In spite of the advances in Disability Studies and history, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge of disability in pre-industrial societies and outside Europe and North America. The latter, argues Sara Scalenghe in this important book, amounts to a form of ‘disability imperialism’ (8) in which modern, western models of disability are privileged in academic studies despite some 80% of the world’s disabled population living in the Global South. In Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800, Scalenghe challenges scholars to engage with alternative models of disability in a book that adds significantly to our understanding of disability in early modern Islamic culture and society.
Until fairly recently, there has been no word for ‘disability’ in Arabic. In earlier centuries, much was written about ‘people with blights’, but these accounts do not map easily onto modern concepts of disability, since ‘blights’ did not necessarily relate to a person’s capabilities or productivity. Thus, descriptions of ‘blights’ incorporated characteristics such as long beards and short necks as well as more recognisable impairments such as paralysis, blindness and hearing loss. Nevertheless, impairment was an important issue in the early modern Ottoman Arab world (encompassing geographically the region of the Middle East corresponding to modern Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), not least because high rates of consanguinity led to congenital and hereditary impairments. Drawing on a rich variety of source materials, most notably legal texts and biographical dictionaries, Scalenghe discusses social, cultural, political and medical responses to these impairments in her book, through studies of deafness and muteness, blindness, impairments of the mind and, in a chapter that extends the boundaries of what disability history might encompass, intersex.
The book begins by exploring experiences of deafness and muteness, focussing in particular on mutes at the seraglio of the Ottoman court who communicated using sign language. Biographies of deaf men showed that although hearing loss might be viewed as a misfortune, it did not necessarily prevent someone from participating in social and economic life. However, with the exception of mutes at the court, evidence is lacking for the lives of the prelingually deaf. Inability to speak might be disabling in particular situations, particularly given the need to vocalise prayer and indicate verbal consent in marriage. However, Scalenghe shows how Islamic scholars often took a pragmatic approach, with some arguing that prayer in the heart was sufficient, provided that proper intent was present, and that marriage might be consented to using writing or making a clear sign. In her study of blindness, Scalenghe finds little of the contempt with which the blind might be treated in mediaeval or early modern Europe. Instead, blindness enjoyed a privileged place in hierarchies of impairment in the Arab-Islamic world, showing how there were many attempts to integrate blind men into society. Significantly, there was little evidence of the notion of impairment as divine punishment due to the absence in Islam of the Christian doctrine of original sin.
The chapter on impairments of the mind compares attitudes towards four groups of mental deficiency: idiocy, melancholia, madness and holy folly. Those suffering from mental affliction were often confined within the home, but there was no Foucauldian ‘great confinement’ of the mentally disturbed in institutions. Whereas melancholia might stem from sadness, despair and environmental factors, ‘holy folly’ was understood as a divinely favoured state that gave the majdhūb – holy fool – considerable liberty for licensed eccentricity. Holy fools convinced others that they had special abilities which could only come from God and, despite the disruptive nature of their appearance and behaviour, they were accepted largely because people feared divine reprisals. Nevertheless, it was easier for men to adopt the role of holy fool than women – one of many gender differences in attitudes towards impairment in the Arab-Islamic world.
The book’s most interesting chapter is the final one, which makes the case for examining intersex as a type of impairment. High rates of consanguineous marriage were responsible for the frequency of disorders of sexual development in the Middle East. Although it is not conventional for gender ambiguity to be classed as a ‘disability’ today, in a society in which almost everyone was expected to marry and have children, physical characteristics that affected a person’s marital and reproductive prospects might be disabling. In the Ottoman Arab world, the intersexed were recognised as a distinctive human variety. There was little religious or moral displeasure directed against them and they were not regarded as monsters or signs of divine punishment. However, the judicial authorities did make serious attempts to assign them to one sex or the other. Much like other forms of impairment, argues Scalenghe, the physical difference of the intersexed was handled ‘in a frank, straightforward manner, reflecting an attitude generally devoid of embarrassment, shame or moral opprobrium’ (161).
Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800 is a tremendous book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of disability outside the modern western, industrialised context. The text makes a powerful case for the broadly tolerant and pragmatic attitudes towards physical difference in the pre-modern Middle East, at least before the spread of western-influenced institutionalisation and social Darwinism in the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is relatively little in the book on the treatment of bodily deformity or mobility impairments and it is unclear how those injured in work or conflict fared in this society. Nevertheless, the book asks many important questions and, in highlighting the importance of ‘defects’ that might hinder marriage or reproduction as ‘disabilities’, demonstrates the need to broaden the scope of disability history in the early modern past – a point that historians of Europe and North America as well as those of the non-western world should note.
Swansea University, Swansea, UK
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© 2015, David M. Turner
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1045358