Plague of Amwas
Traditional narratives about reactions to the plague of Amwas by Caliph Umar and his top commander Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah informed medieval Muslim theological responses to epidemics, including the Black Death.
[8]) Amwas, the Arabic name for Emmaus Nicopolis, had been a fortified Roman army camp in the first century, which grew into a small city by the early third.
[9] At the onset of the plague, the site served as the principal camp of the Arab Muslim troops in Syria where spoils were divided and soldiers paid.
[12] Widespread famine in Syria–Palestine possibly set the stage for the plague due to weakened immune resistance and the stockpiling of food reserves in towns and villages, which could attract plague-infected rodents and bring them into contact with the human population, according to Dols.
[14] Umar subsequently embarked for Syria to assess the situation, meeting with the army leaders at a desert way-stop called Sargh (thirteen days' march north of Medina).
[14][16] Disagreeing with their recommendations, he next consulted the leaders of the later converts from the Quraysh, the tribe to which the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the caliphs belonged, who proposed that the army should withdraw from the area of the epidemic, which Umar accepted.
[14][16] Abu Ubayda protested the army's withdrawal on the basis of a purported prohibition by Muhammad on Muslims fleeing or entering a plague-affected land.
[14] The summit at Sargh concluded with Umar ordering Abu Ubdaya to lead the army to healthier grounds and the caliph's return to Medina.
[29] According to al-Tabari (d. 923), after returning to Medina from Sargh, Umar informed his advisers of his intention to visit his troops in Syria–Palestine and assess the chaos wrought by the plague.
[18] The historian Wilferd Madelung surmises that the plague in Syria had precluded Umar from deploying commanders more preferable to him from Medina and he thus appointed Mu'awiya in lieu of a suitable alternative.
[31] Amwas was replaced as the Arabs' headquarters in Palestine first by Lydda and/or Jerusalem, followed by Ramla, which was founded by the Umayyad caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik in the early 8th century.
[37] Modern historians concur that the actual circumstances of the plague of Amwas are not reconstructable and largely focus on the descriptions of the event in the 8th–10th-century Islamic histories and collections of hadith (traditions and sayings of Muhammad) in the context of theological debates on predestination, the status of Muslim sinners, and contagion.
[14] The tenets consistently caused theological disagreements throughout the epidemic recurrences of the Middle Ages as a result of the difficulty in accepting plague as divine mercy or punishment and observable contagion.
In the assessment of Dols, native Christian and Jewish attitudes and natural human anxieties likely influenced aspects of the first principle, namely that plague represented divine punishment or warnings.
[14] A poem about the plague of Amwas recorded by the Damascene historian Ibn Asakir (d. 1175) reflects the martyrdom belief: How many brave horsemen and how many beautiful, chaste women were killed in the valley of 'Amwas They had encountered the Lord, but He was not unjust to them When they died, they were among the non-aggrieved people in Paradise.
