Contagion and the choices of individuals

This lesson asks you to evaluate how individual choices affect the control of disease and to describe non-medical ways of protecting oneself. The museum offers two records on contagion and on what a person is told to do when plague is in a land, with the views of the scholars attributed. These are scholars' views on causation, not an account of how infection spreads; medical explanations come from your class's sources. What these choices achieved, and how health authorities advise people today, are for your class to bring. ¹

For each instruction in the records, name the person who must choose and the people who are affected by the choice. Then ask in which situations a single choice protects only the chooser and in which it protects others.

Read how the Kuwaiti jurists' encyclopaedia sets two reports side by side in the record on contagion. Most scholars hold that disease does not pass by its own nature but by God's act and decree; they reconcile the hadith "no contagion" with the hadith "the diseased should not be brought to the healthy": the first denies contagion by nature, the second directs keeping away from what customarily causes harm by God's decree ^{2 3}. The record on the epidemic gives a saying of the Prophet ﷺ, citing Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim: if it falls in a land you are in, do not flee it, and do not enter it ^{4 5}. The record on the plague summarises the same two collections: who hears of it in a land does not enter, who is in it does not flee, and who dies of it patient and hoping for reward has a martyr's wage ^{4 5}. This is what the records report; the museum neither explains the hadiths nor reconciles them itself.

The record on contagion reports three positions, each attributed. Most scholars hold that disease does not pass by its own nature but by God's act and decree, and they reconcile the two hadiths as above ^{2 3}. Umar and a group of early scholars deny contagion ³. Another group affirms it, and holds that preserving lives, limbs, property and honour from ruinous causes is obligatory ⁶. These are scholars' views on causation, not an account of how infection spreads, and the record does not choose between them.

The records on the epidemic and the plague are brief summaries that cite Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim; neither gives the narrator, the number or the full wording of the report ^{4 5}. The record on contagion comes from the Kuwaiti jurists' encyclopaedia, which reports what scholars hold and rule, so it witnesses what was said, not what was measured ². It names Umar and a group of early scholars for the denial, but gives no names for "most scholars" or for the group that affirms contagion ³. Ask whom each position belongs to, and how far the speaker stands from the encyclopaedia that reports it.

The record on the plague says that who hears of it in a land does not enter and who is in it does not flee ^{4 5}, and the record on contagion says that most scholars reconcile the two hadiths by taking the second to direct keeping away from what customarily causes harm by God's decree ³. For each instruction, name who makes the choice and who is affected by it. Then take a position on whether a choice of this kind affects only the one who makes it, and answer the strongest objection to your position: if most scholars hold that disease passes only by God's act and decree, can one person's choice affect anyone else at all?

• Contagion: the definition, the scholars' views, and the spouses' option.
• The plague: a summary of what the two Sahih collections report about entering and leaving its land.
• The epidemic: the saying reported from the Prophet about a land where it falls.

Read the record on contagion and set the two views side by side in a chart, naming who holds each.