91Èȱ¬

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Dr Myriam François, journalist and research associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS University of London.

Good morning.

Yemen is one of the Arab world's poorest countries. Since 2015, it has been devastated by a civil war which has brought famine, cholera and untold misery on its people. The UN has warned that in addition to the devastation wrought by war, Coronavirus could spread faster, wider and with deadlier consequences than many other countries in the world.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that the countries we think of as war zones were once thriving cultural and intellectual centres – Iraq, Syria and Yemen. As a Muslim, my connection to these places is powerful despite never having visited them, in no small part because the body of theology which remains a reference for Muslims today is indebted to intellectuals from these parts of the world. It’s devastating to see people who once produced some of the world’s most illustrious poetry, critical thinkers and powerful artists, reduced to headlines featuring starving children.

Justice is a central concept within Islam – the Quran tells us that we should always seek peace, but we cannot accept injustice, as the pleas of those who are suffering are cries we will be accounted for responding to – or not. We pray to God for help, but it is through the actions of humans that this must usually manifest. One person’s prayers are answered when we decide to make other people’s suffering our problem and when we consider the sometimes small ways in which we can affect change.

May we all be the light which others are praying for and may we remember that despite the borders and boundaries created to divide us, we are one family and that pleas of any of our children is the distress of our own child. Amin.