Doing Disability History in Non-Western Societies: A Perspective from the Arab World

The exciting field of disability history is still characterized by Euro-American centrism. Yet an estimated 80 percent of the world’s disabled people live in the Global South. While usually well meaning, the ways that international governmental and nongovernmental organizations frame and finance disability-related projects are usually predicated on Western models of rehabilitation and development based on liberal philosophies, with little knowledge of the histories of different non–Western local community practices. This “disability imperialism,” as we might call it, is bitterly ironic when millions of people in the Global South become disabled as the direct or indirect consequence of the wars waged by the United States and its allies, or of the appalling conditions of many of the sweatshops that produce cheap manufactured goods for the North.   Scholarship on the contemporary Arab world highlights the dire conditions in which many people with disabilities live. Negative attitudes are widespread, and, as in many other parts of the world, women and people with intellectual disabilities suffer double discrimination. The problem with much of this scholarship, however, is that it tends to project backward in time today’s low social and economic status of disabled people. Some authors even impute this lamentable state of affairs to the supposedly discriminatory statements of the foundational texts of Islam, the Qur’an and the Hadith.   Given the historiographical near-void on this subject, these backward projections are simply not warranted. This presentation offers a historically grounded perspective, with a focus on the Ottoman period, on how people in the Arab world viewed and treated people with impairments, and on the ways in which impairments disabled individuals. By doing so, it hopes to contribute a non-Western perspective to the question of whether the strategies employed by disability rights activists in the United States are useful outside the North American context.