The Study of Islamic Urbanism: An Historiographic Essay

Author(s): NEZAR ALSAYYAD

Source: Built Environment (1978-), Vol. 22, No. 2, Islamic Architecture and Urbanism (1996), pp.
91-97
Published by: Alexandrine Press
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 THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC URBANISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

The Study of Islamic Urbanism:

An Historiographic Essay
NEZAR ALSAYYAD

The idea of a particularly Islamic city was first proposed by Western scholars
operating within an Orientalist perspective. Later, their ideas were discredited
when seen to be part of a larger pattern of derogatory stereotypical scholarship.
The recent rise of nationalist ideologies in the Middle East has, however, made it
difficult for many scholars to free themselves from these early positions. Scholarship
on the Islamic city is now in a position to return to more fundamental questions
about the nature and meaning of Islamic cities and to detailed analysis of the
specific individual and institutional forces that have shaped them.

The present times have brought about a Conceptual Foundations and

resurgence of Islamic regimes in many
countries in the Arab and Muslim world,
and the question of an Islamic city has once
again come to the fore. It is useful in
addressing this renewed interest to realize
that the idea of a particularly Islamic city
Uneven Assumptions
The first interest in the West in the nature
of the Islamic city was spurred by the
writings of the Marcais brothers. Their work
is still cited in most books and articles on

has an historiography that is several gener
ations long. The idea of the Islamic city has
also survived considerable political shifts in
the production of scholarship.
Interest in the topic of the Islamic city
dates from the early decades of the twentieth
century. It was first represented in the
writings of several European scholars whose
work was mainly the product of the colonial
regimes of France and Britain. This gener
ation of early researchers provided the West
with the basic surveys of many Muslim
cities. An examination of the material
produced by them, and how this has been
viewed by later writers, may help identify
the origins of some current research assump
tions and trends that dominate the field of
Muslim urbanism.
Muslim cities because it provides a general
framework within which to pursue further
examination of particulars. In a classic article
published in 1928, 'L'lslamisme et la Vie
Urbaine', William Marcais introduced the
idea that Islam was essentially an 'urban'
religion that had produced a civilization
whose essence was its cities. In this article
Marcais contended that Friday prayers in
the congregational mosque were a reflection
of the necessity of urban living for the
continued survival of Islam. He then described
what he called 'the quintessential Islamic
city', which he claimed was centred around
a Friday mosque, a nearby market, and a
series of public baths.
The ideas introduced by William Marcais
in the 1920s and 1930s were followed up by

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 ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM
his brother George in the 1940s, and by
Roger LeTourneau in the 1950s. In two
articles published in 1940 and 1945, George
Marcais identified what he considered the
unique morphology of a Muslim city, with
ethnically segregated residential quarters and
hierarchically ordered bazaars. LeTourneau's
work on Fez, culminating in a 1957 book,
continued this line of research. It too, how
ever, relied on a specifically North African
model of the Islamic city which over
emphasized the centrality of the Friday
mosque and the market and the importance
of public baths as general features of Muslim
cities. The intent of this emphasis was clearly
to establish the difference between the Islamic
city and its medieval European counterpart.
Operating in a different region was
another French Orientalist, Jean Sauvaget.
His work on the Syrian cities of Damascus
(1934) and Aleppo (1941) drew a slightly
different picture, showing how Muslim cities
evolved from pre-Islamic origins. Sauvaget's
line of inquiry was followed up in the 1950s
by another French scholar, Xavier De
Planhol, who contrasted new towns estab
lished by the Muslim Arabs with Middle
Eastern towns of Greco-Roman origin taken
over by the Muslims. De Planhol's model of
a Muslim city, like that of Sauvaget,
emphasized a linear bazaar, an elevated
citadel, and irregular alleyways feeding the
residential quarters. De Planhol was one of
the first scholars to put a special derogatory
spin on the meaning of urban form in Islam.
For instance, he wrote (1959, p23.):
Irregularity and anarchy seem to be the most
striking qualities of 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 up
the face of the city. By a truly remarkable
paradox this religion that inculcates an ideal of
city life leads directly to a negation of urban
order.
The choice of words here is a clear
indication of a specific norm which equated
regularity with order and development, and
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associated it with the West, while irregu
larity was considered an Islamic trait
reflective of urban chaos.
By the 1950s, then, two different models
of Muslim urbanism had emerged within
Western scholarship. One was based on
examples from North Africa, the other on
examples from the central Middle East.
Neither of these models, however, incor
porated much about the characteristic
institutional structure or social organization
of Muslim society.
It took the work of Gustave von Grunebaum
to bring all these strands together to produce
a fully mature Orientalist picture of the typical
Muslim city. After it appeared in 1955, Von
Grunebaum's classic article 'The Structure of
the Muslim Town' was widely used to teach
and discuss the form of the Muslim city. In
this work, Von Grunebaum merged the
work of the Marcais brothers on Morocco
and Sauvaget on Syria into a compromise of
elements, which he called 'the typical
physical form of a Muslim city'. Then, using
Kroeber's culturalist theory,1 he married
this formalist analysis to the institutional
structure and social organization of urban
Islam identified by the Orientalists Massignon
and Brunschvig. Von Grunebaum's work
showed all of the negative, reductionist ten
dencies of Orientalist scholarship. His desire
to define the Muslim city in terms of equiva
lent institutions found in medieval Europe
led him to analyse Islam as a unitary phenom
enon, incapable of development and change.
Ironically, by the 1960s the Von
Grunebaumian stereotype had become
accepted by many scholars from the Islamic
world itself. This could be observed in the
work of R. Jairazbhoy, Abdel Ismail, and
Ahmed Monier. Jairazbhoy (1965), an Indian
scholar, used examples from Mughal India
and the Arab Middle East to agree with Von
Grunebaum's notion that irregularities in
the form of Muslim cities were a result of
the absence of controlling authorities. He
suggested that Islam's desire to ensure the
safety and independence of its urban
 THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC URBANISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHY ESSAY
inhabitants resulted in an appropriate form
of residential segregation and commercial
grouping. However, when it came to the
form of the city, Jairazbhoy's description
was almost identical to that of Von
Grunebaum. A check of his references
reveals that although he did not rely
explicitly on Von Grunebaum, he cited
exactly the same sources.
As Jairazbhoy's books spread the Von
Grunebaumian stereotype on the Indian
subcontinent, the work of Ismail (1969) and
Monier (1971) achieved the same effect in
the Middle East. In the work of both these
Egyptian researchers the Von Grunebaumian
stereotype was used in its entirety as an
underlying basis for discussion.
With hindsight, then, it appears that the
concept of the Muslim city first evolved,
developed and matured as a result of cumu
lative research done by 'Orientalist' scholars
from the West and 'Oriental' scholars from
the Muslim world. These writers largely
drew on one another in a chain of authority
that went all the way back to the Marcais
brothers and Sauvaget. Ironically, a similar
chain may also be found in the Arab
Chronicles, which all writers used as primary
research evidence. As a result of this first
wave of literature, researchers were led to
believe that Islam could be credited with
significantly increasing the degree of urban
ization in the Middle East and with introducing
a new urban form: the Muslim city. These
two central issues were to remain un
challenged until Ira Lapidus's important
work on Muslim cities of the central Middle
East in the late Middle Ages.
Revisionist Challenges and
Scholarly Responses
Lapidus's research (1967) marked the begin
ning of a different series of books on Muslim
cities that formed a second identifiable wave
of scholarship. This was justifiably critical of
earlier literature, and established what I call
the revisionist phase.
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Lapidus concentrated on exploring the
urban structure of three major Muslim cities
- Aleppo, Cairo and Damascus - during the
Mamluk era. Instead of testing the Weberian
proposition2 that the urban entities of the
Muslim Middle East were not really cities,
he reformulated the issue by asking what
forces established Muslim cities as functioning
urban political units. He concluded by
suggesting that Muslim urban society was
not an entity defined by any single political
or socioeconomic body, but rather a society
which divided essential powers and functions
among its different component groups. This
system of relations constituted the gov
ernment of Muslim cities, whose urban form
was the outcome of interactions between
these subsidiary groups.
Lapidus's principal contribution lay in his
attempt to identify the subsidiary groups
that constituted the urban structure of
Muslim cities - namely, the military elites,
the Ullama or religious leaders, and the local
notables and merchants. This model, which
contains Weberian traces, remains useful
in analysing the cities of the Middle East
within the temporal framework of the
Middle Ages.
A colloquium held at Oxford University
in 1965 (the proceedings of which were
published as The Islamic City, edited by
Albert Hourani and S.M. Stern, 1970) was
another important contribution to this second
wave of literature. This volume contained a
number of excellent essays covering different
aspects of Muslim urbanism. In the intro
ductory article, Hourani offered distinctions
based on time, place and function that he
claimed must qualify any discussion of
Muslim cities. The central question of the
book became whether Muslim cities in the
Middle East have common features at all,
and, if so, whether these were explainable in
terms of Islam. Many other contributions to
the book were actually refutations of earlier
research. For example, Stern emphasized
that the absence of professional organizations
was only one example of the absence of
 ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM
organizational bodies in Islamic society.
Other contributors also demonstrated that
many of the characteristics previously thought
to define the Islamic city were typical of
medieval cities of both East and West.
During this period of challenge to earlier
ideas about Muslim cities the publication of
Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism (1979)
had a major impact. Said argued that early
Orientalist research was imbued with the
idea of the Orient as mysterious, unchanging,
and ultimately inferior. This powerful position
won over many researchers on the topic, and
the effect of Said's work could be observed
in the different tone of the many books on
the Islamic city published in the 1980s.
It may be somewhat coincidental that
these writings paralleled the rise of funda
mentalist regimes in many Muslim countries
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The emer
gence of these new nationalistic attitudes
brought about an increasing awareness of
the religious values implicit in Muslim
cultural systems. But one result was that
Muslim governments were obliged to re
examine the subject of the Muslim city in
order to devise operational guidelines for
building and planning practices.
Looking back, it is now possible to classify
the schools of scholarship of the 1980s and
early 1990s into three distinct groups: the
politically motivated, the philosophically
inspired, and the socially informed. While
the three groups employ very different
methods in the study of Islamic urbanism,
they share the unwavering belief that the
Islamic way of life was reflected in the form
and culture of its cities.
Recent literature on Muslim urbanism,
mainly published by international bodies or
government institutions, has perhaps most
noticeably reflected the views of the first
group. For example, UNESCO sponsored a
colloquium headed by R.B. Serjeant in 1980
to establish the unique institutional qualities
of the Muslim city through a critical
treatment of its individual component urban
functions (Sergeant, 1980). And the respected
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Arabic journal from Kuwait Aim El-Fikr
published a special issue during the same year
entitled 'The Islamic City', containing contri
butions in a similar vein from well-known
Arab scholars that maintained a somewhat
nationalistic tone which reflected the authors'
pride in the history of Arab culture.
Several conferences on Middle Eastern and
Muslim urbanism inside and outside the
Muslim world also took place at this time.
A variety of organizations were active in
sponsoring such meetings. One was the Aga
Khan Award for Architecture, which also
published several interesting books oriented
to serve the award programme, and whose
philosophy can be clearly linked to educa
tional objectives propagated through the
institution's educational unit at Harvard and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.3
Another was the Organization of Arab
Towns, which sponsored several international
conferences and which published one prin
cipal volume that dealt with the identity and
evolution of the Muslim city from past to
present and offered strategies for future
planning (Serageldin and El-Sadek, 1981).
And the Saudi government sponsored several
conferences on the Islamic City, most notably
the one held at King Faisal University which
attempted to identity the so-called 'Islamic
essence of architectures and urban existence'
in the Muslim world (Germen, 1983).
Another important conference, which
clearly displayed these rising nationalistic
tendencies, was held under the sponsorship
of the Professors World Peace Academy. Its
proceedings (Saggaf, 1987) contained work
from different interdisciplinary contributors
covering historic and contemporary issues
in Middle Eastern urbanism. In a brief
introduction, the editor, Abdul Aziz Saggaf,
a distinguished Yemeni scholar, explained
that the book would not treat the Islamic
city as a historical phenomenon, but as a
contemporary entity capable of providing a
harmonious environment for its inhabitants.
Saggaf's position is a good example of
the reactionary tendencies of this group of
 THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC URBANISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
nationalist scholars. He began by quoting a
controversial paragraph from Lapidus (1967,
p.93, as quoted in Saggaf, 1987):
We can no longer think of Muslim cities as
unique. . . None of the characteristic bodies of
Muslim society were specifically urban forms
of organization. . . Cities were physical entities
but not unified social bodies defined by
characteristically Muslim qualities.
He then responded to this passage by
providing a view that stood for the position
of many of his colleagues (Saggaf, 1987, p.3):
Of course, most scholars take issue with
Professor Lapidus since Muslim cities do have
certain distinctive features. They have a unique
layout and physical design, the central focus
point of which is always a Maidan around a
castle or palace on one hand and the central
mosque on the other hand.
It was ironic that in reaction to a perceived
dismissal by Lapidus of the concept of the
Muslim city Saggaf reverted to the very
model provided by Von Grunebaum that
had been the source of many problems in
scholarship on Muslim urbanism. It was as
if in defence of the concept of the Muslim
city it was now legitimate to use the work of
the Orientalist who had introduced it, even
though almost all the original Orientalist
assumptions had been proven wrong. Not
all research on Islamic urbanism in the
1980s, however, followed the above line of
analysis. Although their work was not as
widely disseminated, a second group of
researchers attempted to bring together the
study of Muslim philosophy and Muslim
architecture and urban form. This is the
group I have referred to above as having a
philosophical inspiration. The use of Sufism
(as one branch of Islamic religious and
spiritual practice) by this group has led to
new levels of understanding of urban form.
The centrality of the mosque and the royal
quarters, for example, has now received a
new interpretation. The early Orientalist
notion was that the centrality of these
elements was a representation of centralized
authority. But in the work of the Iranian
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born scholars Nader Ardlan and Laleh
Bakhtiar (1973) this original notion has been
replaced by the idea that the centrality
emerged from a latent spiritual belief related
to the concept of oneness in Islam. Other
scholars working within this philosophical
tradition have engaged in similar investi
gations using Arabic language, literature
and mythology to interpret city form. Although
this group has not produced any substantial
work, they have made interesting connections
and constructed a deeper complexity.
Finally, a third group of scholars working
in the 1980s and early 1990s has sought
social explanations for the configurations of
urban form within the Islamic city. Those in
this group are rather diverse in their
orientations, but by concentrating on socio
cultural structures, they have constructed
case studies that are later generalized to
encompass the 'Islamic City' as a generic
type. Among the noteworthy works produced
in this category are those published in
Arabic by Jamel Akbar (1988) and Saleh Al
Hathloul (1992). Using Islamic law rulings,
rendered to resolve urban conflicts and
building disputes, they have identified the
process by which social and cultural struc
tures ultimately shaped Muslim cities.
Other works along the same lines, however,
have not been as successful. Either they
have isolated the problem by concentrating
on the city as a kit of parts, thus falling into
the formalist trap.4 Or else they have
attempted to analyse the city regionally
within politically defined geographic entities
that have not existed as consistent historical
units.5 These later studies do some injustice
to the socially informed school of thought,
since their tendencies toward reductionism
or generalization result in an overly deter
ministic view of urbanism.
Scholarship Reoriented
The above discussion reveals the clear split
in purpose that currently abides at the centre
of the investigation of Muslim urbanism. At
 ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM
a time when revisionist and anti-Orientalist
literature has overturned many basic assump
tions about Muslim cities, many scholars -
particularly the formalists and the regionalists
- have not been able to see beyond the
immediate physical qualities of cities, and
have thus had difficulty letting go of the old
stereotypical model. What conclusions can
be drawn from such a historiography that
seemingly comes full circle?
At the outset I pointed out how the idea
of a stereotypical Muslim city was constructed
by a series of Western authorities who drew
upon a small sample of cities from a variety
of locations. This stereotype was then elab
orated in concert with the development of
Orientalist scholarship. As the flawed basis
of such Orientalist work became evident,
the stereotype was challenged by a number
of revisionist writers. However, aspects of
the original stereotype have now been
re-championed by some Arab and Muslim
scholars for political and nationalistic
reasons.
Edward Said has already described such a
state of affairs (1979, p.263):
No scholar or school is a perfect representative of
some ideal type or school in which, by virtue of
national origin or the accidents of history, he
participates. Yet in so relatively insulated and
specialized a tradition as orientalism. . . there is
in each scholar some awareness, partially
conscious and partly unconscious, of national
tradition, if not national ideology.
The brief description of scholarship on the
Islamic city I have presented here shows
how attempts to describe Muslim urbanism
have been severely affected by the biases
and beliefs of both early and late scholars.
One source of these problems for early
writers was that many were Christians
attempting to come to grips with a powerful
alternative force. The image of the Muslim
city was only part of the larger image of
'Mohammedism' (Said, 1979, p.60). Thus,
instead of observing the unique conditions
of particular cities, these early writers
needed to fit the cities into a convenient
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mold. For later writers the problem has
concerned a protective nationalism. They
have clung to the idea of the Islamic city as
something that is particularly their own.
And in doing so they have conveniently
ignored the flawed nature of the early
scholarship that produced this idea.
In this article I have attempted to raise a
set of questions relevant to a discussion of
Muslim city form. My intention has simply
been to reveal the linkages between a parti
cular system of ideas and the nature of
conclusions reached. It should be clear that
what is needed today is a culturally informed,
ethnically conscious, and gender-sensitive
interdisciplinary approach. Only an approach
that can both analyse the intents of the
creators of Islamic cities,6 and account for
the dynamic balance that developed between
their inhabitants and their governments can
explain why these urban agglomerations have
survived as cultural entities until today.
NOTES
1. A.L. Kroeber's classic work, The Nature of Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) was
used by many scholars of this generation.
2. The work of Max Weber remains an important
foundation for any work on the sociology of
urbanism, particularly his book The City (New
York: Free Press, 1958).
3. For more on these seminars and programmes,
see Sibel Bozdogan's review essay The Aga Khan
Award for Architecture: A Philosophy of
Reconciliation. Journal of Architectural Education
45(3) May, 1992, pp.182-88. Also see Renata
Holod (ed.) Architecture and Community
(Singapore: AKAA, 1983); Sherban Cantacuzino
(ed.) Architecture in Continuity (Singapore:
AKAA, 1985); and Ismail Serageldin (ed.) Space
for Freedom (Singapore: AKAA, 1989).
4. See, for example, Besim Hakin's Arabic-Islamic
Cities: Building and Planning Principles (London:
Kegan Paul, 1986), which suffers both from a
formalist oversimplification of urban form and
social-deterministic generalizations of how cities
are created. For more on this, see my review
article Arab Muslim Cities. Design Book Review,
No. 14 (Spring, 1988).
 THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC URBANISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHY ESSAY
5. An example of this may be Masoud
Kheirabadi's Iranian Cities (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1991).
6. Recent work in this direction may include
Hitcham Djait's Al-Kufa: Naissance de la Ville
Islamique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986);
and my own book Cities and Caliphs: On the
Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 1991), from which this paper
borrows considerably.
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