Writings on Disability in Islam: The 16th-Century Polemic on Ibn Fahd's" al-Nukat al-Ziraf"

Al-Haytham b. ‘Adiyy (d. 821) is the first known writer on the topic of people with
disabilities. About seven centuries after his death, an interim period during which produced a vast field of literature on this topic was produced, a book written in 1541 on people with disabilities triggered a vigorous debate that continued until 1543. This article unfolds and contextualizes one of the hitherto unstudied works on disability in Islamic literature, and focuses on the two-year debate between the author of the book (Ibn Fahd) and a well-known contemporaneous jurist (Ibn Hajar al-Haytami). The debate went beyond these two figures to include damaging a book and the issuing of different fatwas from different Islamic cities supporting the author.