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Disability History in the Middle East cover
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Pre-order. Available Nov 26 2026
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Description

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.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1 – Introduction: Disability in the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Sara Scalenghe, Loyola University Maryland, USA, and Beverly Tsacoyianis, The University of Memphis, USA
Ch. 2 – Blindness, Poverty, and Social Control in Late Ottoman Istanbul (1845-1914), by Irem Yildiz, The University of Oxford, UK
Ch. 3 – Modern Prosthetics in Late Ottoman Society, by Elif Küskü, Istanbul Technical University, Türkiye
Ch. 4 – Reading Resistance and Agency Through 19th Century Citizen Petitions” by Yasmin Shafei, American University in Beirut, Lebanon
Ch. 5 – Who Belongs in a Jewish Homeland: Disability, Gender, and Zionism in the Yishuv (1880-1947), by Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Ch. 6 – Disability and Employment in Colonized Algeria, 1900s-1940s, by Gildas Brégain, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
Ch. 7 – Contesting the Politics of British Prosthetic Care: Pain, Nativeness, and the Plight of Palestinian Jewish Amputees in WWII, by Marco di Giulio, Franklin & Marshall College, USA
Ch. 8 – Between History and Memory: 21st – Century Literary Portrayals of Disability in 1940s and 1950s Palestine and Israel, by Beverly Tsacoyianis, University of Memphis, USA
Ch. 9 – Disabling Effects of Anger in Iran (1941-1951), by Saghar Bozorgi, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Ch. 10 – Portraying Disability in Refugeedom: Palestinian Refugees with Disabilities through UNRWA Photographs and Videos, 1950s-1980s, by Maria Chiara Rioli, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Ch. 11 – Piecing Together the Life of an Iranian Woman Political Prisoner: Defetishizing the Production of Madness and Disability through State Violence, by Sona Kazemi, University of Wisconsin – La Cross, USA, and Efrat Gold, University at Buffalo, USA

Product details

Published Nov 26 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 272
ISBN 9780755653256
Imprint I.B. Tauris
Dimensions 234 x 156 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Beverly Tsacoyianis

Beverly Tsacoyianis is an Associate Professor in t…

Anthology Editor

Sara Scalenghe

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