Disability History in the Modern Middle East

This volume presents a comparative, cross-disciplinary approach to disability history in Middle Eastern communities, focusing on case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters span a number of country case studies including Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Iran, and cover a wide range of topics including experiences of disability during the late Ottoman Empire, the construction of disability under the British Empire in Syria and Egypt, psychiatric healing practices in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the intersections of religion, nationhood and disability. By foregrounding marginalized voices from the past, to uniquely highlight a perspective on disability studies from the Global South, this book also questions the ethics of treatment and advocacy for policy reform in the present day.