Cluster Essay Drug overdose, disability and male friendship in fifteenth-century Mamluk Cairo Kristina Richardson Department of History, Queens College of the City University of New York, NY. Abstract Shiha ¯b al-Dı¯n Ahmad al-H . ija ¯zı¯ (1388–1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut, a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. As a result of the overdose, boils broke out all over al-Hija ¯zı¯’s body, he was unable to eat or sleep, and he lost significant cognitive power. After recovering from the overdose, he abandoned his legal studies and became a leading poet. Most interestingly, al-Hijazi wrote a letter to his dear friend S . ala ¯h . al-Dı ¯n al-Asyu ¯t . ı ¯ (d. 1455) on the tenth night of overdose detailing his suffering, his social isolation and the solace he had found with an unidentified Turkish slave soldier who was suffering the same physical, psychiatric, and social discomforts. The letter is an indictment of his fellow Cairenes who had ignored or mocked him in his illness, though the non-Arab, unfree soldier condemns most forcefully the social body of fifteenth-century Cairo and their misguided constructions of blighted bodies. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2012) 3, 168–181. doi:10.1057/pmed.2012.12 The English term ‘disability’ focuses on physical and cognitive performance and productivity – what the body can or cannot do. The equivalent classical Arabic term  a ¯ha literally means ‘blight’ or ‘damage,’ and it can refer to objects both inanimate (crops, trees) and animate (human and non-human animals). The category of blightedness certainly encompasses ‘disability,’ but it incorporates r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 3, 2, 168–181 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/