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Josef van Ess. Der Fehltritt des Gelehrten: Die "Pest von Emmaus" and ihre theologischen Nachspiele. Supplement to Schriften der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Masse, no. 13. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 2001. 453 pp. (56.00; Sw. Fr. 96.00 (3-8253-1200-3).
In the year 17 or 18 of the Hijra (A.D. 639/40) an epidemic disease broke out in Emmaus and shook the Moslem community. The hitherto victorious armies were faced with a great catastrophe: God, who had favored the Moslems up to this time, seemed to have sent down this visitation upon them. Josef van Ess explores how different types of texts, both theological and historical, have interpreted this event. Van Ess is one of the great masters of early Islamic theology and historiography, as he has demonstrated with his monumental work Theologie and Gesellschaft im 2. and 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra, vols. 1-6 (1991-97). While in that work he scrutinized "the theology and the society of the second and third centuries Hijra," he now tries to go even further back in time, taking an event, the "plague of Emmaus," as an incident that generated a large amount of theological and historiographic writing.
The starting...