Six years ago, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk started writing a historical novel about the outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional island. He'd been dreaming of such a project for decades: as a student of history and of the great European plague chronicles and novels-Defoe's "A Journal of a Plague Year," Manzoni's "The Betrothed," Camus's "The Plague"-he had a particular interest in the way that plagues have tended to get what we might now call "Orientalized." Muslims, especially in the Ottoman Empire, have been portrayed as more resistant than Christians to the imposition of quarantine. In a 2020 essay, Pamuk argues that Western observers like Defoe noted a strain of fatalism in the Muslim world view the theological idea of "Every Man's end being determined," as Defoe put it. If you can do nothing to alter your fate, why bother protecting yourself from death? (Historians have vigorously contested the claims about both resistance and fatalism.) Pamuk maintains that, in the nineteenth century, the rise of pilgrimages to Mecca or Medina ensured that Muslims became "the world's most prolific carriers and spreaders of infectious disease." And since people always imagine that plague comes from elsewhere, from anywhere but within one's own society, it may have been politically convenient for Westerners to imagine that it somehow originated in Muslim lands, or, more vaguely, in "the East." As Pamuk reminds us, "Crime and Punishment" ends with Raskolnikov grandiosely fantasizing of a great, obliterating plague "that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia."
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 31, 2022-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 31, 2022-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
STUNTED
\"The Fall Guy.\"
MOTHERS OF US ALL
Paula Vogel's \"Mother Play,\" Shaina Taub's \"Suffs,\" and Amy Herzog's \"Mary Jane.\"
PURE PLEASURE
The \"Radical Optimism\" of Dua Lipa.
PARADISE LOST
The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.
ORIGIN STORY
What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?
DEATH IN VENICE
At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.
WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I
\"You'll never get away with this!\" Ultra Man vowed as he wriggled in his chains. \"You may destroy me, but you'll never destroy what I stand for!\"
STONES OF CONTENTION
The British Museum faces accusations of cultural theft-and actual theft.
A CAMPUS IN CRISIS
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
ARROW RETRIEVER
I am an arrow retriever. After a batrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste-and maybe even a sin―for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, \"Arrows don't grow on trees.\"