Between Religion and Science The Debate on the Concept of Contagion in the Medieval Islamic World and its Western Parallels

The notion of contagion was looked upon with sus picion in the Arabic medical tradition. Medieval Islamic theologians generally ascribed epidemics to the will of God, denied contagion, and believed that an epidemic disease was to be accepted as a fatality, or even a blessing for the believer, as dying of plague could be regarded as a form of martyrdom that granted direct access to paradise. By contrast, in the works of two fourteenth-century Arab Andalusian intellectuals, Ibn Ḫātima, d. 1369 c., and Ibn al-Ḫaṭīb, 1313–1374, we find clear clinical evidence of the contagious nature of the fourteenth-century plague outbreak. The paper explores the contribution Ibn Ḫātima and Ibn al-Ḫaṭīb gave to the concept of contagion, understood as disease transmission through direct con tact or by proximity.