Islamic Civilization

The Islamic Urban Setting: Countering Western Fallacies

 Lombard notes that Sao Paulo in Brazil, said to be the fastest growing city in the world (its population rising from 60,000 in 1888 to 2 million in 1950), hardly, in fact, compares with the growth of Baghdad  from 500 inhabitants in 762 to nearly 2 million in 800.[1] This was by no means an isolated case. Some of the greatest cities of the Middle Ages anywhere were all founded in early Islam, cities such as Cairo , Al-Qayrawan  and El-Mehdia in Tunisia ; Fes  and Marrakech  in Morocco ; and Al-Kufa and Basra  in Iraq .[2] The latter two grew exceptionally rapidly, from just small towns, into great cities, Kufa reaching 100,000 inhabitants, and Basra 200,000 in the space of three decades.[3] Samarra’s population according to Herzfeld might have reached 1 million in the 9^th century.[4] Fustat’s medieval population must have risen to between 450,000 and 600,000.[5]  And the same in Spain, where sudden and fast rises turned once sleepy towns into large cities, Al-Maqqari (d.1632) refers to an anonymous medieval author who states that in Spain there were 80 cities of the first rank, 300 of the second, and so many smaller towns and villages that only God could count them.[6] At their heights, Seville  contained 500,000 inhabitants; Almeria an equal number; Granada 425,000; Malaga 300,000; Valencia  250,000; Toledo  200,000.[7] Under the Muslims, Cordoba  became one of the most important and most populous cities of the Mediterranean .[8] Its population has been variously estimated  at between 100, 000 and one million, but the latter figure is more plausible as archaelogical works in the city have revealed its huge medieval size, which fits with the one million figure.[9]  After the construction of two new cities, Madinat al-Zahra (940-941) and Madinat al-Zahira (978), it became in the 10^th century a conurbation of more than 15 kilometres.[10]

Cities played a fundamental part in the history of Islam, which is somehow paradoxical when remembering that those who carried the faith throughout the world, from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, were mainly Arabs and Bedouins ‘who never slept between four walls,’ says Marcais.[11] A point also noted by Udovitch, who contrasts the desert and oases ‘the setting of its birth,’ with the cities and towns ‘the setting of Islam's growth and maturity.’[12] From Makkah  and Madinah , the centres of power, culture, and wealth moved to such urban sites as Damascus , Baghdad , and Samarkand , and to Cairo , Qayrawan, Fes , and Cordoba .[13] And Islam, again, stands central to this urban process.  ‘To achieve its full social and religious ideal, Islam cannot do without urban life,’ explains Marcais, who also highlights how, the mosque, central element of the faith, both in religious and political terms, supposes both permanence and urbanity; and so ‘The mosque creates the Islamic city.’[14] Something obvious not just in the East, but also in the West, the centrality of the mosque in a vast urban setting was obvious in Seville , Valencia  and other Muslim Spanish towns.[15] Further contributions of the faith to this urban rise will be seen as the outline proceeds.

Even when acknowledging the urban character of Islamic civilisation, mainstream Western historians and commentators wrote very disparagingly on Islamic cities, writing, which is, however, wholly contradicted by historical reality. Three main strands of attacks on Islamic cities, and their refutation, are dealt with here.

The first attack on Islamic cities is that they were not cities in the modern sense. Max Weber, in the late 19^th century, for instance, suggested that there were five distinguishing marks of the medieval city: fortification; markets; a legal and administrative system; distinctive urban forms  of association, and partial autonomy.[16] Since the Muslim city lacked some of these marks, Weber maintained, they were not cities, just chaotic concentrations of crowds.[17]

Weber’s, like others’, derogatory approach to the Islamic city is not unique. Each and every aspect of Islamic civilisation, sciences, history and faith, has been identified and defined from a derogatory angle. This work will show this recurrently. A few instances are looked at here, briefly, to illustrate this, before refuting Weber and his hordes of followers. Muslim universities are thus said not be universities, because they lacked a definite date and legal status in their foundation.[18] Which is odd considering that neither were subsequent European universities, which were also based in every respect (organisation, administration, campus system, certificates, learning…) on Muslim antecedents.[19] The same is also said about Muslim chemistry, defined as an occult practice called alchemy, which is also odd when Western chemistry inherited everything (classification of metals, the use of experimentation, the vocabulary, the laboratory etc,) from its Islamic predecessor.[20] And the same with respect to the observatory in Islam, which is deemed not an observatory, when every single feature found in the Muslim observatory (use of large instruments, gathering of large number of scientists, prolonged observation, etc,) was to be found in its successor the Western observatory.[21] And the same is said and written with respect to hospitals, described as mere ‘maristans.’ Muslim civilisation, itself, is said to be a plagiarised form of Greek civilisation, whilst the faith of Islam, said to be a mere corruption of other faiths.[22] Even the military victories of Muslim armies, including that of Ain Jalut in 1260 which broke the deadly Mongol onslaught on Islam, was painted as a pale success against a handful of Mongols,[23] or was only a skirmish says Saunders,[24] who oddly enough also says that it was a turning point in history, and that the Mamluk victory at Ain Jalut saved Islam.[25] Hence, Weber’s derogatory attitude to Islamic cities is neither new, nor unique. Nor can it stand up to scrutiny, as shown by the following.

In contrast to the ancient city or to the Western communes of the later Middle Ages, Islamic cities possessed no special legal or corporate status. The town as such is not recognized in Islamic law notes Udovitch.[26] Nor can we identify any institutions for internal governance, such as guilds or municipal councils, which have been used by social historians to deny the title of city to the Islamic city. But as Goitein points out, "the medieval Islamic city was a place where one lived, not a corporation to which one belonged."[27] The 'ulama', or religious scholars, Udovitch notes, ‘served as a cohesive force within the urban amalgam,’ just as did the muhtasib (the state inspector of corporations, trades, and markets) and a number of formal and informal groupings, including the extended families, the neighbourhoods, local constabulary, and religious orders. The Islamic cities represented effective social realities, and as seats of the government or its representatives they guaranteed security; as local markets or international emporiums they provided economic opportunities; and with ‘their mosques and madrasas, their churches, synagogues, and schools, their bathhouses and other amenities, they contained all that was needed for leading a religious and cultured life.’[28] Oldenbourg also notes how in large cities there were schools for all, free for young children and sometimes even for university students; there were public baths at every street corner, as well as many private pools.[29] Oldenbourg also points out that Muslim cities, cosmopolitan by nature, were great centres of commerce, into which caravans flowed from all corners of the East and the West.[30] They were administrative centres employing thousands of clerks, cultural centres where sometimes tens of thousands of manuscripts were preserved in public and private libraries, where schools of literature and philosophy of all persuasions met, where men assembled in public squares to discuss the Qur’an; each of these cities a world in miniature; even the small cities, like Homs and Shaizar, had ‘an opulence and comfort which European kings might have envied.’[31] Islamic cities thus met the requirements of the modern city we have today, and were centuries ahead of their Western counterparts in doing so.

The second form of attack against Islamic cities  is their ‘chaotic’ nature, the chaos seen as a child of Islam, the faith. Thus, Planhol says:

‘Irregularity and anarchy seem to be the most striking qualities of Islamic cities. The effect of Islam is essentially negative. It substitutes for a solid unified collectivity, a shifting and inorganic assemblage of districts; it walls off and divides up the face of the city. By a truly remarkable paradox this religion that inculcates an ideal of city life leads directly to a negation of urban order.’[32]

This is part of a wider line of attack on Islamic cities as outlined by AlSayyad:

‘Housing is mainly made up of inward oriented core residential quarters, each allocated to a particular group of residents and each is served by a single dead end street. As for its spatial structure, the Muslim city has no large open public spaces and the spaces serving its movement and traffic network are narrow, irregular and disorganised paths that do not seem to represent any specific spatial conception.’[33]

The anarchy attributed to the Islamic model is refuted by historical evidence, though. Jairazbhoy, for instance, argues:

‘First of all irregularity has always been alien to Islamic art, and indeed in architectural designs there is usually an over zealous desire for symmetry. The irregularities of streets in Muslim towns are the result of subsequent haphazard growth…. It is people who are at fault, not the system.’[34]

The image conveyed in Western scholarship of Islam as a faith being the source of anarchy and asymmetry is, indeed, fundamentally contradicted by the faith. Gazing at designs on a Muslim prayer carpet, whether these designs are of Makkah , or a mosque interior, or any other motif, will show absolute, perfect symmetry and precision. Anything on the left side of the carpet is found on the other as if computer designed. No Islamic carpet will show asymmetry. Prayer itself, in a mosque (or anywhere else), is perfect order, in the reading of the verses, in the timing of the prayers, in the direction of the prayers, in the numbers of the (rakaas) (prostrations); in the line of worshippers, in the simultaneity and harmony of their prostration etc. The Qur’an is recited with absolute, perfect orderliness, in form, in sound, in the repetitions, in the length of the verses, etc.. Exactitude and utmost precision are constantly expected of the faithful in every deed, in making contracts, in inheritance matters, in the way of fasting, in distributing alms, in the way of performing pilgrimage etc. The gardens of Islam are absolute perfect symmetry and order; and so is the art of Islam, as the consultation of any book on Islamic art will show, and so on. It is secular, Western inspired, Islamic society, which is messy. Such ‘modern’ society simply has no parameter upon which to build order. Neither has it any parameter of any sort that helps it build or respect green spaces, or look adequately after its water supply, or clean its streets etc. The chaos of modern Islamic cities today is, indeed, undeniable, but, rather than being the outcome of Islam, it is the result of the secular elites in power, and their ineptness in imitating Western models, whilst they have only contempt for anything Islamic.

Historically speaking, Al-Sayyad demonstrates that the irregularity of forms in Muslim cities as a response to social and legal codes and as a representation of the Islamic cultural system had no foundation. Muslim towns were originally designed according to very regular geometric patterns, and they only achieved an irregular form in later years probably due to many factors.[35] In this respect, the outline by Lassner on the foundation of Samarra (today’s Iraq ) in the 9^th century is an excellent illustration of how fundamentally Islamic urban design stands wholly at the opposite end of what stereotypes claim. Samarra, the second great capital of the Abbasid caliphate, was situated along the Tigris some sixty miles (ninety-seven kilometres) north of Baghdad . The city was subject to meticulous planning; several thoroughfares running almost the entire length and breadth of the city.[36] The main thoroughfare was the "Great Road" (shari' al-a'zam), called al-Sarjah, extended the entire length of the city. With later extensions it ran some 20 miles (32 kilometres) and was reported to have been 300 feet (91 meters) wide at one point. The part of the road that still exists, although somewhat narrower (240 feet or 73 meters), testifies, indeed, to dimensions that were staggering. The great government buildings, the Friday mosque and the city markets were all situated along al-Sarjah; and it was throughout the entire history of the city the main line from which most of the city's traffic radiated toward the Tigris and inland.[37] The market areas were subsequently enlarged and the port facilities expanded as part of an energetic program that included the refurbishing and strengthening of already existing structures.[38] The new mosque was an enormous structure; and as it was to serve the entire population of Samarra (which resided for the most part along the first two thoroughfares inland), three major traffic areas had to be constructed along the width of the urban area. Each artery was reported to have been about 150 feet (46 meters) wide so as to handle the enormous traffic; each artery flanked by rows of shops, representing all sorts of commercial and artisanal establishments; the arteries in turn connected to ample side streets containing the residences of the general populace. The Great thoroughfare was extended from the outer limits of Samarra, and feeder channels that brought drinking water flanked both sides of the road.[39] And Samarra was not alone. Sketches of all the cities founded under Islam (Fes , Al-Qayrawan , Cairo …) equally had wide roads and spaces, green spaces, and perfect geometry and symmetry were fundamental to their design.

In fact, still in relation to urban chaos and anarchy, if a brief comparative exercise between Islamic and Western cities during the medieval period (and even up to the recent times) is made, it will further confirm how, in general, Western writing is the very opposite of historical reality. Islamic cities, first, like large Islamic towns, were paved with stones, and were cleaned, policed, and illuminated at night, whilst water was brought to the public squares and to many of the houses by conduits.[40] The houses were large buildings, several storeys high, housing numerous families, with terraces on the roofs, internal galleries and balconies, and fountains in the centre of the courtyards.[41] 10^th century Cordova is said to have had 200,000 houses, 600 mosques, and 900 public baths, and its thoroughfares, for a distance of miles, were brilliantly illuminated, substantially paved, kept in excellent repair, regularly patrolled by guardians of the peace.[42] Living conditions in 16^th century Algiers , according to Western contemporary visitors:

‘Compared favourably with those in northern capitals. The domestic architecture, the flowered patios and gardens of the race which built the Alhambra were among the most attractive in the world. Every respectable house had a galleried courtyard and a flat roof embellished with potted plants. An efficient water supply provided numerous fountains and cleaned the streets to a degree unknown in England.’[43]

And long would be the list of early Islamic cities which could boast huge expanses of gardens.[44] Every city had its countless gardens, and on the outskirts were great orchards full of orange and lemon trees, apples, pomegranates, and cherries.[45]  In North Africa , one learns of a multitude of gardens, surrounding and inside cities such as Tunis , Algiers , Tlemcen, and Marrakech .[46] In the city of Samarra, a garden of the 9^th century consisted of 432 acres, 172 of which being gardens with pavilions, halls and basins.[47] In Turkey, Ettinghausen says: ‘devotion, if not mania’ for pretty flowers was prevalent everywhere.[48] Al-Fustat, in Cairo , with its multi-storey dwellings, had thousands of private gardens, some of great splendour.[49]

In contrast, Western Europe could not compare on any front with the Muslim East.[50] Compared to Baghdad , Paris, Mainz, London and Milan were not even like modern provincial cities compared to a capital. ‘They were little better than African villages or townships, where only the churches and the occasionally princely residence bore witness that this was an important centre.’[51] The streets of both Paris and London were receptacles of filth, and often impassable; at all times dominated by outlaws; the source of every disease, the scene of every crime.[52] The mortality of the plague was a convincing proof of the unsanitary conditions that everywhere prevailed; the supply of water derived from the polluted river or from wells reeking with contamination.[53] Medieval Muslim visitors to Christian towns complained-as Christian visitors now to Muslim towns do of the filth and smell of the "infidel cities."[54] At Cambridge, now so beautiful and clean, sewage and offal ran along open gutters in the streets, and "gave out an abominable stench, so . . . that many masters and scholars fell sick thereof."[55] In the thirteenth century some cities had aqueducts, sewers, and public latrines; in most cities rain was relied upon to carry away refuse; the pollution of wells made typhoid cases numerous; and the water used for baking and brewing was usually-north of the Alps-drawn from the same streams that received the sewage of the towns.[56] Italy was more advanced, largely through its Roman legacy, and through the enlightened legislation of Frederick II for refuse disposal; but malarial infection from surrounding swamps made Rome unhealthy, killed many dignitaries and visitors, and occasionally saved the city from hostile armies that succumbed to fever amid their victories.[57]

A third, and final, stereotype about the Islamic city, as already noted above, is with regard to the segregation of races and ethnic groups. This again has no hold in reality. There has never been in Islam anything of the segregation approaching the American southern states, or South African apartheid system, or in most modern Western agglomerations today. Islam is not segregationist either as a faith or society.[58] Van Ess observes that there were no ghettos in the Islamic world all the way down to modern times. Members of the same religious community often lived in the same quarter for reasons of family solidarity; but they were not kept apart from Muslims deliberately and on principle. In particular, they were not unclean; they could be invited to dinner.[59] Throughout the Muslim world, whether under the Arabs, or the Turks , all ethnic groups and faiths, had access on equal terms to every single amenity or service,  and they formed part of the Islamic whole, and shared in opportunities, and even at the highest echelons of power.[60] The Jews in Cairo , for instance, are mentioned as practicing the professions of medical doctors, artisans, accountants, and despite professional specialisation, there is no instance of segregation of populations on ethnic or lines of faith with regard to professions and trades.[61] The same was true in Cordova, where under Islam, there is no evidence of a segregation of the Jewish population from its Islamic counterpart.[62] There is in fact plenty of evidence showing quite the reverse, a dense intermingling of faiths, which also includes the mozarabs (Spanish Christians living under Muslim rule).[63] In fact, segregation in that city followed precisely the Christian taking of the city in 1236. As soon as the city  was taken by the Castilian, one of their first measures was to remove both Muslim and Jewish populations, who were then forced to re-locate into isolated neighbourhoods, cut off from access to every form of land communication.[64] In the instance when the Islamic state intervened to allocate one particular place in a city to a particular group, this was based on the need to guarantee a right of space to a group of people who had lost their worldly rights and possessions elsewhere. For instance, when Al-Hakam I of Spain (r. 796-820) banished the Cordovans in the early 9^th century, they were offered a part of Fes  to resettle.[65] The same happened with the Jews, who when banished by the Spaniards in 1492 found exactly the same space and rights in the Ottoman urban realm.[66] And they were not just settled in the new space, their social status rose, too. The startling rise of the new port of Algiers  was largely due to the influx of Aragon Jews, even if the port itself was established by Kheir-Eddin Barbarosa (early 16^th century).[67] They achieved extraordinary pre-eminence in Morocco , too, during the 16^th century.[68] And the same happened with the Muslims who were banished from Spain in 1609-10 and who were allocated parts of towns and cities, farming lands, trades and businesses from Morocco through Algeria to as far as Turkey and Syria .[69]

At all times, indeed, the Islamic city offered an image of a vast gathering of multiple faiths and races. Early Basra , for instance, had a substantial population of Hindus, Yemenis, Persians and Arabs.[70] Muslim Palermo  in Sicily  included Greeks, Lombards, Jews, Slavs, Berbers , Persians, Tatars and Black Africans.[71] The monk Theodosius, brought from Syracuse with Archbishop Sophronius in 883, acknowledged the grandeur of the new capital, describing it as:

"Full of citizens and strangers, so that there seems to be collected there all the Saracen folk from East to West and from North to South... Blended with the Sicilians, the Greeks, the Lombards and the Jews, there are Arabs, Berbers , Persians, Tartars, Negroes, some wrapped in long robes and turbans, some clad in skins and some half naked; faces oval, square, or round, of every complexion and profile, beards and hair of every variety of colour or cut." [72]

And these were no exceptional cases, as Watson points out.[73] What was true of Palermo  in the 9^th century was true of Algiers  in the 17^th; a city Lloyd says, which was not just clean and well disciplined, but also every visitor remarking on the law and order that prevailed in a city inhabited by persons of every nationality and religion.[74] The public baths of the city, Fisher notes, were made available to persons of all races and creeds, and even to slaves.[75]

Islamic buildings, too, in their design, just like the towns, cities and society, betrayed the same cosmopolitan spirit, as Durant notes:

‘From the Alhambra in Spain to the Taj Mahal in India ,’ Islamic art overrode all limits of place and time, and ‘laughed at distinction of race and blood.’[76]