A Cluster Of Coronavirus Cases Can Be Traced Back To A Single Mosque And Now 200 Million Muslims Are Being Vilified

Yawar Nazir / Getty Images A woman wearing a protective mask leaves after attending Friday prayers at the Jama Masjid (Grand Mosque) in New Delhi, March 20. Attendees hitched rides, took trains, boarded buses, and caught flights, crossing state borders and passing through international airports, arriving in thousands in New Delhi from across Asia. Now, Indian authorities fear that many thousands of people may have been exposed to the virus as a result of the congregation of the Tablighi Jamaat group at a mosque in the Nizamuddin neighborhood of New Delhi last month. On March 25, after the entire country was placed under strict curfew, the chief minister of a state in North India attended a major Hindu celebration at a temple. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers stranded away from their homes since the lockdown began, now crowded into soup kitchens and temporary encampments, at tremendous risk of spreading the virus. Making matters worse was an audio clip that emerged last week, shared on WhatsApp and broadcast on some news channels, in which the voice of a man called on Muslims to reject social distancing and continue to gather at mosques. Indian news channels and WhatsApp forwards have said the voice belongs to Maulana Saad, the 56-year-old organizer of the religious gathering where thousands of Muslims met in March. After members congregate every few months, it is customary for them to travel, knocking on the doors of other Muslims to convince them to turn to what they consider a truer form of Islam, which involves dressing and living in more traditional ways. Yawar Nazir / Getty Images Another video, shared by an editor of a prominent news wire agency, claimed that a mosque in the city of Patna was sheltering 30 people from Italy and Iran, among the countries that have been worst hit by the coronavirus. On Wednesday, a viral video that received thousands of shares and views on Facebook and Twitter purported to show a group of Muslim men breathing out hard in a coordinated fashion.