The role of non-Muslim translators in the transfer of ancient Greek medical knowledge to the medieval Muslims, and thence to medieval Europeans, is well known. Yet the scholarly quest for “Islamic contributions to civilization” has contributed to underestimating the ongoing role of Jewish and Christian physicians, after the initial translation movement, in the professional practice of medicine of the medieval Middle East. Medical training and practice in the Middle East continued to cross religious boundaries throughout the medieval period. This paper uses three late medieval Arabic biographical dictionaries and narrative sources in Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian to demonstrate the full participation of non-Muslim physicians, into the late medieval period, in the often grudging collaborations which we term “Islamic” medicine. The biographical dictionaries used are the well-known works of Jamal al-Din al-Qifti and Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, as well as the unedited Rawdat al-alibba fi tarikh al-atibba of Daud b. Nasir al-Din al-Mawsili in the early fifteenth century. While much of al-Mawsili’s text was borrowed from Ibn Abi Usaybi'a’s work, he reordered and supplemented that earlier material in order to emphasize the importance of his native Jazira. In the process, he also revealed that into the fifteenth century, the medical profession drew from the various local religious communities. The biographical dictionaries will be supplemented by anecdotes culled from narrative sources, including the Syriac chronicles of Bar 'Ebroyo (Ibn al-'Ibri) and the travel account of Ibn Battuta. My paper builds on the research for Egypt by Jason Zaborowski, expanding to include a later period and a larger region in late medieval Anatolia, Jazira, and Iraq. Rather than presenting medicine as a secular meeting-ground for inter-religious convivencia outside of religious discourse, however, this paper argues that both Islam and Christianity linked healing to God. Rather than medicine being free of religion, it was a domain of shared goals among people of different religions. Religious practice was expected in medieval Middle Eastern medicine, and a plurality of religions continued to be attested among practitioners and teachers as well as among patients and pupils. The religious diversity of late medieval Middle Eastern medicine reveals non-Muslims as participating powerfully in “Islamic” society and culture, thus presenting an alternative to the common scholarly presumption that non-Muslim minorities were marginalized and of negligible historical importance in the late medieval period.

Considering the enormous body of literature, albeit of wildly varying quality, on martyrdom and Muslim suicide bombers in the contemporary Middle East, it is surprising that, a few short encyclopedia entries aside, there are only three historically grounded articles dedicated to suicide anywhere in the Arab world before the twentieth century (Rosenthal, 1946; Denaro, 1996; Martel-Thoumian, 2004). This paucity stands in sharp contrast to the vast and nuanced scholarship on suicide in medieval, early modern, and modern Europe, which has demonstrated how changing attitudes to self-murder have reflected deeper societal changes. This paper takes early modern Ottoman Syria as a case study to challenge the widespread assumption that killing oneself was so rare in Arab-Islamic societies that there is simply nothing to write about. The paper draws from numerous cases of suicide reported in chronicles, first-person narratives, biographical dictionaries, and court records from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century (e.g., Ghazzi, Muhibbi, Muradi, Ibn Ayyub, Ibn Budayr, Ibn Tulun, Ibn Kannan). These narratives are supplemented by contemporaneous legal sources such as fatwas and legal compendia, whose foremost concern was the permissibility of funerary rites for self-murderers. The paper first sketches the men who killed themselves (no cases of women could be located): their age, family circumstances, socio-economic and educational background, how they took their lives, and why. It then focuses on how these cases were narrated and represented. Although there is no clear-cut evidence that the Qur'an itself prohibits suicide, the Hadith unambiguously declares it an unlawful act that dooms the perpetrator to eternal Hell. Why is it, then, that many presentations of suicide are either matter-of-fact or decidedly empathetic? And why did the authorities routinely choose to attach no penalties, unlike the post-mortem punishments, sometimes spectacularly savage, inflicted on the bodies of suicides in parts of early modern Europe? One possible answer, I argue in the conclusion, is that in Ottoman Syria, unlike in Europe, self-murder was not perceived by the political and religious authorities as a significant threat to the public order. Ultimately, this paper hopes to open the way for serious historical studies of suicide in Middle Eastern history.

The space of the cemetery in medieval Cairo was one of contradictions and cultural exchange. Modern scholars have studied the cemetery largely in the context of shrine and tomb visitation, called ziyara. However, analysis of the cemetery in other contexts, particularly for family grave visitation and holiday and festival celebrations, has yet been fully explored. This paper is a move in that direction, analyzing Cairene cemetery spaces in the Mamluk period through the lens of gender and class. I argue that, because the cemetery was both part of and distinct from the larger urban space of the city and because people of different classes, genders, and religions mixed together in this space, it caused significant anxiety among different scholars writing in various medieval genres. However, the ways in which these anxieties manifest in their works vary due to the specific concerns of both the individual author and also the genre in which he is writing. The sources used for this inquiry include chronicles, biographical dictionaries, bida' (anti-innovation) treatises, pilgrimage guides, and hisba manuals. Because of the varied activities that took place in the cemetery, from visitation of saints’ tombs to mawlids to funerals, an equally varied number of sources address issues of cemetery visitation. Careful analysis of such sources reveal specific anxieties about gender – in particular, the presence of women provoking social disorder in the form of sexual immorality (fitna). Furthermore, some authors specifically denigrate the behavior of the “commoners” in the cemetery, drawing out class distinctions in how people behaved and using accusations of “the practices of the commoners” to malign certain customs. Both gender and class connect to the issue of the mixing of religious groups in the cemeteries, as some scholars argue that Muslim women and commoners were more likely to be swayed to non-Muslim practices. Shared shrine spaces were a source of anxiety for Muslim and dhimmi authors alike. Therefore, by analyzing the space of the cemetery in this specific time and place, larger medieval concerns about space and society are revealed.