Michael W. Dols

Plague in Early Islamic History

The appearance of epidelmics in early Islamic history may be attributed in part to the cyclical recurrences of plague in the Middle East following the Plague of Justinian, beginning in A.D. 541. Based primarily on the Arabic plague treatises written after the Black Death (the second plague pandemic in the mid-fourteenth century), the history of the plague epidemics through the Umaiyad Period has been reconstructed. These epidemics provoked medical and religio-legal explanations and prescriptions, which have strongly influenced the attitudes and behavior of the Muslim community toward the disease. Besides the deaths of important men by plague, it is suggested that the endemic nature of plague during the early Islamic Empire may have significantly retarded population growth and debilitated Muslim society in Syria and Iraq during the Umaiyad Period.

The leper in medieval Islamic society.

To the Western mind, no disease is so fearsome and horrible as leprosy. Leprosy still conveys the suggestion of physical repulsiveness, moral perversion, and promiscuous infection; the leper is the archetypal outcast, societys pariah and sometimes its scapegoat. We have inherited such ideas about the disease and its victim largely from the Middle Ages; since that time the leper has become a familiar figure in Western literature and art.2 The formation of these beliefs regarding lepers tells us a good deal about the nature of European Christian society in the medieval period what was despised and cast out is as revealing about social attitudes as what was cherished and preserved.3 The leper affords similar insight into the nature of traditional Islamic

Insanity in Islamic Law

Insanity in Islamic law is not considered as a separate or distinct category in the legal textbooks. It is discussed as a cause of legal disability or interdiction (hajr) and as a particular disabi...

The Treatment of the Insane

‘For every disease there is medicine to cure it except for madness, plague and old age’ al-Mansuri1 The medical texts suggest how the mentally disturbed should be treated; unfortunately, they generally do not tell us how they were treated. The rare historical descriptions of the care of the insane are, therefore, an essential complement to the medical texts. These descriptions are mainly of the violently insane in hospitals, but this focus should not be allowed to obscure the customary, less dramatic and more familial care in the home. Whether in the hospital or in the home, we can anticipate all manner of physical therapy as well as simple care. And as Ibn Bakhtishu, a physician who treated the insane in a hospital, attests, the treatment of madness also raises the question of psychotherapy.

Medieval Islamic Medicine. Ibn Riḍwān's Treatise "On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt"@@@Medieval Islamic Medicine. Ibn Ridwan's Treatise "On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt"

If our book is of the kind that we have described, the need for it is imperative for the elite and the common people of Egypt, as well as for the foreigners who come here, in order to maintain the health of their bodies and to remove their illnesses. The ones who most need this book are the doctors, for the required treatment cannot be know without a knowledge of the temperament of the country and what particularly occurs in it.