A 15th-Century Islamic Scholar Has Surprisingly Contemporary Advice on Handling Pandemics

A 15th-Century Islamic Scholar Has Surprisingly Contemporary Advice on Handling Pandemics

Six hundred years ago, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani —an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo— wrote “Merits of the Plague,” a landmark work of history and religious thought that looked at accounts of centuries worth of plague outbreak and their possible origins, along with explanations of why God would allow such devastation to take place. This work wasn’t only theoretical but also based on experience. He survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Today’s guests are Joel Blecher and Mairaj Syed, editors and translators of the book into modern English. We discuss the book and how it weaves together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, death-count registers, poetry, and the author’s personal anecdotes. “Merits of the Plague” is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience, and care for those around us.

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How Two California Wines Shattered Centuries of French Supremacy in a Blind Taste Test

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In 1976, nine French wine judges did the unthinkable: they blindly selected two California wines over France's most elite vintages in what became known as the Judgment of Paris. This shocking upset se...

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How an Italian Engineer with 700 Knights Defeated 100,000 Ottoman Troops at the Siege Rhodes

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Throughout the 16th century, one man stood between the Ottoman Empire and European domination, yet his name has been largely forgotten. Gabriele Tadino was an Italian military engineer whose genius tr...

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America's Founding Fathers feared a standing army would inevitably threaten civilian governance. Yet 250 years later, the U.S. military remains a strange outlier among nearly every nation that has eve...

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Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and State." This line has been the gold standard for thos...

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Every Communication Breakthrough—From Cave Art to AI Video—Exists to Tell Stories

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There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an attempt to tell stories. Our first night-fires created...

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The East’s Auschwitz: How Imperial Japan’s Secret Experimenters Escaped Justice

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During the Holocaust, Josef Mengele discarded every medical ethic to perform horrific human experiments at Auschwitz, including non-consensual vivisections, limb transplants, and agonizing surgeries c...

24 Helmi 44min

The Chemistry of Conquest: Behind the USSR’s State-Sponsored (and Steroid-Powered) Olympic Glory

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Since the era of Joseph Stalin, Moscow’s rulers have sent Russian athletes into the Summer and Winter Olympics with one command: you must win. These competitors operated under a "win-at-all-costs" doc...

19 Helmi 1h 3min

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