Pakistan is a terrible place. It is a terrible place to be a woman, a child, a member of a religious minority, a reformist Muslim or an atheist. It is a hell hole of monstrous proportions, a place where oppression, violence and ignorance prevail and where women, religious minorities and heterodox Muslims life in fear for their lives. It is a hell hole created and sustained by some of the worst and most backward forms of Islam that exist. Pakistan is not controlled by any of the more relatively benign paths within Islam such as the Ahmediyya or the Ismailis , it is instead dominated by much more extreme and uncompromising forms of Islam  than these, formssuch as Deobandism.

Pakistan is one of those nations that seems to have a disturbingly close similarity to the sort of nightmarish and fantastical places found in science fiction. For example Pakistan would be the ideal choice if you wanted to suggest a country that could double as the ‘Savage Reservation’ that is found in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Like Huxley’s Savage Reservation, Pakistan is filled with dirt, disease, superstition and ignorance of a sort that is hard for the Western mind brought up in a Judeo-Christian post Enlightenment culture to really comprehend. Yes, Pakistan really is that much of a shithole.

But, if a recent story from the left leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz is to be believed, Pakistani ignorance and cultural blight may not only be a problem for those who have the terrible misfortune to be a Pakistani citizen. If Haaretz’s claim that Pakistan and Pakistani religious groups have been acting as unwitting superspreaders of Chinese Covid19 are correct, then it’s a problem not just for Pakistanis but the whole world.

This is what Haaretz said:

On Sunday, the Gaza strip reported its first two cases of coronavirus. The two Palestinian men had recently returned from Pakistan.

They were among the 250,000 people that gathered in Lahore two weeks ago, to participate in the Tableeghi Ijtema [literally “a congregation for outreach”] – an Islamic event organized by the local Tableeghi Jamaat [Outreach Congress]. 

An offshoot of the South Asian Deobandi Islamic movement, the Tableeghi Jamaat has spent the past century preaching Islam in the region, and now has a  presence in over 80 countries. The Raiwind area in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province and home to 11 million inhabitants, hosts the annual Tableeghi Ijtema, which includes hundreds of thousands of participants from around the world.

So it appears that the Chinese Covid19 infections that hit Gaza originally came from Pakistan. Haaretz went on to explain that calls had been made for this massive event that was held between March 11-15^th to be cancelled but this did not happen despite Pakistan reporting its first Covid19 cases in February.

According to the Haaretz report the Pakistani government only belatedly on the 12^th March woke up to the scale of the Covid19 problem and asked for the event to be closed. However it may well have been too late as 250k Muslim attendees had already set up camp for the event in Lahore. It is likely that Covid19 may have already been spreading among those who had gathered for this religious event. Even after the event was cancelled the real reason for cancellation was not given as a virus but instead ‘rain’ was given as the reason.

Haaretz added:

The Tableeghi Jamaat’s reluctance to cite an infectious virus as cause for the disbandment is rooted in its regressive ideology, whose exponents have ranged from militant jihadists to radical preachers to Islamic televangelists unleashing a perilous blend of unscientific fantasies and bigoted fallacies. For these ideologues, cancelling congregational prayers owing to an infectious disease is synonymous with repudiating Allah’s command.

This unbending orthodoxy coupled with retarded fatalism may well have had dire reprecussions across the world. Haaretz has not only voiced alarm at the attitude of the group behind this gathering but also aims criticism at the Pakistani government. Haaretz said:

While regressive religionists across divides exhibit dangerous disregard for global calls for social distancing, what is rarer is for a state to continue to kowtow to the clergies, when their precarious abandonment of logic can have fatal ramifications for the entire country.

And yet, at a time when Iran has shut down the holiest Shia sites, Saudi Arabia has banned prayers at mosques – including the two holiest in Islam –  and numerous Muslim countries like Turkey, UAE, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, among others have closed mosques, Pakistan allowed the Friday prayers on March 20, nationwide. 

What the Pakistani government have done is the equivalent of throwing a bucket of petrol onto a bonfire in the hope of extinguishing it.

Sadly as we might expect from Pakistan, the world’s ‘Savage Reservation’, Covid19 has provided ample fodder for various religious extremists, spiritual quacks and the many other sorts of nasties that thrive in cultures where the education level is low and superstition rules.

Haaretz continued:

Little wonder that instead of being restrained, Islamic clerics in Pakistan are currently having a ball with their coronavirus theories, while being invited on television ostensibly as experts on COVID-19. 

Prominent Deobandi cleric Muhammad Taqi Usmani revealed on national TV that Prophet Muhammad had come in the dream of a Tableeghi Jamaatmember and “shared the cure for coronavirus.” The cure was the recital of certain Quranic verses. 

What this cleric is suggesting is little different from the medieval practice of religious penitents whipping themselves with chains in order to drive away or atone for an outbreak of bubonic plague. Looking at Pakistan is like looking into the darkest and most nasty recesses of the long distant past of places like the UK. It’s like looking back to the days of trial by ordeal or at feudalism or any other of the past nasties when you look at Pakistan.

The influence that various extreme Islamic clerics have in Pakistan is going make a bad Covid19 problem a whole lot worse. Some indication of how much influence these clerics have over Pakistan can be found in this quote from Haaretz:

Even as the tally of coronavirus patients in Pakistan crosses 1,000, underlining a precipitously rising curve, the government’s first priority has been to ensure the Islamic clerics that their one-stop shops aren’t under any threat. The Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar, whose government has reacted criminally late to the spread of COVID-19, met Islamic clerics from various sects in the lead up to last week’s Friday prayers to ensure them that mosques won’t be shut down in the province.

Covid19 is going to rip through Pakistan taking the lives of men, women and children who are unlikely to get any life saving or life lengthening medical treatment because the Pakistani government does not  invest in their countries infrastructure and listen to the scientists. Pakistan instead invests vast amounts of money in weaponry to counter its neighbour India and listens to deranged clerics who believe that cancelling Friday prayers is more important than saving lives.

If Haaretz’s claims are well founded then Pakistan and in particular the massive religious event that was not properly cancelled, may have spread Covid19 throughout South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and even maybe beyond. The world may indeed end up paying for Pakistan’s backwardness and stupidity.