Since the beginning of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has been changing human societies in more ways than we can currently comprehend, some of these changes have become visible and the profundity of their impact has become clear, but other changes to our societies and cultures are still invisible and will only reveal their nature and the extent of their impact in years, if not decades to come. The current volume of the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies contains a colourful collection of articles offering a religious perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic in general, including a discussion on the impact of faith in framing and dealing with such events today and in the past as well as some specific observations on the Jordanian case. The contributions come in a variety of languages, from scholars at different stages in their careers; the readers will therefore have a rich volume at their disposal offering a miscellany of points and views. The articles are on the whole brief and concise making for a light reading, they are however quite precise in the theses they make. The volume should be an enjoyable and useful read for the professional researcher as well as the occasional reader on matters of faith and society.
Pandemics, like all collective phenomena, elicit a societal response, and it is there that the moral dimension of human coexistence is made clear and visible. In his concise piece on neighbourliness, HRH Prince el-Hassan bin Talal reminds us, that duty towards the neighbour sits at the heart of social ethics. It is in the recognition of the humanity and difference of our neighbour that societies realize their human wealth and rich variety; and it is in deference to the well-being of the other, that members of a community ensure a healthy and wholesome society for all. All ethical and religious cultures of the world agree on the principle of treating the other as one would treat oneself; the ‘Golden Rule’. This Rule, that was canonized in Christian and Muslim scriptures, as well as the in teachings of other world religions, is the basic principle of neighbourly conduct. Loving thy neighbour is not other than loving oneself; while the love and the duty that people have towards one another are part and parcel of their love for God. God can only love, those who love as well. HRH invites the reader to combine Christianity’s ‘GreatestCommandment’ with Islam’s’Common Word’,hence, ‘The Greatest Common Word’ thus yielding the simplest and most elegant principle for societal wellbeing. From this principle of love, flows the care for the other, and from it follow the moral obligation to protect one another. Prevention of disease and contagion, is not so much a selfish act of self-benefit, but by fine shift of perspective, rather, an altruistic act of benevolence.

The issue then proceeds with articles making specific sociological observations about the impact of the pandemic; the essay by Diana Darwish investigates the impact of the Jordanian governments’ Defence Order No. 13 (March 2020), stipulating the suspension of all non-essential economic activities in the country. The decision left thousands of workers, particularly those that earn their living on daily basis, in a state of existential uncertainty. This eventually led to work-related abuses by some employers, partly unintentional due to the chaos that ensued, but some was due to employers exploiting the vulnerability of the workers. Darwish discusses the governmental response to the economic crisis; she identifies the extraordinary measures that were taken to protect the workers, but she equally demonstrates how some businesses circumvented the law and even took advantage of the crisis. Although the author focuses on the specific case of Jordan, the circumstances she describes were seen in other countries of the region.

Also focusing on Jordan as a case in point, and supplementing the arguments of Darwish, the contribution by Majdi Hussein al-Hmood gauges the public’s support, or lack thereof, for the Jordanian government’s imposition of strict curfew. Al-Hmood analyses social media content; looks specifically at the comments and reactions to the official announcement by the government, of public measures regarding the pandemic. These reactions are extracted from an official Jordanian media channel, and are classified according to their discursive content (pro/con/ambivalent). His essay makes simple but elegant observations about the fluctuating levels of support during the two main waves of infections-cum-restrictions. Whereas the Jordanian street was supportive of the first set of measures taken by the government, support during the second wave declined, mainly because of economic reasons and the people’s need for support or subsidy to survive the curfew. Economic reasons to the side, to be sure, reasons related to the education of the youth, work, be it in industry or agriculture, as well as other psychological factors played a role in the degrees of support that citizens showed towards governmental measures.
Remaining with the Jordanian case, but focusing mainly on the health and education sectors, the essay by Layla Sawwaf offers an overview of the new technologies produced in order to cope with the emerging social reality.

Taking the developments in France to offer an additional perspective she observes the emergence of health portals as safe and cost-effective solutions for health and health-related fields; she also highlights the ensuing debate on security issues related to the use of information and communications technologies. In her article, one finds valuable specific information on the introduction of location apps like vv (security) by the ministry of health, where the use of the app was almost obligatory, at least for those that wish to use governmental facilities and have access to restaurants and to public spaces. She also offers a quick comparative perspective on the app Cradar (Jordan eGov, Medical Program) and similar homologues elsewhere, not least the worldwide diffusion of Cybersanté (EHealth). Sawwaf’s observations regarding the situation in Jordan mainly relate to the education-sector. With more than 1.5 billion students having been deprived of the traditional school-system because of the pandemic worldwide, Jordan was not an exception, and cyber-solutions for distance-learning flourished here as elsewhere. While France saw the introduction of portals and apps like Éduscol, Étincel, Éduthèque, and Kartable, the Arab world saw the emergence of Lamsa, Rawy Kids and Kitabi, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. Sawwaf observes that Jordan was quite active in this regard, and launched in partnership with the Jordanian Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship, portals and apps like JoAcademy, Mawdo03 and Edraak, while building distance-teaching platforms like Darsak. However, the appearance of these novel modes of engaging the student revealed the great disparities in preparedness between the different countries. Sawwaf reveals that affordable accessibility to the net, is one hurdle to be dealt with, while the parent’s literacy in matters internet technology must be improved before we can expect better results for the children. She ends her essay with some observations on the use of artificial intelligence for the future, not only for managing the pandemic, but more importantly for organizing and re-gaining control over the rapid shifts that the world has been living in terms of knowledge-production and information-flow, industry and technology, commerce and supply-and value-chains.
Moving away from the specificities of the Jordanian response, and into the broader context of pandemics, the volume offers two pieces by two senior scholars on the religious history and theology of pandemics. The essay by Emilio Morales de la Barrera explores the impact of the pandemic on the human subject. Putting to the side the pandemic as an objective biophysical event, the author identifies the subjective ramifications of living in the exceptional times of pandemics. His phenomenological observations invite the reader to make three stops to consider ‘uncertainty’, ‘the increased relevance of present time’ and ‘interdependence. Like all dire events and exceptional crises, the pandemic plunged the world in a state of uncertainty.
Uncertainty, itself a psychological sentiment of doubt, lack of clarity, and even fear, is equally a temporal attitude towards the future. Although humans have always known this sentiment, which marks our essential relation to all that is future, the pandemic strengthened the feeling of uncertainty and increased the urgency of finding a new orientation for the individual, the community and even the world. This collective sentiment, argues de la Barrera, has re-established the absolute importance of ‘present time’, as a means for regaining control of the future. Arguing within the discursive frames of high-profile philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, the author considers the future of capitalism in the aftermath of the Covid-tremor and the possible resurgence of communism, or, the contrary scenario, following Yuval Harari, of capitalism digging its roots even deeper. Technology, which the pandemic established as the only stable hegemon that will shape future societies, can lead us down a number of paths. However, and wherever the technology may take us, ‘interdependence’ of services, industries and peoples is an objective reality that caries with it another-subjective- aspect: solidarity. Human solidarity cannot occur without interdependence. As the pandemic showed that in this world, everyone has an effect on everyone, be it through contagion or the supply chain, it equally demonstrated that everyone is morally responsible for everyone. The article, without mentioning it, has given a great illustration of the Islamic prophetic dictum: “you are all herders, and each of you is responsible for their herd, where the ethics of responsibility and the reality of dependence are intimately intertwined. Between the objective and the subjective, the author gives a very stimulating account of the -blurry- shape of things to come.

Further subjective aspects of the pandemic are explored by Mátyás Szalay, who looks at the mask, what it conceals and what it reveals. After a brief but enlightening etymological introduction on masks and persons in Greek drama, the author highlights the elegant, but highly complex changes these elements underwent under Christianity. The features of the dialectic of concealing and revealing is conveyed in the beginning of the article. The mask, an instrument that reveals the persona in Greek drama, is figuratively incorporated into the Christian belief in the masking and unmasking of the divine though the person of Jesus Christ, and through the theology of imago Dei, where every human is given a divine mask in a positive, revelatory sense. Szalay’s remarks invites us to think of a corresponding interpretation of the Quran 7:26, where the ‘robe of piety’ conceals our sins, and functions as a revelatory sign of God. The dialectic of revealing and concealing oneself, the author reminds us, is not a purely personal matter. It is present in all human interactions and is essential to human cultural expression and marks every dimension of life. The world, as such, is accessible to us, but remains ultimately, epistemically inaccessible, and human culture, negotiates and stabilizes this duality.
This duality is most true of the individual, whose cognitive abilities, her soul, is infinite and she is yet unable to fully know herself. The human being is even alien to himself, and will probably never resolve this alienation, as the myth of Narcissus drowning as he seeks to touch his image, reminds us. The author, reveals the role of love, not as an emotional faculty, but as an epistemic factor that enables people to know and recognize each other “the more one loves, the better one can understand the person”.

In light of this, Szalay then moves on to interpret the ramifications of the pandemic in a globalised world in accelerating social and cultural processes that were already present, in less visible forms, underneath the surface of our current soceity. Of these, one may mention what he terms ‘sickness-induced separation’, or how illness became the object that hospitals treat, and not the ill person himself. Patients, in the modern medical establishment are isolated, when indeed, integrating them into a loving community is more conducive to health and would better enable them to reintegrate the meaning of sickness into their lives. Sickness thus becomes an even greater problem, alienating the patient from his family, body, his very self and more. The above element relates to another that the author highlights, i.e. the ‘suspicious body’. The body, already suspected of being the vehicle of sin, becomes, in the medical world, the bearer of another source of suffering: viruses and diseases. The pandemic, the author rightly claims, further enabled the state as well other social powers to ‘regulate and restructure private relationships’; the very severe administrative regulations atrophied whatever was left of private space. In the past, one could safely isolate oneself in times of war or political upheavals and take refuge in the private sphere of the family and through personal relationships like friendship or neighbourliness, today, this is no longer possible. Szalay reminds us of the shocking fact that during the pandemic, radical regulations that eroded our private sphere, were applied wholesale without any public debate.
Other realities that were exacerbated by the pandemic are the ‘virtualisation of relationships’, both private and public; as well as the ‘perception of the other’. Relationships, either by increased virtualization, or by masking, are being forced into rapid change, and are quickly changing the dynamics of human encounter. Be that as it may, the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected humanity has become, and wearing the mask became a sign of solidarity. Although the author seeks to find a positive interpretation of society’s willingness to wear a mask: “we are in the same boat”, one should add that it can be equally interpreted as a reflection of hyper-individualism and people’s willingness to isolate and shut themselves out. Szalay’s article is a succinct demonstration of how the pandemic lifted whatever was left of our illusions of normality, and accelerated the post-modern transformation of human relations: increasingly impersonal, and almost fully disembodied.
Not forgetting the history of pandemics and the religious reception of these events the essay by Ellias Kapeller and Sylvia Khela offers a broad overview of Islam’s and Christianity’s -legal and theological- responses to pandemics, both in the past and in the present moment. The authors frame the religious reception of crisis in terms of ‘coping’ mechanisms, for, after all, faith is tightly related to matters of life and death, from caring for the ill to burying the dead, passing by the need for prayer and the role of communal solidarity in times of hardship. Regarding the legal and theological reception of pandemics, the authors emphasize the traditional question that always accompanied them: whether such crises are divine punishments, or simply natural manifestations and therefore neutral historical events. A sub-question emerges here, especially if we assume divine intervention: are pandemics contagious, as seen in the history of the faiths? The article offers a representative sample of traditional responses to these debates, and explores the similarities, and differences between them; always keeping in view the vantage point of our present situation.