Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Reading The Islamic City
Reading Legal Texts
Whose Culture? And Whose City?
The Framework for the Book’s Analysis
Chapter One
Genealogies of Place
The Power/knowledge of Uqbah’s Dream
The Power/knowledge of Idris’s verba concepta
The Power/knowledge of the Jurist-consult
Chapter Two
Discursive Practices
The Practices of the Maliki School
The Practice of Social Norms/customs
The Practice of Legal Opinions
Chapter Three
Discursive Readings
The Indeterminacy of Marginal Sites
The Adjudication of Canonical Spaces
The Interpretation of Territory & Land
Chapter Four
Discursive Formulations
The Judgment of Self-ordering
The Judgment of Informal Orders
The Judgment of Random Incursions
Conclusion
On Intertextuality
On Discursive Relations
On Reading the Madinah
Bibliography
Glossary
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Akel Ismail Kahera is professor of architecture and community planning at Prairie View A& M University and Director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture. He is the author of Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space Gender & Aesthetics (University of Texas Press, 2002).
Reading the Islamic City: Discursive Practices and Legal Judgment
contributes to an ongoing dialog in urban studies in significant
ways. It illuminates a rich history of Islamic urban form and civic
development, while providing our emergent 21st century world-view
with ways to bridge Islamic urban practices with Western
ideologies, and to merge various disparities between
(mis)understandings as presented in varying forms of discourse or
media. Filtering its analysis through Foucault's notion of
'discursive practices,' it reiterates that understandings, social
relations, and spatial action are at once negotiated and given
legitimization in particular milieus, but also in turn supplying
the formative base upon which new epistemes are assembled
spatially. It assembles an otherwise disparate, multifaceted
subject into a 'continuity of discourse' and presents critical
issues underlying collective action and subsequent urban form. It
highlights that Islamic urban fabrics, as with many places, are
composed within intertextual palimpsests of meaning and necessary
relations between discursive points of view. Urban development is
viewed as formed epistemically and axiologically, bearing on the
coincidence of knowledges, ideals, power, laws, order, practices,
social customs, cultural bearings, and religious views. From a
historic perspective, the book situates the relations between
juridical practices, law, and policies that have long directed
building practices and planning, and thus urban inhabitation. At
the same time, it acknowledges that local knowledges,
self-practices, and communities of knowledge gain affordances
toward co-substantiating urban form, through modes that co-inform
each other. The book provides an advocate voice for an often
under-represented subject in current Western didactics of urban
form, so that it can be understood or given meaning in current
times. Beyond the construction of cities from functional
standpoints, religious or idealistic views also underlie structural
form and foster rich notions of tranquility, beauty, equity, and
responsibility that go alongside civic urban life. As such it
provides a cross-referential vantage point that can guide future
city design practices along these lines. General readers of urban
studies will benefit from the book's multidisciplinary dialog
toward urban development, be it analytical, pedagogical, or
application oriented, while researchers interested in the more
particular subject matter will greatly benefit from its rigor of
scholarly reference and detail.
*Craig Anz, Southern Illinois University*
With compelling insights into the ethos and power structures of
Islam, Reading the Islamic City deftly weaves vivid images taken
from poetry, prayers, and paintings through Foucault’s analytical
discussion of governmental rule of law to convey a deeply
humanistic dimension contained within the rigid dogma of Maliki law
that informed the development of the Islamic urban form. Kahera’s
interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Islamic city
provides not only a very precise and methodical deconstruction of
the historic development of the Islamic city, but peels back its
complex layering in a very accessible read that reveals Islam to be
not simply a religion, but 'a way of being in the world' that
informs every aspect of one’s life–including the development of
one’s personal dwelling and broader surroundings. This analysis
also prompts discussions about the nature and development of one’s
own cities and dwelling places and would be of interest not only to
religious scholars, but also to architects, urban planners,
demographers, economists, and anyone interested in the human
race.
*Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, Prairie View A&M University*
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