Beware what you catch!

I can hear her words still reverberating in my ears like she said it yesterday. To catch a  big fish, always put a small fry on the hook. All through my childhood, this is the mantra that Amma preached upon us. She was unapologetic about her views about the nuns in the convent school that my sisters went to. Even though she was the one who insisted that my sisters should go to a missionary school, she was always sceptical about their true intentions. She told my sisters to learn what the teachers taught but not what the nuns preached. She was clear about that. In her mind, the school gave good education, for the other stuff, thank you very much.

Whenever someone offers you a handout, be wary. Amma would always remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything carries a piece of baggage. In simple terms, we grew up distrusting altruistic intention, minding only for ourselves. Maybe, these teachings helped us to pull ourselves by our bootstraps to greater heights.

As we matured and our inner eyes opened, we thought maybe the human race survive all this while because of our altruistic acts, not just each individual's zest to survive. The strong had to hold out a helping hand to guide the weak. For that, we have charity bodies, NGOs and religious institutions.  

All that Amma had said came echoing back to me after so many decades when Bill Gates, the once-richest man in the world, announced that he was donating half of his property to charity and was sacrificing his life and soul in solving Africa's food and health problems once and all.  

Soon enough, the truth was revealed. At the heights of the Wuhan virus pandemic and the desperate dearth of vaccines in everybody mind, someone suggested that the patency for vaccines should be lifted. It was thought more vaccine makers can increase production to make it available to the masses, the rich and poor alike. But, much to everybody's surprise, Mr Gates opposed the idea citing fear of a drop in the quality of vaccines produced. In my eyes, it sounds like a drop in income rather than quality control.

Even closer to home, our leaders are not at all interested in getting all its citizens vaccinated. The tussle is not in procuring vaccines, but which brand to use, whose proxy companies would get the lion's share of the bargain and what is it for them. Nobody is bothered about the lay people's welfare. Even individual states which procure vaccines via donations are restricted from using, citing licencing and legal mumbo jumbo as the issue. Again, the bottom line is ringgits and sens. If their intentions are so clear, are they worried? No, they are so thick-skinned that nothing can hurt them. Come next election, they would create another ruckus to garner sympathy votes.

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Tabligh Jama'at Movement

FOR GENERAL INFORMATION

• Farish A. Noor is Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.

Muslim missionary movement Tablighi Jama'at encourages followers to move out of their comfort zones - literally. It also emphasises social welfare. Appealing to the latter and engaging followers positively will get them to self-regulate their movements, and help to contain the virus pandemic.

By now alarm has been raised about the numbers of people who have been infected with the coronavirus after attending a large gathering of the Tablighi Jama'at religious movement at the Sri Petaling mosque complex in Malaysia.

The gathering, held on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur from Feb 27 to March 1, reportedly involved about 16,000 people from several countries who are devotees of the Tablighi Jama'at movement. The Ministry of Health is tracing the contacts of about 90 Singaporeans who attended the gathering after five were diagnosed with Covid-19 as of Sunday.

Having gotten themselves infected due to the lack of social distancing, many of the members of this group have returned to their respective countries in the ASEAN region, including Singapore, and there is a worry that the virus may spread even further as a result of such large-scale human movement.

WHAT IS THE TABLIGHI JAMA'AT?

The Tablighi Jama'at is a lay missionary pietist movement among Muslims that emerged in India a century ago, and from the outset, it has laid enormous emphasis on the need for individual believers to leave their comfort zones, go out into the world to face challenges and hardship, and to renounce all things worldly and materialistic.

For seven years, I conducted fieldwork with the movement, and during this time, I travelled along with members of the Tabligh all over the world, from the United Kingdom, France and Germany to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and then on to almost every part of South-east Asia.

This need to travel - which some of the members described to me as being on a state of permanent pilgrimage - lies at the core of what the Tabligh is as a movement of faith renewal. When the Tabligh was formed in northern India in the early part of the 20th century, it regarded the state of Muslims as abysmal. The founders of the movement argued that the faith of many Muslims had been weakened as a result of their attachment to all things worldly and materialistic, and they believed that one has to renounce attachments to worldly things in order to be truly free to believe sincerely.

I have met scores of members from all walks of life who have, upon joining the movement, renounced their worldly attachments and stopped doing things like watching TV, wasting time on social media, or give up smoking or drugs.

In many ways the Tabligh was and remains a largely benign movement: It has never sought out confrontation with other faith communities (as it largely confines its activities to another fellow Muslims) and it has never had any political ambitions (for it regards politics as something worldly and therefore a distraction from faith and love for God). Outsiders have sometimes seen them as fatalistic, apolitical and apathetic to the wider needs of society, but the members would argue that one cannot change the world positively unless one has been a better and more faithful individual first.

A MOVEMENT THAT MOVES

What is special about the Tabligh is that it is a non-centred movement that does not have the rigidity of parties, organisations or corporations. Membership is open to all and on a flexible basis: Some join and follow the Tabligh for a weekend a month, some for weeks or months per year, some for life.

One thing that they all do is move, in order to meet other members of the faith community and to weaken their bonds to the material world around them. They do not stay in hotels when they travel (for that would be unseemly and too worldly), but choose to stay in mosques and seminaries that they occupy.

It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which this is a mobile movement. I have interviewed many of their members, all of whom have travelled around the region and beyond, and I have been amazed by the stories they shared with me.

Once, in the Indonesian province of West Papua, I met a Tabligh lad who had travelled all the way to Peru - via Jakarta then to Singapore, then to Japan, then to Los Angeles, on to Mexico and finally to Peru and back again. At the large gatherings of the Tabligh I have attended in Pakistan, southern Thailand (at Yala) and Java (at Temboro), I have met thousands of Tablighs from every part of the world.

CAN THE TABLIGH REGULATE ITSELF?

Governments the world over are now faced with the difficult task of educating their respective populations and encouraging people to maintain a healthy social distance from one another while avoiding large gatherings. This poses a problem for movements that conduct pilgrimages in groups, and this applies not only to the Tabligh but also Christians who undertake pilgrimages along the pilgrimage trails of Europe, Hindus who visit temples, and Buddhists who make pilgrimages to shrines.

So what is the best way forward with groups such as these?

First, we should remember that the Tabligh has, in fact, had to self-regulate its activities and movements in the recent past.

Two decades ago when Indonesia was in the grip of violent militancy, the Tabligh was infiltrated and used as a vehicle by some radicals who sought to move across Indonesia anonymously. When it was discovered that terrorists had used the movement as a means to get to places like Bali, the Tabligh responded by checking on its members and ensuring that their movement would not become the vector for violence in the country.

As the Tabligh is a movement of faith and it cares about the welfare of its members, it should be made clear to them that social responsibility is also an important value in religion. Muslim history has many examples of how Muslim rulers have imposed controls on movement in times of epidemics, and Muslim scholars have always laid great emphasis on the concept of collective social well-being.

So rather than scapegoating or victim-blaming the Tablighi movement and its members, a better approach would be to engage them constructively while opening opportunity structures for them to demonstrate social responsibility instead.

And what applies to the Tabligh will also apply to all itinerant movements and pilgrimage groups that likewise move from one place to another. By not singling out the Tabligh as a unique problem, we avoid the mistake of adding stigma to the crisis, and by engaging them positively, such movements can actually play an important role in containing this virus pandemic.

The underlying message ought to be that social welfare and caring for the greater good of society are also components of faith, and they are not incompatible.

Corona the vaccine, we the virus.

Swans in Venetian Canal
 Credit @filterjm

Probably for the first time since Man started giving salutations to the feared forces around him, he has been asked to stop all kinds of religious congregations in big groups. For aeons, Man believed that maladies take place because the Divine forces have been angered. In their simple understanding, the only avenue left for them to correct the tragedy is to appease the Divinity by glorifying it to high heavens; hoping that He would throw us His Grace.

Hence, despite appeals by the authorities, practitioners of various faiths continue to put their trusts in the forces above, not in rational thinking and the sciences. They feel that people have been misled for far too long. The way the human race appears to be heading does not assure them of a happy ending. Too many have placed self-interest above salvation to expect altruism to prevail.

There are groups of people who are hellbent in finding scapegoats. In their minds, many if not most germs came from the East. In recent memory, we have heard of SARS, H1N1 and Nipah Virus and their fixation with exotic animals like civet cats and bats. In the 14th century, Bubonic Plague and Black Death arose from the Far East via the Silk Road.

Scrolling through the annals of history, one discovers that pretty much every human pathogen originated from our exploitation of animals. Humanity's dominion over animals has unleashed a veritable Pandora's ark of infectious diseases. Most modern human infectious diseases were unknown before domestication led to a mass spillover of animal disease into human populations. For example, tuberculosis appears to have been acquired initially through the domestications of goats but now infects one-third of humanity. Meanwhile, measles and smallpox may have arisen from mutant cattle viruses. We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, chickens and typhoid fever, ducks and influenza, water buffalos and leprosy as well as horses and cold virus (Michael Greger, How Not to Die).


Or is our decision to self-isolate against each other is Nature's conniving power play to avenge decades of rape of its sovereignty? Look at the countries which were teeming with excessive human activities and see what lockdown has achieved? China's citizens can finally get fresh air and see the blue sky without being enveloped with smog. One week of an absence of gondolas and visitors, dolphins and swans come out to play. It looks like Corona is the vaccine, and we are the virus of Nature.

Since prayers in large enough groups will not see any daylight in the near future, cries for help from the divine forces cannot happen. I guess we have to depend on our God-given intellects to save us from extinction.

Dolphins have appeared at the Italian coastline after the
shipping lines were locked down due to coronavirus (REUTERS)

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Not our crowning glory

COVID-19?
jumping species or wannabe predator??

Is it funny that every time Man thinks that he has it all figured out, Nature (or fate if you like to call it) just jolts him back to reality? Like Will E Coyote and his spanking new latest invention from ACME Corporation, it just falls flat and blows right on his face again and again, and Roadrunner always goes scot-free, scooting off yet again, screeching "beep..beeep!" 

The latest viral scare of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) just opens up our vulnerability. All the so-called foolproof systems that we had installed are just scribblings on the sand - they cannot withstand the test of time. And they are so porous. We thought we had all the arsenal that could not only not annihilate our enemies but ourselves in the process too. All these are useless in combating our electron-microscopic size enemy. We are literally crippled by an unseen offending foe. All the King's horses and the King's men cannot put our peace of mind together at least for now. 

In the 1990s, our leaders were hellbent on embracing globalisation. They argued that we were heading to a borderless world where physical borders were an illusion. Commerce transcended boundaries, and we should welcome it with open arms. No one could live in isolation. Now, see what is happening. Countries are scurrying to close the borders as not only diseases spread like wildfire, refugees who bungled up their own nation are clawing through the immigration gates displaying their victim card. Many have opted for self-isolation to keep their people safe.

Over-dependence on particular countries for supplies and over-concentration of the supply chain from a specific region has not been a smart move after all. It looks like when China sneezes, the whole world may get pneumonia.

The democratisation of flying made travelling no more an activity of the bourgeois. Now, everyone could fly. With it came secondary industries and opening of new regions and tourists attractions. Unfortunately, the concept of open skies also opened the Pandora box of international subversive activities and seamless flow of problems. At the time of writing the tagline of one of the most popular low-cost airlines has changed from 'Everyone can Fly' to 'No one wants to Fly' or 'Nowhere to Fly'.

We thought the world wide web of interconnectivity was going to transform the world into a utopia of a knowledge-based society,  well-informed consumers and broad-thinking creative communities. How naive we were. What we have are fake news of questionable authenticity and a band of fist thumping keyboard warriors who type away their hate speeches under the cloak of anonymity without a thought of the effects of their actions. 

Generations before us grew up without any exchange of physical touch or public display of affection. In some societies, physical touch between unmarriageable kins was frowned upon. With open-mindedness, bodily contacts by handshakes, hugging and pecking became the norm. Come SARS, MERS-CoV and now COVID-19, and we are back to our traditional ways of salutations - bowing and placing of own palms together; fear of transmission of pathogens.

Just a thought...

The mighty Chinese armada used to travel to the four corners of the globe. They are said to have 'discovered' the Americas even before Columbus' alternate route to India. But then everything stopped. The Ming Dynasty decided to opt for a closed-door policy of the world. Even the Japanese kingdoms underwent a similar transformation. Was the spread of disease the reason for this move?

(Nerd Alert: Corona is Latin for Crown. Corona also refers to the gaseous accumulation around the Sun (which looks like a crown enveloping the Sun), mainly around its equator. Did you know that there is a field of study dedicated to studying the Sun called Solar Science (Helioseismology)? The suffix 'seismology' is used here because Solar Scientists principally study it via the oscillations of sound waves (?Om - ௐ, ॐ etc.) that are continuously driven and damped by convection near the Sun's surface. One of the puzzling thing about the Sun is that the Corona is hotter than the Sun surface by a factor of 150 to 400. The Corona can reach temperatures of 1 to 3 million Kelvin.)

To know is to know that you know not!

My mother was dead sure 55 years ago that her predicament was induced by poverty. She blamed her father for not ensuring that education was given importance to the girls of the family.  In his case, he generally thought that school was quite a waste of time when precious time could be used in the workforce and the continuity of survival. She was crossed that her husband did not have the means to give her pleasure of sitting haughtily cross-legged on her throne as the mistress of her own home but instead had to be contended to make other people's home tidy and clean. She cursed the stars that she was born under that cast a spell that it was necessary to bring in a second source of income to her young family. 

And then that happened. It was a series of maladies that were destined to happen as she ventured into her family life. After nine months of carrying an apparently normal baby boy, she delivered a stillbirth! Scrutinising the lifeless stillborn child, she noticed dark marks on his cheeks and back. All through her grieving period, through the consoling words of her friends, she thought she came to learn of the reason for her loss...

Slapped Cheek

She remembered that day, vividly. The bus had arrived late, and she was rushing to her workplace. To reach her destination on time and to avoid embarrassment in front of her contemporaries and employer, she, in her obviously pregnant state took a short cut. It involved walking diagonally through a Christian graveyard. As fate had it, a funeral procession was in session. She felt a cool zephyr pass by, and suddenly she felt an intense feeling of apprehension as she approached the crowd. She passed it off as tiredness of pregnancy, the heat and her fast-paced movement. A few weeks after that episode, the mishap happened. Her world came crumbling down. The loss of a male heir to rewrite her life history came to zilch. No one could give her a decent explanation for her loss.

Thanks to her street-smart, worldly friends, there was closure. It seems that the Grimm Reaper, in his zest to recruit more souls to his side, was on a wild hunt at the heat of the noon sun. An easy prey was standing in from of him in the form of a gravid mother. All Satan needed to do was to give a tight slap on the fetal cheek and back and voila, another one bit the dust, another soul to the dark side.

Everything fitted in fine like lock and key. She had another reason to be melancholic about life. Poverty drove her to work, braving the sun and graveyards to make ends meet. And impoverishment made her lose her child. That was her understanding of her loss. Life moved on. She went to deliver three other children and the grace of God and her unwavering loyalty to the Almighty. 

In her mind, everything made sense. She, in her gestational state, should have known better than to venture into sensitive areas, like a graveyard where restless souls looked for company. What more, at the height of the time when the sun when it is at its peak above the head! It was her fault, she thought, but she justified her actions and the outcome of her fate.

Little did she realise, she never came to know until her second-born who later made it to medical school enlightened her on a condition called 'slapped cheek syndrome' or 'fifth disease' caused by a virus (Parvovirus B19). It was known to cause stillbirths. It was inconsequential, anyway. Much water had passed the bridge.

One does not have to know the truth, the whole and nothing but the truth to carry on with life. Even though it is unimaginable, life was still going on planet Earth when its occupants though that their planet was a flat pancake. Just like the explanation of interference of unknown forces only work fine for my mother. Many things were accepted with simple, which now seems mumbo-jumbo, explanations. She agreed to the fact that one cannot know everything and some stones are better left unturned. It gave her closure to meet another challenge in life.

Socrates was quoted to have said that 'to know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of real knowledge'. The problem is how far you want to go to seek the truth. Somehow, one has to draw the line somewhere, pacify himself with his limited knowledge and move on to do other things in life.

"What I do not know, I do not think I know"Socratic paradox.

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