Vol. 2 No. 1 Specials

In a Malaysian hospital, nurses will bring food to a patient with AIDS, but they won’t help to feed him. They will bring his medication but refuse to help him ingest it. They won’t touch him. His mother, who visits daily to keep him alive, looks upward to God – but there she has worries as well. She cannot seem to find an Imam who will perform funeral rites after her son submits to the inevitable. She has tried to forget the stories she’s heard of Imams who have condemned AIDS victims at their own gravesites, right before the eyes of a grieving family.

Although AIDS is spreading rapidly throughout some parts of the Muslim world, religious traditions have complicated the response to the epidemic, with diverse schools of thought each offering their own solutions to the problems of prevention and treatment, along with supportive verses from the Quran. And while some parts of the Western approach to AIDS are considered helpful, others are deemed incompatible with the distinct economic, social, and religious circumstances of the Muslim world. Christians in Europe and America have grappled with the religious implications of the epidemic since its inception – attempting to reconcile Biblical scriptures, the words of clergymen, and the culture of Christianity with the social and medical aspects of AIDS. Conservative Christian churches in the West remain uncomfortable with providing condoms, even as they take the forefront in providing AIDS drugs around the world. For Islam, the intellectual and political task of reconciling religious imperatives with the complex social demands of AIDS has only just begun. While some Muslims embrace the educational and medicinal triumphs of the West’s fight with AIDS, others see only the failures of Western medicine, and opt for a distinctly Islamic approach.

When compared to other regions of the globe, the Muslim world appears to have avoided the worst devastation of AIDS. However, there are many indications that the epidemic might explode. According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global HIV Epidemic Report for 2003, 28.5 million people have AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Another 1 million cases are present in East Asia; in India and Oceania, there are about 4 million cases. Currently, Muslim countries in these regions have unusually low rates of AIDS: North Africa and the Middle East have a combined 500,000 AIDS cases within their borders, while Indonesia, the country with the largest concentration of Muslims in the world, has only 120,000 cases. But this seemingly unthreatening situation conceals an imminent AIDS upsurge within the Muslim world. In Indonesia, for example, the WHO reports that HIV infections jumped approximately 62 percent, to 210,000 cases, over the course of 2003. In Malaysia the number of documented cases grew by 5,217 in just four months of 2002. WHO health officials note that inaccessible populations, poor healthcare infrastructures, and inexperienced doctors have led to inaccurate reporting about AIDS. For example, UNICEF reports only twenty documented cases of HIV/AIDS in all of Afghanistan. Health surveillance in the war-torn country is limited at best, and UNICEF predicts that thousands more cases of the disease exist as a result of intravenous drug use and increased prostitution.

Advocacy for a distinctly Islamic way of coping with the AIDS epidemic is rooted in failed attempts to transplant traditionally Western methods of prevention to Muslim nations. Mass condom distribution dominates the agenda of the WHO and UNAIDS, often provoking resistance from Muslim religious officials. Indonesia, for instance, declared in June 1995 that it had bought 97 million condoms for free distribution in order to fight AIDS. But some Muslim clerics argue that the increased availability of condoms, and the government's passionate advocacy on behalf of their use, has promoted a condoning view of casual sex that is not only morally corrupt but also counterproductive in the fight against AIDS. Ibrahim Kabo, the chairman of the Islamic Council of Ulama in the Nigerian state of Kano, said at a 2001 HIV/AIDS seminar in Nigeria: “We are disturbed over the social consequences [condom distribution] will bring. We are aware of similar campaigns in Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal which resulted in a high increase in promiscuity.” Others in the Muslim community have argued that distributing condoms without mounting a corresponding educational campaign is dangerous. Without sex education, many Muslims continue to hold strong prejudices against condom use. One villager in Morocco told a physician that “a condom is like a sock and that part of the human body is not expected to have any socks on it!”