Download PDF | Sara Scalenghe - Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 - Cambridge University Press (2014).
222 Pages
Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800
Physical, sensory, and mental impairments can influence an individual’s status in society as much as the more familiar categories of gender, sexual orientation, age, class, religion, race, and ethnicity. This was especially true of the early modern Arab Ottoman world, where being judged able or disabled impacted every aspect of a person’s life, including performance of religious rituals, marriage, job opportunities, and the ability to buy and sell property. Sara Scalenghe’s book is the first on the history of both physical and mental disabilities not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in the premodern non-Western world.
Unlike previous scholarly works that examine disability as discussed in religious texts, this study focuses on representations and classifications of disability and impairment across a wide range of primary sources, including chronicles, biographies, the law, medicine, belles lettres, and dream manuals. As such, this is a sociocultural history that seeks to explain how blindness, deafness and muteness, impairments of the mind, and intersex were understood and experienced in a specific Arab-Islamic context within the geographical area that includes present-day Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel under Ottoman rule in the early modern period.
Sara Scalenghe is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Maryland.
.
Acknowledgments
This book first began as a doctoral dissertation at Georgetown University under the supervision of the incomparable Judith Tucker, the most marvelous mentor a graduate student could hope for. Throughout the years she has been unfailingly supportive, and a lot of fun to boot. lam also very grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee, Carol Benedict, Ahmad Dallal, Beshara Doumani, and John Voll, for their probing questions and incisive comments, and to Chris Toensing and Kevin Martin, who have shared this journey with me since our old days on Ontario Road in graduate school. That they read every word of the book manuscript is just one more reason I love them.
My quest for sources, especially manuscripts, in the archives and libraries of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States was supported by generous funding, including an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, a Cosmos Club Foundation Young Scholars Award, and a Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History awarded by the American Historical Association.
Dissertation writing was made possible by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and by a Royden B. Davis Dissertation Fellowship provided by Georgetown’s History Department. A Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and junior sabbatical semesters as well as summer faculty grants from Indiana University Bloomington and Loyola University Maryland were instrumental in giving me the time and resources to make substantive revisions to the manuscript, including expanding its geographical scope to Egypt.
I owe an enormous intellectual debt to Susan Burch, who introduced me to the richness of the field of disability history, critiqued each chapter of this book, and encouraged me to make it accessible to non— Middle Eastern specialists. I continue to be inspired by her integrity and the rigor of her scholarship. Jeff Brune, too, generously read every word and gave me extensive and incisive feedback that compelled me to rewrite entire sections. Cathy Kudlick’s suggestions, especially for Chapter 2, were invaluable and led me to rethink some of my central assumptions. I also thank her for inviting me to share my work in her seminar on the body at the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University and at the Bay Area Disability Studies Consortium in March 2013. Although my flight was canceled due to stormy weather, her class discussed the book manuscript and took the trouble to type and email their insightful remarks to me.
Over the years I have benefited from the opportunity to share parts of my work in progress at conferences, workshops, seminars, graduate colloquia, and talks in the United States and abroad. In particular, I wish to thank Jim Gelvin and the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA for inviting me to give a talk in February 2012, and Susan Burch for the opportunity to speak at Middlebury College in April 2013. The observations made by faculty and students at those two events were crucial for sharpening my thinking in the final stages of revising.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press for their very helpful comments, to the production team at Cambridge University Press, to Nancy Zibman for preparing the index, to Laurie King for reviewing the proofs, and to my saintly father for double-checking that the citations in every footnote and in the bibliography were formatted correctly.
Note on Transliteration, Personal Names, Dates, and Translations
I have transliterated Arabic and Turkish words in accordance with the system devised by The International Journal of Middle East Studies. As a general rule, words that recur frequently, like khbuntha, have diacritical marks and are italicized only the first time they appear.
As I explain in Chapter 2, Arabic personal names can be very long because they often comprise onomastic chains that report the name of the father and, if known, of the paternal grandfather and greatgrandfather, in addition to several other nouns and adjectives that indicate place of origin and/or residence, occupation, honorific titles, and other distinguishing characteristics. For the sake of prose, as a general rule I provide only the first and last name of an individual in the main body of the text. Thus, for example, Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Naqshabandi al-Hanafi al-Asamm al-‘Arbili is shortened to Muhammad al-‘Arbili. In the case of authors, a longer version of their names is listed in the footnotes and bibliography. I have, however, made several exceptions to this rule, including when a person was only known by his or her first name and father’s name, for example, ‘TItban b. Malik (“b.” is an abbreviation for “ibn,” “son of”), or for those who were commonly addressed by an honorific title rather than by their first name, for example, Najm al-Din (“the star of the faith”) al-Ghazzi.
I used conversion tables to convert all dates from the Islamic calendar (called “Hijri,” which means “of the emigration,” because it begins in 622 CE when the Prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina) to the Gregorian or Common Era calendar (CE). Because the Islamic calendar is lunar and the Gregorian is solar, we can convert dates with precision only if we know the day, month, and year that an event took place. Thus, for instance, Muharram 1, 1208, Hijri corresponds to August 8, 1793, but Ramadan 1, 1208, is April 2, 1794. When the full Hijri date was not available to me and all I had was “the year 1208 Hijri,” I converted it as 1793/4 CE.
All English translations from Arabic, Turkish, French, and Italian are my own unless otherwise specified.
Introduction
Disability and Its Histories in the Arab World
This book explores what it meant to have disabilities in the Ottoman Arab world. The first stumbling block in the path of anyone wishing to study disability in the Arab world is the absence of an Arabic word for “disability” until fairly recently. “The disabled” and “disability” as discrete categories are products of modern Europe.’ They did not appear in the Arab world until the twentieth century, and it is thus not surprising that the current Arabic equivalents of the English words “disability” (aga) and “disabled” (mu ‘awwaq; also ma‘ug and mu‘aq) are of correspondingly recent coinage. They both derive from the verb ‘aga, “to hinder” or “to hamper.”*
This does not mean, of course, that awareness of impairments did not exist prior to the modern period. In fact, a distinctive characteristic of Arabic literature well into the eighteenth century is works or chapters of works devoted to “people with defects” or “people with blights,” variously referred to as abl al-‘ahat, ashab al-‘ahat, or dhawu al-‘ahat. Kristina Richardson has noted that the word ‘aha, “blight,” “defect,” or “damage,” “is not a word intrinsically linked to the human body — it could also be applied to crops, for instance — and does not necessarily connote physical disability. Rather, it suggests a mark that spoils the presumed wholeness, integrity, or aesthetics of something.” > Hence, “blights” encompassed a wide range of mostly physical traits as varied as blindness, leprosy, flat noses, and even blue eyes.
One of the earliest and best-known representatives of this genre is The Book of the Leper, Lame, Blind, and Cross-Eyed by the famous Abbasid belles-lettrist al-Jahiz (d. 868/9). It addresses a wide array of physical defects, from skin disorders to lameness, goggle-eyes, hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body), leprosy, hunchback, scrotal hernia, warts, absence of eyebrows, short necks, and baldness.*
In the centuries that followed, other Arab authors followed this literary trend.’ To mention but two examples from the Ottoman era, the Meccan Hadith scholar Muhammad al-Makki (d. 1547) wrote a treatise on people with physical “blights” that described men who were blind, cross-eyed, had hunched backs, or were bald. Al-Makki gathered information from the Hadith, biographies, and various anecdotes, and stated that his purpose was edification and entertainment, not slander.° The entertaining aspect of this type of literature is even more salient in the work of the Egyptian belles-lettrist Ahmad al-Hifnawi al-Bishari (fl. 1769), which contains anecdotes, poems, jokes, and stories about judges, poets, doctors, the insane, thieves, and many others. One of al-Bishari’s chapters is devoted to “people with blights”: those who were blind, one-eyed, cross-eyed, had hunched backs, were bald, those suffering from bad breath, and those with very long beards.”
It is evident, then, that the category of “people with blights” is not synonymous with “people with disabilities.” It encompasses a much broader range of conditions than today’s “impairments” and “disabilities,” which are intrinsically connected to individual performance and productivity. Some, like hemiplegia, fall within our modern conception of disability; others, such as flat noses, bad breath, or freckled faces, do not. In addition, because it refers to visible defects that mark the body, ‘aba excludes physical, cognitive, sexual, and reproductive impairments that are difficult or impossible to identify by sight.
To complicate matters further, the phrase “people with blights” only rarely appears in nonliterary sources like medicine and the law. One possible explanation is that many “blights,” such as short necks and very long beards, did not require or were not amenable to medical treatment and did not affect a person’s legal status in any way. Islamic law, for its part, employed the words zamdna, “chronic illness” or “chronic condition,” and zamin or zamin for “someone with a chronic illness or condition” in certain contexts in reference to physical impairments like missing limbs, partial paralysis, muteness, and blindness. One context was work: a chronic condition might prevent a man from earning a living, which would entitle him to financial support from his relatives (this was a moot point for women, because according to Islamic law, they ought to be supported financially by their fathers, husbands, or other male relatives).
Although there was no category for “the disabled,” either conceptually or linguistically, people with impairments of the body and of the mind are everywhere in Arabic sources dating from Ottoman times. The reason for this striking frequency may be, at least in part, a function of the sheer numbers of people with impairments who lived in Arab towns and cities. People acquired impairments for much the same reasons that people acquired them all over the world: war, poverty, congenital anomalies, injuries, illnesses, and diseases, including the waves of bubonic plague that ravaged Greater Syria and Egypt.
But there are at least two additional causes that are particular to the region. The first is consanguineous marriages, also known as “cousin marriages,” which are associated with a relatively high incidence of certain congenital malformations and of conditions caused by autosomal recessive genes, including hereditary deafness, certain types of blindness and muscular dystrophies, neurological disorders, and disorders of sex development. Historically, marriage between cousins has been practiced widely throughout the Arab world and Southwestern Asia. Cousin marriage occurs most commonly among paternal first cousins, including double first-cousin marriage (two siblings who marry two siblings who are their first-degree cousins). It is a cultural, not religious, norm that may be rooted historically in the desire to keep property within the family. While more common among Muslims, it is practiced by non—Muslims as well. The rate of consanguinity in the Arab world is one of the highest in the world: clinical geneticists estimate that to this day an average of 40 percent of marriages in many Arab countries are consanguineous, and that the percentage may be as high as 90 percent in certain Bedouin communities.
Second, the emerging field of medical geology is beginning to reveal surprising clues about the relationship between geological features and the prevalence of certain impairments in the Middle East. Iodine deficiency is a case in point. Iodine is a chemical element that is needed for the correct functioning of the thyroid glands. It is not produced by the human body and can only be acquired through food. An insufficient supply of iodine can cause goiter (enlargement of the thyroid) and, in the children of women who had iodine deficiency during pregnancy, deafness, stunted growth, and damage to brain development. In fact, iodine deficiency is the most common cause of preventable congenital cognitive disabilities in the world. Medical geologists have discovered that the main origin of the deficiency in parts of Lebanon and Syria is that the soil itself does not retain iodine, which is thus not bioavailable.’ It follows that iodine deficiency and the impairments it produces were historically endemic in the Eastern Mediterranean region well into the second half of the twentieth century, when the deficiency was recognized as a serious public health issue and salt started to be iodized.
Although people with impairments were an integral part of the social landscape of the Ottoman Arab world, they have been almost entirely ignored by scholars. Even social historians, who are usually sensitive to the lives of the marginalized and the disempowered, and who have written about most facets of the human experience in depth and with nuance, have hardly displayed any interest in disability. Indeed, the pithy observation by U.S. disability historian Douglas Baynton that “[d]isability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write,” applies perfectly to the scholarship on the Arab world.'° To the best of my knowledge, the only book-length historical study of disability anywhere in the Arab lands in any period and in any language is Kristina Richardson’s recently published Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (2012). It is largely a literary history centered on the writings of six male Sunni Muslim scholars in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cairo, Damascus, and Mecca who wrote about “blighted bodies.” "'
While not about the Arab world, M. Miles’s study of the deaf at the Ottoman court (2000) and Ayse Ezgi Dikici’s MA thesis, “Imperfect Bodies, Perfect Companions? Dwarfs and Mutes at the Ottoman Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (2006), are useful studies of disability in Ottoman Turkey. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet’s pioneering article on the history of disability in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iran (2010) offers interesting insights for comparative purposes, and the late Michael Dols’s Majniin: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (1992), remains a classic despite the fact that it was not written from the perspective of disability studies.
Although not works of history, of much value to historians are Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s groundbreaking article on blindness in the medieval period (1989), Yusuf Sadan’s study of “blights” in Arabic literature (1983), Mohammed Ghaly’s a meticulously researched book on disability in the writings of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists from early Islamic times to the present day Vardit RisplerChaim’s legal history entitled Disability in Islamic Law (2007), and Muhammad Hawwa’s study of “people with special needs” in Islamic law (2010)."3
The literature on urogenital anomalies and hermaphroditism, better known today as intersex or disorders of sex development, is even more sparse and is focused almost exclusively on Islamic legal theory: Agostino Cilardo’s “Historical Development of the Legal Doctrine Relative to the Position of the Hermaphrodite in the Islamic Law” (1986); Ulrich Rebstock’s “Mathematischen Quellen zur Rechtsgeschichte: Das Problem des Hermaphroditen” (1990), which charts the complex mathematical formulas used by jurists to determine a hermaphrodite’s share of inheritance; Paula Sanders’s “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law” (1991); and, more recently, a brief chapter in Vardit Rispler-Chaim’s Disability in Islamic Law (2007). Rispler-Chaim is the only scholar who has approached intersex as a disability."4
This dearth of scholarship is not unique to the Arab world or the Middle East but extends to all other non—Western societies, both premodern and modern. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of Kristina Richardson’s Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012), there are no histories of disability before the nineteenth century in any part of the world besides Europe and the United States. Disability history in the West, on the other hand, has made spectacular strides and is now a vibrant field, tackling topics as diverse as blindness in nineteenth-century France, “ugly laws” in the United States (laws that as late as 1974 ordered people with disabilities regarded as unsightly not to appear in public), eugenic programs in Nazi Germany, war veterans, prosthetics, freak shows, and much else in between.'’ In the last few years a cluster of publications has centered on disability in the European Middle Ages, a welcome and promising antidote to the general presentism of the field.
The need for histories of disability in non-Western contexts is particularly urgent if we aspire to avoid Euro-American centrism, a narrative that is circumscribed by the experiences of Western Europe and the United States. To quote Helen Meekosha, “contemporary disability studies constitutes a form of scholarship colonialism”'” whose implications extend well beyond academia. An estimated 80 percent of the world’s disabled people live in the Global South. Although usually well meaning, the ways that agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, USAID, and nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam choose to frame and finance disability-related projects are almost invariably predicated on Western models of rehabilitation and development based on liberal philosophies, with little knowledge 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 a result of the appalling conditions of many of the sweatshops that produce cheap manufactured goods for the North, or as the direct or indirect consequence of the wars waged by the United States and its allies. For example, recent medical studies have exposed some unexpected repercussions of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq. It is widely suspected that depleted uranium was used in the 2004 bombings of Fallujah. The rate of cancers, congenital anomalies in newborns, including ambiguous genitalia, and other health problems since then has soared dramatically, possibly exceeding that of the survivors of the U.S. nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In this context, the strategies employed by disability rights activists in the United States are not necessarily the most appropriate outside North America. Take, for example, Disability Pride, a movement grounded in minority identity politics and inspired by Black Pride, Gay Pride, and others. Whereas Disability Pride has been effective and empowering in the United States, it may be a less beneficial tool in locales where focusing on prevention is more urgently needed than focusing on promoting pride.
Scholarship on the contemporary Arab world highlights the dire conditions in which many people with disabilities in the region live. Negative attitudes toward disability are widespread, and, as in many other parts of the world, women and people with intellectual disabilities suffer double discrimination.‘? The problem with some of this scholarship is that it displays the tendency to project backward in time today’s relatively low social and economic status of disabled people and to assume that it must be the relic of the past. Some writers 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 disability in the Middle East, however, these backward projections are simply not warranted. This book hopes to contribute a historically grounded perspective to this conversation.
Framing This Book
To the extent that the sources permit it, I am interested in recovering and documenting the lived experiences of people who had impairments. How did Arabs view and treat people with impairments? In what ways did impairments disable individuals? Were impairments fundamental constituents of a person’s identity? How did they inform social, economic, and reproductive relations? Were people with impairments ostracized, marginalized, or integrated? Were their conditions attributed to divine punishment or to moral failing? What role did religion play in the construction of and attitudes to impairments? In what ways were the experiences of impairment influenced by gender and by socioeconomic class?
Like most historians of disability today, I believe that disability is as essential a category of analysis as the more familiar triad of race, class, and gender. And like many historians of disability today, I take a social constructionist approach that employs the “social model” of disability. The “social model” replaces the earlier “medical model,” according to which disabilities are medical problems that reside within the individual and, as such, are pathologies in need of correction and rehabilitation, existing independently of historical processes and cultural practices. Earlier histories of specific diseases (leprosy, for example) were usually framed within the medical model of disability.
Some scholars maintain that the social model is premised on a distinction between impairment and disability. An impairment is whatever a given society regards as an anatomical abnormality or physiological loss of function and is built on a belief about function, whereas disability is the systemic societal response to perceived impairments. In other words, while impairments are not transhistorical, they are more “objective” than disability within a given society. Thus in the United States in the twenty-first century, nearsightedness (myopia), a physiological condition of the eye, can be considered an impairment but only becomes a disability if corrective lenses or corrective surgery are not available.
A powerfully clear illustration of how disability is socially constructed is still the parable written in 1975 by Victor Finkelstein, an anti-apartheid activist and one of the early leaders of the disability rights movement first in South Africa and then in the United Kingdom. Finkelstein asks us to imagine a village inhabited almost entirely by wheelchair users who run it according to their needs. What happens when able-bodied people move into the village is worth quoting at length:
They design their own buildings to suit their physical situation. One thing the wheelchair-user architects quickly discover in this village is that because everyone is always in wheelchairs there is no need to have ceilings at 9 feet 6 inches high or door heights at 7 feet 2 inches. Soon it becomes standard practice to build doors to a height of 5 feet and ceiling or rooms to a height of 7 feet 4 inches. Naturally the building codes set out in the regulations made these heights standard. Now everyone is happy in the village; all the physical difficulties have been overcome and this little society has changed according to the physical character of its members. At last the buildings and environment are truly in tune with their needs.
Let us say that when all the adjustments had been made and became fixed, in this wheelchair-user society, a few able-bodied had, through no choice of their own, to come and settle in this village. Naturally, one of the first things they noticed was the heights of the doors and ceilings. They noticed this directly, by constantly knocking their heads on the door lintels. Soon all the able-bodied members of the village were also marked by the dark bruises they carried on their foreheads. Of course, they went to see the village doctors, who were, naturally, also wheelchair-users. Soon the wheelchairuser doctors, wheelchair-user psychiatrists, wheelchair-user social workers, etc., were involved in the problems of the able-bodied villagers. The doctors produced learned reports about the aches and pains of the able-bodied in society. They saw how the bruises and painful backs (from walking bent double so frequently) were caused by their physical condition. The wheelchair-user doctors analysed the problems and wrote their definitions. They said these able-bodied people suffered a “loss or reduction of functional ability” which resulted in a handicap. This handicap caused a “disadvantage or restriction of activity” which made them disabled in this society.
Soon special aids were designed by the wheelchair-user doctors and associated professions for the able-bodied disabled members of the village. All the able-bodied were given special toughened helmets (provided free by the village) to wear at all times. Special braces were designed which gave support while keeping the able-bodied wearer bent at a height similar to their fellow wheelchair-user villagers. Some doctors went so far as to suggest that there was no hope for these poor sufferers unless they too used wheelchairs, and one person even went so far as to suggest amputation to bring the able-bodied down to the right height. The able-bodied disabled caused many problems. When they sought jobs no one would employ them. Special experts had to be trained to understand these problems and new professions created for their care....
In time special provision had to be made in the village to provide a means of obtaining money for these able-bodied disabled to live. Voluntary societies were created to collect charity and many shops and pubs had an upturned helmet placed on the counters for customers to leave their small change. Painted on the helmets were the words “Help the able-bodied disabled.” Sometimes a little plaster-cast model would stand in the corner of a shop — the figure bent double, in their characteristic pose, with a slotted box on the figure’s back for small coins.*'
The allegory concludes with the able-bodied disabled people organizing to fight against their marginalization. Their demands for societal changes, such as raising the heights of buildings’ doors and ceilings, are met with opposition by some irritated wheelchair users who believe they should stop causing problems for the village and just accept the disadvantages caused by their impairment. The moral of the tale is that a person is not inherently disabled, but rather is disabled by society. Given that what it means to be disabled is produced by society and changes through time and place, this book does not assume that people with impairments in the Ottoman Arab world were automatically disabled. Faced with uncharted territory and a daunting plethora of possibilities, but also restricted by the availability of primary sources, I opted to limit the scope of this study to permanent impairments (or potentially permanent, like certain forms of madness) that could hinder substantially a person’s ability to participate fully in some of the major spheres of life, namely the ability to make a living, take part in religious rituals, sexuality, marriage, and reproduction.
The four core chapters of this book explore deafness and muteness, blindness, impairments of the mind, and intersex and urogenital anomalies, respectively. To some extent these are of course subjective choices, and they are inevitably shaped by my Western twenty-firstcentury notions of disability. But, significantly, those are also among the impairments that recur most frequently in early modern Arabic sources. Baldness and bad breath, found in Arabic belles-lettres under the heading of “people with blights,” motility impairments, hemiplegia (partial paralysis), and, above all, leprosy — a chronic illness that could bear devastating legal, economic, and social consequences — are addressed only in passing because they are discussed too infrequently in the sources I examined.
Deafness, blindness, and impairments of the mind are commonly found in histories of disability. Some readers, however, may be surprised to find urogenital anomalies and intersex discussed in this book (I adopt legal scholar Julie Greenberg’s definition of an intersex person as “anyone with a congenital condition whose sex chromosomes, gonads, or internal or external sexual anatomy do not fit clearly into the binary female/male norm. In fact, I am not aware of works of history that examine intersex conditions alongside physical, sensory, or mental impairments.
Yet in the Ottoman Arab East ambiguous genitalia were frankly discussed, especially in legal sources, because of the problems they could engender in the sphere of marriage. Hence, a woman with a severe form of labial adhesions might have been more impaired than a man with a missing arm or leg. Complex laws were elaborated to address intersex conditions, which, as will be shown in Chapter 4, could be highly disabling not only in matters of marriage, sex, and reproduction, but in other spheres of life as well.
The geographical scope of this book is the region of the Middle East that corresponds to today’s Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. I refer to this area interchangeably as the Arab East, the Ottoman Arab lands, the Arab-Islamic world, and Ottoman Syria and Egypt. Ottoman Syria, early modern Syria, Greater Syria, and the Levant all refer to the geographical area bounded by the Taurus Mountains, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Euphrates River, corresponding to the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and the Turkish province of Hatay.*4 I chose Egypt and Syria because they were the core Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and included major foci of cultural production such as the large urban centers of Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem, all of which produced an extraordinary wealth of primary sources.
The temporal parameters span from roughly the early sixteenth century, when the Arab lands were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, to the early nineteenth century — a stretch of time conventionally referred to as the early modern period.*5 I expected to find more differences across space and found instead more similarities, as I expected to find more differences across time and found instead continuities — a reminder that the pace of cultural change can be slow. The Epilogue addresses, albeit tentatively, some of the developments in ideas about impairments that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It bears emphasizing that this is not a study of disability in “Islam.” My focus is not on the foundational texts of the religion, the Qur’an and the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). Although, as we shall see, these texts played a critical role in shaping attitudes toward disability, I strove to examine a diverse corpus of sources written in Ottoman Syria and Egypt in the hope of recovering the widest possible range of information, narratives, and discourses about impairments. These sources include biographical dictionaries, chronicles, travelogues, legal and medical texts, treatises on physiognomy, dream manuals, essays on specific subjects (on blindness, for example), works of belles-lettres, such as collections of jokes and anecdotes, and Arabic lexicons.
Chronicles, some of which are written in semi-autobiographical or autobiographical style, travelogues, and biographical dictionaries proved to bea treasure trove, as they offer countless descriptions of and comments about people with physical and mental impairments. Indeed, historians of the Middle East are singularly fortunate to be able to mine biographical dictionaries, an extraordinarily rich body of literature that is a “unique product of Arab Muslim culture.”*° The earliest extant example of the biographical dictionary dates from ninth-century Iraq, and by the sixteenth century it was a firmly established and wellrespected form of historical writing. For reasons that are unclear, the genre appears to have reached its peak in Greater Syria under the Ottomans (hence the preponderance, in this book, of biographies of men who lived in that region), but early modern Egyptian authors produced several biographical dictionaries as well.
In thousands of biographies of varying lengths, biographers recorded the lives of men from all walks of life, often their contemporaries or one or two generations removed, whom they deemed notable in the broadest sense. The Damascus-based Hasan al-Burini (d. 1615) stands out because he included biographical sketches of some of his close male friends whose only possible claim to noteworthiness was friendship with the author. We read about rulers and other state officials, jurists, Sufis, teachers, hospital and school administrators, preachers, muezzins, mosque prayer leaders, soldiers, merchants, craftsmen, physicians, entertainers, political rebels, imposters posing as prophets, and even victims of rape or murder.
Biographers took their works very seriously. Although many entries are hagiographical, authors consistently expressed their desire to present the most accurate and fairest depiction of their subjects. To that end, they supplemented the information they gathered firsthand with a plethora of both written and oral sources they reckoned credible. A major drawback of the genre for today’s historians, however, is that individual entries were rarely dedicated to women; when women do appear in Ottoman-era Arabic biographical dictionaries, it is usually as the wives, mothers, daughters, or other relatives of a male biographee.
This book also draws extensively on Islamic jurisprudence. Islamic law (Shari‘a) differs in significant respects from other legal systems. In the words of Joseph Schacht, a foremost legal historian, the Shari‘a is “an all-embracing body of religious duties,” in the sense that “it comprises on an equal footing ordinances regarding worship and ritual, as well as political and (in the narrow sense) legal rules,” so that “it is impossible to understand Islam without understanding Islamic law.
Most Muslims in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire belonged to four Sunni schools of law: the Hanafis, Shafi‘is, Malikis, and Hanbalis. I concentrate on the Hanafi school because it was the official school of law of the empire, but I also pay attention to the Shafi‘is, who had many adherents in Egypt and Syria, and to a lesser extent to the Maliki and Hanbali schools, mostly prevalent in North Africa and in the Arabian Peninsula, respectively, but with pockets of followers in the Arab East.
I use two main types of legal sources: law books and collections of fatwas. Law books lay down rules and regulations for almost every aspect of every Muslim’s life from the cradle to the grave, while fatwas are nonbinding but authoritative legal opinions issued by a mufti, that is, a person qualified to issue fatwas, in response to specific questions. Because questions were posed by members of all socioeconomic strata of society (the service was supposed to be free of charge), fatwas not only afford us a glimpse into the process by which scholars interpreted the law “on the ground,” so to speak, but also represent a barometer for the legal and social issues that were of concern at any given time in any given community of Muslims. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, impairments featured prominently in Islamic law.
This book is not a history of medicine, but I provide some medical background because ideas about impairments were shaped in no small part by an understanding of the body rooted in humoral medicine. The Ottoman period was a time of medical pluralism characterized by the coexistence and overlapping of three different medical traditions: humoral medicine, religious medicine, and folk medicine.*° Humoral medicine, the dominant medical framework both in the Middle East and in Europe until the nineteenth century, was grounded in the Greek theory of the four humors. According to this theory, the human body consisted of blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. A person’s health depended on the correct balance of these four substances. Religious medicine or “Prophetic medicine” relied on the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad concerning health, sickness, and hygiene. We have relatively little information about the third medical tradition, Arab folk medicine, which was largely transmitted orally, but we do know that it relied on remedies based on plants, animals, and minerals, as well as on amulets and charms.
Of the three traditions, this study draws primarily on humoral medicine because it was the most widely practiced in Arab urban centers, including in hospitals, because an abundance of Arabic texts dating from the Ottoman period are available to historians (little has survived of Prophetic or folk medicine), and above all because it was the medical framework with which many Arabs conceptualized impairments.3* A significant limitation of this body of sources, however, is that they offer little or no information about chronic impairments or physical anomalies, like congenital deafness, that Arab physicians deemed either incurable or not in need of a cure.
The authors of the works I have examined belonged to different socioeconomic classes, had different levels of education, and resided in both major urban centers and smaller, more provincial locales, but they shared three characteristics. First, all were Sunni Muslims. Sunni Muslims represented the vast majority of the population and thus dominated cultural production. Of course, Christian, Jewish, Druze, Shi‘, and other minorities who resided in the region produced their own vast bodies of writings in a variety of fields, which may well contain discourses about impairments that differ from or even contradict Sunni Muslim discourses. The second feature shared by all the authors is that they wrote in Arabic, albeit with varying levels of proficiency. This is hardly surprising, for the Turkish language was foreign to the majority of Arabs living under Ottoman rule. Furthermore, for centuries Arabic had been the language of science, medicine, and the law, and therefore, whereas well-educated Turks were expected to at least know how to read Arabic, the reverse was relatively rare. Third, all the authors were male. Despite my best efforts, I was not able to unearth a single work of jurisprudence, medicine, history, biography, or belles-lettres composed by a Sunni Muslim woman in the Arab East between the mid-sixteenth and the early nineteenth century. There is ample evidence of female literacy in that period, at least among the upper classes, but if women authored any works, those remain in private collections, were written anonymously or under male pseudonyms, have been improperly cataloged, or are lost.
Do these sources constitute an elite body of knowledge, and if so, does this book merely examine a cultural sphere removed from and irrelevant to a broader social reality? This question is conceptually flawed, because it (at least implicitly) posits an impermeable dichotomy between “elite” and “popular” culture that today lacks purchase with most cultural historians. Despite the relative prestige afforded by their education, most of the authors were not denizens of any “ivory tower,” but, rather, were actively engaged in the lives of the communities in which they lived. Besides, writers like the Damascene chroniclers Ibn Ayyub al-Ansari (d. ca. 1592) and Ibn Budayr al-Hallaq (fl. 1762), who left us two of the most engaging and colorful accounts of life in Damascus in the early modern period, were of fairly modest means and displayed relatively little proficiency in high literary Arabic. Ibn Budayr earned his living as a barber, while Ibn Ayyub was a court clerk whose life ambition, an appointment as deputy judge, eluded him until shortly before his death.
Many other types of sources were not examined. For example, I did not make use of the voluminous records of the Islamic courts.3* Ottoman imperial edicts, censuses, and taxation records for the Arab provinces might contain valuable information about the Ottoman government’s policies toward people with impairments. A preliminary reading of the Ottoman tax registers for sixteenth-century Syria and Palestine reveals that, in accordance with the Hanafi school of law, blind, lame, and insane men were exempted from certain taxes on the grounds that they were “unsuitable for work” (amel-mande).3} But perhaps the most promising source for historians of disability is Arabic poetry. The snippets I have read of this enormous corpus of material, much of which is still unedited, reveal beautifully vivid representations and self-representations of and by people with impairments.
This book merely attempts to lay the foundations for a history of disability in the Ottoman Arab world. I hope that future scholarship will refine and perhaps amend the picture I have drawn through new approaches and new sources.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق