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.
Interplay of institutional and cultural theories of organization
