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?
