Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views
Andre Raymond
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1. (1994), pp. 3-18.
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ISLAMIC CITY, ARAB CITY:
OFUENTALIST MYTHS AND RECENT VIEWS
Andre' Raymond
1. Orientalism and the Concept of the Muslim City*
The important contribution made to the subject by Stephen Humphreys in
his Islamic History and his explicit reference to 'the great French tradition
of Islamic urban studies'' fortunately exonerate me from.any accusation of
'Franco-centricity' for my first remark-namely, that the classic concept of
the Muslim city is very much a French affair. The !%st 'formal' exposes are to
the credit of the French 'school of Algiers', developed by the Marpis brothers
(1928, William Marqais, 'L'Islamisme et la vie urbaine') and extended into
the 1930s and 1940s by the school of Damascus (Sauvaget and Weulers~e).~
Generally speaking, the problems of urban planning seem to have particularly
interested French researchers, as is evidenced by the series of often remarkable
monographs produced during the long French presence on the southern and
eastern Mediterranean shores: from the Marrakech of Deverdun, the Fis of
Le Tourneau and the Alger of Lespbs to the Alep of Sauvaget. We owe the
history of Cairo, although still under the commanding shadow of Lord Cromer,
to Marcel Clerget.3 It was only later that Gustave von Grunebaum summed
up the essentials of a 'doctrinal' development, in which Janet Abu Lughod
mischievously highlighted the chain of successive authorities (isniid), from the
works of the founding father^.^ It will not be, therefore, through an excess
of chauvinism that I will characterize the first constitution of this corpus by
features that are strongly linked to French Orientalism and Orientalists.
1.1. The 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
* This is the text of the Annual BRISMES lecture given at SOAS, London in
March 1994. It was translated into English by Ms Camilla Crumbeke.
R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, Princeton, 1991, p.228.
The basic expods are to be found in: William Marpis, 'L'islamisme et la vie
urbaine', in Articles et conjknces, Paris, 1961; Georges Marpis, 'L'wbanisme
musulman', in Mdanges d'histoire et d'archtologie de lJOccidentmwdman, 2
vol., Algiers, 1957, v.1; 'La conception des villes dans l'Islam', Revue d'Alger,
11, 1945; Roger Le Tourneau, Citis musulmanes d'Afnque du Nor& Algiers,
1957; Jean Sauvaget, 'Esquisse d'une histoire de la ville de Damas', REI, 4
(1934); Alep, Essai sur le de'veloppement d'une gmnde ville syrienne, Paris,
1951; Jacques Weulersse, 'Antioche, Essai de gQgraphie urbaine', BEO, 4
(1934); Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, Paris, 1946.
Gaston Dwerdun, Manukech des origines d 1912, 2 vol., Rabat, 1959-1966.
Roger Le Tourneau, Fb avant le protectomt, Casablanca, 1949. Ren6 Lap&,
Alger, ltude de gkographie et d'histoire urbaine, Paris, 1930. Marcel Clerget,
Le Caire, 2 vol., Cairo, 1934. Jean Sauvaget, Alep ...,Paris, 1931.
* Gustave von Grunebaum, 'The Structure of the Muslim Town' (1955),in Islam,
London, 1961. Janet Abu Lughod, 'The Islamic City', IJMES, 19 (1987).
country is totally conditioned by Islam. Robert Ilbert wrote quite judiciously
on this subject that 'it is because, at the beginning, most Orientalists posed
... the fundamental role of Islam in the structuring of urban space that it
was again revealed at the end'.5 It is therefore not surprising to hear Islam
naturally referred to regarding the institutions, the organization of political
life, the social and economic activities and even the physical structure of the
city that, in these conditions, one can only describe as 'Muslim'.
This aspect is so well known that is quite superfluous to dwell any further
on it. It would perhaps be more profitable to attempt to understand
how the intellectual and political environment in which these theoreticians
of the Muslim city lived (many of them French scholars, remember) coloured
their representation of the object they studied. Let us note first of all that
French colonization had spread in Algeria and Tunisia, then in the Levant, in
regions which had been deeply marked by the Greek and Roman civilizations.
The minds of the researchers would undoubtedly be drawn by the fascination
of antique town planning, countless examples of which were spread before
their eyes (from Timgad to Palmyra); this is nowhere more obvious than with
Sauvaget: a great part of his work was devoted to highlighting the traces
of antique town planning, still present in the modem organization of Arab
cities (see his studies on Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia)! This tendency
was allthe more natural as French colonization willingly represented itself as
re-establishing Roman 'imperium', with which French civilization was establishing
ties, so to say, after an 'interval' of some fifteen centuries. Ancient
town planning, set off by prestigious monuments, in keeping with municipal
regulations and institutions, and regularly developed physically, was an obvious
model to follow: 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 Arab urbanism. The
comparison with Western medieval cities, and their urban institutions (the
famous 'communes'), in which the blossoming of Europe was nurtured, while
the Arab Orient was slowly sinking into its decline, must have been just as
dangerous. Having found nothing in the theories of Weber on the evolution
of Western cities that could be applied to the cities they had before them,
the specialists, in particular Sauvaget in Syria, had to admit that they were
dealing with a type of urban layout that could only be defined by a morose
enumeration of all those elements it obviously lacked: the regularity and institutions
of the antique city and the charts and communes of the medieval
town.7
This moroseness would be all the more accentuated as (thanks to French
conquest) the Arab cities they were studying had just emerged from a period
of 'Turkish' domination, whose recent reverses and violence had blackened
the whole span of its long history. One could put together an anthology
Robert Ilbert, 'La ville islamique: r a t 4 et abstraction', Les Cahiers de la
recherche architectumle: Espaces et formes de I'Orient arabe, 10/11 (avril1982).
See his works, already mentioned, on Damascus and Aleppo, and 'te plan de
Laodic&-sur-M4r1,BEO, 4 (1934).
'I have been unable to trace the direct infiuenceof Max Weber on the theories
of J. Saubaget and J. Weulersse.
of assessments contrasting the 'Turkish tyranny' with the age of order and
progress announced by French domination, the heir to ancient civilization.
I will limit myself to two significant quotations taken from books that are,
on different accounts, monuments of erudition and perspicacity: under the
Ottomans, writes Marcel Clerget, Cairo 'was slowly dying ... letting the
remains of its glorious past crumble down little by little ... Cairo returned
... to the scattered settlements favoured by the first Arabs ... Art vanished
with all the other manifestations of an ordered and intelligent life'. In Aleppo,
noted Sauvaget (whocould, nonetheless, recognizeits Ottoman magnificence),
the 'elements of disintegration ... once again exert their pressure, with a
tendency to exaggeration that accelerates the disruption of the urban centre
... The Aleppo of the Ottomans is nothing but an illusion ('un trompe-
170ei17)-a sumptuous fa~adebehind which there are only ruins7.'
1.2. The 'Syrian school' brought an additional element to this depressing picture.
The studies conducted by Jacques Weulersse on Antioch and the Alawite
cities of Northern Syria led him to define a city model that was profoundly
split between hostile communities (here the Sunni Muslims, the Alawites, the
Turks and the Christians)-a dislocated city, broken up into closed, inwardlooking
sectors, a conception which J. Sauvaget and J. Weulersseheld strongly
in common. See J. Sauvaget's remarks: 'the Muslim city is no longer considered
as a single entity, existing in itself, complex and alive: now, it is just a
gathering of individuals with conflicting interests'. Or again, this time about
Aleppo: we owe to the Muslim period nothing but 'the dislocation of the
urban centre, its fragmentation into small, distinct and even sometimes antinomical
cell^'.^ It would be logical to suppose that J. Weulersse, who arrived
in Syria in 1932, found in Antioch the confirmation of Sauvaget's findings
about Aleppo.
It is partly to J. Weulersse, who was greatly impressed by the spectacle
of an Alawite city submerged in a foreign, and even hostile, Sunni rural environment,
that we owe the concept of the Arab city as a parasitic body. There
would be much to quote from the remarks of J. Weulersse on this Oriental
city: 'In the Orient, the city appears as a foreign body "encysted" in the
country like a creation imposed on the countryside it dominates and exploits'.
A variety of reasons account for this phenomenon: historical reasons ('artificial
settling by foreign masters'), a Syrian variation on the often repeated
theme of the incapacity of the Arabs to govern themselves and their submitting
to 'foreign' dynasties; demographic reasons (the urban populations have
different origins: they 'are not, as in the West, fed by the surrounding rural
population'. There is a 'specifically urban' population. It is to be noted that
this theme was commonly used about Algiers with its population of baldis
differing from the 'Algerian' population); ethnic and religious reasons (the
towns accommodated communities that were different from those living in
the surrounding countryside: Antioch is 'Turkish', in the middle of an Alawite
and Arab region; Hama is 'Arab' in the middle of an Alawite and Bedouin
'M. Clerget, Le Caire, I, 178-180. J. Sauvaget, Alep, 239.
J. Sauvaget,'Esquisse', 455-56; Alep, 248.
region). (Note here this 'national' acceptance of a way of life, nomadism,
which is characteristic of the manner in which French Orientalists generally
analysed native society in North Africa). The city is 'without human roots in
the country that supports it and on which it lives ... The city's inhabitants
thus [appear] as a drifting population ... Their only link with the countryside
being the desire to exploit it to the hilt ... The economic activities of
the cities thus seem essentially parasitic ... The city ... consumes but does
not produce'.1° This concept, it should be noted, has been prevalent in our
studies for a very long time, and it is only quite recently that it underwent
severe criticism from Albert Hourani who coined the expression 'ago-city'."
1.3. Such are some of the scientific, sociological and political presuppositions
of the urban theory whose main proponents were William and George
Mar~aisand Roger Le Tourneau in the Maghreb, and Jacques Weulersse and
Jean Sauvaget in Syria. The essentials of the doctrine were the subject of a
remarkable summary in the classic article by Gustave von Gmnebaum, 'The
Structure of the Muslim Town', published in 1955 (Islam, 1961,141-158), but
they are also to be found in many of the later publications that again took
up the main Orientaliit themes on this point.
I should first like to repeat that this conceptionof the city is fundamentally
negative in its approach. The 'Muslim' city has lost the regularity of the
antique city: it has replaced Graeco-Roman order (physically orthogonal)
and organization with a structure based on no apparent logical principle. The
streets are irregular and winding; even worse, they often end in a cul-de-sac.
The Arab city, seen on a map, is a labyrinth and, for the visitor, a muddle
in which he is led astray. The comments made by Roger Le Tourneau in his
Cith musdmanes d'Afnque du N o d are absolutely typical: 'Nothing'is more
foreign to a Muslim town in the Maghreb than the rectilinear avenues of a
Roman or a modern city [note the term 'Muslim town', and the comparison]:
an aerial photograph of any Muslim city makes us think of a maze, or a
labyrinth. Instead of being integrated into a planned design, the buildings
have forced the communication routes to skirt round them, or to slip between
them, as best they could. As a result, there are an extraordinary number of
dead-ends and the roads are very rarely straight'.12 G. Marpis wonders about
the contradiction involved: 'Nonetheless. it is not because the Muslims, who
content themselves with narrow streets, have not acknowledged the advantage
of a straight line as the best route from one point to another', he concludes,
leaving the reader to tackle this mystery of Arab mental structures.13 The
monuments of the Muslim city give only a depreciated image of the beautiful
urban ornamentation of antiquity: 'the souks, the qaisariya, the khan ... are
but a degeneration of avenueswith colonnades, of the basilica, of the agora'.14
lo J. Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie, 86-88.
I' Albert Hourani, 'The Islamic City', in The Islamic City,A.H. Hourani and S.
Stern (edd.), Oxford, 1970. See also my remarks on the subject: 'Les rapports
viiles-campagnes', in Tenoars el Socie'te's,.B. Cannon (ed.), Lyon, 1987. 

l2 R. Le Tourneau, Cite's mwulrncmes, 20. 

l3 G. Marpis, 'L'urbanisrne rnusulrnan', 227. 

l4 J. Sauvaget, Alep, 247. 

Sauvaget brilliantly demonstrates how the antique avenue with its columns
was transformed (or, should one say, degraded) and became the siiq.
The 'Muslim' city was not equipped with those communal institutions that
ensured the development of the medieval city. It was not administered. No
wonder! 'The status of the cities,' wrote J. Sauvaget, in his famous article
on Damascus, 'is subject to no particular provision in Islamic law. There
are no more municipal institutions ... The city is no longer considered as
an entity, as a being in itself, complex and alive: it is just a gathering of
individuals with conflictinginterests who, each in his own sphere, acts on his
own acco~nt'.'~The city is no more than a non-city, Muslim town-planning
no planning at all. The Muslim era, Sauvaget was to conclude energetically in
his Alep, 'is unaccompanied by any positive contribution ... the only thing we
can credit it with is the dislocation of the urban centre ... The work of Islam
is essentially negative'; the town has become 'an inconsistent and inorganic
assembly of quarters'; it is as if it were 'the negation of urban order'.16
It is of course difficult to go any further than this and one is therefore not
too surprised that in their description of a 'non-city', essentially characterized
by what it is not, the Orientalist exegetes were rather short of positive
elements. Chiefly struck by the surrounding anarchy and disorder, dismayed
by an apparent disdain for straight lines and ninety-degree angles that offended
not only their reason and taste but perhaps their moral standards,
they noted the fact, which seems self-evident, that the city, inhabited by a
totally or predominantly Muslim population, accommodated Muslim institutions
(&isba,the justice of the q6df) and included at least one mosque, not
surprisingly located in a central position (just like the cathedral in the medieval
town that Western scholars did not, however. call 'Christian'). Besides
the mosque-cathedral, used for collective prayer, the city had a highiy centred
market that was usually connected to the mosque and organized according to
strictly specialized activities in the frame of the trade guilds, with a clear-cut
separation between the residential and non-residential quarters. The reference
to walls surrounding the city and provided with gates, and the observation
that many cities had a palace--often in the form of a citadel-in which the
prince resided, seem to emerge from otherwise quite commonplace descrip
tions of North African cities in the case of the brothers Marqais and R. Le
Tourneau. One can say the same of their remarks concerning water supplies,
the hammdm (in particular from the viewpoint of its role in the fulfilment of
religious duties), and eventually the removal of garbage.
Let us note also that this city is described as timeless, or rather that
changes of epochs did not seem to affect its organization in any way: L.
Massignon, in fact, set up as a dogma the immutability of the markets around
the mosque from the city's origins up to French colonization. In any case, the
Orientalists evidently considered that the city they had before their eyes, that
had been produced by the last centuries of its evolution, was definitely the
same as the city they analysed from texts of the classicalera. George Mar~ais
(in 'L'urbanisme musulman') refers, on page after page, to the Fustat of the
l5 J. Sauvaget, 'Esquisse', 455-56. 

l6 J. Saumget, Alep, 247-48. 

tenth century, to the Fez of the Marinid sultans of the fourteenth century and
to the Algiers of the Turkish dep, in order to define a city that is above all
North African, while resorting, with no compunction, to an analysis of the
sociological behaviour of the Muslims which is also considered as ne varietur.
The house (inevitably a 'Muslim' house) is also timeless. So as to preserve
family privacy (considered as a preoccupation mainly linked to Islamic religious
dictates), the house is turned inwards, its blind walls remaining blank to
any socio-economic investigation. The central courtyard does not only fuEl a
social function, it is also symbolic and has a religious value. G. Marpis wrote
on the subject in 1940: 'the house is aired and lit by its inner courtyard, whose
piece of sky belongs to it alone'.17 Half a century later, a Lebanese historian
echoes the statement in stronger terms: Antoine Abdel Nour ascribes a metaphysical
value to this courtyard: the 'celestial' courtyard (as our texts put it
so well)-[a rather extreme translation of samdm-, 'open-air']-is thus able to
communicate not only with other human beings, but with the universe'.18
This remarkable coincidence between the Orientalist and the Oriental
draws our attention to a last point that seems noteworthy. The Orientalist
concept of the Muslim city and Muslim house was generally adopted by Arab
and Muslim researchers who, after the Westerners, looked into these problems.
They ignored the fact that the highly stressed 'Islamic' character of the city
and housing originated, for the Rench Orientalists, from a local tendency to
defineas 'Muslim' any feature particular to the Arab population of the territories
in which French colonial domination was established: we must not forget
that, in the officialterminology of Algeria before 1960,the natives were termed
'Muslims' following a religious reference, and not 'Algerians', as would have
been logical, since the 'colonists' called themselves Europeans (and, of course,
not Christians). One can understand why the Arab epigones of these theoreticians
adopted a view that highlighted the uniqueness of their civilization, and
enhanced the feature through which their identity could best be asserted and
preserved during political ordeals (colonization in particular)-that is to say,
religion. One is more surprised that they did not more vigorously criticize the
highly disparaging considerations that accompanied this acknowledgement of
Islam. This is a quite remarkable feature of 'colonial' acculturation.
2. The End of Orientalism: the City Reconsidered
2.1. I believethat a date can be given for the end of classicalOrientalism in our
studies: 1957, i.e. the publication date of the second volume of the masterly
work of H.A.R. Gibb and H. Bowen, which I should describe (with admiration)
as the last great endeavour of European Orientalism.lg The project (an
ambitious overall picture of 'Islamic' society) could not be completed in view
of the progress of research at that time. The title itself (Islamic Society and
the West) underlines the main weakness of the enterprise (its Eurocentrism),
l7 G. Marsais, 'L'urbanisme musulman', 227.
l8 Antoine AbdelNour, 'Typesarchitecturaw et vocabulairede l'habitat en Syrie',
in L'espce social de la ville arabe, D. C h e d e r (ed.),Paris, 1979, 83.
l9 H.A.R.Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West,2 vol., Oxford,1950-
1957.
and explains its inevitable failure. The series of works scheduled to follow this
'introduction' was never to be. It also seems to me very significant that von
Grunebaum's article, the epitome of the Orientalist conception of the city, is
dated precisely 1955,and was thus to be its swan-song. As early as the 1960s,
the postulates of Orientalism were to be called into question one after another
under the effect of factors that I will now try to summarize.
2.2. One cannot overemphasize the importance of the role played by the
arrival of researchers trained in varied disciplines, and with a double specialization,
in a field which, until then, had been dominated by scholars expert in
Oriental languages and Islam, and occupying varied domains of research for
which they had no specific preparation. The pioneering role of Ira Lapidus
must be underlined here. His Mwlim Cities in the Later Middle Ages20 has
helped highlight the 'historical' character of the city. In France, Claude Cahen,
an historian interested in economic issues, influenced a whole generation
of historians who became specialists in the history of the Arab countries in
which they used their disciplinary expertise.
Just as weighty in fruitful consequencesfor the extension of urban research
(nowopen to much confrontation and comparison), was the arrivalin this field
of geographers such as Eugen Wirth in Germany, who brought with them an
interest in the study of space, as one of the variables involved, and an aptitude
for its translation into maps-a domain in which the old studies were generally
deficient. with the notable excevtion of J. Sauvaaet. The contribution of the
sociolog&ts and the anthropolo&sts has also be& decisive in understanding
social problems, as it was naturally useful to compare them with those posed
by the study of any city or society, Islamic or not. CWord Geertz and others
helped to relocate our field in the wider framework of the great disciplines of
the social sciences,and make it benefit from their progress and the possibility
of fruitful parallels-with the risk, of course, of contamination of om work
by trends of uncertain duration arising around new gurus, often on this side
of the Atlantic. At least our research has ceased to be an island, a domain
reserved only for specialists in Oriental languages and ~tudies.~'
2.3. I would attribute the same importance to the development of studies on
the Ottoman period, that is to say the four centuries that have elapsed since
1516,with the huge amount of documentation accumulated and preserved by
the administrations of the Empire's Arab provinces. Stephen Humphreys,
in his Islamic History, has put much stress on this still relatively recent
rediscovery-quite rightly, in my o p i n i ~ n . ~In this domain, we naturally
owe a great deal to the progress made by the Turkish school led by Omer
Lutfi Barkan with his &st studies on the tax system and demography, extensively
based on Ottoman archive documents, at the end of the 1930s. The
massive use of these extraordinarily varied documents (judges' registers, tax
20 Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the later Middle Ages, Hanard U.P., 1967.
*'Eugen Wirth, 'ZumProblem des Bazars', Islam, 51 (1974);'Die orientalische
Stadt', Saeculum, 26 (1975). Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development
in Morocco and Indonesia, Chicago, 1971.
22 S. Hurnphreys, Islamic History, 231.
documents,central political archives, waqfacts), and their inexhaustible abundance
(thousands of registers and millions of documents), have transformed
the picture researchers had, until the end of the 1950s, of the Arab cities of
the Empire in a territory extending from the frontiers of Morocco to those of
Iran.
2.3.1. Generallyspeaking, this documentation called into question the concep
tion of generalizedOttoman decadence, a postulate which was one of the bases
of the very negative views of the scholars of the Algiers and Damascus schools
on the Arab city, received by colonization from the so-called obscurantist and
brutal Turkish domination.
2.3.2. The examination of the Tribunal registers revealed, in particular, the
considerable role played by the q6d% in the management of the city and
somewhat attenuated the Orientaiist concept of 'non-admiitration', thus
confirming the elements treated by R. Brunschvig in his study on medieval
urbanism and Muslim law.23 New consideration was given to the importance
of institutions whose existence was known, but whose activities had been
underestimated-the trade &ds in the economic centre of the city, the communities
of the quarters (hawma, hara, m@alla) in the residential areas, and
the communities of religious or ethnic character. The variety of these communities
and their activities brought useful corrective elements to the thesis
that Sauvaget had developed concerning Damascus and Aleppo, of a nonadministered
city left to the self-interest of individuals and therefore doomed
to anarchy.
2.4. On several essential points the Orientalist analysis was strongly challenged
and criticized; the reflection of J. Abu Lughod in IJMES is a good
example of this kind of devastating e ~ ~ o s k . ~ *
2.4.1. The possibility opened up by the Ottoman documents of an in-depth
and detailed study of urban society, and its interpretation in figures, called
into question one of the foundations of the Orientalist vision, that of the
egalitarianism of Muslim society, considered as the mere reproduction of the
religious umma. The figures given in my Artisans et Commerqants on the
highly unequal nature of 'traditional' Cairo Muslim society were confirmed
recently by research conducted on Damascus by Colette Establet and JeanPaul
Pascual, as well as by the work being carried out by Tal Shuval for
Algiers.25 The manner of envisaging the structure of the city, or the problem
of 'traditional' housing, was, under these conditions, profoundly altered. I
shall return to this point later.
23 Robert Brunschvig, 'Urbanisme mkiidi8val et droit musulman', Islamica, 1947.
24 Janet Abu Lughod, 'The Islamic City-Historic myth, Islamic essence, and
contemporary relevance', IJMES, 19 (1987).
25 Andre Raymond, Artisans et commercants eu Caire au XVIIIeme siecle, 2
vol., Damascus, 1974,11, 375. Colette Establet et Jean-Pad Pascual, Familles
et fortunes a Damas, Institut Ran@ de Damas, in press. C. Establet, J.P.
Pascual,A. Raymond, 'Le mesure de l'inigalite dans la sociiti ottomane,
JESHO, in press. Td Shuval, Alger au XVIIIkme siecle, in progress.
2.4.2. One of the bases of the Orientalist theory, the disparaging comparison
with the city of classical antiquity which contributed so much to depreciate
the image we had of the Muslim city-the degenerate heir of a glorious pastsomewhat
collapsed under the effect of the scientific work of the specialists
(historians and archeologists) of the Late Roman Empire (the Byzantine period),
for example in Apamea (J. Ch. B a l t ~ ) . ~ ~The discovery of a gradual
degradation of the ancient order is not recent: apparently conscious of this
evolution, and as though smitten with last-minute remorse, Sauvaget noted
(in the penultimate page of his Alep) that the reduction of the frame of urban
life to more rudimentary forms (observed in the Muslim era) had begun under
the Byzantines, but he did not go any further towards the logical conclusion
this remark obviously entailed. In a more explicit manner, C1. Cahen suggested,
as early as 1958, that one should avoid considering pre-Islamic urban
history 'through traditional images of an impeccable antique city ... The city
inherited by Islam is no longer an antique city'. The theme was convincingly
taken up again, notably by S.M. Stem ('The Constitution of the Islamic City')
and more recently, by Hugh Kennedy in his authoritative article 'From Polis
to Madina', in which he notes 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 winding paths, there was no agora, no
colonnades, no theatre'.27 Many of the (negative) aspects that the Orientalists
thought characteristic of the Islamic city were therefore apparent in the
'antique' city that had preceded, and resulted from, an urban evolution that
spread over three centuries.
2.4.3. The research conducted by Baber Johansen in Germany,2s allowed the
necessary rectifications to be made to yet another fundamental point of the
Orientalist exegesis, strongly underlined by Sauvaget: the so-called silence of
Muslim law on the subject of the city. The fuqah6' (Hanafite in the case of
Johansen's research) were thus capable of conceiving the existence of a city as
distinct from the countryside, a point which seems obvious but left Sauvaget
in doubt. They were even able to describe some of its essential structures, such
as the division between public quarters and private quarters which entailed
major consequences in the application of Muslim law (the problem of the
qasdma). As regards this point, the study of the archives of the qadiof the
Ottoman era has confirmed the 'medieval' research of Brunschvig and proved
the existence of an implicit doctrine on which were based the decisions taken,
day by day, by the 'ulamd:
26 	Janine et Jean Ch. Balty, 'Le cadre topographique et historique', in ColIoqve
ApamCe de Syrie, Janine Balty (ed.),Brussels, 1969. On this subject see the
papers presented at the conference La Syr-ie de Byzance 6 Z'Islam, P. Canivet
and J.-P. Rey-Coquais (edd.), Damascus, 1992.
27 	J. Saumget, Alep, 248. Claude Cahen, 'Mouvementspopuiaires et autonomisme
urbain', Ambica, 5 (1958), 226. Samuel M. Stern, 'The Constitution of the
Islamic City', in The Islamic City, A.H. Hourani and S. Stem (edd.), Oxford,
1970. Hugh Kennedy, 'From Polis to Madina', Past and Present, 106 (1985),
13-14.
28 	Baber Johansen, 'The claimsof men and the claims of God', in Pluriformiteit en
vardeling, Nijemegen, 1980;'The all-embracingtown and its mosques', ROMM,
32 (1981).
2.4.4. Finally, the preposterous nature of some of the basic presuppositions
of Orientalism was progressively brought out into full light. 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-sixthsof the
Islamic world? Oleg Grabar noted the absurdity of using a concept such as
that of Islam to account for urban phenomena of countries with such varied
historical and cultural traditions, and different climatic conditions, as those
of a Muslim world that spreads from Morocco to China, from Central Asia to
Black Africa.2g The development of research carried out on the foundation
periods (Kubiak for Fustat; Hichem DjGt for Kufa); in the classical periods
(Lapidus, J.-C1. Garcin), and in the modern period (A. Raymond), justifies
the query of J.-C1. Garcin: the evolution of Muslim society during a period
that spread over twelve centuries makes 'a ne vanetur interpretation' of the
'Muslim city' and the 'Muslim house' very Contrary to what was
suggested by the Orientalists, for whom the 'traditional' city they had before
their eyes (then still almost intact) and the medievalcity were two aspects of
the same reality, the classicalcity has to be reconstructed,as the fundamental
features of the urban structure have naturally evolved from the time of their
foundation to the classical and to the modern periods.
2.5. All these data explain why the criticism of the traditional concept of the
'Muslim' city was so radical. After having reviewed the supposed characteristics
of the 'Islamic' city, Eugen Wirth successively eliminated the irregular
street network and the dead end (tobe found in the ancient Orient), the house
with a central courtyard (also present in antiquity and a common feature all
around the Mediterranean, Muslim and Christian), and the division of the
city into quarters; he concludes 'that the "soukn, the central business area, is
probably the only and fundamental distinctive criterion for the Near Eastern
city which can be considered as Islamic cultural heritage'. And the suggestion
of E. Wirth is 'to renounce the term "Islamic city" and to prefer the more
general "Oriental cityn ... Islam seems to be more the inhabitant or occupant
of Middle Eastern urban systems than the ar~hitect'.~'It remains to be seen
if, beyond so radical a revisionism, some characteristics of a 'traditional city'
can nevertheless be defined on this tabula m a .
3. 	Characteristics of the 'Traditional' City
3.1. The fundamental feature of the structure of the 'traditional' Arab
is the very clearly maxked separation of its economic activities and its residential
functions. In the great Arab cities that we know, the main economic
29 01% Grabar, 'Refiections on the study of Islamic Art', Muqarnas, 1 (1983),8.
30 Wladyslaw Kubiak, Al-Fzlstat, Cairo, 1987. Hichem Djait, Al-Kzifa, naissance
de la ville islamique, Paris, 1986. 1. Lapidus, Mwlitn Cities. Jean-Claude
Garcin, 'Habitat m6didi8val et histoire urbaine', in Palais et Maisons du Caire,
I-Epoque mamlouke, Paris,1982, quotation p.216. Andri Raymond, Grandes
villa arabes a l'epoque ottomane, Paris,1985.
31 Eugen Wirth, 'The Middle Eastern City: IslamicCity? Oriental City? Arabian
City', Lecture given at Harvard University, 1982, 9.
32 	I have developed these themes in The great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th centuries,
New York, 1984 and in Grandes villes arabes.
centres (specializedmarkets, working on products that are the object of international
trade: spices; cloth; caravanserai devoted to wholesale trade) occupy
the centre of the city. This feature, however, is also to be found in IranoAfghan
cities. This is such an outstanding phenomenon that E. Wirth, as we
have just seen, has made this 'market' the most certain characteristic of the
'Oriental' city, if not the only one.
The central area of the markets is strongly linked to the main mosque, as
Louis Massignon pointed out in his &-st studies of Moroccan and Iraqi cities,
which does not exclude profound modifications in the geography of these activities
according to the evolution of the economy. There are a great number
of public monuments (mosques, educational establishmentsjmadmas) in this
'public' area of the city, whose individuality is so strong that it is often expressed
in the toponymy: in Cairo it is the ancient Fatimid foundation of
'Q&ira3; in Aleppo, it is the 'Mdineh' (=madina), 'the City'. The specificity
of the central area thus appears in its activities, focused on trade, religion
and education. It can be read on the maps with its network of relatively
large and straight streets leading directly to the gates (see the main street
of Aleppo, of antique origin, or the ' Q ~ a b a 'in Cairo, which was laid out by
the Fatimid conquerors in AD 969). It is also expressed in works of jurisprudence
by the concept of a 'public' space, as Baber Johansen's research clearly
demonstrated.
Around this centre there s~readsan area devoted above all to residential
housing, in which economic activities only appear in the form of local,
non-specialized markets (the suwayqa) that were so brilliantly analysed by J.
S a u ~ g e t . ~ ~On the maps this area stands out by the more irregular layout of
its streets, which often end in blind alleys, and by the existence of practically
closed quarters that only open in the direction of the central regions where the
population goes to work or to purchase products not in everyday use; examples
of this arrangement can be found in certain Oriental cities of antiquity.
It is to be noted that this network of irregular streets, which was sometimes
wrongly taken to be a characteristic of the whole 'Arab' city, was in fact just
one part of the street network: in Algiers, Cairo and Aleppo, these dead ends
represented only a little less than half of the total length of the streets, and
they were predominant only in the non-central parts of these cities.
This general structure of the city determined a radio-concentric distribution
of both its economic activities and residential areas. The spacing of the
various trades from the centre to the outskirts, following a rather strict classscation
(the richer and the more specialized trades in the centre, the poorer
and the more space-consuming or polluting on the outskirts of the city), is
a well-known phenomenon, and is moreover an experiential fact in what remains
of the traditional cities. History also shows that when the expansion
of the city absorbed 'peripheral' activities, a relocation near the city limits
33 	See Jean Sauvaget, 'Dkrets Mamelouks de Syrie, I', BEO, 2 (1932), 29-30;
'Esquisse', 452-53;Alep, 105.
could occur: this was the case with the tanneries in Aleppo, in Cairo and in
Tunis during the Ottoman era.34
The reality of such spacing as regards residential housing frequently provokes
objections that are chiefly based on 'Orientalist' presuppositions: the
concept of an umma whose egalitarian nature would be transposed to the social
behaviour of the faithful regarding their homes-the 'unitary' character
of which would be strongly marked; the idea that traditional society was characterized
rather by the harmony of its socic-economic conditions than by a
separation into categories (indeed, even 'classes') with contrasting characteristics.
The research carried out in Cairo, and more recently in Damascus and
in Algiers, shows that, on the contrary, 'traditional' society was characterized
by its very pronounced inequality: in Cairo, at the end of the eighteenth
century, 3% of the individuals studied shared 50.1% of the cumulated prop
erty and 50% possessed only 4.3%. Gini's index-which provides a convenient
evaluation of this social inequality-gives values indicating great disparities:
0.74 around 1700 in Cairo and Damascus, even more in Algiers.35
It is therefore not surprising that such an inequality was expressed spatially
by the formation of 'rich' housing areas in the central regions, moderate
housing in the intermediate regions, and poor housing on the outskirts. This
layout of successive rings was demonstrated for Cairo by Nelly ~ a n n a . ~ ~It
could probably also be deduced from the studies conducted by A. Marcus
and 3.-C1. David on Aleppo or those of J. Revault on Tunis.37 Although
many authors hesitate to accept this fact, it hardly seems questionable, it
being understood of course that no area has a totally homogeneous character
(which leaves a place for those observations dear to the Orientalists, and to
the Orientals, on the proximity of rich and poor in the Muslim city); it being
also understood that a great many factors prevent a perfect geographical
realization of such a layout: for instance, the existence of quarters inhabited
by the ruling caste (often on the outskirts), or the constitution of community
quarters that obey an entirely different logic. Anyway, it should be noted that
such an arrangement was described long ago by G. Sjoberg for preindustrial
cities in general.38
3.2. Just as important are segregative factors whose appearance many medieval
historians tend to place during the Ottoman period, although the Ottoman
domination no doubt only accentuated phenomena that existed well
before the beginning of the sixteenth century in the Arab countries later incorporated
into the-ottoman empire. But here again, the old myths on the
homogeneity of the social body die hard. Nevertheless, the omnipresence
34 Andre Raymond, 'Le dkplacement des tanneries B Alep, au Caire et B Tunis', 

REMMM, 55-56, (1990). 

35 See the studies mentioned in footnote 25. 

36 Nelly Hama, Habiter au Caire a m XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Cairo, 1991.

37 Jean-ClaudeDavid, 'DBgradation et tentativesactuelles de riadaptation', BEO,

28 (1975). Abraham Marcus, Aleppo in the eighteenth century, Columbia, 1989.

3. Renault, Palais et Maisons de Tunis, Paris, 4 vol., 1967-1978.

38 Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindwtn'al City,New York, 1968.

of these divisions is quite obviously one of the most striking features of the
Arab-Muslim city.
We have just seen how the very marked inequality which characterized
traditional Muslim society resulted in a splitting of the housing areas which,
without being absolute, formed very heterogeneous sectors in the city. The
existence of relatively closed residential quarters also contributed to reinforcing
this heterogeneity; although the quarters took on a certain diversity, just
like the housing 'zones', they appear to have developed above all in moderate
or poor housing areas, and they therefore contributed to a certain compartmentalization
of the city.
These segregative factors were particularly marked in the case of the numerous
religious and ethnic communities whose variety was one of the characteristics
of the Arab city. It can be estimated that one-fifth of the population of
Cairo during the eighteenth century belonged to an ethnic community (Turks,
Syrians, North Africans) or to a religious community (local Coptic Christians,
Christians of Syrian origin and Jews). The figure is even higher for a city like
Algiers (Andalusians, Turks,Berbers ... ). If the ethnic minorities were unequally
grouped together according to the extent of their 'differences' (the
Turks and the Kurds had a stronger tendency to stay together than the nonnative
Arabs), the religious communities (thepeople of the Book, or dhimms)
were usually subject to fairly strict segregation. There existed of course Christian
or Jewish quarters, even if their development did not generally originate
from a political decision: the apparent exceptions of constitution of the Jewish
quarter in Sana'a at the end of the seventeenth century or of the Moroccan
'mellahs' at the beginning of the nineteenth century should be noted, but it is
unlikely that the Jews were not already more or less grouped together in these
two cities. This again does not preclude some cohabitation of Muslims and
Christians. But from this point of view, the evolution of the Christian quarter
in Aleppo, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, seems exemplary: the
progressive extension of the community towards the East, resulting from its
considerable growth during these four centuries, clearly shows the limits of
this mixing; the consequence of the Christians' advance was obviously that
the Muslims abandoned their 'conquered' quarter^.^' This is a phenomenon
that can be compared to the 'blackening' of areas in some of today's large
American cities: in both cases, the 'stronger' community withdraws so as to
avoid any contact with the weaker community-with the difTerence however
that the Christians of Aleppo were an economically more prosperous community
than the Muslims they were pushing back by their expansion. The
tendency of the Ottomans to let 'natural' communities govern themselves,
for reasons of convenience,may have accentuated what is an apparently very
ancient phenomenon. Antioch, as we have seen earlier, presents an extreme
picture of this religious (Alawite, Christian) and ethnic (Turkish) segregation
39 Andre Raymond, 'Groupessociaux et ghgraphie urbaine B Alep', in The Syrian
Land,T. Philipp (ed.),Stuttgart, 1992.
of comrn~nities.~~But this fragmentation of the city was in no way conducive
to anarchy, as the communities (td'ija/~awfi1i~were associated with
the administration of the city through their natural heads (shaykhs).
3.3. Contrary to the Orientalist postulates, the single type of housing in the
form of the house with courtyard appears as a myth, but it is so deeply rooted
and so often mentioned that it will have to be discussed once again. On the
one hand, even in the framework of the house with courtyard, socio-economic
differences constitute an essential variable that precludes its being considered
as a unique model. There is a world of difference (and all the misery
of the world) between a near-palace in the centre of the city (with numerous
and specialized rooms, one or two floors, luxury fittings) and the elementary
courtyard-house, nearly a rural house, on the city outskirts, even if both
houses are arranged around a courtyard. The differenceis visiblefrom outside,
contrary to the illusions of Orientalists. On the other hand, the Arab world
possesses a large spectrum of types of housing, whose variety corresponds to
both socio-economic differences and regional speczcity. We can mention, as
regards the latter aspect, the tower-house so well illustrated by houses around
the Red Sea (Rosetta, the Yemen). Above all, however, the range of types of
housing, corresponding to the needs of socially highly varied populations, is
very rich: collectivehousing of fvnduq type (very widespread) and of rub' type
(in Egypt only), designed for the middle classes; 'middle' housing without a
courtyard described very convincingly by N. Hanna for Cairo;41poor community
housing of a rural character, of hawsh type (elementary houses grouped
around a courtyard) attested in Egypt, Syria and in the ~ i j a z ; ~ ~poor unicellular
houses whose existence in the Fatimid Fustat was recently revealed
by the Scanlon and Kubiak ex~avations.~~One must, therefore, refute very
strongly the theory of a single type of housing based, on the one hand, on an
egalitarian conception of Muslim society and, on the other, on the hypothesis
of the preponderant role played in this particular society by the notion of
'privacy' (so important around the Mediterranean, Muslim or not).
4. Conclusions
Whatever the uncertainties that remain, or gaps in our information, it seems
that one cannot speak of an 'Islamic' city such as the one the Orientajists
thought they could define. The characteristics mentioned have nothing Islamic
about them or are not relevant. Moreover, the often renewed efforts
to define an urban 'doctrine' from the fundamental texts of Islam have generally
proved disappointing. Besim Selim Hakim, in one of the more recent
attempts of this kind (Arabic-Islamic Cities, London, 1986),indulged in an
40 J. Weulersse, 'Antioche, essai de gbgraphie urbaine'. 

41 Kelly Hama, 'Bayt al-Istambulli, an Introduction to the Cairene Middle Class

House', Annales Isiamologzques, 16 (1980). 

42 A. Raymond, Grandes villes arabes, 323-25.

"3.Kubiak and G. Scanlon,finalreport on Fustcit C, published in 1989. 

exhaustive collection of quotations from the QurlHnand h ~ d i t h . ~ ~All he gathered,
however, was a compendium of general dictates, essentialIy concerning
the protection of privacy, or the constraints of neighbourhood life. The only
truly significant text is the well-known Muslim hadith: 'If you disagree about
the width of a street, make it seven cubits'. A 'Muslim' doctrine in this
domain can only be properly established on the basis of the collections of
judicial decisions (such as the nawEzil)or of the transactions of the Tribunals
(m@ama) which reflect the practice of the judges and the muftl, exercised
of course in the framework of the shae'a, but belonging quite obviously to
the domain of the odniin.
Does this mean that one can solve the problem thus posed by merely
resorting to a geographical and cultural criterion, and by conjuring up a
'Mediterranean' Arab city, or, to be on the safe side, a :Mediterranean AraboIslamic'
city? This would mean ignoring the reality of a vast domain, stretching
from the Ocean to the Indus, in which indisputable common characteristics
could be found: concentration of market areas in the heart of the city; existence
of closed quarters (mahalla);importance of segregation and exclusion
factors; predominance of houses with central courtyards. Even if these elements
are not really 'Muslim', they do show an identity of organization that
is definitely present from Marrakesh to Herat. It is also true that it is not
easy to demonstrate the specificity of an Arab city, an Irano-Afghan city or
even a Turkish city.
In this vast, 'Muslim', domain we are certainly faced with an urban system
whose reality reveals the great weakness of the Orientalist description: its
conclusion, explicit or not, of secalled 'urban anarchy', is quite obviously
devoid of any meaning, since a city, that is to say a geographicalconcentration
of a large population, can only subsist or develop within a system of coherent
relations between its society and the space in which it expands. It is true.
however, that the precise characteristics and possible originality of such a
system cannot be easily defined at this stage of research, insofar as our present
knowledge does not allow us, in particular, to account for its origins and
formation.
To go further, first of all the Arab antecedents of the 'Arabo-Muslim'
city would have to be made clear. The excavations in progress in the Yemen
(and, in particular, those of Shabwa, organized by Jean-Francois Breton) have
provided a wealth of suggestions and enabled us to relate the urban layout of
an ancient, third-century town, such as that of Shabwa, to the modem cities
of Shibam and S a r ~ a ' a . ~ ~These excavations, however, seem to exclude the
centrality of the market and result in a concept of the housing layout that is,
all in all, random ('alCatoire'), which contradicts all we know of classical and
modem town planning in the great Arab cities. The excavations at Fau in
Saudi Arabia by al-Ansary would be of precious help if they continued with an
investigation of the residential quarters in their relationship with the public
44 	Besirn Selim Hakim, Arabic-Islamic Cities, London, 1986, 146.
45 	J.F. Breton and Ch. Darles, 'Shibam', Storia delta Citta, 14 (1980). J.-F. Breton,
'lesite et la ville de Shabwa', Syria, 68 (1991). Ch. Darles, 'L'architecture
civile 2 Shabwa', Syria, 68 (1991).
structures (temples) and business establishments (caravanserais? and scqs?)
that have been revealed.46We have not yet reached that stage.
The connections between the Arab cities and the Mediterranean cities of
antiquity would also have to be better defined historically. In this case it is
undoubtedly in Syria that a possibleanswer to the problem is to be found. The
discovery in 1984of the market of Palmyra set up in the antique roadway may
provide us with the missing link in the transformation from a Roman avenue
lined with columns to an Arab suq, of which 3. Sauvaget had an intuition
sixty years ago. Its date, however, remains conject~ral.~~
Finally, excavations would have to shed some light on the first large-scale
Arab establishments in Kufa (AD 638) and Fustat (AD 642). No doubt we
shall have to resign ourselves to the fact that the obstacles to any such venture
will be insurmountable for a long time yet. The indications given by
RP. Gayraud concern a marginal site outside Fustat, in a limited area of
a few hundred square metres which makes difficult a conclusion about the
foundation of the
The ground is thus far from being cleared, and nothing shows that it will
be in the near future. For the time being, it is wise to resort to the notion
of a traditional city marked by 'regional' aspects (Arab in the Mediterranean
domain, Irano-Afghan and Turkish), but naturally fashioned in depth by the
Muslim population that organized it and lived in it (with its beliefs, institutions,
and customs, all profoundly impregnated with Islam): it is the most
prudent approach we can suggest, one which best takes into account the elements
we have now at our disposal.
46 A.R. al-Ansary, Qaryat al-Fau. A portrait of Pre-Islamic Civilization in Saudi
Arabia, London, 1981.
47 	Khad Aslad, 'IktishZf siiq min al-'ahd al-umawi fi Tadmur', Annales
Arche'ologiques Arabes Syriennes, 37-38 (1991).
4s Roland-Pierre Gayraud, 'Istabl 'Antar, 1987-1989', Annales Islamologiques, 25
(1991).