History of Infectious Disease in the Islamicate World

 A “Global” History of the Black Death: New Narratives for the Islamicate World, Monica Green 

Abstract:

 
In February 2021, I presented to this group a talk, “Bringing Dols and Conrad into the Genomic Age,” which laid out how and why work from genetics (both paleo- and phylo-) was transforming what could be known about the geographic and even temporal scope of the late medieval plague pandemic we have come to know as the Black Death. My argument was that this expanded definition of the 2nd Plague Pandemic made the Islamicate world central to the whole larger phenomenon. Thus, approaching the question from a “global” perspective that spanned political regimes and even linguistic and cultural borders was essential.
 
I am now completing my book, The Black Death: A Global History, and wish to return to the question of the centrality of the Islamicate world in how narratives about the pandemic should be framed, not only for research purposes but also (and even especially) for teaching, whether in the context of Islamic Studies or in general historical surveys. The COVID Pandemic has made very clear the need for “pandemic thinking”: conceiving of pandemics in ways that go beyond accretions of stories from sometimes random documentary accounts to multidisciplinary syntheses that attempt to explain how all the elements that go into creating pandemics—microbial, ecological, climatic, and of course human—fit together to move a disease across vast distances, landscapes, and cultural settings. In other words, this work needs to be scalar and it needs to be global.
 
For this talk, I will focus on three elements: 1) the importance of recognizing the uninterrupted cultural history of plague in the Islamicate world, from its 7th-century origins on; 2) the new ways in which the Mongol Empire fits into the story of the Black Death; and 3) the ways in which historiographical accretions in both the Islamicate world and Christian Europe, starting in the 14th century, have occluded key insights that now need to be peeled away in order to recognize the pandemic in all its magnitude. I will conclude with some desiderata for future work.

Two Plague Treatises from the Ottoman Empire (Ahmed Tahir Nur and Mehmet Emin Güleçyüz)
 
In this session, Ahmed Tahir Nur (Yale University) and Mehmet Emin Güleçyüz (The University of Chicago) will present the contexts and contents of two Arabic plague treatises from the early sixteenth century Ottoman Empire that they are currently editing and preparing for publication. Ilyās b. Ibrāhīm’s Shield from Plagues and Epidemics and Idrīs-i Bidlīsī’s Refraining from Epidemic-Stricken Places were conceived under different conditions and served different purposes. Yet, both treatises were written during a major outbreak of plague, and were devoted primarily to a comprehensive treatment of infectious diseases in general and plagues in particular. Their authors’ theoretical and practical engagement with plague reveals the significance of these plague treatises as historical sources on a number of areas, including transmission of medical knowledge and epistemological, religious and legal debates of the time.
 

Corpse Traffic, Plague, and Cholera in the Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Iraq
(Zeinab Azerbadegan) 
 
Since the fourth International Sanitary Conference in Istanbul 1866, regulating the traffic of dead bodies to Ottoman Iraq became an international preoccupation in the emerging global public health regime. Corpse traffic was a common and long-standing Shi’i practice, where the faithful transported the bodies of their dead to be buried inside or near the shrines in Ottoman Iraq. This presentation examines the global and local attempts at regulating corpse traffic, focusing on the debates among medical experts to show how medical knowledge production was informed by Orientalist and colonial discourses at the time. Demonstrating the impact of regulating corpse traffic on state-society and inter-imperial relations in Ottoman Iraq, this presentation highlights how the dead body was ascribed different national, class, and religious identities reflecting local and global political, social, and economic concerns in the region.

When the Asylum Catches Cholera: Istanbul, 1893, Burçak Özlüdil
 
The life of the institutionalized Ottoman mental patients was interrupted in a dramatic way twice between the 1870s and the 1890s due to outbreaks of contagious diseases. While the first—mysterious and contained—disease resulted in a major patient transfer and abandoning of the state insane asylum (Süleymaniye), the second one, the cholera outbreak of 1893, was dealt with differently. This presentation will look at the intersection of madness and contagious disease as it relates to concerns of public health in the Ottoman capital. I will primarily focus on the planned and actual responses of the Ottoman and asylum administration by analyzing the spatial dimensions of the outbreak and the responses inside and outside the asylum.
 

The Life and Times of Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi (d. 1692): Anxieties of Religious Conversion and Medical Translation (Duygu Yildirim) 
 
This paper explores how and why certain medical translations became successful during the times of religious conflict in the early modern era. By focusing on the understudied relation between religious conversion and medical discourse, this paper scrutinizes the Ottoman imperial physician, Hayatizade Mustafa’s (d. 1692) medical work entitled, Curative Treatise for Difficult Diseases. As a Jewish convert to Islam, Hayatizade’s translations provided him a space in which he used the discourses of “utility” and “progress” to refute classical Islamic medical tradition. Hayatizade’s engagement with melancholy reveals the ways in which medical discourse became a polarized setting where religious identities were negotiated during the time of religious conflict in the Ottoman Empire.
 

In this session, Nukhet Varlik and Ece Turnator will introduce the Black Death Digital Archive, a new resource of interest to the members of the HIDIW working group. "The Black Death Digital Archive (BDDA) is a multidisciplinary portal for researching the Second Plague Pandemic, i.e., outbreaks of plague that started with the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death and their recurrences across Afro-Eurasia the 13th century to the 19th" 

"What’s in a Name?: Selfhood in Physicians’ Reports covering Ottoman Iraq" 
Hande Yalnızoğlu 
 
This presentation will focus on the reports of William H. Colvill, physician at the British Embassy in Baghdad, on the plague outbreak in Ottoman Iraq, close to the town of Karbala, in 1867. Searching for the native voice in his texts in order to uncover the intricacies of translating and establishing medical knowledge on plague, it ends up seeking to answer a very simple question: why did Colvill record the cases he was told about with their full names?   

In this session, our presenter Mustakim Arıcı will discuss his recent publication, “Silent Sources of the History of Epidemics in the Islamic World: Literature of Ṭā’ūn/Plague Treatises.”

Cholera and Plague in Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Baghdad and Basra (Isacar Bolaños)
 
Isacar Bolaños will discuss some of the main primary sources (especially local histories of Baghdad and Basra along with some archival documents) for the study of cholera and plague in Ottoman Baghdad and Basra during the nineteenth century. 

Justin Stearns
 
Justin Stearns will share his research on the plague treatises of Idrīs al-Bidlīsī and al-Baylūni on the basis of his publication “Public Health, the State, and Religious Scholarship Sovereignty in Idrīs al-Bidlīsī’s Arguments for Fleeing the Plague”.