Ṭāʿūn

The plague — the Black Death that swept through Afro-Eurasia in the 1340s, killing between one-third and one-half of the population of the regions it struck and fundamentally reshaping the medieval world. Ibn Battuta encountered its devastation upon returning westward from the East: in Damascus he was told that 2,400 people had died in a single day; in Cairo the death toll was staggering. His account provides one of the few non-European perspectives on the pandemic and records how Muslim communities responded — with prayer, with charity, and with the prophetic hadith counselling acceptance of plague as martyrdom for the patient believer. The contrast between the flourishing world he had left and the devastated one he returned to gives this section of the Rihla a particular pathos.

As understood in the classical tradition of Ibn Battuta and the scholars of his school.