ABSTRACT
The clearest and most positive definition of the city as spatial expanse, that is, physical form, appears in the urban studies of Central Asia. N. Khanykov testifies that "any hamlet surrounded by walls and a moat and containing a citadel and a Friday mosque is called a city" (p. 282). V. V. Bartol'd, from an analysis of terminology used by Arab geographers, suggests a threefold structure of (1) quhandiz or qaVa (citadel), (2) šahristān or madīna (inner city, old city), and (3) rabad (suburbs), plus (4) balad (the city as a whole incorporating all of the three above elements) (p. 284). K. Shimizu shows, using 10th-11th century Nishapur as an example, that the territory called Nishapur at that time consisted of three distinct spaces: Nishapur as a city, with the threefold structure mentioned above, Nishapur as a municipal region, made up of towns and villages within a day's travel of the city, and Nishapur as a district, the area within 100 to 200 kilometres of the city, connected by radial highways. He asserts the continuation of space from the city to the district, including rural villages, and their close and mutual social and economic relations8 and this should be regarded as a general characteristic of cities in Central Asia and the Iranian sphere. He also says that city inhabitants had three levels of consciousness about themselves corresponding with the above differentiation. While Lapidus took the oasis cities of Central Asia and the Iranian sphere into consideration, he extracted the importance of continuities between the city and the rural village and their groupings as a region including both urban and rural elements in terms of the morphological characteristics of Islamic society. Research into Ottoman social and economic history using land survey registers and sharia-court registers reveals economic connections between regional cities and surrounding villages in Anatolia (pp. 204-5), but were these a network extending in all directions or local independent groupings like the "small islands surrounded by the sea of the desert" which characterize cities in the Iranian sphere? (p. 242) Such research is rare in the Arab lands, whether the Maghrib or Mashriq, where the centripetal tendency and cosmopolitanism of large cities like Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Fez and Tunis tend to be emphasized. Is this merely a difference in point of view, or does it reflect differences in geographical conditions between Turkey and the Iranian sphere on one hand and the Arab lands on the other?
