Fatalism

 In his renowned study of the role of pestilence in global history, Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill cites a hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammed that seems rather salient to our present situation. It reads: "When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a country, do not go there; but if it breaks out in the country where you are, do not leave." 

I felt called out. In the days following the expiration of my two-week post-vax period, after all, I had at first felt a sense of freedom. The long confinement is over! The world is my oyster! I can travel again! A friend and I almost instantly joined what seems like the majority of newly-immunized Americans in booking plane tickets to fly overseas. 

We were admirably modest in our expectations. It's not like we planned the trip for this summer. "We'll book it for October," we said. "By then the pandemic will have died down everywhere." We also told ourselves that if we didn't set our plans in stone right then, we might never manage to do so. So we booked our flights. Heading for the United Kingdom. 

Since that time, we have watched as the numbers of Delta variant infections ticked upward, both here and in Great Britain. I pored over the U.K. travel restrictions, monitoring to see when, if ever, they might upgrade the United States to the "green list" of countries cleared for travel; or—failing that—relax the quarantine requirement for countries on the "amber list."

But as the Delta variant situation continued to worsen and the global vaccination effort still lagged behind the pace of new infections and mutations of the virus, an awareness steadily dawned on my friend and me. Perhaps even if the U.K. ultimately lets us come, we shouldn't go. The hadith therefore seemed as if addressed to us directly. Stay put, it said. Don't leave. Sound public health advice.

McNeill sees the saying in the opposite light, however. He cites it as among a number of hadiths that allegedly encouraged a fatalistic attitude to epidemic disease on the part of the Muslim world, throughout the Medieval and early modern period. He claims multiple times that Islamic societies resisted prophylactic measures against the plague. 

All of which seems like an improperly sweeping generalization. But if canard it is (and I think that's likely), it is one of surprisingly long standing. It reminded me of a passage that occurs in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. His narrator is debating whether to flee in the face of plague would be tantamount to denying God's will or questioning the wisdom of Providence. 

In reply, his brother reproaches him for emulating the "Turks and Mahometans in Asia" who "presuming upon their profess'd predestinating Notions, and of every Man's End being predetermined and unalterably before-hand decreed, [...] would go unconcern'd into infected places [...] by which means they died at a Rate of Ten or Fifteen Thousand a-Week." 

By comparison, here is William McNeill, writing in the 1970s: "Moslems regarded Christian health measures with amused disdain, and thereby exposed themselves to heavier losses from plague than prevailed among their Christian neighbors." And later on: "Moslems had long been resigned to plague and found European quarantine efforts rather amusing." 

Such claims seem likely to be based on little more than a needlessly uncritical adoption of the earlier assessments of European writers. After all, McNeill's own account will later remind us that the Muslim world was the source of one of the most effective public health measures ever devised: the practice of inoculating children with small pox pustules, in order to ward off later, more severe infections. 

This practice, McNeill reminds us, was introduced to Europe as a result of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travels in the Ottoman world, and her subsequent championing of the inoculation method in fashionable circles. In a very real sense, then, the entire history of modern immunization techniques takes its origin from the folk practices of Islamic societies. 

Hardly a fatalistic attitude to epidemic disease! Indeed, McNeill observes, it was actually Europeans who proved initially resistant to inoculation (and Jenner's later vaccination technique that was partly based on it) for precisely the reasons that Defoe attributes to Muslims. "Opponents criticized the practice," writes McNeill, "as an interference with God's will."

And at any rate, the irony of Defoe's account is that his narrator—immediately after being warned against this fatalistic attitude to Providence via his brother, proceeds to engage in a form of bibliomancy. He concludes from his reading of a passage chosen at random that God does in fact desire him to stay in London, and would regard it as a violation of his will if he were to flee. 

In truth, I suspect there is no society on Earth or in history that has been genuinely indifferent to epidemic disease, whatever their theology; and the words from the Prophet himself appear to encourage anything but fatalism. 

I suppose the injunction to stay put during a pandemic could be taken as a counsel of passivity. But it is also fully compatible with modern public health guidelines and an elementary understanding of the principles of contagion. Muhammed was urging nothing we wouldn't recognize today in the form of a coronavirus "lockdown."

Another hadith that McNeill uncharitably construes: "He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr." The historian seems to read this as practically encouraging people to go out and get themselves killed from the plague; but that is scarcely the only interpretation. One could equally say the sentiment does more to recognize the loss of life that pandemics entail than our own society has done to date, amidst our present catastrophe. 

Our society, after all—including me most days of the week—seems intent at this point chiefly on putting the pandemic behind us. We don't want to think about it anymore. We want to move on with our lives; reopen for business; book plane tickets to travel overseas to countries barred to us for the past year-and-a-half. 

But meanwhile the crisis continues to rage abroad; people are still dying. In many parts of the developing world, it is not even close to reaching its conclusion, and global vaccination efforts have been so slow to respond that millions more may die from the disease and its variants before this chapter of human history can truly be closed. 

Speaking of the people as "martyrs" whose lives are being lost to a disease that we now have the technological capacity to prevent, but which we are not, simply because our world is not moving swiftly enough to vaccinate all humanity, seems not at all wide of the mark. It is, on the contrary, a far more humane sentiment than the apathy we witness amongst ourselves who have been immunized and therefore see COVID-19 as yesterday's news. 

If we are looking for an example of deadly "fatalism" in the face of pandemic disease, we can see it here, in the rich and vaccinated "West," amidst those who tell the other countries of the world that they must simply sit and wait for now, that vaccinating the world by 2023 is the best anyone can do, by which time the virus may well have mutated to the extent our vaccines are no longer effective. 

The innocents of the world who perish as a result of this torpor and apathy are indeed among the "martyrs" of human inhumanity. We must not forget, must not "move on," until every last person has been brought to safety.