Der Fehltritt des Gelehrten: Die "Pest von Emmaus" und ihre theologischen Nachspiele (review)

In the year 17 or 18 of the Hijra (A.D. 639/40) an epidemic disease broke out in Emmaus and shook the Moslem community. The hitherto victorious armies were faced with a great catastrophe: God, who had favored the Moslems up to this time, seemed to have sent down this visitation upon them. Josef van Ess explores how different types of texts, both theological and historical, have interpreted this event. Van Ess is one of the great masters of early Islamic theology and historio graphy, as he has demonstrated with his monumental work Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra, vols. 1-6 (1991-97). While in that work he scrutinized "the theology and the society of the second and third centuries Hijra," he now tries to go even further back in time, taking an event, the "plague of Emmaus," as an incident that generated a large amount of theological and historiographic writing.

The starting point for van Ess's inquiry is a report by Ibn Abi Shayba (d. 235/849) in which he says that a certain Mu'adh preached in H(breve)ims>= after the outbreak of a plague in Syria. In the first part of his book, van Ess closely examines this report, analyzing it sentence by sentence in twenty different sections (pp. 13-122). In the second part he summarizes his findings and pushes his inquiry further, first studying the persons involved in the different reports (pp. 127-61), and then turning his attention to a number of different subjects (pp. 162-311) such as jihad and the certainty of salvation.

The section on the plague (sect. 2.5, pp. 228-311) will be of particular interest to historians of medicine. Here, van Ess gives a comprehensive overview of recent scholarship, deals with the difficulties involved in identifying the "plague of Emmaus," and illustrates the theological debates and reactions that it caused. He argues (pp. 279-85) that the "plague of Emmaus" most likely was not the bubonic plague, as thought by many other scholars such as Dols; instead, he says that the symptoms described in the historiographic literature point to smallpox (judari), although certainty cannot be reached; it might even have been measles. Another problem is the transmission of the disease. Van Ess argues that in general Moslem physicians had no notion of contagion; they followed the Greek theory of miasmas as reported by Hippocrates in his Airs, Waters, Places, which was translated into Arabic.

Van Ess shows how theologians dealt with dilemmas caused by the epidemic: should one accept the disease as an act of grace on the part of God, or should one avoid the plague by leaving the territory where it is present? The answer to this question is conditioned by both religious belief and political allegiance. On the level of theology, the debate about predestination played a great role. On the more political level, the problem arose that one of the heroes of Islam, the conqueror of Egypt "Amr ibn al-As, apparently did not go into the area of the plague but rather led his troops to conquer Egypt. Was that the right course of action, advocated by the prophets' companions and the caliph "Umar, or did "Amr ibn al-As flee out of cowardice?

In the last section before the conclusions, van Ess tackles questions of source criticism (pp. 312-80) and methodology (pp. 381-92). For this early period of Islamic history, we mostly rely on accounts that are at least one century later than the original event. Furthermore, such archaeological evidence as we possess is sketchy at best. This hampers our ability to know what really...