Bio-Medical Discourse and Oriental Metanarratives on Pandemics in the Islamicate World from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20249491
AutoresSuhail Ahmad (0000-0001-6611-2484, University of Bisha, autor correspondente), Robert E Bjork (0000-0003-2029-9620, Arizona State University), Mohammed Saleh Ali Almahfali (0000-0002-8438-9097, Malmö University), Abdel-Fattah M Adel (0000-0001-7968-8167, University of Bisha), Mashhoor Abdu Al-Moghales (0000-0001-7984-5388, University of Bisha)
Ano2024
Volume13
Fascículo3
Páginas89
Data de publicação2024-06-17
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h13030089
OpenAlexW4399729366
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas51

This paper examines the writings of European travelers, chaplains, and resident doctors on pandemics in the Mediterranean regions from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Using French comparative literary theory, the article highlights how Muslim communities in Egypt, Turkey, Aleppo, and Mecca were stereotyped based on their belief in predestination, their failure to avoid contamination, and their lack of social distancing during plague outbreaks. This paper argues that travelers were influenced by Renaissance humanism, Ars Apodemia, religious discourses, and texts, such as plague tracts, model town concepts, the book of orders, and tales, and that they essentialized Mediterranean Islamicate societies by depicting contamination motifs supposedly shaped by the absence of contagion theory in prophetic medicines. Regarding plague science, this paper concludes that Christian and Muslim intellectuals had similar approaches until the Black Death and that Arabs were eclectic since the Abbasid period. This paper further maintains that the travelers’ approaches fostered chauvinism and the cultural hegemony of the West over the Orient since the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, driven by eschatology, conversion, and power structure narratives

Ancient history · Geography · Pandemic · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Islamic Studies and History · Medicine