The tenets consistently caused theological disagreements throughout the epidemic recurrences of the Middle Ages as a result of the difficulty in accepting plague as divine mercy or punishment and observable contagion. In the assessment of Dols, native Christian and Jewish attitudes and natural human anxieties likely influenced aspects of the first principle, namely that plague represented divine punishment or warnings. Muslims in this camp related the plague to lax morals among the Muslim troops in Syria, such as the consumption of wine, which supposedly led Umar to order the lashing of drinkers. On the other hand, the interpretation of plague as mercy or martyrdom is evident in Abu Ubayda's speeches to the troops at Amwas and in the council at Sargh. A poem about the plague of Amwas recorded by the Damascene historian Ibn Asakir (d. 1175) reflects the martyrdom belief: How many brave horsemen and how many beautiful, chaste women were killed in the valley of 'Amwas They had encountered the Lord, but He was not unjust to them When they died, they were among the non-aggrieved people in Paradise. We endure the plague as the Lord knows, and we were consoled in the hour of death. On the principle of predestination, the events of Amwas were used to argue that whether a person fled or remained in a plague-affected area their death had already been decreed by God. During an episode of plague in the Iraqi garrison city of Kufa, the prominent statesman and scholar Abu Musa al-Ash'ari (d. 662) turned away visitors to his home due to someone in his household having the plague, and he justified Muslims fleeing plague on the basis of Umar's actions at Sargh. According to Dols, this also implied a recognition of contagion despite the contradiction with the purported hadith rejecting contagion as a pre-Islamic theory.