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' •"•>'" ' Journalof the Economic andBRILL Social HUtory of the Orient 56 (2013) 471-493

The Islamic City Critíque: Revising the Narrative

Gregory Aldous*

AbstractIn recent years scholars have challenged the concept of an Islamic city by constructing ahistorical narrative in which it derives from the orientalist tradition. They claim that Frenchorientalists in the early twentieth century created an ideal type of the Islamic city as con-trasted with its Western counterpart in order to support the assumptions of orientalistdiscourse. The first part of the anicle challenges this assumption by showing that the Frenchorientalists did not in fact posit an Islamic city type. The second part offers an alternativeexplanation for the genesis of the concept by tracing it to the work of American anthro-pologists in the 1950s.

KeywordsIslamic city, urbanism, historiography, orientalism

In 1987 Janet Abu-Lughod published an article in the International four-nal ofMiddle East Studies in which she presented the history of oriental-ist scholarship on the Islamic city.' She argued that in the mid-twentiethcentury a succession of orientalists, the early ones working in French, setout to construct an ideal type of the Islamic city. That is, they assumed thatall cities in the Islamic world were structured along similar lines; that thisstructure was conditioned by the religion of Islam; and that these citieswere fundamentally different from cities in Europe. She wrote this in reac-tion to the attempts among contemporary Arab urban planners to resurrectthe so-called traditional Arab-Islamic city. André Raymond subsequentlyexpanded upon her narrative in an address before the British Society for

*' Gregory Aldous, History Program, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, 150 FinoliDrive. Greensburg, PA 15601, USA: [email protected]." Janet Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City—Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contempo-rary Relevance." Intemationaljoumal of Middle East Studies 19.2 (May 1987): 155-176.

© Koninklijke Brill NY, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341315

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Middle Eastern Studies in 1994.^ He argued that these orientalists wereblinded by their assumption that any phenomenon arising in the Muslimworld must be based on the Islamic religion and he accused them of alwaysmaking an unflattering comparison with European cities. The picture con-structed by Abu-Lughod and Raymond of the history of the Islamic cityconstruct has become the standard narrative among scholars.'

This narrative suffers from two deficiencies. It flattens the complexity ofthe orientalist discussion concerning cities in the Islamic world, and itignores other genealogies of the contemporary work on the Islamic citytype. The French orientalists working on Islamic urbanism in the mid-twentieth century were not, contrary to Abu-Lughod's and Raymond'scontentions, involved in a common enterprise to define an ideal type ofthe Islamic city. While their critiques sometimes made valid points againstsome ofthe work ofthe French orientalists, on other counts they mischar-acterized the work of individual scholars in order to fit them into an a priorinarrative.

Nevertheless, the question Abu-Lughod raised is a valid one—where didthis contemporary notion of the Islamic city as an ideal type originate? Intheir effort to account for the existence of this assumption in the work oflater scholars like Gustave E. von Grunebaum and Ira Lapidus, Abu-Lughod and those who follow her have projected all the faulty assumptionsin these later scholars back onto the French orientalists who preceded themand whom they cited. Close reading of the French orientalists reveals thatthis projection is unwarranted. There is another source for thisconcept—Âmerican anthropologists working in the 1940s and 1950s,who had a strong interest in what they believed to be the way cities

'̂ André Raymond, "Islamic City, Arab Ciry: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views." BritishJournal of Middle Eastern Studies 2\ .\ (1994): 3-18. For a later restatement of his argument,making many ofthe same points, see idem, "The Spatial Organization ofthe City." In TheGity in the Islamic World, ed. Salma K. Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill, 2008).'̂ A number of authors have assumed Abu-Lughod's narrative. Some examples include Eck-

art Ehlers, "The City ofthe Islamic Middle East." Golloquium Geographicum, 22, Modellingthe City—Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1992): 89-91; Michael E. Bonine, et al.. The MiddleEastern Gity and Islamic Urbanism (Bonn, 1994): 21-2; Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology ofIslam (Oxford, 1999): 202-4; Zeynep Çelik, "New Approaches to the 'Non-Western' City."Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58.3 (Sep. 1999): 375; Emily Gottreich,"Rethinking the 'Islamic City' from the Perspective of Jewish Sçzcer Jewish Social Studies11.1 (Fall 2004): 119, 120; and Rami Farouk Daher, 'Amman: Disguised Genealogy andRecent Urban Restructuring and Neoliberal Threats." In The Evolving Arab Gity: Tradition,Modernity & Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London, 2008): 41-2.

The Islamic City Critique: Revising the Narrative 473

exemplified innate characteristics of their civilizations. Both Abu-Lughodand Raymond emphasized the important role von Grunebaum played incodifying the Islamic city type, and in fact von Grunebaum collaboratedwith some of these anthropologists in the 1950s just prior to the publica-tion of his seminal article on the Islamic city.

The present article is divided into two parts. First, an examination ofsome of the French orientalist works cited by Abu-Lughod and Raymondwill reveal the nuance and diversity of their work and will show that theydo not easily fit into the standard narrative of how the Islamic city wasconstructed. While Abu-Lughod and Raymond cite a variety of scholars,for the sake of brevity I will limit the present analysis to surveying four ofthe most important ones: William Marcáis; his brother Georges Marcáis;Jean Sauvaget; and Roger Le Tourneau. In the second part of the article Iwill discuss von Grunebaum's exposure to the ideas of his anthropologistcolleagues and argue that they had ai strong influence on the formation ofthe Islamic city construct as it was adopted by scholars in the late twentiethcentury as well as among some urban planners and thinkers in the Arabworld up to the present.

The Orientalists and the Islamic City

William Marcáis

William Marcáis typically receives credit for initiating the work on theIslamic city model."* His 1928 article "LTslamisme et la vie urbaine" was anattempt to explain why the nomadic Arabs took to living in cities immedi-ately after leaving the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. He arguedthat this was due to three fectors.^ First, some Bedouin aspired to sedentarizedue to the difficulty of their nomadic lifestyle. Second, although the major-ity of Arabs in the seventh century were nomadic, those who organizedthe conquests were sedentarized Arabs living in the Hijaz—agriculturalistsfrom Medina and merchants from Mecca and Ta'if.

His third point, and the heart of his argument, was that Islam is bynature an urban religion. "LTslâm," Marcáis stated, "s'affirme dès son

•" See for example Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City": 155; and Raymond, "Islamic City,Arab City": 3." William Marcáis, "L'Islamisme et la vie urbaine." In Articles et conférences (Paris, 1961).These factors are summarized on p. 59 and explained in detail on pp. 59-62.

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apparition comme une religion essentiellement citadine."*^ The founderand early believers were city dwellers, and it was for them that the Qur'anlegislated. Ethical issues dealt with in the Qur'an, such as financial specula-tion and usury, are of interest to urban merchants. The veiling of women isonly practical in an urban setting. The congregational prayer on Friday, "lerite essentiel et le plus hautement significatif" in Islam, requires a settledcommunity. Marcáis noted that the madhhabs calculated the minimumsize of the community differently, some requiring a city for the congre-gational prayer to be possible and necessary, and others putting the bar attowns or large villages—but they all agreed that the community had to besettled and permanent. Marcáis noted.''

That the jurisprudents restricted Friday prayer to cities raised the ques-tion as to what constitutes a city in Islamic law. Marcáis cited the caliph'Umar, the jurists Malik ibn Anas and al-Shäfi'l, and the Andálusi geogra-pher Abu 'Ubayd al-Bakri to show that the classical definition of a city wasany settlement that included a congregational mosque and a bazaar.Marcáis included an interesting anecdote from a contemporary Frenchtraveller in Morocco. The traveller asked the name of a certain village andhis guide corrected him, using the same terminology as al-BakrI: "Ce n'estpas un village; c'est une ville qui possède une mosquée-cathédrale et unpetit bazar."*

William Marcáis added to the central mosque and the bazaar a thirdnecessary feature of the Islamic city, the public bath, arguing that its impor-tance has also long been recognized by Muslim writers and noting that ithas been nearly ubiquitous in the Muslim Mediterranean world since theUmayyad period. While acknowledging that the hadith literature largelycondemns public baths, he suggested that it had become ubiquitousbecause it so readily facilitates performance of the major ablution, whichexplains why baths increasingly came to be annexed to mosques.'

William Marçais's article does not fit easily into the Islamic city histori-ography, except insofar as it was cited by later authors who did in fact positan Islamic city. In contrast to them. Marcáis did not set out to define theIslamic city. He instead argued that Islam is essentially an urban phenom-

''^ Ibid.: 61. "Islam has asserted itself since its appearance essentially as a religion of thetownsman."" Ibid.: 62.

"* Ibid.: 65. "This is not a village. This is a city that possesses a cathedral-mosque and asmall bazaar."-» Ibid.: 66-7.


enon, and set out to define what urbanism means in terms of Islamic lawand practice. Rather than defining Islamic urbanism in contrast withurbanism elsewhere, he defined urbanism as opposed to nomadism withinIslam. Regardless of whether one agrees with Marcáis, such an argument isnot the same as defining an Islamic city model. Abu-Lughod appears toacknowledge this when she said that Marçais's article presented "only avery modestly etched idea of the Islamic city, one which poorly distin-guishes it from cities in other religious/cultural contexts and one which hasas yet no topography." In other words, William Marcáis failed adequatelyto describe the model he is believed to have initiated.

Georges Marcáis

William's brother Georges Marcáis continued his inquiry into what consti-tutes "urban" in Islamic culture. His most-cited statement on the topic washis 1939 lecture before the inaugural session ofthe fifth congress oftheSociétés Savantes de l'Afrique du Nord in Tunis. '" In the lecture, entitled"L'urbanisme musulman,"" Marcáis argued that while Roman urbanismin North Africa is justly studied, scholars should not neglect the study ofIslamic urbanism.

Repeating William Marçais's point that the city is essential to the prac-tice of Islam, he devoted the first part of his lecture to discussing the condi-tions under which Muslims constructed cities. The earliest Muslim cities,such as Basra and Kùfa, were designed for military purposes—to garrisontroops and to administer the conquered regions. Later frontier bases inNorth Africa also evolved into cities. Aside from military cities, there arealso cities founded to serve the needs of a princely court. Like Versailles,they often started as elaborate hunting lodges which soon became theruler's means of escape from the capital.'^

Turning to the urban landscape. Marcáis considered several neces-sary features of any city—security, provision of water, and sanitation—and how Muslims addressed these issues. Like most pre-modern urbandwellers, Muslims addressed the problem of security by the use of walls.Water was provided for by means of aqueducts and cisterns. Sewerage was

"" Janet Abu-Lughod dated it to 1940, but that was the date of publication. See Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City": 156.'" Georges Marcáis, "L'urbanisme musulman." In Mélanges d'histoire et d'archéologie del'Occident musulman (Algiers, 1957): 219-31.'̂ ' Ibid.: 219-22.

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implemented in the form of street drainage, and trash removal resulted inhills of garbage growing just outside the city. Marcáis noted that oversightof these utilities was assigned to the muhtasib, the official traditionally incharge of supervising the markets. With regard to circulation, another nec-essary aspect of any city, he noted that this preoccupies modern urbanistsmuch more than it did pre-modern Muslims. Since wheeled vehicles wereabsent from these cities, provision only needed to be made for the unham-pered circulation of pedestrians and pack animals.''

Quarters could be delineated based on ethnicity or on land use, andthese could overlap if a certain land use was associated with a certain ethnicgroup. The strong emphasis Muslims placed on the privacy of the familyresulted in the strict separation of residential and commercial quarters. Thecommercial zone of the city had a hierarchy of uses radiating from the greatmosque. First, those uses directly pertaining to the mosque's activities: can-dle sellers and merchants of perfume and incense to serve the mosque's reli-gious function, and booksellers and bookbinders to serve the mosque's (andits associated madrasas) intellectual function. Then came leatherworkers,clothiers, jewellers, and hatters; then merchants of furniture and kitchenutensils; then blacksmiths. Near the gates one found the caravanserais. Atthe edge of town were the tanners, dyers and potters.'"*

It becomes clear that Georges Marcáis was not attempting to codify anIslamic city distinct from cities elsewhere, far less did he claim that theIslamic faith determined the form or composition of these cities. In speak-ing of "Islamic urbanism" he described urban phenomena as they occurredin the Muslim setting, but he openly acknowledged that many of the fea-tures he identified were not unique to Muslim cities, but could be foundin many settings including medieval Europe. He did not attempt to argue,for instance, that city walls or street drainage are unique to Muslim cities,only that they are to be found there. When he brought up specificallyMuslim institutions, such as the muhtasib, he used it as a way of showinghow a Muslim institution was used to address a universal issue.

On the other hand, in the case of Georges Marcáis, Abu-Lughod's andRaymond's criticism that he generalized about the entire Islamic worldbased on North African examples is justified. This is more apparent in theother article of his that they cited, "La conception des villes dans l'Islam",and so supports their argument even more clearly, even though they did

'̂ ' Ibid.: 224-7."» Ibid.: 229-31.

The Islamic Gity Gritique: Revising the Narrative 477

not make use of it in their analyses. The latter article, published a few yearslater, lacks focus and wanders from one observation to another withoutany clear thesis, but the basic themes can be summarized. He first dis-cussed the factors contributing to the founding and the success of Islamiccities. He compared three types of cities—Roman, medieval European,and Muslim—and noted their differences and similarities. He reiteratedthat Islam is an essentially urban religion. Finally he described two com-peting forces in Muslim cities: a centripetal force represented by the con-gregational mosque and the Islamic faith versus a centriftigal tendency todivide the city into quarters in contravention of Muhammad's teachings.

In this article Georges Marcáis spoke clearly of an Islamic city as a cat-egory of analysis distinct from classical and medieval European cities. PaceRaymond, however, he did not insist on the inferiority of the Islamic city.On the contrary, when Marcáis compared Islamic cities to European onesit was as often to show similarities as differences. After observing, for exam-ple, that each type of commerce in Muslim cities was generally restrictedexclusively to one street, he stated, "II en était de même dans nos villeschrétiennes du Moyen Age."'^ He also regarded the congregational mosqueas equivalent to the Christian cathedral:

Des docteurs rigoristes poseront en principe que la prière du vendredi ne peut êtrecélébrée que dans la mosquée-cathédrale et qu'il ne peut y avoir qu'une mosquée-cathédrale par agglomération urbaine; de même n'y a-t-il qu'une église cathédrale dansles villes chrétiennes.'*

He went on to draw a lengthy parallel between the congregational mosqueand the classical agora, both physically, in that they were built at the centerof town at the intersection of major arterials, and socially, in that theyserved as the space in which public life took place.'^ It is also worth notingthat when he claimed that Muslim cities lack political autonomy, he didnot attribute this to Islam, but rather argued that Islam, represented by the

' ' ' G. Marcáis, "L'urbanisme musulman": 230. "It was the same way in our Christian citiesofthe Middle Ages."'" Georges Marcáis, "Laconception des villes dans l'Islam." Revued'Alger2.\Q (1945): 527."The rigorist doctors [i.e. the 'ulamä'] will propose in principle that the Friday prayer canonly be celebrated in the cathedral-mosque and there can only be one cathedral-mosque perurban ^lomeration—^just as there can only be one cathedral church in Christian cities.""' Ibid.: 527-8. He made a similar comparison in "L'urbanisme musulman": 230.

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'ulama, was the chief means by which the populace resisted the demandsof their political rulers.'^

In fact in his previous article, "L'urbanisme musulman," Georges Marcáisargued for the superiority of Muslim urban form. Using the analogy ofevolution, he said urban differentiation into ethnic quarters was equivalentto coral {madrépore)—that is, simple animals composed of homogeneouspolyps—whereas functional differentiation was like a higher vertebratewith specialized organs. He went on.

L'évolution normale de la cité fait prévaloir sur la différenciation ethnique la différen-ciation fonctionnelle. Je crois que cette dernière est plus nette dans les villes musulma-nes que dans les nôtres. Plus que dans nos villes existait naguère et existe encore dansles terres d'Islam ce que nos urbanistes désignent sous le vocable barbare de zoning:une distinction entre le quartier officiel, les quartiers d'habitation et les quartiers

It seems unjustified to equate such statements with the generalization thatthe orientalists intended to show the inferiority of the cities of Islam tothose in the West. Marcáis clearly had great admiration for cities in theMuslim world, promoting them as worthy of scholarly attention and argu-ing that in certain respects they were superior to Western cities. He did gen-eralize about all Islamic cities, but otherwise Abu-Lughod and Raymond'srepresentation of his arguments does not hold: Marcáis did not claim thatall urban features derived from Islam or that Islamic cities were inferior toEuropean cities. One orientalist who did assume the inferiority of Mus-lim cities, though he failed to adhere to the stereotype in other ways, wasJean Sauvaget.

fean Sauvaget

Turning to the eastern Mediterranean, the French orientalist Jean Sauvagetdid a great deal of work on Syrian history, from the Seleucid period throughthe Middle Ages. In several of his works he studied the built form of cities

'"' Ibid.: 524.''̂ ' G. Marcáis, "L'urbanisme musulman": 229. "The normal evolution of the city causesethnic differentiation to be superseded by functional differentiation. I believe that the lat-ter is more pure in Muslim cities than in ours. More than in our cities, there has existedlately and still exists in the lands of Islam what our urbanists refer to with the barbarousword zoning—a distinction between the official quarter, the residential quarters, and thecommercial quarters."


and its evolution over time, writing extensive treatments of both Damascusand Aleppo.^" Since these studies' conclusions and historical outlines areessentially the same, there is no need to go over them both. AUp is morein-depth and more often cited by later scholars so only that work willbe discussed here.

Sauvaget set out in his introduction to explain how the city of Aleppodeveloped in such a seemingly unlikely location. His answer to the ques-tion is unremarkable: a combination of agricultural resources, the presenceof a tell that could be used for defense, and most importantly its locationat the crossroads of trade routes. Far more interesting is the book's explana-tion of the evolution of the city and its use of both historical documentsand extant archeological evidence (at least, such evidence as did not requiredigging). He argued that Aleppo reached its quintessential urban form inthe Hellenistic period, this form surviving during Roman occupation. Inthe Late Empire and under Byzantine rule urban life deteriorated, but thatdeterioration accelerated in the Middle Ages due to two factors: the estab-lishment of Islamic norms starting in the eighth century, and a period ofpolitical chaos in the ninth through eleventh centuries.

When it comes to Aleppo's urban development, for Sauvaget theUmayyad period was culturally an extension of the Byzantine. Only inthe Abbasid period did a "pensée spécifiquement islamique" appear andcome to influence politics and society.^' He did not, however, stress anaccelerated deterioration of Aleppo's "urbanism" until the ninth centuryas Abbasid central rule gave way to a period of political instability. Withthe city contested among Byzantines, Bedouin, Fatimids and Turks, a lackof security contributed to the rise of "sociétés de chevalerie" and the divi-sion of the city into quarters.^^ The civic spirit that had maintained theold urban order crumbled away.̂ ^ Once this happened there was no way

'"' Jean Sauvjêt, "Esquisse d'une histoire de la ville de Damas." Revue des Études Islamiques^( 1934): 421 -80; idem, Alep: Essai sur le développement d'une grande ville syrienne des originesau milieu du XJX' siècle (Paris, 1941). For a modem review oíAlep, see R. Stephen Hum-phreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1991): 234-8. For hisdiscussion on another Syrian city, Latakia, see Jean Sauvaget, "Le plan de Laodicée-sur-Mer." Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 4 (1934): 81-114; and idem, "Note complémentaire."Bulletin d'Études Orientales 6 (1936): 51-2.^" Sauvaget,^/): 72-3." ' Ibid.: 96-7."^ For the peak of Aleppine urbanism, see Sauvaget, Alep: 52, 246. For the deteriorationof the city in the Late Empire and the Byzantine period, see pp. 66-7. That the Byzantine

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to reverse the process, because Islam has no urbanism comparable to thatof the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations. Islamic law does not allowfor a municipal legal entity or for anyone to have a special legal status,according to Sauvaget. Instead, all believers are equally members of theindivisible umma.^^

It is rather ironic that Sauvaget has been included in the orientalist tra-dition that created the Islamic city model,^' since he assumed there wasno Islamic city and that there could not by definition be one. On the oneoccasion that he described Aleppo as a Muslim city, it was in the sense thatAleppo's population had become thoroughly Muslim.^^ Sauvaget went sofar as to say, "De la conquête arabe au milieu du xix' s., Alep est moinsune ville musulmane, stricto sensu, qu'un avatar de Bérée,"^^ referring toBeroea, the Seleucid foundation ofthe city. If he used any typology at all(other than the classical city type implicit throughout all his works), it wasthat ofthe "Syrian city";^' he regarded the cities of Syria as having under-gone a similar evolution due to similar historical circumstances. Sauvagetsometimes offered a positive observation on Islamic cities, including thefollowing remark that reveals something of his perspective:

... la ville qu'a modelée l'Islam est—indubitablement—d'une valeur esthétique supé-rieure à celle que pouvait offrir la Bérée antique, développant en perspectives monoto-nes ses rues en damier et l'interminable file de colonnes de son avenue. Mais ceciimporte peu. Une ville n'est pas une œuvre d'art.̂ ^

trend continued under the Umayyads can be found on pp. 72 and 81-2, and the Abbasidtransition on p. 82. See chapter 7 for the changes wrought by the period of instability,particularly pp. 93-7, 104-5 and 107-8."' Sauvaget, Alep: 73, 247."' See for example Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City": 159; Raymond, "Islamic City, ArabCity": 1-7; and Eldem, Goffman and Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West(Cambridge, 1999): 2.'̂••' Sauvaget, y4/i/>: 128.

"' Ibid.: 249. "From the Arab conquest to the middle ofthe 19th century, Aleppo is less aMuslim city, stricto sensu, than an avatar of Beroea.""' Sauvaget, "Esquisse": 425-424, Alep: 242-244.'̂̂ ' Sauvaget, Alep: 248. ".. .the city [of Aleppo] that Islam modeled is undoubtedly of

an aesthetic value superior to that which ancient Beroea could offer, which developed inmonotonous vistas its checkerboard streets and the interminable line of columns along itsavenue. But that matters little. A city is not a work of art."


Even a compliment such as this reveals how little Sauvaget thought ofIslamic cities.^" André Raymond was therefore right in calling attention toSauvaget's essentially negative definition of the Islamic city, in that Sau-vaget only conceptualized the Islamic city as an absence of something.Nevertheless there is no reason to link Sauvaget with the Marcáis brothersin a common project to create an Islamic city type. Unlike them, Sauvagetsaw the Islamic city as merely the absence of city in that it deviated fromtrue cities—the cities of Antiquity.

Roger Le Tourneau

Another orientalist whose work is said to have contributed to the creationof the Islamic city concept was Roger Le Tourneau. Like William andGeorges Marcáis, Le Tourneau was a French scholar who pursued his workin North Africa. He is best known for his books on the city of Fez. Hisfirst, Fes avant le protectorat, published in 1949, is also the most detailed.^'It is an encyclopedic work, dealing with Fez's history, physical setting,demographics, municipal institutions and economy. It also delves into thecity's social fabric, discussing education, marriage and family life, and reli-gious practices. A later edition, entided La vie quotidienne à Fes en 1900,^^was a revised and abridged version of Fes avant le protectorat.

Although both books are included in Janet Abu-Lughod's "isnäd" oforientalist scholarship on the Islamic city, in these books Le Tourneau didnot actually generalize from his case study on Fez to other cities in theIslamic world.'' Even in those passages where one might expect it, he madeno reference to Islam being a determining factor in the features of urbanlife that he described. In his detailed discussion of public baths, for exam-ple, he noted their architectural features and how they functioned, withoutwriting that they are necessary to Muslim life as a means of maintainingritual purity.''* Likewise when discussing the arrangement of the Fasi house,he did describe it in terms later to become stereotypical of the Islamic

"" Sauvaget's contempt is at its most explicit when speaking of Latakia, "Le pian deLaodicé-sur-Mer": 81.^" Roger Le Tourneau, Fès avant le protectorat. Étude économique et sociale d'une ville del'occident musulman (CasManca, 1949).'^' Roger Le Tourneau, La vie quotidienne à Fès en 1900 ([Paris], 1965).' " Janet Abu-Lughod, 'The Islamic City": 159. Le Tourneau's later work. Les villes musul-manes de l'Afrique du Nord, will be discussed below.*" Roger Le Tourneau, Fès avant le protectorat. 247-250.

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house ("trois ou quatre pièces rectangulaires et allongées entourant unpatio central carré"), but he described this as typical of North Africa ratherthan of Islam.'^

Even Le Tourneau's most generalizing work. Les villes musulmanes del'Afrique du Nord made little attempt to define an Islamic city. Despite thetitle. Le Tourneau set out to describe urbanism in the Maghreb withoutsuggesting that his findings pertained to other regions, using the term"musulmans" to refer to the local inhabitants of North Africa as opposed tothe French. Throughout the text Le Tourneau consistently discussed "lesvilles maghrébines"znà only rarely used the term "villes musulmanes."^

Le Tourneau set out to describe urban life in the Maghreb by looking atseveral dimensions ofthe city: physical form, demographics, political insti-tutions, economics, culture, and religion, with a coda discussing Europeanimpacts. These are basically the same topics covered in his books on Fez, invirtually the same order. Nevertheless, he did not extend to all the cities ofthe Maghreb the characteristics of Fez. While describing the Maghrebi cityin general, he also gave attention to diversity of form. This is particularlytrue when describing the physical characteristics ofthe North African city.He noted, as did the Marcáis brothers, that the center of the city is domi-nated by the grand mosque and the adjacent central market. He gave asexamples Fez and Tunis, and the smaller cities of Nedroma and Sefrou,adding that the only exception to this of which he knew was the Khârijîcities in the Mzab.'^ He noted a third element in the center ofthe NorthAfrican town, the palace ofthe sovereign or governor (the tiär al-imára),but stated that its presence in the center ofthe city was "beaucoup moinsconstant que les deux autres." He mentioned Tunis, Tlemcen and early Fezas examples where the dar al-imára was in the center of town, and Marra-kesh and Almoravid Fez as examples where it was not, also noting thatmore recently in Algiers the deys had located their palace in the central citybut relocated it to the qasba on the periphery.^*

» Ibid.: 495.^'^ Roger Le Tourneau, Les villes musulmanes de l'Afrique du Nord (Algiers, 1957). Fromthe context it is clear that Le Tourneau used the term musulmanes here in the sense of"indigenous." Cf Raymond, "Islamic City, Arab City": 8; and Haneda, "Introduction: AnInterpretation of the Concept of the 'Islamic City'." In Islamic Urban Studies: Historical

Review and Perspectives, ed. Masashi Haneda and Toru Miura (London, 1994): 4.•'̂ ' Le Tourneau, Les villes musulmanes: 11-12.^«' Ibid.: 12-13.


Le Tourneau was careful to note change over time throughout his dis-cussion of Maghrebi cities. In his discussion of Jewish quarters he statedthat while Jews concentrated in their own quarters early on, it was notuntil the fifteenth century that the authorities restricted them to a certainquarter (called a melLth), first in Fez, then later in other cities.^' In hisdiscussion of popular piety, he noted with characteristic caution that thesources do not allow him to state with confidence the degree to which peo-ple attended mosque in past ages.''" Le Tourneau summed up his sensitivityto geographic and chronological variation in North African cities thus:

U est naturellement très malaisé de parler de la population des villes m^rébines: lesdifférences de l'une à l'autre sont considérables et, à l'intérieur d'une même ville, leséléments du peuplement ont beaucoup varié à travers les âges.*'

André Raymond has argued that the orientalists contrasted the Muslimtowns with their Roman antecedents, and consistendy defined Islamic cit-ies in negative terms in that they lacked the physical and political ordercharacteristic of ancient cities and of European cities. While Le Tourneaudid draw a contrast with Roman cities in this passage, in several places henoted that the Maghrebi city resembled the medieval European city."*̂

Furthermore, in contrast to Raymond's assertion that Le Tourneau hada merely negative approach to describing the city, he in fact took a rathersophisticated, and not wholly negative or dismissive, approach to suchmatters as municipal institutions and public space. He noted that Muslimcities lacked city-wide institutions, but he did not therefore conclude thatthese cities lacked internal order and were thus easy to control by centralauthorities. He stated that order was maintained in a different way than bymeans of the municipal organÍ2^tions common in the West. He anticipatedthe work of later historians by stating that the various communities in thecity, in their vying for particular interests, created a stable equilibrium:

'« Ibid.: 18.•"" Ibid.: 89.*" Ibid.: 27, emphasis in original. "It is naturally very difficult to speak o( the populationof M^rebine cities: the differences from one to the other are considerable and, within thesame city, the elements of the populace are quite varied across the ages."''̂ ' See for example pp. 13, 22, 55 and 66. Le Tourneau compared the traditional Maghrebimarkets to modern European stores on page 71.

484 G. Aldous IJESHO 56 (2013) 471-493

Équilibre d'apparence précaire, non pas réglé par des institutions précises, mais équili-bre de fait, fondé sur la tradition et assez solide au demeurant pour avoir duré pendantplusieurs siècles.''^

Raymond conflated the work of different orientalists into a pastiche thatdoes not accurately reflect any individual scholar's work. He seemed toassume that if Sauvaget had a negative definition of the Islamic city, thenall orientalists with an interest in the Muslim city must have shared hisview. Conversely, if the Marcáis brothers proposed a certain model forIslamic urban structure, Sauvaget must have adhered to it. There is, how-ever, no reason why we should make that assumption. On the contrary, theMarcáis brothers, Sauvaget, and Le Tourneau each dealt with quite differ-ent questions. William and Georges Marcáis defined Islam as an urbanreligion and attempted to identify what Islam means by "urban". Sauvagetsought to reveal the Hellenistic urban form obscured by later Muslim habi-tation. Le Tourneau studied urban life and institutions in Fez and the sur-rounding region. Not only are these independent lines of inquiry, but theysometimes worked at cross purposes. Georges Marcáis in his enthusiasmextolled Islamic urbanism as superior to that found in Europe, while Sau-vaget saw the same phenomenon as a degenerate residue of classical glory.Whereas Sauvaget emphasized discontinuity between ancient and Islamiccities, Georges Marcáis emphasized continuity.'*'* And neither Marcáis norLe Tourneau claimed that all the urban elements they described necessarilyderived from Islam. Abu-Lughod and Raymond, each in their own cri-tique, have created an erroneous impression of the history of the conceptby assuming that any orientalist who spoke of the Islamic city was attempt-ing to define an ideal type that derived from Islam and compared unfavo-rably with European cities. Yet to assume that the orientalists shared aunity of vision is unfounded.

Nevertheless, later in the twentieth century a number of scholars inves-tigated the phenomenon of the "Islamic city" in just such terms—an idealtype, determined by the religious norms of Islam, remaining essentially thesame throughout the Muslim world and across centuries, and capable of

''̂ ' Roger Le Tourneau, Les villes musulmanes: 46. "Equilibrium apparently precarious,unregulated by formal institutions, but certainly equilibrium, based on tradition and quitesolid nevertheless for having endured for some centuries." Compare Ira Lapidus, MuslimCities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). See also Le Tourneau's remarkson urban insritutions in Fez in La vie quotidienne. 43.'''" See for example G. Marcáis, "La conception des villes dans l'Islam": 530-531.


being compared to city-types in other civilizations, such as the West. If theFrench orientalists in the interwar period did not invent this concept, thenits source must be sought elsewhere.

Von Grunebaum and the Creation ofthe Islamic City Type

The first orientalist to discuss such a model was the one sometimes claimedto be the last: Gustave von Grunebaum. His 1955 article "The Structure ofthe Muslim Town" has been regarded as a key text in the orientalist projectof defining the Islamic city. Toru Miura asserted that von Grunebaum'sarticle "was instrumental in formalizing the concept ofthe 'Islamic city'.""*'André Raymond called it the "epitome ofthe Orientalist conception ofthecity" and also its "swan-song."''* Far from being its swan song, this articlewas the first by an orientalist to define an ideal type for the Islamic city,and is the one whose influence has continued to the present.

Not much earlier, von Grunebaum had published Medieval Islam: AStudy in Cultural Orientation. As the tide suggests, he intended to explainthe culture ofthe medieval Islamic world, "to trace the temper and flavor ofthe Muslim Middle Ages.'"*^ He indicated, for example, the place of religionin people's lives and how the major religious communities interacted. Hediscussed the legal and political systems and the social order. It is interest-ing, though, that he devoted a scant two paragraphs to urbanism in Islam.''*He merely summarized William Marçais's argument that Islam is an intrin-sically urban religion and that there was a stark eontrast in Islam betweenurban and rural. What makes this interesting is that there is no hint inMedieval Islam ofthe urban model later deseribed in his 1955 attiele."" Itis possible that von Grunebaum had in mind an Islamie eity type—as onewould expect if this was something orientalists were talking about—butsimply chose not to include it in his book. Given the nature of the book

•"' Toru Miura, "Mashriq." In Islamic Urban Studies: Historical Review and Perspectives(London, 1994): 88.•"' Raymond, "Islamic City, Arab City": 9. See also Abu-Lughod's treatment in "TheIslamic City": 157-158.'"'' Gustave von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam (Chicago, 1953-first ed. 1946): vi." ' Ibid.: 173-174.•"' Abu-Lughod also noted that this is "interesting," but made no attempt to account forit. "The Islamic City": 157-158.

486 G. Aldous IJESHO 56 (2013) 471-493

and its subject matter, however, it is hard to see why he would leave out anIslamic city model.

"The Structure of the Muslim Town" was published a few years afterMedieval Islam as part of a collection of essays entitled Islam: Essays in theNature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition.^'^ The volume considered Islamas a unified civilization, and the essays addressed what distinguishes thiscivilization and how it developed. This was an old theme for vonGrunebaum, reflected for example in Medieval Islam. Unlike MedievalIslam though, this volume included an extended treatment of the Islamiccity. While some of the essays in the volume had been published previ-ously, his article on the Islamic city appeared here for the first time.

In many respects the article simply amalgamated some of the argumentsof previous orientalists, for example that Islam is an intrinsically urbanreligion with an antipathy toward nomadism (the Marcáis brothers), andthat cities found in the Islamic world were a degenerate form of the classi-cal city (Sauvaget). Yet while he rehashed old arguments, he recast them byframing them as characteristic of an Islamic (or, in his words, Muslim) citytype. Throughout the article he made reference to the "Muslim town":"The full-fledged Muslim town, as has been said before, has two focalpoints.. ." '̂ "For the unity of the Muslim town is functional, not civic."'^He noted that while the layout of cities in Iran and Turkestan prior toIslam were different from those in the Mediterranean region, "within thearbâd gradually the universal pattern came to prevail," the universal pat-tern being the presence of a bazaar and a central mosque.^'

The article is more than just a description of the typical Islamic city. VonGrunebaum also implicitly set out to explain how the city in the Muslimworld exemplified Islamic civilization. He argued that in Greek and Roman

"" This work appeared in two editions in 1955, but the text and p<înation in both editionsare identical. First the American Anthropological Association published it and distributedit with the April 1955 issue of the American Anthropologist (G.E. von Grunebaum, Islam:Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, Comparative Studies of Ctilturesand Civilizations 4, ed. Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, in the American Anthropologist,57.2, part 2, memoir no. 81, April 1955). Later that year it was published in England forcommercial distribution (G.E. von Grunebaum, Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth ofa Cultural Tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

' " Von Grunebaum, "The Structure of the Muslim Town." In Islam: Essays in the Natureand Growth of a Cultural Tradition (London, 1955): 145." ' Ibid.: 147." ' Ibid.: 148.

The Islamic Gity Gritique: Revising the Narrative 487

culture, the state existed prior to the individual and "only within a statecan the distinctively humane in man be adequately developed." By con-trast, in Islam the role of the state was to assist individuals in their serviceto God. Thus their citizenship is ofthe Muslim umma rather than of theircity.'"* Education took place in the mosque, reflecting the fact that educa-tion was motivated by religion. The division of the city into quarters wasan echo of the tribal divisions of the conquering Muslim armies in theseventh century, each tribe receiving a portion of the newly-built city.̂ ^Citing Sauvaget, he noted that the orthogonal street pattern ofthe classicalcity was lost in the Byzantine period, and then continued.

But the development was consiunmated under the Muslim domination, and what hadbeen the haphazard result of the infiltration of Orientals into the population of thetown became now the adequate expression ofthe mores backed by a definite religiousoudook on social relations. The ancient political interest in the community, the classi-cal ideals of city-oneness and of the clarity of the architectural (and administrative)design have been replaced by a dominant religious interest, by ideals of quarter orgroup loyalty, by the desire to shield the family group from dispersal and contamina-tion, and by the concept of government as an outside agency with which one no lon-ger identifies but which one rather wishes to keep at arm's length from the spheres ofone's personal and ^miliar life.''

So the Islamic urban pattern was "the adequate expression" ofthe mores ofIslam, and the loyalties to quarter and group that were characteristic of thiscity were urban "ideals" motivated by Islam. Elsewhere in the essay hewent so far as to say that Muslim orthodoxy was a "product of urban life."^^Von Grunebaum treated the Islamic city as an ideal type, and he proposedthat this city type was an expression of Islamic civilization. This was showneven in the structure of the book, where the title indicated that it wasabout Islam as a ctiltural tradition, and the article on the Muslim town wasincluded in the section entided, "Expressions."

This represents a rather sudden appearance of the Islamic city type inthe orientalist literature, even within von Grunebaum's own work. A clue

"" Ibid.: 143-144." ' Ibid.: 147. Note the contrast with Georges Marcáis: while Marcáis believed the divisionof Muslim cities into quarters contradicted Islam's ideals (e.g. La conception des villes daml'Islam: 526-527), von Grunebaum believed that quaners, along with everything else inMuslim cities, reliably expressed an Islamic essence.'« Ibid.: 149." ' Ibid.: 158 n4l.

488 G. Aldous /JESHO 56 (2013) 471-493

as to why may be found in the circumstances of the book's appearance. Itwas originally issued as the fourth volume in a memoir series entitled"Comparative Studies of Cultures and Civilizations," edited by RobertRedfield and Milton Singer, and was distributed with the April 1955 issueof the American Anthropologist. Redfield and Singer were anthropologistsat the University of Chicago at the same time von Grunebaum was there.Singer was a specialist on South Asia whose work focused on the city ofMadras, using it as a way of understanding Indian civilization. Redfielddid most of his field work in Mexico and is best known for delineating folksociety and distinguishing it from peasant society.^' A folk society, accord-ing to Redfield's model, is a small, primitive, isolated community, whereasa peasant society is dependent upon a larger urban civilization. Folk socie-ties have what he called little traditions, which are oral and unreflective.Peasant societies, on the other hand, subscribe to a great tradition (or avernacular version of it) radiating from the centers of civilization, whichare typically cities. He regarded the villages he had studied in the Yucatanas being part of two great traditions, the Spanish-Catholic and the nativeYucatecan. The city, as the place where the great tradition is created, is thedistinguishing mark and fullest expression of a civilization's ethos.^'

Redfield built on the work of V. Gordon Childe. Childe, an Australian-born British archaeologist, was an early popularizer of archaeology andanthropology and wrote several best-selling books on prehistory andancient civilizations. He proposed two major transformations in prehis-tory that paralleled in their significance the Industrial Revolution that hadlately occurred in Europe. These were the Neolithic Revolution, when cul-tures moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and the UrbanRevolution, when cities (as opposed to homogeneous agricultural villages)appeared. It was this that brought about civilization.*" So for Childe, andlater for Redfield, urbanism is the hallmark of civilization.

"" Redfield's magnum opus is The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, 1941). For anextended treatment of the folk/peasant contrast, see his The Primitive World and Its Trans-formations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1953).''•" For the great and little traditions, see Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago,1956). For the role of cities in civilization, see idem. The Primitive World and Its Transforma-tions (Ithaca, N.Y., 1953), and Redfield and Singer, "The Cultural Role of Cities." EconomicDevelopment and Cultural Change 3.1, The Role of Cities in Economic Development andCultural Change, part 1 (Oct. 1954): 53-73.'̂ '' Childe's best-known works describing these processes were Man Makes Himself (Lon-don, 1936) and What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, England, 1942). Both have


Yet Redfield went a step further, arguing that the two revolutions positedby Childe, the neolithic and the urban, were really one large transition.

In the long view of human affairs, the food-producing revolution and the urban revo-lution of Childe form into one mighty event: the transformation of the folk societyinto civilization. The first revolution appears as a prelude and precondition of thesecond. Taken together, they are one major turning point."

He furthermore stated that the urban revolution was the more importantphase of this transformation, because "it is with the coming of city life thatwe are able to see novel and transforming attitudes taken toward life andthe universe."*^ With the development of cities, Redfield argued, comesdivision of labor, the appearance of specialized trades and crafts, and newsocial institutions. But beyond that, the rise of cities involves a transforma-tion of a culture's ethos. The old order is broken down and reconstitutedin the new social environment of the city, and the city becomes the centerof the new culture, defining it and giving it its fullest expression."^^

This theme of the role of the city in the shaping of a civilization's ethoswas elaborated in the article Redfield co-authored with his colleague Mil-ton Singer entided "The Cultural Role of Cities." They noted that whilethe urban revolution involves a fundamental transformation of folk soci-ety, it does not involve a complete abandonment of the folk tradition.Rather, that tradition is "universalized" through a process of generalizationand abstraction. The tradition, formerly oral, is committed to writing inthe form of sacred books maintained and interpreted by a cadre of speciallytrained literati. These literati construct urban monuments, such as tem-ples, dedicated to the ritualized expression of the tradition. This new urbanform of the local tradition then disseminates to the surrounding regionand replaces, or at least holds a privileged status with regard to, the local,rural culture on which it is based."

The question of how to define and compare the major civilizations ofChina, India, Islam and the West preoccupied Robert Redfield in his lateryears, and he sought out collaboration with colleagues working on other

been reprinted in several editions. His most succinct treatment may be found in "TheUrban Revolution." Totvn Planning Review 2\.\ (Apr. 1950): 3-17.' " Redfield, The PrimitiveWorld and Its Transformations: 26." ' Ibid.: 5.'̂ '̂ Ibid.: passim, esp. 48-58."* Redfield and Singer, "The Cultural Role of Cities": 66-67.

490 G. Aldous /JESHO 56 (2013) 47¡-493

regions.''^ He and Singer worked closely with von Grunebaum on severalinterdisciplinary projects designed to apply their ideas to Islamic civiliza-tion. In early 1953, for example, they asked von Grunebaum to organize aconference on the great and little traditions in Islam under the auspices ofChicago's Department of Anthropology. The conference, entitled "Unityand Variety in Muslim Civilization," was held in Belgium in September ofthat year."^

Von Grunebaum also collaborated with Redfield and Singer on severalgraduate seminars at the University of Chicago. In the spring of 1953 theyconducted an interdisciplinary seminar entitled "Islam and the West," inwhich a number of Chicago faculty participated, including von Grunebaum.This seminar continued the work of previous seminars in exploring twoquestions: whether it is possible to define a civilization, and whether it ispossible to compare civilizations.*^^ This seminar was important for vonGrunebaum in formulating some of the ideas found in Islam: Essays in theNature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition,^^ but his essay on the Muslimtown probably owes more to a subsequent seminar, which dealt directlywith Islamic urbanism.

Held in the winter quarter of 1954, "The Muslim Town and ItsAntecedents" was the first in a four-seminar series funded by the FordFoundation during 1954 and 1955 with the purpose of promoting col-laboration between the social sciences and the humanities. While Red-field and Singer were both heavily involved, the committee that oversawthe project consisted of von Grunebaum along with the medievalist SylviaThrupp and the sociologist Everett Hughes. The series, which bore the title

''" Fay-Cooper Cole and Fred Eggan, "Robert Redfield, 1897-1958." American Anthropolo-gist, new series, 61.4 (Aug. 1959): 655.'̂ '' The conference proceedings were published as Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization,ed. Gustave E. von Grunebaum (Chicago, 1955). See pp. vii and 5 for the conference's con-nection with Redfield and the Anthropology Department, and see von Grunebaum's essay,"The Problem: Unity in Diversity" (pp. 17-37) for his application of Redfield and Singer'sideas in the Islamic context." ' The other scholars of Islam who participated were Marshall Hodgson, Ali Oth-man, Muhsin Mahdi, E. Sarkisyanz and Calvin Stillman. Robert Redfield and MiltonSinger, "Anthropology 342—Redfield, Singer. Comparison of Cultures: Islam and theWest. Summary and Analysis of Spring Quarter, 1953." Robert Redfield Papers, box 71,folder 11. University of Chicago Library. A similar overview ofthe course may be foundin the Gustave E. Von Grunebaum Papers, box 12. University of California Los AngelesLibrary.'''" Von Grunebaum, Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition: xiii.


"Urbanisation and Cultural Change," continued with seminars on "WestEuropean Urban Society c. 1250-c. 1450," the Spanish colonial town, andcontemporary world urbanism. The final report that the committee sentto the Ford Foundation in 1956 noted that von Grunebaum's piece "TheStructure of the Muslim Town" arose from that seminar. '̂

The immediate context, therefore, for the appearance of von Grune-baum's seminal article on Islamic urbanism was his collaboration withsocial science colleagues at the University of Chicago. Anthropologistswith whom he worked had developed, independently of the oriental-ist tradition, a notion of the city as the quintessential expression of acivilization's ethos. Having formed this idea, they then approached vonGrunebaum with the aim of applying this concept to the Islamic world. Insetting out to define the Islamic city type, while he took his raw materialfrom French orientalists of the interwar period, von Grunebaum framedtheir data to address questions relevant to the climate of inquiry in whichhe worked at Chicago.

Janet Abu-Lughod summed up her two "isnâds" of orientalist scholar-ship on the Islamic city by observing.

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. With each telling, thetale of authority grows broader in its application.™

To some extent this can serve to describe Abu-Lughod's critique itselfWhile recent scholars have raised valid criticisms of the Islamic city model,many have operated under a felse notion of their own—that the model wasinvented by French orientalists in the interwar period. They have thus con-tributed to their own "isndd" of Western scholarship, consistently attrib-uting the Islamic city type to French orientalists based merely on whatAbu-Lughod wrote about them, projecting von Grunebaum's ideas back-ward onto them. In the course of this they have missed a key influence onvon Grunebaum, and thus on later orientalist thought, emanating fromoutside the orientalist tradition.

' " G.E. von Grunebaum, Everett C. Hughes and Sylvia L. Thrupp, letter to the BehavioralSciences Division of the Ford Foundation dated 2 February 1956. A carbon copy is con-tained in the Gustave E. Von Grunebaum Papers, box 12, folder labelled "URBANIZATION".University of California Los Angeles Library.™' Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City": 160.

492 G. Aldous /JESHO 56 (2013) 471-493

Bibliography

Primary sources

Redfield, Robert, and Milton Singer. 1953. Anthropology 342—Redfield, Singer. Com-parison of Cultures: Islam and the West. Summary and Analysis of Spring Quarter,1953. Robert Redfield Papers, box 71, folder 11. University ofChicago Library.

Von Grunebaum, G.E., Everett C. Hughes and Sylvia L. Thrupp. 1956. Letter to theBehavioral Sciences Division ofthe Ford Foundation dated 2 February 1956. A carboncopy is contained in the Gustave E. Von Grunebaum Papers, box 12, folder labelled"URBANIZATION". University of California Los Angeles Library.

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