Mosques will be deserted, daylong fasts will be broken in isolation and in some places the calls to prayer that rally believers together will end with a different exhortation: worship from where you are.

Ordinarily during Ramadan, the holy month that commences this week, Muslim community life swells with special prayers at mosques and crowded iftar dinners that can stretch into the early hours.

But that kind of socialising now risks spreading coronavirus, and bans on religious and family gatherings will persist across much of the Islamic world even as businesses and government offices start to reopen.

“It’s going to be difficult and depressing,” said Mohammad Faoury, who works for a refugee organisation in Amman, Jordan. “Since I’m single and live alone, Ramadan is the month when I can finally see my family for extended periods of time. It’s a time we strengthen the bond.”

The virus has emptied Islam’s holiest sites at the most sacred time of year. The Ka’bah, the gold-embroidered shrine in Mecca’s Grand Mosque, is closed to worshippers along with the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.

“Our hearts are tortured from pain in the holy month of Ramadan,” said Sheikh Omar al-Kiswami, the imam and director of al-Aqsa, where only guards and mosque employees will be permitted to pray. “It is a very sad moment in the history of Islam.”

Jamia Masjid, one of the oldest and grandest mosques in the disputed south Asian territory of Kashmir, usually overflows in the evenings with people gathering for prayer and discussing religion, politics and life. This month it will sit silent for the first time in living memory.

“In Ramadan I would pray all five times of the day at Jamia and would also do iftar there, but this time it is a matter of life and death,” said Fatima, 74, from Srinagar. “There is danger outside and the best thing is to stay home, stay quiet.”

A locked gate at Jamia Masjid in Srinagar. Photograph: Dar Yasin/AP

Indonesia has banned mudik, an annual homecoming in which tens of millions of people travel to see their families for Eid-al-Fitr, the festival that marks the end of the fasting month.

Across Israel and Palestine, mosques – as well as churches and synagogues – have been closed. Abdullah Abu Galous, a 38-year-old hardware shop owner from the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said it felt as if Ramadan had been cancelled.

“I would never have thought that a tiny virus could stop us from celebrating the month of Ramadan. It has held more than one billion Muslims throughout the world hostage,” he said.

Authorities in Turkey have so far resisted calls for a total lockdown, insisting the wheels of the economy must keep turning. But Ramadan will be marked by a new four-day lockdown starting from Thursday night, during which families will not be able to travel to eat and celebrate together without risking fines or arrest.

The emergency has raised unprecedented issues for many of the religion’s 1.8 billion adherents as they prepare to abstain from food and water during sunlight hours.

Several Arab newspapers have carried expert assurances that fasting has not been shown to reduce resistance to the virus. Al-Azhar, Egypt’s top Sunni mosque, said last week that coronavirus could not be used as an excuse not to participate unless it was scientifically established that drinking water helps to ward off the disease.

Women shopping in Baghdad after lockdown measures were partially eased. Photograph: Khalid al-Mousily/Reuters

Lockdowns have curtailed the production schedules of some of the soap operas that are a staple of Ramadan evenings in many homes, leaving TV executives scrambling to fill airtime during their most lucrative advertising season.

But the inability to pray and eat together may be most keenly felt. In the UK, the Muslim Council of Britain has encouraged people to hold virtual iftars on social media.

More than 1,400 people have signed up for nightly iftar broadcast of the call to prayer, and guest speakers are being organised over Zoom by the UK-based Ramadan Tent Project, with the option for viewers to split off into smaller group discussions. “Just because you’re in quarantine, it doesn’t mean you have to spend Ramadan alone,” said Rohma Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the project.

Abu Ibrahim, 32, said he was keeping this year’s difficulties in perspective. In 2011 he observed Ramadan under airstrikes in Dara’a, southern Syria. The following year he spent the first day of the month dodging Syrian army patrols to escape on foot to Jordan.

“People say, how are we going to get through this Ramadan when we can’t see each other, when there’s a health risk,” he said. “We used to put food on the table and hear the sound of bombing. We were scared of death, of our families dying. Coronavirus doesn’t worry me. I’m in my house, with my family, we’re safe, we have electricity, phones, food.”

A seller cleans a fanous, a traditional Ramadan lantern, at his shop in Cairo, Egypt. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

Fa’ek Thyabat, the imam of Bab Al-Rayan mosque in Amman, said the Qu’ran did not explicitly guide worshippers on how to observe Ramadan during a plague, leaving worshippers to navigate the uncharted territory with reference to the wider tradition.

“There is a hadith [a prophetic saying] that says: ‘If you hear of a plague in a land, then do not go into it. If it happens in a land where you are, then do not go out of it,’” Thyabat said.

“Similarly, if we know that Muslims who eat garlic and onion are advised not to go to mosques because the bad breath will hurt mosquegoers, it is easy to conclude that you cannot go to the mosque when there is the risk of spreading contagious disease.”

In a faith without formal hierarchies, not all Islamic leaders share Thyabat’s interpretation. Hundreds of worshippers continue to turn out for prayers in Herat, Afghanistan, where a hardline preacher, Mujib Rahman Ansari, recently advised his followers that death from coronavirus was a form of martyrdom.

In neighbouring Pakistan, the government has compromised with clerics by lifting a ban on group prayers during Ramadan on condition that no carpet is laid, children and older people stay away and worshippers wear masks and keep six feet apart.

Worshipers offer noon prayers at a mosque in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Photograph: Anjum Naveed/AP

Maulvi Haider Zaman, a prayer leader in Islamabad, said coronavirus was “not an issue” and insisted it was important people still came to offer prayers during Ramadan.

“People are not afraid to perform their prayers,” he said. “We will be imposing social distancing in the mosque but I don’t think it is needed as coronavirus will not affect people in mosques. It’s the home of Allah.”

In Jordan, Thyabat said he was instructing worshippers to focus on the upsides. Ramadan in past years had been an occasion for increasingly lavish iftar feasts and shopping bonanzas, he said. “This Ramadan is an opportunity for people to re-adopt the real spirit of fasting, which is about austerity and helping relatives and needy people.”

Additional reporting by Sufian Taha, Jassar Al-Tahat, Shah Meer Baloch, Akhtar Mohammad Makoii and a reporter in Srinagar