Arab Islamic Voices, Agencies, and Abilities

Disability Portrayals in Muslim World Literature and Culture

By (author) Saloua Ali Ben Zahra

Publication date:

01 November 2017

Length of book:

164 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498569576

This book explores portrayals and predicaments of the disabled in Arab/Muslim post colonial North African and Middle Eastern societies in genres ranging from classical Arabic scripture to secular popular culture including Francophone Moroccan and Algerian fiction, Egyptian Middle Eastern film, as well as Tunisian song and television. In line with theorists Aijaz Ahmad and Ato Quayson’s objection to reading Third World literature as “national allegory,” The author argues that rather than being metaphors or allegories, disabled characters represent persons with disabilities in their culture and act as a mirror upon their changing societies. Contemporary Maghrebians and Muslims with disabilities find themselves at an intersection of conflicting and competing cultures, their native Islamic culture and Westernizing lifestyles. In the rush to import everything Western, despite humanitarian Islamic teachings regarding the disabled, are often abandoned. In situations of fundamentalist menace, the disabled, who tend to be the most vulnerable and abused fraction of Arab/Muslim society, suffer the worst, especially women.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Al Qur’an’s Teachings with Respect to the Disabled
Chapter 2: The Tunisian Deaf Mute through the Lens of American Orientalism
Chapter 3: Tunisian Camera’s Treatment of Disability
Chapter 4: The Disabled Native: Ressource Humaine for the French: A Literary Study of Algerian Rachid Mimouni’s Tombéza
Chapter 5: The Case of Female Characters with Disabilities: Moroccan Fatima vs. “Cure or Kill”: A Disability Study of Tabar Ben Jelloun’s l’Enfant de Sable [Sand Child]
Chapter 6: Disability and Shame in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame: What it means to be a Pakistani Disabled Postcolonial Woman
Chapter 7: The Egyptian Visually-Challenged Sheikh Husni’s Treatment of Blindness in the Egyptian Film Al Kitkat
Chapter 8: Iraqi in Paris: Speaking Volumes: the Bond in Deafness of an Iraqi Father and Son
Conclusion
Bibliography

With thoughtful studies of individual works Dr. Ben Zahra has dared to compile an alternative canon of contemporary Arab literature by focusing on the portrayal of disability. She has also challenged some received truths about colonial and postcolonial periods and the curious mix of gains and losses for challenged and marginalized individuals associated with them. Dr. Ben Zahra in her book makes a convincing case for acceptance of what might have seem a niche category—the portrayal and construction of disability in modern Arab literature—as central to discussion of Arab and North African literature and culture.