Asfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

“A remarkable, highly original, and elegantly written history of the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane, or ʿAṣfūriyyeh. Joelle Abi-Rached insightfully links the changing fortunes of this Quaker foundation to the history of a society wracked by wars and sectarian conflict. Despite, or perhaps because of its own resolutely nonsectarian character, it ultimately lost its battle to survive, and it now lies in ruins, mute but vivid testimony to the decline and breakdown of both state and society in late twentieth-century Lebanon.”—Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, and from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine “This beautifully written book, based on impeccable scholarship, is more than a political history of psychiatry in Lebanon through a study of the birth and death of one mental hospital; it will become an indispensable text for those who wish to understand imperialism and its subjects, changing ideas of normality and pathology, and the relations between religious and medical authority, as they played out in the ‘modernization’ of the Middle East.”—Nikolas Rose, Professor of Sociology, King’s College London“In this book, the innovative and meticulous historian Joelle Abi-Rached takes on a topic long taboo in the Middle East: mental illness. Although the book introduces many new insights in this regional context, it also offers a window into the impact of psychiatry and mental illness in other societies uncomfortable with the breadth of such central parts of modern life. This is an important new book for anyone concerned about the relationship of instability and stability in an age of wars and repeated changes.”—Leila Fawaz, Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Tufts University