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Islam and HIV/AIDS: Compassion, Action
An international conference in South Africa

In 2005, almost five million people were newly infected with HIV, bringing the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS to over 40 million. Among them, there are some 2.3 million children. Of the adults, almost half (46 percent) of the infected people is female, with this figure being much higher in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 60 percent of people infected are female.

There is increasing evidence of wide underreporting of HIV rates in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, prevalence is already relatively high in several African and Asian countries with large Muslim populations, and overall prevalence rates are on the rise in all Muslim countries.

The more deprived and disempowered a person is, the more likely it is that HIV/AIDS will affect his or her life, and the more severe its impact will be. Once it does affect a person's life, breaking the downward spiral of poverty and disease becomes increasingly difficult. It is both because of the gravity of the disease itself and because of the role it plays in reinforcing poverty that Islamic Relief Worldwide is keen to help find solutions to this pandemic.

Conference Background
A 'Muslim response' to the threat of HIV and AIDS broadly appears to go through three stages in the course of the disease's progression.

• In areas in which the disease is rare, its existence is denied or ignored. People living with HIV and AIDS are considered to be part of a small minority of sinful deviants. 
• As the disease spreads, denying or ignoring HIV and AIDS is no longer possible. There are increasingly frequent calls for appropriate care for those who are living with HIV and AIDS. In addition to this, there is an increasingly urgent call for action to prevent ‘non-sinful' types of transmission (e.g. blood transfusion, mother-to-child transmission, marital transmission). In the field of sexual prevention and drug abuse, Muslim authorities call for abstinence from pre- and extra-marital sex. There is no attention for cultural, social and economic factors which inform sexual practices. 
•  Many people do have pre- and extra-marital sex. HIV continues to spread to them and their partners, and reaches catastrophic proportions. In addition to taking the lives of the people infected, and affecting the lives of the people that surround them, HIV and AIDS cripples wider communities socially and economically. The disease reinforces and aggravates poverty, deprivation, famine and the spread of other opportunistic diseases. When this stage is reached, some religious authorities and groups begin to consider cultural, social and economic factors which inform sexual practices. They also start to discuss the disease's implications for Islamic definitions, such as the traditional definition of orphans (i.e., whether or not a child whose parents are alive but incapacitated by AIDS should be considered to be an orphan).
  

In South Africa's Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike, this third stage has been reached. The disease is no longer as much of a taboo as it is in much of the rest of the Muslim world, and open discussions on its causes and consequences are increasingly common. South Africa is an ideal location for a conference of this type, as it enables Islamic scholars to engage in meaningful dialogue, not only with each other, but also with organizations that have been active in the fight against HIV and AIDS for years, and with Muslims and non-Muslims who are actually living with the disease.

Conference Objective
To develop and subsequently apply approaches to HIV/AIDS which are both effective and Islamically sound. These approaches will be developed jointly by Islamic scholars, HIV/AIDS-related practitioners, and people living with HIV/AIDS. The approaches will be based on Islamic teachings and examples of good practice, and they will build upon existing Muslim and interfaith declarations related to HIV/AIDS.