Last time we considered the highly structured approach to urban design that came under the rubric of Hellenism. We found that space was treated with symmetry and regular geometric shapes, that there was usually a principle axis articulated by columns with some sort of monumental focus, that there was a leggible hierarchy of urban events created through the use of conventional typological elements that form an armature. Hellenistic planning followed a mandate for clear order and it used architecture to both control topographic conditions of settlement but also to neutralize the social situation and give a new political identity to a place.
Constantinople, a second Rome closer to the wealthier and more stable Middle East and free of the deep rooted problems of Rome, was the last city to be planned on Hellenistic principles. Officially founded in 330, it will reach a full size to the extent of the second set of walls by 447. The straight streets leading from the city gates to the palace are lined with double storey colonnades, evenly measured, axial and interrupted at key points by large public fora. The forum closest to the tip of the peninsula is named after Constantine and wall circular with an immense 100 foot high column carrying a statue of the first Christian emperor, depicted as the sun god. The column is a Hellenistic way to mark the hierarchy of spaces.
Constantinople was built up during the next two centuries and eclipsed Rome as the center of power. Rome, known as caput mundi, the head of the world, was subject to long-standing internal divisions, and numerous external threats. Finally with the Sack of Alaric in 410 AD, the invincible metropolis took a turn for the worse. The efficient maintenance of the city, the military protection, and most of all the strength of numbers all dissipated. By the 7th century, all but one of the 13 lines of the acqueducts were cut , since they were liabilities providing entry to invaders. The city will continue as an important place with its new center of authority, the Pope, the most powerful religious authority for believers in Christianity, and new churches, the Christian basilicas, were built in almost all of the intervening centuries preceding the Renaissance. But the city during this decline was like a fuzzy reflection of itself. Most of the population was huddled into the area of the Campus Martius, transforming the monumental district into housing. Civic institutions and cults, the Vestal Virgins, the Senate, will soon become distant memories. The area of the Republican Forum, will receive its last monument in 601, the Cloaca Maxima will fall into disrepair during the next centuries, and in its abandon, the Forum became known as Campo Vaccino (the Cow Pasture). Where Roman Senators once decided the world's fate, cattle will now graze without much reflection on human destiny. Fires, plagues, invasions, lack of maintenance, and scavengering will transform the world's most glorious city into a ghost town of ruins, at one point with no more than 5,000 inhabitants. Caput Mundi had moved down a little lower in anatomical analogy.
Exactly what caused the decline of Rome and her dependencies would require several lectures. Already we saw the first century rebellions in Palestine were an indication of resistance to both the economic and the cultural burden of the Romans. There were two large plagues during the latter half of the 2nd century, and the population of the empire was estimated to have shrunk from 70 million to 50. During the 3rd century there was a rapid succession of emperors, most of whom were done away with, and with Diocletion begins the practice of splitting the power of the emperor among three or four generals, the tetrarchs. Meanwhile the wealthy citizens of the empire were fed up with high taxes and they moved all of their capital to large country estates where they could defend themselves from the city. There is of course an analogy with our own times in the move of the middle classes to the suburbs where they will not be subject to high city taxes, and where they feel better defended against the "anarchy" of the cities.
Other social factors influenced the waning of Roman cities: there were slave revolts and the military became dominated by foreign mercenaries with no loyalty to Rome. And amid this apocalyptic scenario of a collapsing social order, the wide-spread spiritual crisis was addressed by Christianity, Mithraism, and other mystery cults. St. Augustine will write his City of God as an ideal antidote to the city of man that was full of corruption and despair. All of these factors led to the dissipation of Rome's power and the decline of her cities. Probably the single most important factor in the decline was the inability to maintain open borders. Trade, which had given a common purpose to Roman cities was interrupted and without this essential economic factor, the maintenance of the urban fabric and the solidarity of the citizens lost its glue.
What interests us in considering the decline of Rome is the reversal of the ambitious and orderly structure of Hellenistic cities, into adaptive rather than assertive patterns. There may have been as many as 1000 important cities during the prime of the empire that had a municipality dependent on Rome. From the time of the Sack of Alaric to about the year 1000, especially in the western half of the empire, there will be a massive process of deurbanization. Cities shrink into castle compounds, such as Arles which now can house its entire population in the amphitheater and use it for self-defense. North African cities like Timgad will sink into the sand. Constantinople will remain important, having perhaps as many as a half million inhabitants at one point, and the cities in the immediate region of this reduced Roman, now known as Byzantine, empire, will continue at a somewhat reduced capacity, we might recall the improved status of Jerusalem at this point.
Christianity
We can come up with all sorts of material explanations, and reduce things to economic terms, but human society, because it is so complex, like the individual is complex, never quite corresponds to the formulas that historians hypothesize. One factor that escapes rationalization is religion which has been present since the beginning of cities, probably in a stronger capacity than we have been allowing it because our own times tend to be so secular. In imperial Rome the religion was assimilated from the Etruscans, Greeks, and Egyptians, and eventually included the state and the emperor as something divine. The anti- Rome that was to follow looked beyond the world of emperors and the state to a cosmic order that was not of man's doing. Both Christianity and Islam, the two competing religions that will come to dominate and the struggle over the Mediterrenean, believed strongly in a single God--in fact in the same God--they just had different names for him. The order of the city will change according to the nature of these religions and draw its character from their needs.
Christianity, as we have seen, inherited the Roman Empire under Constantine. The temples will be abandoned--only a few, such as the Pantheon in Rome, will be reappropriated as places of worship--and churches, which did not look like temples but were derived from the secular basilica or meeting hall will become the new social focus of the city. Old St. Peter's in Rome, one of the two churches built to Constantine's order is a good example of the basilical type. It had no facade to speak of; the front portico was used to dispense charity, the gate led into an a large atrium court where the catechumins who were learning about the religion would gather; beyond this was a transitional foyer or narthex that led into the basilica, a long covered hall flanked by two colonnaded ambulatories. The hall was used for gathering to hear sermons, the ambulatories were used for processions. The single bit of grandiosity was an arch, associated with triumphal arches, placed on the major axis and inscribed with Constantine's name . Otherwise it was a humble structure, without the monumentality or sense of manipulation of Hellenistic architecture. Excepting a few magnificent structures such as those in Ravenna or the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, architecture under the Early Christian regime became a self- effacing project, low-profile and introspective. The city will lose its sense of direction and control. Poverty, charity, humility will be imposed as part of a new ideological agenda that did not correspond to the directness and splendor of the Hellenistic way.
Islam
The other great religion, Islam, will be equally antithetical to Hellenistic urbanism but not for the same reasons. Public institutions, public spaces, and coordinated street patterns were unnecessary under Islam because of the new emphasis on local justice and the importance of community. Although the Prophet Mohammed, who was a merchant and thus urbanized, was against nomadic existence, most of the early converts to the new religion, which he began formulating in 610, were of nomadic origin and related to this floating pattern of life. The Arab-Islamic city, which occasionally was built as an occupation of earlier Hellenistic cities, but usually was built ex-novo, retains something of the nomad's life in its patchwork of communities. Instead of colonnaded streets and clearly encoded space like the Hellenistic city, the Arab-Islamic city was made of an infinite number of fragments, not clearly connected on the ground plane. The organization of the city fabric was somewhat like the ceramic decorations of the mosques with their interlacing patterns. There was a strong sense of orientation in Islamic cities that came from above, like the nomad's reliance on the position of the stars to navigate the deserts: all Arab- Islamic cities are characterized by their observance of the orientation to Mecca, known as the quibla. All prayers, and thus all buildings for prayer are directed that way, and when a belieever dies he is buried facing Mecca. So while the fabric of the city appears incredibly incoherent and snarled, there is an underlying spiritual order that compensates with its directness. No matter how complicated the street pattern in an Islamic city may be, you can always find your way to Mecca.
A pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the hajj, is one of the five pillars of Islam that a good believer should aspire to. The other four are: Faith, prayer five times a day in the direction of Mecca, fasting during the month of Ramadam, and tything. The cult site in Mecca, an immense colonnaded space, not too unlike a Hellenistic temenos, surrounds a seven storey box, draped in black cloth, known as the Ka'aba (which means "the ancient house). The Ka'aba is the alleged house of Abraham, the common ancester of the people's of the book, though it had served as a pagan shrine for tribal cultures. The pilgrimage ritual and the site were coopted by Mohammed in his brilliant synthesis of peoples on the Arabian peninsula. The book in this case is the Qu'ran, which played an instrumental role in unifying the diverse tribes and peoples under Islam during the 7th century because the Qu'ran cannot be translated to other languages but must be read in the original Arabic.
Islam, by the way, means "voluntary surrender to God," but the enormous empire that was gathered after Mohammed's passing was made of more than volunteers. Many were the same peoples who had undergone wave after wave of empire builders, from the Assyrians to the Persians, to the Seleucids, to the Greeks and Romans, Sassanians, and so on. Islam's territories were conquered not by the miracle of faith, which was the strategy of the early Christians, but by the majesty of the sword, which became one of its prominent emblems. In the span of less than 100 years the followers of Mohammed spread from their power base in Mecca and Medina to conquer all of the Fertile Crescent, all of North Africa, most of the Iberian peninsula and most of Persia, arriving to the borders of India.
The Arab attitude of conquest was quite different than that of the Romans who had tried to supply an instant universal culture to displace the local one. The Arab conquest herded the various tribal and ethnic groups, extracting taxes and sometimes conscripts from them, but otherwise left them to manage themselves in urban enclaves. The ruling caste always remained aloof from the rest of the city. They brought a new religion as the source of hegemony but did not require allegiance to it. Their power was maintained primarily through military prowess. This is not to say that Islam was not intent on conversion--the Arab-Islamic city will be characterized by obedience to the faith. But the different varieties of Islam, Sunni and Shi'ah, the various minor faiths such as Jews and Christians, and Druze and Coptics, were usually allowed to live in their own communities according to their own customs without disturbance, subordinate to the dominant faith, but tollerated.
The Mosque
The building tradition of the Arab-Islamic city was dominated by the new cult buildings, the typology of which was usually characterized by a large hypostyle hall. There was a long tradition in the Middle East of the hypostyle hall, found throughout the Fertile crescent from Ancient Egypt to Persia, which served as a royal audience hall. Ancient Persepolis, for instance which was buiilt around the time of the Persian invasion of the Aegean under Xerxes. Just as the Christians had adapted the secular assembly building of the basilica for their cult buildings, so Islam avoided the temple typology of the Romans and adapted a secular typology for its cult buildings. Like early Christian churches, mosques do not have prominent facades. A mosque complex usually has a colonnaded forecourt which contains a fountain for washing before entering the prayerhall. Somewhere on the perimeter is a tower, a minaret, where a crier calls people to prayer five times a day. The interior space is usually arranged laterally so that as many people as possible will be exposed to the quibla axis to Mecca. There is usually a special niche, the Mirhab, indicating the quibla direction, and sometimes, such as at the great mosque at Quairowan a small dome also articulates the axis. Excepting the Dome of the Rock, which was emulating the typology of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, domed and vaulted structures will not be a characteristic of Islamic architecture until the Ottomans take Constantinople in 1453 and follow the magnificent example of the domed Church of Hagia Sophia. The broad and unfocused hypostyle hall served well for the purposes of Islamic services as there were no processions or active ceremonies in Islam. Instead people were meant to be spread through the room, like the evenly distributed columns, and remain fixed in prayer. At some point the Imam would ascend the minbar to deliver a speech, often times about the political situation. The only hierarchy in a mosque was that of being closest to the Quibla wall. The hypostyle type reached its most exquisite expression in the great mosque of Cordoba in Moorish Spain, where the fanciful arcuated technology lifts the roof on double arches and alternates with dome covered lightshafts to create a flickering play of light and shade.
The First Islamic Cities: Damascus and Bahgdad
In the early years of Islam the most important city after the cult centers of Mecca, Medina and Jersualem, was Damascus, which had been an important Hellenistic center. The Ummayads, followers of Mohammed's son Omar, and the source of the Sunni faction, used Damascus as their capital city. The transformation of the city's fabric around 650 is indicative of the change in urban values away from public concerns to those of individual communities. The rigid orthogonal organization of Hellenistic Damascus underwent the process of what Kostof used to call frazzeling, a blurring of paths and edges. The rulers were aloof from the city, concerned only with fortifications, the major mosque, and their palace complex. The mosque occupied the Christian basilica used by the Byzantines, changing its orientation to use the breadth rather than the length of the building. The site had been the location of the great temple of the hellenistic city. The more remarkable alterations took place on the Decumanus, the major east-west street, and on the agora,which had been a protected open space. The decumanus was typically colonnaded like the streets of nearby Palmyra, but the columns were reused as supports for shops that spilled out into the street, blocking the direct passage of the axis and creating a meandering route with no clear direction. The agora was likewise filled in by vermiculated paths and dead ends. Public life was removed from big public institutions and public spaces, but continued as market activity in the covered and winding passages of the suk.
Until this day there are bitter disagreements among the believers in Isalm over those who accept Omar's version of the sayings of the prophet, the Sunni, and those who believe that it is a corruption and will accept only the original words of the prophet, the Shi'a. In 754 the power shifted to the Shi'a who killed all of the Ummayad heirs (except one who set up a dynasty in Spain), and the new dynasty, the Abbasyds, took power under Al-Mansur, the conquerer. Al-Mansur moved his base to a neutral site on the Tygrus River, that was closer to his allies, the Persians.
His new city of Bahgdad, not far from ancient Babylon, will be the great exception to Arab-Islamic city building because of its extraordinary geometric regularity. The round city of Al-Mansur was described by a contemporary historian as seeming to have been poured from a mold. Like the capitals of Eastern satraps, the round city was less of a city than it was an enormous fortified palace with its dependencies. It was surrounded by a double set of walls and had four gates oriented to the cardinal points. At each gate was occupied by a garrison of 1000 soldiers, who were supported by 30,000 troops inside the walls. Colonnaded axial streets led to the center. The spoke-like radial minor streets were named after various clients of the Caliph and reserved for their residences. In the center was the large palace for the Caliph and the great mosque as well as a guardhouse structure, and a police headquarters. All commercial functions were banned from the round city and no one was allowed to ride through the open space on a horse. It must have been a severe and intimidating place. Allegedly 100,000 craftsmen took 22 years to build it. Today the round city is buried somewhere under the modern fabric of Baghdad.
The caliph recognized almost immediately the disadvantages of such an immutable scheme and built a more magnificent palace outside of the walls of the round city, and had the royal offspring do the same. The round city had an unflinching order that was completely at odds with the fluid patterns of the settlements that grew around it. Hardly anything remains of the Baghdad of the Abbasyds--the city was completely destroyed by Ghengis Khan in 1258. Baghdad remained important as a study center, and such later buildings as the medresas, or colleges, attest to its importance and sophistication. The ponderous monuments built for Saddam Hussein during the 1980s seem to evoke the geometry and also the inflexibility of the lost round city quite consciously.
The Herat Neighborhood System
Aside from the characteristic religious building type of the mosque, is there anything else that defines the Arab-islamic city? Janet Abu-Lughod puts it in these terms: "1) juridical distinctions between Muslims and/or citizens and outsiders; 2) segregation by gender and a virtually complete division of labor according to it; and 3) a fully decentralized and ex post facto system of land use and governmental regulation over space." That is, the urban system valued tribal or ethnic formations over universal integration; the religion strictly segregated women from public life, leading to very private architectural solutions, and the patchwork of the city was made of different enclaves gave it a sense of incoherence.
If we examine part of Tunis we find an urban fabric that is characteristic of most Arab- Islamic cities. The major streets are wide enough only for two camels to pass, a regulation that is mentioned in the Qu'ran. Feeding off the main street are a series of dead-end alleys which often had gateways. These were referred to as herats, or hara, and they implied a social organization that was relatively self-governing. In poor sections of the city, the herat of the protected alley was the space where women could circulate freely. In Cairo there was usually a character located at the mouth of this alley, someone who owned a shop or house close to the entry, called a nadorgi, who monitored comings and goings and acted as an impediment to any illicit social practices. There is something curiously similar between the herat and the US suburban enclave, even if it is not determined by the ethnic composition and does not have the same sort of density or form. Consider this homily from the Qu'ran: "Of happiness: a good wife, a spacious home, a good neighbor, and a good mount." Just substitute fast car for "good mount" and you've got the basic value system of suburbia (well not exactly--you'd probably have to factor in good school system as well). This system of herats is a private world in which the relation of neighbors is the only political dimension provided for in the city and the sense of the city as a whole, a place with representative spaces is unnecessary.
The dense, non-axial, patchwork of Arab Islamic cities aspired to a different spatial order than that of Hellenistic times. We noticed a perspectival understanding of space on the decorations of Pompeian villas, where overlapping allows all of the parts to relate in a synthetic vision of the whole. But when space was depicted in Islamic society (which was very rarely because of the resentment of craven images), such as in this Persian minature of the 15th century, space is flat and not integrated. One item is connected to the next, like the nomad's path through the desert. Kwinter last year brought our attention to the new categorical analogies of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly the smooth and the striated, and the tree and the rhyzome. Islamic cities grow in a smooth way, like an evenly woven fabric--they are an accretion of independent fragments and sprout up according to the rhyzome analogy, like grass spreading rather than a tree with a single root system. Of course there are exceptions--the glorious arcaded streets of Isphahan in Persia set on the farthest eastern edge of the conquests distinguished itself as closer to a Hellenistic order of axes linked to an armature of public buildings. At the westernmost edge in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Alhambra was built, a marvelous palace with colonnaded gardens, that followed a spatial order closer to Pergamon than to the more casually structured complexes of north Africa.
The Islamic territories did not remain under monolythic authority for very long. The succession of caliphs was as precarious as the succession of Roman emperors during the 3rd century and various dynasties formed and claimed different areas. The constantly renewing military ranks, drawing on the Seljuks and Turks of Anatolia, would influence the dramatic changes in regime until the Ottomans took Constantinople and imposed a unified and stable regime on the Islamic territories between Persia and North Africa during the 15th century.
Cairo, Mother of All Cities?
Cairo was the greatest city to appear during the period of Islamic dominion. It was located approximately in the middle of the region of the conquest, in a place that not only had the benefit of the agricultural surplus of the Nile, which since the time of the Pharaohs had been a key to easy surplus, but was well-situated for trade, and will develop special relationships with Constantinople and Venice acting as the clearing house for the rest of the Orient. Cairo will grow along the Nile spreading to a length of 16 miles (that's approximately from downtown Houston to the Airport) as an immense linear metropolis across the river from the famous pyramids of Giza. Unlike Damascus it had no previous Hellenistic armature to frazzle but grew piecemeal as the accretion of herats. The 14th century travellor Ibn Battuta (an arabian version of Marco Polo) described Cairo with its impressive sense of swarming chaos: "Mother of cities...mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and spendor, she surges as the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarcely contain them for all the capacity of her situation and sustaining power."
The pattern of development of Cairo depended on the checkerboard settlement of her military overlords, who first set up camp in the 640s in a place they called Fustat in the southern region. A palace and mosque was built and tribes were invited to settle outside of the walls of Fustat which was reserved for the military elite. The succession of military rulers moved their elite compounds always one more checker square to the north, abandoning the previous compound to become popular districts, where each neighborhood bore the name of a nomadic tribe. During the 9th century the Tulinids built the impressive complex for Ibn Tulun (870s) with a monumental minaret and impressive domed mausoleum structure in the courtyard of the mosque. And they engineered a canal to connect the Nile to the Red Sea, an important commercial link.
Fatimid Cairo
The Fatimids, who had established their power first in Tunisia where they built the impressive mosque of Quairowan, claimed the city in 969 and set up yet another elite compound to the north of the previous one, which they called al-Qahirah: "the Victorious". Both the name and the position stuck and Cairo will be called thence forward Cairo and this will serve as her monumental district. The Fatamids were Shi'ites and were the first rulers to proclaim Cairo as the site of an independent Caliphate--they thus had ambitions to rule all of the Islamic territories as legitimate successors to the prophet. Their city was, like the round city of Baghdad, a palace complex with a great mosque and subdivision for the 10 military units that served the wazir. The army was made up of a variety of mercenaries-- Greeks, Curds, Turks, Armenians, and Ethiopians, each of whom lived in separate neighborhoods inside the walled city. Commercial activites during Fatimid times took place in Fustat and the southern regions.
The Fatimids established the great mosque of Al-Azhar near the palace and the southern gate, the Bab Zuwaylah, looking back to the conquered city. This will act as a nodal point, answered at the opposite northern edge of the city by a second major focus, the mosque complex of Al-Hakim, adjacent to the gate of Bab al Futuh. In the center of the city they built the great palace for the Wasir on the east and the smaller palace to the west and the "palace walk" the street in between them, known as Bayn al-Qasrayn.
The fortunes of the Fatimids declined in the 12th century due to a combination of crop failures, plagues, Crusaders to the north, and unclear political successions. At one point their defenses against competing caliphs were so low they elected to burn the district of Fustat as a scorched-earth tactic of self-defense. The city was reorganized by a Turkish general, Al-Saladin, who took Cairo in 1169, and from here will organize the offensive to expell the Crusaders from Jerusalem. Saladin changed the pattern of the city by moving his enclave not further north on the checkerboard but to the east, on the crowning position of the hill, where he built a citadel, mostly from the blocks of the Giza pyramids. Saladin was a Sunnite and sponsored a series of rededications in the walled city of his predecessors, establishing new schools, or madresa for study. This established a pattern of competitive patronage and monumentalization through religious endowments for the center of Cairo to be followed by other rulers.
Mameluk Cairo
The next rulers of Cairo, another caste of military men from Turkey known as the Mameluks continued the policy of sponsoring religious institutions in the old Fatimid city. They also subsidized the price of bread, bringing Cairo close to the welfare tactics of ancient Rome. Such measures were invariably a defense against the rebellious possibilities of an estimated 50% of people living on the edge of starvation. Although they sponsored the most beautiful monuments of the city, the Mameluks, who comprised about 10% of the population were not well-loved by the local residents: "The mameluks," wrote one commentator, "were responsible for much disorder in Egypt, They attacked the inhabitants, slaughtered them, pillaged their wealth and carried off their wives. They engaged in such excess that even Europeans, had they been masters of the country, could not have done as much." They held their power through feudal obligations, exchanging military protection for tribute.
This condemnation notwithstanding, the rule of the Mameluks was generally tolerant, more tolerant than European cities of this age. The old center of the Fatimid city was replenished with monuments, transforming the figure of the city's core beyond regonition. Schools for studying the Qu'an and religious buildings, and between them a flow of commercial attachments that made up the famous Casbah, or market district. Looking at the beautiful map made during Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, we notice the pattern of vermiculated alleys, the herats that make up most of the fabric of the city. The segregation of women was strongly enforced. In theory vomen were only allowed to leave the dwelling on three occasions in their life: their wedding day, the day their mother dies, and the day they themselves die! The severity of this code was imposed mostly on the wealthy upstanding residents who could afford large palaces. The house would have a secluded private courtyard and separate quarters for women upstairs. The windows of the house would be shielded by latticed mashrabiyya, a veiling of the windows, through which women could see out to the world of men but not vice versa. This compulsion for privacy and protection of women is given authority in the Qu'ran with statements like: "He who looks into a house without the occupant's permission, and they puncture his eye, will have no right to demand a fine or ask for punishment."
The Qu'ran provides basically for a society of neighbors and not for one of citizens. Thus its mention of planning focuses on things like this: "Do you know the rights of neighbors? You must not build to exclude the breeze from him, unless you have his permission." The sanctity of the neighbor is brought out in another passage: "Via Aisha who asked the Prophet: o messenger of God I have two neighbors to which one should I give this gift? The prophet answered: to the one whose door is nearest to yours."
Mameluk Cairo was composed of people who came from all over the Islamic world. It was a melting pot of sorts, all the ingredients did not blend in but remained autonomous. Each foreign community which was usually involved in some specialty of trade lived in a hotel-like compound known as a wakela--as many as 10 % of the population was housed in this manner. This wakela type is also sometimes known as a caravansary or a khan. On the ground level are places to store goods, have shops, and keep animals. The upper stories are for the individual families involved and are arranged in vertical slices of two to three levels. One or two bays per family. There would have been a wakela for the Palestinian soap merchants and another for Syrian date merchants, etc.
The Jews lived in a quarter named after them not far from the palace compound of the center. And the Christian Coptics had their own quarter as well. Each tribe and group of people administrated itself in its neighborhood, but was subject to the city's administration when it involved public taxes or military questions.
Mameluk Cairo reached a population of over 400,000 people surpassing Constantinople and rivalling ancient Rome in size and glory. It grew in the rhysomal accretive pattern with little control over its form excepting the boundaries of topography, the river's edge and the hills. It was a focus of military authority, a reality that always kept itself segregated from the rest of the city, and a principal point of global commerce, linking Asia to Europe. Cairo was also the center of profound religious activites, having an inordinate amount of study centers staffed with monks imported from all over the Islamic world. Ibn Khaldun, the great scientist and philosopher captured the city's essence for the Islamic world: "He who does not know Cairo does not know the grandeur of Islam. It is the metropolis of the universe, the garden of the world, the anthill of the human species, the portico of Islam, the throne of royalty, a city embellished with castles and palaces, decorated with dervish monasteries and with schools, and lighted by the moons and stars of erudition. What one sees in a dream surpasses reality but all that one can dream about could not come close to the reality of Cairo."
Cairo lost its independence in the 16th century to the Ottomans who ruled with a brief interruption by Napoleon until the 20th century. Cairo is the quintessential Arab-Islamic city and if it has been difficult to visualize it, part of this is due to the layered, introverted and accretive nature of the city which is atomistic, with one thing attached to the next. There is rarely a moment of high representation in the city, only the gates and minarets and a few scooped-out entry facades to the schools and mosques. Roman cities followed the architectural strategy of Hellenism to try to civilize its various populations, attempting to control behavior and impose its laws. Islamic cities, on the other hand, grew piecemeal without a unifying structure or monumental vision. Planning--excepting things such as military defense--was left to negotiations between neighbors, there was no language for civic things. The introverted nature of the city placed the needs of the community over that of the state or the larger phenomenon known as the city. And in this we must recognize something very familiar to the experience of the megalopolis as a city made of endless suburban cul-de-sacs.
Sources:
A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, eds., The Islamic City, Oxford, 1970.
Besim Hakim,Arabic-Islamic Cities, London, 1986.
Janet Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City--Historic Myth, Islamic Essence and Contemporary
Relevance," in Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19, 1987, pp 155-176.
_______, Cairo, 1001 Years of the City Victorious, Princeton, 1971.
G. Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, Oxford, 1924.
Nezar Alsayyad, Cities and Caliphs, On the Genisis of Arab Muslim Urbanism,
New York, 1991.
Paula Saunders, Ritual, Politics and the city in Fatimid Cairo, Albany,
1994.
George Mitchell, ed., The Architecture of the Islamic World, New York,
1978.
Caroline Williams, Islamic Monuments in Cairo, Cairo, 1993.