ancient cities

century AD, Maliki law was highly developed and
enjoying much success among the urban population
as well as in local towns and villages in the
North Africa.
Speaking mostly about cities in North Africa,
Brunschvig’s 1947 “Urbanisme medieval et droit
musulman” notes how Maliki law was applied in
cases relating to roads, walls, rebuilding, and problems
relating to water, neighborly relations, and the
location of business like tanneries, forges, stables,
the origination or the abolition of easements, and
legal procedures in general. In his view, the defining
element of the Islamic city is a typology with its
own identity based on legal traditions, intimately
associated with the shari‘a. Apart from being sympathetic
to Brunschvig’s argument, Titus Burckhardt
also refers to urban rules and building
ordinances, which emerge from
the tradition (sunnah) of the Prophet
and customary law (urf).
This explains why the shari‘a is
needed to adjudicate disputes in
building proximity, spatial organization,
and the configuration of a
dwelling, to safeguard the rights of
people, and to prevent harm or
reciprocal harm. Legal judgment
applies to these situations, and it
may well affect the way we critique
the habitat conditions in the madinah.
The madinah remains important,
given the constantly shifting
patterns and the construing of the
word of law; the concept involves a
considerable number of mental
images that exist only in authority/
power representations. The concept
of the madinah informs our understanding
of the underlying structure
of urbanism. Finally, it enables us
to refer to the pattern of language
by the precise semantic properties.
Also useful for comparison is Ibn
Khaldun, the fifteenth-century
North African scholar, statesman,
historian, and jurist, who provided
a number of descriptive markers that
characterize the Muslim city. In
the Muqaddimah: An Introduction
to History, Ibn Khaldun examined
Islamic City
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several theoretical and practical concepts of the
Muslim city. The text of the Muqaddimah is
extraordinary for the way in which Ibn Khaldun
modulates the interpretation of history and the
dichotomies of urban life. A number of literary
images emerge in juxtaposition: exegesis, economics,
ethnicity, law, demography, and air and water
pollution.
Because the image of the madinah is problematic,
the meaning made possible by a hermeneutic
reading lay emphasis on the ethos of the madinah
accounting for the operative shari‘a system.
Furthermore, there remains an excess of physical
evidence available for research, for that reason,
historiography remains an open debate. The
Muslim world includes a wide assortment of
Islamic city Tunisia, cobblestone street 1860–1900
Source: Copyright © Library of Congress.