Covid-19 Diary

Dr Yusuf Shabbir, a British Islamic scholar and jurist based in Blackburn, England, began keeping a pandemic diary on 3 May 2020 (10 Ramadan 1441) at the suggestion of a colleague, Dr Riyad Kallingal. Writing from within a community deeply shaped by congregational worship, Shabbir documents how COVID-19 forced an unprecedented disruption of Muslim religious life in Britain: the closure of mosques, the suspension of congregational and Friday prayers, the reimagining of Ramadan and Eid under lockdown, and the fraught question of how to wash and bury the dead according to Islamic rites when bodies were sealed in bags. The diary records how a historic meeting of senior muftis and scholars convened at Darul Uloom Blackburn on 21 March 2020, reaching a unanimous decision to limit mosque congregations to four or five people—a decision Shabbir frames as agonising but necessary, noting that for one scholar present, the gravity of the moment prompted him to request everyone to perform two extra units of prayer before the discussion began.

The corpus is Shabbir’s own lived experience set against a broader archive of Islamic legal opinion: his website, Islamic Portal, published over one hundred COVID-related Q&As and articles addressing everything from the permissibility of wearing masks during prayer to whether COVID tests invalidate fasting to the conditions under which burial without ritual washing (ghusl) is permissible. His method is that of the scholar-practitioner and participant-observer, filtering the public health crisis through the categories of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) while recording the intimate texture of communal grief—the deaths of two local imams from the same Blackburn mosque on a single day, the strangeness of praying Maghrib with only one companion, the improvisation of Eid prayers on residential streets. The diary’s transnational dimension is significant: it moves between the British context and developments in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, and beyond, tracing how fatwas and scholarly opinions circulated globally in real time, and recording moments such as Shabbir’s communication with Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani in Karachi over the correct procedure for bodies sealed in bags.

Its significance for this archive is considerable, as it fills a gap in the Pandemic Stories Digital Databank by offering a perspective rooted in Muslim religious community and jurisprudence—a lens central to millions of pandemic experiences globally but largely absent from English-language life writing scholarship on COVID-19. The diary reveals that for observant Muslims, the pandemic precipitated a theological crisis without modern precedent: the closure of mosques during Ramadan struck at the very heart of congregational worship, and scholars were forced to determine whether the obligation to pray shoulder to shoulder could be suspended to preserve life, whether a funeral without ghusl fulfilled the community’s sacred covenant with its dead, and whether the unprecedented emptying of Islam’s holiest sites constituted a divine test or a jurisprudential emergency. These were not procedural adjustments but questions that shook the foundations of communal devotion, and Shabbir’s diary captures the anguish of navigating them in real time—making it an essential record of a pandemic experience that millions lived but that few documented with such scholarly precision and emotional candour.