muhammad. Gaza’s first reported cases of coronavirus were people who attended a Tablighi Jamaat conference “alongside 250,000 Muslims in Pakistan last month that went ahead contrary to government advice.”
“Imran Khan allowed a quarter of a million Muslims to gather – and returning home, they’ve spread the coronavirus from Kyrgyzstan to Gaza.” Also, despite coronavirus warnings, Muslims continue to gather for Friday prayers in neighboring India.
Islamic clerics in Pakistan are currently having a ball with their coronavirus theories, while being invited on television ostensibly as experts on COVID-19. Prominent Deobandi cleric Muhammad Taqi Usmani revealed on national TV that Prophet Muhammad had come in the dream of a Tableeghi Jamaatmember and “shared the cure for coronavirus.” The cure was the recital of certain Quranic verses.
But despite the exhortations from Muslim clerics, Pakistan has finally banned domestic and international flights and train service.
“How Pakistan Became a Coronavirus Super-spreader to the Entire Muslim World,” by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, Haaretz, March 25, 2020:
On Sunday, the Gaza strip reported its first two cases of coronavirus. The two Palestinian men had recently returned from Pakistan.
They were among the 250,000 people that gathered in Lahore two weeks ago, to participate in the Tableeghi Ijtema [literally “a congregation for outreach”] – an Islamic event organized by the local Tableeghi Jamaat [Outreach Congress].
An offshoot of the South Asian Deobandi Islamic movement, the Tableeghi Jamaat has spent the past century preaching Islam in the region, and now has a presence in over 80 countries. The Raiwind area in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province and home to 11 million inhabitants, hosts the annual Tableeghi Ijtema, which includes hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world.
This year, with the congregation set for March 11-15, there had been calls to postpone the event, given the spread of COVID-19. By the end of February, Pakistan had already reported its first coronavirus cases. On the eve of the ijtema the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic.
Where Iran had cancelled the weekly Friday prayers and Saudi Arabia had suspended the Umrah pilgrimage by the end of February, the Pakistani government was still dillydallying over forestalling a gathering of over a quarter of a million people in the country’s second most populous city.
On March 12, the organizers were asked to disband the congregation, but only after around 250,000 people had already assembled in camps in preparation for the event. The reason cited for the closure of the event wasn’t the fact that world is in the midst of a pandemic which will completely change the global order – it was “rainy weather.”
The Tableeghi Jamaat’s reluctance to cite an infectious virus as cause for the disbandment is rooted in its regressive ideology, whose exponents have ranged from militant jihadists to radical preachers to Islamic televangelists unleashing a perilous blend of unscientific fantasies and bigoted fallacies. For these ideologues, cancelling congregational prayers owing to an infectious disease is synonymous with repudiating Allah’s command….