Al-Qalam 
Pray at home. By doing so, you will be protecting other Muslims in your community as well as all other South Africans, says Na’eem Jeenah community leader, activist and executive director of Afro-Middle East Centre.
Many South African Muslims are dealing with the question of how Muslims should respond to the imminent corona virus crisis – by making it all about how to respond to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ban on gatherings of more than 100 people.
Some are even saying that the issue is about counter-posing the need to ‘abide by the laws of the government’ with the need to be faithful to Islam. And so, there have been numerous very creative suggestions of how to limit the size of masjid congregations to below 100 and create additional congregations in backyards, garages, halls, homes, etc so that all the congregants will still be able to pray – including the jumu’ah salah.
No! This is missing the whole point.
The issue is not coordination of congregations. The issue is also not about abiding by the laws of the country.
The issue is about stopping the spread of this virus, ‘flattening the curve’ as they say, and, thus, protecting lives, especially the lives of the most vulnerable, like the elderly. (After all, isn’t much of Islam about how to protect the vulnerable, weak, oppressed, etc?)
And for that, gatherings should be minimized – any sized gatherings. There are examples from different parts of the world where everyone at a particular event of less than 100 people got the virus – possibly from one person at that event, and possibly that person did not even know they had it.
We need to minimise the number of occasions we have where people gather – any number of people, not just the large number of 100. Fifty people is too much, 30 is too much and even 20 is too much!
In a (social media) comment on someone else’s page, I said that the jumu’ah salah in South African masajid should be cancelled while we are dealing with the corona virus threat. Someone asked whether I was calling for the whole country to be quarantined.
No, I’m not! Not yet, anyway. I’m saying we need to be extra-vigilant. And part of that means minimising gatherings as much as possible – including small family get-togethers. That will rob the virus of the opportunity to spread rapidly among and between people. So, in a sense, I’m saying that for now we should all be doing a limited self-quarantine (at least until that is no longer sufficient).
Jumu’ah is fard – we know that. But in times of crisis and when peoples’ lives are threatened, in conditions of darura (necessity), the rules can and must be adapted. It can be that the haraam even becomes halaal. So it can be, too, that the fard becomes makruh. In extreme circumstances, the fard can even become haraam. We are not in this latter circumstance (yet). But we are in the former, and by acting now we can ensure that we do not reach the latter.
Shut down the masajid now so that in a few weeks’ or months’ time, we will be able to return to the masajid and pray with the same-sized congregations as we saw last week.
We don’t want to keep the masajid open and have daily janazah salah for the old and weak people who have been killed by the virus – and by our stupidity.
Pray at home. By doing so, you will be protecting the other Muslims in your community (as well as all other South Africans).
Wa Allahu ‘alam.
