Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

This title outlines the complex significance of bodies in the late medieval central Arab Islamic lands. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights' by Medieval Arabs, as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, biographies and autobiographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, Kristina Richardson brings the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world to life. It investigates the place of physically different, disabled and ill individuals in medieval Islam. It is organised around the lives and works of 6 Muslim men, each highlighting a different aspect of bodily difference. It addresses broad cultural questions relating to social class, religious orthodoxy, moral reputation, drug use, male homoeroticism and self-representation in the public sphere.It moves towards a coherent theory of medieval disability and bodily aesthetics in Islamic cultural traditions.

'With few exceptions, we hardly have any scholarly treatment of the historically nuanced social and cultural condition of physical and mental impairment...This is why Richardson's Difference and Disability in The Medieval Islamic World is so important. It is an indication of the growing field of disability history, and its expansion beyond mainly Western concerns.' - Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Tel Aviv University, Review of Middle East Studies--Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Tel Aviv University "Review of Middle East Studies", Richardson has written an original and highly learned first book that reveals much about the cultural construction of difference and disability and about scholarly friendships and communities that shaped that culture.-- "H-Disability, H-Net Reviews"

Kristina L. Richardson is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York, and is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut fur Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, University of Munster, Germany.