Lecture 7

As your book points out, the Middle East is where agriculture developed, about 10,000 years ago. Until fairly recently, the Middle East was largely agricultural and people resided primarily in rural communities. The textbook mentions that in the early 1940’s, an estimated 75 percent of Egyptians were engaged in farming in rural areas. By the mid-1980’s, only about 35 percent of Egypt’s labor force were farmers. By 2000, that percentage dropped even more as more and more people have migrated from rural areas to large cities looking for steady employment and better educational opportunities. Having said that, we should keep in mind that agriculture remains a very important part of the economy, as it does in this country, because of its overall necessity to the economy and also because there has been to some degree reverse migration back to the countryside as people look for less expensive property in rural areas at least as part-time dwellings. With modern technology and means of communication, rural life has changed quite a bit in the Middle East as it has everywhere else in the world; so you do not necessarily see or feel a sharp distinction between rural and urban parts. Satellite television is almost everywhere as is the internet and cellular phones. For self-employed or independently wealthy people, the rural-urban divide is not very meaningful.

Certain class and social status distinctions remain, however, between the more rural parts of a country and the urban. Difference between Saidi and Cairenes: speech, sophistication, etc. Villages in various parts of the Middle East can be tribe-based or not. Some of the villages in Anatolia, in Turkey, are characterized by homogeneous ethnic groups, such as Kurdish, as in Eastern Turkey, or tribal communitites, such as the Chebayish in southern Iraq. Smaller villages tend to have a headman called a mukhtar in Arab countries and Turkey, ‘umda in Egypt, and katkhoda in Iran. Usually elected by various households or appointed by the government. In tribal communities, usually the sheikh of the tribe is the village chieftain. Now the books goes into a lot of detail about land use and land tenure arrangements which are not of great concern to us. Except for one, the waqf system, which I will come back to in the urban context.

The largest cities in the Middle East and North Africa: Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, for example, can be quite densely populated, as are particularly Cairo and Istanbul. Cairo: 1998 census: 16 million; Istanbul: 2000, over 9 million (9,413,000 to be exact). The most spectacular urban growth has taken place in the Persian Gulf region, with the revenues from oil production pouring in starting in the 1970’s. But most of these oil-rich countries are sparsely populated and have heavy expatriate populations of other Arabs, South Asians, and Southeast Asians, such as Filipinos, who do a lot of the actual administrative and menial work.

The question may be raised justifiably: can we talk about “the Islamic City” and what would we mean by it? There is one very important concept and facet of Islamic societies that puts a distinctive stamp on the architecture in particular within such societies: the importance of the family and the household and the desire for privacy. Because of the fact that space tends to be segregated by gender, private residences are often (I should say used to be often) built facing inward, facing away from the street, so that the most private family quarters are in the innermost part of the house. Oftentimes, these houses would open out into an inner courtyard that would be the common or shared space for the various members of the household.

Another very important institutional feature of most Middle Eastern and North African cities is the waqf system. Waqf refers to a charitable endowment, a charitable foundation. Any public building or institution can be declared to be a charitable foundation, in which case the building or institution is declared to be a public property, meant to be of benefit to the public. Once a wealthy individual or family declared his, her, or their property to be waqf, the government could no longer get hold of it. It was a charitable foundation in perpetuity. This allowed for a system of education institutions, hospitals, libraries, mosques, markets, hostels, public baths, inns, and agricultural lands to be set up for the benefit of the public, which were usually free since they were self-generating in income from the original endowment. Both wealthy men and women were public benefactors of this type, which testifies to the civic-mindedness of the elite in various cities.

SOME KEY TERMS:

Mehallet: neighborhoods often divided according to professional occupations, ethnicity, kinship, and tribal or village origins. Also religious brotherhoods: tariqas.

Other defining features of the Islamic city, broadly speaking, are a central mosque (brings people together for congregational prayers; you can hear the daily azan five times a day which confers a certain rhythm upon an Islamic city.

Suq (public bazaar or market): also a central gather place and place of commercial activity

Public square (midan): where public preachers and storytellers gather

Gardens: reminiscent of the serenity of Paradise