Perception and Representation of Disability in the Middle Eastern Communities
Panel II-15, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Monday, October 5 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
As a contested notion, the concept of disability has received considerable attention and become subject of theories from diverse lenses in recent years. While people with disability have been viewed as inferior, deviants, mad people, and objects of pity, the subjectivity of disability identity is increasingly emphasized, oftentimes by references to its intersection with other modes of identification. In the context of the Middle East and its diaspora, theological and historical interpretations, social and cultural construction of disability, legal regulations, and particular analyses regarding immigrants and refugees developing mental disabilities or disorders are among significant subjects of inquiry. Thus, this panel aims to foster discussion on disability from diverse perspectives including history, culture, gender, and religion.
The papers in this panel draw on Islamic understanding of disability, policy making, intersection of gender, culture, and disability identity in transnational context in the US, and mental health issues in the aftermath of forced displacement in relation to cultural integration after resettlement. While impairment is a biological and/or medical condition, disability is often constructed by societies' attributed meanings to body, power politics, and normalcy. These meanings are shaped and reshaped by culture, religion, and historical developments. In this sense, this panel offers, through different perspectives, an analysis of the construction of disability as a result of religious interpretation, gender relations and cultural attributes, and post-resettlement issues.
The first paper looks into the divergence between legal regulations and approaches of disability advocates in Jordan. Understanding conceptualization of disability is understood through the cultural and religious meanings of it. The second paper examines textual representations of disability within the Qur'an in order to develop a critical understanding of disability in Islam and its ethical implications on contemporary Muslim communities. The next papers move to the immigration context. Here, culture becomes even more significant in and may develop disability as a minority identity. In this regard, the third paper explores the experiences of American Muslim women with disability through the lens of cultural and feminist approaches. Disability in the immigration context is often encountered as disorders in mental health due to trauma and depression. The fourth paper explores the cultural stigmatization of mental health disabilities and the emotional resilience through a culturally competent model among Syrian refugees. These studies, altogether, shed light on the experiences of disability at the intersection of culture, religion, and gender.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Enaya Othman
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Ms. Halla Attallah
-- Presenter
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Suzy Ismail
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Enaya Othman
This paper explores the experiences of American Muslim women with disability through the lens of feminist and cultural approaches. The paper examines the intersection of disability identity and gender relations in a transnational context in which dominant structures of culture operate as double oppression for women with disability. Disability as an identity is constructed through religious, cultural, and social meanings of normalcy and abled bodies. As Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, in her founding work Extraordinary Bodies regarding feminist disability studies, argued that social meanings defining both female and disabled body construct them as inferior, and this hierarchical categorization grounded in body can be explored by an examination of “politicizing the materiality of bodies” and “rewriting the category of woman” (21). While the arguments of feminist disability studies are grounded in power politics based on body, most of the current research and theory focus on the attributions to white female body as disabled and inferior. On the other hand, women from diverse backgrounds are underrepresented in the scholarship although they are also subjects of stigma due to their culture and experience of immigration. In this sense, drawing on feminist disability studies, this paper also integrates the body politics in relation to norms of normalcy and superiority or, deviance and inferiority with reference cultural categories and origins. In diaspora and transnational context, such normalcy can be a source of oppression, yet it also reproduces itself as a source of liberation. In this sense, based on narratives of first and second-generation Muslim women in Milwaukee, collected from people with Middle Eastern background through oral history techniques, this paper discusses a) disability as a social and cultural construct as a result of enforced normalcy based on body, b) women’s bodies seen as disabled, c) women’s experience as more complicated than men in case of an impairment or disease since they face a lot of hardship based on their gender. Women’s narratives reveal that disability, as a form of identity, is formed through the essentialization and standardization of physical aspects; and the body configuration discredits the subjectivity of identity.
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Ms. Halla Attallah
This project examines textual representations of disability within the Qur’an in order to develop a critical understanding of the Qur’an’s historical conceptualization of disability, and to interrogate the ethical implications posed by some of the text’s rhetorical content on contemporary Muslim communities. Scholars working on disability and Islam generally agree that the Qur’an presents an ethos of social and religious inclusion with regard to individuals with physical impairments, which arguably influenced later Muslim jurists concerned with disability. Indeed, the Qur’an insists that there is no moral blame on individuals who are blind, sick or lame, and the text advises against the exclusion of this group from community meals (Q 24:61). However, these conclusions are based solely on the Qur’an’s legal content, thereby ignoring a significant portion of the text--the Qur’an’s narratives--which also contains valuable information regarding the text’s historical understanding of disability and how it theoretically influences contemporary cultural perspectives on disability. Furthermore, most of the research on Islam and disability does not engage foundational scholarship from disability critical theorists, which has proven beneficial to scholars investigating disability in premodern (and “non-Western”) texts such as the Hebrew Bible. Using a literary-critical approach that draws on the methodological recommendations of Angelika Neuwirth, who argues that a comprehensive reading of the mu??af as we have it hints at the development of an emerging Muslim community and its ideology, I bring the Qur’an into conversation with disability studies. As a case study, I analyze the story of Moses and the “knot” in his tongue from Qur’an 20:25-31. I argue that while the Qur’an’s rhetorical discourse consistently associates disability imagery with inferior categories such as the non-believers who are described as “blind, deaf and dumb” (Q 2:18)—an association that would be criticized as ableist by contemporary disability scholars and activists—the story of Moses presents an account that destabilizes this system of classification. I suggest that from the story of Moses, we can derive a Qur’anic ethic for the full acceptance of individuals with disabilities that also emphasizes the ethical obligation to accommodate people of all (dis)abilities in religious practice. Moses’ “knotted tongue”, regardless of how we read it, is an integral part of his prophecy and identity in the Qur’an. God does not “fix” it, but instead accommodates him with his brother Aaron who functions as a fellow Prophet and interpreter, through whom Moses’ strengths are increased (Q 20:31).
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Suzy Ismail
Since the start of the country’s Civil War in 2011, Syria has beome the source of the largest number of forced migrants since World War II. With an internal displacement of approximately 6.2 million residents forced to flee their homes and an estimated 6.7 million civilians who have fled the country following the Arab Spring uprisings, the Syrian refugee crisis continues to escalate almost a decade after its start. The experiences of these forced migrants upon resettlement has often included trauma-induced breakdowns in resilience, defined as a drop in social support and acceptance, difficulty attaining successful acculturation, negative education outcomes, inability to maintain religious adherence, avoidance of family and friends, and a loss of hope. Mental health issues such as increased incidence of depression, anxiety, PTSD, panic disorders, OCD behaviors along with socio-emotional difficulties are also found to be a common, yet often unaddressed and untreated, occurrence among many members of displaced families and forced migrants. This social problem of declining resilience and increased mental health struggles among resettled Syrian refugees leads to difficulty in cultural integration post-resettlement. Although refugee integration challenges have been studied from the psychological or social standpoint of resilience theory, due to a collectivist worldview, traditional modes of mental health treatment and family rebuilidng are often not effective in reaching this vulnerable population. Research that explores refugee integration in terms of cultural value dimensions as prevalently expressed in Syrian culture, with emphasis on collectivism and uncertainty avoidance, can provide a new avenue of overcoming the stigmatization of mental health treatment. Moving away from the traditional Western model of self-actualization in therapeutic paradigms and towards a more culturally competent model of self-transcendence can provide avenues of overcoming perceived cultural stigmatization of mental health disabilities and the silence surrounding breakdowns in emotional resilience. Through a linguistic content analysis of transcribed oral histories collected by Duke University, a qualitative analysis using Hofstede’s Value Dimensions will be used to understand the documented social problem of declining emotional resilience due to mental health stigmatization among resettled Syrian refugees.
