Experiencing “the Islamic City” (or, Reflections… Pt. 2)

I am in week 2 of my course on Islamic Urbanism (refer to my previous posting, “Some Initial Reflections …” for details about my interests in this course). Predictably, the notion of “the Islamic City,” established by years of Orientalist scholarship, has already come crashing down. I finished writing “Initial Reflections” with little sense of how, in the process of calling a city “Islamic,” an observer might or might not intentionally include the city’s component parts (e.g. walls, markets, and houses, as well as of course mosques and prayer rooms) in that religious designation.

Surely, it’s in some ways a question of signification — how we come to “read” the things we see as religious, or to associate them visually with a religious idea or system. Yet it’s precisely this process — made easy and often mindless by the production of exotic, Middle-Eastern Others through media — that allows scholars to think about “The Islamic City” in terms of its form while maintaining some illusion of rigor in the definitions they lay out. What often happens in these cases, Janet Abu-Lughod argues, is that these scholars “read” Islamic cities in terms of a great many assumptions often taken from “a small and eccentric sample of pre-modern Arab cities on the eve of Westernization (domination).” This tradition has even produced among urban planners working in Muslim-majority regions the idea that, if they were to try and retrieve something of the glorious Islamic-imperial past, they’d be able to wrap their hands around something stable and concrete — not a formless ghost of a past brimming with activity of varied motivations, but a clear and “readable” vision of Islamic architecture, present in forms and presentable as an Islamic city.

Tarif Kahlidi, who we read in our first week of class, sought to correct this blurred vision with philology — a dense, rigorous run-through of textual sources beginning with Qur’anic passages about cities and expanding outward and at pace with the development of of Islamic religious literature — Abu-Lughod finds that her own urban experiences provide better tools.

I don’t mean to say that Abu-Lughod reproduces the problems her Orientalist predecessors left her with, or even that the point about travel-writing is central to her cirtique. Actually, her critique runs in the opposite direction altogether: she sets out primarily to critique the chain of authority that allowed the meager, narrow observations of “pre-modern Arab cities” to stand in for the entirety of urban life within Islamic civilization. These scholars not only essentialized Islam and Islamic modes of urbanism, they also failed really to distinguish Islamic urban construction from that influenced by any other religious groups: religious sites at the center, surrounded by various communal spaces, shops, and workshops, and then dwellings on the outer edge.

But where is Abu-Lughod’s chain of authority, now that she has abandoned the old one? A short, mostly descriptive paragraph gives it away — she travelled to a city in India with substantial Muslim and non-Muslim populations. She charted her course through various neighborhoods to discern what, if any, “Islamic” qualities the more heavily-Muslim quarters might possess. From this paragraph she builds the solid argument that the religion of Islam may be quite important in the individual, family, and communal lives of city-dwellers, but seldom has it been the sole, or even the most important, factor in the development of the urban fabric. She found different modes of spatial organization in Muslim neighborhoods — she could occasionally feel her own trespass on spaces that, while not strictly private, were clearly meant to contain certain familial and communal activities. The gendered spaces with which Muslim — and Hindu — homes tend to operate were altered at times by proximity to other families, or to certain features like alleyways, which then became a semi-private space for those living adjacent to it.

It’s amazing what just walking around can do to our preconceptions about others, about life, when as conscientious and forward-thinking as Lughod was when she wrote the article in 1987. Walking around can destabilize us as we try to read spaces like a page from a book (or from a travelogue). This type of argument, while certainly indebted to certain strands of criticism emerging in the ’80s, is perhaps most indebted to a welcoming of the abundance of information one gathers through experience. It also opens up space, for me at least, for a take on anthropologist Webb Keane’s argument that some things that are unmistakeably material (e.g. a building, walls, etc.) complicate and sometimes confound the way we “read” them. Cities are not “Islamic” by sign value alone, unless we like Abu-Lughod’s Orientalist forebears are willing to abstract a city’s structural characteristics from the vagaries of on-the-ground reality.

My slow hike continues toward a more holistic reflection on the idea of “The Islamic City.” Must the semiotic question of “reading” landscapes and the more ethnographic question of experiencing them form an irreconcilable fork in this road? The division between abstract and concrete will be the subject of the next installment of my “Reflections.” I imagine a strict division will not hold. But then what?