ancient cities

The madinah, it would seem, is well understood;
scholars in history, cultural anthropology,
architecture, urbanism, and geography
have been devoted to the study of the features of
the Islamic city. Cognizant of the fact that social,
religious, and cultural traditions associated with
urbanism or umran are often misunderstood, we
reiterate that the meaning and use of domestic
and public space and property ownership posit a
wide spatiotemporal experience. The Islamic
city stands in striking contrast to the polis or the
Platonic city as in Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s
The City of God (De Civitate Dei), or More’s
Utopia.
In sum, three distinct accounts bid to explain the
notion of the Islamic city. These are mentioned by Ibn
Khaldün, who used the terms, private ownership
(mulk), tribal kinship, and solidarity (asabiyah).
When Ibn Khaldün says, “man is madani by nature,”
he is suggesting that his lifestyle depends on an
urban culture and organization. This sheds light on
the idea conceived by al-Farabi as well; authority,
submission, obedience, conformity, and consensus
govern the internal workings of the Islamic city,
where spatial transparency can be achieved only by
tacit agreement. This usage is legitimate because it
presupposes a true social contract and implies that
coercion does not exist where virtue is paramount.
Al-Farabi’s virtuous city is governed by the shari‘a of
the Qur’an, which exercises control over human
behavior and serves as an apparatus to allow the
society to exercise its freedom.
It should be noted that the notion of a collective
social environment refers to the idea of culture as
it is used in modern sociology and anthropology.
Culture in this sense has an overriding influence on
people’s views and the things that people do on a
daily basis, or whether the immediate community
matters to society at large. Finally, as an idea, the
term madinah relates to an ordered landscape as a
semiotic space of dwelling, a discursive model, and
legal practice. In other words, the Islamic city is
not a grammar of objects or perceptions, which do
not add up; it also characterizes an epistemic configuration
of habitat in terms of Muslim conventions
of political and religious authority.
Akel Ismail Kahera
See also Cairo, Egypt; Caravanserai; Damascus, Syria
Further Readings
Istanbul, Turkey
405
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1987. “The Islamic City—Historic
Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary
Relevance.” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 19:155–76.
Al-Farabi. 1985. On the Perfect State: Mabadi ara ahl
al-Madinah al-Fadila. Translated by Richard Walzer.
Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Arkun, Mohammed. 1983. “Islam, Urbanism, and
Human Existence Today.” P. 39 in Architecture and
Community Building in the Islamic World Today,
edited by Renata Hold and Darl Rastorfer. New York:
Aperture.
Brunschvig, R. 1947. “Urbanisme medieval et droit
musulman.” Revue des Etudes Islamiques 15:127–55.
Burckhardt, Titus. 1980. “Fez.” Pp. 166–76 in The
Islamic City, edited by R. B. Serjeant. Paris: UNESCO.
Ibn Khaldun, 1967. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction
to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kojiro, N. 1989. “Ibn Khaldun’s Image of City.” In
Proceedings of the International Conference on
Urbanism in Islam, edited by Y. Takeshi. Tokyo: The
Middle Eastern Culture Center—University of Tokyo.
Madhi, M. 1964. Ibn Khaldün’s Philosophy of History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Masashi Haneda and Toru Miura, eds. 1994. Islamic
Urban Studies. London: Kegan Paul.
Is t a n b u l, tu r k e y
Istanbul, previously known as Byzantium and later as
Constantinople, can be described as an early modern
city of the period 1500 to 1800. It was comparable
with other great cities of western and central Europe
during that time. This account of early modern
Istanbul intends to show the city’s urban features that
belonged to the era. For much of the period Istanbul
was one the most densely populated cities in Europe. It
numbered probably 60,000 inhabitants in 1477.
These people had been forcibly brought to the city
from different areas of the Ottoman Empire following
the Ottoman conquest in 1453. There were Muslims
and non-Muslims, including Greeks, Armenians, Jews,
and Gypsies. By the 1600s Istanbul had more than
300,000 inhabitants. The city’s economic growth and
prosperity attracted the people. Many also had left
their hometowns or provinces because of the civil wars
in Anatolia in those years. There was a continuous