ABSTRACT
Early and medieval Muslim claims that biblical and antique sites lie at the foundations of a number of Islamic madCnas have received academic consideration.1 By contrast, the legends narrated of these and other mad Cnas at the moment of their foundation or Islamic re-foundation have received almost none.2 This is an oversight, for although medieval Arab authors often show a fascination for the marvellous and unusual, and thus cannot always be relied on for objectivity, the contrived, semi-literary elements, or topoi, shared by a number of these legends indicate more than just heightened imagination. As will be argued in this chapter, they indicate a ritual re-enactment of a Prophetic foundation paradigm, and suggest that for at least some Muslims, whether or not an ideal Islamic city existed physically, it existed conceptually as a recurring expression of the alleged miracle of Islam. In the first part of the chapter, I shall refer to the foundation legends of Fez, Wasis, al-Rafiqa, Madcnat al-Zahira, Kairouan, Baghdad and Samarra, to demonstrate that such shared topoi exist. I shall start with the Fez legend, on account of its length, and then make comparisons with the other legends. In the second part, I shall examine the possibility that a paradigm from the Life of the Prophet, or sCra, informs the topoi’s existence. Because the term ‘legend’ will subsequently be differentiated from that of ‘myth’, I shall define the former. While its meaning in the chapter broadly follows ordinary usage, namely a story ‘associated with some particular place or culture-hero’,3 specifically, it follows the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski:
[Legends] refer to subjects intensely stimulating to the natives; they are all connected with activities such as economic pursuits, warfare, adventure, success in dancing and in ceremonial exchange. Moreover, since they record singularly great achievements in all
such pursuits, they redound to the credit of some individual and his descendants or of a whole community; and hence they are kept alive by the ambition of those whose ancestry they glorify.4
