Prepared by / Maha Al-Yamani

In the past, when strength provided life with the source of its continuation, the human model had to be linked to physical strength capable of snatching life from the jaws of death. As for those with disabilities, the earth was narrow for them and the minds of its naive people were unable to accept them because of their ignorance of both the cause and the treatment. Returning to Greek and Roman mythology makes us stand on the colors of torture that were inflicted on them, from being tied with chains to trees to being thrown into rivers or exiled to the tops of mountains.

The opinions of philosophers were no more mature than that. Here is their pillar, Plato, who deprived them of his virtuous republic and called for the necessity of getting rid of them to maintain the purity of the human element!

Then came Islam and awakened humanity in man and established the principles of odness, love and cooperation and sought to the soul to refine it from its impurities and to the mind to transcend it towards the bright and clear truth!

Literature for people with special needs:
In our world, there are things we request and they are fulfilled for some of our peers. We try to possess them and they possess us. We enslave them in our dreams and they enslave us in our wakefulness. They are the four poles of life: beauty, perfection, influence, and money. If our steps stumble here or our dreams fail us there while pursuing them, we are afflicted with frustration and despair and we forget every blessing that d has bestowed upon us. How then about those who were deprived of some of the relative perfection given to every human being and for whom life was hidden from one of its corners.

This question, posed by Karen Sader in her introduction to the book "Dictionary of the Giants / Writers with Disabilities," was the incentive and motive for serious work that exhausted three years of diligent effort spent by her and her colleague Nasir Al-Jawhari in excavating hundreds of sources and references and collecting fragments from the bellies of books until the number of volumes they took as a basis for this dictionary reached approximately 360 titles and the number of those translated reached about 400 writers. They aimed through it to express their pride in those with high determination who were deprived of something and given many things.. So this dictionary was born. In our Arab history, Al-Jahiz wrote a book entitled "The Lepers, the Blind, and the Lame" in which he spoke about the news, literature and achievements of people with special needs.

Considering that the senses are the first window for programming creativity to the world of reality, we have the right to ask this question.. Is literary, artistic and scientific creativity linked to the safety of all senses and organs, or is it a divine gift that does not distinguish between a healthy person and another?

In the reality of those with disabilities - or special privileges - throughout the ages is the best answer. Some of them crossed those barriers and soared in the sky of talent, innovated and excelled. Their minds shone with light and reached deep ideas, and their eyes extended to distant axes and revealed the hidden. Disability did not limit them from perseverance and work for them, nor did they despair of the presence of deficiency in some of their abilities, but rather increased their will and determination to discover for the healthy what they failed to discover in all paths of science, art and literature. The evidence from Arab and international history is many, including ancient and modern examples that we will review in this report about the bright names with a wide reputation and the writings remaining in the memory of history for those who moved towards literature and the worlds of narration specifically because it is the art that is based on feeling, imagination and intellectual reflection, which are naturally a weapon for the disabled as a vent in their times and a voice with which they touch the ear of the world..

• The poet Bashar ibn Burd (95- 167 AH) an Abbasid poet and one of the masters of poetry in Arabic literature was blind since birth, with a scarred face and bulging eyes covered with red flesh. Al-Jahiz said: “He was a poet, rajiz, rhythmic speaker, orator, master of prose and couplets, and has well-known letters.” He was very intelligent, learned poetry and literature and excelled in them, and he had a special school of poetry. He was the imam of poets in his time and has a large collection. He says about his blindness:
  I became blind as a fetus, and intelligence comes from blindness.
  So I came with wonderful intuition as a refuge for knowledge.
  And the light of the eye sank for the heart, so it sacrificed.
  With a heart that, when people waste, it achieves.

• The philosopher poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (363- 449 AH), the conclusion of the poets of the second Abbasid era just as Mutanabbi was its beginning.
  An Abbasid writer of widespread fame and abundant knowledge, he suffered from smallpox in the fourth year of his life and became blind from it. The poet said when he was eleven years old: “I praise d for blindness as others praise Him for sight.” As for his poetry, it is a collection of wisdom and philosophy in three parts: Al-Luzumiyat, Saqt al-Zand, Daw' al-Saqt. His poetry has been translated into many languages. His most important compositions: Al-Ayk wa al-Ghusun (on literature), Taj al-Hurra (on women), and Risalat al-Ghufran (his most famous book).

• The Dean of Arabic Literature Taha Hussein (1307 – 1393 AH), a great Egyptian critic. He was infected with smallpox at the age of three and lost his sight. He founded the Universities of Alexandria and Ain Shams and served as Minister of Education.
  From his works: On Pre-Islamic Literature, Leaders of Thought, Wednesday Talk, The Days, With Abu al-Ala in his Prison, The Call of the Curlew, With Mutanabbi, Lost Love, and many others. As for translations, they include Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians, ds of Greece, and selected pages of representative poetry among the Greeks.

• Al-Kumait ibn Zayd al-Asadi (60 -126 AH), an Umayyad poet who was knowledgeable in Arab literature, languages, news, and lineages. He was known for his mental alertness, sharp intelligence, quick wit, and broad, diverse culture. He was deaf and could not hear anything, but he excelled in poetry until he was counted among the masters of Umayyad poetry. Abu Ubaida said: “If the Banu Asad had no merit other than Al-Kumait, it would be enough for them.” It was mentioned in the Treasury of Literature (In Al-Kumait there were traits not found in a poet: he was the orator of Banu Asad and the jurist of the Shia, a brave knight, generous, and a marksman unmatched in his people). Al-Kumait was killed during the caliphate of Marwan ibn Muhammad in 126 AH, and the total of his poetry when he died was about five thousand verses.

• Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi'i (1298- 1356 AH), one of the expert writers, literati and poets of the glorious era, originally from Tripoli, Syria, and he is from a family famous in the field of judiciary. He suffered from typhoid which left him with a speech impediment and deafness in his ears. This was a reason that distanced him from people on one hand and pushed him towards research and reading on the other. He was chosen for the position of poet to King Fuad and has literary works including: History of Arab Literature, Under the Banner of the Quran, Letters of Sorrows, Inspiration of the Pen, The Battle, The Red Cloud.
  From his poetry:
  May d forgive my heart, were it not for its agitation
  With this love, my tongue would not have been proud of it
  The soul did not talk to me on a great day
  But I rolled up my sleeves unless the feet slipped
  If a person loves, his wings are clipped
  And far be it for the clipped to fly!

• The miracle of the disabled throughout the ages, Helen Keller, was an American who lost all channels of sensory communication with the outside world, suffering from deafness, blindness and muteness since childhood. Despite this, she learned writing and speaking, and languages, and studied at university then devoted herself to writing and authorship. She has books, stories and articles, including: The Story of My Life.

• Marcel Proust, a famous French writer and author born in 1871, studied law at the University of Paris, was a brilliant philosopher, and had a major impact on the course of the modern novel. He suffered from asthma and allergies, and his health was very weak. He was confined to his room and wrote on his bed without leaving it.

• David Wright, a deaf poet and writer born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1920. He loved the musical tone of poetry since childhood. At the age of four, he suffered from complete deafness. Fortunately, he carried in his ears memories of sounds from childhood days, which enabled him to speak and allowed for the development of his talents. He said in the book of his life story, which he named (Deafness), that he felt that deafness had pushed him to care for poetry as a kind of compensation for the external sounds he missed, so that at the age of eight he found himself driven to write poetry. He wrote his first collection of poems in 1942. Deafness left its mark on his poetic images, making him sometimes draw silent paintings of objects with sound, leaving it to the reader or listener to complete the painting himself, which adds a moving rhetorical atmosphere to these paintings. The total of his output is about 24 books including his works, compositions and collections.

Saudi creativity: a bet on ambition and excellence:

• Currently, the creations of the disabled in the Arab world and our local Saudi environment are no less than their predecessors. We find many creative men and women and writers with special needs that are difficult to count. Among them, for example, the young Saudi writer Alia Al-Shaman, who suffers from quadruple cerebral palsy and muteness, and with one moving finger in her left forefinger, she writes on the keyboard. She has written many books and novels, including the novel "Princess of Imagination" and "The Novel of Challenges" and the book "The Pen." She was nominated for the Arab Thought Award.

• And the deaf poet Ali Al-Ghamdi, who participated in the program "Million's Poet" in its third edition and delivered a poem that won the admiration of the committee and was like a message from those with special needs titled "A Deaf Voice." A blind poet named Muslih Al-Rashidi also participated in the same program, and the committee also agreed on his qualification before the 48.

• And the creative blind poet Abdul Aziz Al-Zahrani, who participated in the "Prince of Poets" program and has a distinguished literary and media presence and many poems of high poetic quality, and the blind Saudi writer and novelist Majid Al-Jard, who has a printed novel titled "Darkness Descended," and also the blind poet Nawaf Al-Otaibi, who has a collection of beautiful poems and many creative writers and poets with special needs who are difficult to count.

A final comma:

The subjects of the writings of authors with special needs varied from autobiographies, personal and emotional experiences, and presenting the concerns of people with special needs to intellectual, political, and religious topics. We feel this in this introduction written by Taha Hussein in his book The Days, saying: "And those of the blind who read this talk will see in it the life of a friend of theirs in childhood who was affected by this ordeal little by little when he knew it, and he did not know it except little by little when he noticed the difference between us and his brothers in the conception of things and their practice. He was affected by this ordeal with a deep, harsh effect, not for anything; except because he felt mercy and pity for him from his family, and he felt some people's mockery of him and contempt for him, and if people had been of such civilizational elevation and understanding of things in their reality that they do not mock those affected by some pests, nor pity them nor show them special treatment they undertake with affectation, if all of this had been, that boy and his like would have known their ordeal gently, and their lives would have been straight and free from complexity, as it is straight for many other people. And thank d that this doctor did not surrender to sadness and his circumstances did not drive him to despair, but he went on his way as he was able to , trying to do od for himself and for people as much as he was given the opportunity to try to do od. And how many are those who conquered this ordeal for the best they conquered it, and triumphed over it for the best they triumphed over it, and provided for themselves and for people more and more useful and more lasting than what he provided, but every human being is eased for what he was created for, he does not exert effort except what his energy reaches, and I hope that blind friends will find in reading this talk amusement for them from the burdens of life as I found in dictating it.."