In a brief, introductory essay on recent research on Iranian cities, Masashi Haneda asks himself how to discern a cityís "fundamental rules of dispute", i.e. those that prove strong enough to order factional conflicts "at a fundamental level" of city life.
. Despite his suspicions of the Weberian-urban idealtype - constructed on the idea of a commune with one single standard of citizenship - which Haneda became familiar with through his studies of the "Islamic City", the question still haunts him. Incidentally, the very term "city", in bringing a certain order into a jumble of experiences along conflicting lines of class, origin, sex, race and occupation, relies on, or is empowered by its proper "rules of dispute". These rules, along with the "fundamental levels" they inform, alternate according to the "city" regarded as - to take the parameters acknowledged by Haneda himself - an administrative body, an intersection of goods and/or people, a geographic space, a cultural occurrence (fashions, schools, movements) or a discursive spatializiation of power (ëUnless Tehran stops misbehaving, and admits to allegations of two F-16s hidden in a woodshed, Washington will find itself under a moral obligation to -í).
The concept of the Islamic City is a paradigm still widely used in urban studies today, and is based on a combination of Max Weberís notions of the Idealtypical European city of the middle ages with examples of colonial cities in North Africa. The concept came under increased attack during the eighties, when in 1982, Eugen Wirth observed that the blind alleys, the maze-like configuration of the streets, the "private" or "secluded" courtyards, and the racial segregation of the inhabitants supposedly distinguishing the Islamic City widely existed long before Islam. Even the bazaar, or suq, was later found to be older than expected. Generally, the termís inherent heuristic shortcomings demand constant counter-comparisons with (equally hypothetical) "European" cities to retain its conceptual thrust; for example, the idea of Islamic Cities being founded by dynasties and modeled on the Islamic monarchy is repeatedly contrasted with so-called "city-republics" or "citÈs" of Europe. As yet, no books have appeared on "the Christian City", nor, for that matter, on the Buddhist, Hindu or Pagan City. But in the case of Islam, rather than inquire into, say, the decisive influences of urban agglomerations on Islam (or on European urbanism, for that matter), the two are most often either treated separately, or the focus lies on the totalizing influence of the latter . Moreover, the question has been raised whether "Islam" as an urban religion, commonly held to despise nomadic life, hasnít lead to a negligence of both spatial commonalities and socioeconomic interdependencies between city and village, and to a general ignorance of rural manifestations of Islam.
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