The Role of Cities and City Life in the Central Lands of Islam

Thus Islam and the Arab language came to the central lands of Islam including modern day Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Arabia, Iran and Iraq. One thing that certainly predates the call from Muhammad was the fine cities of the Middle East, the so-called Cradle of Civilisation.

Within a relatively few years after the death of Muhammad, the political seat of Islam moved from Muhammad’s relatively recently settled city (but mother of all cities for Muhammad), Medina, to the long-established Damascus. The third holy city of Islam was another long standing city, al-Quds (Jerusalem), Mecca of course being the holiest.

Shortly after Damascus became the political city of Islam it was supplanted when the ‘Abbasids established the royal city of Baghdad. Both Damascus and Baghdad played major roles in the first 400 years of Islam in creating the civilised culture of Islam. The Umayyads expanded Damascus rapidly and built an administrative centre at Ramla (now in Israel) and the ‘Abbasids of course built Baghdad. Rusafa in Syria (near what had been the Christian centre of Sergiopolis), Wasit, which became the capital in Iraq, (named for being the midpoint between influential Kufa and Basra a la Canberra between Melbourne and Sydney) and ‘Anjar (short for ‘Ayn al-Jarr) in Lebanon were other important cities in the early Islamic epoch. Several Persian and Sindi cities also became important and central cities to Arab-Islamic life and various palace complexes were also built in Middle Eastern deserts.

Baghdad proved that Muslims could build imperial cities of importance as well as occupy major cities established by other civilisations. It was well placed, however, to benefit from the 'city knowledge' of the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent and Cradle of Civilisation it occupied.

The Muslim conquerors built other new provincial cities from the beginning, essentially for their occupying troops, which later became important centres of both culture and politics such as Basra (in c. 638) and Kufa (in c. 638) in Iraq and Fustat (in 641-3) in Egypt (later Cairo was established nearby). They became influential cities in their own right essentially due to the nature of the lands they occupied and the indigenous peoples in their hinterlands. Other major cities were also established further to the West including in Spain and Tunisia (e.g. Qairowan in 670 by the Umayyads) that furnish prime examples of a fine new Arab-Islamic civilisation. Later Istanbul, which had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire as Constantinople, became the centre of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

At the heart of city life, of course, from the earliest times is trade in goods and ultimately in ideas, and Arabs found themselves major players in world trade simply because of where they were, geographically, and the size of their new empire. We know about both pre-Islamic and Islamic Arab city life from geographers and historians writing in Arabic in the early Islamic period. The geographers noted the difference between the ancient cities and the new, planned Islamic cities. City histories were a distinct and prolific genre in this period (as I will discuss in a later post) which tended to be about 5% early history and topography and 95% biographies of scholars and notables of the many cities so treated.

We also have records kept and manuals created by the administrators of various cities that reveal city economics and design and in some cases a particular interest in Roman city design. From about 780, Arab cities came to be usually governed by a muhtasib (City Administrator) responsible for producing these items. This ‘Abbasid position was an outgrowth from the Umayyad position of Administrator of the Souk (Amal ala Suq, c.f. the Greek agora nomos). Interestingly, as early as in the time of ‘Umar, one of these early administrators of the market was a woman. These were imperial rather than city technocrat appointees with a policing role and as such focused on suppression of local movements rather than their promotion. They came from the ranks of doctors, lawyers and scholars. As a result, today we have some detail from their reports of the nature of these problematic movements such as guilds. The muhtasib (or hisba) was responsible for the control of the market, schools, medical and pharmaceutical services and training, guilds, fire fighting, police, sanitation, waste disposal and mosques, as well as maintenance of the city’s other functions and the public probity of citizens. As you can imagine, a large public workforce was responsible to this manager of the city, who therefore needed the social skills required to manage the people of the city and its economy as well as technical knowledge such as knowledge of economics.

Creative literature (including poetry) also provides some of the information we have today about cities such as, for example, 9th Century Basra and 10th Century Baghdad (via al-Hamadhani in whose stories one can find female door-to-door merchants working at night in Baghdad). Archaeology and details of inscriptions including inscriptions on coins and other artefacts also provide evidence of the nature of city life.

We know that the early Arabs of Arabia were not completely unfamiliar with local cities. Apart from living near and trading with cities in the Cradle of Civilisation, there had been significant civilisations in Yemen (at, for example, San’a, Najran and Ma’rib) and other parts of southern Arabia that we know about from early poetry and archaeology. There were three significant towns in the Hijaz (Mecca, Medina and at-Ta’if). There were eastern Arabian cities such as Mushaqqar and including on the island of Bahrain. There were also central and northern oasis cities and the central cities of the Lakhmid and Ghassanid civilisations discussed earlier such as Taima’, Dumat al-Jandal, Qaryat al-Faw, Jabiya, Rusafa and Hira. The city of Hira is supposed to have also been the birthplace of the Arabic script.

Also in the Arab orbit but slightly to the north were the pre-Islamic cities of Petra, al-‘Ula, Jerash, Hajar and Palmyra (Tadmur) and other Nabataean cities influenced by the Romans.

The Arab word, Madina, for city or town really firstly meant place of central authority (c.f. the Hebrew word ‘madinat’ meaning state). The word is feminine and Arab authors and people often write and speak of cities as if the cities are actually women. ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif treats his childhood home, Amman, warmly in his Story of a City (Sirat Medina) and Nizar Qabbani and Naguib Mahfouz have also written in this way. Qabbani, in particular, has written that each city has a unique personality of 'her' own and expressed great and eternal love for Beirut, in particular. Munif writes rather anthropomorphically of cities being powerful and cruel to their inhabitants because their inhabitants are themselves cruel in his Cities of Salt series and in other works.

On the advent of Islam, Qarya could also mean anything from village to city. Just as in Greek the word metropolis means mother of towns or cities the new Islamic city and adopted city of Muhammad, Yathrib, which came to be called simply al-Madina, was also referred to as Umm al-Qura (mother of towns or cities). The Qur’an itself refers to cities at one point apparently referring directly to Antioch.

A city is also its people and Islam first flourished because of an agreement of the citizens of a city, Yathrib (Medina), to be governed by Muhammad. We know that Muhammad encouraged all Muslims to become involved in the life of this special city, Medina, and that, presumably partly as a result, the former Yathrib rapidly expanded in size; more or less exponentially, in fact. Hijra which had meant migration came to mean settling in a city as being Muslim became associated with living in a city. Maqdisi noted in the 10th Century that the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus contained separate mosaics depicting all the known cities in the then-known world.

We know Medina and other cities and many of their Muslim residents also became wealthy on the spoils of the first Islamic expansions. It appears to have been somewhat embarrassing. We know, for instance, that in the reign of ‘Uthman as Caliph wealthy prospective residents of Kufa and Basra were criticised for their ostentatious displays of that wealth by the construction of palatial homes. The Qur’an also discusses city versus country life.

Ibn Khaldoun developed a theory of the development of cities and the relations of cities with their hinterlands and other regions through trade and war. ‘Islamic’ cities are, in fact, as varied as local circumstances required, as suggested by Ibn Khaldoun’s theory. The centre of Mecca, for example, is the Ka’ba Mosque and the pre-Islamic centre of commerce whereas the centre of Baghdad is a strategic seat of government and a water source. Nevertheless Medina, too, and many other Islamic cities tend to have a Mosque towards their centres (in the case of Medina reflecting the location of Muhammad’s long-standing home). The idea of a religious centre being central to city life and geography is not specific to Islam, of course.

Some features of some Islamic cities but by no means all include narrow and crooked streets within enclosed ‘gated’ neighbourhoods and an ‘Islamic’ lack of external ostentation of housing which may however be internally richly and ostentatiously decorated. Many modern Islamic cities have wide, straight streets and quite externally ostentatious private houses. So that's a bit about the flavour of the early Islamic cities and also how they are today. I'll look a bit more at some specific cities in the next post.