The outbreak of the Corona pandemic has awakened the memories of the world about ancient epidemics, and throughout human history, epidemics have struck ancient civilizations and societies since the first known outbreak in 430 BC during the Peloponnesian War (between the allies of Athens and the allies of Sparta).
And for a long time before the spread of the Corona virus, the subject of the epidemic was a literary tradition spread in ancient literary history, and a number of poets addressed human stories ranging from familiarity and separation, and the feelings of those who lost their beloved by the epidemic, as well as those trapped in quarantine or afraid of infection or fleeing death.
Among the most famous poems whose epidemic was the poem "Cholera" of the late Iraqi poet Nazek Al-Malaika, which was considered the beginning of "free poetry", which made the reputation of this poem outweigh the poem of the Egyptian poet Ali Al-Jarem, which he wrote when the cholera struck his hometown of the "City of Rashid" in Egypt in 1895 .
Plague of the Umayyad era
In his book "The Plague in the Umayyad Age: Unclear Pages from the History of the Umayyad Caliphate," the Egyptian author Ahmed Al-Adawi reviewed the effects of the plague on the Umayyad state, life, and societies in its various regions, and considered that the era of the Umayyad period witnessed about twenty plagues, with a rate of one plague for every four and a half years.
He considered that the decline in the weight of Damascus - which was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate - was due to the outbreak of the plague, which also resolved major battles in the Umayyad period, including the struggle of Musab ibn al-Zubayr with Abd al-Malik bin Marwan in Basra, as well as resolving the fall of the Umayyads when the Abbasids took the appropriate time to announce their revolution between plagues Two great stricken Sham and Iraq in the middle of the eighth century AD (second AH).
Al-Adawi says to Al-Jazeera Net that Christians and Muslims viewed the epidemic differently, as Christians viewed it as a divine punishment for human beings as a result of the sins and evils they committed or committed, as we note in the Old Testament that deals with "the Lord's revenge on the people by shedding the epidemic on them, especially Jeremiah and Isaiah prophecies."
As for Muslims, the plague differed specifically from other epidemics due to its association with hadiths describing it as mercy and considers the dead to be plague as a martyr, and for the patient there is a reward for the fastings in the way of God, and then they differed on the issue of supplication by raising it or not, yet a number of jurists went to consider it a divine punishment for indulging in pleasures Sins, leaving acts of worship and neglecting assumptions.
Al-Adawi concludes his statement by saying that if we "scrutinize what people are discussing these days on social media, we will not notice much change between people's minds today and their counterparts who lived in the Middle Ages."
Writers and epidemics
Nine centuries ago, the Canadian jurist and writer Omar Al-Maari, known as Ibn Al-Wardi, wrote his poem about the plague that was considered a poem of self-lamentation, as he died because of the plague two days after its writing, and in his report published by the British Middle East Eye website, the writer Mustafa Abu Sunaina said that the area of The Middle East and North Africa have a long tradition of writing poetry about disease and the epidemic.
The writer stated that the work related to the epidemic in the Middle East is not just fictional literature, as it extends beyond artwork and impressionism to include hygiene guidelines, travel books and hadiths, moreover, the work of the ninth century writer Ibn Abi Al-Dunya along with the works written by Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani provided instructions on how Fighting disease, as we resort to the World Health Organization and the appropriate extension agencies.
1947: Cholera in Egypt
The cholera poem of the Iraqi poet Nazek Al-Malaika (1923-2007) depicts the shadows of death, sadness and suffering that shattered Egypt during the last months of 1947, and the epidemic was considered the largest of its kind in Egypt during the twentieth century, as it resulted in the death of more than ten thousand people.
The angels in her poem conjure live images of vehicles carrying dead bodies and the silence that was camped on the Egyptian streets, as colloquial phrases are used for the disease, and it says:
In a severe cholera person, death is avenge
Silence is bitter
Nothing but zoom back
Even the diggers of the grave are idyllic
The mosque died its muezzin
The dead who will mark him are left with noah and exhalation
A child without a mother and a father cry from a burning heart
Tomorrow there is no doubt that evil disease will stop it
The writer mentioned that the origin of the infection was never proven, but many Egyptians believe that it was transferred to them by the English soldiers returning from India to Egypt, which at the time was a British colony.
Critics praised her style at the time as one of the first works of free poetry instead of the traditional poem, and the poem opened a new chapter of Arabic poetry and inspired a new wave of Arab poets to experiment with different forms of poetry. During the nineties, the angels moved to Cairo, where she spent her last years.
1784: Plague in North Africa
The author explained that the popular perception of epidemics focused on outbreaks of diseases such as the Black Death in the Middle Ages or the outbreak of influenza between 1917-1920, which was dubbed "the Spanish flu".
Richard Tolley's book, "10 Years at the Court of Tripoli," tells the British consul in Tripoli, West since 1784, the story of the plague that afflicted the coastal city in 1785.
Tolli wrote how burning straw was used to disinfect homes, along with what we might now recognize as social spacing. The situation was also harsh in Tunisia, where the plague reached the city of Sfax in 1784, and it is likely that it killed about 15,000 people, and this happened in a coastal city with a population of 30,000, twice the city of Tripoli.
The writer added that Sfax was previously plagued by plague in 1622 and again in 1688, and a century later the epidemic eliminated many of the ruling elite, including officials, politicians and poets, and the epidemic began when sea merchants arrived after they escaped from the plague in Alexandria, and despite being prevented from entering Sfax But some sailors managed to break this ban.
1349: The epidemic in Syria
Ibn al-Wardi, who lived in Aleppo, Damascus, and the Levant, wrote, describing the "Black Death" that swept the world during the mid-fourteenth century from Asia to the Middle East and then to Europe.
The writer indicated that Ibn Al-Wardi was in Aleppo when the plague arrived in 1349, and he has been devastating the city for 15 years, which resulted in the death of about a thousand people every day, and described his condition in verses written two days before his death, saying:
I am not afraid of plague as someone else, but it is not one of the two beautiful
If I die from the rest, and if I lived, my ears and eyes would recover
The tenth century AD: fever in Egypt
The famous Abbasid era poet Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabi called his poem on fever the title of "Visiting the Night", as the fever intensified in the evening, and he described his resistance to the disease and his pursuit of his hopes.
Al-Mutanabbi likened the fever to the shy girl he treats with his hair, and he said:
My visitor is as if she is alive, so she can only visit in darkness
I gave her the limbs and gaskets, so she recovered and became bones in my bones
The skin narrows and narrows on my soul, and it expands with sickness
As if the morning expelled it, and it tear out with four sijam
I watch her time without longing
Despite the lack of poems and literary works that deal with plague and the epidemic in the era of Islam, the prophetic hadiths were strongly present among the people of that era.
In 639, the plague spread in the Levant and led to the death of many companions. In the Palestinian village of “Amwas” located between the cities of Jerusalem and Ramleh, about 25,000 people died in the Amwas epidemic, including Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah, Mu'ath bin Jabal, Sharhabil bin Hassan and others, Which prompted Muslim scholars and writers to write about the plague and how to prevent it.
Among the hadiths that were widely cited in the books of epidemics, the Prophet, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, said, “If you heard of it on a land, do not enter it, and if it fell to a land while you were on it, do not get out of it to escape from it.” I asked the Messenger of God ﷺ about the plague, and he told me that it was “a punishment that God sends to whomever He wills, and that God made it as a mercy for the believers.