Saturday, April 11, 2020

FAITH GROUPS AS SUPER SPREADER OF CORONA- 19 PANDEMIC

SOURCE:
( A )  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-coronavirus-tablighi-jamaat-delhi/2020/04/02/abdc5af0-7386-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html

 ( B ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qVPGrkI_M&t=54s

 ( B )  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52061915

 ( C )  https://theprint.in/opinion/tablighi-jamaat-congregation-and-how-religion-has-been-the-super-spreader-of-coronavirus/392531/

  ( D ) https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/coronavirus-infections-linked-religious-gatherings-debate-rages-over-worship-amid

 ( E ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablighi_Jamaat
( F )   https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/tablighi-jamaat-event-india-worst-coronavirus-vector-200407052957511.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skPS8qomNbY&pbjreload=10




FAITH GROUPS AS SUPER SPREADER 
                                   OF  
               CORONA- 19  PANDEMIC




                                              TABLIGHI JAMAT


                              PART ONE OF       PARTS


                            [ [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qVPGrkI_M&t=54s  ]









Tablighi Jamaat is a Sunni jamaat. Basically an offshoot of Deoband, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Khandhelwi in 1926 founded it to prevent newly converted Muslims from slipping back into Hinduism Dir to the influence of the Shuddhi movement. Even the murder of Swami Shraddhanand by Abdul Rashid is ascribed to TJ. Puritanical and fundamentalist, it is an evangelical organisation that focuses on weaning Muslims away from practices that it considers non-Islamic. It does not believe in following any particular fiqh even though it originated in Hanafi branch of Indian Islam.
Lately, it’s activities have laid a fertile ground which makes it easy for jihadi organisations to recruit its members, even though it abjures politics and violence. It has two major factions, headquartered in Raiwind, Pakistan near Lahore, and in Nizamuddin, Delhi. Both the factions have generated controversy for becoming super-spreaders of Corona Virus. Pakistan TJ has done it globally, while the India TJ has done it across India. Sanjay Dixit takes a look in his usual deep probing style.





India confronts its first coronavirus ‘super-spreader’ — a Muslim missionary group with more than 400 members infected

( https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-coronavirus-tablighi-jamaat-delhi/2020/04/02/abdc5af0-7386-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html  )

                                                                       By 

    Joanna Slater,  Niha Masih     & Shams Irfan 
People who took part in a Tablighi Jamaat gathering in March wait to board buses to a quarantine facility amid concerns of infection in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Biplov Bhuyan/Hindustan Times/Getty Imag 





Joanna Slater
April 2, 2020 









The devotees came by the thousands from all corners of India and beyond, converging on a large white complex in a crowded quarter of Delhi to share a message of piety.
When they left in the first weeks of March, they unknowingly carried the coronavirus with them.









Gatherings last month at the headquarters of a prominent Muslim missionary group are emerging as India’s first “super-spreader” event, complicating efforts to control rising infections in this nation of 1.3 billion people.
More than 400 confirmed cases and at least 10 deaths across the country — stretching from Tamil Nadu in the south to Kashmir in the north — have been linked to people who attended events at the Tablighi Jamaat center near a historic shrine in India’s capital.
The infections, which represent about a fifth of India’s total cases, have sparked a frantic effort to track down anyone who attended the recent meetings. In at least two states, potential contacts are being traced using mobile-phone location data.
  [  https://www.youtube.com/watchv=OVp2U2p4lmE&list=TLPQMTEwNDIwMjDSLsF8Z4dmTw&index=3  ]


The outbreak also has provoked a spasm of Islamophobia in India, a Hindu-majority nation that is home to 200 million Muslims. In February, the country witnessed its deadliest sectarian clashes in years after the government’s pursuit of a controversial citizenship law sparked violence.

As the pandemic continues, people practicing their faith have become unwitting but powerful vectors in the spread of the virus. A cultlike church helped fuel the pandemic in South Korea. A synagogue north of New York City was at the center of an early outbreak. An evangelical congregation in France was the source of hundreds of infections.

India banned all religious gatherings when it instituted a three-week nationwide lockdown March 25. But several states and cities already had implemented their own restrictions: Delhi, for instance, prohibited all assemblies of more than 50 people March 16.
The activities of Tablighi Jamaat have emerged as a particularly potent vehicle for transmitting the virus. Founded in India nearly a century ago, the group has as many as 80 million adherents worldwide. It is built around small bands of itinerant missionaries who urge fellow Muslims to deepen their observance and model their lives directly on the ways of the prophet Muhammad.
The group eschews politics and in theory operates without formal record-keeping, said Barbara Metcalf, a prominent historian of South Asian Islam. It stresses proselytizing and travel, producing a “state of vulnerability and uncertainty in which one learns to be dependent on God,” Metcalf wrote.
The Tablighi Jamaat cases in India may be linked to another religious gathering held by the same group in Malaysia. At the end of February, 16,000 people from numerous countries attended a multiday Tablighi Jamaat event at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur. That gathering was the source of hundreds of coronavirus cases in Malaysia and dozens more in Brunei, Cambodia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Cases have also emerged at a Tablighi center in Pakistan.
By early March, missionaries from several Southeast Asian countries were in India. Nearly all of them passed through the bustling complex in Delhi’s storied Nizamuddin district and then traveled on to different parts of India. Several of them later died, including a Filipino man and six Indonesians. One Indian who went home to Kashmir after participating in a three-day event at the Delhi center also died.
Missionaries and devotees continued to arrive at the center even after Delhi authorities banned large gatherings. Then India suspended all passenger trains March 22, followed swiftly by the countrywide lockdown. 
About 2,300 people were stuck at the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters, unable to leave or travel. Yet the authorities took no action to remove them until this week, when all of those at the center were shifted to quarantine facilities or hospitals.
“Everybody now wishes that [activities] had been discontinued earlier,” said Fuzail Ayyubi, a lawyer representing the Delhi center, adding that the group had communicated its situation to the authorities and cooperated with the police.
“This is not the right time to blame us or the government,” Ayyubi said. “Everybody is stuck in a situation mankind hasn’t seen before.”
Local authorities across India are racing to contain the outbreak, sometimes using methods that appear to be without precedent here. In Kashmir, a restive Muslim-majority region, the government compiled a list of more than 800 residents who were present earlier in March in Delhi, including in the neighborhood where the Tablighi Jamaat center is located.
The list was assembled with the help of telecom companies after an analysis of data from cellphone towers, call records and travel itineraries, said a senior police official in Srinagar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.
Three other officials and doctors in Kashmir confirmed they had received instructions to check on the health of the individuals mentioned on the list. The Washington Post reviewed a copy and contacted 10 people listed. All confirmed they had recently been either near the Tablighi Jamaat center or in another Delhi neighborhood frequented by Kashmiris.
Kashmir has been subject to a broader crackdown since last August, when India stripped the territory of its autonomy and statehood. Rohit Kansal, the top bureaucrat in Jammu and Kashmir, did not confirm or deny that the region was using cellphone data in its effort to trace contacts. The territory is “following a proactive and aggressive policy of test and trace,” he said.
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, authorities say that about 1,100 residents traveled to the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in March. Many of those have come forward, and the state is using a “multitude of methodologies,” including “clustering of cellphone data,” to trace people, said Beela Rajesh, the state’s health secretary.
The Indian government has expansive authority to require mobile-phone operators to share data. While the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a right to privacy in 2017, its legal contours remain unclear.
Indian officials are increasingly looking to cellphone data to help enforce measures to control the pandemic. Arvind Kejriwal, the top elected official in the state of Delhi, announced Wednesday that the local government would temporarily use cellphone data to determine if more than 20,000 people were violating orders to quarantine themselves at home.
Some Indian Muslims worry that the infections linked to the missionary group will intensify anti-Muslim rhetoric. The cases can be used as “a convenient excuse for some to vilify Muslims everywhere,” wrote Omar Abdullah, a senior politician in Kashmir. One prime-time anchor referred to the coronavirus cases as “a murderous attack in the name of faith,” and “CoronaJihad” trended on social media.
The first-known Indian victim of the outbreak at the Tablighi center was Mohammad Ashraf Anim, a 65-year-old Kashmiri businessman. He had traveled to Delhi to take part in a special three-day quarterly event for devotees, said a person familiar with his plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Anim returned home to Kashmir and attended prayers at a mosque the following Friday. A few days later, he developed coronavirus-related symptoms. He died March 26.Irfan reported from Srinagar.
Home to nearly 2 billion people, South Asia could be the next coronavirus hot spot
                                                                                                                                                                  ================================

                 PART TWO  OF       PARTS
                                     

                                        TABLIGHI JAMAT

 [  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTvhVfWd8Us&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR3P-59alcjT3UGHI0pQ5sa9CS6qg4uUsO6thadTAoMa07lKIENNORjaig8 ]




#TablighiJamat #CoronaVirus Starting from 'Musalmanon, Musalman bano', the Tablighi Jamat has come a long way. It is now an international organisation of multi-million followers with 3 major centres in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. It is a revivalist movement that harks back to the time of the Prophet Mohammad. One needs to understand the sanitary attitudes of the Jamaat in that context. It is closer to a cult under the absolute command of a Supreme Leader called Amir.


                    TABLIGHI JAMAT

                        [  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCEi-WFyyfo ]





FAITH GROUPS AS SUPER SPREADER 
                                   OF  
               CORONA- 19  PANDEMIC                                                   by                                                             Saba Naqvi
                         Senior Journalist.




It is clear that religious congregations can spread the Covid-19. But in India, beyond the infection, the consequences of the Tablighi outbreak have been dreadful for the world’s third largest Muslim population, most of whom are employed in the unorganised sector, as all workers are. At a time when people are scared of the unknown, many have settled for hating the known enemy even more than before.


Worrying: Tablighi outbreak has been dreadful for the Muslims reeling under the lockdown.


In his bestselling book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari argues that Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fiction. He says that we are the only living creatures that can invent fictional stories and then convince millions to believe in them. So, when a thousand people believe a made-up story, we call it fake news, but when “a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s religion.” He also notes that religion can provide solace to millions, as it indeed does, and observes that people may be upset with his equating of religion with fake news.
Founded in 1927 in Mewat, India, the Tablighi Jamaat is one of the most powerful religious reform movements in the 20th century Sunni Islam, with millions of followers across the world. Briefly, the Tablighis find it necessary to travel across the world, and upon arrival within the boundaries of nations, travel some more, to spread their word that what they think is the last word on Islam. Travelling and congregating in order to urge the believers to follow a ‘pure’ form of the faith is what they do.
Now that it is established that the gathering of thousands at their Delhi headquarters in March has turned out to be the biggest ‘super-spreader’ of coronavirus in India, it is worth noting that individuals who take it upon themselves to tell people how to live their lives are so woefully unmindful of science, modernity or even common courtesy. Media reports say that the head of the Tablighi Jamaat, Maulana Saad, told the faithful that there was no need for social distancing or following the advice of doctors as that was only an excuse to divide the power of the congregation. Not very different from some Pentecostal Christian preachers in the US telling their congregations that the virus is a hoax and only belief in God can save them.

But where the Tablighis really broke the coronavirus bank is that they insisted on gathering people with a history of foreign travel at their headquarters in Delhi, besides spreading the disease in Malaysia and Pakistan.

Like many puritanical religious groups in the world, they believe they know better and are special people, while most human beings (including many Muslims) live in ignorance and follow false beliefs. The Tablighis have a distinct dress and beard as they believe it is how things were in the lifetime of the Prophet. It’s a bit of a mystery how anyone knows what the length of the trouser or pyjama was or if the beard was grown while the upper lip shaved thousands of years ago, but that is the dress code of Tablighis, as apparently the Prophet said that clothes must not drag on the floor. It’s a small quibble as world religions speak of immaculate conceptions and unscientific miracles and fantastic improbable things.

The good aspect of the Tablighis is that they preach ‘inner purity’ and a simple life (lavish weddings are frowned upon). Women, entirely in purdah, can participate and work alongside men related to them to spread the word. But it is mostly a male brotherhood, as is the case with organised Islam across the world.

The Tablighis are detached from politics and, in that, they are distinct from schools of political Islam that advocate violent means to overthrow regimes and establish Islamic rule. They are not interested in converting people, but in showing Muslims how to be, well, ‘good Muslims’.

In the spectrum of the subcontinental Islam, the Tablighis stand at the opposite end of the pole to the Sufis. Among the most significant of the Sufis was Delhi’s Nizamuddin Auliya, the 13th-to-14th century saint, in whose dwellings, new forms of music, poetry and language were birthed. For those who know the fine print, it is a double misfortune that the Tablighis are now associated with the hashtag #Nizamuddin. This is because their headquarters, the Markaz, happens to be located in the Delhi neighbourhood named after that great Sufi of the Chishti order.


And in this outrage at the Tablighis being the super-spreaders of the coronavirus, let us not forget that it was the Sufis who were the super-spreaders of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. They accommodated many local traditions and were not puritans by any stretch of the imagination, but individuals who explored love, devotion and equality even as they revelled in the colour, sights and sounds of the festivals. Part of the Tablighi endeavour is to ‘cleanse’ Islam from precisely these practices that remain popular in Sufi shrines and, indeed, Indian culture. No qawallis for the Tablighis, no pluralism or syncretic traditions for them, no composite culture. This is also the time to remember that many hymns attributed to Baba Farid, a Sufi of the Chishti order, are incorporated in the Guru Granth Sahib. It was said that Guru Nanak met Baba Farid on two occasions.

In the age of coronavirus, it is clear that faith groups and religious congregations spread the infection. But in India, beyond the infection, the consequences of the Tablighi outbreak have been dreadful for the world’s third largest Muslim population, most of whom are employed in the unorganised sector and reeling under the lockdown, as all workers are. At a time when people are scared of the unknown, many have settled for hating the known enemy even more than before. The regular television appearance of obdurate mullahs does not help.

 Anyone with a Muslim name is now being attacked on social media, many TV anchors are stoking all the subliminal prejudices and some people are advocating a boycott of Muslim-owned businesses. Reports of attacks on Muslims are coming in along with a disturbing story in a newspaper of a hospital refusing to deliver the child of Muslim parents. Communalism, coronavirus and fear make a lethal combination. The hatred is worse than it’s ever been and we do have well-oiled supply lines to keep pumping up the communal poison. 

Can we please choke those lines?










 











What Tarek Fatah Said On Tablighi Jamaat Controversy


                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raKZMNYK0Sc




   































































































































                        
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