The Evolution of Muslim Urban Society

• Published in: Comparative studies in society and history 1973-01, Vol.15 (1), p.21-50
• Main Author: Lapidus, Ira M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Caliphs; Cities; City/Cities; College admission; Communities; Islam; Law schools; Middle East/Middle Eastern; Muslim/Muslims (see also Moslem); Muslims; Social evolution; Towns; Urban (see also Ru/Ur); Urban sociology
• ISSN: 0010-4175; 1475-2999; 1471-633X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500006903

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.