The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries Bonnie D. Irwin The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries. By Paul Wheatley. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 572, preface, 26 illustrations, appendices, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.) The culmination of a career's worth of research and published posthumously, The Places Where Men Pray Together is a wide-ranging study of the Middle East's urban centers from the earliest days of Islam through the tenth century. Paul Wheatley applies history and urban studies methodologies to the data collected and described by the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Maqdisi. Thus the book provides not only a modern analysis of the growth and development of urban centers in Islamic lands, but also a means for English-speaking readers to access economic, political, and cultural information collected ten centuries ago. Wheatley addresses the admittedly vexed question: What made a Muslim city Muslim in the medieval period? His approach is to discuss changes in structure and function of thirteen urban centers between the pre-Islamic period (the jahiliyah or "Age of Ignorance") and the tenth century. These thirteen centers extend from al-Mashriq in the East, which includes what is now Iran and Afghanistan, to al-Maghrib in the West, now southern Spain and North Africa. Wheatley readily admits the difficulty inherent in studying history and cultural geography of the earliest centuries of Islam. Like medieval folklorists, he must depend on scattered manuscript sources, archaeological remains, and early geographers such as al-Maqdisi for his data, despite the fact that he studies the most populated and well-known regions of the Islamic world. Within each of the thirteen urban systems, Wheatley looks at marketing and service centers, transportation, industrial and craft centers, religious centers, and fortified settlements. He identifies three components that determine settlement in a region: first, the spread of settlements around a center that can provide goods and services; second, a linear component along transportation routes; and third, a clustering around specialized industrial or cultural centers. Muslims created very few cities, choosing rather to modify existing urban centers. One change was the introduction of the mosque, a center not only for prayer, but also for other communal gatherings. In cities that Muslims founded, mosques could be found in central districts. In cities that were conquered, mosques were often established in places where churches or synagogues had been built, sometimes in the same structures, and usually in the central district, if the city had one. [End Page 493] Not all cities developed along the same patterns, owing to the fact that geography varies widely in Islamic regions. In cities such as Baghdad or Alexandria, situated on rivers and lakes, growth of the urban center followed geographical imperatives as much as cultural ones, with smaller cities sprouting up along the same bodies of water. In regions such as the Arabian Peninsula (al-Jazirah), entirely Muslim and predominantly Arab, settlement patterns and urban development were influenced more heavily by religious forces, as the numbers of people undertaking the pilgrimage to Makkah and Madinah increased in each of the first four centuries of Islam. Wheatley includes an enormous amount of cultural data in this book, which includes 159 pages of notes. Those interested in the possible transmission routes of folklore during the seventh through tenth centuries can find information on travel routes, settlement patterns, and population changes through the Islamic region. The volume is especially helpful for those studying the material culture of this period or region. A material folklorist would be well-advised to read the "Industrial and Craft Centers" section of each of the chapters on the thirteen regions. One learns the distribution of a variety of industries, such as mining, which clearly influenced jewelry and art as well as the manufacture of tools; leather-working and textile manufacture, which led to centers of clothing and housewares production; and agricultural products, which influenced foodways. The difficulty nonexpert readers will encounter with this volume is that Wheatley relies heavily on Arabic terms, usually only translating them when they first appear in the text. The glossary mitigates...