Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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IV. CRITIQUE OF THE MODEL
According to Bonine (1983), the "Islamic City" model/theory poses a number of
problems. The major elements of the city (e.g., courtyard houses, the market place and
wall) can be found in other pre-industrial cities which share similar climatic conditions.
For example, the windowless massed outer walls of buildings, the public paths, citadel, the
narrow winding streets, all existed before Islam, and Bonine considers associating them
solely with Islamic Cities as "fallacious." Moreover, the religious significance of the
mosque is comparable to similar institutions in other societies. Sauvaget goes further by
saying that "all principal Islamic institutions were an adaptation or modification of earlier
ones, even the Great Mosque." 63 Although Bonine recognizes the significant input of
Islam on the region, he denies the applicability of the term Islamic City. He states that
"Islam is not necessarily an urban religion, nor did it necessarily foster urbanism".
Instead, he suggests the use of the term the "Middle Eastern City" to refer to the traditional,
premodern ME city.
In her work on Rabat, Janet Abu-Lughod (1980) raises questions on the term's
applicability to other parts of the Muslim world. 64 She points to the sheer objectivity of it,
by questioning the intellectual construction of the rubric Islamic city: how it designates a
religiously coined entity. She wrote that "The construction of the concept of the Islamic
city was an integral part of the colonial project of distancing, objectifying, and
dehumanizing the peoples who were to be treated as "lessers." 65
Abu-Lughod (1987), after reviewing the corpus of the Islamic City model, brilliantly
debased its underlying arguments and questions them as myths. She argues that the model
of the Islamic city grew on a mere "handful of cities are actually described" and "only
certain legal codes- on which the Islamic form of city is presumed to be based- have been
studied. She stated that:
Only gradually did it become clear to me how much a conspiracy of copying
and glossing had yielded this optical illusion....In short, most studies still
focus on a single case and try to generalize, rather than start with the more
fundamental question: why would one expect Islamic cities to be similar and
in what ways 66
She devises a modest list of five major factors as an answer to this question. She
rules out three factors (terrain and climate; technology; distribution and transportation) as