Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry has said that God’s wrath “was the ignorance of the conservative religious class that had led to the coronavirus outbreak in Pakistan”.
“The global outbreak of coronavirus has spread in Pakistan due to ignorance of the religious community and now they say coronavirus is a punishment from God and we need to repent,” he tweeted.
He added that scholars who have the knowledge and the intellect were blessings of Allah, but to give an ignorant status of a scholar was destruction.
“66 studies are going on in which 43 are on new vaccines, 16 on new antibiotics and seven are focusing on antibodies,” the minister said later.
On Wednesday, several of Pakistan’s senior religious leaders announced that they would keep mosques open for group prayers, on a day when the country’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 crossed the 1,000 mark.
The declaration seemed to counter an announcement from President Arif Alvi that upon his request, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University’s religious clerics’ council issued a fatwa — an Islamic religious edict — that public gatherings, including group prayers in mosques, can be banned in the interest of public health.
The Cairo-based university is one of the oldest seats of Islamic learning, founded almost a century before Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world.
The Pakistani clerics said young children, old people, those who were sick or taking care of the sick could stay home. They also guided their followers to install sanitizers at the entrances of mosques, and advised more cleanliness.
