God and the Black Death, Part 3

what the different pandemics looked like, and so forth. And then in the second episode we focused largely on religious responses to the plague in Christian Europe. Today, we wanted to expand talking about religious responses to the plague and talk about some historical work on Islamic responses. But to begin this discussion, I wanted to start by reading a wonderful tale that I came across in a paper by a scholar that I'm going to be referring to later

in this episode. So this story was originally told by an Ottoman historian in the late fifteenth century about events that allegedly happened I think in northwest Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey. And the translation and retelling of the story is by a modern historian named Neuquat Varlik, who I believe is currently a professor in the history department at the University of South Carolina. But Rob, if you're ready,

I'm gonna read this tale, let's do it. On the first night of January of fourteen Nino, while transporting a load from Gallipoli to Aderna with other fellow laborers, a wagon driver had an accident in bully year when his ox was injured on the road and could not move any further. His fellow drivers went to town to bring help, leaving him alone to spend the night on the accident site.

Later that evening, when the unfortunate wagon driver was crying in despair, he suddenly heard a loud noise, whereupon he saw two horsemen in black attire astride black horses, racing toward him. In fear, he hid under the wagon and watched them going by like a lightning. Immediately after them, a horseman in green attire, riding a pale horse and waving a lightning whip, came by and called out to him, Oh, you driver, have you seen two horsemen in black attire

riding black horses. When the driver showed him in which direction they went. The horseman then asked the driver what he was waiting for. Once the driver told him about the accident, the horseman descended from his horse and touched the leg of the ox three times, and the beast was miraculously healed. Upon seeing this, the driver moved toward the horseman in gratitude and inquired about his whereabouts. The horseman revealed himself as profit his ear helping those in need.

He added that he was chasing The horseman quote. They are pestilence and plague. They live among people God sent them. They obey the orders of God. I have received an order from God to expel them. They were eight in total. I killed six of them. If I can kill those two before they reached the seashore, there shall not be another plague for thirty years. Oh wow, I kind of want to see the rest of the movie. I mean,

this is this sound, this is delightfully cinematic. Yeah, the writers in black the ring rights and then yeah, a hero, a hero in green with a lightning whip upon a pale horse chasing down plague to kill it. Ye, so this tale was originally set down by a fifteenth century Ottoman chronicler named Rooch, and I found the retelling in a paper called from bett Noir to lemal de Constantinople, Plagues, Medicine and the Early modern Ottoman State by an author

named Nuquet Varlik in the Journal of World History. And this is a paper that documents evidence of how the conceptualization of plague and the administrative reaction to it within the Ottoman Empire changed over the course of several centuries. But regarding that tale itself, one fact I found funny was that despite the supernatural details that make it seem like an obvious piece of creative storytelling, the original chronicler or Roach apparently claims that it is based on the

testimony of several trustworthy witnesses. So I'm not sure what to make of that, but anyway, Varlec highlights it in her paper as a fascinating example of popular plague narrative and one that reveals some common features of thought about

epidemic disease in the Ottoman Empire. So apparently this story bears strong resemblance to other tales like it going back to the early Islamic period in which there's usually like a man in green riding a pale horse who appear in times of epidemic, disease or other struggle and helps people rid themselves of pestilence or rid themselves of gin, which are a form of supernatural creature, kind of demon

that might be made of air or flame. Uh. And there are other common elements to such as the figure in green uh touching, the touching a wound, or touching an animal or say a leg three times in order to heal it. And so the hero in this story given given the name Heasy or here is also known I've seen spelled as al Keter or al kadir uh some those. That's sometimes like a l k h a d I r, which means the green One, I believe, though I think there's some etymological debate about where that

name comes from. It's largely taken, I think to me in the Green One or the Verdant One. He's a sort of saint or guardian angel type figure who appears in Islamic lore going very far back. So Varlex says this story would have had very familiar narrative of elements

to listeners and readers. In fifteenth century Anatolia. But there are also unusual elements, For example, the portrayal of plague and pestilence as writers in black is, she says, otherwise rare or perhaps even unique to this story at this point in Ottoman literature. Though It's interesting to me because at least now that's a motif that seems utterly natural, Like depicting plague as embodied as a as a writer wearing a black cloak on a black horse like that.

That that seems like something I would have encountered in stories all the time. So I'm wondering if it comes from this or if there there are parallel traditions in other cultures. Yeah, because certainly from a Western perspective and with the benefit of of you know, multiple centuries to look back on, and that's the grim Reaper, the black hooded figure like this is just such a staple of of Western traditions and Western depictions of of evil and

uh and these these forces of destruction. Yeah, but did it exist within Islamic thought or with an Ottoman thought at the time beyond this one story that is? Yeah, And so Varlex says, this story is actually a pretty excellent reflection of how Ottoman Muslims of the of the time period generally thought about plague as part of what she she calls the Islamic plague cosmology of the fifteenth century, which she characterizes as a system of explanations that are

ultimately revolving around divine causation around God. So she writes, quote, according to this, plagues were inflicted upon humans by God, and God alone had the power to relieve humans from this ill In its broadest outlines, this vision of divine origins and agency prevailed in the Islamic world throughout the ages, and as such remained the predominant discourse circulating both orally

and in written texts. And so in this way it sounds at least in part comparable to what we discussed in the previous episode where arting Christian Europe, which was that there may have been many different beliefs at the time in Christian Europe about the proximate causes of plague. You know, wasn't mi asthma type of bad air that's

pervading the town's or was it astrological causes? You know, was it a conjunction of the planets coming into a terrible catastrophic alignment or earthquakes releasing vapors from the ground or something, but whatever the proximate causes, where most authors in Christian Europe at the time would generally trace the causal chain at some point back to divine will God

sent this plague. But regarding the Islamic views on the causes of plague, I do want to be clear that Varlik qualifies this characterization by stressing that there is not just one monolithic Islamic tradition, nor was there only one type of view held by Muslims at the time, And in fact, the rest of her paper after this opening story is devoted to showing how the multiple courses in Ottoman society, beginning mostly under this umbrella of Islamic plague

cosmology where where basically all of the causes of plague are divine, how that evolved over the years and then especially during the sixteenth century, transformed into a radically different and more medical or naturalistic theory of the causes of

plague and what the appropriate responses to it should be. Yeah, I think it's also worth remembering that the Islamic world during the centuries we're talking about here, they had access to a great deal of important knowledge, in some cases knowledge that had essentially been lost to Western Europe and

and sometimes only accessed again in Europe through Islamic texts. So, you know, in Western centric imaginings of things, it might be easy to you know, to dream up this world of monkst libraries, nights, and peasants on one hand, and then this monolithic religion on the other. But the Islamic world harbored some of the greatest minds of age. Well, yeah, a lot of European wisdom of the time was actually derived from works produced by the Islamic world in the

Middle Ages. Say from a big example that we referenced in a previous episode is uh the the Persian poly math Avicenna, who is you know, sometimes considered one of the the fathers of modern medicine, and that his work was very influential not just in the Islamic world, but

also in Christian Europe. Now, I want to come back and revisit uh varlecks paper a little bit later in the episode, but for a bit I'd like to shift to talk about some of the major themes in the existing comparative analysis of how Christians and Muslims responded to the Black Death and its recurrent waves because I know this was one of the things that got you interested in this subject to begin with, But then it was one of those subjects where as soon as you start

to get a peek in through the window, you realize that it's like very complex. There's and like every time you read something and you think you know a fact, then there's like you read something else and realize, oh no, maybe that's not as clear as it once seemed. Um And and this seems to be a common feature not just of comparing Christian and Islamic reactions to say, plague in the Middle Ages, but a common feature of the history of comparative religious analysis. Uh, you know, I'd like

comparative religious analysis. It's really interesting. You can learn a lot from comparing and contrasting different religious traditions. But it's also very, very tricky. It's one of those subject areas where you can easily be tempted into forming inaccurate generalizations on the basis of a small set of evidence. And you and you've got a kind of natural zeal to identify patterns and trends. You want to be able to make general statements and make characterizations so it looks like

you have actually discovered facts that generally hold true. But sometimes the you know, the the zeal to make facts statements of that kind overcomes what should be some caution and what what should what should be caution and humility in the face of trying to characterize something as complex as a religious response. Actually, remember this came up when we were reading papers about iconic versus an iconic religious traditions.

You know, it seems like scholars who engage in comparative religious analysis today are increasingly conscious of the need to be kind of frugal and tentative with generalizations about the similarities and differences between entire religions and the communities that practice them, because comparing and contrasting to religions isn't like comparing and contrasting the features of geometrical shapes, you know, like you can list the the all of the differences

and similarities between a right triangle and an Isosceles triangle or something. But but you know, religions are extremely complex social phenomena, and sometimes you're not even aware of what you're missing out on. As a function of the sources of evidence available to you. Yeah, Like I think we've discussed this in terms of say Buddhism, for example. Know, I mean you can if you talk very generally about Buddhism, what are you accounting for the different regional versions of

of of the faith? Are you dealing with the different um different social levels within a given community, Like, there's so many different divisions that can be uh, you can you can pull on and if you're just being very general about it, Yeah, it might help you prop up a point you're trying to make, but you're certainly not gonna be doing a fair job of of speaking to how that particular model of faith. Uh uh you know

impacts uh, you know, the human condition at large. I mean, I think about how difficult it is to make accurate generalizations about something as complex as a religion, even when you live amongst it, Like how how would you make accurate characterizations about, say, Catholicism in twenty first century America, even though like you probably know a bunch of Catholics in America in the twenty first century and like you know, you you you're immersed in a culture in which this

is this is one part of it. Um. Uh so it seems like you should have a really good view about it, but then it's still probably hard to make accurate generalizations. And now imagine you had to make those generalizations hundreds of years later, working off of a select number of surviving books from the period, and that's pretty much it. So anyway, all that to say that when you engage in this type of stuff, it's important to have a spirit of humility and and be cautious about

how much you think you know. And following from that, something we talked about in the previous episodes is that, much like the scientific history of the plague pandemic itself, the subject of the Islamic response religious response to plague has undergone some revision and re examination in recent decades.

And uh so here I think maybe it makes sense to introduce two different papers that I've been looking at, uh to introduce what seems to me to be one an example of sort of the dominant historical characterizations from uh say, the late twentieth century, along side a more recent paper I found talking about some re examination of

those claims. So to start with the older characterizations, I'll refer to a paper I quoted in the previous episode It's a piece called the Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death in Muslim and Christian Societies by Michael W. Dolls, published in the nineteen seventies. This is the historian Michael W. Dolls,

who lived nineteen forty two to nineteen eighty nine. And this piece was actually the place I found that description of the plague from the fourteenth century North African Muslim historian Eben Caldoon, which was you remember that really haunting description of like the city's being emptied and the way signs falling away, And what did he say? It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion, and restriction in the world had

responded to its call. Yeah, but anyway, so that that's the Dolls piece I'm gonna be looking at, but then also providing some more recent or revised understanding, though not

just responding to Dolls. I was also reading a uh An article by Justin Stearns, who I believe is a professor at n y U Abu Dhabi who specializes in uh Muslim history, and this one is called New Directions in the Study of Religious Responses to the Black Death, And I should stress that those sterns disagrees with a few of dolls as generalizations uh that that he makes. He says that overall Dolls's history is like a really important and excellent work. It is it. He does seem

to be widely cited. Yeah, so it's not like the older one is like bad. It's just like he you know, maybe could have had more nuance in it. Got you now. I think in the previous episode we talked about how even if you put religious ideas aside for a moment, that Christian and Muslim societies into some degree tended to share the same dominant mechanical theories of the spread of plague. Where they had mechanical theories of the spread, which was

the most common was that they were rooted in miasthma theory. Again, this is uh, the idea that there would be some form of bad air spreading the plague, and that this would have been derived from the common heritage of medical authorities like Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna. But then Dole says that European Christian and Muslim reactions were quite dissimilar in terms of their religious responses, and that this tells us

something about the essential identity of each religious culture. So Doles has three major claims about the dominant views of Muslim religious authorities during the Black Death and and they go like this, and we can come back and analyze or maybe question these as we move along. So, first of all, Dole says that plague was viewed as a mercy from God and a martyrdom for the faithful Muslim.

And so this this is an interesting variation to the extent that it's true, because by being a martyrdom, this would make dying from plague and a form of honorable death that will ensure that the martyr is delivered to paradise. And this stands in contrast to the widespread Christian view that plague was a divine punishment for sin uh though Doles mentioned some Muslim opinion that plague could be a

punishment for sin in some cases, or say for nonbelievers. Alright, so the second tenant is quote a Muslim should not enter nor flee from a plague stricken land. And apparently this is a longstanding prophetic tradition in Islam. And to the extent that people did hold disbelief, it would obviously interfere with them protecting themselves by fleeing plague ridden towns. And then the third point is that quote, there was no contagion of plague, since disease came directly from God.

And this is allegedly in contrast to Christian Europe, where although there was no germ theory of disease, you could see that there was some kind of rudimentary concept of contagion, the idea that somehow by being around plague you could

get plague, though the mechanisms might have been obscure. So I think the difference here is that Doles is claiming that while in Europe there was broadly an idea that plague could be transmitted by some kind of brute physical causation, you could somehow just like get plague from the environment, in the Muslim world, plague was given to you directly by supernatural means by God, and thus didn't physically spread.

And Doll's emphasizes these claims he makes by putting them in contrast to what he what he would claim about Christian Europe. So he writes, quote, the importance of these three principles to Muslim society was in what they did not affirm. They did not declare that plague was God's punishment, they did not encourage flight, and they did not support a belief in the contagious nature of plague, all of which were prevalent in Christian Europe. However, he does quality

ify these. He also does not treat these as the universal blanket statements. He says that while these three religio legal tenants, or what he calls them, while they were generally held, it would be untrue and unreasonable to believe they were held universally, and there was some measure of

scholarly debate about them. So as for the first principle, the idea that plague is a is a mercy and a martyrdom from God, there is some historical and literary evidence of people believing the opposite in Muslim societies, that in some cases it was viewed as a punishment for sin, like it was commonly in Christian Europe, rather than as a mercy. So just one example I came across. I was reading that paper by by Newcat Varlick, and she mentions a saying of a fifteenth century Ottoman scholar who

attributes plague to adultery. So you know when adultery takes place, you know that that can only foster evil upon the world, and that evil becomes plague, which sounds kind of like some of the things that we were talking about in

the last episode that were commonly believed in Europe. Now there might be some doubt about these three characterizations he makes, but first, I did just want to mention some consequences that Dolls believes follows from uh these three facts he believes to be true about the Muslim response to plague.

One major difference is that Muslim societies do not really seem to record what he calls, quoting another source the quote striking manifestations of abnormal collective psychology, of dissociation of the group mind that were present in Christian Europe. Um. So, for example, he says that there's really no evidence that Muslim society has produced apocalyptic messianic movements in response to

the Black Death as did Christian Europe. So think of the flagelence that we talked about last time, and he thinks that this may be in part due to a relative lack of theological precedent in Islamic tradition. Quote. Furthermore, the fact that there was no certainty that play was a divine punishment for sin, removed the impetus for a

cohesive puritanical and revivalist popular movement. Yeah, because if you think back to what we discussed in the last episode, there was this sense that the system is failing, like, why are we still being punished by God for our sins?

What more do we have to do? Perhaps we have to work outside the system, And it leads to these various heretical um threads such as the flagelence you know, becomes a movement, and yeah, you can see where of if there's a not a precedent for those kinds of movements and you you don't have as much of this emphasis of of play being directly caused by by personal or communal sin, uh, then there's there's less room for that to to to grow right now. There's another important

difference that the Doll's argues. He says that minority communities in Muslim lands were not persecuted a reaction to the plague, certainly not to the extent that they were in Europe. For example, the way Jews were persecuted in communities throughout Christian Europe as a sort of a violent outburst in response to the plague and dolls. Thinks this may be in part derivative of his claim that Muslims did not generally believe in contagion, but rather believe that plague was

sent directly from God. So the way that would work is if you can't really get the plague from a physical cause, like if if you know it's just God deciding whether or not you get plague, if you can only get it straight from the divine realm, then you couldn't really have these delusional conspiracy theories about Jews poisoning the wells and so forth. Now, now, speaking of the the the Jewish persecution during the Black Death, I had I want to throw in just one little bit here.

I had some notes on this, but then we ended up not covering it. And then we heard from a listener on the stuff Doable Your Mind Discussion module, which is the book group for for for discussion of the show, heard from Adam, who is a rabbi, and what was writing in about between these episodes about a book that they've read titled The Jew in the Medieval World by

Jacob R. Marcus so Um. Basically, this added wrinkle in the Jewish persecution during the Black Death death was that there was apparently this charge that Jewish people were less affected by plague and that this was uh. This indicated that they were somehow involved in it. Now, to be clear, as we as we stressed in the last episode, Jewish people did die of plague like everyone else, and at

an appalling rate. But there it is sometimes though asked whether Jewish hygiene practices might have given them a slight edge over the rest of the population in terms of of previous illnesses and outbreaks and even with the Black Death UM. So it's it's interesting to think about. It's it's worth stressing that this form of anti Semitic messaging continued on for centuries, and you see variations of this

even during the twentieth century. There's um I've seen images of a Polish poster, for example, that invokes fears of Typhus, connecting Jewish people to Typhus um you know, which, which

is just another example of of anti Semitic persecution. But to your point, if there is a widespread belief that uh, that afflictions like this come directly from God and cannot be acquired from other communities or other individuals within your own community, Uh, then there's less room to engage in this kind of thought, right, because you couldn't think that it was like somehow a physical weapon being used against you by, say, you know, a a persecuted minority group

that you had suspicions and resentments toward. In a way, all this ties into something that the Dole says ultimately where he characterizes the Muslim reaction to plague as relatively quote pacific, collective and controlled compared to the response to

plague in Christian Europe. Uh So there's a long quote I guess I'm not gonna read this whole bit, but I'm gonna read part of it where he's sort of summing up what he sees as some of the major differences and how they grow from the different different theological emphasies of these two religions. He says, quote, the cosmic settings of the two faiths are wide apart in their emphasis.

Where the Muslims primary duty was toward the correct behavior of the total community based on the Sacred Law, the Christians was with personal redemption, where the Koran supplied guidance the Bible furnished consolation. For the Muslim the Black Death was part of a god oriented natural universe. For the Christian it was an eruption of the profane world of

sin and misery. But anyway, I've been mentioning that with these three generalizations that the Dolls makes, I wanted to come back and and possibly interrogate them or or question them to some extent by consulting this paper is reading by by Justin Stearns from two thousand nine, And this paper makes clear Sterns is very much a fan of of evaluating the religious responses of Christians, Muslims, and Jews

to the plague. So it's not like he thinks it is not a worthwhile project to engage in comparative historical religious analysis. That's what he's clearly into um. But he does talk about how previous scholarship has regarded the responses of the three religions here as fundamentally different in important ways, such as how they conceptualize contagion, like we were just

talking about. And one of the things that Sterns emphasizes is that these distinctions are not necessarily so clear as they have seemed other scholars, and that there is often more internal diversity and debate within each religion than has previously been appreciated, and more similarities between their responses than is sometimes appreciated. I'm not going to go in depth on every point he he makes in this paper, but there was one thing he gets into early slightly orthogonal

to what we're talking about. But but I did think it was very interesting, which was about the idea of local versus universal, And it's sort of the idea that you can't really understand the Second plague pandemic if you only think about the initial outbreak in the middle of the fourteenth century in Europe. You need to think more

broadly in terms of time and geography. But at the same time, you can't just think about the plague, the Second plague pandemic, which in a way you could argue goes on for centuries as something that had global effects continuously for the entire time that it was present, because each outbreak of plague in each individual region, each new epidemic, could be perceived by the people experiencing it as at

least potentially local and unique. It was happening to them in the place where they lived, and it was this current disaster. You know, we can sometimes be lured by the breadth of history into thinking that people in other times and places in history understood they were living in a historical trend much more than they did, you know, Like we we don't even really understand the historical trends that we're living in until until we're right at the

end of them. Often, yeah, and and sometimes not even even then. Like it's you know, it's sometimes it's difficult to look back on previous decades and think of them as as like historical periods in the same way we might view some you know, like say the eighties, the seventies, the sixties, but uh, you know, like the last twenty years have kind of feel like just sort of a recent blur to me. Like it's it's hard to think

of those as as important like pillars of time. Yeah, it's you know, the present always feels kind of unique, and and it is only in looking back that you're really able with confidence to identify all the ways in which the present, for you now the past is like the even further past. Yeah. And I guess also we have with modern media, of course, we have a more global perspective, or we have access to a more global

perspective at times regarding what's happening in the world. And there's also maybe a tendency to want to package everything. You know, you need a title for this segment, so um and and I guess you could make a case for some of that going on in prior ages with different you know, writers and commentators. But but yeah, it wasn't a situation where you would turn on your global news channel and see, you know what we're calling this

present darkness. Now Here I want to come to Stearns is interrogation of some of these generalizations made by made by Michael Doles. So I think the first one we should look at is this question of did Muslims in the at the time of the Black Death generally accept a theory of contagion or not? Remember this was doless third generalization. He says that there really was no contagion of plague in the Muslim conscious, since disease came directly

from God. It was caused supernaturally, not by any kind of physical mechanism that would allow it to spread from person to person or in an area. And Starn's argues that there's actually a lot at stake in our understanding of these kinds of attitudes towards plague, and especially you can see how characterizations of this kind get applied to

situations that they might not really be good analogies. For for example, uh he He cites the example of many Europeans hundreds of years ago, not like modern historians, but people in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries Protestant authors using what they believe to be the historical example of Turkish Muslim's reaction to the plague within arguments about whether Christians had a moral duty to stay in plague gridden areas in order to help their Christian neighbors, or whether they

should uh they should flee the disease in order to protect themselves. And authors who advocated fleeing the disease sometimes compared their opponents to Turkish Muslims because they believed that Turkish Muslims had a fatalistic attitude towards plague and would

not try to escape it. You can find numerous references in the sixteenth and seventeenth century of of European authors talking about it like this, like, for example, Leibniz, apparently in mounting an argument against fatalism, used Turkish Muslims during plague outbreaks as an example of the philosophy of fatalism. They failed to escape areas affected by plague even when they easily could have, and he regards this, I guess

as foolish. And here in this question about about the belief and contagion in the Muslim world, we actually get to a specific historical figure uh, a figure known as even al Hatib and uh The Stearns describes al Hatib as the prolific and rightly celebrated granad and vizier and

man of letters. This was a scholar who lived in southern Iberia under the Immirate of Granada during the fourteenth century uh and in the years after the Black Death, al Hatib wrote a famous treatise called on the Plague, in which he argued that the plague was in fact contagious, despite some some theological judgments to the contrary, and offered citations of empirical evidence to prove it. Michael Dole's in that piece does acknowledge al Hatib, and on the issue

of contagions, cites him as one very important exception. So Doles writes quote as for the third problem of contagion, the Andalusian scholar Iban al Hatib has attracted European attention for his observation and forceful statement of the contagious nature of the black death. This points, however, to the exceptional nature of Ibn al Hatib's belief and the weight of opinion against him. Even al Hatib was the only Muslim writer to my knowledge to argue against the accepted interpretation

of plague. His fourth right statement is probably one of the portions of his writings which gave support to his enemies in their later persecution of him as a heretic um, and so in the In the latter thing here this refers to the fact that at the at the end of his life al Hati was caught up in a series of palace coups and political power struggles, after which it in one of them he was jailed after being convicted by a by a sort of panel of jurists, and at some point uh he was murdered in his

jail cell. He after being tried for heresy, though Starns argues that this was not necessarily as a result of his comments about the plague and may may have just as well been a just kind of a pure power play.

Like he was murdered by his political opponents, and Stearns writes that this series of events quote has been widely construed by students of medieval European history as having been due to the rigid and intolerant nature of Islam orthodoxy, and I suspect a general impression that scientific thought in the Muslim world was in decline. Um so uh so.

Sterns argues that the both of these ideas, that that Muslims in general rejected belief in contagion, and that even al Hatib was a quote, free thinking exception in a sea of fatalistic and narrow minded Muslim jurists and theologians. That both of these ideas have been around for a long time and are continuously represented in scholarship on the Black Death of the period. But Sterns kind of pushes

back against them. Now. He does seem to agree that theological rejection of the theory of contagion was in fact the most common view in the pre modern Arab Muslim world um, but he says that even al Hatip support for contagion theory, rather than being the the single loan voice of descent, was actually probably more like a particularly rhetorically power full phrasing of a view that was a minority opinion but was nevertheless pretty widely held and openly

discussed by plenty of Muslim jurists. And this may make sense, right because outside of of the various like philosophical and theological ideas that that either population European or Islamic world would have had, there would have been like direct observation, there would have been there would have been room to

realize there's something to the way this illness spreads. There's something about physical proximity to other people with the illness that you could potentially pick up on, though complicated by the fact that, as we discussed in the first episode, I mean, the transmission vectors of historical plague outbreaks are still somewhat obscure to us today. Like there's still debate about to what extent uh plague was spread by contagion

from other people. Remember in the first episode we talked about So there's this idea for a long time that play is primarily spread in bubonic form from from bites, from fleas, from commence al rodents or other animals, and that probably represents some amount of spread. But then there are other ways it can spread, so you can get the neemonic version of the plague, and then it can be spread in aerosolized droplets you know, people cough and

and spread it person to person that way. And then there is this more recent idea that maybe it was spread person to person but through the vector of human ectoparasites, fleas and lce on people's bodies. But all this to say because there is not one single way the plague is spreading, but probably multiple different routes, and we're still not sure what percentage of transmission these different routes represented. Uh,

it obviously must have been confusing. Yeah, And I also want to stress that, as we've discussed on the show before, like observation and common sense do not always lead to scientific reality. You know, they can these these you know, your gut instinct and just seeming you know, observing how the word world works. This can and has at times

resulted in thoroughly non scientific ideas. So I don't I don't want to imply that in either group it was just a matter of, oh, well, they just should have paid more attention and been more sensible, right, No, No, I didn't think you were saying that. Okay, I just want to be clear. Yeah, apparently all hat He was was mounting empirical arguments for contagion um. But anyway, Sterns writes that quote, far from having been accused of heresy

for his statement on contagion. Even all hats opinions on the plague were debated by succeeding generations of scholars, as can be seen in a recently published collection of legal opinions from the fifteenth century, and in that his eventual trial for heresy was most likely politically motivated. You know he was there. There was like a power struggle going on.

And Sterns uses the example of this one UH figure to make the point that while some broad trends within religious communities can be observed, stern does agree that the majority view among Muslim jurists and theologians at the time is that plague is not contagious and is caused supernaturally by God. But but but just disagrees that Alhati was the only person pushing back against this. Again, as as he says, it was, it was more like a it

was a minority view that was expressed and debated. And so the broader point I think he's making is that you can you can get a much more accurate picture of historical trends by understanding the diversity of thought within communities at the same time that you're trying to identify the the broader overriding trends that described them. And from here, Actually this is later in his conclusion that he cites this,

but I found this really interesting. He quotes a completely inverse image of this comparative generalization about about fatalism and belief in contagion in response to the plague um So he quotes a twenty one century Tunisian scholar who makes use of an interesting anecdote from a fourteenth century figure named even Marzook alha Feed, and alha Feed writes that in in this fourteenth century work that he was sent by the Sultan of Tlemson, which is in modern day

Algeria too on a journey to the Sultan of Fez, and at that time there was a great outbreak of disease in the stretch of North Africa known as the mug Rub and as they traveled through the land um this Uh, this figure was accompanied by a group of messengers, including one of whom was a Christian. And here I just want to read from Stern's citation of of this story, of this this fourteenth century uh figure quote. Their intention in doing what they did was not to approach the

epidemic by entering the castle. This was their choice, and I was in agreement with them. The Christian asked, what's with these people who don't enter this place? His translator, as he didn't speak Arabic, well said to him, they have fled from the epidemic. Then the Christians said what we were told had the following meaning, fleeing will not save them. There is no doubt that what God has

decreed is what will be. When I heard these words, I was dismayed and confused about what I was doing, as it was well known that according to prophetic tradition, one shouldn't approach such an area. I rejected completely that it should seem that one who had no knowledge of the hadith, who is an unbeliever, should be greater in entrusting himself to God's order and more believing in what had been decreed. I knew that it was a trial, so I advised advancing and entered the castle, though I

didn't order the others what to do. Uh So this is interesting because Stearns notes that there's at least he cites a modern Tunisian scholar who has used this historical anecdote to argue the exact inverse, that that Christians were fatalistic about the Black Death and that though there were a diversity of views among Muslims, some argue for fleeing the plague and establishing quarantines on the basis of contagion theory.

Uh So, I thought that was funny about how it can go both ways and uh And while there is of course a lot to be learned from comparative studies of religious interpretation and natural events, this kind of project can also just make it so tempting to make misleading generalizations on the basis of a single anecdote that you're aware of and and sort of gloss over internal diversity

and disagreement than now. Stearns make some other points in this paper that I think go to apart from the contagion point, the other two characterizations that were made by Michael Doles. The first one was that plague was generally viewed as a mercy from God and a martyrdom for the faithful Muslim, and second that a Muslim should not

enter nor flee a plague stricken land. And on these subjects, I thought this was interesting and and this goes along with something that I think comes through in several places in in Starns argument, which is that he argues that there's often more similarity between the three different religions responses than is appreciated, and that sometimes these theological debates about the plague are actually largely reproduced within each monotheistic religious community,

so they share some similarities in their internal controversies and reactions. But he does argue, as uh Dolls, I do think acknowledge somewhat that there were also views within the Muslim world that characterized the plague as a punishment for sin, as like the dominant view in Christian Europe was, and that in fact, in some cases some Jewish sources from the time mentioned plague as being a punishment for sin as well. This just seems like this is a commonplace

for the monotheistic religions to go mentally. And as for some of these interesting internal controversy, Stearns talks about some conflict even between some ideas mentioned here, like for example, he goes on to explain some of the origins of the prophetic tradition that one should neither enter nor leave

an area where that is stricken by plague um. And he says that these these prophetic traditions, they gave rise to some some difficulties in reconciling them with each other that had to be in these differences had to be sorted out by later Muslim jurists and theologians. So, for example, one contradiction might be, on one hand, you have a belief that dying of plague can be a form of martyrdom, which is an honorable and good death, a mercy from God.

And then on the other hand, you can have the belief that if plague is in an area, you shouldn't enter it. And so you could view these things as as possibly being in contradiction with each other. But much like as we saw with the Christian tradition, I think Stern's idea here is that this just sort of gives

rise to competing takes. Well, like with any other religion, you've got some authorities emphasizing one half of the tradition, some authorities emphasizing the other, uh some making mention a little mention of either one, and just sort of telling

people to get away from the plague. So this does make me think about a point of comparison that kept occurring to me which was really funny, which is like just the trouble you get into if you just assume or try to infer religious beliefs and practices from the canonical traditions or scripture of a religion, it would be like trying to do you think you could infer what Christians believe just by like looking at passages in the Bible. Oh yeah, if you just draw one sometimes read it

out of context. Yeah, it can. You could. You could make all sorts of of of of blanket statements, you know, in terms of thinking about um, about illness as uh and disease as being a martyrdom Um. I'm I'm reminded of something from from from from later centuries in UM in European tradition, the the Eisenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunwald. Uh. This would have been the the early sixteenth century. But these are famous depictions in which we see Christ himself

uh suffering from some sort of skin disease. Uh that that I believe is thought to be ergotism. But but in these cases of physical disease, physical ailment. It takes on, you know, the trappings of holy suffering. Well, yeah, that's a really good point. And actually this is a thing that Sarns mentioned. I I skipped over it, But there is a part where he points out that actually thinking of death from plague as as a form of martyrdom

is not totally unique to to Islam. There's all. There are also Christian traditions that characterize plague death as a martyrdom. They're not they're not extremely common in Christianity, but he cites, for example, Cyprian who apparently held this view that you could be a martyr after dying from plague, or maybe not plague specifically, I'm not sure, but from certainly from

epidemic disease. Another interesting point of similarity I was noticing is and reading about Sterns and then thinking about some of the stuff we talked about in the last episode. Uh was the idea of of public demonstrations in response to plague, like public processions of various kinds. For example, Sterns writes that a common response to plague in Muslim cities throughout the Middle East was for people to go

outside the city and fast and pray in groups. Uh. And this is he says, similar to how Muslims might often appeal for deliverance from other disasters, non disease disasters like drought. You know, they might gather outside the city to fast and pray for rain. But there's another thing I really take away from these discussions, which is something that that Sterns emphasizes in this paper, uh, which is that there's still a lot to learn and that is

potentially available to learn. Uh. Not just like is is definitely lost to history, because he says there are plenty of plague treatises from the time period, especially reflecting Jewish and Muslim views that he says quotes still languish in manuscript. So I think what that would mean is that there are cases where we have some kind of artifact. Original manuscripts do exist, but they are waiting for for scholars to get to them. Basically, we're waiting on them to

be edited and translated. So there's still a lot more to learn about the period. So he suspects these will probably further tell against blanket generalizations of religious responses and might reveal more and more internal diversity of thought. Yeah, because if this is it is true that basically within any of these faiths we're discussing, you had the same sort of arguments going on, the same sort of of discussions, then that will just be further illuminated through the translations

of these in the in the saving of these old texts. Yeah, Now, one thing I wanted to come back to before we wrap it up is that paper I quoted at the beginning of the episode, the paper by nu Quat Varlik from the Journal of World History in called from bett Noir to Limala, Constantinople, Plagues, medicine and the early modern Ottoman state. And so in this paper she she traces

an interesting history. So she makes an argument that within the Ottoman Empire, so this would be the Muslim Empire based out of Anatolia modern day Turkey, that eventually spreads and and controls much of the Middle East and North Africa and parts of eastern Europe. She says that there is a transformation over time of how plague is conceptualized and this this happens especially in the sixteenth century, and

this is something that's really important to consider too. We've been talking about trying to appreciate the nuances within religious communities and the internal diversity. But also it's important to remember how views even of a single religious community change over time. So she says that before the sixteenth century, plague is seen mostly in religious terms, like we've been talking about with the quote, with the general outlines of an Islamic plague cosmology, which had God and divine agency

at its very core. And so under this view, like we've been saying, most the most common belief is that epidemic diseases were sent directly from God and only God had the power to alleviate your suffering. Uh. Though within this supernatural framework, of course, you could appeal to other supernatural interventions, such as the intercession of saints. And that makes me think about the story we started with with the uh, you know, the saintly figure in green, and

she writes in her conclusion quote. In this configuration, disease was seen as an unfamiliar and unruly presence, a presence that the Ottomans imagine themselves as having no control over, even in the medical works of the era. This supernatural vision was juxtaposed with the perplexing amalgamation of knowledge they had recourse to, which must have only confirmed perceived feelings

of vulnerability. But then then after this, uh she she charts how during the sixteenth century especially, there is a pretty rapid transformation of attitudes towards plague in the Ottoman Empire, including a shift from a majority supernatural view of disease

to a much more natural and medical view of disease. So, instead of being viewed as as strange and unfamiliar threats over which we had no control, diseases came to be seen more as a quote familiar aspect of the natural realm, just one part of how the world works, and something that we do have some kind of power to intervene against. And so this took the form of a new corpus of scientific knowledge about epidemic disease that was developed in

in the sixteenth century. And and uh this would include discoveries about the causes, transmission, and prevention of infectious disease, and that this new knowledge led to changes in public health policy from the Ottoman state. It sort of took plague from being a predominantly supernatural issue and made it instead a political problem. But that does seem the healthier trajective for things to take, you know, to to go from the supernatural to the the idea that, yes, this

is something that can be managed on some level. Yeah. And it's interesting to think also though that um. I mean, among all of these religious communities, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all still today have religious um approaches to disease, even if they would probably rely on science based medicine as the primary intervention and way to prevent disease and and

and heal yourself from disease if you do catch it. Uh. It's interesting that like it, uh, the the introduction of science based medicine is the primary effective way of combating disease has not removed the religious response to disease, right right, I mean, all of these communities still have religious thoughts about epidemics and still pray about them and all that. I guess another thing that's just this whole discussion really drives home is how amazingly lucky we are in terms

of the medical interventions that exist today. I mean, you know, we everybody's exhausted living through a pandemic for the past however many god awful months this thing has been. But I mean, we're we're so lucky to have the kind of the vaccines and the other interventions that we have today that we're just not on the table for for

people in the fourteenth century. Yeah. Absolutely. By the way, earlier I mentioned a Polish language anti Semitic poster, and I just wanted to throw in a little more information on this because I kind of referred to it in passing. But this is the post. You can find at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's website at u s h g M M dot org um, where it's labeled anti Semitic poster published in Poland in March nineteen one. Quote.

An anti Semitic poster published in Poland in March ninety one. The caption reads Jews our life, they cause typhus. Uh. This German published poster was intended to instill fear of Jews among Christian polls unquote. So I just wanted to provide additional, uh, additional backstory on on that particular post roads referring to, and you can look it up if

you visit this website. All Right, Well, this has been a fun multipart examination here, and uh, I believe we're gonna move on to other topics at this point, but

we would love to hear from everyone out there. If you have particular insight, uh, if these episodes have touched on an area of expertise or or interest and you would like to weigh in, then by all means, we'd love to hear from you, and it's not impossible that we could return to this topic if it looks like there's some some interesting angles, uh that that need further exploration in the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you

will find find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed which you will get wherever you happen to grab your podcasts. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have listener mail on Monday's Artifact on Wednesdays, and on Friday we do a little Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most of the science and just talk about a strange film. And on the weekends we do a vault episode. Huge thanks as always

to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, You can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio usit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows by mothers by many pressing the foot p