Research on mental disabilities has ushered in a shift from disease-centered to patient-centered inquiry. This paper employs mental disability as an analytic tool through which to explore the relationship between colonial carceral institutions and the people in late nineteenth-century Egypt. The study examines nineteenth-century citizen petitions from the National Archives in Egypt to tell the history of mental disabilities from the perspective of patients’ families. Viewed as counter-narratives to the institutional histories in asylum reports and government correspondences, these petitions reveal the experiences of the families of patients confined at the ‘Abbāsiyyah Asylum. The research aims to answer the question: How did Egyptians accustomed to home care and traditional treatments respond to the state’s referral of mentally ill family members to the asylum? The paper centers the experiences of patient’s families within the historical enquiry on colonial asylums and demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of the psychiatric encounter and the negotiation and resistance strategies deployed by actors in this encounter. Uncovering the voices of family members, however fragmented, is but one of the ways in which historians can ensure that the family remains an integral part of disability studies. As central parts of the process of discharging patients from the asylum, the petitions reveal how families contested the confinement of family members and how they sought, alternatively, to treat them at home. The citizen petitions cited in this study demonstrate that families were not merely passive recipients of the asylum’s confinement of their relatives, ultimately challenging their institutionalization and seeking to take back control over their care. They provide valuable insights into the ways families deployed their own agency in interpreting and negotiating the legal systems enforced by the state. They also uncover the range of emotions, from anxiety and concern to fear and hope, intertwined with the institutionalization of relatives with mental disabilities in late nineteenth-century Egypt. This research demonstrates the wealth of information that may be garnered from historical sources such as petitions. By demonstrating the potential of these sources for revealing familial responses to institutional confinement, this paper suggests new paths of engagement with disability studies. It further acts as a call for the greater exploration of similar sources and the voices they represent, as well as for an interrogation of the manner in which they embody a wider resistance to colonial institutions.

Despite the considerable number of documents pertaining to disability preserved in the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey Directorate of State Archives Ottoman Archives, the history of disability in the Ottoman Empire is still in its infancy. This paper focuses on the politics of prosthetics in the period corresponding to the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, during which there was a remarkable increase in prosthetic cases, particularly related to work accidents. From the 1890s onwards, Sultan Abdulhamid provided free prosthetic support to ordinary citizens who became disabled due to illness, war, or accidents. This new “free prosthetic support” marks to the beginning of the history of modern prosthetics in Turkey. Following Abdulhamid II’s directives, students were sent abroad to learn prosthetic techniques to ensure the beneficial use of this technology for the people. Upon their return to the country, these students manufactured prosthetics for the public through state institutions. This paper explores the journey of ordinary citizens, male and female, to obtain prostheses following accidents. Their journeys can be meticulously traced through correspondence between institutions and the written petitions requesting a prosthesis. These documents provide answers to many questions, including the type, cost, material of the prosthesis, and why the petitioner needed a prosthesis. The paper argues that the extensive use of modern prosthetics within the boundaries of the Empire must be understood in the context of the Ottoman Empire’s health reforms under Sultan Abdulhamid. The Sultan’s personal interest in health policies, coupled with his paternalistic attitude, contributed to the establishment of numerous health institutions, the renovation of old hospitals, and the close monitoring of developments in the medical world. Known for rarely leaving his palace, Abdulhamid II tried to win the hearts of the people by offering gifts and charity that especially targeted the disadvantaged segments of society. In addition to his keen interest in the production of modern prostheses, he also attempted to solve “the beggar problem” in Istanbul and he established Darülaceze for the housing of homeless individuals, the “Hamidiye Etfal Hospital” for the treatment of orphaned and poor children, and other free hospitals accessible to various disadvantaged groups.

This paper investigates the plight of twenty-five Palestinian Jewish volunteers who lost their limbs while serving under the British Colonial army during WWII. In June 1945, the wounded men were being cared for in Alexandria’s General Hospital no. 3, which served disabled colonial soldiers from Mandate Palestine in need of rehabilitation. But the locally manufactured prostheses were poorly constructed, causing the amputees psychological and physical pain. Convinced that they deserved higher standards of care, these men demanded that they be transferred to England to be fitted with top-notch prostheses. But their status as “natives” rendered them ineligible for a benefit that was only granted to British soldiers. Thus, the amputees came to view prosthetic technology as an extension of the politics of imperial power, which distributed rewards based on hierarchies of race and ethnicity. This paper shows how the experience of pain caused the amputees to distance themselves from their asserted Jewish “nativeness” in Palestine in the hope of gaining access to an impressive technology that could remake their bodies. The story of the twenty-five amputees is significant because it testifies to the contradiction between the disabled veterans’ rejection of the British administrative classification of themselves as “natives” and the Zionist drive to assert Jewish nativeness in Palestine. This case study sheds light on the boundaries between nativeness and settlerhood, pain and relief, and being worthy and unworthy of care in colonial contexts.

Sanism and ableism pervade the modern world. Nationalist rhetoric around the “strong” mind and body reflects deep anxieties around ideal types. This paper contextualizes multiple discourses of national strength, family politics, and individual worth. I argue that male doctors and political elites in the 1940s and 1950s pathologized women’s experiences in family life (particularly with depression and psychosis) under a nationalist veneer of conformity in a medical effort to silence or suppress difference. By analyzing the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Rosine Nimeh-Mailloux’s The Madwoman of Bethlehem against a backdrop of several psychiatric records from Bethlehem Mental Hospital in the 1940s, and in light of recent research in trauma studies and disability studies, I argue that women navigated the medical landscape with the agency available to them: some chose to escape criminal prosecution or family persecution through accepting the label of madwoman and the carceral space of the hospital, while others turned to suicide in despair of the limitations of the period. While much of the sources analyzed here focus on psychiatric interventions, the paper complicates binaries of “sane” and “insane,” “modern” and “traditional,” and “science” and “magic.” The unseen supernatural and observable natural world overlap as illness and treatment are shaped by culturally meaningful practices as well as immediate political goals. Gender, ethnicity, and class-based identities intersect in treatment options and beliefs that contribute to conversations on the worthy and sacrificial body. The paper foregrounds questions around inclusion and exclusion against a backdrop of 1947 and 1948. It shows multiple and not necessarily conflicting approaches in how these communities perceived and reacted to cognitive difference and disability more generally in the nation-building project, with hierarchies around congenital vs. acquired wartime physical disabilities and visible vs. invisible cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Both political and medically shifting conditions led to marginality of individual experiences of illness and trauma while the collective trauma of the Holocaust and the nakba came to be framed by politicians as deeply inflecting nationalist trajectories in the decades to come. Informed in part by the work of Alean Al-Krenawi, Bashir Bashir, and Amos Goldberg, this paper applies approaches from both the critical disability and mad pride movements and argues for more scholarly attention to complementary systems of care and political trajectories that may better incorporate the voices of individuals and communities seeking support, affirmation, and inclusion.

Although often silently, disability permeates refugeedom. In 2020, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 12 million people with disability were in a condition of forced displacement. Historically, the Middle East has a significant number of refugees with disability, also among Palestinian refugees. Since its establishment in 1949 after the watershed events of the 1947-1949 war, the Palestinian nakba – the expulsion and fleeing of more than 750,000 Palestinian refugees from cities and villages erased or depopulated – and the creation of the State of Israel, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was the main institution that implemented humanitarian assistance addressing Palestinian refugees with disability. This paper aims to unpack how UNRWA communicated its services and projects aimed at Palestinian refugees with disability, with a specific focus on visual production. The paper argues that photographs and videos were essential tools not only for fundraising goals but, most significantly, to create a visual representation of reality responding to UNRWA objectives of education, development and depoliticization of Palestinian refugees. Through scrutiny of the UNRWA Photo and Film archive, one of the most sizeable archives depicting refugees, the analysis will concentrate on the construction of the image of Palestinian refugees with disability. Firstly, the paper discusses some elements of the history of photography in Palestine since its diffusion in the late Ottoman period and its development during the British Mandate. Secondly, forms of photographic and video representation of disability by UNRWA in the 1950s-1960s are analysed. Thirdly, the new paradigm of disability that emerged in the 1970s-1980s, vehiculated in the 1981 United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons, is approached through a study of UNRWA photographs and videos. The changes deriving from the first intifada (1987–90), with a massive number of people made disabled by the military attacks, and the effects of the Oslo peace process phase in the 1990s are outlined, concluding with ethical reflections on making history of disability and photography. In doing so, this paper intends to contribute to the intersection of history of humanitarianism, disability, refugeedom and visual studies.

We define “cripping histor(iograph)y” as documenting, engaging, and interpreting the lives of disabled and mad people who have either lived in the past, live in here and now, or will/should be living in the future. We used this epistemology to resist disabled and mad people’s erasure from the past and from the future, and therefore, from here and now, as it is the erasure from temporality that slowly creeps in and facilitates the erasure from here and now. To have an inclusive future that values, invites, and desires disability, madness, and alternative ways of being in the world, we must resist dissolving into sameness. It is ableism and sanism along with other forms of oppression that should be abolished, not our insanities and disabilities. As such, in this paper, we engage in “cripping histor(iograph)y” by writing disabled people back into their own histories and exposing the embedded ableism in documenting history, memory, and memoirs, especially as it relates to mass atrocities and systemic violence. To transnationalize disability as a material reality and to address the significant gaps in the literature around the experiences of Middle Eastern peoples with disability, madness, and trauma, we engage in cripping Iran’s prison history of the 1980s by attending to the disabled and mad dissidents who became disabled through systemic torture. We interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and now live in exile as part of the Iranian diaspora. Using the Transnational Disability Model (Kazemi, 2017) rooted in Dialectical Historical Materialism, we theorize dissidents’ disability as a “response-ability” against the totalizing state violence (Sakhi, 2014) and demonstrate how disability/madness is a historical-materialist construct, not a fixed biomedical pathology, mediated by power relations. Following Marx’s Consciousness Theory, embodied experiences of violence (state-sanctioned, ableist, and gender-based) become a point of departure for survivors to develop political consciousness and transform themselves, and society, as public pedagogues. - There can be radical possibilities rather than “limiting tragedies” that need to be “fixed” by medicalization and psychiatrization. We explore disability’s meanings in relation to the material conditions under which people are forced to function in the Middle East, seeking to theorize how people become and remain disabled due to state violence, and how they come to terms with what happens to them as politically conscious agents and actors.