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If you’re one of these people still going around telling yourself that the global pandemic is just a fiction, completely made up, fabricated to herald some new world order… wake up. It’s not. For some, it is a health emergency.

Take the friend of my wife. Just a few days ago… healthy, enjoying an active social life, posting selfies as they gathered with their friends… all unvaccinated… all convinced that the global pandemic is a hoax. Now she’s on a ventilator, fighting for her life. Her lungs have given up.

Now all who attended the halaqa are panicking. “We just didn’t know,” they say. “We had no idea.” Yes, despite my wife warning them a year ago, when she lost her own cousin to the virus. Take the vaccine, she petitioned them, but they believed the naysayers instead and carried on regardless, safe in the knowledge that they possessed special knowledge denied ordinary folk.

Not only did they not have the vaccine, but they carried on meeting in their circles of knowledge, laughing and joking, boasting that they were not sheep like the rest of us. If the authorities did all they could to impede freedom of movement, they celebrated taking the village roads to meet up for tea anyway.

So congratulations to the charismatic demagogues we used to call ulema… well done for spreading the nonsense believed by your disciples, who now sit on life support. Well done for filling up the cemeteries with Muslim graves, row upon row of them. No, but a sincere well done: well done for pulling the scales from our eyes and revealing your true scholarship. Worthless demagogues, playing to crowds.

Wake up. Protect yourself and your loved ones. Or be like the halaqa my wife used to attend, who have nothing to help them now but prayers.