The year is 1830, and Iraq is groaning under plague, beneath Ottoman occupation. An occupation that never cared in the slightest about building Iraq or developing it, just as it neglected every country it occupied, all of which languished for centuries under Ottoman backwardness.

The Ottomans in Iraq, like locusts in every other land they entered as invaders, cared about prostitution, about tax collection, and about theft. But nobody cared about cleaning the waterways and the roads or building hospitals. Add to that the deterioration of Iraqis' conditions because of the thefts and plunder of the House of Osman, and the collapse of their immunity because of the hunger, poverty and ignorance they were drowning in up to their necks at the hands of the House of Osman. And this was the seed of the plague epidemic, which began striking Baghdad timidly that same year.

The Ottomans knew the plague had begun to appear, but they did not care in the slightest. The governor of Baghdad, "Daoud Pasha," was busy following up on the method of making the "kofta" that would carry his name to this very day, punishing cooks, impaling them, cutting off their limbs and jailing any cook who made it wrong.

And since there was no interest whatsoever in the matter of the plague, the first victim fell in the middle of the road, and since not one man from the Ottoman state cared, the people buried the body themselves, and each of them went back to his home carrying the deadly infection.

In the middle of that same year, 1830, the plague was killing a thousand Iraqis a day. Then it reached the point of killing nearly 2,000 Iraqis a day. That is double the number the plague used to claim in Iraq in the seventh to tenth centuries!

Meaning that the countries under the rule of the House of Osman in the nineteenth century were more backward than they had been 12 centuries earlier, in the year 870!

With the Ottomans' indifference, corpses spread through the roads and found no one to lift them, and the epidemic, in its black cloak and with its scythe, entered Basra, Najaf and Kirkuk and reached Kurdistan.

"Daoud Pasha" shut his palace on himself and on his men and his retinue, amid an abundant stock of food, drink and clothing, and left the Iraqi people to suffer.

The air and the water were contaminated, the water carriers died and the farmers dwindled, so the locusts came for the crops, and whoever survived the plague died of hunger and thirst.

But fate was lying in wait for the Ottomans.

Because of what the Ottoman Sultan harboured towards "Muhammad Ali" after the victory of his son "Ibrahim Pasha" in the Greek war, he ordered huge Ottoman army forces to remain in Iraq, secretly nursing a plan to move and eliminate "Muhammad Ali."

And because these forces were encamped on open ground, not in the governor's palace, the plague went on cutting them down, soldier after soldier and man after man. And "Daoud" Pasha watched them with cold indifference. They were just soldiers with no value.

And the Ottoman garrison of Baghdad fell into the clutches of the epidemic, while "Daoud" was in his palace, behind its doors and its locks, safe.

In a terrifying story by "Edgar Allan Poe," inspired by these events, called "The Masque of the Red Death," about a city struck by plague, where people bled and fell as lifeless corpses, its tyrannical ruler gathered the grandees and the wealthy in the palace and fortified himself and his own people, and left his people to suffer and die at the hands of the disease they called "the Red Death."

And on a black night, he held a masked ball, and in the middle of his guests he was surprised by a guest disguised in a shroud smeared with blood, carrying in his hand a scythe like Death. The people were disgusted by this repulsive disguise, and the ruler drew his sword and pounced on the guest to tear off his mask and find out how he had got in when all the doors of the place were well secured.

And there was the terrible surprise: the heavy guest was the Red Death himself, the epidemic embodied in a horrifying, almost human form, and soon the prince and the inhabitants of the palace began to fall, blood bleeding from their bodies.

That is exactly what actually happened in Baghdad as well. The plague crept into the fortified palace of "Daoud Pasha" through the drinking water, and with astonishing speed it went on wiping out everyone in it. "Daoud Pasha" himself caught the disease, and everyone around him began to fall and death went on claiming them.

And the strange thing is that "Daoud" woke up one morning and felt better, and he really was recovering. But he found not one living creature in his palace except three of the servants, who themselves looked exhausted and on the verge of infection. So he left the palace and went out into the street looking for anything to eat, and exactly a third of Baghdad's population were lifeless corpses in the roads, with insects crawling over them and beasts of prey and rats tearing them apart, and the waterways had turned into pools of stagnant water, and the lakes and the drinking water into filthy marshes teeming with corpses.

And "Daoud," who had survived the plague, nearly met his end from hunger and thirst!

But fate willed that "Daoud" should live for some reason, perhaps so that he would record these events for us, as proof of his own baseness and the baseness of his state and the lineage of the House of Osman. A generous family of fishermen from the people of Baghdad found him, and their aged father took him to his home, fed him and gave him water that had been boiled, which his wife used to boil and leave to cool, in an attempt to avoid the disease.

The plague receded on its own after it had run its course in the year 1831. But backwardness never receded from the minds of the House of Osman. Not a single measure was taken to prevent the matter from repeating, so the epidemic came back with savagery and ferocity, striking Basra in the year 1832.

And in Egypt, "Muhammad Ali" Pasha devised a new system for our people displaced and fleeing from Baghdad, which he called "al-karantina," meaning "quarantine." He would accept their seeking refuge, but they were placed in special buildings on the border, under the supervision of resident doctors. Those who were confirmed to be free of the epidemic were allowed to enter, and those who turned out to be infected began to be treated.

And on the eve of the battle of "Nisibin," or "Nezib," between Egypt and the Ottoman state, and while the Ottoman Sultan was pretending to conciliate "Muhammad Ali," the Sultan sent to Egypt a special delegation from Istanbul to examine that precautionary measure. And Egypt taught the Ottomans, for the first time in their history, how to establish a "quarantine." And "al-karantina" appeared in Istanbul for the first time in that same year, 1838.

And the strange thing is that the Ottomans applied "quarantine" only in Istanbul, to protect themselves. It was not applied in afflicted, exhausted, sick Iraq until the year 1895.

#الخلافة_العثمانية
#awareness_against_السرسجة

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- كتاب: الأوبئة والأمراض التي اجتاحت العراق في العهد العثماني وكيفية الوقاية منها - د. علي كامل حمزة السرحان - المعهد التقني ببابل.

- (PDF) Epidemic History of the Late Ottoman Iraq:
https://www.academia.edu/.../Epidemic_History_of_the_Late...

- Meyers, Jeffrey (1992). Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. Cooper Square Press.