COVID-19, social distancing and theodicy

Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:361–365 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-024-00572-x COVID‑19, social distancing and theodicy Mark Woodward1 Accepted: 14 October 2024 / Published online: 26 October 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 The papers included in this special issue and others published previously in this journal provide examples of some of the ways in which Muslim communities responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to introducing the individual papers, I will make one basic point in this introduction. This is that there were no distinctively Muslim responses. Muslims responded to it in much the same ways that adherents of other religions did. The variety of Muslim responses most closely resembled those of Christians and Jews because of their shared religious heritage.1 All were concerned with questions of theodicy that are inherent in monotheistic religions. Simply put, these concern the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and misfortune (including pandemics) with the concept of an omnipotent and benevolent God. Like previous plagues including the Black Death that swept across Eurasia and North Africa from the eighth to the early twentieth century and the post World War I Influenza pandemic, both of which resulted in millions of deaths Covid-19 was, and is, an equal opportunity killer. It was first detected in Wuhan China in November 2019 and spread rapidly across the globe. People sickened and died irrespective of religion, ethnicity or nationality. Like earlier pandemics it spread along trade routes. COVID-19 spread far more quickly than previous plagues for one simple reason. Journeys across continents that once took months, now take hours. It would not have mattered where the virus first appeared, it would have globalized with the same terrifying speed. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it to be a pandemic on March 11 2020. At that point countries began to close their borders. Some, especially China, imposed strict quarantines on the most hard-hit cities. Many countries, provinces/states and municipalities issued “stay at home” orders for all but essential 1 For discussions of this point see: Miller et al., (2020). The coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic, social distancing, and observance of religious holidays: perspectives from Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. International Journal of Critical Illness and Injury Science, 10(2), 49–52. Taragin-Zeller and Kessler (2021). It’s not doctrine, This Is just how it is happening! Religious creativity in the time of COVID-19. Religions, 12(9), 747 and Turner (2021). The political theology of COVID-19: A comparative history of human responses to catastrophes. In: Gerard Delanty (ed.) Pandemic, politics, and society: critical perspectives on the Covid-19 crisis. Berlin: De Gruyter, 139 − 56. * Mark Woodward 1 Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Vol.:(0123456789) 362 Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:361–365 workers and “lock downs” for most businesses. International travel became nearly impossible. These efforts, slowed, but did not stop the virus from “going global”. WHO estimates that as many as three million people died by the end of the year. By March of 2023 at least seven million had perished. The actual number of fatalities will never be known because many victims were not formally diagnosed and, in some countries, most notably the United States, there was politically motivated underreporting. Fear, sometimes bordering on hysteria, panic buying of essential supplies and denial were among the initial responses. As was true in the case of previous pandemics many people and some governments were quick to blame combinations foreign or domestic enemy others and socially undesirable groups including immigrants and the poor and/or divine retribution for the onset of the pandemic. In fourteenth century, European Christians attributed the Black Death the Satanic machinations of Jews and Gypsies. In the United States there is a long, well-established tradition of blaming immigrants for epidemics including polio, typhus, and yellow fever.2 The Chinese government, Jews, Muslims and indivuals including Bill Gates and George Soros were all mentioned in COVID-19 conspiracy theories.3 Nativist political movements seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to demonize their ethnic enemies. US president Donald Trump called it “Kung Flu” and “the China virus” which contributed to an uptick in anti-Asian violence in American cities.4 In India Hindu nationalists called it “Corona Jihad” sparking anti-Muslim violence.5 Western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) share the theological postulate that plagues and other natural disasters are divine retribution for individual and collective sin. The paradigmatic example is the plagues God inflicted on Egypt that are described in the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 7:14 − 11:10) and the Qur’an (al-Araf 130–133). Plague and sin are linked by conceptual metaphors that are deeply embedded in these traditions and cultures influenced by them. Conceptual metaphors are expressions, images, memes and symbols that link semantic domains. Lakoff argues that they are unconscious and that they define the realities people live by.6 It is not surprising that Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders drew on this shared tradition establishing common threads in COVID-19 discourse.7 Historically, 2 Cohn (2018). Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. Oxford University Press. 3 Douglas (2021). COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Group processes & intergroup relations, 24(2), 270– 275. 4 Gover et al. (2020). Anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the reproduction of inequality. American journal of criminal justice, 45(4), 647–667, Cooper and Lampropoulou (2024). China Virus, Kung Flu, and MAGA: Countervalues and sociological fractionation on Twitter as evidenced by pro-and anti-Trump discourses in relation to Covid-19. Discourse, context & media, 57, 100,758. 5 Zajączkowska (2020). Hindu-Muslim relations in times of coronavirus. Studia Orientalne, (2 (18), 77–91. 6 Lakoff (2009) The neural theory of metaphor. Available at SSRN 1,437,794. 7 Tolmie and Venter (2021). Making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic from the Bible–Some perspectives. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 77(4). Ahmad and Ahad (2021). COVID-19: A study of Islamic and scientific perspectives. Theology and Science, 19(1), 32–41, Brown (2022) The eleventh plague: Jews and pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:361–365 363 seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with God was among the primary means of combatting epidemics. These efforts often included counterproductive mass gatherings such as prayer services and mass funerals that because super spreaders.8 Some Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and adherents (...truncated)