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The Evolution of Muslim Urban Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Ira M. Lapidus
Ira M. Lapidus
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia of time, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, and changing. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillates between attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic city life, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictory perspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history have given each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern towns between the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamic society—shared common features of social organization. Small communities, such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamental units of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organized religious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods, who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies and slave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from the towns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically, then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups, religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended on the relationships between person and groups within this three-tiered institutional pattern.

Type
Cities
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 21 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

1 Lapidus, M., Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967),Google Scholar and ‘Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies’, Middle Eastern Cities, edited by the author (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 47–74.Google Scholar A brief résumé of previous work, including this paper, appears under the title ‘Traditional Muslim Cities: Structure and Change’, in Brown, L. C., From Medina to Metropolis (Princeton, 1972).Google Scholar

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