CITIES are rightfully defined as the engines of civilization. They are contexts of human progress, asylums for the emancipated in the normal sequence of descriptions. In contrast, Islamic cities, a term evolved by western scholars, are often denoted as frozen, non-evolving and stagnant physical objects, by both western and Muslim writers.
The concept of the Islamic city has always maintained a central place for discussion and debate. The first model, a framework of an ideal Muslim community was the all encompassing, al-Medina. Although this model was layered with other urban typologies and Muslims came in contact with other societies as well, yet the idea of the Medina as a framework of an ideal Islamic city remained deeply etched in the minds of Muslim philosophers, legal and religious communities.
Travellers of mediaeval times, such as Ibne Battuta, provide merely a descriptive text which is typological in nature and does not situate the city in topographical context. Though some geographers, travellers and historians describe the changes taking place in Muslim urban centres, but they do not go a step further to provide reasons for these shifts. Even in occasions when they do contextualize the evolution of the city it is not in a religious perspective, rather from a social, environmental or historical standpoint.
The debates and ideas pertaining to the Islamic city begins with Weber, who established in his book, The City the features of European urbanism, as a requirement for settlements to qualify as a city. In determining these necessary characteristics and functions, Weber notices that Islamic regions lack some of these, hence proclaims an inherent inadequacy of these settlements to even gain the status of a city. The Occident cities, according to Weber, in contrast to their Oriental counterparts, entail a comprehensive structure of political institutions giving rise to community representation and participation. He outlined five important characteristics of a complete city: markets, fortifications (walls), urban forms of associations, partial autonomy and a court administering partly autonomous law. The Islamic city lacked the last two marks. It did not possess municipal institutions or law and did not enjoy any legal privileges provided by the state. Except for rare exceptions, the Islamic cities were largely devoid of autonomy.
Weber’s colonist approach is shared by the writings of other contemporaries of his period such as Von Grunebaum and Le Toumeau. The underlining problem of analysis of these, and other authors is their simplistic and uncritical classification of all Islamic cities into an unchanging ‘type’. The ‘typical’ Muslim city would thus contain a central mosque, palace and baths, residential quarters and a market place arranged in an irregular maze of street networks. Though all Muslim cities have contained components of this type at some point but the relationship between these parts has evolved with the changing importance of religion and the claim of its ‘Islamic essence’ remained unexplained.
The first generation of writers formulated a stereotypical image of the Islamic city, as a container of fixed morphological and legal constituents attributed to Islam. William Marcais’s essay L’ Islamisme et la vie urbaine established a notion of the Islamic city which was adopted by many nineteenth century writers. Marcais attributed the urbanity of the Muslim city as a function of its relationship with Islam. Religion was the defining factor. And shaping the form of any Islamic city as described by William Marcais was the Friday congregational mosque surrounded by a market place and public baths. This elementary sketch of Muslim cities formed the basis for later additions and development. George Marcais further elaborated this idea through his writings on the marketplace or suq in a typical urban situation. The attitude of the oriental scholars is best understood through the words of Ernest Renan: “The mosque, like the synagogue and the church, is a thing essentially urban. Islamism is a religion of cities.”
Hugh Kennedy, author of the article, From Polis to Medina: Urban Change in Late Antique an Early Islamic Syria analyzes the process of urban transformation of the towns of late antiquity that took place under the Arab Muslim rule. He examines two related issues of this urban evolution. First the chronology of changes, when they came about and how far changes were taken under the Arabs. Second, the possible reasons for these changes. In the first part of the article, Kennedy studies the various aspects of the changing physical form of the city, like the end of the classical theatre and the addition of the mosque as a new public building. Kennedy discusses the model formulated by Sauvaget (which suggested that changes occurred during a period of anarchy and weak government) as holding no firm evidence. He reconstructs this view in light of historical background — that many of these transformations and decay had already set in before the Muslim conquests.
The development of the urban fabric, according to Kennedy, often regarded as a process of decay may in fact have been a result of increased commercial activity, which in turn led to the pressure on public open spaces and encroachment. Kennedy proposes that the transformation of the classical polis to the Islamic Medina between the sixth and the twelfth centuries was a product of long-term social, economic and cultural determinants. And not that of administrative incompetence or aesthetic insensitivity.
There is also an unnecessary emphasis on the “urbanity” of Islam — any expanding society with common aspirations and beliefs would locate themselves collectively and establish urban settlements with the increase in population.
Von Grunebaum moves conveniently between a body of research, picking what best suits his analysis, and putting it together without reference or critical evaluation. The bandwagon of the now firmly typified, Islamic city is joined by other Oriental and Arab scholars like Ismail and De Phanol, whose conviction of the ‘rightedness’ of the classical European city is echoed in his words:
“Irregularity and anarchy seem to be the most striking qualities of the Islamic cities. The effect of Islam is essentially negative. It substitutes for a solid unified collectivity, a shifting and inorganic assemblage of districts; it walls off and divides the face of the city.”
Contributions of a number of other writers are also based on Grunebaum’s stereotype and neatly add to the construction of the myth. Hourani addresses the question of what makes a city ‘Islamic’. He begins by making the point that even though the cities lacked the features, yet they were prosperous and growing urban centres. Although Hourani begins to question the construction of the concept in relation to Islam and informs us of the variety in each of these cities.
With the consolidation of the pure Islamic ideals and its manifestation in the typical Muslim town, a number of writers acquired it as a referential point for other related studies. Heinz Gaube’s investigation on the physical history of Iranian cities, for example, is based on the premise of their regional differences in relation to typical Islamic cities. Thus, even when variations were acknowledged, they were not explored in their own contexts but against the features of the standard. Bakhtiar and Ardalan both working on the cities of Islamic Persia drew the analogy of the Islamic city to cosmic organization. Though the authors application of the Sufi philosophy to the urban physical structure may seem far fetched, it can be looked as an initiative to establish its own grounds for understanding. Nevertheless the influence of the topological Islamic city is evident in their representation of the city. Their model, like others, is a transparent layer over the solid stereotype.
The tradition is carried up-to the 1980s by Samuel Noe working on Lahore (Pakistan), Beskim Hakim on the city of Tunis and J Wagstaff on the analysis of the creation and development of towns in the Middle East bearing a resemblance to Cairo. Hakim, in his book Arabic Islamic Cities, goes back to early sources of Arab jurists, geographers and historians. Yet his sources reveal a reliance on the idea of early orientalist scholars, Marcais brothers and Grunebaum. He also endorses the role of Islamic Law in the formation of the Muslim city.
It is this chain of orientalist scholarship that both Janet Abu-Lughod and Nezar Al Sayyad find comparable to the practices of Isnad, or the chain of authority in Islam,
“It is ironic that Arab scholars working on the subject of the Muslim city chose not to contradict the existing authoritative body of literature produced by orientalists in spite of their awareness of some of its fallacies. It is even more ironic that they chose not to return to the early Arab sources but instead adopted many unproven notions nurtured by Westerners about the Muslim city. Their desire to gain legitimacy among their European peers led them to participate in the academic construction of a myth and the institutionalization of inaccurate knowledge on the Muslim city.”
It can be summarized from the above discussion that the advent of the concept of the Islamic city came about as a reaction to the Weberian notion of the Western ideal and the Muslim city failing to meet these ideals. The first set of writings, hence reflect a kind of defence mechanism which aimed to contradict Weber’s criteria. Massignon challenged Weber’s stand by attempting to demonstrate that guild like institutions of professional organizations did exist and were an active part of city life. He attributed communal solidarity in Muslim society to such corporations which developed within the structure of turuq or the brotherhood of mystics. In few words, these writers were reacting to Weber’s biased opinion and attempting to establish that there is an Islamic city because it possesses these set of elements, which are equivalent to the elements in the European cities, but may not manifest themselves in a purely Western framework. The concept was picked up and built upon, and was perhaps even a fashionable subject for scholarly writings for the next five decades.
Again, scholars like Edward Said have reminded us that this classification is not only a result of the formalist approach of orientalist to history but reflects the biased position of the writers who directed the field of historic research through their political power.
Within the age of the acceptance of the typical Islamic city, there were scholars who had deviated from this path and began to question the approach. Robert Brunschvig, is perhaps one of the earliest writers who traced the evolution of the physical pattern in relation to Muslim law. He concluded a direct relationship between the two in view of the role of the Muslim jurists in the decision making process of the cities. Claude Cahen and Jean Aubin whose articles appear in The Islamic City, and who are also cited by Hourani suggest that many of the elements attested to the Islamic city can be found in other mediaeval cities — such as the Italian, the Byzantine or even to the Chinese or Central Asian city to some degree. Cahen also contested Massignon’s theory of guilds in Muslim cities and showed that these professional organizations should not be understood as European guilds, since they were controlled entirely by the State. S Goiten simply argues that the absence of an equivalent Arabic world for guilds indicates its absence.
S Stern in his article The Constitution of the Islamic City, moves from declaring the absence of autonomous municipal institutions in Islamic societies leading to a lack of corporative institutions to “the absence in Islam of corporations in general”. He condemns Massignon’s entire theory as bogus and his argument of the Ismaili origin of the guilds as historically unsound. According to Stern, Massignon’s dual interests in Ismailism and organization of labour in modern Islamic communities led him to combine the two and speculate. However, Stern’s evaluation of limited public representation and power due to lack of autonomous bodies, leading to very few instances of civil movements which were “nothing comparable with the results of the communal movements in Western Europe” — is not historically correct. Islamic history provides several examples of civil revolts which in many instances wiped out dynasties in a matter of days. More important is his evaluation of the ‘looseness’ of the structure of the city owing to absence of a ‘constitution’ establishing guidelines and restrictions.
Ira Lapidus’s work Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages was one of the first endeavours to divorce the concept, from its topological position and study of the city according to its own criteria. Lapidus identified the structure of the Muslim society as composed of subsidiary groups with specific functions and authority instead of a unitary social, political, or corporate institutions. Thus the urban form was a product of the relationship between these groups which constituted the government of Islamic cities. He recognized these groups as the religious leaders or ulama, military elite, merchants and notables, and the common population. This social pattern manifested itself in the configuration and development of the Muslim urban organization. Lapidus’s work was not complemented by any writers working primarily with the physical characteristics of the city.
The ideas of the typical Muslim city, however, were largely favoured, perhaps due to the following main reasons: (a) Reluctance of writers to question a concept that had been developed for decades (Albert Hourani’s writings, for example, as discussed earlier). Janet Abu-Lughod summarizes this effectively, “My very own book on Cairo fell into the trap set by the Orientalists by accepting many of the earlier authorities about the nature of the Islamic city. The edifice they had built over the years seemed to me a string and substantial one. Only gradually did it become clear how much a conspiracy of copying and glossing had yielded this optical illusion”, and (b) simplistic generalizations which was easily comprehensible and comfortable to the orientalist mind.
The turning point in this steady discourse occurred with the publication of Said’s Orientalism which clearly declared the conspiracy of orientalist constructs — to the extent that it had shaped the Muslims own perception of their reality. Said’s observation is confirmed in the case of the Islamic city, by reactions of some nationalist scholars to the revisionist ideas of the Islamic city. The philosophy of distinctive urban features of Islamic cities has such a strong hold that attempts to recognize them as separate and unique entities was understood as an attack on the “Islamic” city. Thus, this deterministic attitude refusing to see beyond the apparent physical reality was not limited to the orientalist thought and began to express itself in different forms.
CITIES are rightfully defined as the engines of civilization. They are contexts of human progress, asylums for the emancipated in the normal sequence of descriptions. In contrast, Islamic cities, a term evolved by western scholars, are often denoted as frozen, non-evolving and stagnant physical objects, by both western and Muslim writers.
