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Coronavirus: I attended tabligh mass Islamic prayer in Malaysia, now I’m in hospital
- Khairi Akbar says nobody could have predicted event that attracted thousands of participants would turn into Malaysia’s largest virus cluster
- Now he is fighting negative perceptions of the movement – from his hospital bed as he recovers from the coronavirus
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Khairi Akbar has been active in the Tabligh Jamaat missionary movement for years.
A regular at the mass Islamic prayer session it hosts in Malaysia annually, Khairi said this year’s gathering from February 28 to March 1 had seemed no different.
He recalled thousands of fellow Muslims sitting in the mosque praying together, eating together, and listening to sermons on “how to rectify our own flaws, how to prepare ourselves for the afterlife, that sort of thing”.
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“We talked about the importance of the mosque in communities and how men must make the mosque ‘alive’,” he said.
But there was a difference to this year’s event: its disastrous consequences. The novel coronavirus spread through the gathering, which had attracted between 12,000 and 16,000 participants, turning it into Malaysia’s largest cluster of infections. In the weeks since the tabligh, nearly 600 attendees have tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and there may be many more cases to come as hundreds or perhaps thousands of the participants are yet to be tracked. The Ministry of Health believes 16,000 people attended the event and 4,000 are still missing; the tabligh says that based on the mosque capacity, no more than 12,500 people could have attended and 1,500 are missing.
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