Disability in the Islamic Tradition

This article gives an overview of how disability, or more broadly the phenomenon of ‘physical/mental otherness’, was represented in the Islamic tradition. It is argued that the pre-modern Islamic tradition had a significantly different approach to this phenomenon than the approaches produced in the post-industrialization modern world. This study is divided into two main sections. The first section examines the question of terminology and its seminal role in framing both pre-modern and contemporary deliberations on Islam and disability. The second section reviews how people with disabilities were represented in a number of scholarly disciplines within the Islamic tradition. Besides giving the reader an overall idea about disability in the pre-modern Islamic tradition, the article also gives extensive references to modern studies on Islam and disability so that the reader gets acquainted with modern scholarship in this emerging field of study.