The pernicious, debilitating impact of malaria in Arabia is one of the most constant themes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European travel literature, and indeed, a large number of European travelers themselves ran afoul of malaria in the Arabian Peninsula. Case in point is the sad story of British archeologists Theodore Bent and Mabel Bent, who, in early 1897, set out on a scouting expedition into the Yafei and Fadhli regions of Yemen. On their way inland, they were detained in the town of Khanfar, where the mosquitoes were “awful,” though this did not stop them from
“taking long walks through the cultivated fields” along the Wadi Banna while negotiating with the local sultan for passage into the interior. About fifteen days later, during their tour of the highlands behind the town of shukra, both Bents were laid low by a severe fever. “My malarial fever was constant,” Mabel Bent later recounts, “and i had no tertian intervals, i lost my strength completely. We both, and several others, were very ill, and we were not strong enough to get at our medicine-chest.” Unable to walk or even ride a camel, Mrs. Bent reports, “i had to be carried to the sea, 17 miles, on my bed, which was strengthened with tent-pegs and slung on tent-poles.”1 Although they subsequently returned to Britain to convalesce, Theodore Bent’s health had been ruined by his bout with malaria, and he died on May 5, 1897, only a few days after their return.
The Bents were certainly not the only European travelers to suffer from malaria in the Arabian Peninsula. A number of the authors upon whom i have relied for ethnographic materials, including Freya stark, Charles Huber, William Palgrave, Harry st. John Bridger Philby, Ameen Rihani, and J. R. Wellsted, contracted malaria at some point during their journeys. Ameen Rihani suffered from it repeatedly throughout his trip though Najd, and later notes, with black humor, that many of his journal entries were “written when i was in the lap of Dame Malaria, who envel-oped me, saturated me, with the heat of her love.”2 While Rihani survived to tell the tale, other European travelers did not, including Louis Burck-hardt, a talented young swiss traveler and scholar who died of malaria or similar malady in 1817 at the age of thirty-three.3
Despite these testimonials from travel literature, the prevalence of malaria in the traditional Arabian Peninsula has often been overlooked
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or underappreciated in the scholarly literature. A study of the historical prevalence of malaria in the Arabian Peninsula conducted in 1968 claims that malaria was present in only a small fraction of the Arabian Penin-sula, most especially in Tihamah, the southern Yemeni coast, the al-Hasa region, and some portions of the Hijaz.4 in the Arabian regions that were malarial, the report suggests, malaria infections were relatively infrequent, with only 10–50 percent of adults exposed to the disease. Other scholars have gone so far as to argue that the lack of malaria in Arabia has left a mark on human genetics. Medical researchers Anderson and Vullo, for example, speculated in 1994 that “the absence of malaria in the African and Arabian Deserts could explain why . . . high lactase activity predomi-nates” among Arab and Berber pastoralist populations.5 As we shall see below, there may be some truth to these scholars’ claims about a negative correlation between malaria and the LP (lactase persistence) gene, but i imagine that the bereaved Mrs. Bent would have taken exception to their claim concerning the “absence of malaria” in desert Arabia.
indeed, an overwhelming body of evidence suggests that malaria has been a constant danger to both visitors and indigenous inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula over at least the past two thousand years. As early as the first century CE, the Periplus, a survey of the Arabian coastline written by an anonymous Greek mariner, notes that the incense-producing prov-ince of Dhofar was “very unhealthy, and pestilential even for those sailing along the coast.”6 Although the Periplus only suggests malaria infection, other early sources are more explicit. According to eighth-century histo-rian ibn ishaq, when the Prophet and his companions fled from Mecca to the agricultural oasis of Yathrib (Medina), they found it to be the “most fever-infested land on earth.” Many of the Companions became “delirious and out of their minds with a high temperature,” including Abu Bakr and the freed slave Bilal.7 Mohammad himself died of fever in Medina, and the apparently recurrent nature of his illness is suggestive of malaria.8
While it may seem that their nomadic ways and tendency to occupy more arid landscapes would offer them some protection, Bedouin populations were actually disproportionately vulnerable to malaria. in a pre-islamic Bedouin ode, the poet shanfara likens his cares and worries to “quatran fever”—in other words, fever that recurs at seventy-two-hour intervals, which is typical of a Plasmodium malariae infection.9 Bedouin concern about such fevers is well attested to in early islamic historiography, which describes the Bedouins’ persistent fear of “damp, low-lying, febrile and insect-ridden places.”10 As one Bedouin supposedly complained to
his Caliph, “O Commander of the Faithful, we are not a people who can endure watering places where mosquitoes devour us and fevers grip us.”11 Arabian Bedouins were, in fact, even more vulnerable to malaria than Arab townsmen. Unlike hadr Arabs, Bedouins had little prior exposure to malaria infection, and thus lacked even the modicum of resistance that prior exposure affords. What is more, owing to their milk-rich diet, camel Bedouins had high levels of blood riboflavin, which may facilitate malaria parasite propagation in red blood cells. This is in sharp contrast to village and town-dwelling Arabs, whose milk-poor diet rendered them mildly riboflavin deficient and thus potentially less susceptible than the Bedouins.12
Bedouin fears of malaria are manifested clearly in their folk tradi-tions, which tend to associate watery and fertile landscapes with fevers, jinn, or both. While following the trace of the Wadi Jirdan in southern Yemen, for example, Dutch traveler Daniel van der Meulen was astonished to find that, although portions were covered with “fresh, green grass and
‘ilb trees,” the wadi was completely without “any traces of inhabitants.” He soon discovered why: the wadi was “full of mosquitoes . . . so ravenous that we could kill ten of them at a time on our arms.” Pondering the matter, van der Meulen speculates further: “Might not malaria have driven settlers away from this fertile, dank piece of land? The siyāras [guides] said that it was a country full of evil spirits which is perhaps a different way of saying the same thing.”13
A number of other travelers recorded similar stories of Arabs asso-ciating moist lowland depressions with dangerous fevers and spirits. We have already seen how the Bedouins surrounding Khaybar associated its abundant waters with fevers that were especially dangerous to people of non-African ancestry. Bertrand Thomas was told similar horror stories about the waters of the Wadi Andhaur in the Oman interior, which tasted sweet, but caused “a fever that kills.” Thomas discovered the cause of this folk belief “when a mosquito, the first [he] had seen since Ja’alan, buzzed in [his] ear, and the only inhabitant of the place, a Bait ash shaikh tribesman, came to [him] with a large spleen and malaria symptoms.”14 Other Bedou-ins ascribed fever not to water but to specific times of the year. When trav-eling in the interior valleys of Yemen, for example, Freya stark was warned by her “camel-men” to avoid the “cloud-steaming lowlands” of the Wadi Hajir in the hot months, as “all who go there when the dates are in flower, fall ill with a fever and die.”15 in still other cases, Bedouins contended that certain ill-favored locations were the haunt of dangerous fever-causing
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jinn. The Al Murrah tribe of eastern Arabia, for example, exploited the palms of the Jabrin oasis, but never camped within its confines out of a
“dread of the spirits that are said to haunt the ruined forts.”16
As a general rule, Bedouins “shun[ned] the confinement of even an hour” within a desert oasis, and if they did venture into the verdure of a palm plantation, they were careful to leave it by nightfall, an eminently sensible precaution in areas frequented by malaria-carrying mosquitoes.17 When Bedouins did choose to interact with oasis towns in a large-scale or sustained way, they often did so through intermediaries or proxies in order to protect themselves from the inevitable oasis fevers. For example, after the powerful Rwala camel Bedouin tribe of northern Arabia conquered the town of al-Jawf in the early twentieth century, they garrisoned it with
“thirty-five soldiers, most of them young negroes, who never set aside their loaded rifles.”18 in a parallel case, though slightly outside our area of study, the shammar Bedouin of the northern iraqi plain employed their African slaves as overseers and tax-collectors in the fertile villages they controlled along the Euphrates River. in their study of the legacy of slavery in iraq, Juwaidah and Cox ascribe this to social factors—free men were hesitant to collect taxes from their peers—but an equally compelling explanation would be the typical Bedouin hesitation to venture into the notoriously malarial date plantations.19 Perhaps because of these pragmatic practices and folk beliefs, which led them to avoid oasis environments, Bedouins had the reputation of being somewhat healthier than their town-dwelling counterparts. J. R. Wellsted, for example, noted in the early nineteenth century that the inhabitants of Oman’s interior oases “constantly suffer[ed]
from sickness,” including “violent fevers,” and “have not the vigorous and healthy look of the Bedowins.” Wellsted ascribed these fevers to the oases’
“swamps and pools of water, bordered by rank and luxuriant vegetation,”
and as we will see below, he was not far off the mark.20
While malaria was undoubtedly a scourge of both Arabian farmers and pastoralists, it did provide some measure of protection against outside attack. Diseases, including no doubt malaria, contributed to the failure of the first century BCE Roman expedition into southern Arabia under the generalship of Aelius Gallus.21 The Egyptian and Ottoman armies that repeatedly invaded Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries were also weakened by malarial infection. italian mercenary soldier Giovanni Finati, for example, describes how, in 1815, 90 Egyptian soldiers died of illness in just three months while garrisoned in the lower Hijaz oasis town of Turaba. Finati blames this on the use of local ammonium
salts, though commentators on his work believe that “intermittent fevers”
and other diseases were the likely cause of this mortality.22 The Ottomans lost far more men to disease during their ill-fated 1904–05 occupation of the highly malarial Najd district of Qasim: of the 4,500 troops sent out, only 1,000 returned, largely because the occupying troops were “decimated by disease.”23 Ottoman troops suffered similar problems from malaria dur-ing World War i, durdur-ing which north Arabia became a battlefield between Ottoman and British forces. Czech scholar and wartime diplomat Alois Musil recalls how one Ottoman military expedition against the British was completely undone by malaria. Of the 176 soldiers on the expedition, fully 130 were rendered hors de combat by “fever and malaria,” and many cases were so serious they had to be evacuated to Damascus for medical treatment.24