Science and Scripture in a Medieval Plague Treatise (Ibn Hajar’s Merits of the Plague)

Register Here

Date: Monday, October 7, 2024

Time: 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM

Location: JHB DSR Room 318, Dept for the Study of Religion, 170 St. George St. Toronto

We are excited to announce an upcoming workshop titled “Science and Scripture in a Medieval Plague Treatise (Ibn Hajar’s Merits of the Plague).” This workshop will be led by Dr. Mairaj U. Syed, an associate professor of religious studies and Middle East/South Asia studies at the University of California, Davis, on Monday, October 7, 2024.  

About Merits of the Plague

The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the first time

A Penguin Classic

Six hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, death-count registers, poetry, and the author’s personal anecdotes, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience, and care for those around us.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Bio:
Mairaj U. Syed is an associate professor of religious studies and Middle East/South Asia studies at the University of California, Davis, where he also serves as the director of the Middle East/South Asia studies program. He specializes in Islamic law, theology, comparative ethics, and digital humanities. His 2017 monograph, Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, published by Oxford University Press, offers a framework for analyzing ethical thought within pluralistic traditions. Recently, alongside Dr. Joel Blecher, he completed a translation of a medieval Islamic treatise on the plague, published by Penguin. His latest research involves interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars worldwide, focusing on the application of computational methods (e.g., NLP, machine learning) to gain meaningful insights into Islamic texts, particularly hadith. His work on the computational analysis of hadith has been recognized with numerous grants. In 2014, he was a Fulbright scholar in Istanbul. Syed teaches a wide range of courses, including Islamic Studies, Social Theory, and Digital Humanities. Additionally, he is active in American Muslim civil society and serves as an expert witness on Islamic law in U.S. legal cases. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University.