God and the Black Death, Part 3

The Black Death was the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history, decimating a late Medieval world unaided by the germ theory of disease. In this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the ways that religion responded to the plague and the effects these efforts had on its spread and impact.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Plague. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the
production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our
talk about the plague, the Second Plague, pandemic, the Black Death,

(00:24):
and specifically some religious responses to it now in parts
one and two. In part one, we sort of focused
on the plague itself, some questions about how it was transmitted,
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

(00:47):
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

(01:07):
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,

(01:28):
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,

(01:51):
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,

(02:15):
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

(02:36):
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.

(02:57):
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

(03:18):
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

(03:39):
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

(04:02):
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

(04:25):
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

(04:48):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:34):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:42):
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

(07:04):
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,

(07:24):
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

(07:44):
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.

(08:07):
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

(08:29):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:13):
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

(09:33):
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

(09:57):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:42):
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,

(11:03):
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

(11:25):
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

(11:47):
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

(12:09):
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

(12:34):
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

(12:54):
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

(13:17):
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

(13:38):
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

(13:59):
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

(14:21):
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.

(14:42):
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

(15:03):
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

(15:25):
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

(15:46):
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

(16:08):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:52):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:38):
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

(17:59):
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,

(18:21):
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

(18:44):
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

(19:05):
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

(19:27):
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,

(19:50):
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

(20:13):
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

(20:36):
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

(20:56):
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.

(21:17):
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

(21:40):
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

(22:00):
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

(22:20):
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

(22:42):
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.

(23:04):
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

(23:25):
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

(23:49):
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

(24:11):
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,

(24:33):
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

(24:53):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:38):
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

(25:59):
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

(26:20):
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

(26:43):
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

(27:03):
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

(27:25):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:32):
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

(28:56):
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

(29:16):
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,

(29:39):
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

(30:00):
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

(30:22):
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

(30:43):
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

(31:05):
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

(31:27):
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

(31:50):
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

(32:10):
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.

(32:31):
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

(32:53):
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,

(33:17):
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,

(33:38):
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

(34:01):
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

(34:23):
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

(34:43):
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

(35:04):
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.

(35:24):
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

(35:45):
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

(36:07):
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

(36:28):
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

(36:49):
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

(37:11):
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

(37:34):
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,

(37:56):
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

(38:18):
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

(38:40):
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

(39:01):
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

(39:23):
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

(39:45):
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

(40:09):
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

(40:31):
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

(40:51):
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,

(41:13):
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,

(41:34):
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

(41:56):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:39):
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

(43:01):
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,

(43:21):
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

(43:43):
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

(44:05):
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,

(44:29):
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

(44:50):
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

(45:11):
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

(45:34):
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

(45:57):
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

(46:19):
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

(46:42):
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

(47:03):
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,

(47:23):
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

(47:44):
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

(48:05):
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

(48:26):
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,

(48:49):
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

(49:13):
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

(49:36):
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

(49:59):
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

(50:20):
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

(50:44):
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

(51:07):
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

(51:29):
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

(51:52):
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

(52:14):
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

(52:35):
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,

(53:00):
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

(53:20):
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

(53:42):
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.

(54:02):
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

(54:23):
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

(54:44):
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

(55:04):
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

(55:27):
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.
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(55:47):
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