Lockdown: violators should be punished
It’s been many days since I last went out of my house. The good
men who manage the affairs of our apartment complex have decreed that senior citizens stay
home until the virus has been tamed. But most residents violate the order to
refrain from praying in the mosque. “It’s unthinkable”, says a Muslim resident,
“It is mandatory to gather in a mosque five times a day, corona or no corona”.
The cops who are supposed to enforce the law apparently agree, they participate
in the congregational prayers as well (despite the presence of Tableeghi Jamaat
members who may have been infected while attending the recent gathering in
Raiwind). I see from social media that throughout the country, men are doing
the same without considering that they are endangering the lives of those who
are most vulnerable (like me). It’s for these reasons that I fear we may lose
the battle against the dreaded virus.
Now the greatest authority on Sunni Islam (Shaikh Al Azhar) has
advocated that mosques be closed to prevent the spread of the disease. Even
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries have done so. But our ulema
apparently consider themselves superior to those in other countries, they want
the faithful to gather and offer congregational prayers five times a day. Last
Friday the mullah in a Clifton mosque near my work place exhorted his audience
to come regularly to his mosque despite government orders not to do so. Today I
heard that people stormed the door of a mosque in Karachi’s DHA to offer
prayers, putting others at risk.
I
remember how, when Al Azhar decreed that simple bank interest was not
equivalent to “riba” and was therefore permissible, a prominent religious party
leader said he did not accept this ruling, as Al Azhar had permitted the use of
condoms for birth control. I suppose the same reasons will be cited for
rejecting the august body’s fatwa regarding closure of mosques.
I was
wondering: what if all nations simply resigned themselves and gave up? What if
we just sit back and decide to let nature take its course, and let those who
are vulnerable die? As those who are against the lockdown say, “All of us have
to die one day, so why not now?” A hundred years ago, during the last pandemic,
50 million perished. How do you explain to them that even though death is
inevitable, the virus will cause millions to die an early death? Here we run
into another problem. “The time of death for every living thing is fixed, you
can’t delay it with medications and lockdowns”, say the faithful. Even when you
tell them that those who survive the virus will be forever scarred, with
reduced immunity and lung damage, they are not convinced. They point out that a
103-year-old woman survived, but they ignore the fact that an infant also
succumbed. It’s useless, these people will never comply, the government will
have to use force to make them do so. But our prime minister Imran Khan himself
is not sure what to do. He’s against a complete lockdown; he wants buses and
trucks to continue operating. Sure, it will ensure that truck and bus drivers
will remain fully employed, and it will enable people to travel between cities
to visit their relatives and pray at their favorite shrines, but again, it will
result in more and more people being infected. So the end result will be the
same: a lockdown or even a curfew.
The Great Khan should learn from what other countries have done. In parts of
the U.S., there is a complete curfew, in neighboring India, a lockdown has been
enforced for three weeks. Apparently this is the only solution. Those who
violate the lockdown should be punished. There is no other way.
The writer is an engineer, a former
visiting lecturer at NED Engineering College, an industrialist, and has been
associated with the petroleum, chemical industries for many years. He tweets
@shakirlakhani
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