Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani - Merits of the Plague

This book was conceived in the spring of 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic as dread, chaos, lockdowns, and death gripped the world. Struggling to absorb our new circumstances, many readers, ourselves included, turned to classic works on the plague with fresh eyes. Those works offered a sort of brutal comfort, a reminder that humans have faced times like these in the pastindeed, times much worse than theseand made sense of them. Passages crafted hundreds of years ago or more, which once seemed arcane and fanciful, now offered profound insights across time and spoke to our current moment of astonishment and despair. Reports of the plagues daily death tolls that scholars once viewed as inaccurately high now seemed comically low.

In relative terms, the deadliest pandemic in human history was surely the Black Death, which began in the thirteenth century, peaked in the fourteenth century, and recurred periodically for more than four centuries afterward. Even though many modern readers will associate the Black Death primarily as a moment in medieval European historyand plague literature from the Western canon has returned to our bookshelves and nightstands with a vengeancesome of the most profound meditations on the plague were arguably produced outside the West, in the lingua franca of Arabic, and in the cultural and intellectual milieu of Islam. Perhaps this is because Muslim writers, whose audiences crisscrossed Africa and Eurasia for trade, study, and pilgrimage, were best positioned to grasp the truly global scope of the plague and the moral, theological, political, and economic dilemmas it posed.

One of the most important and influential works on the plague in Islamic thought is Ibn ajar al-Asqalns Merits of the Plague, a fifteenth-century book that is here translated from Arabic to English for the first time. The book wrestles with debates over the origins of the disease, the most effective responses to it, and the meaning of suffering and mass death. In doing so, the author crafts a compelling, if counterintuitive, argument: there is merit in the plague if one understands it as an expression of Gods will and an opportunity to practice patience and care for others. To make this case, the author weaves together evidence from stories about the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, medical works, law books, anecdotes from firsthand experiences, tales of unseen spirits, death-count registers, and plague-era poetry that spans eight centuries and the known Muslim world. In this way, Merits of the Plague is both a profound meditation on the plague as well as a classical anthology of medicine, law, history, traditions, and literature about pandemics in the pre-modern world.

Ibn ajar al-Asqaln, a fifteenth-century Egyptian, a paragon of the Islamic intellectual tradition, was at one time the most powerful judge in the Mamluk Empire. He was also a poet, a merchant, and a once-in-a-generation scholar whose knowledge of the Hadith (the corpus of narratives involving the Prophet Muhammad) was renowned from North Africa to India. The fact that he was stricken by the disease, and lost three children to it, must have had a profound effect on his thinking. He wrote this short volume to serve an audience coming to terms with the new realities brought about by the plague: widespread death, uncertainty, fear of contagion, the limitations of medicine, and crises of faith. While these themes will ring familiar to all readers who lived through the recent pandemic, the book also invites us into a world and a vision of reality inflected by Islamic thought, where the jinn meddle in human affairs and the heavenly rewards of martyrdom give meaning to suffering and the great loss of life.