ABSTRACT
The transmission of disease has remained an open debate in the Moslem world, in relation to Koranic and Hadith sources. Documented advice to military leaders (inspired by the Sunna) that they should avoid foreign countries plagued with epidemics, or refrain from leaving the infected places, are attested in the beginning of the Islamic expansion in the Middle East.1
The mention of Bedouin shepherds segregating mangy camels is also frequent. On the other hand, those who die during epidemics can be assimilated to shuhadâ (martyrs),2 submission to divine decrees is generally recommended, and this submission, dubbed fatalism, has been frequently addressed by Western travellers and orientalist studies. In 1827, Antoine Barthélemy Clot, a French physician who sailed to
Alexandria to organise the medical staff in Egypt3 was not ready to adopt this interpretation of the Moslem attitude. He was ready to decipher it not as a testimony of archaic resignation but as a profound understanding, based on daily observations, of the true epidemiologic facts, which were still waiting for a rational coherent and global interpretation, undoubtedly the one that was contained in his personal books, that followed behind him, on a different ship. In Egypt, in the first half of the nineteenth century, during Mohammad
‘Ali’s reign, there occurred a confrontation that challenges the currently received ideas on modernity and modernisation in the East. This confrontation was a meeting between the ruler of Egypt, the reformist pasha Mohammad ‘Ali, and the French physician Antoine Barthélemy Clot who had been requested to come, to improve the sanitary situation of the army. The debate involved the management of epidemics, and the most frightening
of all, plague, ‘to call it by its name’ (La Fontaine). The answers to practical questions of quarantine and isolation measures in times of plague and cholera, given respectively by the pasha and Clot, differed profoundly, reflecting, in the latter case, scientific entrenched convictions on the nature of contagion and, in the former, pragmatic observations associated to a shrewd sense of the ‘raison d’état’. This debate on the nature of plague and the means of prevention illustrates the complexity of the public health choices in the epidemiological context, and the difficulty of unravelling the pathways of the disease.
