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CHAPTER THREE Contagion Contested Greek Medical Thought, Prophetic Medicine, and the First Plague Treatises As for what concerns children, al-Ṭabarī has said that if one suspends a fragment of elephant tusk around the throat of a child, it will be protected against the children’s plague (wabā’ al-aṭfāl). al-Shaqūrī, eighth/fourteenth century “Master, shall I mention the advice that al-Tabari gives on this topic, namely putting an elephant’s tooth on children as a way of keeping the plague at bay?” “Don’t bother with that. Note down instead that ‘prayer is the preferred weapon of the believer.’ But God Almighty has said: Say, O people, act in accordance with your station. I am acting, and you will know. . . . “There are specialists in law and hadith who claim that the plague is caused by a pinprick from the jinn and who deny the possibility of contagion as being contrary to observation, feel, experience, and research. Concerning such people I am reminded of an apt comment that Ibn al-Khatib made on several occasions: ‘Ignoring the things that science tells us is an act of malice, a taunt against God Himself, and an insult to the hearts of all Muslims.’ “Just a minute more before we finish. It’s not correct to attribute all the earthly causes of the plague to foul, humid air alone. Another factor involves symptoms of senility in a political regime, circumstances that are often characterized by unjust taxation and levies that oppress farmers and result in reduced activity and then total collapse. That in turn leads to food shortages, inflation and rebellion, followed by famines and plagues. Politicians bear a large responsibility for this chain of events. That’s why human beings should, to the extent that they can, take all possible precautions .” Ibn Khaldūn in Bensalem Himmich’s The Polymath THE BLACK DEATH arrived on the Iberian peninsula near Almería in June of 1348 (Rabīʿ I of 749), from where it spread throughout the Naṣrid kingdom of Granada, reaching Granada itself in the winter of 749–50/1348–49 and 68 Infectious Ideas Málaga in March of 750/1349.1 While it is difficult to know how many people were killed by the epidemic—and its demographic impact may well have varied considerably regionally—what evidence we do have suggests that it was a devastating natural disaster, which lasted through the fall of 750/1349. Lirola Delgado, Garijo Galán, and Lirola Delgado have shown that more than half the number of scholars living in Almería during this period—twelve of twenty-one—died during the Black Death, though they rightly caution against deducing from this that the city in general suffered a mortality of 50 percent.2 Similarly cautious, Calero Secall has suggested that at the height of the epidemic, more than three thousand people may have died in a single month in Málaga, close to one-fifth of the estimated population.3 Regardless of the exact number who died, the plague was a catastrophic disaster for the Naṣrid kingdom and posed numerous challenges to its inhabitants. Among these were whether to attempt to flee the plague or not, how to care for those who had fallen sick with the disease, and whether the plague should be considered contagious. Numerous prominent Andalusī scholars rose to the occasion and wrote plague treatises in response to these questions, most notably among them Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 776/1374) and Ibn Khātima (d. 770/1369).4 In doing so, they drew upon an understanding of the plague that was shaped by several discourses or fields of knowledge: Islamic medicine, Prophetic medicine, and Islamic law, the last of which included evaluating Prophetic traditions that related to the plague and contagion. Although these plague treatises were important in their own time and, as we will see in chapter 5, were discussed and debated in the Islamic West for at least one hundred years after their authors died, their overall significance for later scholars pales in comparison with a work written in Egypt in the early ninth/fifteenth century by the famed scholar Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 852/1448), whose views on contagion we considered in chapter 1. Michael Dols, in his classic The Black Death in the Middle East, emphasized the importance of the work of Ibn Ḥajar, and rightly so, but also emphasized the exceptional nature of...

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