Firmly rooted in the disability rights movement of the 1960s, in the United States disability studies first emerged as a field of academic inquiry in the 1980s, in part as a reaction to the dominant clinical and medical approaches that viewed disability merely as an individual deficit or pathology in need of medical “fixing” or rehabilitation (the medical model of disability). Disability scholars, mostly from the social sciences and the humanities, demanded instead that we shift our attention to how societies and cultures construct, define, and respond to disability, positing that a person who has an impairment is only actually disabled by society's barriers and exclusions (the social model of disability).Footnote ¹ Over the past three decades the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of disability studies has grown exponentially. It has both elaborated and incorporated new approaches, including intersectionality, crip theory, and postcolonial theory, and has complicated and challenged the social model of disability.Footnote ² Disability is now also widely recognized as a human rights issue, as evidenced by the landmark 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), whose Preamble defines disability as “the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.”Footnote ³ Although to date disability studies remains largely a Euro-American endeavor, calls for perspective from the Global South/Majority World are growing louder and stronger. They are supported by numbers: the 2011 World Report on Disability produced jointly by the World Health Organization and the World Bank estimates that at least 15 percent of the world's population, more than one billion people, has a disability, and of those, the overwhelming majority live outside of Europe and North America.Footnote ⁴ In this context, then, not only does disability studies have much to offer to Middle East studies, but Middle East studies has much to offer to disability studies.

Historians have played a vital role in the field in two distinct but interconnected ways: by unearthing how people with disabilities, like other minority groups, have lived and interacted with their environments in different times and places, and by using disability as a category of analysis, much like race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and other markers of identity.Footnote ⁵ In a seminal essay entitled “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” which argues that “disability was a significant factor in the three great citizenship debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: women's suffrage, African American freedom and civil rights, and the restriction of immigration,”Footnote ⁶ US disability historian Douglas Baynton famously wrote, “Disability is everywhere in history, once you start looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories that we write.”Footnote ⁷

Baynton's essay was published in 2001. That year, fascinated by an article I had come across on dwarfs and deaf attendants at the Ottoman court, I was just beginning to conceptualize my dissertation, which many years and several incarnations later would be published as Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800. Footnote ⁸ Non-Western histories of disability were exceedingly scarce at the time, and I was often tempted to abandon that project altogether. The reactions to her work Abir Hamdar describes in her contribution to this roundtable do not surprise me, as I was frequently met with blank stares or, worse, cringe-worthy if well-meaning compliments such as “How nice of you to study those poor people.” But Douglas Baynton was right: once I started looking for it, what today we call disability was indeed everywhere in Ottoman Syrian (the Arabic words commonly used today for “disability” [iʿāqa] and “disabled” [mu ʿawwaq, mu ʿāq], which derive from the Arabic verb root that means “to hinder, to impede,” did not gain currency until the 20th century). Exploring blindness, deafness, impairments of the mind, urogenital impairments, and intersex was challenging, but also interspersed with rewards and surprises. We must beware of romanticizing or idealizing the lives of premodern people with disabilities and, as Kristina Richardson's contribution reminds us, remember that impairments were sometimes the product of violence. That said, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this Ottoman, Arab, Muslim-majority society tended to include rather than exclude, victimize, or stigmatize impaired and non-normative bodies. Islamic theology, which rejects the Christian doctrine of the original sin and of disabilities as the result of the sins of the fathers, must have played a role.Footnote ⁹ Certain suras of the Qurʾan (especially 48 and 80) and hadith sayings explicating the Prophet Muhammad's attitudes to disability undoubtedly influenced the elaboration and development of Islamic law vis-à-vis disability, the subject of Vardit Rispler-Chaim's essay. But theology and Islamic law were not the only factors informing attitudes to and shaping the lives of people with disabilities. An educational system that largely relied on memorization and the oral transmission of knowledge made it possible for blind men, for example, to make a living as teachers, Qurʾan reciters, and muezzins. Despite years of spadework, I barely managed to scratch the surface. I only used sources penned by Sunni Muslim, literate Arab men who lived mainly in urban centers. Women's voices are notably missing in my narrative, as are those of Christians and other religious minorities. Many books and articles about disability in the premodern Middle East remain to be written. Court records and other archival sources ought to be systematically mined, visual arts examined, and the vast body of premodern Arabic poetry, rich with representations of disability and self-representations of poets with disabilities, combed through.

The book I am writing now picks up where Disability in the Ottoman Arab World left off. It seeks to unpack how ideas about, and the lived experience of, disability changed (or did not change) in the late Ottoman and colonial Arab world as a result of the momentous transformations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These include the expansive Ottoman reform movement, new economic patterns, new educational systems, including the introduction of “special education,” new notions of citizenship tied to productivity, biomedicine, European-style medical institutions, Social Darwinism, eugenics, and the production of disability caused by the violence and exploitation of colonialism and imperialism. In this effort I join recent and ongoing work by scholars working on other parts of the world, such as India under British rule and the Congo under Belgian rule.Footnote ¹⁰ What is quickly becoming apparent is that disability as a category was central to Orientalism and to the justification of European imperial projects in the Middle East.

There is still little scholarship on disability in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East and North Africa.Footnote ¹¹ There are several studies of medicine, diseases, and epidemics during these periods (and in the Ottoman Empire, for that matter), but hardly any of them take a disability studies perspective. In the pages that follow, Sandy Sufian addresses the tensions between historians of medicine and historians of disability as well as the productive conversations they can have, while Beverly Tsacoyianis zooms in on mental health. But beyond medicine, because disability is a social, cultural, political, and economic phenomenon, it ought to be of interest to scholars in all fields and disciplines.

The disruptions of the late Ottoman and colonial period cannot alone be responsible for the deplorable conditions in which many people with disabilities live today, especially women, as Abir Hamdar rightly points out, or for the stigma attached to people with developmental and intellectual impairments in Jordan that Christine Sargent's ethnographic fieldwork has revealed. We will not have conclusive answers until further research is conducted, but the widespread attribution of the present state of affairs to “Islam” or “tradition” is essentialist, reductionist, and lacks empirical basis.

The future of the field is bright, as I hope the rich contributions to this roundtable demonstrate. I would also like to acknowledge two interdisciplinary conferences held in Cairo, “Disabilities, Revolution, and the Politics of Hope,” organized by Sherene Seikaly in 2014, and “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability: The MENA Region in the Modern Period,” organized by Monika Baár in 2018, that brought together academics, practitioners, and grassroot activists in fruitful and open debates. Last but not least, I would like to recognize Jasbir Puar, who was invited to contribute to this roundtable but was unable to do so. Her recent book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, takes Israel's occupation of Palestine as one of its case studies to make a remarkably sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the biopolitics of disability in the age of neoliberalism.Footnote ¹² But perhaps there is no better indication that disability studies is now beginning to be taken seriously in MENA studies than IJMES’s invitation to organize this very roundtable; until only recently, it would have been unimaginable.