Urbanity in the Middle Eastern studies and the paradigm of Max Weber’s

Islamic City

Searching for an explanation for the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the occident as a

birthplace of capitalism, Max Weber proposed a theory of urban life and development

taking the medieval European city as an ideal type. He suggested that there were five

distinguishing marks of the city in the full sense: fortifications, markets, a court

administering an autonomous law, distinctively urban forms of association, and at least

partial autonomy.1 In this sense, Weber maintained, the city had fully existed in Europe,

never in Asia, only in part and for short periods in the Near East. The first publication of

The City coincided with the advent of the French orientalist school of urban studies,2

which contributed to the importance of Weber’s concept for the development of the

discourse on the Islamic city.

Establishing his concept of the city, Weber clearly distinguished between two

different perspectives – the economic and the political one. Economically defined, the

city was “a settlement the inhabitants of which live primarily off trade and commerce

rather than agriculture.”3 According to Weber, central to this definition was the city

market that often converted the settlement into a city. Within the economic concept, a

further differentiation could be made – that between consumer and producer city. The

1 Max Weber, The City (Munich, 1921), translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1958, p. 81. This and all further references are to the 1958 edition.2 For the French Orientalist school of urban studies see André Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views,” in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 21:1, 1994, pp. 3-18 and R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.3 Max Weber, The City, p. 66.

1

consumer city was characterized by the presence in it and the decisive economic

importance of large consumers while the thriving of the producer city was based on the

location in it of factories, manufactures, or homework industries supplying outside

territories. However, Weber admitted that actual cities represent mixed types and should

be classified by their prevailing economic component.4

From the political perspective, if a locale performed political or administrative

functions, it could be held to be a city even if it did not qualify as a city economically.

Urban economic policy, moreover, could be determined by a sovereign to whom political

dominion of the city with its inhabitants belonged.5 The political definition, however, also

had its deficiencies – villages, like cities, could both be strong economically and even

possess their own authorities. The ideal city type that emerged in the occident during the

Middle Ages, as established by Weber, conformed to both the economic and political

concepts. According to Weber, “[t]he city of the Medieval Occident was economically a

seat of trade and commerce, politically and economically a fortress and garrison,

administratively a court district and socially an oath-bound confederation.”6

In Weber’ concept, the city’s role as a fortress was very significant although, like

the economic and political functions, it was far form universal. While some cities, like

those of Sparta, either never had walls or remained open for long periods, in certain

frontier regions not only cities but even villages fortified themselves.7 Fortresses,

however, were important for the development of civic identity, with guard and garrison

duty representing the oldest specifically “civic” obligations. The first burghers were

bound as citizens to the performance of military duties which also predetermined 4 Ibid., pp. 69-70.5 Ibid., p. 74.6 Ibid., p. 104.7 Ibid., p. 75.

2

membership in their estates. Disposal of a castle, on the other hand, not only signified

military dominion over the country but also opened the way for the development of a

politically independent gentry. As Weber pointed out, in Northern Europe vassal

independence was bound up with enormous castle construction.8 The assumption of

military functions on the part of urban families together with their participation in the

civic economy played a crucial role for the development of the city towards the ideal

medieval type. Weber argued that this shattered the monopoly of the ruler who was

considered only to be primus inter pares in the ruling establishment or even simply as

equal.9 This leads us to the main theme in Weber’s analysis of the development of the

city, namely the development of an autonomous urban community.

The emergence of an urban community, according to Weber, was a phenomenon

observed only in the Occident. The revolutionary innovation of medieval occidental cities

in contrast to all others was the usurpation by the urbanites of the right to violate lordly

law. The new political equality allowed for the existence of municipal councils that

served as counter balance to the ruler. Participation in these councils was based on free

elections.10 According to Weber, by the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of

modern times nearly all cities in the occident were dominated by an urban council or a

corporation of burghers. In contrast to antiquity, when the individual could be a citizen

only as a member of his clan, in the new urban communities of the Middle Ages burghers

joined the citizenry as single persons. In the accomplishment of this fundamental change

Weber discerned the crucial role of Christianity and its contribution to the dissolution of

clan associations. The newly emerged commune was characterized by the burghers’

8 Ibid., pp. 76-78.9 Ibid., p. 79.10 Ibid., p. 94.

3

abidance to a common law which made it a guild of “legal associates” who formed an

autonomous status group.11

The oath-bound fraternity of burghers in the medieval occidental city was

strengthened over the course of the wars between the communes. The period of insecurity

accelerated the internal structuring of the communes, forcing the mass of the burghers to

join the sworn communal brotherhood. Weber stressed the importance of this period for

the regulation of the legal status of the urban commune. The purely personal oath-bound

confederations became permanent political associations and their members were treated

as urban citizens who were subjects to a special and autonomous law.12

The real participation of the burgher class in civic administration, however, was

closely related to the rise of the guilds which, according to Weber, could not be identified

simply as “guilds of artisans” but rather as political units which competed for power with

the patriciate. The success of the guilds led to the achievement of full political

independence and strong external power for the city. Membership in a guild provided

citizenship and, as far as internal administration is concerned, it could secure a place in

the municipal council.13 This extraordinary importance of the guilds in the occidental

city, however, led to their total transformation from an economical institution into a

“purely electoral association of gentlemen with access to communal offices.” In the

process, membership in the guilds came to be acquired through inheritance and purchase

rather than through apprenticeship and initiation.14

Another crucial factor in the development of the occidental city, as presented by

Weber, was the popolo – an association of economically varied elements ranging from 11 Ibid., p. 95.12 Ibid., p. 111.13 Ibid., p. 139.14 Ibid., p. 154.

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artisans to entrepreneurs that displaced the unruly burgher fraternities – which, in the

thirteenth century, led the fight against the noble families. As a political sub-community

it had its own official, finances, and military organization thereby functioning as a state

within a state. Once its legal institutions assumed shape, the popolo became so important

that often obtained universal importance for the populace. What is most important for

Weber’s argument, however, is the juridical autonomy of this urban institution. The

popolo not only had its own legislation but even at times managed to obtain priority of its

statutes over those of the commune.15

With the development of the patrimonial bureaucratic state, the occidental city, as

described by Weber, began to lose its distinguishing features. It was gradually

overwhelmed by the state and lost its characteristic autonomy. The administrative

structure of the city was transformed into “a representative corporation with status

privileges, independent only with respect to the circle of its corporate interests, but

without meaning for the administrative purpose of the state.”16

Weber’s concept, in which the medieval occidental city emerged as an ideal type,

was elaborated through constant comparisons and contrasts with the urban situation of

other regions of the world. It conformed to the contemporary level of knowledge and the

dominating paradigms in the perception of the world. For Weber the medieval commune

and the ancient polis were similar in essence as associations of citizens subject to a

special law; the essence of the oriental city, on the other hand, was defined as a series of

“absences” thus establishing it as a foil to the ideal occidental model. Edward Said has

pointed out that Weber’s and other early twentieth-century sociologists’ use of “types” as

15 Ibid., pp. 157-159.16 Ibid., p. 185.

5

analytical categories has both neatly associated them with Orientalism and enabled them

to influence the field considerably.17

According to Weber, the oriental, or Asiatic city, both in Antiquity and in the

Middle Ages, shared some of the features of the occidental city being often a fortress and

a center of trade. Despite these similarities, however, it lacked the defining characteristic

of the occidental city, namely its function as an autonomous urban community; even the

concept of a joint association representing a community of burghers per se was missing.

The oriental urbanites themselves did not really feel a strong attachment to the city –

bonds such as clan, tribal, or caste loyalty held precedence over the participation in an

urban community. Indicative of this significant difference between the occident and the

orient was the case of India where, according to Weber, the hereditary caste system

excluded the emergence of a citizenry and urban community. To put it in Weber’s words,

“[t]he triumph of ritualistic caste estrangements shattered the guild associations and royal

bureaucracies in alliance with the Brahmans swept away, except for vestiges, such trends

toward a citizenry and urban community in Northwestern India.”18 The Chinese urban

dweller, on the other hand, belonged to his family and native village, rather than to the

city he lived in.19

This prevalence of clan, tribal, or caste affiliation, as emphasized by Weber,

eliminated the possibility of civic confederations thereby preventing the development of

an urban community that was dependent on the emergence of the city fraternizations.20 In

these circumstances, an autonomous city law in the occidental sense could never develop;

17 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979, p. 259.18 Weber, The City, p. 84.19 Ibid., p. 81.20 Ibid., p. 119.

6

neither could the concept of the law as a rational creation.21 In Asia, as Weber

maintained, the very idea of a legal status of “citizenship” was unknown; so was the idea

of the city as a corporate unit. The lack of an autonomous city law was not the only

characteristic “absence” in the oriental city. The participation of its inhabitants in local

administration was also “out of question.” According to Weber, this was due to the

oriental city’s being the seat of a high official or ruler and thus under his direct

supervision.22

Another major difference between the occidental and oriental city, that explained

why civic development had not started in Asia but in Europe, Weber maintained, was the

urban military composition of the orient. In contrast to the situation in Europe, in the

orient the army was incorporated by the monarch into his own bureaucratic management.

The soldiers, drafted and equipped by the monarch, were therefore separated from

ownership of the means of warfare which led to their military helplessness as subjects.

Weber argued that no political community of citizens could arise on such a foundation.

While in the occident the individual conscript enjoyed military independence and the lord

of the army was dependent on the good will of its members, in the orient, despite the

financial power of the gilds and individuals, the urban residents could not unite and

effectively oppose the city lords in a military manner.23

In Weber’s juxtaposition of occident and orient, the strongest dichotomy was that

between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. In contrast to Christianity and its role

for the dissolving of clan associations, Islam never overcame the rural ties of Arabic

tribal and clan associations remaining the religion of a conquering society structured in

21 Ibid., pp. 81-82.22 Ibid., p. 82.23 Ibid., pp. 119-120.

7

terms of tribes and clans. During Muhammad’s time the Islamic state largely destroyed

the existing urban autonomy. In Weber’s argument Mecca appeared as a standard

reference for non-civic development. Despite the importance of some rich guilds, the

dominant military and political position of the Qurayshi family prevented the rise of a

government by guilds. Weber’s description of urban realities in Mecca and the contrast

with his ideal medieval city model deserves quotation at large: “The idea of an

association which could unite the city into a corporate unit was missing in Mecca. This

furnished its characteristic difference from the ancient polis and the early medieval Italian

commune. However, when all is said and done, this Arabic condition – of course omitting

specific Islamic traits or replacing them by Christian counterparts – may be taken to

typify the period before the emergence of the urban community association.”24 Weber

admitted that he made reference to Mecca in order to describe the typical civic conditions

before the emergence of the ideal medieval occidental commune. However, he argued

that until modern times civic life in Mecca had been characterized by the constant

competition of various authorities without fixed competences. Thus Weber contributed to

the creation of a frozen image of the Islamic city that never managed to overcome its pre-

communal condition.25

In a recent article discussing the historical sociology of the city and its

relationship with orientalism, Engin Işın has pointed out that historical sociology in the

way Max Weber, Henry Pirenne, and Lewis Mumford have written, has been very little

practiced in the past century; in contrast to the growth of urban history, historical

sociology has been neglected.26 The analytical frameworks, within which urbanists have 24 Ibid., p. 88.25 Ibid., p. 88.26 Engin F. Işın, “Historical Sociology of the City,” in Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Işın, eds., Handbook of Historical Sociology, London: Sage, 2003, p. 312.

8

been working, however, have been profoundly influenced by the historical sociology of

the city and its typologies. The essence of the occidental civitas described by Weber and

the orientalist discourse were interdependent. Weber borrowed from the orientalists the

notion of the stagnancy of Islamic society and contributed to the emerging field of

oriental urban studies with a typological framework of analysis.

Elaborating his concept of the city based on a cultural East-West dichotomy,

Weber rarely referred to any primary sources. As for the secondary literature he was

drawing on, he made use of the publications of eminent nineteenth-century scholars, such

as Theodor Mommsen and Henry Sumner Maine.27 Weber’s idea of the Islamic city,

especially his argument for Mecca as an epitome of non-civic development, was heavily

based on Snouck Hurgronje’s works which represented orientalism’s contemporary level

of development. Hurgronje’s refined studies of Islamic society, conforming to the

dominant colonial vision of the essence of the power-relationship between Orient and

Occident, naturally expressed the orientalist concept of the stagnancy of the world of

Islam and its role as a contrasting image of the West.28

The first publications in this new branch of orientalism were the product of the

work of French scholars on the cities of the Levant and North Africa between the 1920s

and 1950s.29 As André Raymond has pointed out, “[t]he doctrine of the Orientalists

concerning the Muslim city and Muslim town planning fits naturally into the fundamental

concept of Orientalism, according to which any phenomenon arising in the civilization of

a Muslim country is totally conditioned by Islam.”30 The approach of the French school

27 See, for instance, Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, Leipzig: Reimer & Hirsel, 1854-56; Henry Sumner Maine, Early History of Institutions, London: John Murray, 1875.28 For a discussion of Hurgronje’s contribution to the development of orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 209, 256.29 See note 2. 30 Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City,” p. 3.

9

of Islamic urban studies was based on the need for a detailed description that had to

facilitate political control. Influenced by Weber and the traditions of historical sociology,

the French orientalists formulated a model that was then applied to all Islamic territories.

Much like Weber, they read the salient features of the cities they were describing in terms

of a dichotomy between a progressive European and a stagnant Muslim world.

Conforming to Weber’s approach and employing well-developed orientalist schemes, the

French urbanists created a frozen image of an Islamic city that wasn’t changing over

time. This city was characterized by what it was not in comparison with the cities of

Antiquity and the European Middle Ages rather than by an analysis of its geographical,

political and social context.

The first researchers working in the field of the urban studies of the Middle East

were fascinated with antique urban planning and especially the ancient cities’ grid-

patterned layout. They lamented that the Islamic city with its irregular streets and cul-de-

sacs had lost the regularity and grandeur of its predecessor from classical antiquity. Thus

they conformed to Weber’s idea of the detrimental role of Islam on the urbanism of

classical antiquity. Since French colonization represented itself as re-establishing Roman

“imperium,” it followed the model of ancient town planning: the return to an orthogonal

layout, triumphing over the irregularity of Arab streets, was understood as a victory of

civilization and progress over the anarchy that had characterized Islamic urbanism.31

The second quarter of the twentieth century, though still dominated by an

orientalist attitude to the Middle East, witnessed some positive developments. Of

particular importance for the move toward a more balanced view of the Middle East and

its urban history was the work of Turkish scholars led by Ömer Lütfi Barkan. They

31 Raymond, Islamic City, Arab City, p. 4.

10

pointed at the existence and outstanding value of documents kept in the Ottoman

archives. Studies on the tax system and demography, extensively based on Ottoman

archival sources, began to appear in the 1930s.32 The use of this vast amount of sources –

qadi registers, tax documents, waqf deeds, among many others – radically transformed

the notion researchers had of the cities in the world of Islam. The examination of the qadi

registers shed light on law and administration and posed serious challenges to Weber’s

concept of the Islamic city as a non-administered one. Apart from emphasizing the

considerable role played by the qadis in the management of the city, new consideration

was given to institutions such as the trade guilds, the communities of the neighborhoods,

as well as those of religious and ethnic character. Despite some innovative attempts and

the achievements of the Ottomanists, however, the bulk of the research on the city in the

world of Islam remained focused on the Levant and North Africa in an attempt at

delineating an urban model that would be valid for all cities in the Muslim world.

The first sustained challenges to the Orientalist concept of the Islamic city were

not undertaken until the 1970s. Most of the contributions to the debate were published in

the proceedings of conferences, including those organized by Ira Lapidus in 196933 and

Albert Hourani and Samuel Stern in 1970.34 The articles included in the latter volume

addressed many aspects of the Islamic city paradigm, including the ideas proposed by

Weber. The new generation of scholars had evidently overcome the old attempts at

creating an ideal model of the city. Albert Hourani clearly expressed the doubts of recent

32 See, for instance, Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir İskân ve Kolonizasyon Metodu Olarak Vakıflar ve Temlikler,” in Vakıflar Dergisi, II, 1942, pp. 279-386; “Tarihi Demografi Araştırmaları ve Osmanlı Tarihi,” in Türkiyat Mecmuası, 10, pp. 1-26; “Quelques Observations sur l’organization économique et sociale des villes ottomanes, des XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in Recueil Société Jean Bodin, vol. II, 1955, pp. 289-311, 33 Ira M. Lapidus, ed., Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium on Ancient, Islamic and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.34 A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, eds., The Islamic City: A Colloquim, Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1970.

11

scholarship about the validity of the Islamic city model: “Over this wide area of the world

and these many centuries, can we really speak of something called the “Islamic city”?

Did cities in the Muslim world have any important features in common, and if so can

they be explained in terms of Islam, or must we look for other types of explanation?”35

The question regarding Islam’s role as a defining factor in the urbanism of the Middle

East was to be asked frequently in the next several decades. Hourani’s argument was that

urban life could not be expected to have taken the same form in all regions, not so much

because of any supposed differences of national or religious character, as because of

“varying soils and climates, different inheritances, and involvement in various

commercial systems.”36 He suggested that scholars should distinguish between the cities

of the different parts of the Islamic world – those of the western half, representing Greek,

Roman and Byzantine heritage, those in the area of Iranian culture, and those of the

Indian subcontinent, for instance. Within each area one should also be able to make

further sub-divisions, like those between the cities of North Africa, the Nile valley, and

the Levant, or between the cities of Mesopotamia, the Persian plateau, and Transoxania.

Addressing more explicitly Weber’s concept, Hourani agreed that Islam did not

recognize corporate personality except in a limited sense. This, however, was explained

with the spirit of Islamic social thought that went against the formation of limited groups

within which there might grow up an exclusive natural solidarity hostile to the all-

inclusive solidarity of an umma based on common obedience to God’s commands.37 The

development of autonomous municipal institutions, on the other hand, was prevented by

the fact that the power of the state was rooted in the city. The local bourgeoisie and the 35 A. H. Hourani, “The Islamic City in the Light of Recent Research,” in A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, eds., The Islamic City, p. 11.36 Ibid., p. 11.37 Ibid., p. 14.

12

‘ulama could not serve as the basis for the formation of local autonomous institutions

because they needed the government for maintenance of peace and security and,

moreover, for food supply and protection of the trade routes.

Again addressing Weber, Hourani argued that the autonomous cities of the

classical world and of medieval Europe were not the norm to which all cities at all times

had tended to approach but rather an exception which itself needs explanation. Hourani

rightly pointed out that Weber’s main problem was always to explain the emergence of

the rational, bureaucratic, industrial society of modern Europe; Weber’s emphasis on

Europe’s uniqueness made it easy to draw the inference that this unique society was the

norm and all others were arrested or diverted in their natural development towards it. It

would not however be true to say, Hourani argued, that because municipal privileges in

the world of Islam never existed, urban life never existed.38

In another important contribution to the 1970s volume on the Islamic city, Samuel

Stern set out to examine the character of civic life in Islam and the constitution of the

Islamic city and how these two distinguished it from the cities of other societies. The

“constitution” of the city was defined by Stern in the sense of the city’s character and

structure.39 Stern was determined not to deal with the frequently discussed material and

topographical aspects of the Islamic city but with its inner structure which, according to

him, was characterized by its looseness, i.e. the absence of corporate municipal

institutions. He began his exposition with an analysis of the antique heritage and its

influence on the development of the cities in the world of Islam. Stern made the argument

that Islamic civilization did not inherit the municipal institutions of Antiquity because,

38 Ibid., p. 15.39 S. M. Stern, “The Constitution of the Islamic City,” in A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, eds., The Islamic City, p. 25.

13

owing to their gradual decline, there was by the time of the Muslim conquest of the

eastern parts of the classical world nothing left to inherit. According to him, after a period

of a gradual and complicated decline, with the administrative reorganization and

centralization of Byzantium in the seventh century, municipal city government was

altogether destroyed. Therefore, since the municipal institutions had ceased to exist by

the time the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire were conquered by the Muslims,

the emerging Islamic civilization could not inherit and develop them. Thus Stern

criticized Weber who had attributed the absence of municipal institutions in Islam to the

tribal traditions of the Arabs.40

The problem of the relationship between Antiquity and Islam had become a major

theme in the discussions of Islamic society and the Middle Eastern city since the 1950s.

Samuel Stern’s convincing argument was only one of the many contributions. It

gradually appeared that many of the negative aspects that the Orientalists thought

characteristic of the Islamic city were apparent in the antique city and had resulted from

an urban evolution that spread over a few centuries. This argument was also expressed in

1985 by Hugh Kennedy in his authoritative article “From Polis to Madina.” Kennedy

maintained that in the urban communities of the fifth and sixth centuries in Syria “there

was no classical town plan to affect later growth… The ‘streets’ were narrow and

winding paths, there was no agora, no colonnades, no theatre.”41

Discussing the “constitution” of the Islamic city, Samuel Stern admitted that

Islamic civilization not only did not have the chance to inherit the municipal institutions

of Antiquity, but it did not even develop any of its own. Despite some groping towards

40 Ibid., pp. 26-30.41 Hugh Kennedy, “From Polis to Madina,” in Past and Present, 106, 1985, pp. 13-14.

14

urban autonomy, nothing comparable to the situation in Western Europe could develop.

The first Islamic centuries saw a splendid development of urban civilization but the

intense civic life did not produce formal, juridical, civic institutions. Stern points out that

this was a period of comparatively stable central government that was not particularly

propitious for the rise of municipal autonomy.42 Similarly to the unsuccessful attempts for

the creation of civic institutions, the craft organizations in Islam too never assumed a

proper corporative form. Though, according to Stern, this lack of corporations could be

explained in terms of Islam, it could not be considered a specific characteristic of Islamic

civilization, since this was a common feature of most civilizations.43

The peculiarities of the status of the individual in the cities of the Muslim world

found a new explanation in the 1970s based not on a contrast with an ideal European type

but rather on a profound examination of Islamic society. Albert Hourani pointed out that

Islam did not recognize the corporation but only the individual and the community of

believers. The emphasis was on the freedom of the individual to seek the goods of this

world and the next in his own way and to dispose freely of them. In the interests of the

community, the ruler had a duty to intervene in order to regulate the relations of

individuals, to prevent one individual infringing the freedom of others. The separation

between public and private life could also be explained in terms of the concept of the

freedom of the individual. Thus a civitas, the city as association, what Weber and other

sociologists were mainly interested in, could not be formed in a society whose basic

units, the families, touched only externally.44

42 Stern, “The Constitution of the Islamic City,” p. 31.43 Idem, p. 49.44 Hourani, “The Islamic City in the Light of Recent Research,” p. 24.

15

The status of the individual was also examined in the 1970s by Marshall G. S.

Hodgson in his brilliant study of Islamic civilization.45 In volume 2 of The Venture of

Islam Hodgson discussed Islamic society in the Earlier Middle Period of Islamic history,

945 – 1258. He argued that the period was characterized by its cosmopolitanism which

became apparent in the notion that the individual was a “citizen” of the whole Dar al-

Islam. Despite the various local traditions, the only explicit unity was that of the Dar al-

Islam itself, which predetermined the maintenance of the universality of the whole

society. Under these circumstances, it was impossible for cities to build up enduring

bourgeois autonomy in the sense of the European commune. In Muslim lands such

corporate entities as the communes could not thrive – a person was not a citizen of a

particular town, with local rights and responsibilities determined by his local citizenship.

As a free Muslim he was a “citizen” of the world of Islam, with responsibilities

determined by his presence before God alone.46 According to Hodgson, the reason for this

cosmopolitanism of the Islamic world in the Earlier Middle Period was the central

position of the Muslim regions in the geographical configuration of the expanding Afro-

Eurasian Oikoumene., and the effects over time of that expansion.47

Studies focused on the city and its inhabitants in the Middle East over the last

three decades have continued to provide new and meaningful insights, reflecting a

growing sophistication of methodologies and approaches. Since there has been a growing

awareness that every urban entity has its own unique identity, which is different from

others in terms of geographical and historical circumstances, the perception of the

impossibility of using generalizations to describe a unified model determined a change of 45 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vol., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.46 Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, v. 2, p. 124.47 Ibid., p. 87.

16

approach and a new attitude dominated the field of urban studies of the Islamic world.

The 1980s, however, witnessed the publication of the most critical and cogent analysis of

the Islamic city, Janet Abu-Lughod’s The Islamic City – Historic Myth, Islamic Essence,

and Contemporary Relevance.48 Abu-Lughod maintained that the model of the Islamic

city so far defined was the result of an orientalist perspective based on the observation of

a few case studies in a limited area. The three particular cities, the studies of which stood

as the basis for the development of the standard image of the Islamic city, were Fez in

Morocco and Aleppo and Damascus in Syria. “In each case, a very tentative set of place-

specific comments and descriptions appears. These enter the literature and take on the

quality of abstractions.”49 Abu-Lughod further pointed out that the model of the Islamic

city, focusing on the fourteenth-century situation, did not take into account the evolution

of the three cities over time. She warned of the dangers of generalizing specific

morphological and geographical data that had led the orientalists to assimilate cities from

widely differing areas, and instead advanced an idea of the formation of the Islamic city

through a morphological process based not only on legal, political, and religious systems

but also on specific cultural factors.

In another highly critical essay,50 Janet Abu-Lughod directly posed the question

what made a city Islamic. She drew attention to the paradox of the existence of a large

body of literature about an intellectual reality called the Islamic city, while there were

almost no publications on other types of cities defined by religion. Abu-Lughod herself

expressed preference for the term “Muslim city,” “because it refers to cities built by

48 Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Islamic City – Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19, 1987, pp. 155-176.49 Ibid., p. 160.50 Janet Abu-Lughod, “What is Islamic about a City? Some Comparative Reflections,” in Urbanism in Islam, The Proceedings of the International Conference on Urbanism in Islam (ICUIT), Oct. 22-28, 1989, v. 1, pp. 193-217.

17

Muslims, i.e., believers in Islam, rather than to cities built by a reified abstraction called

“Islam.”51 She argued that Islam must not be used as an explanatory element; rather, one

should demonstrate how specifically Islam characterized certain aspects of the city. Abu-

Lughod addressed some key features of the Islamic city that had been perceived as

typically Islamic and argued that they were rather based on geographical and cultural

specifics. One of them was the street pattern of Muslim cities, notorious for its

irregularity. According to Abu-Lughod, despite the influence of the Islamic property

rights, what solidified this system of crooked narrow streets was the changing economics

of transport. While in Roman and Byzantine times straight and wide streets were needed

for the wheeled carts pulled by oxen, the new harness allowed for the use of camels to

carry heavy loads thus making the straight and wide streets superfluous.52 Another feature

of the Muslim city, typically explained as Islamic influence, that Abu-Lughod analyzed,

was gender segregation. She admitted that this feature of the medieval Muslim city was

one of the main differences distinguishing it from its medieval European counterpart, but

emphasized the similar extent of gender segregation in the pre-Islamic world, especially

in classical Greece, Persia, and within Jewish society.53

In this critical article, Abu-Lughod addressed one of the key aspects of the debate

on the Islamic city, closely elaborated by Max Weber, namely the lack of municipal

institutions in the cities in the world of Islam. It is interesting that, developing her

argument, she contradicted the revisionist approach of Stern, Kennedy and others,

regarding the influence of the ancient city on Islamic urbanism. Abu-Lughod argued that

51 Ibid., p. 211.52 Ibid., p. 203-204.53 Ibid., p. 204, 214. For a detailed discussion of the origins and development of gender segregation, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale: Yale University Press, 1993.

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the urban heritage of the part of the classical world that Islam conquered in the early

Middle Ages was found intact by its new masters. According to her, the seventh-century

cities of the Middle East represented a high culture that was surpassed only by the

magnificence of China. Therefore, the political system of Islam diffused from an urban

base from the very beginning. That was a major contrast with the developments in

Europe – the Middle Eastern cities did not have the chance to grow in the cracks of

secular and religious power; rather, they were the centers of power. Thus, cities could not

be expected to have had their own municipal institutions. They actually were the

institutions through which the economic, political, religious, and social systems worked.54

Abu-Lughod’s conclusion to the problem of Islam, or religion in general, as a defining

factor for the character of urban centers was that religious beliefs and institutions were

only one of the many defining factors. The differences between “Christian” and “Islamic”

cities, therefore, were based as much on geographical and historical conditions as on the

religion of their inhabitants.

Although the discussion of the existence of an Islamic city per se has not been as

central in the last couple of decades as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, there still have been

major critiques of the Islamic city in scholarly literature. In his 1994 article, the eminent

historian of the Arab cities André Raymond aptly posed the question: “How can one

speak of an Islamic city by only considering Mediterranean Arab cities (and sometimes

cities of the Maghreb) and ignoring the remaining five-sixths of the Islamic world?”55

Raymond rejected the orientalist vision of the backward Middle Eastern city. He

challenged the orientalist assessments of French urban historians contrasting the Ottoman

54 Abu-Lughod, “What is Islamic about a City?,” p. 201-202.55 Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City,” p. 12.

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period with an alleged age of order and progress announced by French domination.

Raymond argued that Ottoman rule represented a period of expansion, rather than

decline, for the cities of the Middle East.56

The sustained efforts at debunking the vision of a unified Islamic city type

notwithstanding, this orientalist concept has proved durable in the works of architects and

urban planners, both theoreticians and practitioners. Besim Hakim, for instance, argued

that the general principles for the construction of the Islamic city had been defined by

Islamic law.57 In his research, based on the urban form of Tunis, by juxtaposing

fourteenth-century Maliki law with the contemporary madina, Hakim discounts the

possibility of evolutionary change over the centuries, and his model for the Islamic built

environment suggests the orientalists’ frozen picture. In the last several decades, on the

other hand, urban practitioners with a new-found respect for the great achievements of

the past have been searching for ways to reproduce in today’s cities some of the patterns

of city building that have been defined as Islamic. In this quest, they have been

influenced, whether wittingly or not, by the Orientalist literature and its alleged depiction

of the essence of the Islamic city. This approach has been criticized by Janet Abu-

Lughod, who has argued that none of the conditions which would allow for the

reconstruction of Islamic cities by design still exist. Cities, according to her, are living

processes rather than products with strictly defined characteristics; in this sense, they can

only be encouraged to grow in the desired direction and not reproduced on the basis of a

strict, be it Islamic or other, pattern.58

56 Ibid., p. 12.57 Besim Selim Hakim, Arabic-Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles, London: KPI, 1986.58 Abu-Lughod, “The Islamic City,” p. 173.

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The editors of a most recent publication dealing with urbanism in the Islamic

world have formulated their leading concept as “to consider the city as a living

organism.”59As any living organism, they argue in the introduction, the city should be

seen in continuous transformation and not in frozen images. Thus they reject the

orientalist approach, integral part of which has been Weber’s concept of the city,

attempting not only to provide snapshots of urban fabric but also to deal with the

transformation of this fabric over time. Contrary to the orientalist notion of a uniform

Islamic city type, the editors of, as well as the contributors to, this two-volume set

acknowledge the kaleidoscopic nature of the Islamic world and provide a close look at

the regional and chronological differentiation of the city, representing cities ranging from

the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Entitling the volume “The City in the Islamic World,”

the four prominent editors aim at putting an end to the no longer productive discourse on

the “Islamic city” that had its origins in the typological approach elaborated by Max

Weber in the early twentieth century.

59 Salma K. Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Attilio Pettruccioli, André Raymond, eds., The City in the Islamic World, Leiden: Brill, 2008, p. xiii.

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