“We pray five times a day, we pray Jummu’a, we sleep with our families, we hug, we shake hands, we are fine, fine fine,” he said on the recording. “We have anti-virus while you are infected with the coronavirus, we have anti-coronavirus; it is the Allah we worship. We pray, we slash fornicators, we cut hands.”
Shekau thus joins several other Islamic leaders who have stated that the coronavirus is Allah’s judgment, and that Islamic piety will protect people from it. If he or any of his followers contract the coronavirus anyway, this will not disabuse them of this belief. They will simply assume that they were not obedient to Allah enough, and redouble their efforts to please him, which could lead to more jihad activity, as Muhammad called jihad the greatest of all deeds.
“Boko Haram’s Shekau Labels Anti-COVID-19 Measures an Attack on Islam in Nigeria,” by John Campbell, Council on Foreign Relations, April 17, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Abubakar Shekau, a Boko Haram faction leader, kidnapper-in-chief of the Chibok school girls, notorious for his grisly videos and brutal implementation of punishments of seventh century, Middle Eastern origin, this week issued an audio recording on the coronavirus after a long period of radio silence.
In it, he characterizes international measures to address the coronavirus pandemic as part of the war on Islam by evil forces. He denounces especially social distancing, the suspension of pilgrimages to Mecca, and the likely modification of certain Ramadan observances. “Just look at it, they stopped you from Umrah and Hajj, even the fasting they are telling you that corona season needs a lot of drinking water.” He asserts that “Muslims,” by whom he means exclusively the followers of his extreme brand of Salafi Islam, are protected from the virus.
“We pray five times a day, we pray Jummu’a, we sleep with our families, we hug, we shake hands, we are fine, fine fine,” he said on the recording. “We have anti-virus while you are infected with the coronavirus, we have anti-coronavirus; it is the Allah we worship. We pray, we slash fornicators, we cut hands.” (“Cut hands,” according to the translator of the recording, means amputating the hands of thieves.)
He comes close to saying that COVID-19 is Allah’s punishment on the ungodly.
As he has many times before, he is contemptuous of secular leaders: “In the times of infidels like Trump, Idris Derby [sic] with the goat eye, Buhari, Muhammad Issoufu, the dog of the hands of France. Children of pigs and monkeys. If you don’t repent you will be finished.”…