Negotiating Cure: Blindness, Spiritual Healing, and Biomedical Modernity in 1960s Egypt

This study employs discourse analysis to examine the representation of blindness and healing in the 1968 Egyptian film Kandil Om Hashem. The film dramatizes the cultural practice of seeking cures for visual impairment through the blessings (baraka) of religious shrines, positioning this faith-based approach in direct conflict with scientific treatment. Moving beyond a purely medical model, the analysis reveals how the film constructs blindness as a culturally embedded experience in which societal beliefs and traditions shape perceptions of the body, disability, and cure. I argue that the central narrative tension between theological and scientific paradigms reflects a broader socio-cultural negotiation of modernity in 1960s Egypt, particularly among marginalized communities for whom spiritual practices offered accessible and culturally legitimate healing. Framed by Modernization Theory and the biopsychosocial model of disability, the analysis contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on disability studies in non-Western contexts and the enduring role of cultural belief systems in modern health.