Islamologist: COVID-19 Crisis May Spark Global Spiritual Awakening

For the Islamologist Asma Lamrabet, who expresses her opinion in the columns of TelQuel, the coronavirus crisis is the hope of a spiritual renewal. This is why she is convinced that this crisis reveals a long-denied reality, namely that of the global and common destiny of our humanity. Regardless of our religious roots, our convictions, our beliefs or non-beliefs, we suddenly find ourselves, as human beings, facing this feeling of belonging to a planet wounded by our excessive individualisms. "Believers, mystics, atheists, agnostics, we all find ourselves, each in our own way, praying, hoping, devoting ourselves, showing solidarity, helping, loving, giving,..." observes Lamrabet. And to note that "the time is for human solidarity, compassion, self-denial and empathy. And this, whatever our religious or other tradition, is nothing other than the (re)emerging expression of a human spirituality yet to come".

For Asma Lamrabet, "we will surely experience a rebirth of the human being, this time in harmony with his natural environment and in rupture with dogmas of all kinds". The emerging spirituality will not be a new religion, but rather a questioning of the approach of all our religious, mystical, or sectarian ideological traditions. Institutionalized religions will have to emerge from their timid ethnocentrism, from these abstract and meaningless dogmatic concepts of unbelief, she insists.

Asma Lamrabet, who is also an essayist, thinks that the lessons to be learned from this crisis will certainly be innumerable, painful, difficult to put into practice, to lead to a spiritual awakening. An intelligent, serene spirituality, which will not divide humanity into believers and unbelievers, privileged and indigent, those who have all the rights and those who have none. And this, despite the resistance at all levels.

All the crises that our human civilization has gone through have given birth to both the best and the worst afterwards. It is on the basis of this that Asma Lamrabet invites everyone to prayer, so that it may be that of the best to come.