COVID-19 Reignites Debate Over the Relationship Between Science and Religion in Islam

The “explanation” offered by many believers—both Muslim and non-Muslim—regarding the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, viewing it as either a divine test or a punishment, raises fundamental questions. It prompts a reconsideration of the nature of the relationship between science and religion, as well as the dynamic between God, humanity, and the universe within the context of Islam as it is understood and practiced by its followers today.

The Jabriyya and the Qadariyah

This debate over the nature of such relationships first surfaced regarding human actions: does God create, will, and preordain them for man, or is man the sole creator of his own actions, possessing the free will to choose and act? These questions led to the emergence of the Qadariyah school toward the end of the Rashidun Caliphate. This movement denied divine predestination, asserting instead that humans possess the capacity for independent action and choice. Concurrently, an opposing doctrine emerged, known as the Jabriyya, which argued that man is compelled in all his actions and possesses no freedom of choice, as it is God who creates and wills these acts, forcing their execution.

The crux of the conflict between the Jabriyya and the Qadariyah regarding the God-man relationship lies in the nature of divine omnipotence. If human actions are the product of individual creation, choice, and free will, as the Qadariyah contend, it implies that God’s power is limited and restricted, as it would not extend to human deeds. Conversely, the Jabriyya argue that if God creates, prescribes, and ordains man’s actions, then divine power is absolute, without bounds or restrictions. Applying this to the pandemic, according to Qadariyah doctrine, if an individual chooses of their own free will to associate with COVID-19 patients and subsequently contracts the disease, they are the sole cause and responsible party for their infection, independent of divine will or power. The Jabriyya, however, would maintain that the transmission of the virus is not a result of the individual’s choice to interact with the sick, but rather the exclusive will of God, who decided to inflict the disease upon them.

The Denial of the Principle of Causality

As the previous example illustrates, there is a clear cause (physical contact) that explains the result (the transmission of the infection). This provides a natural, scientific explanation that leaves no room for the intervention of divine will or power. It is precisely this conclusion that proponents of the Jabriyya viewed as a limitation of God’s omnipotence, leading them to reject and combat Qadariyah doctrine. Later, during the second half of the 5th century AH, Al-Ghazali approached this issue from a broader perspective. He expanded the debate beyond the relationship between God and human action to include God’s relationship with the universe, nature, and its phenomena. This led him to deny the existence of causality—the very mechanism many use to explain natural and cosmic phenomena. Al-Ghazali argued that if every phenomenon had an inherent cause explaining its occurrence, God’s power would not only be limited, but He would become entirely unnecessary. Phenomena such as rain, combustion, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the cycle of day and night, motion, rest, disease, pandemics, procreation, death, floods, and droughts would be explained by their own internal causes. To prevent a worldview where God’s existence becomes superfluous, Al-Ghazali denied the principle of causality. He argued that this principle is merely a habit formed by observing the consistent association between two phenomena—the first of which we label the cause and the second the result—much like paper burning when it touches fire. We conclude that fire is the cause of the paper’s combustion, whereas, in Al-Ghazali’s view, the true and direct author of that combustion is God, not the fire.

The Denial of Causality and the Beginning of the Era of Decline

While modern microphysics—specifically quantum physics—has redefined the concept of cause compared to classical Newtonian physics, it has by no means diminished the role of causality as a fundamental prerequisite for scientific knowledge. On the contrary, it has confirmed that to deny causality is to strip away the very foundation of knowledge, which relies on explanation through cause and effect. Without the principle of causality, there can be no science or rational understanding of nature and its phenomena. Consequently, Al-Ghazali’s rejection of causality marked the dawn of an era of decline and stagnation in the Muslim world—a state from which it has yet to emerge. This shift enshrined the dominance of superstitious and esoteric thinking, legitimizing the authority of “sacred ignorance” and paralyzing reason in its search for the natural causes of phenomena, thereby stifling the emergence and growth of experimental natural sciences among Muslims.

The triumph of obscurantism and “sacred ignorance” over rational and scientific thought cannot be attributed solely to Al-Ghazali’s prestige and his vast influence on Islamic discourse. It was equally driven by the ruling classes’ embrace of this irrational vision, which they actively encouraged and promoted. Sovereign rulers perceived any restriction on God’s direct intervention in nature or human behavior—through the principle of causality or the doctrines of the Qadariyya—as a direct threat to their own absolute power. It was for this reason that the Umayyad caliphs executed Ma’bad al-Juhani and Ghaylan al-Dimashqi, pioneering figures of the Qadariyya movement and defenders of free will, while favoring the spread of fatalism (Jabriyya). This latter doctrine exonerated leaders from responsibility for their injustices and sins, attributing all their actions to the will of God alone, who was said to have decreed their deeds without allowing them any freedom of choice.

Thus, politics has historically instrumentalized Islam for its own ends, interpreting religion in ways that legitimize the injustice and despotism of those in power. It was therefore inevitable that a conservative and backward reading of faith would receive official backing and widespread dissemination at the expense of a rational approach that recognizes human freedom and relies on causality to explain natural phenomena. This explains the victory of sacred ignorance, the Jabriyya, and irrational thought based on the rejection of causal explanations. Al-Ghazali’s ideas denying causality were hailed as a stroke of genius, and his works—hostile to philosophy, logic, and reason—became the definitive authority for this religious “sacred ignorance.” In contrast, the rationalist writings of Averroes (520–595 AH) were consigned to the flames and his enlightened ideas were scorned, only to be later welcomed and given their due value in Christian Europe.

Al-Ghazali’s Questions Also Echoed in the Christian World

In this context, it is worth noting that medieval Christian Europe also witnessed a widespread prevalence of mysticism and superstition, far more pronounced than in the Muslim world. These were rooted in a conservative reading of religion tailored to serve the interests of the feudal elite. Whenever rational and scientific truths conflicted with religious dogmas, the former were rejected on the grounds that they opposed the Christian faith, while the latter were imposed as absolute truths in accordance with the Gospels. The Christian world thus experienced a dynamic similar to that seen in Islamic lands regarding fatalism, the Qadariyya, and the principle of causality.

Regarding this principle of causality, Christian philosophical thought from the Renaissance through the end of the 18th century reached the same initial conclusion as Al-Ghazali: if phenomena result from natural causes, God risks becoming superfluous, since everything can be explained without recourse to divine intervention. However, while Al-Ghazali stopped at this observation and rejected causality to preserve divine omnipresence and omnipotence, Christian thinkers of that era emphasized the second consequence—one overlooked by the Muslim theologian. If every natural phenomenon stems from a direct divine act, then any scientific knowledge of nature becomes impossible, because genuine knowledge requires understanding causes. Once everything is attributed to God as the sole cause, seeking natural causes loses all purpose and becomes unachievable. Where Al-Ghazali sacrificed causal knowledge to protect faith in a God who causes everything, Christian philosophy sought to reconcile divine faith with the scientific understanding of nature. How did it achieve this?

How Did the Christian World Come to Embrace Reason to Understand Nature?

Reconciling faith in a God who created the universe with the simultaneous conviction that human beings can unlock nature’s mysteries, understand its causes, and discover its governing laws required a specific solution: acknowledging that when God created the universe, He simultaneously established the laws by which it operates. Thus, every event occurring in this universe stems from cause-and-effect relationships within the framework of the laws governing and explaining its occurrence. God does not intervene as a direct agent in triggering each phenomenon; rather, He is present through the laws He established, which necessarily produce these phenomena through causality. This is what enables us to explain an occurrence by identifying its natural cause and discovering the governing law as a necessary consequence of that cause. The classic clockmaker analogy perfectly illustrates this relationship between God and a universe governed necessarily by laws He created: the clockmaker does not live inside the clock mechanism to manually move its hands at every moment (which would align with Al-Ghazali’s theory). On the contrary, when he built the clock, he also designed the mechanical principles through which its hands turn autonomously, independent of the maker himself. The same applies to the universe: with all its components and phenomena, it “functions” according to laws created by God, operating autonomously and independently of ongoing divine intervention, much like the movement of a clock functioning independently of its creator.

This was the path taken by philosophical thought within the Christian tradition starting in the European Renaissance—combining faith in God, belief in natural causes and laws, and confidence in humanity’s ability to understand these laws and explain phenomena independently of religion. Unlike Muslim thinkers who sacrificed the search for natural causes in favor of fatalism and predestination, this approach preserved both religion and science, faith and reason, without sacrificing one for the other. This explains why so many scientific breakthroughs, from the Renaissance through the 20th century, originated within monasteries and churches at the initiative of Christian clergy—such as Copernicus (1473–1543), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and Galileo (1564–1642) in astronomy; Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) in genetics; and Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), architect of the Big Bang theory and the expansion of the universe.

How can one explain why these figures formulated theories that contradicted the very Christian teachings they themselves adhered to? The answer lies in their ability to separate the religious sphere—built on faith, belief, and worship—from the scientific realm, understood as a pursuit of causes aimed at discovering the fundamental laws of nature. Among Muslims, however, this separation has proven difficult: for them, much like Christians in the Middle Ages, science must remain subordinate to religion and conform to its dogmas, or risk rejection. This explains why Christians and Buddhists can hold numerous superstitious and esoteric religious beliefs—at times even more deeply rooted than those found among Muslims, as previously noted—without these beliefs hindering their generation of scientific knowledge, which enjoys complete independence from religion. In the Muslim world, by contrast, superstitious and metaphysical thinking acts as a major obstacle to the spread of rationalist and scientific thought, because reason and science are required to serve religion and submit to its truths and axioms.

On the other hand, if the superstitious and irrational dimension of religion has prevailed over its reformist and enlightened side among Muslims, it is because political authorities, ever since the Umayyad era, have encouraged the spread of such irrational thinking. This mindset serves as one of the ideological levers that authoritarian regimes rely upon to exercise tyranny and hoard power. The greatest danger to these despotic regimes lies precisely in the spread of scientific and rational thought. Consequently, while these regimes willingly adopt the technological products born of science and rationality, they adamantly reject the critical mindset and intellectual approach that produced them.

Islam as understood and practiced by Muslims:

As for the objection that Islam encourages the use of reason and reflection on natural phenomena to understand them, it misses the point. Why? Because I am not dealing here with Islam’s theoretical stance on reason, science, and causality, but rather with the attitude of Muslims themselves—that is, Islam as it is understood and practiced by Muslims. The same applies to Christianity: there was a time when it sank far deeper into superstition and hostility toward reason and science than Islam ever did, during an era when Christians burned, excommunicated, and tried scholars. Yet Christianity eventually transformed into a faith that no longer opposes reason or science, once Christians began separating the religious sphere from the scientific domain. In this framework, religious certitudes exercise no control over scientific truths—a control that, had it persisted as it has among Muslims, would have prevented the development of scientific knowledge yielding conclusions contrary to those certitudes—and scientific truths exercise no authority over religious postulates, which otherwise would have led to the abolition of religion on the grounds that its truths are not scientific.

This separation between the realms of religion and science explains why the persistence of superstitions among certain Christians, or the practice of prayer and supplications to ward off plagues and epidemics, in no way undermines science or the pursuit of causes, which are viewed as a domain independent of religion, its rites, and its beliefs. Thus, Georges Lemaître, for instance, as a devout Christian, prayed and implored God during moments of worship. Yet when observing celestial bodies, he did so strictly as a scientist faithful to the scientific method, entirely independent of prayer, devotion, faith, or piety. For a Muslim believer, by contrast, it is difficult to imagine an astronomer along the lines of Georges Lemaître. If such a Muslim scholar were to observe the stars through a telescope, he would, in all likelihood, immediately connect what he sees to the majesty and omnipotence of God rather than to the objective laws revealed by astronomy. By conflating the scientific domain with the domain of faith, he ends up explaining a natural phenomenon—governed by its own causes and laws—through the lens of his Islamic religious convictions.

The hegemony of a culture of fatalism and predestination:

It is clear from this discussion, taking the COVID-19 pandemic as our starting point, that it is inconceivable to see Muslims produce medicines and vaccines against diseases and pandemics as long as they subject science—which is founded on causality—to a religion that views God as the ultimate cause of all things. This belief in an absolute divine causality encompassing both natural and human phenomena, embedded at the very core of the Islamic faith, directly contradicts the search for natural causes behind natural phenomena, which is an indispensable condition for the emergence of scientific knowledge.

The danger of reducing everything to divine causality lies not only in the absence of major scientific contributions from Muslims, but above all in the predominance of a culture of fatalism and predestination to explain both natural and human phenomena. Such a worldview prevents the formation of rational and scientific thinking capable of understanding nature in order to master and harness it. Indeed, we saw the immense difficulty authorities faced in enforcing lockdown measures, as numerous citizens defied these orders. They did so not out of a love for freedom, as some recalcitrant Europeans did, but because of a religious conviction that this epidemic was a divine decree that only God’s will could end, rendering lockdowns or sanitary states of emergency ineffective. This is what prompted a reckless few, answering calls from Salafists and merchants of religion, to violate the lockdown on the night of March 21–22, 2020, in Tangier, Tetouan, Fez, and Salé, demonstrating en masse to shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” With blatant foolishness, they put their “sacred ignorance” on full display, sending a crystal-clear message to the authorities rejecting health measures, which they perceived as a challenge to divine will and a rebellion against God’s decreed fate.

The state’s responsibility, first and last:

Why have Muslims failed, unlike Christians, to move beyond relying on “sacred ignorance”—based on a backward interpretation of religion—to explain nature and its phenomena, or to separate the religious sphere from the causal explanation of nature? Because, in Muslim societies, as we have emphasized, it is the state itself that preserves, cultivates, and ensures the spread of this “sacred ignorance,” using it as a tool for intellectual, ideological, and political control. Consequently, no shift in how Muslims view natural phenomena—as autonomous, objective facts governed by causes and laws independent of faith—can occur until the state decides and desires it. To achieve this, the state must start by reforming school curricula and overhauling how it manages religion and exploits it politically. Such a transformation, however, presupposes a genuine commitment by the state to the democratic exercise of power, thereby relinquishing the “sacred ignorance” that has long served as a pillar of its authoritarian and despotic regime.

We thus see the extent to which politics is omnipresent: whether in an authoritarian regime relying on “sacred ignorance”—that is, on superstitious and metaphysical certainties—or in a democratic regime requiring rationality and logical, scientific planning in the management of public affairs.

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