The city is never merely an accumulation of buildings, streets, markets, and inhabitants. It is a dense human artifact: a spatial form in which power is staged, social relations are ordered, memory is inscribed, wealth circulates, worship is organized, and difference is negotiated. Following Henri Lefebvre, the city may be understood as the most intense arena in which space is socially produced: not a neutral container, but the materialization of relations, practices, representations, and struggles. It is also a juridical, economic, and political association, defined by market exchange, corporate life, forms of autonomy, and the institutions that regulate communal order. To Paul Wheatley, the city is a ceremonial, administrative, and symbolic center, a place where collective meaning is spatially concentrated and where society represents to itself the order of the cosmos, the polity, and the sacred.
This course examines the city from an Islamic perspective by moving beyond the modern, often essentialist notion of “the Islamic City” as a fixed urban type. Instead, it asks how pre-modern Muslim jurists, theologians, historians, geographers, philosophers, and administrators understood the city as a coherent form of legal, political, social, and moral life. It treats the city as a paradigmatic field in which revelation, community, law, authority, worship, exchange, and memory acquired spatial form.
Legal sources will be read as theories of property, privacy, public right, roads, markets, water, waqf, nuisance, neighborhood, and Friday prayer. Theological and philosophical writings will illuminate the moral grounds of association and the ideal ordering of collective life. Geographers and historians will be approached as analysts of region, prosperity, foundation, transformation, and ruin. Ibn Khaldun’s ʿilm al-ʿumrān and al-Maqrizi’s Khitat will occupy central places as two of the most sophisticated pre-modern attempts to theorize the relation between city, state, civilization, decay, and memory.
The course moves from Medina and the early garrison towns—Kufa, Basra, Fustat, and Qayrawan—to Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Samarra, Cairo, Isfahan, Cordoba and Granada. It emphasizes hybridity, adaptation, and continuity rather than a single religious morphology. Its central argument is that Islamic urbanism generated a coherent vocabulary of urban intelligibility: jamāʿa, sulṭa, sūq, ḥisba, waqf, ḥaḍāra, ʿumrān, and kharāb. The course thus seeks a definition of the city that preserves historical diversity while recognizing conceptual integrity.
Research paper required.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective
MIT Certificate-Protected Syllabus
