The Islamic City Critique: Revising the Narrative

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Abstract In recent years scholars have challenged the concept of an Islamic city by constructing a historical narrative in which it derives from the orientalist tradition. They claim that French orientalists in the early twentieth century created an ideal type of the Islamic city as contrasted with its Western counterpart in order to support the assumptions of orientalist discourse. The first part of the article challenges this assumption by showing that the French orientalists did not in fact posit an Islamic city type. The second part offers an alternative explanation for the genesis of the concept by tracing it to the work of American anthropologists in the 1950s.