Extending The Pause

Rethinking Politics of Care in a Fractured World

Photo by McKenna Phillips on Unsplash

We continue to find ourselves overextended as we navigate the demands of round-the-clock care for an ill family member.

Illness is this fundamental human condition through which we come to truly understand what health is. Illness could be a moment of repair and a time to draw together in care. Yet the world as we know it conditions us to approach illness with fear and avoidance. We are taught to see sickness as an obstacle to productivity, a disruption to be overcome so that we may resume the real stuff of life: producing, progressing, and surviving - the market.

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
—All About Love: New Visions, Bell Hooks

But what if illness were not simply something to fight against? What if it were a phase of life - a time for healing not just of the body, but of the mind and spirit? A moment for uncovering, repairing, and maintaining the networks of care that sustain us?

This experience has led us to reflect deeply on the wider medical system such as the NHS in the UK and how its approach to health is shaped by an underlying psychology of waging war against illness and death. It becomes a battlefield where only the loudest cries, or the most visible suffering command urgency, a reality shaped by chronic disinvestment, the creeping lure of neo-liberal privatisation, and a universalist model of care that prioritises empiricism and Eurocentrism over other healing traditions. Illness envelops you in chaos, while health is measured by your ability to resume your economic role - the cog in the wheel of the machine. Your worth is reduced to a payslip, your existence to numbers on a screen. And in this logic, the possibility of your illness, a sin against productivity, requires a market medicine to reduce your statistical possibility of illness via a new profit driven vaccine or other pharmaceutical solution, delivered annually to ensure productivity. The GDP rules the logic of your health and illness.

Capitalism has defined “health” itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor.

—Health Communism, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant

As Muslims, our prophetic wisdom teaches us that illness is not something to be shunned, but rather an inevitable part of life - one that carries deep obligations: to visit, to care, and to uphold the dignity of the sick, thereby preserving the dignity of our communities.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:
"Whoever visits a sick person, a voice calls out from the heavens: 'You are blessed, and your steps are blessed, and you have made a dwelling in Paradise."
—Hadith 1443, Sunan Ibn Majah

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:
“When a Muslim visits his sick brother, he is walking in the mercy of Allah. When he sits with him, he is immersed in mercy. If he visits him in the morning, seventy thousand angels pray for him until the evening, and if he visits in the evening, seventy thousand angels pray for him until the morning.”
—Hadith 1442, Sunan Ibn Majah

We also come from Global South contexts where care and health have not been placed in the hands of corporate powers or the state, absolving us of our collective responsibility to one another. In an era where these systems dominate, it is vital that we recognise that what is so often dismissed as backward or unprogressive - our communal, compassionate approach to health, life, family, community, and existence - is precisely what can bring repair to this fractured world.

Part of overgrowing will be our ability to honour what we bring and offer alternative views and modes of existence grounded in the ancestral wisdoms we draw from - wisdom that has the potential to heal, reconnect, and restore balance to a world in need of profound repair. If we are to resist the privatising fractures that this system perpetuates and depends upon, then a vital question emerges: ‘How do we, as individuals and collectives, approach illness in ways that truly centres care? That truly centres healing and the building of collective wisdom of healing?’. We must do so in ways that do not debase our communities by merely returning people to the workforce - the cyborg in service of the Market Deities. Or them becoming burdens, and especially economic burdens. Surely we can do better than that?

This vision of health that is rooted in care, repair, building collective wisdom and the dignity of our communities must not be bound to the state and its god - the market. How do we, in our own lives and communities, dismantle the market-driven view of health and nurture something beyond it?

If you can see necropolitics at play here? Is it not imperative that we overgrow it?

When we return—whether next week or the week after—we’ll be discussing Necropolitics, Health, and Warfare. Stay tuned.

And in the meantime, if someone you know is ill or struggling, reach out. Check in. Be patient. Our world depends on our commitment to repair and our ability to grow beyond these necropolitical systems.

Please note that the weekly Wednesday live will be cancelled this week and possibly next week if we need to extend this break in order to focus on care.