Blindness and other visual problems were very common in the premodern Arab world, to the point that there was a small genre of books like Consoling the Blind for the Affliction of Blindness, or Accelerating the Good Omen for Those Who Have Patience upon Losing their Eyesight—works read to the newly blind, urging them to trust God in the face of perseverance.

We don't have sure stats, of course. But Mustafa Ali, the sixteenth-century Ottoman governor of Egypt, complained about how in Cairo "one rarely meets a person whose eyes are bright and round." The Scottish physician Alexander Russell, who lived in eighteenth-century Aleppo (modern Syria) for thirteen years, wrote that over one-sixth of the city's inhabitants had eye diseases.

And out of the 206,954 Egyptian patients who visited the British-managed ophthalmic hospitals in 1912, 8.7% were blind in one eye and 6.5% blind in both. Of course, these numbers are skewed since those with no eye problems are unlikely to have visited the hospitals. On the other hand, the very poor, who may have been more likely to be blind, would also be excluded from these stats.

Blindness was generally caused by infection. The single greatest cause appears to have been trachoma, a bacterial infection that leads to the thickening of the inner eyelids and culminates in blindness for about 10% of patients. According to British surveys in 1912, trachoma was virtually universal in Egypt, with around 95% of children having the disease. Even in modern Egypt, around a third of children are trachomic.

The trachoma bacterium and many, many other blindness-causing germs thrive in hot, dry, and dusty climates like the Middle East and do not do as well in Europe. So there were statistically far more blind people in the Islamic Middle East than in the contemporary Christian world.

All this was largely unknown to a population from before germ theory. Most people in Ottoman times subscribed to the Ancient Greek theory of four humors, in which diseases are caused by an internal imbalance between blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. This was the framework usually used to explain blindness from infection.

For example, the sixteenth-century judge Ahmad ibn Muṣṭafa Tashkubrizade used to be an opium smoker. One day, he hit a soldier while in a drug-addled state and was almost killed. He swore off opium after surviving. Soon after, he coincidentally went blind. But his neighbors didn't see this as coincidence. Rather, the dry substance of the opium smoke had kept the wet humors of blood and phlegm in balance. When Aḥmad stopped smoking, the wet substances in his body were uncurbed, so they overflew into his eyes and made him go blind.

Perhaps because blindness was much more widespread, the Ottoman Middle East was a much better place for a blind person to live in than most of the rest of the world. There are entire biographies of accomplished blind people—sometimes dubbed by biographers as al-baṣir bi-qalbihi, "he who sees with his heart."

Consider Hammad al-Basri, a blind chess player who arrived in Damascus in 1530. He defeated all the greatest players of Egypt and Syria, including in games where he played five opponents at once, and eventually went to Constantinople to play in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Or 'Umar al-Misri, a blind teacher of the Qur'an who died in Aleppo in 1724. One of his students remembered a day when he had forgotten to do his memorization homework. Thinking his teacher would never know, he proceeded to read from his copy of the Qur'an. 'Umar then beat him for not doing his homework and trying to trick him. When the student later asked how he had known, 'Umar answered:

I heard your voice coming from the room’s ceiling, so I knew that there was something in your hand that prevented your voice from coming directly to my face.

But these biographies also show how many blind people lived long, exciting, and independent lives, even without playing chess in the sultan's palace. A good example might be Ahmad ibn Khalwati, an eighteenth-century blind Egyptian mystic who lived alone without wife or children:

[Ahmad ibn Khalwati] had neither relative nor stranger [who lived with him], neither maid-servant nor slave nor anyone to serve him in anything at all... His door was always open and he had sheep, chicken, geese, and ducks and all of them went about freely in the courtyard while he attended to their fodder and feeding and watering all by himself. He cooked his food by himself and likewise washed his clothing.

It spread among the people that the jinn [spirits] served him—and it was not far from the truth, for he was one of the people of occult and secret knowledge. Many students came to him to study with him and learned from him...

He had a large number of cats and he knew them individually by their names, pedigrees, and colors. He would say, "This one is Tuhfa bint Bustana, and this is Kammuna bint Yasmin, and this one is so-and-so, sister of so-and-so," and so on.

Part of the reason for the relatively good treatment of blind people was that Islam considers blindness the least problematic of all bodily impairments. One story attributed to the Prophet Muhammad compares a selfish and greedy bald man and a leper with a kind and generous blind man.

In the Qur'an itself, the Prophet is scolded by God for frowning at a blind man who wanted to listen to him while he was preaching to unbelievers:

He [Muhammad] frowned and turned away when the blind man came to him—for all you know, a he might have grown in spirit, or taken note of something useful to him.

For the self-satisfied one you go out of your way—though you are not to be blamed for his lack of spiritual growth—but from the one who has come to you full of eagerness and awe, you allow yourself to be distracted.

No indeed! This [Qur'an] is a lesson from which those who wish to be taught should learn.

Ottoman private law correspondingly made few distinctions between the blind and the seeing. A person going blind, for example, was not a valid reason for removing him from a management position.

Among the literate classes, most blind people made their own living. Blind people were disproportionately overrepresented as Qur'an teachers, Qur'an reciters, and muezzins (the mosque clerk who calls the faithful to prayer). The greatest doctor of the Ottoman era, Dawud al-Antaki, was a blind Christian. The chief mufti of early sixteenth-century Damascus was blind, as were some of the most popular poets in seventeenth-century Egypt. Al-Azhar, the most prestigious educational institution in the Arab world, has had since its foundation and continues to have a special school for blind students.

Unfortunately, most sources from the period focus on the literate elite, and we can't say much about what life was like for Muhammad the Syrian Peasant's blind third son Ahmad. It seems likely that many peasants sent their blind children (not very useful on the farm) to local schools to receive an Islamic education, where they might end up as muezzins or Qur'an teachers. In the cities there were also many blind beggars, who in the case of late eighteenth-century Cairo were organized into a gang.

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The best case study of disabled people in any part of the Islamic Middle East is Sara Scalenghe's Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500—1800.