For Muslims wary of the Covid vaccine: there's every religious reason not to be
As the UK’s Covid-19 vaccination programme has accelerated, optimism about its effectiveness has been rising. According to the Office for National Statistics, more than nine in 10 people are now keen to get a jab, up from 78% in December. But there are significant racial disparities. The Royal College of General Practitioners reports that enthusiasm within Asian and black communities dips by between twothirds and a half, and – as many imams have acknowledged – the suspicion of vaccines is disproportionately high among Muslims.
Why? Influential traditions warn that innovations sometimes come with danger, and a fear of God can produce fatalistic attitudes towards disease: even viruses are part of creation, after all. But the most distinctively Islamic concern is much simpler. Lots of believers worry that vaccines contain pork.
The belief isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound to non-Muslims. Chemically purified gelatine (like the gooey albumins found in salmon and egg whites) is useful to stabilise the active ingredients of many drugs. Manufacturers
have been stepping up the search for substitutes, but animal products are therefore common in injectable solutions. That’s led Muslims sometimes to worry that they might be haram, forbidden. Indonesia’s most authoritative religious body denounced inoculations for meningitis in 2008 (which, quite counter-productively, disqualified thousands of unvaccinated Muslims from hajjlater that year), and a similar condemnation in 2018 contributed to a major measles outbreak. In parts of northern Pakistan, Somalia and Nigeria, false rumours about polio vaccines haven’t just endangered children’s health; hospitals have been torched and clinicians have been murdered.
The fear of life-saving medicines is ironic – not least, because Arab physicians such as Ibn Sina once made Islamic culture synonymous with scientific progress – but mercifully, hardline opposition is confined to ultracautious conservatives and reckless extremists. There’s a lot more support for vaccinating children in south Asia and north Africa than in Europe (the rate in France is lowest of all), and anti-vax sentiment is consistently high in only two Muslim-majority states: Indonesia and Nigeria.
Most sharia scholars, meanwhile,
It is hardly a pressing concern, of course, but what screen drama is going to look like after Covid is, increasingly, a point to ponder. Reality has given the lie to so much now, and never more clearly than in the new offering from documentary maker Hao Wu (with the newcomer Weixi Chen), 76 Days (Sky Documentaries).
It is a fly-on-the-wall, 95-minute film that is set almost entirely in the main hospital in Wuhan during the 76 days that the Chinese city in which the virus originated shut down to try to contain its spread. People bang on the doors to be let in, as we have been taught to expect, but the staff are much more succinct and unconvulsed by sorrow when they have to keep them outside. There is no time for reflection or self-indulgence in a crisis, as Covid has reaffirmed.
Everyone within is fully masked, hazmat-suited and booted, as is familiar from the likes of Outbreak (the monkey, Dustin Hoffman one) and Contagion (Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, everyone dies, quite boring). But will we, in the films to come, have characters drawing messages and sprays of flowers over their PPE, as the Wuhan staff do? We know that, under the worst pressure, people take refuge in art and humour; will we incorporate these responses into future disaster movies? How will we represent grief and distress having been face to face with them for so long?
76 Days opens with howls of agony, as a woman pleads desperately to be allowed to see her father for one last time. We have been trained via screen conventions to accept the facsimile of such scenes, but whether that artifice can endure post-pandemic is anyone’s guess.
The film rarely strays outside the hospital, which holds about 50 Covid patients with symptoms of varying severity. You long to hear more about the wider measures being implemented by the local and central governments – even if the news of such stringency and competence compared with what Britain’s leaders have mustered is likely to bring on a stroke. Or something about the particular politics of China that makes such control possible. But the tight focus manages to give a sense of the epic scale of the pandemic – the relentlessness of the disease, the staggering amount of work, the siege-like mentality and the pervasive exhaustion. The weight of the losses and the glory of the triumphs within the hospital give an idea of how much, in all senses, it has cost the world.
Perhaps there is a languorous stretch in the middle, once the initial excitement has worn off, but the personalities and back stories have not yet fully gained traction. But so be it: it conveys the claustrophobia and creeping boredom that afflicts any longterm situation, even an ongoing emergency. Aren’t we lucky that this is our main problem, instead of a bodybagged father being trollied past us in a corridor, or waking up, as one patient did at home, to find our mother dead beside us, then having to leave her to take our virus-filled family to hospital?
Boxes fill with the disinfected mobile phones of the departed – “31 unread messages”, flashes one – ready for the relatives to collect them when the hospital can spare the time and the staff. An elderly patient wanders around, angry and confused at first, then tearful. His son rings him for a pep talk. “You used to be a Communist party member! Look at your actions now!” Telling the staff that his father has dementia and should be being given medication is slightly more help. “Uncle Li”, as the staff begin to call him, settles, becomes far happier and in the end seems sorry to be discharged to his overcrowded home, in which multiple generations of his family live. “They pick on me,” he says, a new, no less bleak, story suddenly opening up before us as he walks out of the hospital. It is a reminder that the pandemic doesn’t press pause on other suffering, but simply adds another layer.
There are no hugely dramatic moments in 76 Days. It is wholly unsentimental and, allowing for the fact the stream of events must be put into some kind of narrative form, unmanipulative. Everything builds by increments. It is tiny, quiet exchanges that knock the wind out of you and show how immersed you have become in the small, enclosed world.
“I tried to give you money,” remembers one patient as his doctor prepares him for discharge. “How could I accept that?” replies the doctor. “Regardless,” says the man. “I owe you my life. I’ll never forget.” They shake hands. “Remember to wash your hands again,” says the doctor, as he heads back to the wards.
What to make of Clubhouse – the invitation-only, social media, audio app that’s hit the zeitgeist this month?
It’s like a LinkedIn that talks to you. It’s like attending a conference that never ends. Its spirit animal is the oldstyle chatrooms of the early internet where you could swap ideas and soak up expertise. It will chew up hours and hours and hours of your day that are not already chewed up by the other apps.
It’s a series of virtual campfires that you join while some guy with the mic, whose bio describes him as “TRADER, BITCOIN, ANGEL INVESTOR, ENTREPRENEUR”, tells you that in order to get rich you need to get up at 3:48am and jump in an ice bath.
I spent a week in/on Clubhouse – a strange, disorientating week. While in my home, on the bus, at the beach, walking, cooking and resting, I dropped into dozens and dozens of “rooms”. In these rooms, users can listen in to live discussions and interviews about, well, anything. I now know nothing about everything.
There were the Tony Robbins-style motivational speaker rooms with 5,000 + guests, the overflow rooms for someone called Mr Beast, the random rooms with MC Hammer, the rooms where you could get advice on pitches, startups, venture capital, angel investments and personal branding. Crypto rooms, the rooms hosting happy hour cocktails (Keeping it lit and happy!), an intimate (46 guests) chakra healing and sound bowl room, Valentine’s Day mixers and dating advice panels (“I’m in my early 40s, a founder, I work in tech, I want to meet someone. I went to Columbia.” “OK ladies, contact him, follow him – he’s on the right side of the tracks in Greenwich, Connecticut.”). I even attended one or two rooms that were completely silent (“guided meditation, consciousness observation”). It was all quite intense. Even the silent rooms.
From my week-long sample, I’ve observed the conversations are civil, sometimes interesting and informative, well-moderated and largely respectful. The tone is, in part, set by the use of real names. There are no weird handles on Clubhouse, which goes a long way to minimising trolling.
So what’s it like in there?
I spent the start of the week in the big, well-attended rooms that had a strong self-help, “get-rich-or-die-trying” vibe.
Speakers shared the secrets to success – which included getting up before 4am and doing all sort of Silicon Valleyesque biohacks like fasting and ice baths. They referred to Elon and Jack by their first names, and were mostly male and American. (They are also active in rooms like “Clubhouse is broken” that rail against the call-out culture they say is infecting other platforms, and threatens to be a feature of Clubhouse.)
Is this what people pay thousands of dollars to hear at a motivational speaking conference, I wondered, as I feverishly wrote notes (the sessions are not recorded or able to be recorded), including “you’re going to be part of the problem or part of the solution” and “your vibe attracts your tribe” and “I own everything from gas stations to liposuction clinics and I want to expand using debt”.
Being in a room is not like listening to a podcast. Even the most rambling podcasts have a recognisable arc or consistent tone.
But on Clubhouse, there are surprises. The guy that owns the lipo clinics and gas stations says he can’t expand to buy further companies because he’s black and that limits him because some banks won’t lend to him. And so a conversation about entrepreneurship here has the potential to swerve into a conversation about race.
This “live” aspect gives Clubhouse its intimacy. Some nights, trying to get to sleep, I lay my phone on my pillow as I listened to America wake up to a “Morning, muffins and motivation” seminar. It made me think about times when I was a kid and would have the radio on soft at night, close to my pillow, listening to some syndicated show from America that did love songs and dedications. People would call up and their voices would crack as they recounted their stories of love, or hardship or loss.
And so it is here – sometimes. Sessions can be emotional but Clubhouse is rarely funny. Want laughs? Go to TikTok.
Weirdly, no one mentions Covid much, which surprises me. I guess it’s a bit of a buzzkill when people are trying to find their momentum or market or meaning or muffins. I discover one forum “Will life ever be normal again?” and people raise their digital hands and start crying when they speak. They are overwhelmed by parenting, job losses, illness, lockdowns, winter. There is – to use the words of the former US president Donald Trump – “a lot of death”.
But these gloomy rooms are the exception, not the rule.
There is a definite Clubhouse vibe, and it’s not gloomy. It’s libertarian, success-focused, forward-looking and relentlessly, teeth-grindingly optimistic. You’re only one meeting away from making it big. Really. You are. You just need to hustle. Harder. Hit me up with a DM. Let’s start a room. Check out my bio.
Maybe my algorithm is jammed but if this is the new world, there are no rooms that are truly revolutionary. Everyone wants to be a winner within the current system. A freemarket spirit and prosperity gospel vibe runs through the app. How you can get rich. How you can find love. How you can self-optimise.
“I am manifesting success on all platforms. I am manifesting abundance on all platforms,” I find scrawled in my notebook when my week in Clubhouse is over.
This acceptance of the world and its systems as they are, and belief in the individual as the sole agent of change, means Clubhouse will never be a true disruptor in a political sense. It’s just replicating old ideas that don’t work for everyone, in a new technology.
In this way, it’s of its time and of America. This is the app where we metaphorically sit around the dumpster fire, singing Kumbaya at the party at the end of the world.
Sessions can be emotional but Clubhouse is rarely funny. Want laughs? Go to TikTok