ABSTRACT
Cities and the influences that shape them are a topic of endless fascination. Philosophers and thinkers of many persuasions have seen in the city both perfection and degradation. On the one hand, Plato’s Republic and St Augustine’s City of God rest upon the assumption that the city is the apogee of human achievement in this life and the next, while on the other hand the biblical image of the whore of Babylon encapsulates all that is negative about urban life. Muslims viewed cities and urban life with similar ambivalence, and a contrast emerges between Muqammad’s archetypal city, Medina, known as ‘the illuminated one’ (al-munawwara), or the philosopher al-Farabc’s virtuous city (al-mad Cna al-fAPila), and the view of the grand doyen of Islamic historiography, Ibn Khalden, that, despite being essential to ‘civilisation’, the city was the locus of immorality and corruption. While Cairo is fondly called ‘Mother of the World’, the city in its generic form is also seen as a seductress, responsible for sapping the manly energies (muruwwa) of those men of the desert, mountain and steppe who succumb to its charms. Such polarities reflect the dualism of the early Muslim experience and the long drawn out encounter that occurred between the life-styles of the Arabian peninsula and the sedentary civilisations of the Near East from the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century onwards.
