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Over 8,000 Muslim pilgrims gather in Indonesia, despite coronavirus fears
- The pilgrims have gathered in Gowa, near Makassar, for an event organised by Tablighi Jama’at, a global movement of evangelical Muslims
- A similar meeting in Malaysia last week resulted in more than 500 Covid-19 infections
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Thousands of Muslim pilgrims from across Asia gathered in Indonesia on Wednesday, despite fears that their meeting could fuel the spread of a coronavirus, just two weeks after a similar event in Malaysia caused more than 500 infections.
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Organisers and regional officials said the event in the world’s fourth most populous nation had begun, although the regional police chief said he was making a last-ditch effort to persuade organisers to call it off.
“We are more afraid of God,” one of the organisers, Mustari Bahranuddin, said when asked about the risk of participants spreading the virus at the event in Gowa in Indonesia’s province of South Sulawesi.
“Because everyone’s human, we fear illnesses, death,” he said. “But there’s something more to the body, which is our soul.”
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Organisers had rejected a formal request from authorities to postpone the gathering, said a regional official, Arifuddin Saeni.
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