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Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies. By Kristin a L. Richardson . Edinburgh: Edinb urgh Uni versit y Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 158. $110, £65 (cloth); $40, £24.99 (paper).
This book provides a plethora of information about Islamic attitudes to people with disabilities, particularly during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. The study of disabilities in Islamic sources is relatively new, so this book is an important addition to the few monographs available. Although written within a specific historical framework, Kristina Richardson's book transcends these boundaries and provides the reader with new data on the literary, legal, and theological debates on the roles that people with disabilities could hold in society and in the religious life of their communities, beyond the Mamluk and Ottoman eras.
Richardson has identified connections of disabilities among a selection of medieval authors; four of the book's five chapters are dedicated to their writings, accompanied by an analysis of their attitudes to the disabilities as portrayed in their literary production. The first chapter starts with definitions (?ahat, ?afat, i?aqat) and shows that as early as the ninth century c.e. entire books were devoted to disabilities, for example, leprosy, lameness, cross-eyedness, and blindness in Kitab al-Bursan wa-l- ?urjan wa-l-hulan wa-l-?umyan by al-Jahi? (lit. he of the protruding eyeballs), compiled between 821 and 851. A century later, in Kitab al-Aghani, certain disabilities are used as nicknames to describe poets....