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Darrera modificació: 2025-12-31
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Omar, Muhammed - Fancy, Nahyan, "Mamluk maqāmas on the Black Death", Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 25/4 [=Environmental challenges in premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean narratives, ed. Chiara Fontana & Ines Peta] (2025), 151-181.
- Resum
- A long-standing narrative about the Black Death (1346–1350) asserts that the disease originated in China in the preceding decade. Recent work in phylogenetics and palaeogenetics has refined this claim, showing that the branch of Yersinia pestis (the plague pathogen) that gave rise to the Black Death had its likeliest origins in Central Asia. Nonetheless, geneticists still posit that the pathogen was displaced only in the late 1330s, moving overland from Lake Issyk Kul to the Black Sea in less than a decade, resulting in the massive pandemic that afflicted Western Eurasia and North Africa during the late 1340s. This ‘Quick Transit Theory' is built primarily upon a literal reading of Risālat al-nabaʾ ʿan al-wabāʾ by the Mamluk writer Ibn al-Wardī, which literary scholars have long classified as a maqāma, a literary tale in rhymed prose that often features an itinerant trickster. We shall show that Ibn al-Wardī's Risāla was one of at least three maqāmas composed in 749/1348–9 in the Mamluk realm. Far from being the sole eyewitness account, the Risāla shares its tropes and content with these other maqāmas, especially that of his contemporary Damascene writer al-Ṣafadī. The maqāma of al-Ṣafadī has hitherto been overlooked by literary scholars, an edition of which we provide here based on three manuscripts. All these maqāmas depict plague as a roving trickster, but Ibn al-Wardi's visitor is unique in having a range that extends into China and India. Given their literary nature, these maqāmas should not be read as providing historical testimonies about the precise movement of the disease. Nonetheless, by placing them in their original literary contexts, we can learn much about how contemporary scholars coped with such catastrophic events and made the ‘Islamic archive' speak directly to their situation.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
Història de la literatura
Arabisme
- URL
- https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.12790
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