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.

This paper will open with a brief overview of classical fiqh literature concerning sexual disabilities, with a focus on the works by the Maliki al-Wansharisi, the Hanafis al-Halabi and al-Kasani, the Hanbali Ibn Qudamah, and the Shafi’I al-Nawawi . Fiqh literature lists a number of sexual disabilities that may befall males, females, or both, and outlines how the different schools of law have viewed the impact of each sexual disability on the fate of marriage. Special attention is paid to the sexual disabilities of a married spouse, and how this might influence the non-disabled spouse, and whether the latter has the right to get out of a marriage when the partner is sexually disabled. The situation of “sexually disabled” people who are unmarried, and their opportunities for marriage, is also considered. Based on several hadiths, an infertile man was granted permission by the Prophet Muhammad to marry, but only if he had informed the future bride of his disability prior to marriage, and obtained her consent. With the aid of contemporary anthropological literature on ART- Assisted Reproductive Technologies for Muslim communities (Morgan Clarke, Marcia Inhorn, Homa Hoodfar, and others) the paper then analyzes and explains the change in attitudes to sexual disabilities between classical fiqh and contemporary religious thought. In particular, I examine fatwas issued by contemporary muftis such as Hasan Murad Manna’ of Kuweit, ‘Ali Jum’a of Egypt, Wahba al-Zuhayli of Syria, and the Palestinian Husam al-Din ‘Afaneh, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This change, I argue, is the result of the birth of babies to parents who have a variety of sexual disabilities that could not be corrected until several decades ago. I argue that with the advancements of science and medicine, and the success of new ART, of which the muftis at present are well aware, the jurists of today have modified the classical legal opinions on the fate of a marriage with a sexually disabled partner to be more tolerant and accommodating.

There is a rich and growing body of literature on the relationship between photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries and modernity, Orientalism, and European colonialism in the Middle East (Alloula 1986, Ozendes 1987, Graham-Brown 1988, Perez 1998, Erdo?du 1999, Woodward 2003, Behdad and Gartlan 2013, Çelik and Eldem 2015, Behdad 2016, Sheehi 2016). Much of this scholarship has noted Europe’s photographic obsession with the “Oriental” woman and has convincingly demonstrated that the portrayal of women as exotic, timeless, passive, and oppressed beings in need of saving was used as one of the moral justifications for European colonial ambitions in the region. An aspect of photography that remains almost entirely unexplored, however, is the representation of “Oriental” non-normative bodies: impaired, disfigured, deformed, grotesque, odd. This paper hopes to contribute to redressing the balance by examining representations of Ottoman disabled bodies produced mostly in the region that corresponds to today’s Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Turkey in the late 19th century. I examine not only European photographers like the Italian-French Tancrède Dumas (1830-1905) and the French French Félix Bonfils (1831-1885), but also some local photographers, including those featured in the 1893 Sultan Abdul Hamid II Collection. Theoretically, I adopt a Disability Studies approach informed by the groundbreaking work on photography and disability by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (2001) and Robert Bogdan (2012). Prominent Disability Studies theorist Rosemary Garland-Thomson in particular famously proposed a taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability in photography: wondrous, sentimental, exotic, and realistic. The core argument I make is that much like the images of women, representations of disability, too, were used as metaphors for the abject state of the Ottoman Empire and served to reinforce the notion of the Orient as the “Other.” Thus, disability was inextricably intertwined with the European colonial project. But, importantly, as the Sultan Abdul Hamid II Collection demonstrates, depictions of disability were also inextricably linked with Ottoman modernization efforts.

This paper draws from research in disability and trauma studies to analyze Palestinian and Israeli experiences of mental illness and treatment from the 1950s until the present day. The source base is interdisciplinary, and relies on evidence from oral history, film, historical fiction, ethnographies, memoirs, journalistic non-fiction, and newspapers. The main argument is connected to that in my current book project: while biomedical explanations of health and wellness threaten to promote the replication of a standard and ideal body at the expense of atypical ones, supernatural understandings of jinn or demonic possession as an explanation for abnormal or brutally violent behavior (especially in situations of intense conflict between people or communities) threaten to absolve humans of accountability, or to remove human action from the political and cultural conditions which shape human agency. The tension between natural and supernatural understandings of disease etiology is paralleled by the tension between competing historical narratives of authenticity and legitimacy: who has the right to label a body as non-normative and to control the way that body is treated, and what is at stake in recognizing alternative sources of legitimacy – in labeling, in treating, and in narrating that experience? Israeli films such as Hanna Azoulay Hasfari’s Sh’chur and Mamdooh Afdileh’s Jean waJnoon and Rosine Nimeh-Mailloux’s historical fiction The Madwoman of Bethlehem, Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Ari Shavit’s journalistic non-fiction My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, and academic studies by Rakefet Zalashik, Celia Rothenberg, Gershon Shafir, Meira Weiss, Susan Sered, Rosemary Sayigh, Alean Al-Krenawi, Raja Shehadeh, and Rita Giacaman among others, all reveal a deeply scarred past and present as well as some efforts to build culturally meaningful complementary systems of care that incorporate religious as well as biomedical concepts sensitive to the gender, class, religious practice, and ethnic background of the people seeking support. In blending medical, social, and cultural history approaches with anthropological and literary methods, this paper suggests that the history of Palestinian and Israeli societies is inseparable from questions of what is ideal and who has the privilege to narrate in such contested spaces of interaction with the “othered” body.

Government ministries, civil society organizations, transnational partnerships, and social media savvy disability communities are bringing cognitive disability into public focus across Jordan. This public shift coincides with significant demographic transitions, including rising life expectancy, decreasing fertility, and changing marriage patterns, all of which impact local kinship-based economies of care (Ababsa 2013; Hasso 2011; Singerman 2011). The implications for individuals who possess non-normative bodies and minds are complex, as new opportunities continue to expand alongside eroding social safety nets and increasingly grim economic indicators. Pursuing a disability-centered anthropology, this paper broadly attests to the relevance of emerging biosocial identities in Jordanian social life and politics. At the same time, it demonstrates how these identities continue to unfold and make sense in relation to enduring concerns of family, care, and faith. During my research on disability and kinship in Amman, mothers of children with Down Syndrome struggled with uncertainties raised by the passage of time. One woman recounted a conversation in which her teenage daughter expressed excitement at the prospect of starting her own family. While she did not consider her daughter a child, she nevertheless could not imagine her realizing the adult life that would be available to and expected of a young woman without Down Syndrome. In this paper I use ethnographic data to explore how family members engaged young people with Down Syndrome as they aged beyond childhood and into uncertain futures. For mothers of adolescents, thinking about children’s futures raised questions about what precisely adulthood entailed and for whom. Drawing on Alison Kafer's “political-relational” model of disability (2013, 6), I focus on the ways that mothers deployed concepts of accountability and obligation to position cognitively disabled children in a liminal space of extended adolescence. Negotiating the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, their preoccupations reveal how norms of gender, sexuality, and kinship filtered both meanings and experiences of cognitive disability in Jordan. Ultimately, I argue that disability ethnography in the Middle East can contribute to a broader anthropology of personhood by tracing how cognitively disabled people participate in care networks and gain differential access to various roles within those relationships.