The City in the Islamic World
General editor
Salma K. Jayyusi
Special editors
Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli and
André Raymond
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This book was subsidized by His Royal Highness Prince Abd al- Azīz Ibn
Fahd Ibn Abd al- Azīz
Library of Congress-in-Publication Data
The city in the Islamic World / edited by Salma K. . . . [et al.].
p. cm. — (Handbook of oriental studies section 1, the Near and Middle East)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-90-04-16240-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Islamic cities and towns—Islamic
countries—History. 2. Islamic cities and towns—Islamic countries—Social life and
customs. 3. Islamic cities and towns—Islamic countries—Intellectual life. 4. Cities and
towns—Islamic Empire. I. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. II. Title. III. Series.
HT147.5.C59 2008
307.760917’67—dc 22
2008006517
ISSN 0169-9423
ISBN 978 90 04 16240 2
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INHERITED CITIES
Hugh Kennedy
Many, if not most of the cities which existed in the early Muslim world
had existed in one form or another before the coming of Islam. There
were important exceptions: Kufa and Basra in Iraq, Fustat in Egypt,
Qayrawan in Tunisia, and, of course, Baghdad and Samarra were all
founded through government action to provide bases for Muslim settlers and suitable new centres for government. Other new towns seem
to have emerged more gradually in response to new patterns of power
and settlement: Murcia in eastern Andalus, Fez in Morocco, Mosul in
northern Iraq, Shiraz in Fars, and Kirman in southern Iran are all
examples of this latter pattern. Political authority was also wielded
from ancient centres: Córdoba, Damascus, Rayy, and Merv are all
cities whose origins were lost in the mists of antiquity.
The inherited cities of the early Islamic period are an especially
interesting field of study because they give us an opportunity to examine
how the coming of a new élite language and religion and the emergence of new political and military systems affected the structures of
everyday life.
Archaeological evidence necessarily provides the foundations for this
enquiry but in the way of things it is very patchy and does not always
answer the questions we are asking. Many of the cities the Muslim state
inherited are still thriving today and their past is difficult to recover
beneath the modern streets and buildings. Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo,
Córdoba, and Bukhara are all sites where the centre of the ancient city
remains the centre of urban life today. But there are a significant number
of other sites which survived from antiquity into the Islamic period but
which have subsequently been deserted. Among these Jerash in Jordan
(probably de-urbanized in the ninth and tenth centuries), Nishapur in
northeastern Iran, and Merv in Turkmenistan (both effectively deserted
after the Mongol conquests of 1218–20) are sites where the ancient and
early Islamic cities are wide open to archaeological investigation. Balkh
would be the same, if political conditions in Afghanistan were more
encouraging for archaeology. In some other cities, the urban centre
has moved, thus allowing the site of the ancient and early Islamic city
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to be investigated. Such is the case at Samarqand where the walls and
citadel of the old city, destroyed at the time of the Mongol invasions,
lie just outside the modern city developed by the Timurids and their
successors. Fustat presents a complex picture where the Roman fortified
citadel, dating from the reign of Trajan (98–117), was expanded by the
foundation of the Muslim city to the north in the seventh and eighth
century while this in turn was largely deserted during the twelfth century
as the centre of urban life moved further north to Cairo, eventually
allowing both Roman and early Islamic centres to be investigated by
archaeologists.
The archaeological evidence varies widely and different sorts of
material enable us to ask different questions. Broadly speaking, we can
make a division between the stone built cities of the ancient Byzantine
lands and the mud-brick and rubble cities of the Sasanian east. The
largely brick built cities of early Islamic Egypt are only just beginning
to be investigated. Spain and North Africa had some late antique
urban centres in stone, though in general these have been subject to
less thorough investigation than the material from Syria.
The importance of these distinctions between regions and construction techniques is that they fundamentally shape the sort of questions we
can ask about the aspect of inherited cities and the way they changed,
stone architecture enduring more than mud. In all provinces of the
caliphate, we can make general observations about the distribution of
cities and which ones thrived and which declined, but the nature of
the evidence is quite varied. At a more specific level, the picture varies
considerably from area to area. In Syria, and to a lesser extent in the
Muslim west, we can look at the urban topography of some cities, that is
to say that we can observe how street plans and the design of individual
buildings evolved. In sites like Jerash1 and Baysan2 we can observe the
evolution of the street scene and even in a city like Aleppo, continuously
overbuilt to the present day, we can make meaningful judgments about
the way in which the street plan did, or did not change, with the coming
of Islam. Such precision is rarely possible from the Muslim east. Even
from sites like Samarqand, Merv, and Qasr-i Abu Nasr where there
has been some scientific excavation of the urban built environment,
1
On the street plan of Jerash, Carl H. Kraeling, Gerasa: City of the Decapolis (New
Haven, 1938).
2
Yoram Tsafrir and Gideon Foerster, “Urbanism at Scythopolis-Bet Shean in the
Fourth to Seventh Centuries,” DOP 51 (1997): 85–146.
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the information yielded has been limited. The excavations in the old
city of Merv present late Sasanian housing but give little indication of
later evolution, if any; Samarqand gives some information about the
evolution of an élite centre, Qasr-i Abu Nasr the layout and evolution of a small urban nucleus within the walls of the citadel. Despite
these limitations, the eastern Islamic material can give us a sense of
the macro-geography of the city, the extent to which pre-Islamic cities
expanded in the early Islamic era or changed their sites.
In this chapter, I would like to examine three main areas of the early
Muslim world, greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham), Iran and the Muslim East,
and the Muslim West, looking first at the distribution of inherited cities
and then at the morphology of individual sites.
The cities of Bilad al-Sham3
It is the area of Bilad al-Sham, the Levantine provinces, which had
been ruled by the Byzantines that we find the clearest evidence about
the cities the Muslims inherited. Of the larger cities in the area,
Damascus and Jerusalem survived and remained important cities in
the early Islamic period. Damascus certainly expanded in the period
because of its political role as capital of the Umayyad caliphate from
661 to 750 and, although we know little about the urban, as opposed
to the monumental, history of early Islamic Jerusalem, its position as
a cult centre would suggest that urban life continued.
The other provincial capitals fared less well. Antioch had been the
capital of the whole of the late Roman East, one of the great cities
of the Empire and seat of one of the four ancient patriarchates of the
Christian church. Evidence, both written and archaeological, suggests
that the city had been in decline, economically and physically since the
mid-sixth century, but it retained its political primacy until the end of
Byzantine rule. The city survived into Islamic times as a middle-sized
3
The literature on Roman and Islamic Syria is vast. For an introduction to Syria in
antiquity see Warwick Ball, Rome in the East (London, 2000) and Kevin Butcher, Roman
Syria and the Near East (London, 2003). For changes in late antiquity, Clive Foss, “The
Near Eastern Countryside in Late Antiquity: a review article,” JRA, Supplementary
series, 14 (1995): 213–234; Idem, “Syria in Transition, A.D. 550–750,” DOP 51 (1997):
189–270. For the changes in the early Islamic period, Hugh Kennedy, “From Polis to
Medina: urban change in late antique and early Islamic Syria,” Past and Present 106
(1985): 3–27.
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provincial town4 but in the long term it must have suffered from the
rise of nearby Aleppo, itself an ancient city but one which grew rapidly
in the centuries after the Muslim conquest. Chalcis survived as early
Islamic Qinnasrin and there was new early Muslim settlement outside
the walls of the classical city. For a while, it remained important politically as capital of the jund which bore its name but even before the end
of the Umayyad period it, too, was being supplanted by Aleppo as the
most important city in the area.
Apamea had continued to be an important political centre until the
end of the sixth century but it suffered grievously from its sack by the
Persians in 573. The city put up little resistance to the incoming Muslim
armies and the ancient metropolis of Syria II was reduced to the size
and status of a small country town. Further south, the urban centre of
Scythoplis/Baysan, capital of Palestine II, continued to be developed
with new streets and porticoes until the end of the Umayyad period,
though, as with other cities, this may represent continuing vitality in
only a small part of the area of the ancient city.5
The cities of the coast suffered most from the new political circumstances as the Mediterranean became a war zone rather than a means
of communication, though it must be remembered that the Persian invasions of the first decade of the seventh century had already disrupted
much of the ancient commerce. In addition to suffering the damage
wrought by the reduction of sea commerce, Beirut had been ruined
by an earthquake in the mid-sixth century. It may have recovered from
that but any such recovery has left no trace in either the literature or
the archaeological record.6 The geographer al-Ya qūbī says that Beirut,
along with other coastal towns like Tripoli, Jubayl, and Sidon were
inhabited by Persians (Furs) transported there by the first Umayyad
caliph Mu awiya b. Abi Sufyan.7 This suggests that, although the sites
were still inhabited, there was little or no continuity of population.
Tyre and Caesarea both seem to have remained important urban
centres until the early seventh century and Caesarea was the only city
where there was prolonged resistance to the Muslim invaders. After
4
See Hugh Kennedy, “Antioch: from Byzantium to Islam and back again,” in The
City in Late Antiquity, ed. John Rich (London, 1992), 181–198.
5
See Hugh Kennedy, “Gerasa and Scythopolis: Power and Patronage in the Byzantine Cities of Bilad al-Sham,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 52 (1997): 199–204.
6
Linda J. Hall, Roman Berytus: Beirut in Late Antiquity (New York, 2004).
7
Al-Ya qūbī, Kitāb al-buldān, ed. Michaël Jan de Goeje (Leiden, 1892), 327.
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the Muslim conquest, both sank into comparative obscurity and, like
Antioch, any importance they did have was due to their military or
political role rather than their commercial vitality. It was not until the
early eleventh century that the coastal ports of the Levant began to
expand once more with the appearance of western merchants in the
eastern Mediterranean.
Bostra, capital of the province of Arabia, never became important
in Muslim times. Its continued commercial importance in the late sixth
century is suggested by the Bahira legend which describes the youthful
Prophet Muhammad coming to the city as part of the trading caravan
from Mecca and being impressed by the teaching of the saintly monk.
But we know from other sources that it had been sacked by dissident
Ghassanids in the late sixth century and in Umayyad times it lost any
political importance it may still have had to nearby Damascus.8 The
most southerly of the ancient capitals, Petra, is never mentioned in
the accounts of the Muslim conquest, nor is there any archaeological
evidence for new construction after the mid-sixth century. The recently
excavated great church was destroyed by fire in the mid sixth century
and never subsequently rebuilt.9 This negative evidence suggests that
the city had entirely lost its urban character a hundred years before
the coming of the Muslims.
If few of the major political centres of the late Roman Empire
survived as major cities in the Islamic period, there seems to have
been more continuity among the smaller towns, especially those away
from the coast. As is often the case for this period, the archaeological
evidence is more revealing than the scanty literary sources for the first
two centuries of Islamic rule. From this we can see that a city like Jerash continued to be inhabited throughout the Umayyad period. New
housing was constructed and a large new mosque built to house what
was presumably an expanding Muslim population.10 The citadel at
nearby Philadelphia/Amman was extensively rebuilt and by the mideighth century boasted an imposing new palace, a mosque, baths and
élite houses while another congregational mosque was constructed in
the lower town. All this gives an impression of urban vitality which
Maurice Sartre, Bostra: des origins à l’Islam (Paris, 1985).
Zbigniew Fiema, et al., The Petra Church (Amman, 2001).
10
For a preliminary report on this important discovery, Alan Walmsley, “The NewlyDiscovered Congregational Mosque of Jarash in Jordan,” Al- Usur al-Wusta: The Bulletin
of Middle East Medievalists 15 (2003): 17–24.
8
9
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finds no little echo in the written sources. Similarly, the continuing, or
revived, commercial importance of Palmyra/Tadmur is suggested by
the development of a new suq along the old colonnaded street that
had formed the spine of the Roman city.
It is only in Bilad al-Sham that the archaeological record enables us
to make some assessment of the impact of the Muslim conquests on the
built environment and architecture of the towns, and here we enter into
the debate about the nature of late antique cities. The question of the
shape and appearance of the late antique city has been the subject of
lively controversy. There used to be a tacit assumption that the classical
city with its regular plan, broad colonnaded streets, and monumental
buildings survived almost unaltered until the coming of Islam introduced
a new sort of “Islamic city” with narrow winding streets, blank-walled
houses, and no public buildings apart from the mosque. Recently this
picture of abrupt change has been challenged and modified. It is clear
that the regularity and monumentality of the classical city, if it had
ever existed in any sort of pristine state, had changed and developed in
late antiquity. Many of the monumental buildings of the classical era,
the theatres and huge baths, had fallen into disuse, not maintained in
the changed circumstances. Even more significant was the closure and
ruination of the great temples, a process begun in the mid-fourth century
and largely complete by the beginning of the sixth. These temples had
formed the central point of many town plans; the sacred ways which
led to them were also the broadest and most prestigious streets and
the arches and propylaea which added dignity to these processional
routes were central features of the townscape. The abandonment of
the pagan temples in a city like Jerash in the fifth and sixth centuries
meant disruption of the entire urban fabric. And, of course, the rise
of Christianity meant new religious buildings inserted into the ancient
city, creating new routes and spaces.
It was not just the monumental buildings that changed in late antiquity. The broad streets and regular open spaces on the ancient city
began to be eroded and encroached upon by housing and retail spaces.
In towns throughout the Levant, the streets of late antiquity came to
look increasingly like the narrower lanes of the archetypal, though
later, Islamic city. The evolution was far from complete. In provincial
capitals like Scythopolis, the governors laid out new streets and squares
in the sixth century and when the Emperor Justinian gave orders for
the restoration of Antioch after the disastrous earthquake of 540, he
made it clear that it was to be a classical city of the old sort, with
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stoas, agoras, theatres, and baths. When the same Emperor extended
the cardo of Jerusalem towards the Nea Church he was building, he laid
out a broad, straight colonnaded street of which Augustus or Hadrian
might have been proud.
Of course, the coming of Muslim rule naturally affected towns. The
most obvious difference was the appearance of a new sort of religious
building, the mosque. The impact of the mosque on the cityscape
varied greatly from city to city. In Damascus the Umayyad mosque
occupied the great temenos which had previously enclosed a pagan
temple and a Christian cathedral. In Jerusalem, the vast precinct of
Herod’s temple which may have been derelict since the destruction
of the building after the Roman conquest of A.D. 70 became the centre
of the Muslim cult with the construction of the Dome of the Rock and
the Aqsa mosque. In both these cases the new religious monuments
occupied traditional sacred areas.
Both these cases were unusual. In other cities the mosque was built
in an area that had hitherto been residential or commercial. Once
again the clearest evidence comes from Jerash where we can see the
emplacement of the Christian cathedral of the fourth century and
the mosque of the seventh or eighth in the existing urban structure.
The mosque, only discovered and partially excavated in the last two
years, was a large, rectangular, hypostyle building, erected by a crossroads in the classical street plan that seems to have been the centre
of the early Islamic settlement. In Aleppo the mosque, in the heart of
the souqs, may have occupied the site and adopted the footprint of
an ancient forum, just across the street from the cathedral. In some
cities there are literary records suggesting the sharing of sacred space
between Christians and Muslims, the mosque occupying part of the
church. This picture receives striking archaeological support from the
small Negev town of Subeita, where the tiny mosque occupied part
of narthex of the south church without, apparently, interrupting the
functioning of the Christian building. Both church and mosque fell into
ruin together when the town was abandoned, probably in the eighth
or ninth century.
The effect of the Muslim conquest on the ancient street plan has been
much debated and is a central issue in the emergence of the “Islamic
city.” In his pioneering study of Aleppo,11 Jean Sauvaget argued that
11
Jean Sauvaget, Alep (Paris, 1941).
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the classical street plan remained virtually intact until the tenth century
when a period of anarchy and lack of firm government allowed merchants to build their stalls in the centre of the street and so create the
suq as it has existed to the present day. Recent archaeological work has
shown that this picture needs to be modified. The sūq in the colonnaded
street at Palmyra, which in many ways confirms the changes suggested
by Sauvaget, dates from the late seventh or eighth century, some two
hundred years before the time he proposed. A startlingly new perspective
is suggested by recent evidence from Scythopolis. In the city centre there
was a broad, straight street flanked by arcaded porticoes. On stylistic
grounds this was dated to the Byzantine period and seen as evidence of
the continuing commitment of the authorities to the norms of classical
urban planning. However, excavations have uncovered a mosaic inscription showing beyond doubt that the street was constructed by the local
governor on the orders of the Caliph Hisham in the 730s.12 Not only
were the Muslim authorities constructing an urban feature of clearly
classical aspect, the governor was acting as his pre-Islamic predecessors
would have done, to beautify and enhance the built environment of
the city and creating an inscription to commemorate his actions and
the patronage of the ruler who had ordered it.
The evidence from Bilad al-Sham suggests that the coming of the
new Islamic dispensation did affect the appearance and function of
cities but that these changes were in many ways the continuation, variation, or acceleration of change which were already in progress before
the new religion was born. Unfortunately, the nature of the evidence
makes it very difficult to see if this pattern was repeated in other areas
of the Caliphate.
The cities of Iraq
Like Bilad al-Sham, ancient Iraq was a land well endowed with cities.
Some of these were major political centres, notably the great capital
at Ctesiphon, which the Arabs called al-Mada in (the cities) because
it seemed to have so many different parts to it. Many others were
smaller provincial towns which have left little trace in the archaeological record, in no little part due to the fact that they were built of mud
12
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Tsafrir and Foerster, “Urbanism at Scythopolis,” 139.
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brick. Scientific investigation of these sites has been almost entirely
confined to field surveys. This can be very useful in suggesting the
overall areas of settlement in certain periods, but cannot give us any
idea of the use made of inherited street plans or building types. The
early Arab geographers give almost lyrical descriptions of the prosperity
of small towns like Dayr al- Aqūl and Fam al-Silh with their mosques
and palm trees clustered on the banks of canals. Many of these towns
were not, by Mesopotamian standards, ancient settlements at all but
had developed during the great expansion of agriculture in the area
that had occurred during the Sasanian period. The characteristic urban
settlement of the Sasanian period was the small market town rather
than the great metropolis.
A typical town of the area was Nahrawan,13 where the road to
the Iranian plateau crossed the canal of that name. Ibn Rustah, at
the beginning of the tenth century, describes arriving at Nahrawan,
“through which a canal flows,” after travelling for four leagues from
Baghdad through continuous palm groves and cultivated fields. “On the
west bank (of the canal) are souqs, a congregational mosque and water
wheels (nawafiir) which irrigate its fields. There is also a congregational
mosque on the east side and around the mosque are caravansarais
(khanat) for pilgrims passing through the town.”14 The town is also said
to have housed a large Jewish community. Field survey suggests that
the west bank settlement was already in decline by the tenth century,
and by the time Muqaddasi was writing in the late tenth century the
east bank mosque was the only one still in use. By the eleventh century,
the site was effectively deserted.
In Sasanian times, Uskaf Bani Junayd15 was the largest town in the
Diyala river basin after the capital, al-Mada in itself, covering about
four square kilometres. It continued to be inhabited in the early Islamic
period and, unusually for the small towns of the area, boasted an
Umayyad-period palace, presumably built for the Banu Junayd lords
who gave their name to the Arab town. At the same time a mosque
was built over abandoned Sasanian constructions. This early Islamic
prosperity did not last: surface survey suggests that by the tenth century
the settlement only covered about twenty hectares, a twentieth of its
13
Robert Adams, The Land Behind Baghdad: a History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains
(Chicago, 1965), 91–92.
14
Ibn Rustah, al-A laq al-nafısa, ed. Michaël Jan de Goeje (Leiden, 1892), 163.
15
Adams, The Land Behind Baghdad, 95–96.
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hugh kennedy
greatest extent in the Sasanian period. And this settlement, at the heart
of the old city, must have been surrounded by mounds of rubble. At the
end of the eleventh century a little minaret was added to the mosque
and the rooms of the palace were divided by rough partitions to house
occupants of much lower status. After that the ancient settlement was
entirely abandoned.
Ctesiphon (Ar. al-Mada in) was indeed a number of cities.16 Ardashir
I had founded a roughly circular city officially called Weh-Ardashir.
This seems to have remained the centre of government and the winter
residence of the Sasanian Shahs until the middle of the fifth century
when the Tigris shifted its course and divided the city in two. It was
probably after this that a new Ctesiphon was developed to the south
and east of the round city and it was here that the Sasanians, probably
in the sixth century, created the great arched reception hall, still known
today as the Ivan-i Kisra (Iwan or portico of Chosroes). The Sasanian
palace astonished early Muslim builders and has survived, at least in
part, to the present day. Parts of the city continued to be inhabited
after the Muslim conquest. However, it lost its political role with the
foundation of the Muslim new towns of Kufa and Basra: this transition
is given symbolic form as the gates of Ctesiphon are said to have been
removed to Kufa. The establishment of Baghdad must have been a
further blow. At the end of the ninth century it was still a prosperous
market town with two congregational mosques and a sūq17 but it was
probably abandoned during the eleventh. Excavation on the site has
been patchy and it is difficult to assess the extent to which Sasanian
structures were reused and adapted in the Muslim period.
The inherited towns of Iraq suffered from the establishment of new
Muslim cities. Kufa and Basra attracted settlers away from the old
towns and the development of the megalopolis of Baghdad sucked
commerce and ambitious inhabitants away from the old centres. But
it was above all the decline in the irrigation systems from the ninth
century onwards which destroyed the prosperity and vitality of the
towns.18 By end of the eleventh century, virtually none of the towns
For an overview of the history of the city with full bibliography, J. Kroger, s.v.
“Ctesiphon,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Also s.v. “Ayvan-e Kesra,” which gives a sketch
plan of the site.
17
Ibn Rustah, al-A laq, 186.
18
David Waines, “The Third-century Internal Crisis of the Abbasids,” Journal of
the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20 (1978): 282–303; Hugh Kennedy, “The
Decline and Fall of the First Muslim Empire,” Der Islam 81 (2004): 3–30.
16
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the Muslim conquerors had inherited from the Sasanians still existed
as urban settlements.
Cities of Iran
As in the cases of Syria and Iraq, our understanding of the way in
which the Muslims used and developed the cities they inherited is constrained by the nature of the archaeological evidence. Despite recent
work in Merv19 and Samarqand,20 and some earlier soundings and
surveys in Fars in Istakhr and Gur/Firuzabad, there is not a city in
greater Iran, which has been explored sufficiently to give us an overview of change through this period. We have not, for example, been
able to recover the detailed plan of a major urban mosque from the
pre-Seljuk period21 or to see how new religious buildings fitted into the
existing urban fabric.
In some areas, the pre-Islamic cities were replaced by newly founded
centres. The clearest example of this comes from Fars in Southwest
Iran where the Islamic new town of Shiraz supplanted the ancient
urban centres. The site of Shiraz itself seems to have shifted from the
hill-top fortress now known as Qasr-i Abu Nasr to the nearby site of
modern Shiraz in the plains.22 This process of what might be termed
decastellamento, the move from the small, fortified site to the larger, open
position may be typical of other Iranian cities. Other Farsi towns
survived as small centres and Gur/Firuzabad became an important
political capital again in the tenth century. In the province of Kirman
to the east, the Sasanian and early Islamic capital at Sirjan had been
replaced by Kirman city by the eleventh century.
In some of the provincial capitals of Fars (Istakhr, Arrajan, Bishapur,
Gur/Firuzabad, and Darabjird) there is archaeological evidence for the
Georgina Hermann, Monuments of Merv (London, 1999).
Frantz Grenet, “De la Samarkand antique a la Samarkand islamique: continuités
et ruptures,” Colloque International de Archéolgie Islamique, 1993 (Cairo, 1998), 387–402.
21
The only partial exceptions are the Tarik-khana at Damghan of the eighth or
ninth century and the mosque at Na in, probably of the tenth. Neither of these,
however, was a major city nor is it clear how the mosques fitted in to the contemporary urban context. On the early mosques of Iran see Barbara Finster, Frühe Iranische
Moscheen (Berlin, 1994).
22
On Sasanian and early Islamic Shiraz, Donald Whitcomb, Before the Roses and
Nightingales: Excavations at Qasr-i Abu Nasr, Old Shiraz (New York, 1985).
19
20
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establishment of early Islamic settlements alongside the existing Sasanian cities, contingent extensions.23 At Istakhr the early Islamic city was
a walled enclosure some 400m square, with a mosque and a bazaar in
the centre. At Bishapur, part of the early Islamic settlement lay in the
gardens to the west of the Sasanian monumental city but evidence also
suggests that some of the formal architecture of this Sasanian royal site
was adapted to be used as mosques. In the round city of Gur, the early
Islamic settlement seems to have occupied a segment of the original
enclosure. In the case of the five provincial capitals of Fars, the written
and archaeological evidence demonstrate continued occupation, and
perhaps expansion, in Sasanian and early Islamic times, followed by
decay and desertion from the eleventh century on.
In Khurasan the cities which had been important in the pre-Islamic
period continued to be centres of population and political power down
to the Mongol invasions. Rayy, Nishapur, Merv, Balkh, Bukhara, and
Samarqand all throve on their Sasanian sites, though, as we shall see,
they changed in other ways. In Khwarazm, Kath remained the provincial capital and on the steppe frontier to the southeast of the Caspian,
Jurjan remained a city of importance.
Continuity of site did not mean continuity of urban topography.
Throughout the region we see Sasanian cities expanding far beyond
their ancient fortified nuclei and developing new suburbs, suburbs
which sometimes came to replace the old city as centres of power and
high status dwelling.
Probably the clearest example of this is the city of Nishapur.24 The
city that the Arab conquerors found consisted of an ovoid citadel or
quhandiz on one side of a rectanctular shahristan or inner city. These
were both surrounded by mud-brick ramparts which can be clearly distinguished in aerial photography. There is no evidence of an extensive
rabad or outer city beyond these limits. Bulliet calculates the area of the
city to have been approximately 17.6 hectares and, using a density of
23
See Donald Whitcomb, “Trade and Tradition in Medieval Southern Iran”
(Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1979). I am very grateful to Professor Whitcomb for having provided me with a copy of this. On urbanism at Bishapur,
see R. Ghirshman, Fouilles de Châpour: Bîchâpour I (Paris, 1971), 21–36; on Arrajan,
Heinz Gaube, Die Südpersische Provinz Arragan: Küh-Gılüyeh von der Arabischen Eroberung bis
zur Safawidenzeit (Vienna, 1973); on Darabjird, Peter Morgan, “Some Remarks on a
Preliminary Survey in Eastern Fars,” Iran 41 (2003): 323–338.
24
See Richard Bulliet, “Medieval Nishapur: a topographic and demographic reconstruction,” Studia Iranica 5 (1976): 67–89.
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between one and two hundred people per hectare, suggests a population
of between 1,760 and 3,520: this was, as he remarks, “scarcely more
than a garrison for protecting the trade route through Khurasan.”25
During the nine-month siege of the city by the troops of Abd Allah
ibn Amir at the time of the first Muslim conquests a mosque was built
outside the walls of the city and after it was taken, another mosque
was built on the site of the chief fire temple, a symbolic appropriation
of the chief religious site. In the three centuries between the Arab
conquest and the descriptions given by the geographers, al-Istakhri
and Ibn Hawqal, the city expanded enormously. A large new mosque,
known as Jami al- atiq or the Old Mosque, of which traces can still be
identified, was constructed to the south of the city. A new commercial
quarter was developed immediately to the west of the old city. This
is described in the Arabic sources as a murabba a and it would seem to
have taken the form of a crossroads with markets along each of the
four streets which led from it; this seems to have been an early example
of the charsū (chahar sūq, or four markets) which was to be characteristic
of later Iranian towns. By Ibn Hawqal’s time the markets seem to have
stretched for about two kilometres from east to west.
On the other sides of the market from the old city, the Muslim
authorities constructed a Dar al-imara or government house at an
unknown date in the first two Islamic centuries. It is noteworthy that
the new centre of government was not in the old quhandiz fortress but
in an apparently unwalled site some two kilometres away. In the early
ninth century, under the rule of the Tahirids, Nishapur became the
capital of the entire province of Khurasan and an entirely new official
quarter, the Shadyakh was constructed some further to the west.
By the late tenth century, when the city reached its maximum extent,
it was probably about six kilometres across. Bulliet estimates a built
up area of roughly 1,680 hectares. This would give a population of
up to 336,000 but allowing for open spaces and low densities in some
areas, he is inclined to suggest a population of between 110,000 and
220,000.26
Many of the same trends can be seen in the history of Merv. Merv
was a major city, the principal Sasanian outpost on the northeast frontier of the Empire and the seat of the marzban who was responsible
25
26
Bulliet, “Medieval Nishapur,” 87.
Bulliet, “Medieval Nishapur,” 88.
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for the defence of the area. As at Nishapur, the ancient city comprised a roughly oval citadel (known here as the Erk Kale or Citadel
Castle), which was situated on one edge of a sub-rectangular shahristan
nowadays called Gyaur Kale (Castle of the Unbelievers). Despite the
similarities of form, everything at Merv was on a vastly greater scale
than Nishapur. The citadel alone is about 20 hectares, larger than both
quhandiz and shahristan of Nishapur combined. The rectangular city is
about two kilometres square. This would give an area of around 400
hectares and, using Bulliet’s multipliers, between 40,000 and 80,000
inhabitants, though it is not clear that the whole area within the walls
was ever built up, still less clear that it was built up at the time of the
Muslim conquest in 650.
As at Nishapur, the first centuries of Muslim rule of Merv saw the
expansion of the city beyond the walls of the Sasanian site. A whole
new quarter with mosques and markets grew up to the west of the old
walled enclosure along the banks of the Majan canal. It was here that
Abu Muslim built his great new dar al-imara after he took control of
the city in the name of the Abbasids in 747. As at Nishapur again, this
extension remained unwalled throughout the early Islamic period and
was only fortified during the reign of the Seljuk Malik Shah (1072–92).
Meanwhile, the ancient citadel was neglected and gradually fell into
complete disuse and much of the rectangular Gyaur Kale was used for
industrial purposes (steel making) or was simply abandoned.
In Samarqand the process was different. Here the old quhandiz was
abandoned but the mound on which it stood became the site of the new
mosque and when Abu Muslim built a new dar al-imara in Samarqand,
he chose to construct it high on the flanks of the ancient citadel. New
commercial quarters grew up outside the ramparts of the old city.
Merv is one of the rare sites where we can find something of Sasanian domestic architecture and this is important because in the old
Gyaur Kale, the Sasanian city, an area of housing has been uncovered
which shows what might be thought of as a traditional Islamic street,
narrow and winding and bordered by small courtyard houses, the same
general plan, in fact, that could be found in Iranian cities right down
to the twentieth century. The Sasanian houses seem to have been the
last built on the site and we cannot see how, if at all, the coming of
the Muslims affected the built environment they had inherited.
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The pattern of urban development from the comparatively small
Sasanian core to the much more extensive early Islamic city is a common feature of Iranian urban history. Archaeology plays its part in
uncovering these trends but literary evidence often points in the same
direction.27 On the basis of his analysis of textual evidence, Richard
Bulliet has argued that, “the ninth century witnessed the most rapid
growth of cities in Iranian history.”28 Without exception, these were
inherited cities, expanded far beyond their ancient cores: there were
virtually no Islamic new towns in the Iranian lands of the caliphate.
Explanations for this phenomenon vary. Watson has suggested that
improved agricultural techniques and new crops allowed the development of a market- orientated agriculture which in turn permitted the
development of very large cities.29 This view has been criticized by
Bulliet who argues that the importance of these changes was marginal
at best.30 He argues that the key factor is conversion to Islam which
encouraged, even forced, converts to leave their rural communities,
where the old beliefs and social ties still ruled, and move into the Muslim environment of the city. This is an attractive hypothesis but it may
underestimate the importance of state structures. The early Islamic state
made regular cash payments to a large number of people, mostly in the
military: it created, in fact, a very numerous salariat. This was a market
no enterprising tradesman or would-be cook and bottle-washer could
afford to neglect. Merv, for example, was where the military campaigns
against the rich cities of Transoxania were organized in the eighth century, it was here that the soldiers were paid and it was here that they
sold their shares of the booty in the markets: no wonder immigrants
from all over Khurasan flocked to the newly expanding market areas
to cash in. On a larger or smaller scale, this pattern must have been
repeated all over the Islamic East.
It can also be argued that the political and military elites moved
into cities after the Muslim conquest. The admittedly scanty evidence
suggests that great Iranian families of the Sasanian period lived in
rural castles and palaces and that the major fire temples were in rural
locations, often remote from urban centres: the Sasanian kings were
Richard Bulliet, Islam: the View from the Edge (New York, 1994), 73–75.
Bulliet, Islam, 77.
29
Michael Watson, Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world (Cambridge, 1983),
132–136.
30
Bulliet, Islam, 67–70.
27
28
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crowned in Ctesiphon, but the religious part of their inauguration took
place in Shiz (Masjid-i Sulayman) in the Zagros mountains, far to the
north-east. Apart from Ctesiphon and Bishapur, there is little evidence
for elite residences within the walls of Sasanian towns.
Al-Andalus and the Muslim West 31
In Roman times, the Iberian peninsula boasted a significant number of
cities, some of them among the most important in the entire empire.
Many of these sites came under Muslim rule in the years following
the initial conquest of 711. Of the major provincial capitals, Braga
(Gallaecia) was never really settled by the Muslims and Tarragona
(Tarrconensis) was in a frontier zone and seems to have been mostly
deserted in the early Islamic period. Toledo (Carthaginensis), Mérida
(Lusitania) and Seville (Baetica) all became significant Muslim centres.
In addition, Zaragoza, a Roman city, which had not been as important
in classical times, became the centre of Muslim power in the Ebro
valley and Córdoba, again a second rank city in the Roman hierarchy
became the capital of the whole of al-Andalus.
The extent to which the Roman cities of the peninsula had retained
their urban aspect through the troubles of the fifth century and more
than two hundred years of Visigothic rule is not clear. There is almost
no evidence for Visigothic building within cities, either ecclesiastical or
secular, and in many sites it is difficult to find any traces of occupation during this period. While many Muslim cities occupied the sites
of their ancient predecessors and sheltered within the remains of the
late Roman walls, it is only in Zaragoza and the small Andalusian city
of Ecija that we can find traces of the survival of the regular street
plans of the classical period, although at Zaragoza, this apparent continuity masked major changes in the physical structure of the city in
late antiquity.32 While the Umayyad capital at Damascus preserved the
31
For late antique cities in the Iberian peninsula see Michael Kulikowski, Late
Roman Spain and Its Cities (Baltimore and London, 2004). On early Islamic cities in the
peninsula and Morocco, Vincente Salvatierra Cuenca, “The Origins of al-Andalus,” in
The Archaeology of Iberia, ed. Margarita Diaz-Andreu and Simon Keay (London, 1997),
263–278; Patrice Cressier and Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, eds., Genèse de la ville islamique
en al-Andalus et au Maghreb occidental (Madrid, 1998). For a more general introduction to
urbanism in al-Andalus, Basilio Pavón, Ciudades Hispanomusulmanas (Madrid, 1992).
32
See Kulikowski, Late Roman Cities, 244–249.
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outlines of classical planning, these seem to have been entirely lost in
the Umayyad capital of Córdoba. This disappearance of urban plan
and fabric may be evidence for a real hiatus in urban life in the fifth
and sixth centuries.
The story of Córdoba is especially revealing in this respect.33 The
ancient city had bordered the northern bank of the Guadalquivir river
at the end of the Roman bridge. At the end of the third century, a
large palatial complex, known to the twentieth-century excavators as
the Cercadilla, was constructed.34 This probably served as the palace
of the provincial governor and the local administrative centre. Some
of the decorative materials were spolia from the now disused theatre
and it is possible that some of the old city intra-muros fell into ruin at
this time and the remaining population clustered in the southern area
close to the banks of the river. Here a large church of San Vicente was
constructed at the bridgehead as well as a later palace for the governor.
It was this complex which became the centre of Muslim power when
the governor al-Hurr b. Abd al-Rahman al-Thaqafi established the city
as his capital in the city in 716 and constructed a new palace to the
west of the existing urban centre. Al-Samh b. Malik al-Khawlani, governor between 719 and 721 undertook a major programme of repairs,
restoring the Roman bridge, which seems to have been in ruins, and
sections of the Roman walls. He also established cemeteries and two
musallas (prayer places) in the suburbs. It was probably during the rule
of Yüsuf al-Fihri (748–56) that the Christians were deprived of the
main church of San Vicente which was converted into a mosque. The
earliest sections of the present building of the Great Mosque date from
786 when the first Umayyad Amir, Abd al-Rahman I, demolished the
existing structure and used the materials to construct a purpose built
mosque.35 From this time on the Christians and Jews were relegated to
churches and synagogues in the suburbs and the old city was completely
Islamized. In the tenth century, the population seems to have increased
33
For Córdoba see Manuel Acién Almansa and Antonio Vallejo Triano, “Urbanismo
y Estado islámico: de Corduba a Qurtuba-Madinat al-Zahara,” in Cressier and GarciaArenal, eds., Genèse 107–136.
34
For the Cercadilla and its effect on the city, Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain,
114–120.
35
For a recent account of the mosque with further bibliographic references, Marianne Barrucand and Achim Bednorz, Moorish Architecture in Andalusia (Cologne, 1992),
39–46; on the use of classical and Visigothic spolia, Patrice Cressier, “Les chapiteaux
de la Grande Mosquée de Cordoue,” Madrider Mitteilungen 25 (1994): 257–313.
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very considerably and new suburbs were constructed on a large scale,
especially to the west of the city. As in many eastern examples, these
new suburbs remained unfortified. The drift to the west culminated
in the foundation of the new palace city of Madinat al-Zahra in the
mid-tenth century, some five kilometres away.
The antique legacy of the city of Toledo within the medieval fortifications has been obliterated beyond recall. In Seville we can only
find a few traces; it has been suggested that there was a forum on the
site of the Plaza San Salvador and that site of the church itself was a
Christian basilica, then the first mosque of the city, traces of which can
still be seen, until it became a Christian church once more. Mérida was
one of the great Roman cities of Spain and its magnificent ruins still
testify to its antique grandeur. By the time of the Muslim conquest its
main claim to fame was probably the shrine of Santa Eulalia, whose
cult brought pilgrims thronging to the city.36 It was perhaps because of
this communal identity that the city is said to have put up a prolonged
resistance to the invaders. After the conquest it seems as if the local
elites soon converted to Islam and that city life continued within the
old Roman walls. Traffic across the Roman bridge, which still survives,
brought trade to the city. Some time around middle of the ninth century,
the shrine of Santa Eulalia was abandoned and the relics removed and
this seems to mark the end of Christianity as the dominant religion in
the city. The Amir Abd al-Rahman II was determined to impose central
control over the muwallad (native Muslim) aristocracy of the city and in
855 he ordered the construction of a citadel by the river on the site of
a xenodochium built in Visigothic times to house pilgrims.37 In this castle
he based a garrison of troops sent from Córdoba. It also contained a
cistern, which became the main water supply of the town when the
Roman aqueducts fell into disuse. When the Méridans continued to
be restive, Muhammad I ordered the demolition of the old city wall
and the city, thus exposed, began to decline and never became one of
the great cities of al-Andalus. When the caliphate of Córdoba split up
in the early eleventh century, it was not Mérida but the Islamic new
town of Badajoz which became the capital of the Taifa kingdom and
which controlled the area.
36
37
JAYYUSI_F5_93-114.indd 110
On late antique Mérida, see Kulikowski, Late Roman Cities, 91–92, 290–293.
Barrucand and Bednorz, Moorish Architecture, 27.
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Morocco was much less urbanized than al-Andalus at the time of
the arrival of the Muslims. With the exception of the northern coastal
cities of Tangier and Ceuta, the country had been abandoned by
the Roman administration in 285. Despite this, urban life continued
in Volubilis, the best-preserved ancient city in the area.38 In the late
sixth century, the perimeter wall was shortened and much of the old
monumental centre was left outside but some of the domestic quarters
of the city were still lived in. The Muslims seem to have adopted the
city as a base in the area and there is some numismatic evidence that
there was an Abbasid garrison in second half of the eighth century.
The first of the Idrisid rulers took it as his capital and the city seems to
have expanded beyond the late antique walls and a new quarter with a
bathhouse emerged. No trace of any mosque has yet been found and
tradition says that Idris (d. 789) chose to be buried outside the city. The
role of Volublis/Walila as capital of the first Muslim state in Morocco
was brought to an end with the foundation of Fez and the inherited
city was soon deserted for a new one.
The governance of the inherited city
The question of how far the Muslim conquests affected the social
structure of the cities they inherited is a difficult one to answer. Clearly
there was in many cases a new elite, a ruling class drawn from the
dominant Arab/Muslim community. People who had previously been
distinguished and respected citizens would have found their properties
confiscated while they themselves were forced to pay the shameful
poll-tax or even became slaves. The story of the Hamdani family of
Isfahan may be typical. The first member of the family we know of was
a landowner (dehqan) called Ajlan who had property in the rural area
around the city, which consisted of two small urban nuclei, one called
Yahūdiya and another called Jayy. When the Arab armies came to the
area, he was taken prisoner and transported to the Muslim metropolis
of Kufa in Iraq. Here he converted to Islam. He had two sons born in
Kufa but when they grew up they returned to Isfahan and reclaimed
38
See Aomar Akerraz, “Recherches sur les niveaux islamiques de Volubilis,”
in Genèse, ed. Cressier and Garcia-Arenal, 295–304 and Ahmed Siraj, “Vie et mort
d’ une cité islamique,” in the same volume, 285–294.
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their father’s lands. They did not become country squires as he had
done, but moved into the developing city where one of them became
an authority on Islamic law and tradition, which is how we come to
know about them.39
It is impossible to know how far the experience of Ajlan and his family was typical and, in more general times, how much continuity there
was between urban elites in the period before and after the Muslim
conquests. We can see the example of the family of Sarjun/Sergius
in Damascus who served the early Umayyads as financial officials and
whose history we know a little about because the last recorded member
of the family was the great theologian, St John of Damascus.
At an institutional level, the cities the Muslims inherited had little to
pass on. Neither the Byzantine nor the Sasanian world had a tradition
of civic autonomy at the time of the Islamic conquests. In the first
two and a half centuries of the Common Era the cities of the Roman
Near East had enjoyed a high degree of local self-government, choosing
their own councils, collecting their own taxes, and minting their own
copper coinage. From the crisis of the third century, these structures
disappeared: real power in the late antique city was exercised by the
governor appointed by the imperial authorities, taxes were collected
by the imperial bureaucracy, and the copper coinage disappeared. The
abolition of the temple cults on which so much civic patriotism had
been focused simply accelerated the process and though the Christian
bishop was a leading citizen and the cults of the local saints could
provide a focus for local patriotism, they did not enjoy the institutional
status of the vanished town councils.40 In the Iranian world, any lingering traditions of civic government brought in by the Macedonian
colonists of Alexander’s army were long since extinct. There might be
rich and influential local citizens, but there were no institutional structures through which they could articulate their power. In this sphere
the coming of Islamic rule simply continued late antique practice. It
is not until the tenth and eleventh centuries that we find civic leaders
ruling towns and then only in certain areas, northern Syria, and alAndalus for example, where the other political structures were weak.
In these areas the qadi sometimes emerged as a real representative of
Bulliet, Islam, 78–79.
For the effects of different power structures in two late antique cities, Hugh Kennedy, “Gerasa and Scythopolis: Power and Patronage in the Byzantine Cities of Bilad
al-Sham,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 52 (2000): 199–204.
39
40
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local interests but, in contrast to the Italian cities of the same period,
there never developed any political theory or institutional structures to
sustain this fragile autonomy.
Conclusions
The idea that the Arab armies burst in on and destroyed the static
and unchanging world of antiquity is very misleading. The Muslim
conquerors of the seventh and eighth century came to rule over rapidly
changing societies. This picture of change is as true of the cities of these
areas as it is true of any other aspect of life. In the ex-Roman areas,
the classical cities whose ruins we visit and admire and whose image
still represents a certain sort of perfect urbanism, had changed almost
out of recognition: it was the narrow winding streets and churches,
large and small, that the Muslims inherited, not the fora, colonnaded
streets, and monumental buildings. The fate of these inherited towns
varied enormously, from expansion and renewed vigour in the cases of
Aleppo, Merv, or Córdoba, to virtual extinction in Caesarea, Istakhr,
or Volubilis. Some cities were destroyed by the development of Islamic
new towns nearby which sucked their vitality and drew away their
inhabitants: Ctesiphon/al-Mada in could not survive the building of
Baghdad, nor could Istakhr thrive in the shadow of Shiraz. In many
cases the fate of cities was decided by political decisions: those cities
that became centres of government and Arab settlement developed and
prospered. This was not just because they became official cities where
the bureaucrats and military lived but because in the early Islamic
state, the government and its functionaries were the most important
generators of economic activity. Courts of caliphs and governors alike
spent money on buildings and fine textiles, ceramics and metal work.
The soldiers and bureaucrats went into the souqs to buy the necessities
of everyday life and such luxuries as they could afford. Merchants and
craftsmen flocked to provide goods and services and the government
town expanded into a business and commercial centre. The inherited
cities formed an essential foundation to the urbanism of the early
Muslim world but the ways the Muslims used this inheritance varied
enormously from place to place.
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