COVID 19 pandemic challenges and adequate responses from Islamic perspective

• Main Author: Gapur, Oziev
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: BL Religion; BV1460 Religious Education
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/86405/1/86405_XVI%20MUSLIM%20INTERNATIONAL%20FORUM_new.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/86405/
• Institution: Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia

Participants of the XVI Muslim international forum pay tribute to the genius of the invaluable contribution to the world’s treasury of knowledge made by the outstanding thinker Abu Nasr al-Farabi, whose 1150 th anniversary was celebrated in 2020, and emphasize the importance of studying and popularizing his legacy for contemporaries regardless of their religious affiliation. In trying to understand the spiritual meaning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the deprivations, limitations and risks to health and wellbeing that it has brought, the speakers regarded the pandemic as a testing of religiosity and morality for individuals, religious communities and civil societies, giving them the chance to reinterpret their relationship with the Creator and the surrounding world, and to attain new depths of spiritual meditations and experiences. Along with the risks, deprivations, and losses the pandemic is also a period of atoning for sins, moral cleansing and self-perfection. The participants noted the high level of solidarity, empathy and compassion, and displays of good will and self-sacrifice that have characterized the time of the pandemic in Muslim communities across the world. Proof of this is the high level of conformity to anti-Coronovirus sanitary measures in mosques and other Muslim religious sites throughout the world, flexibility regarding adaptations to the daily prayer practice and the realities of the pandemic, and the conversion of Muslim sites into centers of social help and support throughout the world. The fact that millions of people throughout the world have reacted with willingness and desire to voluntary and social programs, participating selflessly in charitable projects, is proof of the high need felt by the whole human community for the renewal and strengthening in society of the humanitarian principles of mercy and compassion. In addition, though, the pandemic has provoked a deepening mutual misunderstanding, mistrust and suspicion, and an exacerbation of Islamophobic feelings throughout the world. The unusual nature of everyday life and the extremity of the rules needed to resist the pandemic have become an excuse for unceasing and, in some cases, increasing policy of discrimination and violation of the rights of Muslims. This is true of Muslims communities in China and Myanmar, as well as the cremation of people’s bodies due to Coronavirus in Sri Lanka, which is a worrying practice for the Abrahamic religions. In light of the above, the development of religious dialogue is seen by the participants of the XVI Muslim International forum not only as a way of establishing bilateral relations between two parties through concrete religious organizations but also as joint service and labor on the path to the common humanization of social-political discourse and the expansion of the space of humanitarian values and initiatives, along with ideas of mutual respect and love between peoples and religions, in the life of societies.