The Prophet of Islām, Muḥammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) declared: “There is no contagion”, and “Nothing transmits [what it has of illness] to anything else” and he said to the bedouin who objected to this statement, on account of what he presumed of scabies being “spread” from one camel to the rest, “Who (or what) gave it to the first one?”, meaning just as the first one developed scabies through the sum of its causes by Allāh’s decree, then so did the rest (without contagion), this being an indication of the bedouin falling into an observational error by confusing coincidence with causation, which underlies superstition and harbouring of omens.
For more detail, refer to NoContagion.Com
Abu ʿUmar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (رحمه الله) (d. 463H) wrote after mentioning his isnād :[1]
From Maḥmūd bin Lubayd (d. 96H):
He said:
Yaḥyā bin al-Ḥakam ordered me to [go to] Jurash [in Yemen]. So I came to it and they—the inhabitants—told me that ʿAbd Allāh bin Jaʿfar [bin Abī Ṭālib] narrated to them that the Messenger of Allāh (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said: “Take caution from the person with this disease—meaning leprosy—just as caution is taken from a beast of prey. If he descends to a valley, then descend to other than it.”
So I said: “By Allāh, if Ibn Jaʿfar narrated this to you, he did not lie to you.” He [Maḥmūd] said: “When he [Yaḥyā] recalled me from Jurash, I came to Madīnah and met with ʿAbd Allāh bin Jaʿfar. So I said to him: ‘O Abā Jaʿfar! What is the ḥadīth that the people of Jurash narrated from you?’ Then I narrated the ḥadīth to him. So he said:
They have lied, by Allāh, I did not narrate [this] to them. For I have seen ʿUmar bin al-Khāṭṭāb call for a vessel in which there was water, and Muʿayqīb would drink from it—and this disease [of leprosy] had taken hold in him—then he [ʿUmar] would drink from it, and would deliberately place his mouth on the same spot [of the vessel] where [Muʿayqīb had placed his] mouth, knowing he was doing so because he disliked that anything of [belief in] contagion should enter into his soul.
See also: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr on Contagion, quote: "As for his saying: 'There is no contagion', then it is a prohibition from that anyone should say: “A thing passes [what it has] to another thing.”
Notes
01 As for what is reported and circulated that ʿUmar (رضي الله عنه) would order Muʿayqīb to keep away from him the length of a spear, then Ibn Ḥajar has declared this report to be munqaṭiʿ, and thus weak.
02 As for the ḥadīth regarding ʿUmar (رضي الله عنه) and the land of plague, then ʿUmar turned away from it in the same way that a person turns away from a burning building in which people are trapped, for fear of being caught and harmed by the fire, and not that one fears that those in the building might “transmit” their burning to him if he enters the building and comes near them. Certainly, ʿUmar (رضي الله عنه) knew the difference between this and that. His action was to avoid the same causes that led the people to become ill with the plague in that land, those causes having enveloped that land and its people, and not out of fear of contagion or "transmission" of illness from individually sick people. This is one of the reasons why it is prohibited to flee the land of plague, because it is pointless.
This would be like to trying to flee a banquet after you and everybody else consumed contaminated drink or food and some people start falling sick. Likewise, if you are in a land that is unhealthy in its air and water supply, leading to an outbreak of illness. So you flee thinking that if you get away from everybody, they will not “transmit” their sickness to you. This is foolish, as you would have already have been subjected to the real cause of the illness, so fleeing is pointless. You should just remain calm, have patience with Allāh’s decree, whatever it brings. You may become ill, or if you had enough vitality, you may not manifest symptoms of illness and your body would have enough strength to resolve it internally without symptoms. Either way, fleeing is pointless.
This is why, as the scholars explain, it is pointless trying to flee a land of plague if you are present when it breaks out, because you would already have been subjected to its causes in the preceding days, weeks or months, so fleeing for fear of plague and death is prohibited. However, leaving for other reasons is permitted, such as for visiting parents in another city, or for medical treatment, or for trade. And this is proof that the ḥadīth of the plague has nothing to do with preventing contagion as Imām al-Ṭahāwī and others have alluded to.
For more on this, refer to our booklet, “Higher Wisdoms in the Ḥadīth of the Plague” written in April 2020, and which will be published here in due course, inshāʾAllāh. Within it is the speech of Shaykh Ibn ʿUthaymīn who rejects that the ḥadīth of the plague is evidence for quarantine.
03 ʿUmar bin al-Khaṭṭāb (رضي الله عنه) preceded by at least a thousand years, many physicians of the Europeans and the West in general, who, in order to expose and dispel the superstition of contagion, would, try to induce disease in themselves by inoculating themselves in the most invasive of ways with the excretions of the sick.
Here are some examples:
Dr. Thomas Powell laughing at the germ theorists, those who followed Louis Pasteur and other fraudsters, propped by the money-power seeking fortunes through injectable serums of pus, purulence and suppuration. He did so by swallowing, inhaling and injecting into himself various alleged disease-causing bacilli (bacteria) and calling fellow physicians to observe as witnesses. See: Dr. Thomas Powell 'Laughs at the Theory of Contagion'
Dr. Rodermund making mockery of the superstition that gripped the germ theorists in the early 20th century, upon their misunderstanding and misinterpretation of biology. He frequently covered himself in the pus of smallpox and went about his daily activities in order to expose the baseless superstitions and "sanctimonious frauds and deceivers" of the public. See: Dr. Rodermund's Experiments with Smallpox and Contagion in the United States
Dr. Clot Bey was commissioned by the French government to study the plague in Egypt and he, along with many other physicians, established that it is not contagious, “[Clot Bey] tested the infectivity of plague materials on his own person. He inoculated himself on two occasions, with the blood of a patient and again with pus from a bubo; he also inoculated various animals. All his experiments were negative.” See: Plague and Contagion
Failed Contagion Experiments: All real-life genuinely scientific attempts to “transmit” illnesses such as influenza, colds, measles, chicken pox and the likes have failed or proved inconclusive. This was well known and established in the early 20th century. However, there was a battle between the germ theorists supported by the money-power to fearmonger and sell serums and injections by developing the pseudoscience of virology, and those who asserted that disease is a multifactorial complex process and arises from within, with “bacteria” and mislabelled “viruses” simply being consequential to disease states and not causal, and they were correct. Sadly, the money-power won, as it always tends to.
And numerous other examples that can be placed here in due course, inshāʾAllāh.
04 As for the claim of those who say that if we deny contagion, then the disbelievers will laugh at us, then on the contrary, if we affirm this superstition, the disbelievers (those who know or discover the truth) will eventually laugh at us for believing in something that is rejected by genuine, real-life scientific experiments (as opposed to sleight of hand tricks with magic wands, as occurs in the pseudoscience and fraud of virology). And in any case, how can something that the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) explicitly declared, and which is held by the greatest of scholars from the era of the Companions to this day of ours be something to be laughed at, especially when it is empirically proven to be true?
05 Continuing the point above, a non-Muslim can quite easily come along and say: “It is now proven that leprosy is not contagious at all, and your Prophet said, ‘Flee from the leper as you would from a lion’, and this is evidence that your Prophet opposed verified creational realities, hence, he is not a genuine Prophet.” And they would cite many concrete evidences, and also cite the CDC:[2]
You cannot get leprosy from a casual contact with a person who has Hansen’s disease like: Shaking hands or hugging, sitting next to each other on the bus, sitting together at a meal. Hansen’s disease is also not passed on from a mother to her unborn baby during pregnancy and it is also not spread through sexual contact...
As such, the reality is the other way around, if we affirm this superstition, those who are knowledgeable and credible among the people of disbelief will laught at us and will attack the Sunnah, which is revelation.
Thus, as is established with the Companions and many great Muslim scholars, these ḥadīths are not an affirmation of contagion, this is but the view of the ignoramuses among the doctors as stated by Shaykh Ḥāfiḍh al-Ḥakamī (رحمه الله). Rather, these ḥadīths are from the angle of prohibiting a thing (alcohol, fornication, belief in contagion) and prohibiting also the avenues that lead to it (sitting where alcohol is consumed, free intermingling with the opposite sex, and being in proximity with the leper). Thus, weak people, of weak consitution and loose imagination will become victims and enter into folly by way of it. Hence, the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) negated contagion and ordered weak people to avoid situations where they are likely to fall prey to observational errors, whisperings and the likes, out of mercy for them. As for the strong, and what else would be expected from the likes of `Umar (رضي الله عنه), then they rid themselves of these tendencies, superstitions and follies, with absolute conviction in the judgement (قضاء) of the Messenger (صلى الله عليه وسلم).
Footnotes
1. Al-Tamhīd (Muʾassassat al-Furqān, 2017, 1/248), al-Ṭabarī in Tahdḥīb al-Āthār, Musnad ʿAlī (29), 74, and Ibn Saʿd in al-Ṭabaqāt (4/109-111) relating from Muḥammad bin Ishāq, and see al-Siyar (2/491-492).2. Refer to the following page on the CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/leprosy/index.html.
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