Contagion in Islamic Lands: Responses from Medieval Andalusia and North Africa

This paper focuses on the responses to contagion formulated by Muslims in medieval Andalusia and North Africa. Examples are drawn from Islamic legal texts that deal with leprosy and the dilemma of defining contagion in light of certain well-known sayings of the Prophet that deny the existence of transmissible disease. The final portion of the paper examines two plague treatises from fourteenth-century Granada in an effort to gauge how Muslims dealt with an outbreak of contagion in their midst.