Disability on Arab screens: cripping class, religion, and gender in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon

Abstract

Arab cinema has not featured many protagonists with disabilities, but over the past two decades differently abled characters have appeared on movie and television screens in the Middle East and North Africa. From feature films to Ramadan serials, characters with Hansen’s Disease, Down Syndrome, autism, visual impairments, dwarfism, and missing limbs have emerged in films and television shows from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Characters with disabilities in Yomeddine (Egypt), Behind the Sun (Syria), and Tale of Amal (Lebanon) challenge disability stigma in Arab cultures and highlight the toll of caregiving. While these portrayals, which all incorporate religious interpretations of disability and feature poor characters living on the margins, attempt to correct the absence of disability representations and discourse in Arab societies, they fall into familiar tropes of disability objectification by employing the ‘prosthetic’ of a disability narrative to explore other marginalized social issues like abortion, gender, race, and religious differences.

Points of interest

• There is hardly any research on how disability is portrayed in film and television in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon

• The research sheds important light on how disability and poverty intersect in Arab popular culture

• This paper discusses how religion (Islam in particular) is used to understand, interpret, and manage disability in Arab societies

• This research shows how Arab filmmakers are using film and television to advocate for more awareness and compassion for people with disabilities in Arab societies. This paper covers taboo subjects related to disability such as abortion, religious minorities, sexuality, and gender marginalization

Keywords:

• Arab
• film
• Egypt
• Syria
• Lebanon
• religion

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my research assistant Fatma Al-Mamari for her invaluable help with this article. I also wish to express my gratitude to the Department of Disability Studies at the University of Malta for holding the Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Disability Issues and Disability Activism, titled ‘Emerging Disability Issues: Varieties of Disability Activism and Disability Studies,’ where I first presented this paper and received helpful feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.