 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. I want to begin by thanking MCC East Bay for inviting me out here to give a talk on this publication, on this translation of a very important work which is called Merits of the Plague written by a very important figure in Islamic intellectual history Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Let me kind of give you some background information before I get into this specific talk which looks at a specific issue of how does this 15th century Muslim intellectual Ibn Hajar deal with science and reconcile it with scripture and things like that. So but let me talk a little bit about what inspired this translation in the first place. So COVID happened, we all know it seems like a long time ago, at least to me, like almost a different lifetime, like a decade ago, but it's only been a couple of years. When COVID happened, a friend of mine that I went to graduate school with, we both did our PhDs together in Princeton's religion department. He called me up and he said, hey Miraj, remember that time we had a conversation about maybe we should collaborate on a project together and that was always in the back of my mind and I think I have a project, right? COVID happened, everything was in lockdown, everyone was at home, masking everywhere and he himself, which is my co-translator, Joel Blacker, was a scholar of commentary on Hadith commentary. And when it comes to Hadith commentary, there is no figure that is more important, especially in Sunnis, for Sunnis, than Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani wrote the most important commentary, explanation, exegesis of the most important book of Hadith for Sunni Muslims and this is Sahih al-Bukhari. So he had done quite a bit of work on Ibn Hajar's commentary called Fatah al-Bari on Sahih Muslim. So he knew, okay, what has been translated, what has been studied of Ibn Hajar and what has not and it just so happened that Ibn Hajar had this treatise called Badl al-Ma'oon fi fadl ta'oon, right? That existed, was edited, was published, but that had not been translated into the English language. And essentially, it is a treatise, a short book on the plague, right? So he called me up when COVID happened and he said, let's do this translation. People are interested in disease. This disease is going to be here for a while. And let's see whether or not we can get a mainstream publisher to publish this book on the plague. So we reached out and our first choice was Penguin. And you probably don't know the dynamics of academic publishing or I mean, not we're publishing in general. Penguin is a big deal. And Penguin has these series of translated works called Penguin Classics. And Penguin Classics in the Penguin Classics series, they have them, you know, the superstars of the Western tradition, basically, right? Anyone that's a superstar of the Western tradition, these big philosophers, these big literary figures, novelists, like, you know, that have been around for a while, Penguin Classics will have published their work. So we went to the Penguin Classics people and we said, hey, listen, man, does a disease happen? People are going to be interested in disease for a while. This is a big deal. It's a world, world changing event. And you're, most of the people, most of the people that you've published are Eurocentric European, like you, you need to get with the time. This is the 21st century. You need to diversify your portfolio of books. And we have the perfect book for you. It's a book written 15th century in Arabic by a towering figure in Islamic thought named Ibn Hajar al-Isqalani. It's never been translated before. What do you think? Right? And they agree. So me and him, you know, translated it. It took us about three years, I would say. And I mean, had we not been working on it together as partners, it would have taken a lot longer, maybe more than six years. But we finished and we published it. That's kind of the story behind why did we publish this work. So that's the inspiration. Opportunity struck. We collaborated. We made a diversity argument because diversity arguments were very popular and continue to be somewhat popular still. And we got, now it's, you know, to some amount of pride, we can claim that Ibn Hajar al-Isqalani is a Penguin Classic author, right? So we've penetrated the Western classics in a way. We've said, hey, listen, you want to take intellectual history seriously, now read Ibn Hajar. And for whatever reason, you know, the book has sold well actually. The publisher has told me that the first round was sold out and they went to a second printing. And I think there's something like 3,000 copies that have been sold. And that is not anything to sneeze at. That's actually quite respectable. Something like what they expect, maybe 1,000, is what they, if something reaches 1,000, that's considered a success in this industry. So we're at 3,000. A lot of people are reading Ibn Hajar. A lot of people are consuming this material. So, you know, it's been quite successful. So let me talk a little bit about who is this guy Ibn Hajar? Why is he special? And what is this book, Merits of the Plague? And I might just talk a little bit about, well, how does science and faith play out in this text if I have enough time? So I think that just getting an overview of this book should be hopefully interesting for you. But before I talk about Ibn Hajar, let me give you a little bit of an overview of the way that I, myself, conceive of the types of work that Islamic scholars and scholars, generally speaking, did in pre-modern times. And I think it's kind of important to have some kind of a framework, right? We talk about the Audama a lot. We talk about scholars a lot. But what does their scholarship consist of? I would say, from my own perspective, from my own historical research, there's three types of scholars. What I call the aggregators, canonizers, what I call the reducers, and what I call the synthesizers. The aggregators, canonizers, are the people that collect material together and organize it in some way. And sometimes the result and conclusion of their work is it becomes a specially important authoritative book, right? So obviously, Sahih al-Bukhari is a work of a canonizer aggregator. What was Bukhari scholarship? He went around, traveled around, collected Hadith, wrote them down. You know, he collected hundreds of thousands of Hadith, sifted through them and said, hey, in my opinion, these 7,000, 6,000, 7,000 or so are especially authoritative, especially valid, right? And then that's Sahih al-Bukhari. So his main intellectual work was gathering material, organizing it in some kind of a fashion, sifting through, making some kind of judgment as to what's good and what's bad. A reducer is someone who, whose intellectual work consists of the following. Intellectual work always involves, not always, many times involves some kind of a conflict, some kind of a dispute. There's always people arguing with each other, right? This has been the case in human history. It will continue to be the case in human history. It is just the way that human beings are. And think even the Quran describes human beings as prone to engaging in Jadal. We are, by nature, argumentative beings, right? And you see this when you study thought. And oftentimes, a problem is you'll have camps, one side believes X, another side believes Y, and they have different reasons for believing X and Y. And a reducer will come in, look at a problem and say, I'm going to simplify and reject a bunch of solutions and say there's only one solution, right? That's what a reducer does. So for instance, to me, there's this guy, Ibn Taymiyyah, you've probably heard of him. To me, he is a reducer. What did he do? He kind of came in and he saw there's a lot of conflict in Islamic theology, for instance. And he said the reason why Islamic theology has all these problems is because they have imported foreign philosophical ideas. I want to reject that method and reduce everything to scripture. And when you adopt my method, you're going to arrive at the proper solution. So his way of dealing with the conflict was out of available multiple options, picking one as the correct answer and showing why his method resulted in that correct answer, right? That's a reducer. A synthesizer is someone that comes onto the scene, sees multiple solutions, multiple people, all of them have their own reasons for saying why they're right, and they take bits and pieces of each and make some kind of a synthetic hole out of it without necessarily eliminating everyone, other than themselves. That's synthesizer. The paradigmatic example of a synthesizer scholar is Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. You've probably heard of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali came in, in my view, the greatest scholar in Islamic history. I'm a big fan of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali came in and he said, there's Greek philosophy, there's Islamic theology, there's Tasawal mysticism, right? I'm going to create a coherent philosophical religious system that takes bits and pieces of each and I'm going to surgically, in a very precise way, create a system that incorporates the benefits and goodnesses of each and without necessarily denying the authority whole sale of philosophy and reject philosophy. He didn't reject mysticism. He didn't reject theology and he ended up creating a conference of philosophy that took bits and pieces. I would say Ibn Hajar is a synthesizer, right? So let me go through this very quickly. I've already kind of talked about this. Reducer's Shafi, Imam Shafi is also a reducer in my opinion, Ibn Taymiyyah, right? And then if you want to look at outside of the Islamic tradition, Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes is a reducer. These categories to me are not necessarily just about Islamic history but can apply to other types of intellectual activity as well. Synthesizer, Ghazali, in the Catholic tradition there's this guy named Aquinas, also a big synthesizer. He did something very similar to what Ghazali did. He was faced with Greek philosophy. He had also theology as well and he tried to combine a synthetic philosophical system that took the strengths of each, right? Maimonides as well, someone like that. So, and Ibn Hajar. So who is this guy, Ibn Hajar? So, Ibn Hajar is born in 1372, give you a sense of time period. He's orphaned at a young age. His name, al-asqalani, comes from al-asqalan. Does anyone know where al-asqalan is? It's very much in the news these days. I mean, unfortunately. So his parents are his, I believe his grandparents. Either his parents or grandparents immigrated from al-asqalan. Al-asqalan is a village that is north of the Gaza Strip. So he has, you know, that's where his parents are from. But they immigrated to Cairo. He grew up in Cairo. His claim to fame is really, he's a Hedid scholar. That's really what he specialized in. But he also studied Islamic law and he ends up becoming quite successful in his time period. He was appointed as the dean of the college. He was a professor of the college. He was also quite handed up becoming quite wealthy. He was a spice trader. And his magnum opus, the work that he's known for, is this enormous commentary many, many volumes, Akshay Al-Bukhari, Fatah Al-Badi. He himself so lost three children to the plague. He lost a toddler, an infant, and then later on in life because there were successive waves of the plague in his lifetime. He lost his adult daughter who herself was pregnant. And he also got the plague. But the plague, so the way that he describes his experience with the plague is very interesting. It's kind of, as the kids say these days, a very low-key description. Like he kind of describes it in a very matter-of-fact way. Essentially what the plague is, is this disease that the way that it manifests is these eruptions called buboes on your body. And they can be of different colors and they especially erupted particular places on the body like your armpit and stuff like that. What the medical experts of his day and age called the soft, glandular parts of the flesh is what they called it. And he got, one of the buboes appeared in his armpit and he was like, one night I discovered I had a buboes on my armpit and I went to sleep. And it grew bigger than he describes. And then I went to sleep knowing full well that I might not wake up the next morning. It's kind of like the way that he said it. But then he said, but I woke up and I discovered that I'd gotten smaller and then after a few days it got smaller and smaller and smaller and disappeared. It's the only thing he says about it in very matter-of-fact. So he himself got the plague as well. So what was the plague? So let me kind of talk to you about that. So the plague, there are actually multiple ways of the plague, which is this very infectious disease. In fact, the most famous plague in human history is called the Black Plague. And the Black Plague took out millions of people all over the world. It was an event that ended up shaping quite profoundly a lot of human history, human institutions. Because when you lose population very quickly like that, it ends up having a huge impact on economies, development of cities, and stuff like that. The Black Plague occurred about 100 years before Ibn Haji was living. What he experienced and the children that he lost to the plague and he himself were successive smaller waves of the plague that came and went, came and went. This happened for a few hundred years. So, you know, the other interesting thing is there was a plague before the Prophet was born, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and a plague that broke out after the Prophet died, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, around the time of the Caliphate of Omar. And it seems like there were experiences of the plague of the early Muslim community because the plague is addressed in hadiths, right? So, we have hadiths that are devoted to the plague. So, when Ibn Haji himself experiences the plague, loses three children to it, and just a couple of generations before this world-shattering event, the Black Plague happened, pretty much wiped out populations everywhere. It is not surprising that he himself would devote some time and attention to addressing this issue, right? So, he writes this book, the merits of the plague, right? And what does he do? What he does is he collects all of the hadith that talk about the plague. He collects all of the tafsirs that mufassirs, commentators of the Qur'an, when they comment on verses relate to the plague. He also collects some amount of theology, and he also collects what his contemporary or what medical authorities in his day and age were saying about the plague. So, basically, in a sense, what the scientists of his day and age, what they were saying about the plague. So, he collects all of this material together, and he tries to make sense of it, right? Interestingly, the main authority for the medical part of it is this guy, you probably heard his name, Abbasinah. You've heard of him, Abbasinah Ibn Sina. So, Ibn Sina wrote this book, Khanun Fitib, which, interestingly, it was a medical textbook that was used in Europe as one of the main medical textbooks up until the 16th, 17th century in their universities. So, Ibn Hajar had access to that text. That was a very famous text in his time period. And he draws from descriptions and analysis of the plague from Abbasinah. And he integrates all of this material to say something about, all right, how do we understand the plague in all of its various, from all of these various facets? So, he structures this book in the following chapters, right? So, one chapter is just on the origin of the plague. What is found in Hadith, what is found in the Tafasir, the commentaries of the Qur'an, about where does the plague come from, right? There are reports that say that the plague was a form of punishment sent down upon the Israelites, right? And he collects all of that material and tries to synthesize that. Another chapter he devotes to, well, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about the plague? What is its features? How does it manifest? So, in that case, he talks about, you know, what do the medical doctors, medical professionals say about what causes it? And he compares the medical account to Hadith that described the plague as caused by pricks of the gym, right? So, you have two competing explanations. The medical authorities kind of have a scientific explanation and they say, hey man, the plague is caused by corruption of the air and when corrupt air is breathed in, it sends that corrupt, corruption to all of the body parts, it interacts with the humorous, immoral theory and something gets imbalanced and that's what causes the sickness, right? That's theory number one. Abbasinah and the medical tradition, the doctors were like, yeah, that's what we think causes, you know, air gets corrupt, people breathe in that air, they get sick and then sometimes they die in large numbers. That's one theory. Another theory is what's found in Hadith, where there are Hadith that say that the prophet, describes the ta'oon, the plague as being the result of jinn coming in and pricking human beings, right? So, you got to kind of understand it as maybe a type of poisoned spear or something like that, where the jinn are coming in, they're pricking human beings, the poison enters their bloodstream and then the plague is sometimes the result of that prick, right? So, we have in Ibn Hajr's own time, a conflict between two competing explanations of what could have caused this devastating disease and that's what one of the chapters is devoted to. And then another chapter, he collects all of the Hadith that describe people who die, that describe the plague as a form of Allah's mercy. And some Hadith that describe the plague as an opportunity for believers to gain the status of a martyr, shuhadah, martyrdom, right? So, he collects all of this material and that's kind of like a very interesting theological problem. How can, why is it, how can we understand something that devastates human societies causes mass death, right? Wiped out a significant fraction of the human population just 100 years before Ibn Hajr's time, including many Muslim societies. The prophet describes it as a mercy. How, how is that reconciled? And then there are all kinds of problems that come up with, well, if somebody dies from the plague and they die, they die as a martyr, what does that mean about martyrdom? Like, how does that work? Right? So, he kind of confronts these issues. And then there are, there's a chapter, there's a Hadith that say that if a town is struck by the plague and you're in that town, don't leave it. So, some kind of a notion of quarantine seems like it's going on. Similarly, there are Hadith that say, if you're outside of the town and you hear that a plague has struck a particular town, don't go to it, right? So, there's all kinds of debates in the scholarly tradition among the, among the lawyers as to exactly how do we implement that? Like, what is that, why, why is it being forbidden? And how do we construe that prohibition? Right? So, he goes into some amount of debate on this issue. And the final two chapters are, the last chapter is, all right, what happens when you get struck by the plague? You get sick, you're struck by the plague. What does the Qur'an and the Hadith recommend as to how you're supposed to approach that? Right? So, this is the book. So, you can kind of see that this book deals with a lot of very different issues, deals with controversy over what explains the plague in the first place. It deals with controversies as to how can the plague, something that's quite terrible, qualify as a mercy? What does that mean? It deals with martyrdom. It deals with quarantine. And it deals with what is the appropriate, a true believer who gets struck by misfortune? What is the appropriate response, the spiritual response, ethical response, religious response? That's the book. So, a lot of interesting material. And it ended up like being quite interesting for me to get to know Ibn Hajr really well in this way. So, let's look at this, let's look at the problem of the, how does he deal with this problem? Medicine says one thing, Hadith says another thing, how do we reconcile the two? How do we understand them together? So, let's go, let's look at this issue in a little bit more depth. So, let's look at the Hadith. So, the Hadith says something like this, the end of my community will be by the sword and the plague. Okay? Oh, messenger of God, it was said to him, we understand what the sword is, but what is the plague? And then the prophet responds to us of them, the pricks of your enemies among the jai. And there is a martyrdom for each who dies with them. Right? So, that's basically the idea of plague as ultimately caused by these pricks by the gem is found in this Hadith. And this is the Hadith. There are many different versions of this Hadith. And that's part of what Ibn Hajr does, is he collects all of the different versions of the Hadith. Right? And he analyzes them, looks at which one's authentic, which one is not authentic, how do you reconcile between different versions? This is like an especially authoritative version of it. Right? Interestingly, there's another Hadith very similar, although it's not related to the science issue, but let me present it to you. The end of my community will be by the sword, the plague. It's a different version of the same Hadith. They responded, we understand the sword, but what is the plague? He replied, the piercings of your enemies among the gem. And there is martyrdom for both. And then, Ibn Hajr says, a previous source said there's another version which says not your, the piercings of your enemies among the gem, but rather your brothers among the gem. So here you have two versions of the Hadith that seem to describe who the nature of these gem that are doing these pricks. One says enemies, one says brothers, here's a problem. The problem of how do you reconcile? What's the truth? Right? How do you solve this problem? A reducer, how do you think a reducer would solve this problem? Now I'm treating you like my students. Choose one, right? And if you're a Hadith scholar, how would you choose? Which one has the better snap? Which one is stronger? Which one is more authentic? Right? That's not the way that he goes. It's very interesting. And I really tells you something interesting about the way that Ibn Hajr thought about Hadith. But that's a conversation for another day. All right, let's look at like, all right, philosophy and medicine. All right, what does Ibn Sina even actually say? So here is a very long quotation of how Ibn Sina himself describes the plague. So you kind of see the plague is a poisonous substance, produces deadly swellings. The swellings occur, the soft and glandular parts of the body, armpits are behind the ears or the groin. Cause of the swelling is bad blood, predisposed to spoiling and corruption. Then he kind of talks about what are the symptoms, nausea, fainting, heart palpitations, swelling, black plague. So these buboes, these things that erupt on your flesh can take on different colors. He says the black one is like, you know, you don't want to get the black, the black colored one. And then here, here he kind of says the pestilence is a corruption of the substance of the air. Right? So that's kind of like the explanation, which is the material for the generation of the spirit and its source of sustenance. For that reason, the life of the person, the life of all creatures is impossible without breathing. So he kind of says, Hey, it goes back to the air being bad. Right? Ibn Nafis, who died in 1288, he was also a very famous in the history of science. He's claimed to fame as he is one of the first people, maybe the first people that discovered the theory of the pulmonary circulation of blood. The doctors are going to have to tell me what that is. I don't quite know. He was born and raised in Damascus, moves to Cairo, and he ends up being the chief physician in the Nasseri Hospital in Cairo. Very famous. Here's what he said. It kind of says similar things, right? The pastor and Ibn Hajar is quoting, he's quoting Avicenna Ibn Sina. He's quoting Ibn Nafis, and he's saying, this is what these people have to say, right? Before he can't, and then he quotes the Hadith as well. The pestilence begins with the corruption that occurs in the air substance due to celestial and terrestrial causes. He identifies the following as the terrestrial causes, brackish water, piles of corpses, the masses of rotting matter, increase in number of insects and frogs, celestial causes for the plague, abundance of meteors, and shooting stars at the end of summer and the fall. So here you're kind of seeing even a development in the scientific explanation, right? Because in Avicenna's Ibn Asina's explanation, what does he say? He just says something about corruption in the air, right? And Ibn Nafis, who lived a couple of hundred years after, maybe about 100, 150 years after Avicenna, he's adding extra explanations. He's saying, well, actually, there's two causes. One related to terrestrial, earthly land, land-like causes, the other is celestial, right? So he's adding to the tradition, adding explanations, building on Avicenna, just kind of giving you kind of give you a sense of how things work, generally speaking, right? These people were researchers building on top of their each other's work, right? This is what Ibn Hajar is dealing with. This is what the medical tradition, what the scientific tradition is saying, right? So we have this interpretive problem. On the one hand, the Hadid say jinn, right? Brother jinn, enemy jinn, some kind of jinn. That's where this is coming from. On the other hand, you have bad air, right? Two opposing explanations. How do you deal with this? So let me talk about this. So here's what Ibn Hajar says. He says that it's interesting. How do you think you would? You have this problem. Hadid says one thing. Science says another. What do you do? Is this a problem that contemporary Muslims face? Yes? You're a doctor, right? So the doctor says yes. He knows. So how would you deal with this? So something like combination. So we have a metaphysical cause, right? That is unseen, but then the testable, observable cause is a material cause. And therefore the two explanations are actually not irreconcilable. They're reconcilable this way. Me as a medical doctor, as a scientist, I can do experiments, observations and lab and figure out the mechanism. And scripture tells me the metaphysics. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. Something like that is what Ibn Hajar ends up doing. So let me let's look at what he says. He says, look, the plague is a distinct type of pestilence because of its cause. The equivalent of which does not exist in any of the other pestilences. It is caused by the pricks of the gym. Okay. So first of all, he is saying the Hadid only refers to the plague. There are many other types of pestilences. The Hadid says the plague is caused by the pricks of the gym. I'm going to limit the applicability of the Hadid to just the plague. So he does not analogize and extend the agency of the gym to all of the other kinds of diseases, right? In my view, this fact does not conflict with the opinion of the physicians discussed previously, that the plague results from poisonous matter or a stirring up of blood or the flowing of it to a body part so on. This is because there is nothing that prevents these from being ultimately generated by a hidden act of a gym's piercing, right? So he's not falsifying what they're observing. He's not even falsifying that it could be poisoned to blood in some sense or another that's causing all of these symptoms. He's just saying, what is the origin of that poisonous substance being found in the body is the gym, right? And then he says interestingly, physicians cannot object to the claim that the plague is caused by the gym's piercing because the pricks of the gym cannot be grasped by reason or sensory experience. Rather, we can only attain knowledge of it from the report of the log in from some kind of scripture, right? Physicians may only speak of what results from that piercing to the degree permitted by the principles of their science, but God knows best, right? So he's kind of making boundaries, right? He's making boundaries, medical, he's not denying, he's not eliminating medical, all medical explanations and medical expertise 100%, right? As a reducer would maybe be tempted to do. But simultaneously, he's not simply dismissing away the head eat that saying, hey, listen, what we know from, we know from science that the head eat can't be true. He's saying, actually, there is a boundary. We can't know about the unseen world through empirical observation. We can only know about what the unseen world through scripture, through what the are on and the head eats tell us what the prophet tells us because the prophet has access to the unseen world because of divine revelation, because Allah gives him that access, right? So boundary, unseen world knowledge of it, we can only get through scripture hadith or Quran. But simultaneously, he's not eliminating medicine, which is based on observable experiments, observation, induction, deduction, creating principles, creating explanations based on what they observe. He's just saying, yeah, that's fine, but you don't have access to the unseen world, right? Here's another thing that he does, which is interesting. Actually, he doesn't do it. He quotes Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya who does it. Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who's a theologian, says, it can't be the air. So he criticizes the air explanation on empirical grounds because he says something like, man, if it was the air, all people and all animals, all of them are breathing in the air, they would all die. But we know that the plague afflicts some people, not others, right? And he says, you go to some houses, there'll be some people that are afflicted by the plague, not others. An entire house, one entire house in a neighborhood will be wiped out, the house next to it will be all alive. If it was the air, they're all breathing in the air, it should affect all of them 100% equally, right? And he also says something, and he also says something like, look, if air is the explanation, bad air is the explanation for a lot of different diseases. But when people get sick with the plague, they don't get sick with all these other, they don't have all these, manifest all these other symptoms and these other diseases, they only have manifest the plague diseases. So it can't be, it can't be the air, because otherwise we would see the co occurrence of many different maladies, right? Because the air is the explanation for a lot of different things. So he goes through and he lists all of these empirical reasons why it can't be the case that the air is the ultimate cause of the plague. So by a process of analogy, the Hedid stands as a potential explanation, because the randomness of the way that the plague appeared to them was one of the reasons why it could be the plague, right? So in this way, Ibn Hajr specifically was able to both reconcile, preserve the authority of medicine, probably did a lot of good things, continues to do a lot of good things, but simultaneously also preserve the authority of scripture in helping Muslims and law and theology understand the world. You didn't want to, like, if you get rid of the authority of Hedid, for instance, then you're getting rid of the authority of a lot of theological ideas, a lot of legal ideas, a lot of the religious sensitivities of a lot of people, right? That's not going to be good. Simultaneously, if you get rid of the authority of the way that medicine works, empirical observation, testing, and making principles, then you're getting rid of a very beneficial medical science. What are you going to do with that? So in some senses, the synthesis is kind of what he ends up doing. Create boundaries, see how we can uphold both of these truths simultaneously, preserve the authority of both without eliminating one, right? That's the reason why I describe him as a synthesizer. And my own view, I've given this talk a couple of times, my own view is we are living in a way, in a time where there are too many reducers, we need more synthesizers. In this country, everyone wants the absolute truth, they want their camp to win, and they want the opposing camp to lose, right? You live in a very conflict, this society is very conflict-oriented right now. We're going through a very intense time like that. And I think what we actually need more of is people that are able to synthesize, to objectively look at the relative truth values of multiple sources of authority, and combine them in a way that renders and supports them coherently together. And stop there. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much my presentation. I really don't have more to say than that. We can open up for questions. Yeah. Oh, yes, yes. So yeah, brother, what's your name? Brother Ahmed brought up a very interesting Hadith, which is relevant to the plague, which is there's a Hadith in which, and there's different versions of it, where when the conquests happen, Omar, after the conquests happen, Omar is going to visit Shem, right? He's going to go visit, in fact, I think, probably on his way to El Quds, the very famous trip that he takes to El Quds. I don't know if this trip or a different trip, the report describes him as heading out, he leaves Medina, and then he gets reports that the plague has struck Shem, right? So people don't know what to do. So he gathers all the companions together, and he says, what should I do? We hear that the plague has struck Shem. We made an intention to go out there. Is it, what's your view? And some of the companions said we should continue on. We made this intention, whatever God has willed is what's going to happen, and we have to fulfill our mission. We have to do what we set out to do, and we should not be scared. There is no fleeing from Allah's Qadr, right? That's like the particular phrase that they used. And then he brought, first he brought the Muhajireen, then he brought the Ansar, they kind of said the same thing, and then, but then one of the companions, I believe, I don't remember the exact companion's name, maybe Amra bin al-Has, he says no, we shouldn't go. It's stuck by the plague. We don't want to die. You know, that's not something that we should do. And then finally Abu Abaydah comes, and he hears about this dispute, and he narrates the hadith in which the prophet says, when you hear that a town has been struck by the plague, do not go to it. And similarly, if you're in a town that's struck by the plague, do not leave from it. So that kind of ends up deciding the issue, and Omar returns. He doesn't complete his trip and returns. And this entire long story, there are many different versions of it, are part of some of the main discussions of how do we handle both. The idea that whatever harm is going to come has already been decreed by God on the one hand. So there's this theological idea that you can't really escape from God's decree. But simultaneously, there is another idea, which is you have a duty, at least this idea shows up in later discussions in Islamic thought, not necessarily in this report, which is you have a duty to take care of yourself and your family to be cautious. You shouldn't willingly expose yourself to danger. Then in fact, you have an obligation not to do so. So now there's a third element that this report kind of highlights that Ibn Hajar also comments on. And that is Omar's duty as the caliph, as he's the caliph at the time, to not, so he not only has a duty to obviously believe in the Allah's decree, and he also has a duty as an individual Muslim, not to expose himself willingly to harmful and dangerous situations. He also has a duty as the head of state to make decisions that are in the best interest of the community overall. So in his case, you actually have three imperatives that are in tension with each other. And in fact, in some versions of the report, Omar makes the decision to head back to return back to Medina before he hears about the Hadith, right? And he is quite anxious about that because he does not want to be seen as fleeing from God's decree, from exhibiting any kind of behavior that would suggest that in his act of fleeing, he is trying to escape through his own willful action, whatever it is, harm that God has decreed for him, right? He did not want to do that. So he was nervous. And in fact, Abu Abay that comes and kind of saves him and confirms with the Hadith report the decision that he already made, and it gives him some some calm and calm and rest for his soul. So it's very interesting that the report in Ibn Hadr's analysis kind of brings up all of these tensions, right? On the one hand, you have a theological imperative to believe that everything that happens both good and bad comes from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right? We accept that. That's a core part of our theology. Simultaneously, we have this practical imperative, this practical, ethical and moral guideline that you should not expose yourself to danger. And then in Omar's case, he has the political, let's call it the political imperative to always make judgments based on what he thinks is in the best interests of the community. And in this case, when you're dealing with a disease, a disease that is seen as dangerous, these three imperatives kind of point in different directions and how do you solve that? That kind of brings me to what I like about, as a historian of Islamic thought, what I like about Islamic thought. And that is something that I think is sometimes missing, not all the time, but sometimes missing in the way that we think about Islam. And that is the ability to embrace and balance complexity in an honest way. You understand what I'm saying? Even Hajar didn't eliminate the problem. It's like, yeah, there are multiple values that seem to recommend different courses of action when you combine them together in this one incident. How do you synthesize them? How do you bring them together? Right? And when you do so, you are sometimes choosing to give one value more of a say in how you solve that problem than another. Be intellectually honest about that. Right? And I think that one of the things that is great when I, in my studies of the tradition, is the ability, the ability to confront the world in its complexity, not simplify it so it meets the scripture, face it head on simultaneously, also face on head on the fact that different scripture, different commands, different theologies all seem to say point to at least different directions, taking all of that input in, not simplifying the world, not simplifying the scripture, bringing it all together and coming to some kind of a reason judgment about what is the best way Islamically forward. And doing so most times, and so another great thing about our tradition, doing so most times without necessarily castigating people who may make a different decision. Right? This is the reason why we have four equally valid, but that, right? And we have, you know, I wouldn't say equally valid, the theologies a little bit more, they're a little bit more, they like fighting more. But, you know, we have a couple of theological schools as well. So, anyways. Any other questions? I just wanted to hear if you have any gems or insights you picked up from that section, even Hajar's text, where he discusses how one should individually in their own experience existentially react to the suffering that comes with the affliction of a plague. I think that's just any practical advice because I think in our day and age we're not really taught to deal with these kinds of things because of the conveniences we have and the lack of a kind of training and developing a sort of strength to deal with these things. I think women are much more tolerable than men when it comes to this kind of suffering, but I've seen a lot of men fall into depression when they get sick, their anxiety around it. So, is there anything in the text that addresses that that you might recall? Yeah, I mean, I think that the entire thing of how do you how do you end up meriting martyrdom through your experience of the plague? He goes into that and he basically says that, hey listen, you merit martyrdom, you earn martyrdom in the way that you respond to this musibah, this trial and tribulation. How do you do that? Something bad has happened. Your spiritual existential and religious response is to accept it as part of God's decree. There's nothing that escapes God's decree, both the good and the bad, the harmful, the beneficial, and including the terribly harmful, even the terribly harmful, right? It comes from God's decree and bringing yourself to accept that. And suffering with patience and perseverance without losing hope and Allah either for cure or for whatever is, you know, if this is going to be the cause of your demise, it's going to be the cause of your demise, right? Accepting that truth. Finally, he kind of has practical recommendations. He says, look, if you get this disease, it might be a death sentence, right? In this time period, it's probably a death sentence. So what do you do? He's like, well, one of the first things you do is you got to make sure that all of the rights that other people have on you get fulfilled, right? So whatever you owe to other people, whatever, you know, you got to fix all those relationships before you go. And there's a very interesting headache in the martyrdom chapter, which describes how you could be a martyr. This is very interesting, actually, is one of the one of the beautiful teachings of our religion. You could be a martyr, right? But before you can make it to heaven, if there are other people that you have harmed, that you have been unjust to, you can't make it past until you fulfill their rights, right? So you could be a martyr and Allah could give you a one-way ticket to jannah. But still, if you have harmed other people, if you have been unjust to other people, if you owe other people something, there's got to be that accounting and it's got to be rectified. Now, you're able to rectify it because Allah has the way that Ibn Hagger explains it, because this is a problem for him. He actually has to solve this problem. The problem is this, what if you have a very sinful person who gets the plague and at the last moment, you know, demonstrates all of the qualities to merit martyrdom? He dies a good death, right? He's patient, everything, right? But then he's a sinner and a lot of his sins consist in the fact that he was not a good person to other people. They have claims on him, right? How do you reconcile that? So he has to solve this problem. One of the ways that he solves the problem is that Allah gives him an overabundance of reward such that he can transfer his reward over to their people and make everything just. But now what is interesting, what's a beautiful gem for me is the fact that Allah refrains from simply cancelling the injustice. Like, the All-Powerful does not do that. The All-Powerful says, that's not my claim, that's somebody else's claim. And that other person, you need to satisfy their claim before you can get to Jannah, right? So there is a certain importance given to rectifying injustices that happen in the world that are the result of human infraction, human sin, human injustice, that even Allah cannot get rid of. It has to happen within that community, within those people. That's kind of an interesting aside. It's a very interesting aside. But I think that the general thing is you make yourself right. You increase in prayer. You read Quran. You accept whatever it is that God has decreed for you. You never lose hope that perhaps you might get healed. But you're also ready to go. You're ready to, if that's your demise, that's your demise. And if you basically show dignity in the process of dying, and for that reason, you merit martyrdom. That's basically, effectively what he says, that you have willpower. And the fact that you've been struck with this tragedy is actually an opportunity for you to show certain virtues, certain character traits, certain psychological, spiritual, and religious dispositions. And it is not a license for you to just kind of lose hope and not do anything. And I think that it's a benefit of our religion that we have this idea of an afterlife. We have an idea of Mus'ibah, trial and tribulation will happen. It is part of God's will. And there is a response that is expected from you. And it's not just about calamity that has happened in the year. Lift with absolutely no spiritual and religious and existential resources by which you deal with them. We have a faith tradition, a religious tradition that gives us those tools to try and die with dignity, because we all got to go. We all got to go. So there's a question here. Thank you. So in the first session, you had mentioned a vow to have these, which says the end of my umma is with, if I remember it is swords and it was the flag. Um, and in the text, the way he concludes or sort of mentions it is that that particularly mentions to the, especially the thing about the gin, the prick of the gin it mentioned, it is applicable to just plug and not other diseases. But, but it's still not the end of the world. And there are a lot of pandemics coming up and we already have a pandemic. And so I'm just curious that if you mentioned that the end of my umma is with flag and the flag, the reason for it is the prick of gin. But the way the author mentions is that the gin aspect of it is only applicable to the plaque. But this is still applicable, which means that there are more coming towards the end of the world is what I think. So is that gin aspect gone? Or is it that does it mean that there are more pandemic coming up that had these means that then towards the end of the world, more pandemic is coming up? Or is it that is it just about the plaque? So I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, I think that if you're a student of Ibn Hajar, and you studied him and you want to take his, what he said seriously, that he would probably answer something like what you said. I mean, if I was, if I was an Ibn Hajarian, right, how would I answer this question is essentially what you're asking me. So, because the Hadid does say the end of my umma is either through fighting or the plague, or maybe it's and I don't quite remember. And you also make up a good point that said the plague is caused by the pricks of the gin. And you also say Ibn Hajar said he restricts the pricks of the gin to the plague, right? He doesn't extend it to all the gin or the cause of all all infectious diseases, for instance, because if he allowed it, if he allowed it to be interpreted in a way where all infectious diseases are caused by the pricks of the gin, then we can say, okay, yeah, maybe near the end of times, when the community is coming to an end, there's going to be some kind of infectious disease that is caused by the pricks of the gin. There's no problem. But because he restricts it to just the plague, then what's the solution? Because the plague is finished. And the end of time hasn't come. So I think he would, I think that he would probably say, well, there's nothing to suppose that the plague is not going to make a comeback at the end of times, which is going to be the result of the pricks of the gin, right? If I was in Ibn Hajar and that's probably what I would say. I think in the book, he goes through a whole thing about like commute, what does umma mean in that sense? And sometimes he says, some people think it means just like the companions and not like the end of times umma or like there's a debate about what umma refers to in that context, right? Yeah, yeah, that's like another thing. It's like, okay, there's the debate that I just, you know, spoke about is Tha'un and the pricks of the gin, and it's only the plague that is a result of the pricks of the gin. The other debate is there was a debate in the tradition before him, and he picks up on it as well, is the umma that's being referred to, the end of my umma will be by the sword of the plague. Is that only the prophet's companions, like umma ti, my umma, is that just the prophet's companions? Is it all, you know, of his community from time, from the prophet's time until the end of the world? And there was a lot of disagreement on that. And he, I believe he comes down on the side of saying that it's not restricted just to the companions. But it kind of, you kind of get a sense, if you read this book, of the extent to which they were very detail oriented in their scholarship, like they took the words that make up the hadith, that make up the Quran, and they were really, really trying to understand at a very granular level, like what exactly is the intent here, and how can we arrive at that using our knowledge of Arabic, using our holistic knowledge of scripture overall, using our knowledge of theology and God's attributes? How do we make sense of it at a very granular level? And it's really quite an achievement, I think, that when you read Islamic thought, the history of Islamic thought, the extent to the, of the sensitivity, care, caution, and patience by which they analyzed things and wrote about them. That's one of the things that I appreciate when I, when I read these works, and, and something that I think that we can try and emulate and imitate in our own, in our own endeavors. Professor Mara, do we have time for one more question? Sure. JazakAllah Khair, very interesting the categorization of the scholars into aggregators and synthesizers. Are you aware of any more modern books that, from synthesizers, that tries to follow the same methodology of Ibn Hajar to come, like to also like, to compare like Hadith and Tassir to the current state of the art science for the plague? Is there any, any book like that? And are you interested in having a sequel of that book to do that? I don't know. That's a, that's a, so you're saying that are there any books that talk, that synthesize science and medicine and scripture and explanations of the plague, for instance, like other than Ibn Hajar? No, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I have not read, there are a few other plague books in pre-modern history, pre-modern Islamic history. The most famous one is this one. This one is the most famous one. Pretty much all the other ones are, I don't think they're as good as Ibn Hajar's. In modern time period, I'm not sure who has written on this and I'm sure I would be surprised if there isn't some scholar that hasn't collected all of this material and hasn't come up with a, you know, a theory of how do you, how do you understand, especially given what we know about how plague spread in modern history of science and modern history? Like, there's another opportunity for synthesis. I'm sure somebody's addressed it, but I don't, I don't know who that is. Okay, Jazakumul al-Qaeda, Professor Maddav, really appreciate you coming to MCC to share this book with us and to share your knowledge with us. There's a book, there's a table with books for sale, $15 and we can ask Professor Maddav if he's willing to sign it for us. And if you want to pay for it, you can just come by the office on your way out. So just take it here and then you can pay for it at the office, Jazakumul, if you want to say any last words. No, thank you so much for your questions and being such a kind audience. I really appreciate it. And if you do buy the book, you don't have to buy the book. I wish I could just give it to everyone, but, you know, publisher probably won't like that. But if you do buy the book and you read it, and you have any kind of comment, it can be even critical comment, I don't mind, please email me and let me know what you think about it. Thank you very much.