Then I traveled to Cairo, and I was informed that the number of the dead during the days of the epidemic reached twenty-one thousand per day, and I found that all the sheikhs I knew had died, may God have mercy on them.
Ibn Battuta in his description of the effects of the plague on Cairo and its inhabitants in the year 749 AH / 1348 AD
Before the development of medicine and treatment in modern times, the history of the ancient world was like endless cycles of epidemics and plagues, hardly a cycle ends until another comes to claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and the plague occupied a remarkable and prominent position in the Arab heritage in all its branches of knowledge, as As a major human catastrophe, it elicited many religious and philosophical questions.
The works of the Prophet’s Sunnah are hardly devoid of a chapter dealing with the plague, its causes and how to confront it. The Prophet - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - considered the deceased as a martyr from among the number of martyrs he reported in his hadiths, and Arab sources of all kinds gave what is presented to the patient affected by the plague from infection to death. The doctor Abu Bakr Al-Razi described the plague by saying: “a hot tumor that appears in the groin and armpit and is killed within four or five days”[1], and he defined the characteristics of this disease by saying: “With the epidemic plague, the mind is mixed with cold extremities, bitterness and bleeding differ, and pain The abdomen and its expansion, bitter stools, bloating, thin and bitter watery urine, blockage and nosebleeds, heat in the chest, distress and blackening of the tongue, thirst and the fall of desire and other bad things”[2].
The famous doctor, Ibn Sina, described the plague as a toxic substance that causes a deadly tumor that occurs in the soft and groin areas of the body, and most of what is under the armpit, behind the ear, or at the rabbit. They referred to several epidemic diseases similar to the plague, but he stated that he was not certain about the link between these names and their relationship to the plague [3].
And if Muslims have known quarantine in its general sense, that is, not to come to the places of the plague, and to prevent the hadiths of the Prophet - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - which warn against leaving the land of the plague if it occurs or entering it, and urging patience as the evidence of his saying - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - "If you heard the land, do not Tdechloha it, and if their income to you, do not go out of them to escape." [4], and saying: "Dead as a martyr, and based injury which Kalmrabott for God, and mouse it mousey crawl" [5], They wrote down their observations about the plagues that they have been subjected to since the era of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, the most famous of which is the Plague of Levant or the Plague of Emmaus in the year 18 AH, in which many of the Companions, may God be pleased with them, died, and Caliph Omar Ibn Al-Khattab was forced to return to Medina when he approached him.
However, the greatest plague that struck the world in its Middle Ages is the plague of 1347 AD and the years that followed, or the plague of 749 AH as it is known in Arab sources, and is widely known as the "Black Plague", as it struck the continents of the ancient world, and annihilated one third of its population from Europe alone. Half of them said.
Historians differed as to the place from which it appeared, it was said China, and it was said the Black Sea, and from it he moved to Iran and the Caucasus, then Italy, Eastern Europe, Egypt, then the Levant and North Africa, and fortunately for us, the most famous traveler in Arab history witnessed him Ibn Battuta during his return trip from China when he was in the country Levant heading towards Egypt via Palestine, so he wrote in his famous journey his most prominent observations about that great plague that wiped out entire nations and cities.
How did Ibn Battuta see the plague in 749 AH?
How did he survive?
And to what extent Egypt and the Levant suffered from it at that time?
When we look at the historians of that era, we find that they say about that year: “There was an epidemic that did not occur in the predecessors of the cyclones.. The people of Muharram in the year seven hundred and forty-nine (1348 AD) until it became famous, while it intensified in the homes of Egypt in Sha’ban, Ramadan and Shawwal, and it rose in Half of Dhul-Qa’dah, and between ten and fifteen thousand souls to twenty thousand souls would die every day in Cairo and Egypt. The pit was buried in the forty-thirty and more, and the dead of the plague would spit blood, then shout and die, and with this the price of the world spread all over the world, and this epidemic was not as it was in a region without a region, but rather the regions of the earth,” as Al-Maqrizi and Ibn Taghri Bardi describe in their two histories. [6].
Cairo and Egypt in general were overwhelmed with the dead of the plague, until we saw the scholar and historian Al-Maqrizi describe the scenes of the mass graves that they were digging at the time to bury the dead groups after another. Months have wiped out nearly a third of that number.
The black plague caused the disease "bumpy" plague, in reference to the name of the tumor that it causes in the human lymph nodes, starting from the thighs, under the armpits, and at the top of the neck under the ear.
An examination of the anatomical character at the end of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed the presence of tumors the size of an egg or less.
And it turns out that some patients who died without showing these signs died because of internal tumors of tissues that border vital organs, such as the liver.
The death rate in bubonic plague is from 30% to 80%, depending on the time of infection, which was especially severe in the summer [7].
With medicine and medicine unable to confront these pandemics, people died in droves, and the famous traveler Ibn Battuta witnessed this great epidemic during his return from his famous trip from China, Indonesia and Iran, settling for a period of time in Damascus in the spring of the second year 749 AH / July 1348 AD, where he monitored the phenomena of the disease and the procedures Which was desperately taken to contain and mitigate it.
Ibn Battuta says:I witnessed the days of the greatest plague in Damascus at the end of the month of Rabi’ al-Thani in the year seven hundred and forty-nine that the king of the princes, the deputy of the Sultan (the Mamluk in the Levant) Arghun Shah ordered a herald calling in Damascus that people fast for three days and that no one cooks in the market what is eaten during the day, so the people fasted for three consecutive days, the last of which was On Thursday, then the princes, the honorable, the judges, and all the different classes gathered in the mosque until it swelled with them, and they spent the night of Friday between a prayer and a farewell memory, then they prayed the morning and they all went out on their feet and in their hands the Qur’an and the princes barefoot, and all the people of the country, male and female, young and old, and went out. The Jews with their Torah, and the Christians with their Gospel, with them are the women and children, all of them weeping and supplicating to God by His Books and His Prophets, and they went to the Mosque of Al-Qadam and stayed in it in their supplication until the noon, and they returned to the country and prayed the Friday prayer, and God Almighty eased them, so the number of the dead reached two thousand in one day. At a time when their numbers in Cairo and Egypt reached twenty-fourAlpha in one day" [8].
We note from Ibn Battuta’s description of the importance of the precautionary measures taken by the administrative authorities in Damascus, as they ordered the closure of restaurants and kitchens that the people of the country relied on for their daily food for three consecutive days, and the announcement of collective fasting in parallel with that. These measures led to something like a mass quarantine, preventing mixing in the streets and alleys of Damascus throughout these three days, and then the number of deaths decreased to two thousand deaths daily compared to Cairo, where twenty-four thousand deaths fell daily because the authorities there did not take the same measures.
And if we know that Bilad al-Sham, especially Damascus, was the first center for medical studies in the era of the Zangids and Ayyubids, and in it were found the most famous doctors in the whole world, such as Ibn al-Nafis, the Dukhawari family, Bani al-Nafakh and others, and in it the Zangids and the Ayyubids established major medical complexes such as Al-Bimaristan Al-Nuri before the Mamluk era Al-Salahi and others, we realized that this measure taken by the Mamluk Prince of Damascus, Arghun Shah, came - most likely - from the advice of one of the senior doctors who graduated from these scientific edifices, as the death rate decreased to 1/12 compared to its counterpart in Cairo.
And if we reflect on what people did in the cities that were hit by the epidemic, we see that they relied on the medicine of the ancients or cared for certain types of food and left others. The famous Aleppine historian and writer Zain al-Din Ibn Omar, known as Ibn al-Wardi, was one of those who died in this epidemic (d. 749 AH), and before his death he wrote his letter known as “The News of the Epidemic” describing the social and political conditions and the conditions of people and what happened to them in his city of Aleppo and others during This great epidemic, and the means they took at the time of what we can call today “alternative medicine” in the face of death.
He says: "If you saw the notables in Aleppo reading from mysterious medicine books, and eating a lot of nashif and citrus... and they were kind and fair, and incense their homes with amber, camphor, Saad and sandalwood, and sealed them with sapphires, and made onions and vinegar among the sum of food and fruits, and reduced the matter to them. Citron (medical lemon) and the like”, which are foods and foods that worked to strengthen the immune system, and perhaps the people of Aleppo’s interest in these foods made the epidemic in Aleppo “lighter.” Despite this, it left disastrous effects among thousands of its residents, and Ibn al-Wardi was among those who died there[9].
In any case, Ibn Battuta moved after death in Damascus subsided, he wanted Palestine and in the heart of which was Jerusalem. Generous... And the preacher Izz al-Din made a supplication one day and called me to those who invited him to it, so I asked him about the reason for it, so he told me that he had vowed the days of the epidemic that if that rose and a day passed when he did not pray for the dead he made the supplication. I made a vow, and I found those whom I knew from all the sheikhs in Jerusalem had moved next to God Almighty, may God have mercy on them, and only a few of them remained”[10].
The plague killed most of the elders of Jerusalem and its scholars whom Ibn Battuta met twenty years ago on the outbound trip, and today he hardly finds anyone among them, so that the preacher of Jerusalem and its jurist makes food that he vowed to God because he did not pray for the dead on that day.
In any case, Ibn Battuta's journey did not stop at Jerusalem, as he headed to the city of Hebron and from there to Gaza, and he saw the scenes in it more grievous, until he said: "Then we drove to Gaza and found most of it empty of many who died in the epidemic, and its judge told us That the righteous in it were eighty, so a quarter of them remained, and that the number of dead in it reached one thousand and one hundred per day.”[11]
The righteous are the trustworthy witnesses and signatories who worked within the Auxiliary Body for the Judiciary and Judges in Gaza City at the time, and the fact that the plague had killed three quarters of them, is a clear reflection, and a clear measure of the disaster that afflicted the city in this epidemic, it was as mentioned by Ibn Battuta and other contemporary historians. It is one of the most depleted countries in terms of population, and it may have lost more than half of its population in this epidemic.
Ibn Battuta moved from Gaza to the land of Egypt by land, crossing North Sinai and then south of Lake Manzala until he reached Damietta, and moved from it across the Delta to Alexandria, which he saw that “the epidemic had eased after the number of dead reached one thousand and eighty per day”, then decided to travel to Cairo He was amazed by its large number of buildings and the greatness of its civilization and the schools, universities, bimaristans and Sufis’ corners in it on his first visit to it more than twenty years ago, as well as the number of scholars he did not count due to their large number, but this time, in the month of Rajab in the year 749 AH / October 1348 AD, Asifa said: Then I traveled to Cairo, and I was informed that the number of the dead during the days of the epidemic had reached twenty-one thousand per day, and I found all the sheikhs who were in it that I knew had died, may God have mercy on them.[12]
And when Ibn Battuta returned to his country, Morocco, the following year in the year 750 AH, after a quarter of a century he spent as a tourist in the land of God, he said: “With her I learned the news of my mother’s death in the epidemic, may God Almighty have mercy on her.” Thus, Ibn Battuta survived the epidemic as he survived epidemics, calamities and situations he was exposed to. Throughout the years of his journey, and perhaps the reason for that was with God’s decree and predestination that he was, as the historian Hussein Mu’nis says, “the owner of a strong body that bears troubles, and resists diseases in a surprising manner… He fell ill more than once during his travels, and was struck by a fever time after time, but he was He comes out of these troubles unharmed, thanks to what God has given him of health and strength, and he tells us about many of his companions who died from diseases or spoiled food, and he escaped death despite their participation in eating this food” [13].
Thus, Ibn Battuta was destined to witness and contemplate the great epidemic that wiped out hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions.
This epidemiological pandemic affected the cultural and economic conditions, and neither the Levant nor Egypt recovered from it - as contemporary history sources tell us - until decades after the passing of this great plague.
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Sources
Al-Razi: Al-Hawi in Medicine 5/8.
Previous 4/431.
Ahmed Al-Adawi: The Plague in the Umayyad Era, p. 39.
Sahih Muslim h 2218
Musnad Ishaq bin Rahwayh c 1376.
Al-Maqrizi: The behavior to know the states of the kings 4/81.
Epidemiology and History p. 73.
The Journey of Ibn Battuta 1/326.
Ibn al-Wardi's Diwan, p. 90.
Ibn Battuta's Journey 4/180.
Previous.
The Journey of Ibn Battuta 4/181.
Hussein Munis: The Travels of Ibn Battuta, p. 19.