After Covid
I walked into the Athenaeum on Pall Mall in London after an important meeting with a chief executive who had flown from Boston to discuss the challenges of integrating the state’s hospitals. In a club of scientists, writers, philosophers and judges, I found myself thinking about how much had changed in twelve months.
I had expected to write about the year of artificial intelligence: the year the machine entered our homes and conversations, changing our relationship with knowledge, work and the state.
Then it occurred to me that this was not so much the first year of AI as the first year in which I realised we are truly living after Covid.
Human history has strange ways of dividing time. There was the event of Jesus Christ, and the world came to reckon its calendar as before Christ and after. Without comparison in sanctity or station, Covid may prove to have been such a rupture: a world before Covid, and a world after it.
We know the brutality of the disease. We know the fear of illness and the anxiety surrounding vaccination. We know of Long Covid, and of effects on the body and nervous system that medicine is still trying to understand.
What we discuss less is what happened inside our homes. Families began speaking differently. Strange quarrels appeared. Sleep, nerves and memory changed. Loss did not always find a language. It is as though every household emerged from the pandemic carrying something it still cannot quite describe.
Covid was global, but its deepest geography may have been the household.
Stranger still, we never gathered afterwards.
I had imagined a world health conference, as nations convene a peace conference after a great war: What happened? What did we learn? How do we protect humanity from the next pandemic, or from the effects of a changing climate?
Instead came the logic of the spoils: vaccines for those who possessed them, medicines for those who could afford them, and then a rush towards the next crisis.
That is why I am hopeful about the World Health Organization. Among those proposed as possible candidates to lead it are two Arab women whose calibre I know: Saudi Arabia’s Dr Hanan Balkhy, a daughter of Makkah, and Qatar’s Dr Hanan Al-Kuwari. I worked with them at Hamad Medical Corporation and on health reform in Qatar. In them I saw some of the finest that the Arab world has offered to public health.
Perhaps the year we expected to belong to artificial intelligence might become something more beautiful: a year for Arab women and public health; a year in which we restore the household before attempting to restore the world.
A year of Hanan.
For hanan also means tenderness.
And healing is not forgetting the illness. It is becoming able to speak about it.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and is tested in the world.
Explanatory note: The Athenaeum on Pall Mall, London, was founded in 1824 as a meeting place for those distinguished in literature, science and the arts. Its members have included Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens; Michael Faraday was among its early leading figures.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.