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Early medieval urbanism in Ifrīqiya and the emergence of the Islamic city (2018)
Entre civitas y madīna El mundo de las ciudades en la península ibérica y en el norte de África (siglos IV-IX), 2018
Kennedy’s (1985) «From Polis to Madina» article marked the start of an important chapter in the history of late antique and early Islamic scholarship. A few years later, Thébert and Biget argued in an important article that Kennedy’s model held true for North Africa: the Vandal-Byzantine period was the point when the classical city «became medieval» and many cities prospered in Ifrīqiya (i.e. eastern Algeria, Tunisia and coastal Tripolitania) after the Arab conquest. Since then archaeologists (and some historians) have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the question of the transformation of the classical city in late antique Africa and confirmed their arguments, but far less attention has been devoted to the question of how the city transformed a er the Arab conquest in medieval Ifrīqiya. e aims of this paper are twofold: to briefly draw attention to a disjuncture between the way in which old and new cities are studied in Ifrīqiya by classical and medieval archaeologists, and to sketch out some key characteristics of urbanism in the post-conquest period based on the latest archaeological research.
The Fate of the Classical Cities of Ifriqīya in the Early Middle Ages (2019)
Africa – Ifriqiya. Continuity and change in North Africa from the Byzantine to the Early islamic Age, 2019
In 642, when the Umayyad armies crossed the Western Desert to raid North Africa, they found themselves in a landscape of cities that could defend themselves – or that at least is the story told by Muslim scholars writing in Arabic several centuries later. In contrast to the medieval sources, which paint an image of an intensely urban North Africa both during and after the Arab conquests, modern scholars have often seen the period as a time of rapid dissolution in urban life, resulting in the complete or partial abandonment of many towns, and the fragmentation or «ruralisation» of others into small, scattered zones of habitation within the ruins of the classical town. In the past three decades, this model has been completely overturned in the central lands of the caliphate, where a series of studies drawing heavily on archaeology offer a very different reading of Byzantine and Sassanian towns in the early Islamic period. Yet, despite repeated attempts to challenge such narratives for North Africa on similar archaeological grounds over the last few decades – most forcefully by Yvon Thébert and Jean-Louis Biget in a provocative 1990 article on the dis- appearance of the classical city – the catastrophist model remains strong in the absence of explicit discussion of North African urbanism after the Arab conquests.This article re-examines the question of the fate of the inherited classical cities of Early Medieval Ifrīqiya (broadly understood as eastern Algeria, Tunisia and coastal Tripolitania) during the late 7th and 8th c., that is, the period when this region was ruled by the Umayyad and then the Abbasid caliphate. While other papers in this volume by and large focus on how particular sites experienced the transition from Africa to Ifrīqiya, I am equally interested in understanding broader patterns of urban success and failure in the Early Middle Ages. My argument is threefold: first, that the inherited Byzantine towns continued to dominate the urban hierarchy in the Early Medieval period, accompanied by a decline in the number of coastal sites and smaller towns; second, that those towns that survived follow a range of trajectories, but overwhelmingly do not fragment or «ruralize»; and third, that these patterns expose a slow but significant transformation of the urban organisation of Ifrīqiya in the Early Medieval period.
An Urban Structure for the Early Islamic City
Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society, 2007
The newly created urban map provided a landscape on which these complicated political, religious, and military agendas could be integrated and expressed. The study of early Islamic cities has suffered from selfimposed limits and has even been challenged as an empirical subject of research. The weight of traditional definitions originates in a preoccupation with the medieval and premodern cities of the Middle East and idealising models based on descriptions of these cities. New trends in recent years include a tremendous concentration of scholarly interest in late antiquity, with reassessments of many assumptions. Among these assumptions may be counted the primacy of literary resources research, especially when the chronological lacunae may be taken to cast doubt on historical constructs in the foundations of Islamic civilisation. The present study seeks to establish a set of topographic features to replace traditional models, to describe an Arabian urban tradition which came to characterise an early Islamic urban complex. Part of the methodology employed will be an examination of the patterns to be found in archaeological evidence, an interpretation of cumulative examples that may be antithetical to the concept of archaeology as employed by many historians. Thus the study of the socalled desert castles of Bilād al Sh ām (greater Syria) is approached from an assessment of formal patterns, setting aside traditional art historical evaluations. These monuments are extraordinarily important for the generation of hypotheses on their functional rationale; in the present case, that they were all constructed as incipient urban entities. Structural elements are visible in these places that may be sought in more recognisable cities: such elements are bathhouses, gates, palatial or-better-administrative structures, mosques and residential elements. A basic hypothesis is that such elements were recognised aspects of urban planning inherited by the early Islamic state, and further that this inheritance
Introduction: Early Modern Islamic Cities
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018
C onceptions of the city, and of the complex socio-cultural practices embodied in cities, have been at the forefront of historical inquiry. Th e debate has been marked by diverse claims about the nature of cities, including the notion that "the city" is an incoherent concept that has been universalized based on urban patterns in the global North. Th e concept of the "Western city" can be traced back to Max Weber's nineteenth-century notion of the medieval European city as a self-governing ideal type, with an independent collective identity. Early modern studies have traditionally emphasized the signifi cance of cities during the heyday of European dynastic states and empires. Cities played signifi cant roles in the midst of the new commercial and political networks that spanned the globe, and within the socio-spatial complexes that emerged across the Atlantic and beyond. Th e city thus occupies a central place in studies of how western European societies produced new and unique urban experiences in connection with complex regional and global processes. Pioneering works such as Jan de Vries's
Migration Letters, 2023
This study aims to evaluate the Caliphate as a political and government system in early Islamic history, particularly in the context of Sayyiduna Hazrat Ameer Muawiya's administration and Architecture, the first Umayyad Caliph. Despite other facets, history has been depicting various governments and political systems that operated across the world and remain continued. Correspondingly, in the early Islamic period, there was also a solid paradigm of government and politics recognized as the Caliphate. From the Islamic perspective, the caliphate or Islamic government represents God's viceregency, to implement and shelter the divine orders by establishing society on Islamic lines and to run and uphold its order via guiding the people toward the true path and fortifying their lives and rights. In this regard, thi 1 s study seeks to critique the different aspects of Sayyiduna Hazrat Ameer Muawiya's administration and Architecture centering upon his political management, administrative setup, and judicial and social service systems. This historical research employs a qualitative research design and is based on secondary sources. The findings reflect that the sociopolitical, administrative, and judicial systems were firmly established and these setups of Hazrat Ammer Muawiya's caliphate were highly valued by a substantial part of the intelligentsia. Such great achievements and accomplishments proved his administration flourishing and kept him still alive in Islamic history as well as the policies for urban planning and architecture.
Journal of Skyscape Archaeology
the study of Islamic city forms into the light of historical-critical scholarship, but they take very different approaches and reach very different conclusions. Thus, while Allawi's work will be the focus of the current commentary, Abu-Lughod's article deserves some attention as a counterpoint. Janet Abu-Lughod is of course best known for her 1989 monograph Before European Hegemony, which deals with pre-modern transregional trade networks during the century of Mongol domination across Eurasia. Published two years earlier, "The Islamic City" (Abu-Lughod 1987) was a follow-up to her first monograph, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Abu-Lughod 1971). That book, she admits, falls into a pattern of orientalist scholarship that describes some essential form for the "Islamic city" based on a handful of Mediterranean examples. After tracing three traditions of scholarship leading to such morphologies, Abu-Lughod proposes a different approach, which she sees already emerging in scholarship of the previous years and which interprets cities not as manifestations of an essential form, but as the result of social dynamics. Thus, patterns of juridical distinction between religious communities, gender segregation and a decentralisation of regulations that Abu-Lughod identifies as intrinsic to Islamic society tend towards certain organisations of space common across Islamic cities. Or in her words, "cities are processes, not products" (Abu-Lughod 1987, 172). By contrast, Allawi proposes two highly prescribed morphological models for early Islamic city planning. At the opening of his article, he promises to investigate "two currents in early Islamic town planning and architecture" (Allawi 1988, 57) as they relate to one another and to later urban structures. These two currents (which are nowhere defined) are explored through "two main town-plan types, the Kufa model and the Baghdad Round City" (Allawi 1988, 57). This is followed by an argument against the view that Islam had emerged from a cultural vacuum, positing instead that there were deep Arabian cultural traditions that informed city building and other aspects of early Arab imperialism. Here already Allawi overlooks the fact that his straw man vision of the past was by 1987 already obsolete: the ex nihilo view of Islam was already untenable. Throughout the article, there is a general failure to engage with the emerging field of Late Antiquity or other lines of scholarship that were active when he wrote. By the time of the Harvard symposium, Peter Brown and others had for nearly two decades already placed Islam within a broad cultural continuity of empire and faith that marked both the late Roman and Sasanian realms. Thus, while Allawi's identification of uniquely Arab cultural elements is welcome, he fails to place them alongside those imperial precedents that Muhammad and his early successors would have known from the great empires that abutted the Arabian Peninsula. Kufa Allawi's first case study is Kufa, which he calls the model for the "open city". As elements of the open city, Allawi lists a haram, a geometric plan, the orientation of that plan and a market. The haram and market correspond to elements of the city that Abu-Lughod addresses, both as they appear in the morphologies described by earlier orientalists and
Systems of Cities: An Alternative Approach to Medieval Islamic Urbanism
2007
Over the past half century, medieval Islamic urbanism has been viewed in terms of a single and restricted model, namely the "Islamic City" concept. The essence of this paradigm, usually expressed in such terms as "cultural tradition" or "Muslim urban archetype," is that all Muslim cities share a common character derived mainly from the religion of Islam and, therefore, they could be explained only in such context. The "urban system" concept, which deals with networks of cities, is suggested here as an alternative framework which will integrate the different approaches to medieval Islamic urbanism and help clarify the place of cities in their regional settings.