Islamic Architecture - Built Environment
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Transcript of Islamic Architecture - Built Environment
Islamic Architecture and Urbanism: Middle Eastern PerspectivesAuthor(s): NEZAR ALSAYYADSource: Built Environment (1978-), Vol. 22, No. 2, Islamic Architecture and Urbanism (1996),pp. 88-90Published by: Alexandrine PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23288982 .
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BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 22 NO 2
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ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM: MIDDLE EASTERN PERSPECTIVES
Islamic Architecture and Urbanism: Middle Eastern Perspectives
NEZAR ALSAYYAD
The subject of Islamic architecture and urbanism has long fascinated Westerners. Travellers' accounts, some dating back to
the twelfth century, illustrate how a series of Western observers through the ages have viewed the cities of the Muslim Middle East, constructed their social reality, and often
misinterpreted their urban meanings. The work of many European painters who roamed the Middle East and North Africa in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has also often contributed to the creation of a
distorted image of urban Islam. But it was
principally the writings of several distin
guished European scholars who controlled the production of knowledge on the Islamic
city during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century that created the singular and often stereotypical image of Muslim urbanism. This image eventually came to underline much research in this area. It has
only been in the last fifteen years, since the
publication in 1978 of Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism, that research by scholars in all fields has challenged this view.
This issue of Built Environment is an
attempt to contribute a slightly different
perspective on a variety of issues in Islamic architecture and urbanism. Although it does not challenge the dominant paradigms, it tries to uncover various relations between
the culture of Islam and its urban form and architecture. The contributors, using different historical frameworks which extend from the eighth to the twentieth centuries, con centrate on issues primarily within the context of the central Middle East. The
contributors are all Middle Easterners who have been educated or settled in the West, and who are accordingly familiar with the Orientalist canon and are sensitive to its flaws. Their papers represent the wide
variety of research approaches and ide
ologies present in scholarship about Islamic urbanism today.
The first paper presents a review of Orientalist scholarship as it relates to Muslim urbanism. It closes by noting how Orientalist stereotypes have ironically been
adopted and accepted recently by the scholars of certain native traditions in their
present attempts to define their own reality. The second paper demonstrates how,
faced with the need to build an image for the new religion, the Muslim Arabs in the
early days of Islam were influenced in the
making of an architectural agenda by their encounters with Westerners.
The third paper is a case study of one
particular urban element - the maidan or urban square
- and its transformation
throughout the history of Cairo. The fourth paper is a study of the process
of initiation of one capital city - Ankara -
following the waning years of the Islamic Ottoman empire and the rise of the repub lican state when the joint forces of modernity and nationalism had become the prime shapers of urban form.
The last paper represents the attempts of some Middle Eastern scholars and archi tects to understand the essence of Islamic
architecture and revive it in contemporary
practice.
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 22 NO 2 89
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ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM: MIDDLE EASTERN PERSPECTIVES
Taken together, the papers should not be
interpreted as presenting a single theme; their authors do not even subscribe to similar scholarly practices or political ideologies. Nevertheless, the papers do at a basic level reflect the range of concerns in
the field today.
REFERENCE
Said, Edward (1979) Pantheon Books.
Orientalism. New York:
90 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 22 NO 2
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