Tablighi Jamaat is in a no-lose situation. If no one gets coronavirus at this gathering, it’s a sign of Allah’s protection of the Muslims. If coronavirus does spread there, it’s because Muslims have sinned, and need to be more pious, and so need to attend more such gatherings. This is the same kind of cycle that leads to jihad activity: when something goes right in your life, it’s Allah’s blessing, and you need to show your gratitude by doing what Muhammad called the greatest deed Muslims could perform: jihad. And if you’ve sinned, you can try to get back into Allah’s good graces by waging jihad.
“Thousands of Muslim pilgrims ignore virus risk to gather in Indonesia,” by Agustinus Beo Da Costa and A. Ananthalakshmi, Reuters, March 18, 2020:
JAKARTA/KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Thousands of Muslim pilgrims from across Asia gathered in Indonesia on Wednesday, despite fears that their meeting could fuel the spread of a coronavirus, just two weeks after a similar event in Malaysia caused more than 500 infections.
Organisers and regional officials said the event in the world’s fourth most populous nation had begun, although the regional police chief said he was making a last ditch-effort to persuade organisers to call it off.
“We are more afraid of God,” one of the organisers, Mustari Bahranuddin, told Reuters, when asked about the risk of participants spreading the virus at the event in Gowa in Indonesia’s province of South Sulawesi.
“Because everyone’s human, we fear illnesses, death,” he said. “But there’s something more to the body, which is our soul.”
Organisers had rejected a formal request from authorities to postpone the gathering, said a regional official, Arifuddin Saeni.
He estimated that 8,695 people had already assembled in Gowa, near the provincial city of Makassar, adding that the numbers would make it hard to put a halt to the proceedings.
“They are still coming,” he said. “There are people from Thailand, Arabia, India and the Philippines.”
The Malaysian event, held from February 27 to March 1, drew 16,000 followers.
Both gatherings in Indonesia and Malaysia were organised by members of Tablighi Jama’at, a global movement of evangelical Muslims that promotes proselytising, known as dakwah….
Promotional material for the Indonesian gathering reviewed by Reuters read, “The pleasure of living in this world is only a little, compared to the afterlife.”