In Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, Sara Scalenghe argues that for the Ottoman Arab world “although physical and mental impairments were identified as such, the categories of ‘disability’ and ‘disabled’ as abstractions and as determinants of identity are anachronistic” (p. 163). This argument begs the question then: can we write a disability history of the early modern Ottoman period and if so, what would, or should, it look like? How might it differ from a social history of medicine of the Ottoman world?

The common goals of disability history are to scrutinize the various treatments of people with disabilities in society, to challenge and analyze notions of bodily perfection and their impact upon those who differ, and to examine the creative strategies and historical agency of disabled people. For the social history of medicine, the emphasis generally shifts from the person with embodied difference interacting with her environment to probing pathologies or medical institutions and practitioners. Stress is put upon how and why notions of disease and illness, and societal interpretations and responses to them, change over time. When considered, people with disabilities are primarily conceptualized as patients with medical problems interfacing with the medical establishment.

If scholars of the Middle East agree that exploring how people with disabilities shape and are shaped by their societies matters to understanding social, political, and cultural dynamics in Middle East history, then it is certainly possible to write a disability history of this period (and others), even if the category of disability, as an axis of identity, was not articulated in the same way that we do so today. Such writing must analyze and highlight the different, time-specific meanings and roles of people with embodied differences as well as analyze any taxonomies of difference for the period under study. To this end, even as her argument disavows a cohesive concept of “disability,” Scalenghe makes a noble attempt to encapsulate many features of disability history, while noting this analytic gap in Middle East scholarship. She introduces us to various sources—chronicles, travelogues, biographical dictionaries, Islamic legal sources, and dream manuals—that routinely include discussions of various types of people with embodied difference. She stresses that such differences were of major concern to her authors. The sheer number, variety, and scope of these sources are impressive. The central questions of the book are: How did Arab Muslims (her central focus is Islam and the Muslim community) understand and treat people with impairments? In what ways did impairments disable individuals in Ottoman society? She primarily posits questions of how over why, leaving much room for further study on the subject. Her conclusion, however, succinctly synthesizes some reasons why the conceptualization of certain physical and mental impairments was “relatively benign” (p. 164). Indeed, the reader learns that the treatment of people with embodied differences was extremely variable in the Ottoman world, depending upon the source, but was not violently stigmatizing. Nor were people with impairments institutionalized as they were in early modern Europe. This inclusive, often pragmatic and diverse approach to embodied difference was due, she believes, to the prevalence of various diseases in Ottoman Arab lands such as trachoma and pellagra, the common practice of consanguineous marriages that often resulted in infants with disorders of sexual development or deafness, and the nonassociation between impairment and supernatural forces. Considering the large scope of the period the book examines, one wonders how and why such trends, conceptions, and treatments of people with embodied differences changed within and across these centuries.

In many ways, Scalenghe has written a book that touches upon the concerns of both historians of disability and social historians of medicine. In terms of the latter, for example, large passages in each chapter are devoted to how each impairment's etiology was conceptualized, how these broad categories of impairments were further demarcated according to type or degree, and how they were medically treated within the humor theory system of medicine. Further, she structures the book around four, broad impairments: deafness, blindness, mental impairments and sex indeterminancy, all either obviously or ultimately made visible. Historians of medicine typically take an impairment-based approach, as opposed to historians of disability who more commonly focus on spheres of life in which people with embodied differences functioned, such as work, religious practice, or family. As a consequence of the book's structure, connections and consistencies regarding social and cultural treatments of people with different impairments—like issues of inheritance, or being excluded from leading prayers or testifying in court—are not explicitly explored. Making these links would have contributed to a greater cohesiveness of the monograph. To her credit, the chapter discussions on these topics reveal how social and cultural features of Muslim society, such as the centrality of orality and clear communication in knowledge transmission, interacted with decisions about the religious roles deaf or blind individuals could take. Still, the book's organization tends to keep Scalenghe from explicitly posing what seems to be an overarching question suggested by these sources: what is the nature of “community,” and who belongs?

Despite an impairment-focused structure, Scalenghe is not entirely focused on medical discussions. She tells us that jurists, not physicians, determined insanity and the fate of those deemed insane (legally treated as minors). Similarly, hinting at the agency of impaired people, she explains that “holy fools”—a subcategory of those with mental impairments who were considered saintly and “mad”—held great power over the non-impaired since the latter could incur God's wrath if they crossed them. She discusses the use of “signs” at the palace, where deaf-mute servants served the sultan, and suggests the use of sign languages in Arab lands since provincial governors were also allowed to hire deaf-mute servants in their local courts. Such a possibility leads one to ponder other spheres where communities of people with various impairments were possibly built and sustained.

Scalenghe could have strengthened her book by critiquing the sources she uses. In particular, she could have analyzed the power dynamics inherent in textual discussions by (presumably) “non-disabled” male writers about those with embodied differences and, for the legal authors, whose real lives they adjudicated. She acknowledges that the nature of her sources makes it harder to discern information about women and uneducated men, but since no texts by people with impairments are available, the methodological question, so central to disability history, remains: how can we try to capture the rich, lived experiences of people with embodied differences, and how can we try to square textual discussions with everyday behavior on the ground? In this way, Scalenghe's book compels us to think further about the ways in which disability history can matter to scholars of the Middle East, how it can continue to be written and developed, and how this approach helps illuminate broader historical phenomena in the region.