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SARA SCALENGHE, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Pp. 203 $ 90.00 cloth.
Sara Scalenghe's Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 should be a welcome addition to the growing number of works in disability studies. Given the heavy focus of existing scholarship on Western societies, Scalenghe's effort to explore a non-Western context is commendable. Blending the history of the body, medicine, gender and sexuality, and disability, on the one hand, and the history of the Ottoman Arab provinces (Egypt and Syria in particular), on the other, this well-written book promises to serve as a rigorous introduction to the subject. It builds on the existing literature and can be fruitfully read in conjunction with Kristina Richardson's Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
The book's basic promise is "to lay the foundations for a history of disability in the Ottoman Arab world" (p. 20). It centers on the social construction of impairments and blights as these are reflected in the historical, religious, and legal sources composed in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire up to the end of the eighteenth century. Although it succeeds in "recovering and documenting the lived experiences of people who had impairments" (p. 10), Scalenghe's focus on urban, male, elite individuals who were Sunni Muslims means that the insights revealed through this book are necessarily restricted to that social group. The author acknowledges the limitations of her sources, and one can hope for future studies to build on Scalenghe's laudable foundational work to bring non-Muslims, non-Sunnis, women, and rural, nomadic, and non-elite urban populations into the historical inquiry.
From the outset, Scalenghe clarifies how she has used the concepts of disability and bodily impairment and cautions the reader against anachronisms. Disability is a product of modern European society and, as such, did not exist as a category in the pre-modern Middle East. Bodily impairments, however, were common to this society even if they did not automatically make individuals "disabled." Following the terminology used in the sources, Scalenghe uses impairment and blight as helpful categories and constructs the book's conceptual scaffolding around them. The work consists of...