Zoom conference on the World as a City (4-7 April) (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
Journal of Urban Archaeology, 2021
Differentiating urban places from rural is often obscure. This paper advances some clarification based on the analysis of settlements from the seventh to the eleventh centuries in Israel/ Palestine. In this case study, archaeological sites in central Israel are classified into types based on their finds, settlement types are identified through terminology in texts from or about Palestine, and the results of the two analyses are compared. The main category for distinguishing one settlement type from another is the amount of services it provides, with the greatest range of services in cities. However, cities in this study are not big, not spatially central, and not very industrial; the only entity to answer such criteria is the metropolis. The paper thus highlights the importance of a contextual inquiry, a regional overview, and a bottom-up perspective.
Cities as Built and Lived Environments: Scholarship from Muslim Contexts, 1875 to 2011
2014
A collection of over 200 abstracts of research publications on cities, translated into three languages From Tehran in Iran to Istanbul in Turkey, and from Herat in Afghanistan to Khartoum in Sudan, the rich diversity of the Muslim world is strikingly expressed through its myriad of cities. This reference volume presents over 200 abstracts of scholarship examining cities as both built and lived environments. They deal with the important subjects such as urban growth in the last 50 years, infrastructure and the environment and migration from rural areas. The historical periods covered span from the Umayyad Caliphate to the present day. Each abstract is presented in English, Arabic and Turkish, opening up this body of scholarship to new audiences. These abstracts demonstrate how much cities have varied between countries and over time.
The Social Morphology of the City in the Qur'anic Perspective
Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies in conjunction with the 1st International Conference on Education, Science, Technology, Indonesian and Islamic Studies, ICIIS and ICESTIIS 2021, 20-21 October 2021, Jambi, Indonesia, 2022
This article discusses an important message of the Qur'an concerning the process of formation and transformation of human settlements. The significance of this study stems from the fact that it evaluates the spatial structure and character of the inhabitants in a city, suburbs, or hamlets from the standpoint of the Qur'an. The theme of urban sociology was discussed according to the thematic interpretation method (maudū'ī) based on Ibn 'Āshūr understanding in His Book Al-Taḥrīr wa Tanwīr. The findings showed that the inhabitant plays a significant role in shaping the morphology of the city. City dwellers differ from village residents in terms of faith, social care, and even the formation of the city shape. The paper ends with a plea for greater attention to the Qur'anic Commentary and examining contemporary urban issues.
The question of space and place's relevance has slowly been gaining momentum in historiography for several years now. To an increasing extent, historians, especially those in the field of urban history, are asking questions inspired by their colleagues in geography and philosophy departments. The volume currently under review is an interesting addition to this body of work; yet it is also very much situated in the academic debate on Orientalism and 'Islamic cities'. As the editors rightfully indicate, much of this discussion has unfortunately ignored the urban locality of these cities. The editors aim to scrutinize the idea of the Islamic city through the lens of European travel writing, employing the term as a heuristic device to analyse how the cities of the 'Muslim world' were represented by travellers from Europe and America. Though it is obvious that employing terms such as 'Islamic city' and 'Muslim world' is problematic, the authors convincingly argue that the categories are vital both to understanding the context of European travel writing on 'the Muslim World' and further problematizing the idea of Orientalism as a homogeneous project of representing 'the West's' most significant 'Other'. The volume covers a broad array of geographies-from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent-through the lenses of travellers from Europe and the United States between the eleventh and twentieth century.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2018
This compelling volume of sixteen chapters covering the seventh to the twenty-first centuries is a major contribution to the literature on cities in Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern studies. The erudition behind the chapters is undeniable, but they are all admirably concise and accessible, making it possible to read the volume cover to cover in just a few sittings. Indeed, this is just what I recommend doing. The chapters move along briskly, overlap, connect, circle back, and defy any easy periodisation or chronology. The editors, Nizar Hermes and Gretchen Head, should be commended for their innovative vision for the volume: "We set out determined to view the entirety of the [Arabic literary] tradition as an evolving continuum and to create a collection relevant to scholars of both classical and modern Arabic literature. While our original vision for the volume saw it as consisting of eight chapters chronologically within the premodern period and eight chapters chronologically within the modern, it turned out that many of the contributors to this collection declined to strictly differentiate between the premodern and modern of their own accord. As a result, a significant number of the chapters gathered here move fluidly between periods…" (p. ix)