The root ‘-d-w conveys the general idea of
transitiveness, transference, the passage
of something from one locus to another, or its situation with respect to them; various verbal and nominal
forms derived from this root that convey the idea of transmission of disease
therefore also have other transitive
or relational connotations. Thus the form I and II verbs mean, inter
alia, to leave something (i.e.
to pass beyond it), to turn away, to misbehave or deviate (i.e. to exceed proper bounds or transgress), and to
pounce upon something. The form IV
verb has especially strong transitive meanings, such as to cause someone to do
or feel something, to express a quality or trait of character to someone else, and to assist,
support, or avenge some
one.[1]
The broad transitive sense of the root ‘d-w brings us to our
second point In medieval Arabic texts the term 'adwa is used in the
sense of "transmissibility",
and hence encompasses the modern notions of both contagion an( infection. Quite often it is clearly the former sense
which is meant, as in sayings like:
"No sick one conveys illness to a healthy one." But in fact, then was
never any attempt to draw a sharp
distinction between the two. Hence although
in some of the cases to be considered here either the one sense or the other
is clearly more appropriate, it must be borne in mind that the modes epidemiological distinctions between infection
and contagion were unknown in the
medieval Middle East, or indeed, as the studies in this volume demonstrate, anywhere else in the world until early
modern times.
Finally, it must
be recognized that there is no single "Islamic" position of contagion.
The debate over `adwa
began in early Islamic times and
is still discussed today among
Muslim physicians committed both to their faith and t, their professions
as modern medics. By focusing on one of the central contributions, it will hopefully be possible to convey some sense of the main issues
under discussion and how medical matters were and in some sense continue to be enmeshed in other considerations
important in Islamic societies.
The author of concern to us here
is Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), one of the most important literary figures of the ninth-century Middle East. Born in al-Kufa (but usually associated with al-Basra), Ibn
Qutayba was a scholar of very broad
education and studied with some of the greatest authorities c his day. He had close connections with the ruling
`Abbasid house in Baghdad
and served for a time as judge of
Dinawar. His literary output was prodigious
and indicative of the talents of the many-faceted scholars of the period. He wrote a historical digest that is still a
useful source today, a compendium on
poets that begins with an important analysis of Arabic poetry, works on obscure and problematic terms and passages in the
Qur'an and hadith ( reports of the deeds,
sayings, and opinions of the Prophet Muhammad an other early Muslims), a
manual for use by government secretaries in need of a well-rounded education, a question-and-answer text on
religio-theological problems, a
compendium of literary pieces on a wide range of topics, and much more besides.[2]
The background to Ibn Qutayba's
discussion of contagion extends back to pre-Islamic Arabia, where
the Arab tribes considered that epidemics were caused by demons and other spirit beings who spread pestilence among mankind by means of their various weapons.[3]
They also considered it obvious that such maladies were likewise transmissible. In
the sense in which the pre-Islamic Arabs understood the term, contagion was
seen most clearly in the spread of
disease among their herds, the most frequently cited example being mange
in camels. A frequently cited example of this is the verse of Dhu'ayb ibn Ka'b, describing how undeserved calamity is
sometimes visited upon the innocent:
The one who has harmed you and with your foe sides / Is the one who should suffer the
force of your blow. / But
sometimes the camels with mange on their hides/ Will infect the healthy and thus lay them low.[4]
An anonymous poet
refers to how the destruction of warfare overwhelms even those who seek to avoid
involvement, just as mange spreads from sick to healthy camels:
War extends its grasping hand
And shows the innocent no
respect,
Like healthy camels in a land
That nearby mangy ones
infect.[5]
That `adwa
was perceived in
a far broader sense than is comprehended by the modern notion of contagion has already been
stressed above. But the point is highlighted by several traditions bearing on the interpretation of a
passage in the
Qur'an in Surat al-Nur (24), vs. 61:
"There is no fault in the blind, and there is no fault in the lame, and there is no fault
in the sick….[6] Early traditions
explaining this verse assert that until its revelation "people were on their guard against the blind, the lame, and the
sick",[7] thus
suggesting that not only diseases, but
also physical disabilities, were feared for the possibility that they might be transmitted to healthy
individuals.
Muslims in early Islamic times seem to have considered it perfectly
acceptable to
continue to speak of disease in terms of these traditional ideas, and even in traditions cited as the
words of the Prophet these perceptions still appear. A famous tradition has it, for example, that
Muhammad advised: "Flee from the leper as you would flee from a lion',[8]
and others claim
that he refused to
receive lepers[9] and advised people not to allow their gaze to linger on them.[10] But
as Islam developed as a spiritual system, the old notions concerning contagion could not remain unopposed. First
and foremost, in a religious order
dominated by the doctrine of an all-powerful and all-ordaining God, there was no place for the concession of
devastating powers to minor spirits, or for a conception of disease causation that allowed for the capricious
infection of one individual after
another regardless of their good or evil deeds. As for "contagion", this notion was particularly
prominent since it arose not only in connection with epidemic disease, but also
with reference to leprosy."[11]
From both of these concerns, there emerged a tradition of the Prophet in which
Muhammad says: la `adwa, "No contagion". That this denial of
"contagion" was based on considerations
far beyond those of medicine or the explanation of disease transmission is proven by the fact that this
pronouncement usually occurs in a list of traditional beliefs now repudiated by
Islam as basless superstition:
"No contagion, no omens from birds, no owl, no serpent". The "omens from birds" (tiyara) refers to the old augury custom of foretelling the future
from the cries, flight, and alighting places of birds; the term for this was eventually generalized to cover all physical
phenomena believed to influence or indicate the course of future events.
The meaning of the "owl" (hama) was disputed, but was believed in some circles to
represent the spirit of wrongfully slain man; it would never rest until his
death had been properly avenged by the
killing of
his murderer. The “serpent” (safar), also disputed, was regarded by some as a parasite that
attacked and afflicted men in their bellies, and was considered more easily transmissible
from one person to another than mange spreading among camels. All of these-"contagion", the omens wandering owl, and the abdominal
"serpent"-are repudiated regarded
as major constituent elements in a system of causation, based largely on concepts of pagan animism and simple
caprice, which implies that crucial events
in human life can be affected or directed by forces independent of and even contrary to the will of God. Viewed from
the strictly monotheistic perspective
of emergent Islam, in other words, there can be no contagion – in the sense in
which it was understood at that time-because all things come from God.[12]
Other
traditions arose to counter early pro-contagion views, but the denial of "contagion"
was the obvious one: does not simple manifest experience demonstrate that some diseases are
indeed transmissible and very quickly and easily so? The anti-contagionist camp
had an answer in the
form of a parable. The Prophet says, "No contagion", and a bedouin replies: "O Apostle of God,
what about my camels? They are like gazelle does on the sand;[13] but let a mangy camel come and mix with them, and
soon they are all mangy." The Prophet counters: "And who
caused the mange in the first one?"[14] The answer is of course God. Similar traditions
against contagion arose, and the
result was that by the advent of the third/ninth century there were in circulation a broad range of
sharply contradictory traditions on this
subject and of course many others where, as with contagion, an old belief or custom was at first accepted in Islamic society
and then rejected. These cases of
contradiction also called into question the validity of the hadith literature in general, both as a foundation for
elaboration of law and as a model for proper pious conduct, since if the
methods and materials of this field inquiry
were sound there ought not to be major contradictions within The rationalist theologians known as the Mu`tazila[15] were
particularly stern in their critique
of hadith, and one of them, the Basra theologian al-Nazzam (d. ca.
230/845),[16] chose precisely
the traditions on contagion to show the
scholars of hadith had
no coherent methodology for
arriving at sound religious
knowledge and that their materials were irredeemably flawed:
How can it be [said] that they commit no errors, tell no
lies, display no ignorance, and do not contradict one another, when those of them who relate from the Prophet-may the
blessing and peace of God be upon
him-that he said: "No contagion and
no omens from birds in Islam", and that he also said: "And who
infected the first one", are the [same] ones who relate that he said:
"Flee from the leper as you would flee from a lion"; and that a leper came to him to pledge his loyalty as a Muslim to him, but [the Prophet] sent him someone to take his pledge and did not allow him to come close to him, out of fear of being infected by him?[17]
As can be seen here,
the issue is not so much medical problems of disease as the broader difficulties posed in other ways by
the old materials on this subject. As it became entangled in questions of this kind, the issue of contagion became a symbol of the dispute
over the legitimacy
of various intellectual disciplines within emergent Islamic scholarship, and what the future of the various alternatives would or should be.
This brings us to
Ibn Qutayba, who took up the challenge of al-Nazzam in his Ta'wil mukhtalif al-hadith ("Exegesis
of Contradictory Traditions"), a book which represents the work of his
mature years and was completed shortly after 256/870.[18] When his attention
turns to contagion he has a circle of hypothetical
antagonists-the Mu'tazila are certainly those meant here-challenge him with
the discrepant traditions mentioned above:
"This is all contradictory", the
critics conclude, "with no common ground between the various views".[19]
Ibn Qutayba objects
and asserts that in fact there is no
contradiction at all. Invoking the doctrine
of miasma (though he does not use
this word) and a proposal for a distinction between
"contagion" as a scientific
concept and "contagion" as
perceived in popular superstition, he
argues that each interpretation has
its context of time and place, and
that if it is situated within its proper context the apparent contradictions
disappear:
Contagion is of
two types, one of these being the contagion of leprosy. The leper gives off an odour so strong that it causes any one who long remains in his presence or eats with him to fall ill. Similar is the case of the woman who is under a leper and has sexual intercourse
with him in the same bedding; the affliction will be brought into
contact with her, and she too may
contract leprosy. The same
applies to his children, who on many occasions come into contact with him.
Such also are the cases of those suffering from consumption (sull), hectic fever (daqq), or purulent mange (naqb). When the physicians prescribe that one should not associate with a
consumptive or a leper, they do not thereby
imply a principle of contagion, but rather only have 'in mind the change in odour, which may well cause the
one who smells it for an extended
period to fall ill-physicians would be the
last people to lend any credence to felicitous or evil omens.[20]
He then turns to the specific example of
mange in camels, as discussed Prophetic tradition:
Similar is the case when the nuqba, a purulent
mange, breaks out on a camel. When the others [in the herd] mix and intermingle with it and betake themselves to the
same place where it kneels down to rest, they
will be brought into contact with the fluid and pus issuing from it[s sores] and so contract the same disease from
which it suffers. This is the principle of which the Apostle of God spoke:
"Do not water the sick with the healthy." He was opposed to a diseased camel mingling with a
healthy one, as the former's pus and rubbing [21]
would expose the latter to the same disease.
Ibn Qutayba's next comments reveal that he was not the first one to attempt
a rational
harmonization of the contradictory traditions relevant to contagion:
One circle of opinion holds the view that by prohibiting such mixing the
Prophet wanted to keep people from falling into the sin of supposing
that what has stricken their camels has come [to them] from the diseased ones.
But so far as I am concerned there is no basis for this opinion, since we find manifest empirical
evidence for the position set forth above.[22]
One representative of this view half a
century prior to Ibn Qutayba was Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam al-Harawi (d.
224/838), a native of Herat
and a widely travelled scholar primarily associated with Iraqi
centres of learning.[23]
Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani (d. 852/1449) several
times cites him (without identifying
the book he is using) for his negative comments on the continuing influence of old interpretations of the tradition
disapproving the mixing of healthy with diseased animals:
Some people attribute
the tradition to fear of how that malady would affect the healthy animals, but this is the worst
opinion that could
be advocated on the hadith, since
it legitimates the superstitious
interpretation that the tradition was meant to prohibit.
Abu 'Ubayd argues
that the prohibition to the effect that one ought not to mix diseased
camels with healthy ones was not declared by the Prophet in order to confirm
the existence of contagion. Rather, what Muhammad had in mind was a situation
in which someone has healthy animals that fall ill by the decree of God;
it might occur to the owner that this was a result of contagion, and thus lead him astray into
religious misgivings and doubts.[24]
It is likely that it is Abu 'Ubayd's
view that Ibn Qutayba had in mind in his critical comments. Abu 'Ubayd was active in the same centres where Ibn Qutayba would later also move, and was simply too
important and too well known for his
work to escape the attention of such a very widely read scholar interested in similar subjects 50 years later.
Ibn Qutayba then proceeds to
explain the second type of contagion he has in
mind:
The other type of contagion is
the plague, which descends upon a land and causes [its inhabitants] to leave it out of
fear of contagion.
Sahl ibn Muhammad told me that al-Asma'i told him, concerning one of the Basrans,
that he fled from the plague, rode off on a donkey, and headed with his family toward Safawan.[25] He heard a
cameleer[26]
singing behind him, saying:
By none will God be left behind
By clutching fast to a donkey's lead,
Nor from Him can one haven find
By turning to his dashing steed.
To each a fixed time God will bind
When he shall meet his death
decreed.
The night-trod road may well but
wind
To where God waits with writ to heed.[27]
The Apostle of God said: "If
it is in the land in which you are, do
not leave it." He also said: "If it is in a land, do not enter it." By
the former he means: "Do not leave the land if the plague is there, as if you supposed that flight from the
decree of God Almighty would save you
from God himself." And by his saying "if the plague is in a land do
not enter it", he means that your remaining in a place where there is no plague would provide you with greater peace of mind and more agreeable
living con ditions.... It is this
sense of contagion of which the Apostle of God speaks when he says:
"No contagion."[28]
There are some problems with this
effort to resolve the problems put to traditionists by al-Nazzam. Belief in ‘adwa as a living willing force appears to have been a very old
perspective, but one that the many references to "contagion" in
pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry and oral lore suggest had in time given way to a more
naturalistic view. While there was no small element of superstition to traditional
beliefs where disease was concerned, most Arab observers from the sixth century
onward viewed the actual transmissibility of disease from one victim to another in practical
terms, as a matter of simple empirical
observation. Further, it is clear that the reason for the Islamic opposition to the doctrine of "contagion"
was not so much that it amounted to pagan
superstition-many aspects of ancient Arabian lore survived on into Islamic times-but that it was regarded as a diminution of the role of God as the author of all things. And it is quite
unclear why Ibn Qutayba seeks to draw
a distinction between ‘adwa as
applied to leprosy and `adwa
as applied to plague.
In other respects, however, his
discussion is an accurate reflection of the social
milieu that produced it. Earlier treatments of the subject had betrayed no
trace of influence from medical thinking, for the simple reason that there was
precious little formal humoral medicine anywhere in the domains of Islam until late in the second half of the eighth
century.[29]
Ibn Qutayba's material, on the other hand, comes from a time when formal
physicians flourished in Baghdad,
translations from Syrian and Greek were being produced at a rapid pace, and formal medical institutions (such
as hospitals) were emerging. Hence his ability to comment on what physicians
say about "contagion". It was, in fact, in the very next generation
after Ibn Qutayba's death that the Syrian physician Qusta ibn Luqa (d. ca. 300/912)
devoted an essay to contagion in
which it was discussed and explained purely in medical/philosophic terms.[30]
Though his discussion in the Ta'wil mukhtalif al-hadith clearly seeks to vindicate the
traditions of the Prophet, it is significant that, first, he does not argue against
contagion as a valid medical doctrine, and second, as we have already seen
above, that in the discussion by Abu 'Ubayd he already had an argument to
hand that would explain away the contradictions among the contagion traditions,
and yet decided to reject it. This suggests that while Ibn Qutayba was keen
to protect hadith from its
critics, he did not want this effort to involve a repudiation of the doctrine of
contagion.
Outside of the context of the problem of contradictions in Prophetic hadith his true opinion on the subject of contagion is
easier to discern. In the `Uyun al-akhbar, a work dedicated to a broad synthetic approach to
culture incorporating material from
many fields of intellectual endeavour, the subject of contagion
arises again-if implicitly-in a brief discussion of leprosy. Here too Ibn Qutayba cites traditions from the Prophet
about the disease, but only those
that uphold a pro-contagion position. And added to these a other materials of a similar orientation. The
Basran Qatada ibn Di`ama (d. 117/735) is
cited for a report according to which a leper is driven away because it
is thought that he has been cursed (balaghani annahu mal`un);[31] the Basran akhbari al-Mada'ini (d. 235/850) is quoted for a report about how the Umayyad caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 96-9/715-17) passed by some lepers on his way to Mecca and ordered that they be burned alive,
re- marking: "Had God wished that any good should come to these, He would not have tormented them with such an affliction as
this."[32]
Elsewhere, again free from the confining
context of argument over contradictory traditions, he discusses a hadith of the Prophet
addressing the issue of whether a buy can
return to the seller a slave found to be defective in some way. Here again
contagion is not explicitly mentioned, but a number of diseases from which a slave
may be discovered to suffer are listed, and almost all of these are ailments
considered contagious in medieval Islamic times: leprosy, consumption, and epilepsy (here called junun), thus posing the dilemma of determining whether the slave already had the disease when sold to
the buyer, or was infected subsequently.[33]
It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ibn Qutayba was a good
deal closer to the pro-contagionist position, and indeed, to formal medical
thinking, than his concern to defend hadith
as a discipline and source of religious
knowledge would allow him openly to concede in a work in which his task was to
defend hadith from its Mu`tazili detractors.
Our Basran
littérateur was not alone in his ambivalent attitudes on this subject. As I
have argued elsewhere, a proper understanding of medieval Islamic medicine can
only be achieved by bearing in mind that the milieu in which it functioned was
a profoundly pluralistic one that allowed for a wide range of medical views and
practices. The formal humoral medicine had to compete with both folkloric and
religious medicine, and in important ways there were overlaps and points of
conjunction among the various traditions.[34]
For scholars whose professional, intellectual, and personal commitments placed
them astride the already ill-defined boundaries between these traditions, it
was therefore difficult to adhere consistently to any one view. Al-Shafi`i (d.
204/819), for example, was an extremely important scholar of law whose writings
on legal theory were decisive in the formulation of Islamic jurisprudence.[35]
His commitments to the Qur'an and hadith were firm and
enduring, and his career was in large part dedicated to their consecration as
the ultimate sources of law and guidance for conduct by Muslims. But in a legal
discussion of medical impediments to marriage his argument highlights the
central role of contagious disease in such matters:
According to what the men of
medical learning and experience allege, leprosy will in many cases infect the
spouse and is thus a disease dictating against sexual intercourse. Hardly any
man's desire would lead him to enjoy sexual relations with a woman suffering
from this disease, nor would a woman find it acceptable to have sex with a man
suffering from this disease. As for the child, it is a manifest fact-but God
knows best-that of children
born to men or women who are lepers, few will be uninfected; those that do will see
the disease pass on to their own children.[36]
Confronted with these facts, al-Shaf’i could
not but concede that the infectiousness
of leprosy-its "contagion"-made it impossible to allow a marriage involving
a victim of this disease. Interestingly enough, he refers to medical opinion as "allegations" (fima
yaz‘umu), which in Islamic legal
parlance means that the material
being cited is open to doubt or contradicts other opinion based on better authority: i.e. he knows of the
traditions being placed in circulation to deny `adwa, and is uncomfortable with the glaring contradiction between the two sides. Still, when it comes
to matters of legal practice, he
finds the argument for contagion too persuasive to condone a marriage between a
healthy person and a
leper.
Elsewhere one finds further evidence that theoretical
views of contagion--i.e. arguments
presented in contexts where the omnipotence of God and His will were concerned-often failed to influence
actual practice. Apart from the fact
that medical texts routinely upheld the doctrine of contagion,[37] public health regulations in the hisba (market inspection) treatises often presuppose
the danger of the transmission of disease[38]
and public authorities clearly were worried about the peril posed by
lepers to healthy persons among whom
they may circulate. In Cairo
in 660/1262 a certificate signed by three Muslim
physicians confirmed that a certain man suffered from leprosy, and so could not circulate among the Muslims
"because that condition is a transmissible
and communicable disease" (li-kawnihi
mina l-amrad al-mu‘diya al-muntaqila).[39]
To assert that "Islam" denies
contagion is therefore to miss the essence of what was in fact a complex and
difficult debate that has continued through most of Islamic history, involving contributions by
individuals too numerous to consider here.[40]
What stood at the heart of the matter for
Muslim scholars was the problem that
to accept contagion as a purely medical doctrine was to accept-at least implicitly-the possibility that
things could occur in the world
independent of the will of God. In some cases, it is true, scholars felt that this difficulty required the rejection of
contagion in any form whatsoever. The essayist and historian Ibn al-Wardi, for
example, who died in his home town of
Aleppo in the late stages of the Black Death in 749/1349, survived long enough to write an essay in rhymed prose on
the plague in which he categorically denied contagion and argued that
God created the plague in the first place
and has subsequently reconstituted it in each individual case.[41]
Far more
common, however, were cases in which scholars upheld the "No contagion" tradition attributed to Muhammad, but
hastened to argue that this denial applies only to claims for contagion
"by its own nature", as the phrase was often put, that God often uses
contagion as an instrument of His will, and that contagion in this sense is a notion that Muslims can readily
accept. Both of these alternatives,
as well as many others, were part of an ongoing discourse the basic
problematics of which are laid out by Ibn Qutayba in clear concise form.
[1] See, for example,
Ibn Manzur (d. 711/1311), Lisan al- arab
(Beirut: Dar Sadir, 137, 6/1955-6), XV, 31b:7-436:10;
Murtada al-Zabidi (d. 1205/1791), Taj al-`arus
(Cairo: Matba`a al-khayriya, AH 1306-8),
X, 235:12-238:33.
[2] The authoritative
work on Ibn Qutayba remains Gerard Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889): l'homme, son oeuvre, ses idees (Damascus: Institut francais de Damas, 1965). See
also Lecomte's article on Ibn Qutayba
in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960-proceeding), III,
844b-847b
[3] See Hassan ibn Thabit (d. ca. 40/659),
Diwdn,
ed. Valid N. 'Arafat (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), II, 172:10-13;
al-Jahiz (d. 255/868), Kitab al-hayawan, ed. Abd al-Salam Muhammad Harun, 2nd ed.
(Cairo: Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, 1385-8/1965-9),1, 351:5-9; VI, 218:12220:8;
Ibn Qutayba, 'Uyun al-akhbar, ed. Ahmad Zaki al-'Adawi (Cairo: Dar al-kutub almisriya, 1343-8/1925-30), II, 114:6; al-Mas'udi
(d. 345/956), Muruj al-dhahab, ed. Charles Pellat (Beirut: Universite
libanaise, 1966-79), III, 214:8-12; al-Tha alibi (d. 429/1038), Thimar al-qulub, ed. Muhammad Abu 1-Fad! Ibrahim (Cairo: Dar nahdat
Misr, 1384/1965), 68:1-69:2; Ibn Abi l-Hadid (d. 656/1258), Sharh
nahj al-balagha, ed. Muhammad Abu
l-Fadl Ibrahim (Cairo: 'Isa al-Babi
al-Halabi, 1959-64), XV, 240:2-8.
[4] Abu 'Ubayda (d. 207/822), Naqa'id
Jarir wa-I-Farazdaq, ed. A. A. Bevan (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1905-12), II, 1026:3; Ibn Abd Rabbih (d. 328/940), Al-'Iqd
al farid ed. Ahmad Amin, Ahmad
al-Zayn, and Ibrahim al-Abyari (Cairo: Lajnat al-ta'lif wa-l-tarjama wa-l-nashr, 1363-70/1944-56),
V, 237:6. For other examples, see al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi (d. ca. 170/786), Dawan
al-mufaddaliyat ed. Charles James Lyall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 752:7-11; al-Humaydi (d.
219/834), Al-Musnad, ed. Habib
al-Rahman al-A'zami (Hyderabad: Da'irat al-ma'arif al-'uthmaniya, AH 1381-2),11, 308:9-309:3 no. 705;
al-Bukhari (d. 256/870), AlJami' al-sahih, ed. Ludolf Krehl and T. W Juynboll (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1862-1908), II, 16pu17:4 Buyu' no.
36; Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 356/967), Kitab al-aghani, ed. Nasr al-Hurini (Cairo: al-Matba'a al-kubri al-amiriya, AH 1284-5), IV, 155:26-7.
[5] Abu Tammam (d.
2311845), Diwan al-hamasa,
ed. with the commentary of al-Tibrizi (d. 502 /1109) by Muhammad `Abd al-Qadir
Said al-Rafi`i (Beirut: Dat al-galam, n.d.),1,154:4.
[6] See A. J. Arberry,
The Koran Interpreted (Oxford: Oxford
University Press,1964), 360.
[7] Ibn Abi Shayba
(d. 235/849), AI-Musannaf
fi l-hadith wa-l-athar, ed.
Mukhtar al-Nadawi (Bombay. al-Dar
al-salafiya, 1399-1403/1979-83), VIII, 130:10-13.
[8] See, for example, Abd
al-Razzaq al-San`ani (d.
211/827), Musannaf, ed. Habib Rahmin al-A'zami (Beirut: al-Maktab al-islami, 1390-2/1970-2), X, 405:5-6; XI, 204:1 205:1; Ibn Abi Shayba, Musannaf VIII, 132:3-5; IX, 44:5-7.
[9] Abi Shayba, Musannaf,
VIII, 131 ult-132:2; IX, 43pu-44:1.
[10] Al-Tayilisi (d. 204/819), Musnad (Hyderabad: Da'irat al-ma`arif al-nizamiya, AH 13 339:26-7 no. 2601; Ibn Abi Shayba, Musannaf, VIII, 132:6-8; IX, 44:2-4
[11] Michael Dols,
"The Leper in Medieval Islamic Society," Speculum 58 (1983): 891-916
[12] For some early examples
of such statements, see Malik ibn Anas (d. 179/795), Al-Muwatta', ed. Muhammad Fu'ad Abd al-Baqi (Cairo: 'Isa al-Babi
al-Halabi, 1370/1951), II, 946:4-6
‘Ayn no. 18; Abd Allah ibn Wahb (d. 197/813),
Kitab al-jami' , ed. J. David-Weill
(Cairo, Institut francais
d'archeologie orientale, 1939-48), I, 90:11-93ult; al-Tayalisi,
Musnad, 265:2-3 no.1961; Abd al-Razzaq, Musannaf, X, 404:15-405:3,
405:12-406:3; XI, 205:5-7; al-Humaydi,, Musnad II, 308:9-309:3 no. 705.
[13] I.e., their unblemished hides are like the tawny
pelts of gazelles, which camouflage against the background of the steppe.
[14] 'Abd Allah ibn Wahb, Jami, I, 91:8-10; Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 242/855), Musnad (Cairo: al-Matba`a al-kubra al-amiriya, AH 1311),
I, 269:14-17, 328:11-13, 440:24-9; 24pu-25:2,
267:2-5, 317:26-30; al-Bukhari, Sahih,
IV, 57:6-11, 69:10-70:6, Tibb nos. 25, 53-4;
Muslim (d. 261/874), Sahih, ed. Muhammad Fu'ad Abd al-Baqi
(Cairo: 'Isa al-Babi
al-Halabi, 1375-6/1955-6), IV 1742:10-1743:6,
Salam
nos. 101-2.
[15] Encyclopaedia
of Islam, VII, 783a-793b.
[16] On al-Nazzam, see Josef van Ess, Theologie and Gesellschaft im 2. and 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra. Eine Geschichte des
religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991-5), III, 296-445, and for his views on
knowledge and epistemology, 380-402.
[17] Josef van
Ess, "Ein unbekanntes Fragment des Nazzam",
in Wilhelm Hoenerbach, ed.,
Der Orient in der Forschung: Festschrift für Otto Spies (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1967), 172.
[18] See Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba, 85-92. The text
was translated by Lecomte in his Le traite des
divergences du Hadit d'Ibn
Qutayba (Damascus: Institut francais
de Damas, 1962), with the passage on
contagion at 114-16
[19] Ibn Qutayba, Ta'wil mukhtalif al-hadith, ed. Muhammad Muhyi l-Din al-Asfar (Beirut: al-Maktab al-islami and Dar al-ishraq, 1409/1989),
117ult.
[21] I.e. against
another animal to relieve the itching of its sores.
A NINTH-CENTURY MUSLIM
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