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Disability Studies and the Qur'an: A Literary Approach to the Icon Polemics in Qur'an 21:51-70
Abstract
This paper takes the Qur’anic treatment of the natural senses, such as hearing and seeing, as a starting point to understand the concept of disability within the Muslim scripture. Scholars of the Qur’an have noted the text’s argumentative style, whereby the verses continuously polemicize against traditions that it considers antithetical to its own brand of monotheism. While scholars such as Sydney Griffith and G.R Hawting have focused on what this tells us about the Qur’an’s surrounding religious traditions – such as Christians and to a certain extent Jews – this paper is more interested in how this polemical discourse implicates other groups of individuals regardless of religious affiliation. The non-believers, for example, are typically ascribed with physical impairments such as blindness or deafness – which are either self-imposed or caused by God – to indicate their inability to realize the Qur’an’s truth or haqq. Using a literary-critical approach that draws on the scholarship of disability theorists, such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I foreground how the Qur’an evokes what is referred to as disability imagery, and I consider ways of interpreting these representations. As a case study, I examine the story of Abraham and the idols from Qur’an 21:51-70 and how the narrative’s ‘idol polemics’ appeals to various physical imagery and impairments in order to further the Sura’s ideological message: monotheism. I argue that although the excerpt evokes disability imagery in a way that would be criticized by contemporary disability theorists and activists, it also presents an alternative reading that destabilizes the Qur'an’s system of classification that associates physical impairments with the idea of sin. Abraham, for example, accuses his father and community of worshipping inanimate objects that cannot see, thereby associating blindness with immorality or sin. Yet the passage presents another reading that undoes or subverts the association between blindness and deviant practices by critiquing Abraham’s community for worshipping manufactured images (represented by the Arabic word tamathil) that are seen as opposed to the one true God that cannot be perceived by the physical eye.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
None