Collected Item: “Covid-19 and Religious Observance”
Give your story a title.
Covid-19 and Religious Observance
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Text, photographs and videos, taken by myself (except the one from Mecca, which is from the internet)
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
Religious observance was one of the many aspects of daily life affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In my home country of Bahrain, congregational prayers were prohibited in mid-March, in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.
The Friday prayers were restricted to only a single mosque, Bahrain’s largest. Under normal circumstances, Muslim congregants would stand shoulder to shoulder in prayer. This was no longer the case as seen in the photo, social distancing and mask wearing was enforced.
The Islamic call prayer (the Azan) was altered, the normal line summoning the faithful to prayer “come to prayer, come to good deeds” was instead replaced with the line “pray in your homes” (as seen in the attached video, which I recorded in Bahrain on).
It was surreal hearing this for the time. The Covid-19 pandemic was the first event, at least in my lifetime, where this was done. Historically, this had precedents in times of plague.
Moreover, the Muslim Hajj pilgrimage, which draws millions to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia every year, was this year limited to a symbolic 1,000 pilgrims.
Having attended the Haj myself a decade earlier and been in the midst of the human masses that descend on Mecca, it was very strange to observe the images of the few socially distanced pilgrims which undertook the Hajj in late July 2020.
In my home country of Bahrain, congregational prayers were prohibited in mid-March, in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.
The Friday prayers were restricted to only a single mosque, Bahrain’s largest. Under normal circumstances, Muslim congregants would stand shoulder to shoulder in prayer. This was no longer the case as seen in the photo, social distancing and mask wearing was enforced.
The Islamic call prayer (the Azan) was altered, the normal line summoning the faithful to prayer “come to prayer, come to good deeds” was instead replaced with the line “pray in your homes” (as seen in the attached video, which I recorded in Bahrain on).
It was surreal hearing this for the time. The Covid-19 pandemic was the first event, at least in my lifetime, where this was done. Historically, this had precedents in times of plague.
Moreover, the Muslim Hajj pilgrimage, which draws millions to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia every year, was this year limited to a symbolic 1,000 pilgrims.
Having attended the Haj myself a decade earlier and been in the midst of the human masses that descend on Mecca, it was very strange to observe the images of the few socially distanced pilgrims which undertook the Hajj in late July 2020.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#Bahrain, #Religion, #Prayer , #Islam , #Muslims , #Hajj , #Pilgrimage , #restrictions #social_distancing , #masks
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Yusuf Abdulwahab
Give this story a date.
2020-11-09