Antara Mengadaptasi Mekanisme Barat dan Mempertahankan Epistemologi Islam dalam Mendepani Wabak: Suatu Refleksi Historis Abad Ke-19/ Navigating Western Mechanisms and Islamic Epistemology amid Epidemics: A Nineteenth-Century Historical Reflection

Abstract

Epidemics often bring latent epistemological tensions across civilizational traditions into sharp relief, including those between Islam and the West. Although epidemic-control mechanisms developed within Western scientific traditions are commonly presented as universal and objective, their adoption has repeatedly posed dilemmas among Muslim societies concerning their legitimacy, applicability and epistemic consequences. This article examines these dilemmas through a content analysis of two nineteenth-century historical texts. The first, Hamdan Khodja’s “Itḥāf al-Munṣifīn wa al-Udabāʾ bi-Mabāḥith al-Iḥtirāz ʿan al-Wabāʾ” (1836), is analysed as a Muslim intellectual response to epidemic-control measures introduced under French colonial rule in Algeria. Khodja acknowledges the practical efficacy of Western scientific methods, yet remains sharply attentive to the worldview that undergirds them. His position foregrounds the central dilemma of how Muslim societies might appropriate useful health mechanisms without succumbing to secular-mechanistic epistemology. This tension is further examined through Donkin et al.’s “The Cholera and Hagar’s Well at Mecca” (1883), a colonial dossier of correspondence among British officials and medical experts. The text shows how British authorities mobilised scientific discourse through claims concerning the contamination of Zamzam water, supported by selective data, pejorative rhetoric and methodological opacity in order to advance a broader colonial narrative. Such practices reveal how scientific inquiry, when embedded within imperial structures of power, could become an instrument of epistemic colonisation. By placing these two texts in conversation, this article argues that the distinction between mechanism and epistemology could not be negotiated on equal terms under colonial conditions. The colonial entrenchment of Western epistemology rendered any attempt to reconcile the two inherently fraught and structurally asymmetrical from the outset. This article therefore calls for the development of autonomous health mechanisms grounded in Islamic onto-epistemology, so that future Muslim engagement with public health may proceed without being drawn back into recurring patterns of Western hegemony.