ABSTRACT
In an important study published a few years ago, Ira Lapidus attempted to show that the conviction that city and country in Islamic society are radically opposed is exaggerated and misleading. 1 Professor Lapidus dealt in his study with all three aspects of the relation between town and country which will form the conceptual framework of this paper: (a) similarity or difference, (b) contact or isolation, and (c) conflicts or integration between towns and villages (although his argument is altogether differently structured). Concerning the first aspect, he says that in fact town quarters were village-like communities within the urban whole. Settlements of all types, from the largest metropolises to the smallest towns and villages, were clusters of distinct physical and social units. In many situations, no absolute distinction between urban and rural habitats could be drawn. Places called villages by the geographers very often had pronounced urban features. Villages were sites of periodic markets and fairs as well as centres of cloth manufacturing. Similarly, they were not deprived of the spiritual facilities of towns, such as ~iifi convents or Friday mosques. Villages with varied activities had differentiated populations, including landowners, 'ulamii', merchants and artisans. On the other hand, cities often had an agricultural component, and suburbs were used for gardening and other forms of agriculture. The composite settlements called towns included many people who differed little in their attitudes, mores, and manner of life from rural people. True, in some instances we find towns organized into religious or ethnic communities differing from rural religious (or ethnic) groups. But such urban-rural divisions were
evidently exceptions to the rule of religious-communal bonds between town dwellers and the peoples of their hinterlands.
