Opinion Just wash your hands

Like nearly every other authority in the world, it is instructing its members to “cover their mouths when yawning and sneezing” and to wash their hands regularly.

The Islamic State — though with reverses across Syria and the Levant, “state” may be too grand a descriptor — is not divinely immune. Like nearly every other authority in the world, it is instructing its members to “cover their mouths when yawning and sneezing” and to wash their hands regularly. In fact, in the travel advisory, described as “sharia directives” in its newsletter Al Naba, ISIS seems so mundane in its concerns that it begs the question: Is COVID-19 the answer to nihilism?

To paraphrase Douglas Adams and Karl Marx, the ISIS advisory holds within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and its appeal ought to vanish “in a puff of logic”. It claims, like religious anti-rationalists everywhere, that the novel coronavirus is “a torment sent down by God on whosoever he wishes”. It goes on to advise its members not to travel to and from Europe, “the land of the epidemic”. The terrorist organisation’s pitch to members has been that those who are chosen are divinely ordained to murder in God’s name. If the ISIS’s destruction has divine sanction, why the squeamishness against God’s scourge?

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Unfortunately, prospective recruits are unlikely to be dissuaded by iron-clad syllogisms. But just following the advisory might help matters. Some of the worst-affected countries in Europe will have one less thing to worry about at borders and airports. And perhaps, while staying indoors and contemplating the narrative of destruction they have been fed, ISIS stalwarts may realise the futility of their ways, and the pain it causes to others. Most of all, the call shows how the coronavirus may have altered, at least for now, the ambitions of the ISIS. Time was, it called for “death” to nearly every way of life, across religions. Now, mercifully, it just wants people to wash their hands.