Answer these 4 questions in 3-4 double spaces pages.

1. Why did contagion represent a theological challenge in the Islamic tradition?
2. Why were Ottoman, and generally Islamic, responses to the recurrent plague pandemics branded as fatalistic in European accounts?
3. How did Ibn al-Qayyim justify the infallibility of Divine decree?
4. Why al-Ghazali’s idea of “the best of all possible worlds” was considered problematic?

Using any of the following sources.

Aberth, John. 2015. Plagues in World History. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Chowdhury, Safaruk. 2021. Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Dols, Michael W. 1977. The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. 2017. On Divine Wisdom and the Problem of Evil, trans. Tallal M.
Zeni. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society.
Ormsby, Eric Linn. 1984. Theodicy in Islamic Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stearns, Justin. 2011. Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in Western Midetrranean. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Varlik, Nukhet. 2015. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The
Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Conrad, Lawrence I. 1982. “Ṭaʿūn and Wabāʾ Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in Early Islam.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25 (3): 268-307.

Conrad, Lawrence I. 1998. Umar at Sargh: The Evolution of an Umayyad Tradition on Flight from the Plague. In Stefan Leder (ed.) Story-Telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 488–528.

Conrad, Lawrence I. 2000. A Ninth-Century Muslim Scholar’s Discussion of Contagion. In Lawrence Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (eds.) Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies. Ashgate Publishing: 163-177.
Fahmy, Khaled. 2018. In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Gallagher, Nancy Elizabeth. 1983. Medicine and Power in Tunisia, 1780-1900. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Green, Monica. 2014. Taking “Pandemic” Seriously: Making the Black Death Global. The Medieval Globe 1 (1): 27-61.
Hodgson, Marshall G. 1977. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
Civilization, 3 vols. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
Hoover, Jon. 2007. Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism. Leiden: Brill.
Kuhnke, LaVerne. 1990. Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Meister, Chad and Paul Moser, eds. 2017. The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robarts, Andrew. 2016. Migration and Disease in the Black Sea Region: Ottoman-Russian Relations in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Sonbol, Amira el-Azhary. 1991. The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt, 1800-1922. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Speziale, Salvatore. 2006. Epidemics and Quarantine in Mediterranean Africa from the Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 16 (1-2): 249-258.

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