Between Tyranny and Anarchy: Islam, COVID-19, and Public Policy

Abstract

Research on the causes for vaccine resistance among Nigerian Muslims reveals what the philosopher Žižek terms a “heaven in disorder:” lack of trust in public institutions, conspiracy theories, ignorance of basic science, individual apathy, and faith in “Allah as the only protector.” Other social contexts demonstrate far greater compliance. How can governments improve outcomes in vaccine resistant communities amidst such complexity, especially in instances where theology provides a right to dissent? Alongside a right to dissent, “obedience to authority” for the sake of social and political harmony is also an important principle of Islamic thought. It has the ability to enhance widespread compliance to public health guidelines by obligating the setting aside of private convictions in favor of collective cooperation. Religious literacy is an important element for responding effectively to pandemics, and by extension, other global emergencies. While policymakers must tailor their outreach to incommensurable worldviews in society, the human family must also imagine effective political models for cooperation despite divergence in worldviews. Otherwise, societies may need to choose between tyranny and anarchy. This article adds to efforts already underway which aim to demonstrate that engagement with religious norms, rather than their dismissal, represents the most promising path towards tackling vaccine resistance, especially in communities in which religious authority significantly informs social practice.

1. Introduction

Research on COVID-19 in Nigeria reveals a wide array of reasons for the country’s notorious vaccine resistance (Da’wah Institute 2023). Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria became the last country on the continent to become polio-free because of its skepticism of global health regulations (JICA 2020). As such, Nigeria is an excellent site for a case study on the causes and potential remedies for COVID-19 vaccine resistance. This paper classifies twenty-one distinct claims presented in a significant recent study under two broader causes for vaccine resistance: (1) lack of trust in public intuitions and (2) complete trust in God. It then looks at these two categories analytically, as launch points for integrating awareness of religious belief and expression into efforts to promote compliance with government health initiatives responsive to crises like pandemics.

The problem of compliance with good public health guidelines is not something theologically specific to the religion of Islam. To be sure, in contrast to the diverse religious landscape of Nigeria covered in the aforementioned study, many Muslim-majority countries or social groups with established or legitimate authority figures have by and large enjoyed widespread compliance with public health guidelines, “obedience to authority” being a generally accepted principle of Islamic political theology. A “right to dissent,” the placing of complete “trust in God,” the “acceptance of science,” and “obedience to authority” are each, in their own right, theologically well-grounded in scripture and tradition. The Quran, for example, commands believers to “obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” (Nasr 2015, 4:13). It is also well known that the natural sciences flourished in medieval Islamic societies (Al-Khalili 2011). The Quran commands believers to “reflect upon the creation of the heavens and the earth,” and it considers every aspect of the natural world an āyah, “a sign of God” (Nasr 2015, 3:191). The prophet Muhammad is also reported to have said that God “has appointed a cure for every disease” (Al-Tabrīzī n.d., 4538). Theology thus invites reflection on, if not the systematic study of, the natural world.

The independent spirit of inquiry that science fosters is not altogether absent in other domains of intellectual life, including politics. Islamic thought and practice, thus, developed a robust tradition of both defending political authority to preserve order and a right to dissent from authority in order, in turn, to uphold the independence of human conscience and agency. This tradition is grounded as much on reason as it is on revelation, identified in part by the imperative to “command what is right” and “forbid what is wrong” (Cook 2001). Above all, every aspect of our lives as Muslims lies under the sovereignty of God. God created us, just as he created the virus. Only God can give life and take life. Accepting God’s decree and God’s power over all things is part of faith. “No misfortune befalls the earth nor yourselves,” proclaims the Quran, “save that it is in a Book before We bring it forth—truly that is easy for God—that you not despair over what has passed you by, nor exult in that which He has given unto you. And God loves not any vainglorious boaster” (Nasr 2015, 57:22–23).

It is evident that the four “ideal-type” approaches do not exist in isolation. “Obe-dience to authority,” “acceptance of science,” “right to dissent,” and “trust in God” interact with each other in unpredictable and subtle ways. The primary mode of justification for each is rooted in a unique set of arguments that has theological validity in normative Islam. At the same time, the nonlinear overlap between them results in human behavior that is not easy to regulate in public policy. Attitudes toward mask-wearing, social distancing, fulfilling communal rites, and vaccines vary widely, and this variation, when blended with new technologies in evolving global cultures, has generated fresh perspectives on faith and practice in the midst of COVID-19. (Taragin-Zeller and Kessler 2021).

Differences of opinion among believers within Islam—believers who sincerely desire faithful submission to God in reference to the very same scripture delivered to them by the very same prophet—are not uniquely a Muslim problem. It is the human condition writ large, a fact that is painfully on display in the global response to the pandemic at several sites. Even societies that claim to rely on science alone for determining their public health policies have not agreed on what to do. Whereas China insisted on a “zero-Covid” policy, Sweden opted to remain fully open (Bergman and Lindström 2023). Meanwhile, the different U.S. municipalities and states adopted diametrically opposed policies, depending on whether they were “red states” or “blue states” (Mitropoulos 2022).

Societies comprised of Muslims practicing Islam, just like societies in which science is utilized to make sense of the world, manifest internal differences for similar reasons. People, even when they inhabit the same intellectual tradition, privilege different modes of reasoning and have different conceptions of how the world works. At times, people with similar modes of reasoning in two different traditions will be more likely to get along with each other than people who think differently while following the very same tradition (Quraishi-Landes 2006). People arrange facts within narratives, and the narratives, what some call worldviews, are the primary lenses that drive the interpretive process (Gottschall 2012; DeWitt 2018). In the second book of his bestselling trilogy, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that humans are able to engage pandemics today in ways that break completely from the past, allowing us to set “new human agendas” unfettered by existential concerns (Harari 2017). Whereas our inability to adequately cooperate to meet climate goals has already demonstrated the difficulty of setting shared human agendas, COVID-19 has demonstrated its near impossibility. The philosopher Žižek describes this reality of competing agendas as a “heaven in disorder” (Žižek 2021). He remains pessimistic about our future, absent a revolutionary political solution. Bracketing Žižek’s proposed solution for a “wartime communism” to save humanity from itself, his fundamental insight may be on the mark: we should look not to unify the heavens, but rather, we should attempt to unify our politics.

Islamic political theology provides a framework for obeying authority while recognizing the right for individuals to hold dissenting views, offering valuable theological resources for effective public policy. Research into humanitarian ways of dealing with public health crises recognizes the characteristic “secular” nature of such well-intended responses, often reluctant to engage “messy” religious and cultural dynamics (Wilkinson 2020). This paper adds to the growing body of evidence arguing in favor of engagement with religion in order to better tackle global problems.

2. Survey Data

The Nigerian study helps to illuminate the impact of trust deficit in Muslim society and culture, a decidedly different explanation for vaccine resistance than one that is di-rectly theological, or, indeed, essential about Islam. Research conducted by the Da’wah Academy captures twenty-one distinct “claims” for vaccine resistance with the help of 3127 survey responses and 4749 interviews. (Da’wah Institute 2023). The research targets primarily Muslim faith leaders and members of faith-based institutions across over seventy organizations. The study, which provides “Islamic responses to vaccine hesitancy”, systematically addresses each claim on its own terms by drawing on science, scripture, and plain fact-checking to counter misinformation. The study then categorizes the various claims under six thematic areas: conspiracy theory, ignorance of basic biology, concerns about the effectiveness of the vaccine, trust-related issues, concerns about side effects, and “miscellaneous”. This paper further abstracts these six thematic areas under the two headings of “trust in God” versus “trust deficit”. Pandering in misinformation and conspiracy theories is merely a manifestation of the “trust deficit”. Whereas “trust in God” comes straight from theology, a “trust deficit” is grounded in a lack of trust in public institutions. The trust deficit, nevertheless, enables a “right to dissent,” which is not just a right but, under proper conditions, an obligation. In other words, there are valid religious reasons for vaccine resistance (

Table 1. Reasons for vaccine resistance in Nigeria.

No.	Claim	Cause
1.	It doesn’t concern me	Trust deficit
2.	Vaccine ingredients are haram	Trust deficit
3.	Vaccine causes COVID	Trust deficit
4.	Vaccine can lead to infertility	Trust deficit
5.	Vaccine can worsen health	Trust deficit
6.	Even medical practitioners don’t take it	Trust deficit
7.	COVID affects only society’s elite and wealthy	Trust deficit
8.	Vaccine is unsafe, even according to medical practitioners	Trust deficit
9.	Vaccine is nefarious means for population control	Trust deficit
10.	Vaccine is means to perform unknown tests	Trust deficit
11.	Vaccine only necessary if one has COVID	Trust deficit
12.	COVID is a conspiracy	Trust deficit
13.	Nigeria is unable to technically manage vaccines	Trust deficit
14.	Vaccine harms pregnant women and nursing mothers	Trust deficit
15.	COVID heals naturally; vaccines are unnecessary	Trust deficit
16.	Muslims do not fear death	Trust in God
17.	Vaccine can kill me	Trust deficit
18.	Allah is the only protector	Trust in God
19.	Vaccine has harmful side effects	Trust deficit
20.	Vaccine is not effective	Trust deficit
21.	Vaccine/manufacturers cannot be trusted	Trust deficit

).

On the other hand, there are equally strong theological arguments in favor of vaccines and compliance with public health guidelines, particularly arguments which invoke “obedience to authority” and “acceptance of science.” However, whereas “trust in science” by itself is a motive that can be channeled in order to break through the barrier of misinformation or the deadlock of theology vs. theology, “obedience to authority,” whose ground is in Islamic political theology, has the potential to be sought as reference in order to overcome private differences of belief for the sake of public welfare and social cohesion. The following table lists each of the twenty-one reported claims alongside its cause (Da’wah Institute 2023).

One of the virtues of this study is its ability to distinguish “this-worldly” secular claims from “other-worldly” theological warrants for vaccine resistance. Looking at the breakdown between “claim” and “cause” in the table reveals, perhaps counterintuitively, just how much more influential social, cultural, “this-worldly” explanations for resisting public health efforts have been. Trust deficit in public institutions dominates the causes for vaccine resistance, and by extension, largely explains the lack of compliance with public health guidelines more broadly. Trust is implicated even in cases where the cause for vaccine resistance appears to be misinformation, such as: “COVID-19 does not exist. It is all a conspiracy theory.” In some cases, there may be a legitimate difference of opinion, such as believing that the vaccine has harmful side-effects. Though this may be the view of a small minority, most subscribe to a collectivist conviction according to which the statistical advantage of adopting an approach which favors public health outweighs the risks individuals might incur. Not so believing usually indicates a trust deficit.

That there would be a lack of consensus within a society as to the degree to which public health policies proposed by the government ought to be embraced is not so strange. Elsewhere, COVID-19 has brought to the surface deep challenges for public policy where cooperation is needed on a global scale. While in the US leaders in red states are arguing for different policies that those in blue states, Sweden is offering entirely different prescriptions from its neighboring countries. All the while, scientists revise their guidelines in real time, adding to the perception that the challenges for a shared agenda are practically insurmountable.

3. Religion and Public Policy

In March 2020, a group of students from the University of Notre Dame in the American Midwest traveled to Muscat, Oman, for spring break. There, they met students who were studying at Notre Dame University, Bangladesh. The two student bodies from Notre Dame on opposite sides of the world were established by the Congregation of Holy Cross, “educators in the faith.” (Congregation of Holy Cross n.d.). The cross-cultural encounter between mostly Catholics from the United States and Muslims from Bangladesh—which we playfully called “Holy Crossroads”—took place during the week that COVID-19 resulted in widespread global shutdowns.

Midweek, the American students received a message from the University administration instructing them not to return to campus after the trip. As student anxieties surged, Muscat went into near total lockdown on the morning of return: All schools were closed; daily congregational prayer in the mosques was suspended; entry of foreign nationals was banned; and Souq Muttrah, a daily thoroughfare, was shuttered. Just two months later, the University of Notre Dame, distinctive among nationally ranked research universities in the United States because of its faith-based mission, became the first institution of its kind to announce that it would reopen for in-person classes that fall. University president Rev. John Jenkins, CSC, explained the rationale in a New York Times Op-Ed titled “We’re Reopening Notre Dame: It’s Worth the Risk” (Jenkins 2020).

Three principles guided his decision: ensuring the physical health and wellbeing of the community; educating the whole person, which requires in-person learning inside and outside the classroom; and advancing high-quality research. Would remote or in-person learning be better for flourishing within learning environments? What risks should be given the greatest consideration in a global pandemic? “No science, simply as science, can answer that question”, argued Rev. Jenkins. “It is a moral question in which principles to which we are committed are in tension”. The global response to the pandemic unearthed the human side of scientific problems. Why do some people believe in the efficacy of masking, and others disparage it? Why did Sweden follow a completely different public policy strategy from its European neighbors, despite following the same science? “There are”, says Rev. Jenkins, “questions that a scientist, speaking strictly as a scientist, cannot answer for us”. The University opened that fall with mandated masking and social distancing, and it mandated vaccines once they became available to near-total compliance.

Meanwhile, in Oman, the population by-and-large also complied with public health guidelines. Even the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, an obligation for every adult Muslim of means at least once in their lifetime, was canceled for all nonresidents (Blakemore 2020). Dissent, however, was not entirely absent, and it was even widespread in some parts of the world (Maire 2020; Piwko 2021). One case study in Bangladesh shows, unsurprisingly, that religion cut both ways, both helping and hurting to promote key public health initiatives which arose during the crisis (Roy 2022). On the one hand, extremist faith leaders used the pandemic to scapegoat others. On the other hand, many faith leaders engaged in social development projects. UNICEF estimates that “currently about 500,000 Imams and religious leaders are disseminating information about COVID-19 in Bangladesh on topics ranging from hygiene and infection prevention, social distancing, and how to benefit from the Holy Quran when in lockdown at home” (ibid, p. 3).

In both compliance and resistance, Muslim scholars have attempted to abide by the sharia, whether advancing the goals of political authorities—even if they have had to postpone or altogether miss out on the lifelong dream to attend the sacred precincts of Mecca and Medina—or thwarting them. The sharia, imperfectly translated as “Islamic law,” has a moral component vis-à-vis one’s obligations to God as well as a political component, which involves policymaking for the common good. Governance requires practical wisdom, the weighing of priorities, and the privileging of certain obligations over others when imperatives clash, especially in emergency circumstances. Scholars reasoning with the “objectives of Islamic law” (maqāṣid al-sharī‘a) offer a three-tier ranking system of priorities: necessities (ḍarūriyyāt), needs (ḥājiyyāt), and embellishments or adornments (taḥsīniyyat) (Abd-Allah 2007). To better understand this three-tier ranking, take the home as an example. Having some kind of home (shelter) is a necessity. Having basic amenities in the home, such as windows for natural light and fresh air and furniture for daily living, are needs. Leather couches and velvet curtains, on the other hand, are embellishments: Nice to have, but one doesn’t invest in drapes if one doesn’t have a home with windows, to begin with.

There are five overarching objectives of Islamic law: the preservation of life, intellect, religion, wealth, and family (sometimes referred to as lineage or dignity). Life takes precedence over everything else. Things that are otherwise forbidden become temporarily lawful in emergency circumstances in order to preserve life. A starving person, for example, is permitted to eat pork or carrion in order to survive, provided that they consume only what is minimally necessary for survival and immediately desist when lawful alternatives become once again available. Consistent with this pattern of reasoning, public policies that temporarily suspend obligatory rituals in order to preserve life—such as the congregational prayer, funeral rites, or the annual pilgrimage—are immediately comprehensible and justifiable within a sharia framework.

Muslim-majority countries classified as repressive, whether secular or religious according to Daniel Philpott’s typology, can therefore expect compliance around COVID-19 policies not simply because they are authoritarian (Philpott 2019). They can also expect compliance because the decision to lockdown is religiously intelligible as a means of advancing public welfare and the objectives of Islamic law. Even dissenters, who personally may not trust scientists or the government, are obliged to comply with public health regulations as a religious obligation. That is because individual judgment does not supersede the rule of law, so long as the law is not obligating outright sin. If one considers—for whatever reason—that the vaccine is a danger to one’s life and health, then one has the moral right to disobey political authority for the sake of preserving one’s life and wellbeing, thus incurring no sin, but one will nonetheless suffer the legal consequences that follow in society. In cases where lockdowns harm more than they benefit, rulers and citizens may come up with different conclusions on the best course of action. The interplay between obeying authority, following science, prudence in policy and enforcement, and the right to dissent thus results in a complex faith-based posture that is both reasonable and in line with the sharia.

4. Obedience to Authority

One of the titles of an Islamic leader is amīr al-mu’minīn, or “commander of the faithful”. The word amīr, “commander”, is indicative of a leader’s authority. “O you who believe”, instructs the Quran: “Obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. And if you differ among yourselves concerning any matter, refer it to God and the Messenger” (Nasr 2015, 4:59). This verse contains layers of meaning for Muslim communal life and political thought. The sensibilities that it generates are directly relevant to understanding Islamic responses to the pandemic.

The “authority verse”, as we might call it, would have been unambiguous within the lifetime of Muhammad. Since the prophet speaks in the name of God, obedience to him is obedience to God. Obedience to anyone who the prophet appoints as a leader, by implication, follows the same logic. Several questions arise on a plain sense reading of the verse in this manner for later generations: What if the leader were to issue an immoral command or order something that obviously stands against a known ruling of God and His messenger? Who are legitimate leaders after the prophet dies? Can leaders have legitimacy if they have not been directly appointed by the prophet? Can usurpers who seize political power ever be considered legitimate? These are the kinds of questions that have occupied the scholarly tradition through the ages.

Because of the eventual fragmentation of Muslims into many legal and theological sects after the passing of the prophet Muhammad, it is impossible to speak of “the” Islamic position on most issues. One can nonetheless attempt to identify general principles that most would consider representative. Among these principles is a reluctance to rebel against established rulers, even if the rulers are personally immoral, so long as they do not openly command other believers to disobey the sharia. In cases where a ruler prefers a moral opinion different from one that is held by a believer, the believer must comply in the public realm, so long as the believer does not consider the ruler’s position a sin. A believer may openly disagree with the ruler but, nonetheless, be required to legally comply with rulings intended for public welfare.

After a meticulous study of the scholarly tradition on “Commanding Right, Forbidding Wrong” in Islamic thought, Michael Cook distills: “[W]ith regard to forbidding wrong in the face of the delinquency of the ruler, there is a clear mainstream position: rebuke is endorsed, but rebellion is rejected” (Cook 2001, p. 479). As The Study Quran summarizes:

Some commentators cite a ḥadīth that indicates that one will be rewarded for obeying those in authority, regardless of the virtue of their character and rule…The general statement this verse makes about obedience to authority has led some Muslims to view obedience, even to unjust rulers, as preferable to the chaos and social harm that may result from a revolt, and a well-known tradition states, “One day of anarchy is worse than a thousand years of tyranny”.

(Nasr 2015, p. 219)

The right to dissent is built into the pledge of allegiance that believers offered the prophet: “We gave our pledge to the Messenger of Allah [may the peace and blessings of God be upon him], pledging to listen and obey in times of hardship and times of ease, willingly or reluctantly, and when others are shown preference over us, and that we would not dispute the order of those in charge, that we would speak the truth wherever we are, and that we would not fear the blame of anyone when acting or speaking for the sake of Allah” (Ibn Mājah n.d.a, 2866).

Islamic political thought would eventually extend legitimacy to any ruler who accepted the mandate to govern within the limits of the sharia, so long as the ruler ceded interpretive authority of the law to put the collective body of scholars. This arrangement placed ultimate authority to make the law in the hands of jurists, who remained, in principle, independent agents in civil society. It also provided a high degree of flexibility within Islamic law by enabling state appointed-judges to adjudicate legal matters while remaining mindful of local customs. One legal maxim states: “custom binds” (al-‘āda al-muḥakkamah) (Abd-Allah 2007).

Muslims living as permanent minorities have recently begun to translate the principle of obeying authority as law-abiding citizens by developing a “jurisprudence of minorities” (Shavit 2016). The approach bears striking resemblance to the Jewish principle of dina de-malkhuta dina, “the halakhic rule that the law of the country is binding, and, in certain cases, is to be preferred to Jewish law” (Encyclopaedia Judaica 2008). The Shi‘ah, having endured minority status through most of Islamic history, permit what is known as taqiyyah—typically translated as “dissimulation”—when they are in danger of persecution (Stewart 2012). Taqiyyah, etymologically related to the term for “protection”, permits Shi‘ahs to conceal their true faith identity in order to ward off unnecessary attention and possible harassment, or worse. Far from being a license to lie or deceive in order to gain an advantage—a highly negative stance, as some critics have wrongly argued—taqiyyah is based on two positive motivations: the protection of oneself and the preservation of public order.

Normative Islamic thinking in the jurisprudence of minorities is far from uniform. Uriya Shavit outlines two broad trends: a salafī approach that hems closer to the plain sense of scripture in line with the relatively conservative approach of scholars from Saudi Arabia, and a wasaṭī approach inflected by the more rational principles of interpretation (uṣūl al-fiqh) of scholars from al-Azhar. The wasaṭīs “broadly apply maṣlaḥah (safeguarding primary objectives of the sharī‘a) and cross-searching within and beyond the four schools of law”, justifying “radical accommodations of religious laws” in new contexts (ibid, p. 3).

In one case study on the banning of the ḥijāb (headscarf) in French public schools, the wasaṭī approach revealed the extent to which Muslim scholars are willing to compromise in order to facilitate peaceful coexistence:

Sheikh al-Azhar Muḥammad Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī distinguished between the case of ḥijābs in Muslim lands and outside them. He declared that the French have the right to ban ḥijābs in their country and that it is permissible for Muslim women who live in France to respect such a law if compelled to do so.

(ibid, p. 243)

Part of the reasoning for such accommodationist thinking, as Andrew March points out, is the acceptance of citizenship as a kind of “social contract,” obligating individuals to participate in society under the implicit terms of that contract (March 2009) Hamza Yusuf, president of Zaytuna College, America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college, exemplifies the approach of this kind of traditional Islam in the College’s COVID-19 policy announced at the start of the pandemic. Yusuf’s letter announcing the move to remote learning draws on the framework of the higher objectives of Islamic law and obedience to authority. “Our sacred law,” writes Yusuf,

holds preservation of life among the highest of divine objectives. During the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, the Bay Area was spared much of the harm that afflicted other parts of the country, largely due to the precautionary measures taken. Erring on the side of caution in our current pandemic seems prudent until we better understand what we are up against. Following the advice of local authorities regarding coronavirus, we have moved all Zaytuna College classes online.

(Yusuf 2020)

Among other things, such testimony underscores the degree to which public policy and religious authority are understood to be compatible. Not only is there nothing “essential” about Islam by way of authoritative resistance to the prevailing public health wisdom of the state, but ideally, as in the case Yusuf comments on, local authorities enjoy the backing of Muslim leaders.

Yusuf presents an excellent example because his letter accepts the authority of science and the mandate of local rulers, especially since both are aligned with Islam’s higher objectives. In 2014, Yusuf participated in a conference on Vaccinations and Religion in Senegal (Vaccinations and Religion 2014). The chair of the scholars committee was Yusuf’s Mauritanian mentor, Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, who reminded the conference attendees of “the Muslim community’s leadership in disease prevention throughout history and the critical importance of being on the cutting edge of research and development moving forward”.

5. Acceptance of Science

As medieval science evolved into modern science, with one manner of assessing and legitimizing knowledge eventually giving way to another, both epistemologies never stopped sharing a common foundation, namely, a commitment to a systematic inquiry into the natural world. The Quran refers to nature as an āyah or “sign” of God. Muslims across the board revere nature as God’s creation and respect its systematic study. The aforementioned Vaccinations and Religion conference report includes the “Dakar Declaration on Vaccination”, which emphatically affirms trust in science: “Vaccination remains to date the most effective method of protection against a variety of mankind’s illnesses and epidemics, and safeguards the wellbeing of the body, which is God’s gift to us”. The source of knowledge for the efficacy of vaccines is not scripture; it is empirical evidence and experience. A well-known hadith implies that knowledge of nature and its workings are accessible independently of revelation:

The Messenger of Allah [may the peace and blessings of God be upon him] passed by some people who were at the top of the palm trees. He said: “What are these people doing?” They said: “They are pollinating (the trees), putting the male with the female”. He said: “I do not think this can help in any way”. They were told about that and they stopped doing it. News of that reached the Messenger of Allah [may the peace and blessings of God be upon him] and he said: “If it will benefit them, then let them do it. It was only a passing thought. Do not blame me for a mere thought, but if I tell you anything about Allah (may He be glorified and exalted) then accept it from me, for I will never tell a lie about Allah”.

(Ibn Ḥanbal n.d., 1395)

According to this hadith, it is not the role of the prophet to instruct people on how things work in the natural world. Specialists—in this case, farmers who are familiar with productive patterns of pollination for favorable yields—exercise independent authority in their respective domains. Muslims are thus likely to go with the general consensus in scientific matters, despite its potential fallibility. Probabilistic reasoning is central to Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh, where “an agreement to disagree” based on a kind of underdetermination of evidence across different schools of thought eventually came to be the status quo (Walbridge 2011).

An alignment of natural science with political authority thus strengthens the likelihood of public policy compliance for faithful believers. However, because science is fallible, an accepted scientific theory being the best explanation of a phenomenon at any given time, believers naturally resist theories that contradict their beliefs in an attempt to hold reason and revelation together, hoping that future developments in science may confirm their faith perspectives. There are hadith about natural phenomena that the prophet did not get a chance to retract in his lifetime, such as the healing power of honey or the so-called hadith of the fly: “If a house fly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink) and take it out, for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease” (Al-Bukhārī n.d.b, 3320). Fortunately, modern science mostly corroborates some therapeutic properties of honey (Mayo Clinic 2020). As for the latter, how can believers make sense of this today?

For one, such hadith have actually spawned scientific research projects spearheaded by faithful scientists (Claresta and Sari 2020). Expert exegetes, however, inevitably find ways to make sense of scripture regardless of its plain sense meaning. For example, the act of dipping the fly could be interpreted as an act of humility that, at the same time, alleviates the consumer of any doubt, thereby preventing needless waste. The disease of the first wing, then, is suspicion or pride; the cure in the second wing is reassurance or humility. The end result is pragmatic: Instead of discarding an entire vessel of food by dumping it out, one proceeds to consume it with gratitude.

On contagion, the prophet is reported to have said: “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place” (Al-Bukhārī n.d.c, 5728). It is fortuitous that the report conforms well to the idea of isolation and quarantine. As one of many articles on the topic affirms: “As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to kill tens of thousands of people across the world, the prophet Muhammed’s advice on how to respond to a pandemic offers a motivation to people to stay put in their homes and protect themselves from the deadly virus” (Sofuoglu 2020). The Dakar Declaration corroborates with another related hadith and well-known Muslim council: “Do not mix those who are sick with those who are healthy.”

Consequently, while a general acceptance of the need to quarantine or isolate is undeniable, both according to science and according to a plain sense (even if somewhat selective) reading of the sources, its modes and practices can remain contested. Is it better to prioritize care for one’s mother or father at the risk of one’s own life? Should the psychological need for companionship—which is tangible and immediate—be prioritized over potential risk to the body by a nebulous virus? Personal convictions in such matters ultimately create space for divergence in public policy, resulting in grudging compliance or outright dissent. The fallibilism of science combined with suspicion of authority makes for a combustible mixture for public policy.

6. Right to Dissent

Alongside the tradition to “listen and obey” is a parallel tradition to dissent, rooted in countless scriptural sources and developed in robust scholarly literature (Kellison 2013). One hadith says: “The best of jihad is a just word spoken to an unjust ruler.” (Ibn Mājah n.d.b, 4011). While primarily couched in terms of opposition, the right to dissent, first and foremost, promotes human responsibility. It affirms that human beings are not only capable of, but also have a duty to exercise, independent moral and prudential judgment. “Though dissent can often be understood in negative terms,” writes Rosemary Kellison, “in the Islamic tradition dissent can also be construed as a positive duty.” (Kellison 2013, p. 134).

“Each of you is a shepherd”, instructs the prophet (Al-Sijistānī n.d., 2928). Believers have a duty to counsel others, regardless of whether they are rulers, subjects, members of a family, or fellow citizens (Al-Nawawī n.d., 7). The mandate of executive citizenship is perhaps best represented by the scriptural imperative to “command what is right and forbid what is wrong” (Cook 2001). Although this phrase appears multiple times in the Quran, the “three modes tradition”, as Michael Cook calls it, is a helpful window into systematically reflecting on the implications.

“Whoever sees a wrong (munkar)”, says the prophet, “and is able to put it right with his hand (an yughayyirahu bi-yadihi), let him do so; if he can’t, then with his tongue (bi-lisānihi); if he can’t, then with [or in] his heart (bi-qalbihi). Which is the bare minimum of faith”.

(ibid, p. 33)

This hadith has been interpreted in many ways. Some scholars consider the charge to use “the hand” (a metaphor for force) reserved for the ruler alone, while the scholars are charged with use of the tongue (a metaphor for the power of the pen and the pulpit). The heart is reserved for the powerless in society, women and slaves. Others apply each of the three modes of every individual to the individual’s capacity. “[T]he biographical and anecdotal record,” chronicles Cook, “is full of sympathetically presented examples of pious Muslims harshly rebuking rulers, governors and their henchmen, often at great risk to themselves” (ibid, p. 476).

Believers who do not trust a government’s motives are likely to follow the tradition of dissent by speaking out against lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, and vaccines, as the case may be. Pew research data indicates that public trust in government is at an all-time low in a place like the United States (Pew Research Center 2022). When disaggregated by race and ethnicity, the trust of the government on the part of the Black population reached an all-time low in 2019, right before the advent of the pandemic. Americans of color have good reason to suspect the government on account of its inglorious past, most notoriously on display in what was originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” (Vonderlehr et al. 1936).

One article on vaccine resistance concludes that “the epidemiological and social crises brought about by COVID-19 have magnified widely held social anxieties and trust issues that, in the unique circumstances of this global pandemic, have exacerbated skepticism toward vaccines” (Pertwee and Simas 2022). In this light, the results of the Nigeria study may in fact be an epiphenomenon of a trust deficit in government overall. Among all the nations of Africa, Nigerians trust their government the least (Bikus 2022). Likewise, Black American Muslims with historically antagonistic relations with the U.S. government strongly dissent against government issued COVID-19 guidelines. For instance, a warning against vaccines was posted by the Nation of Islam in the summer of 2020: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan warns the Black community against taking the COVID-19 Vaccine with the US Government’s treacherous history of experimentation, medications and vaccines” (Nation of Islam n.d.).

Rooted in the experience of enslaved Africans seeking true emancipation, the Nation of Islam has taught that “Islam, the true religion of the black men of Asia and Africa, would liberate black people from white oppression” (Curtis 2010). It is vital to distinguish between the trust-related anti-vax positions among African-Americans and naturalistic anti-vax positions of prominent figures like the professional tennis player Novak Djokovic. While Djokovic tethers his stance to a certain view of science and nature, Farrakhan, the current leader of the Nation of Islam, bases his skepticism on the untrustworthiness of government (Pugh and Savulescu 2022). Farrakhan is by no means anti-science: “I say to those of us in America,” he proclaimed, “we need to call a meeting of our skilled virologists, epidemiologists, students of biology and chemistry, and we need to look at not only what they give us. We need to give ourselves something better” (Nation of Islam n.d.). As such, although standing at the fringes of Islam, Farrakhan’s position vis-à-vis COVID-19 is entirely coherent from the perspective of normative Islam.

Abdullah Ali, a faculty member at the aforementioned Zaytuna College, where Hamza Yusuf serves as president, has expressed opinions that are skeptical of mainstream government narratives. Ali runs “The Lamppost Education Initiative”, an online forum that provides “a window into the rich Islamic tradition through the eyes of contemporary American Muslim scholars, intellectuals, activists, and leaders” (Lamppost Education Initiative n.d.). On 30 August 2021, the website posted a “Fatwa Against Forced Vaccinations”, which is a translation of an opinion issued by scholars from Mauritania (Fatwa Against Forced Vaccinations 2021). The post is a textbook case demonstrating the balancing act between obedience to authority, trust in God, and the right to dissent. It is prefaced by the following assertion: “There is no doubt that the refusal of medical treatment, placing one’s reliance upon Allah and acceptance of what He decrees, is among matters endorsed by the revealed law”. Having asserted the right to refuse medical treatment, which forms the substance of the legal opinion, the post offers the following disclaimer: “The translation of this fatwa is not intended to oppose or discourage anyone from taking the COVID-19 vaccination” (ibid). While the right to dissent is upheld, whether that dissent is grounded in lack of trust in public authorities or an unflinching faith in God, there is a reluctance to endorse the non-compliance of public policy.

7. Trust in God

In the early days of the pandemic, the Tablighi Jama‘at (“Society for Spreading Faith”) received widespread attention for flaunting government guidelines. As a group originating in India in 1926 whose purpose is the revitalization of faith through missionary activity across the Muslim world, with massive, crowded gatherings (ijtima‘), the Tablighi Jama‘at’s very existence relies on human contact. Although the group eventually complied with mandates and restrictions to limit the spread of the virus—mainly to avoid mounting social stigma against the movement—one study focusing on the group’s activities in Lombok, Indonesia, notes that the “leadership still teaches that COVID-19 is not a serious health risk but rather a global conspiracy created to weaken the Muslim community” (Hamdi 2022).

Given the background above, from where does the impulse to be noncompliant arise? In order to answer this question, the sources that have been cited in favor of trusting science must be historicized. Our contemporary understanding of disease is governed by an “etiological standpoint,” which may be “characterized as the belief that diseases are best controlled and understood by means of causes…that are natural…universal…and necessary” (Stearns 2011, p. 4). Causality is among the central concerns of Islamic theology, closely associated with cosmological debates on the nature of human actions, the omnipotence of God, free will, and accountability. With God being the primary cause for all things and the creator of all acts, many Muslim theologians dismissed the idea of necessary secondary causality in the natural world as imposing a limitation on God’s omnipotence.

While debates on this topic are intricate and positions by no means uniform, they influence the thinking of groups like the Tablighi Jama‘at on plagues and contagion. Such positions have resonance in classical theology, rooted in alternative scriptural sources. For example, the prophet is also reported to have said: “[There is] no contagion” (Stearns 2011, p. 15). In order to reconcile apparent contradictions between prophetic reports, worldviews come to play a major part. A contemporary worldview may privilege the achievements of modern science. But there are other possibilities.

For the deniers of contagion, the hadith counseling us neither to enter a plague-stricken area nor to flee from it is interpreted in other ways. For example, there is no point in fleeing because you can’t escape God’s decree. There is no point in entering, for why would you want to put your faith on trial by potentially attributing your fate to a cause other than God? Life and death are solely in the hands of God. One’s lifespan has been preordained. “Truly”, says the Qur’an, “the death from which you flee will surely meet you” (Nasr 2015, 62:9). Not least, why take any measures at all, for death by widespread contagion results in martyrdom, as in another hadith: “Plague is the cause of martyrdom of every Muslim (who dies because of it)” (Al-Bukhārī n.d.a, 2830).

8. Science & Society

In the second volume of his bestselling trilogy on human history, society, and future, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari ponders what our new human agenda might be now that we have solved the pressing problems of hunger, disease, and war. The book presents broad historical trends demonstrating how today’s world has, statistically speaking, less violence, less hunger, and fewer deaths from curable diseases than in the past. Whereas the plague was once considered an act of God, simply to be endured until God so decides to lift the affliction, today we consider it a technical problem. “[F]or modern people”, Harari says, even “death is a technical problem that we can and should solve” (Harari 2017, p. 22).

Harari’s eccentric account of possible human futures was published prior to COVID-19. “No one can guarantee that plagues won’t make a comeback,” he foretells, “but there are good reasons to think that in the arms race between doctors and germs, doctors run faster.” (ibid, p. 12) Does this narrative still hold water as we transition back to a post-pandemic era? In a Ted Talk viewed forty-five million times, Bill Gates warned that humans were not ready to manage a global pandemic (Gates 2015). As COVID-19 was waning, he repeated: “We’ll have another pandemic” (Gilchrist 2022).

There is no way to predict what will come next; historians can at best offer post hoc explanations if we survive. What is impossible to argue against is that the global response to COVID-19 should at least give us pause. Our response in many places across the globe was far from ideal, if not altogether inept everywhere. The world is not a controlled laboratory, scientific research takes time, and consensus does not come easy (Latour 1983; Schrader 2010). Even with a shared view of science, policy prescriptions vary depending on what is prioritized. Communication of evolving guidelines is often iatrogenic, creating mass confusion and facilitating the unintended spread of infection, especially when society provides market or political incentives to exploit our differences for short-term gain. Science is embedded in messy human cultures. “Man is a storytelling animal” (Gottschall 2012). Muslim responses to COVID-19 are no more and no less complicated than the responses of other communities. Seeing our differences as an illustration of our shared humanity enables us to empathize with each other, whether China or Sweden, red state or blue, secular or religious.

Sociologist of religion Robert Bellah deepened our understanding of the story-side of religion by couching religious life within the context of “big history.” In his final synthetic work, Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah, drawing on the framework of neuro-anthropologist Merlin Donald, structures his account with the “mythic” (narrative) as the middle of three stages in the development of religion, between the “mimetic” (ritual) and “theoretic” (philosophical) (Bellah 2011). Although the cultural evolution of human beings moves from one stage to the next, “nothing is ever truly lost,” informs Bellah. (ibid, p. 13). Human societies that have transitioned to the third stage of theorization are incapable of jettisoning ritual and myth, even if they pretend otherwise. We filter reality through narrative. Even scientific truth is embedded within some kind of narrative, what philosophers of science prefer to call “paradigms” (Kuhn 2012). Facts are intelligible in the backdrop of worldviews, whether these are explicitly stated or not. “Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology),” says Bellah, “know who they are by the stories they tell” (Bellah 2011, p. 35). Change the story, change the reality.

The chaotic global response to COVID-19, on both individual and collective levels, can be understood through the “deep stories” behind these responses (Hochschild 2016). Deep stories give rise to deep complexity, what Savoj Žižek calls “heaven in disorder,” by which he means “a radical and even exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell” (Žižek 2021, p. 2). The disorder in heaven is, for Žižek, what explains disorder on earth: “Caught between two (or even three) sides—medical experts, business interests, and the pressures of populist COVID deniers—governments adopted a politics of compromises, proposing often inconsistent and ridiculously complex half measures” (ibid, p. 93).

Global problems need global solutions. In a free-for-all world, governing responsibly has become next to impossible. “The situation is hopeless,” argues Žižek. That is why “it’s time to act ruthlessly…we need in Europe a version of something that cannot but be called ‘wartime Communism.’” To those who think this is bad, Žižek warns of the alternative: “If we stick to our old way of life, we will surely end up in a new Barbarism.” (ibid, pp. 93, 96) It is impossible to deny the resonance of this analysis with the famous Arab proverb: “Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy” (Feldman 2009). What is commonly presumed from this statement is Arab tolerance for tyranny, in contrast to Western love for freedom. “I think that’s exactly backwards,” argues Noah Feldman. “I think the point of the phrase is to tell you just how bad anarchy is” (ibid, p. 143). In other words, “obedience to authority,” under the right circumstances, may be a recipe for social salvation.

9. Conclusions

A recent study conducted by the Da’wah Academy on vaccine resistance among Muslims in Nigeria reveals twenty-one distinct causes that may be aggregated into two categories: complete trust in God versus a trust deficit in government, heavily weighted toward the latter. Heeding some guidance which the survey illuminates, namely, that there is nothing essential about Islamic theology given to resisting sensible public health initiatives, this paper has offered a range of Muslim perspectives on how responses to COVID-19 might be grounded in Islamic sources: trust in science; dissent from the mainstream; absolute reliance on God; and respect for authority. In a world that requires global cooperation, how can public policy deal with such complexity? Blanket prescriptions are inadequate. Good governance requires identifying each objection by first understanding the worldview that sustains it: “evidence-based misinformation interventions” (Green et al. 2023). Evidence from Nigeria and beyond highlights the importance of religious literacy for effective interventions.

Human beings are complex creatures. The future is impossible to predict. The past has taught us enough at least to make sense of where we are, even as we struggle to contemplate where to go from here. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King, Jr. likens the human condition to that of a widely dispersed family that inherits a house in which they must learn to live together (King 2010, p. 177). With a simple stroke of the pen, King helped us understand through metaphor and story. A home is made of individuals who are not the same, but they cooperate and compromise nonetheless, for they must, after all, come to terms with the fact that they are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (King 1963).

People across the globe need at least enough political overlap across their disparate worldviews to function as a family. Absolute individual freedom is a recipe for anarchy. For a world with existential crises requiring global cooperation, anarchy, in turn, is a recipe for disaster. New and more nimble political models are needed which allow societies to pivot between the poles of freedom and cooperation, between primacy of individuals and compromise for the sake of the collective, in order to respond to the challenges of particular moments. Instead of a false choice between “autocracy and democracy,” the focus of the conversation should be on wellbeing. “[J]ust thinking in the old categories of democracies versus autocracies misses all the new challenges that our institutions have to face today,” argues Jean-Marie Guéhenno. (Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs n.d.). Islamic thought offers one framework to balance the tension by encouraging dissent while requiring obedience, so long as the trust deficit in public institutions remains below a critical threshold. Beyond that threshold, the most likely remaining choice might just be between tyranny and anarchy.