ABSTRACT
Recent urban studies of the Middle East have criticized those approaches that look
at cities and villages as completely separate entities. Instead, stressing the
interrelations and overlaps between the two, these studies have advocated setting
up a wider regional framework comprising cities, villages, and even nomads, to
highlight the differences and similarities between urban and rural settlements as well
as the characteristics of their relations. Such an approach, these studies say, is more
appropriate for understanding the reality of Middle Eastern societies, in which town-
dwellers, villagers, and nomads often mingle with each other.2 Although such a
basic stance as this is applicable in urban studies and is widely accepted among
scholars, there have been only a few positive works discussing urban-rural relations
in Iranian studies from such a point of view, at least for the pre-modern era.3
