Religion, Faith, and Corona Virus Pandemic
There has been much writing on the topic of health and economic hazards caused by corona virus pandemic. Yet almost no comprehensive understanding is articulated regarding the role and relationship between religion and the onslaught of COVID-19 across varied fronts. Nonetheless, religion as the sustainer of everything exerts a central social role in the overall rise and resolution of the pandemic and its multifarious consequences.
As a solitary expression on the topic of religion and COVID-19 I read an article in The Daily Star (Bangladesh daily). There was that author’s misunderstanding regarding an incident. It occurred in a lift in Makkah during an Umrah. This event coincided with the time of the coronavirus pandemic. The author wrote about an incident in a lift that was populated by a Saudi family and a Chinese Muslim who was performing his Umrah. The Chinese person sneezed, feeling embarrassed about it. The Saudi family retorted by saying, “La hawla wala quwata illa billah”. The author took this qur’anic expression to mean exorcism of evil spirit. Contrarily, the real meaning of this qur’anic verse is, “there is no power nor ability save by Allah”. Such is an example of how incorrect meaning, and thereby importance of religious values, are misinterpreted and ignored.
On the contrary, the correct understanding of the value of religion becomes a reflection on the depth and effectiveness of the all-embracing explanation and practice of such values. They expand across the entirety of human beliefs, lives, and experiential details. The importance of such cardinal values ought to be correctly conveyed to all.
In this context we ask: How can religion actualize the return of pandemic to a state of normalcy? Such restoration of normalcy although not to a perfect state, rather to an approximated state of wellbeing by stability, has a deeply religious lesson for the entirety of self and human relations in the experiential world-system.
Islamic monotheistic explanation of the model of converting mutation of cells/virus into normalcy
I explain this claim in the following way by means of the greatest religious value and which is conveyed irrevocably by the Qur’an. That universal value is known as the Oneness of Allah. This overarching law is equivalently explained as participatory pairing between the good things of life at the exclusion and remedying of the unwanted ones. The excluded ones are those that deny the law of oneness (Qur’an 36:36) in the light of monotheism in belief and thus value; and in terms of its equivalence by experiential inclusiveness in the order and scheme of all good things.
The pairing principle of monotheistic oneness implies organic interrelations between diversity of the multidisciplinary order and scheme of all things. In the case of COVID-19, this disease is embedded in cellular chaos caused by the vastness of virus proliferation. Renormalization by the law of oneness implies application of treatments that bring back the vastly dissociated COVID-19 cells out of chaos into the nature and structure of organic oneness between the good things and practices. Thereby, the renormalized unified things replace the dissociative cells. Dissociative cellular viruses contrarily deny the oneness of renormalization.
A domain of multidisciplinary inclusiveness foundationally exists by way of the primal existential essence of oneness as law. It regenerates consistency, continuity, and sustainability. All such attributes taken together form the dynamics of the entire worldview of renormalization by unity of knowledge of oneness.
Economic devastation, enormous increase in unemployment, long-term disability to recover from global economic slump in production, trade, national growth and development plans especially in developing countries, and above all the cessation of sustainability in social policy and public plans on expansion and investment have all joined together as multidimensional system cells of death and decadence. Such dissociation, as if of cells, needs to be remedied by treatment and reversed by the discovery and application of normalization. The result is one of unifying the good and realizing unity of the good effects into a coherent effectiveness of normalization via treatment and recovery.
Reversing cellular/coronavirus mutation into normalcy of unity of healthy cells This is the primal religious message that applies to the curative design of renormalization out of cellular multidimensional chaos. The curative contrariness reflects unity of knowledge of the renormalized cells. Thereby comes about the cessation of pandemic chaos and the realization of curative role of religion and faith.
Figure. Isolating cellular (viral) mutation of COVID-19 by treatment to restore normalcy of cells
