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, includ- ing 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 dis- cussed in religious texts, this study focuses on representations and clas- sifications 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 spe- cific 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. www.cambridge.org © in this web service Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-04479-1 - Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800 Sara Scalenghe Frontmatter More information