**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

**Citation:** Mirza, Mahan. 2023. Between Tyranny and Anarchy: Islam, COVID-19, and Public Policy. *Religions* 14: 737. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel14060737

Academic Editors: James Carr, Andrew Flescher and Joel Zimbelman

Received: 14 December 2022 Revised: 18 April 2023 Accepted: 23 April 2023 Published: 2 June 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

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 ayah, "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-Tabr¯ız¯ı 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. "Obedience 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 directly 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).

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.


**Table 1.** Reasons for vaccine resistance in Nigeria.
