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CHAPTER SIX Contagion Revisited Early Modern Maghribi Plague Treatises This consideration demolishes at the same time what the ancients called the “Lazy Sophism” . . . which ended in a decision to do nothing: for (people) would say if what I ask is to happen it will happen even though I should do nothing; and if it is not to happen it will never happen, no matter what trouble I take to achieve it. This necessity, supposedly existent in events, and detached from their causes, might be termed Fatum Mahometanum, . . . because a similar line of reasoning, so it is said, causes the Turks not to shun places ravaged by the plague. Leibniz, Theodicy Thanks be to God, the arranger of the occasions and causes that determine death and life, and which have an effect in conjunction with illnesses and sicknesses. Ḥamdān b. ʿUthmān, opening lines of Itḥāf al-Munṣifīn NUMEROUS EUROPEANS and Muslims in the early modern period saw a firm division between European and Muslim attitudes toward epidemic disease—and used this difference to demonstrate the inherent “rationality” or “piety” of their respective religious or cultural traditions. In this chapter, I argue that Muslims have always held differing opinions as to the contagious nature of the plague and that the sea change that occurred in the nineteenth century, when the phenomenon of contagion became broadly accepted for the first time, drew on a rich history of debate between Muslim scholars on this subject as well as the “rational science” acquired from European colonial powers and their medical specialists . The argument over contagion takes place against the backdrop of one of the most vexing problems faced by historians of the early modern Muslim world, namely Europe’s rise to political and intellectual prominence and the concurrent “decline” of Muslim nations. A related subject of contention is the portrayal of both “modernity” and “Enlightenment” as arriving in the Middle East for the first time at the hands of colonial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While these master narratives have been critiqued in many of their particulars, and various scholars have shown how local Muslim thinkers in the Middle East and Contagion Revisited 141 elsewhere in the Muslim world were involved in a critical engagement with their heritage before they encountered either European colonialism or Enlightenment, the broad outlines of these narratives have yet to be replaced.1 Here it is my aim to show how the understanding of science and even rationality as somehow intrinsically Western or European has influenced—I would argue distorted—our understanding of Muslim attitudes toward epidemic disease and the concept of contagion in the late medieval and early modern periods. Before continuing, it is worth noting two of the historiographical preconceptions that have supported the traditional narrative that the Muslim world was in a superstitious and irrational stupor before the arrival of European modernity: (1) until recently (the past three decades or so), it was broadly accepted that after a highly innovative formative period, by the height of the Middle Ages, Islamic law and with it Islamic civilization as a whole entered into a period of stagnation that did not end until the imposition of European law codes under the colonial powers; and (2) similarly, it has been widely held—and was debated at length in the nineteenth century— that one of the chief reasons behind Muslims’ difficulty in assimilating European knowledge and ways of thinking in the nineteenth century was Sufism, which, with its otherworldly focus, opposes the materialistic rationality promoted and exemplified by the colonial powers.2 Without entering into an extensive discussion of the validity of these characterizations, I wish to note that they have facilitated an uncritical acceptance and privileging of some sources and epistemologies over others. Specifically, they have discouraged research into the precise ways in which Muslims during this period conceived of the plague and contagion and have prevented us from asking why and exactly how attitudes on these questions both varied and changed. Instead, historians have all too often accepted narratives in which Muslims who acted in what has been labeled a fatalistic manner were following Islam and Muslims who failed to behave in the same fashion were not following Islam. In the following analysis, building on previous chapters, I will show that there have been many differing understandings of what the correct Islamic practice is regarding contagion, all vying with each other for legitimacy and authority. The two main...

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