Dylan Evans
“The only way to fight the plague is with decency.”
Albert Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with a provocation: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” In a world stripped of transcendence, where the heart cries out for meaning and the universe responds with silence, the question becomes urgent: why go on living?
But what if the universe is not silent—only veiled? What if its meaning is not absent, but patiently unfolding through a moral logic not always visible to human eyes?
Islam confronts the absurd not with denial, but with defiance of a different kind: not defiance against the lack of meaning, but against the false idols of despair, injustice, and nihilism.
As the Qur’an reminds us, “Do not lose hope in the mercy of Allah” (Qur’an 39:53). This is not naïve consolation—it is a radical act of spiritual resistance. In the moral vision of Islam, the self is not a meaningless speck in a dead universe, but a trustee (khalīfa) charged with upholding justice, struggling against oppression, and walking with humility upon the earth.
Thinkers like Ali Shariati and Abdelwahab El-Messiri offer ways to meet Camus on his own ground. They take seriously the existential weight of suffering while refusing to concede the cosmos to absurdity. Their Islam is not an escape from freedom but its deepening: a revolt not just against political tyranny but against metaphysical despair.
What follows, then, is not a refutation of Camus, but a dialogue—a meeting point between the existential and the prophetic.
The Plague
There is a particular kind of despair that sets in when horror becomes routine—when genocide is live-streamed, pixel by pixel, and the world shrugs. For many today, watching the destruction in Gaza unfold in real time has produced not only sorrow and rage, but a profound, paralysing helplessness. Children lie beneath rubble; entire families are extinguished in seconds; and still, the bombs fall. Still, the cameras roll. Still, the so-called “international community” looks away, wrapped in the ceremonial cloth of “complicated geopolitics” and “security concerns.” For those who held on, even tentatively, to the belief that Western liberalism retained some residual moral value, some ability to defend the innocent or uphold law in the face of barbarity, this moment is shattering. As Omar El Akkad puts it, this is a fracture—a severing of the last thread tethering us to the idea that “the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”
This is not just a political crisis. It is a moral and spiritual catastrophe. We are living through what Camus might have called the reign of the plague, though not a literal pestilence this time, but a metaphysical one: a force of unfeeling destruction, of legalised murder, of bureaucratised cruelty. And yet, in such times, Camus believed, we must not surrender. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he insisted that the artist’s duty was to “fashion an art of living in times of catastrophe, to be reborn by fighting openly against the death instinct at work in our society.” That death instinct is not just the violence of bombs and bulldozers. It is also the quiet seduction of numbness, cynicism and despair. To resist genocide is not only to protest it—it is to resist the corrosion of the heart.
Albert Camus’s novel The Plague is, in this light, not a historical allegory but a spiritual companion for times like ours. Set in the Algerian city of Oran, the novel follows a small cast of characters as they confront a deadly outbreak of bubonic plague. The city is quarantined; death multiplies; isolation reigns. And yet, amidst this encroaching darkness, a few people refuse to submit. There is Dr. Rieux, the unassuming physician who treats the sick day after day, not out of hope or ideology but out of decency. There is Jean Tarrou, who organises voluntary sanitation squads in the name of a personal, humane ethic. There is Joseph Grand, obsessively revising the first sentence of his novel—an almost comic symbol of fragile human persistence in the face of futility.
The plague in the novel is not just a disease. As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton observed, it is a symbol of the “tyranny of evil and of death, no matter what form it may take.” Camus is not warning us only about fascism. He is illuminating a broader human tendency: the will to dominate, the justification of cruelty in the name of history, ideology and God. The plague is that recurring temptation in all societies—to kill in the name of order, to dehumanise in the name of security, to destroy in the name of progress.
This is why The Plague speaks so powerfully to our present moment. Gaza is not just a place of suffering; it is a test of our capacity for solidarity, for truth-telling, for resistance to the death instinct in all its forms. To watch children pulled from rubble and do nothing is to become, little by little, a collaborator with the plague. To mouth the euphemisms of “proportionality” and “military necessity” while hospitals are bombed is to participate in the linguistic armature of death.
The absurd and the Islamic conscience
Camus offers no false comfort. He does not promise victory or redemption. What he offers is a way to endure without losing our souls. Dr. Rieux, when asked why he continues to fight a hopeless battle, answers simply: “This is a matter of common decency.” And when asked what decency means, he replies: “I don’t know what it means for other people. But in my case, I know that it consists of doing my job.”
That job, in Camus’s world, is not grandiose. It is not to fix the universe or purify the world. It is to resist despair. To alleviate suffering where we can. To speak honestly, act compassionately, and remain faithful to the living. In times of atrocity, this modest ethic becomes a form of moral rebellion.
This is a profound response to what Camus names as the feeling of absurdity, which arises from a collision when our human hunger for meaning slams against a mute, indifferent universe. But for the Qur’an, the silence of the cosmos is not a sign of its meaninglessness—it is a veil that conceals a deeper, moral purpose. “Do they not reflect within themselves? Allah did not create the heavens and the earth and everything between them except in truth and for an appointed term” (Qur’an 30:8).
Where Camus sees absurdity, Islam sees a hidden grammar: one in which trials are not arbitrary, but necessary for the cultivation of sabr (steadfastness), tawakkul (trust), and ultimately, moral clarity. As the Qur’an reminds us:
“Do you think you will enter Paradise while such [trial] has not yet come to you as came to those who passed on before you?” (Qur’an 2:214)
In the face of absurdity, Camus recommends lucidity without consolation. But Islam offers something more radical: lucidity without nihilism. As Abdelwahab El-Messiri puts it, “Faith is not a flight from reason but a widening of its horizons… a trust that the world has moral weight, even when its patterns remain mysterious.”
The danger of ideology
Camus understood the danger of ideology—how easily it becomes a mask for cruelty. He had no patience for those who killed in the name of utopia. What mattered to him was not history’s verdict but the human face in front of you. That’s why The Plague is not a novel of revolution, but of small acts of decency under unbearable pressure. The volunteers who bury the dead. The doctor who continues to treat the dying, even when it seems futile. The citizen who chooses to tell the truth, even though it changes nothing. These are the forms of love that survive in the time of the plague.
And this is where we must turn now. The genocide in Gaza may continue. The bombs may keep falling. The institutions may remain hollow. But we are not powerless. We can still choose to be human. To grieve the dead. To stand with the living. To speak without euphemism. To refuse collaboration with evil. To write, protest, donate, organise, document, mourn—yes, even love. For love, too, is resistance. It is the refusal to let death define the world.
Camus did not believe in happy endings. He believed in fidelity to life, to suffering, and to one another. Even when the plague ends, Dr. Rieux reminds us that “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” It waits. It bides its time. And so must we remain vigilant—not just against armies or bombs but against the inward death that comes from resignation.
What The Plague teaches is not that we can defeat evil once and for all. It teaches that we can refuse to be part of it. That, even now, amidst ruins, we can fashion an art of living. And that the measure of our humanity is not our power, but our decency. Even now—especially now—we must choose life.
Revolt and rebellion
Camus writes, “I revolt, therefore we are.” The rebel is a figure who asserts dignity in the face of absurd suffering—who affirms human solidarity even when there’s no metaphysical promise. In Islam, there is also revolt—but it is not a cry into the void. It is an uprising in the name of divine justice.
The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said, “Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or oppressed.” When asked how to help the oppressor, he replied, “By restraining him from oppression.”
Ali Shariati reinterprets Islamic history through this lens of committed revolt. For him, figures like Husayn at Karbala are not tragic martyrs of a senseless cosmos—they are moral agents who choose suffering rather than compromise with tyranny. As Shariati puts it: “Being a Husayni means choosing death when life without dignity becomes a form of betrayal.”
Islam does not shy away from suffering; it dignifies it by orienting it toward ethical struggle. This is not stoicism—it is active, hopeful resistance grounded in tawḥīd: the idea that all power ultimately belongs to God, and no Pharaoh, no absurdity, has the last word.
“And never think that Allah is unaware of what the wrongdoers do. He only delays them for a Day when eyes will stare in horror” (Qur’an 14:42).
Toward a moral horizon
For Camus, meaning must be forged through human solidarity, in full recognition of the universe’s indifference. For Islam, meaning is not manufactured—it is discovered through surrender. Not passive surrender, but moral submission to a God who commands justice, mercy, and hope in equal measure.
“Indeed, Allah commands justice, good conduct, and giving to relatives and forbids immorality, bad conduct, and oppression” (Qur’an 16:90).
El-Messiri critiques modernity’s tendency to reduce humans to consumers or biological accidents. Against this flattening, he offers a Qur’anic anthropology: humans as moral subjects, free but accountable, fragile but capable of transcendence. As he writes, “Man is a being whose existence is charged with responsibility, precisely because it is open to meaning beyond itself.”
Islam’s promise is not that suffering will be eradicated, but that it will be recompensed, understood, and made fruitful. The Qur’an’s moral architecture insists:
“Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it” (Qur’an 99:7–8).
In this world, that moral pattern may not always be visible. But its assurance gives the believer what Camus yearned for: coherence without illusion, hope without self-deception.
Sisyphus
Camus ends The Myth of Sisyphus with a startling image: Sisyphus, condemned to eternal futility, is imagined as happy because he embraces his fate without illusions. It is a noble vision. But perhaps it is not the only one.
The Qur’an offers an alternative:
“We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and loss… But give glad tidings to the patient” (Qur’an 2:155).
In Islam, trials are not absurd—they are signs. And the one who bears them with dignity and hope is not a tragic figure, but a moral exemplar.
El-Messiri urges us to reject the flattening of modern life into material causes and aimless motion. For him, as for Camus, revolt is necessary—but revolt must be anchored in a vision of justice that transcends history. Shariati echoes the same truth in theological tones: “Every moment in which you stand against injustice, you bear witness to the unity of God.”
Islam does not offer easy comfort, but it does offer coherence. It does not promise that suffering will vanish, but it does promise that suffering can be transformed into struggle, into patience, into light.
Sisyphus may push his rock alone. But the Muslim, even in darkness, walks in company with history, with purpose, and with the unseen. “Indeed, with hardship comes ease” (Qur’an 94:6).
Dylan Evans is a writer and psychoanalyst based in Brighton. He blogs about Palestine, racism, and Islamophobia at Medium. He accepted Islam in 2016.
