This paper attempts to contribute to the growing literature in both disability studies and the study of disability and Islam by discussing Shi'i conceptions of disability in contemporary Lebanon through the works of the late Sayyid Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah and Hizbullah's programmatic and political approach towards its wounded veterans through the al-Jarha association. Fadlallah and al-Jarha will be analyzed because they have been two of the most influential Shi'i forces in Lebanon for the past few decades, and the paper does not assume a direct link between the two. The paper begins with contemporary definitions of and terms used to describe disability in disability studies literary and among practitioners. The paper will then continue with an exploration of fatwas, speeches, and writings produced by Fadlallah in order to understand how he interpreted disability, and how these interpretations affect his understanding of the disabled person's responsibilities or requirements within society. This exploration will include a number of topics pertaining to modified religious obligations required from the disabled. Next, the paper will discuss al-Jarha's general approach and specific programs for Hizbullah's wounded, which includes education, vocational training, and monetary support for the disabled. Both examples show that in theory and in political and social behaviors, the main actors addressing disability in Lebanese Shi'i community have adopted and shaped their behavior based on a social definition of disability, in which disability is defined as any obstacle, including but not limited to physical or mental impairments, that inhibits a person from exists 'normally' in his society, political, economically, or socially.

Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Hijazi (1388-1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut (Arabic baladhur), a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. (A marking nut overdose could also prove fatal, as in the case of the grandfather of the famous historian al-Baladhuri, whose descendants, in remembrance, took the name of the drug into their names.) As a result of the overdose, boils broke out all over al-Hijazi's body, he was unable to eat or sleep, and he lost significant cognitive power. After recovering from the overdose, he abandoned his legal studies and became a leading poet. (His verse is quoted in A Thousand and One Nights.) Most interestingly, al-Hijazi wrote a letter to his dear friend Salah al-Din al-Asyuti (d. 1455) on the tenth night of overdose detailing his suffering, his social isolation and the solace he had found with an unnamed mamluk who was suffering the same physical, psychiatric and social discomforts. The letter is an indictment of his fellow Cairenes who had ignored or mocked him in his illness, though the non-Arab, unfree mamluk condemns most forcefully the social body of fifteenth-century Cairo and their misguided constructions of blighted bodies. Al-Hijazi quotes him as saying: "The deaf person is he who does not pity someone painfully afflicted, and the mute person is he who does not open his mouth, though his body has something to say." Removing disability as a condition rooted in bodies, per se, shows that "the defect is located in environments, institutions, languages, and paradigms of knowledge."1 Al-Asyuti's thoughtful response to his friend is also preserved. I want to read these reflections on friendship, community, illness, health and morality as forming what al-Asyuti termed "a story about the body," or even bodies, specifically, the marked bodies of al-Hijazi and the mamlukand the presumed whole social body of 15th-century Cairo. Additionally, I want to situate these writings in the context of elite, Sunni, Arab male scholarly culture in late medieval Cairo and these scholars' relations with the military class of Turkish slaves. I will also consider the ways that contemporary critical discourse on constructions of disability and physical difference can allow us to frame medieval Arab culture in innovative ways, and pose questions that will generate dialogue among scholars and students within and beyond medieval disability studies.

In 1910, an article about the 16th-century biographical dictionary Al-Kawakib Al-Sa'ira by Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi appeared in the Damascene monthly Al-Muqtabas. The article is an indictment of al-Ghazzi's work, which is therein characterized as the product of an era of Islamic cultural and intellectual decline, as evidenced by al-Ghazzi's inclusion of the biographies of majadhib (holy fools). The author found it shameful that such men, whom he labels "imbecile fools" and "worthless individuals" should appear on the same pages alongside the luminaries of the 16th century, for they "trespassed the boundaries of Islamic law with their pretensions that violated mores, and manipulated the minds of the populace." His outrage against holy fools was by no means a voice in the wilderness. In 1929, for example, the influential reformer Muhammad Rashid Rida published a fatwa entitled "Is the majdhub a saint or a madman " in the periodical Al-Manar, in response to a request by a reader who was seeking clarification of the distinction between holy fools and madmen. Rida's fatwa harshly condemns the worship of holy fools, who, he declared, were anything but saints. Instead, he pronounces such individuals either unfortunates afflicted by innate mental defects, or, worse still, impostors whose personal appearance and habits - including the lack of physical hygiene, the practice of public nudity, and the use of foul or incomprehensible language - more likely indicate, if anything, a relationship with Satan rather than with the Divine. Yet, as recent research has shown, less than a century earlier members of the same urban, literate strata of society to whom Rida belonged had openly expressed their belief in and veneration of majadhib. This paper explores the confluence of factors that caused this dramatic shift in perceptions of holy fools in Syria and Lebanon in the late 19th and early 20th century. I analyze sources such as the press (including scientific journals), court records, and the records of select medical schools and hospitals, and suggest that the change was part and parcel of the emergence of new conceptualizations of embodied difference and of the appearance of the "the disabled" as a social category. I further attempt to explain why and how this shift, while undoubtedly leading to new educational and employment opportunities for some people with certain physical impairments, also increased the stigmatization and marginalization of others.

In 1980, Parisian-trained psychiatrist Abdul-Massih Khalaf pointed out that 20th century psychiatric assistance in Syria was characterized by observation, treatment, and monitoring of hospitalized psychiatric patients that ignored the social context of their situation. The medical, social, familial and professional measures of assistance outside of the hospital networks, according to Khalaf, had not been adequately addressed. Using court records, scientific journals, interviews with medical experts, and patient case files from Ibn Sina Mental Hospital near Damascus, I contextualize the production of a syncretic society in Syria where multiple variables influenced conceptions of normality. For example, treatment for young, unmarried, urban Muslim men institutionalized in a French-financed asylum on the outskirts of Damascus differed greatly from treatment choices of families of low-income elderly women of the predominantly Christian town of Saydnaya whose treatment involved home visits by nuns bringing blessed olive oil. The academic and popular discourse of what illness and abnormality meant, and how illness and abnormality was to be treated, resulted in diverse approaches to identity and agency in the colonial Middle East. The development of notions of physical and mental difference and the various responses to such difference was the result of a localized system that syncretized an array of biomedical and cultural understandings of health. This enabled people to identify what they considered abnormal, engage in healing practices, draw support from social networks, and harness health-related issues for political change. This study also traces the impact of new notions of genetics on the body and its place in social networks. For example, in what ways did siblings or parents suffering from illness affect the marriageability or respectability of other family members? In what ways were unhealthy individuals autonomous? Sources I have studied so far suggest that illness and disability blurred boundaries between afflicted individuals and their families. Ultimately, I hope to decenter the model in medical history that focuses on doctors and hospitals in order to emphasize the alternatives that shared the medical arena in offering treatment for illness. The study of syncretic and pluralist arenas for healing will help scholars move beyond totalizing assumptions of what "modern" meant in treatment.