Abstract
Religion is enormously important for many disabled people, their families, and communities, especially in the Global South, but it is not given a great deal of attention. This chapter is a collaboration between religious studies scholars from different faith traditions (Christian and Muslim) and an atheist disability studies scholar. We explore the central role of religion in many disabled people’s lives, and we suggest that a new theology taking clearer account of disability may be productive in understanding the central role of faith in people’s lives. We acknowledge the historical and contemporary nexus between religion and oppression but suggest that there are far more productive ways of engaging with religion than seeing it unidimensionally and solely as an instrument of oppression.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly enough “deafness” is not found on this list. Stewart (2011, p. 68) speculates that deafness was not considered a visible impairment that would have disqualified the priest’s body.
- 2.
Cf. an earlier version of this article in the conference volume of a conference held in May 2011 at the Faculty of Theology of Stellenbosch University on Theology, Disability and Human Dignity, L Juliana Claassens, “Job, Theology and Disability: Moving Towards a New Kind of Speech,” in Searching for Dignity: Conversations on Theology, Disability and Human Dignity (ed. L Juliana Claassens, Leslie Swartz and Len Hansen; SunMedia, 2013), 55–66.
- 3.
For an incisive analysis of the relationship between monotheism in Islam and social ethics in premodern Arabia, see the landmark work by Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979).
- 4.
Ibn Arabi, Muḥyi al-Din, Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (Cairo, N.p. 1911), 2, 596.
- 5.
Ibn Arabi, Muḥyi al-Din, Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (Cairo, N.p. 1911), 2, 596.
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Claassens, L.J., Shaikh, S., Swartz, L. (2019). Engaging Disability and Religion in the Global South. In: Watermeyer, B., McKenzie, J., Swartz, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Citizenship in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74675-3_11
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