Coronavirus: Hundreds of Muslims pray together from balconies in Morocco

Country on lockdown since 19 March, with mosques, schools and nonessential shops all shut

Hundreds of Muslims in Morocco have been filmed praying together from their balconies as the country’s lockdown continues amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A state of medical emergency was declared on 19 March, which, as with many other countries, has closed all but essential stores and forced residents to stay indoors.

On Friday, many mosques throughout Morocco — and the wider Muslim world — stopped communal prayers for the first time in living memory.

After the imposition of such restrictions, locals in Tangier, a coastal city in the country’s north-west, took to their balconies and rooftops on Saturday evening to take part in mass prayer.

In footage widely shared on social media, hundreds of Moroccans can be heard chanting dhikr (devotional acts of remembrance) and supplications while asking Allah for relief from the coronavirus outbreak.

Prayer is one of the “five pillars” of Islam, performed five times a day by the devout, but enjoined as a communal activity at noon on Fridays.

But with the rapid spread of Covid-19 across the globe, some governments have suspended communal prayers or closed mosques entirely, leaving many of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims to pray at home, at work, in parks or in the street.

In Mecca, Islam’s holiest sanctuary, the usually crowded courtyard around the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque has been left all but deserted after Saudi authorities ramped up the country’s containment measures.

At Riyadh’s al-Rajhi mosque, only the imam, the muezzin who sings the call to prayer, and other staff were allowed inside instead of the thousands who normally attend during Friday prayers.

“This feeling is indescribable ... the minarets are crying. The mosques were once full of worshippers,” Nasser Mohammed, the mosque muezzin, told Reuters last week.

A number of Muslim countries have been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus outbreak.

Last month, a missionary gathering in Malaysia, attended by 16,000 Muslims from southeast Asia, created the largest known viral vector in the region, generating 670 coronavirus cases in half a dozen countries. Weekly prayers were later called off in Malaysia.

Crowded shrines in Iran, drawing pilgrims from that country and Shia Muslims from other nations, have also helped accelerate the spread of one of the largest outbreaks of coronavirus so far. To date, 1,934 deaths and more than 24,800 cases have been confirmed in Iran.

In Morocco, the country has recorded 170 infections and five deaths as of 25 March.