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  • Islam and Disability: Perspectives in Theology and Jurisprudence
  • Morgan Clarke
Islam and Disability: Perspectives in Theology and Jurisprudence by Mohammed Ghaly, 2010. London & New York: Routledge, xii + 254 pp., £85.00. ISBN: 978-0-415-60648-6. [AD]

Mohammed Ghaly is one of the rising stars of the burgeoning field of Islamic bioethics. He was a student of al-Azhar University, Cairo, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he now teaches: Islam and Disability displays both a profound knowledge of the Arabic Islamic sources and a clear academic style. Ghaly's scholarship is careful and comprehensive, drawing on an impressive breadth of classical and modern material. Islam and Disability is an invaluable sourcebook for the field. It is not the first, that distinction belonging to Vardit Rispler-Chaim's Disability in Islamic Law (2006) (unless one looked further afield, to Michael Dols' work on madness in medieval Islamic society, for instance). Islam and Disability is, however, wider-ranging than Rispler-Chaim's somewhat slimmer volume and is an indispensable contribution for all those interested in the topic.

Both Ghaly and Rispler-Chaim note the problems of applying the terminology and concepts of today - not least the category of 'disability' itself - to the literature of other times and places, while neither providing wholly satisfactory solutions. Rispler-Chaim organises her account into chapters more or less following those of the Islamic legal treatises, within which disability is discussed in passing: religious duties (how disability might interfere with the performance of prayer, fasting, the Hajj and zakat); jihad; marriage; hermaphroditism; and disabilities caused through human action, here through corporal punishment (hudud) and physical retribution (qisas). Ghaly takes a different approach, and one shaped by his explicit desire that his work be of benefit beyond the academy, through addressing 'the main practical means by which people living with disabilities can still lead, in the social and financial sense, an honourable life' (8). He thus consciously, and reflectively, allows present-day concerns as set out by international organisations such as the United Nations - the rights of the disabled to work and to dignity, for instance - to orientate his exploration of the earlier and modern Islamic literature. [End Page 355]

As not uncommon in what one might term the 'Islam and...' genre, Ghaly's scope is vast, the entire sweep of Islamic scholarly literature from the early periods (which provide the bulk of the material) through to the present day, even if his findings are relatively exiguous: it would appear from both his and Rispler-Chaim's work that 'disability' has not, to date, been a particularly prominent topic of concern within Islamic discourse. Given this huge sweep of history with an eye to present-day interests, it is not surprising that the odd anachronistic note creeps in. Is it not, for instance, somewhat awkward to think in terms of 'psychological' approaches to the problem of how to 'live with disabilities' (62) for the medieval Islamic world? Nevertheless, it should be said that the author is clearly aware of such difficulties and good at situating the scholars and works he refers to precisely in their historical context.

The book is separated into two parts, 'theology' and 'jurisprudence'. The former is much the shorter, covering first 'speculative theology', that is, the question of theodicy - why is there suffering in a divinely created world - and then what Ghaly calls 'practical theology', which is to say the spiritual resources for coping with affliction.

While part two is ostensibly devoted to the Islamic legal literature, it is in fact rather more varied and interesting than that might suggest, opening with a fascinating discussion of the science of physiognomy ( firasah), which, in Ghaly's account, the Arabs took from the Ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle. Should physical imperfections be understood as indicative of moral and spiritual faults? In responding to this question Ghaly gives detailed consideration to the great jurist Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 820 CE), also, it seems, a leading physiognomist. Shafi'i's pronouncements on the topic read badly to us now - 'Beware of the lame, the cross-eyed, the one-eyed and everyone with a physical defect....They are extremely difficult...

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