Download or read book Space and Muslim Urban Life written by Simon O'Meara and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-09 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops academic understanding of Muslim urban space by pursuing the structural logic of the premodern Arab-Muslim city, or medina. With particular reference to The Book of Walls, an historical discourse of Islamic law whose primary subject is the wall, the book determines the meaning of a wall and then uses it to analyze the space of Fez. One of a growing number of studies to address space as a category of critical analysis, the book makes the following contributions to scholarship. Methodologically, it breaks with the tradition of viewing Islamic architecture as a well-defined object observed by a specialist at an aesthetically directed distance; rather, it inhabits the logic of this architecture by rethinking it discursively from within the culture that produced it. Hermeneutically, it sheds new light on one of North Africa's oldest medinas, and thereby illuminates a type of environment still common to much of the Arab-Muslim world. Empirically, it brings to the attention of mainstream scholarship a legal discourse and aesthetic that contributed to the form and longevity of this type of environment; and it exposes a preoccupation with walls and other limits in premodern urban Arab-Muslim culture, and a mythical paradigm informing the foundation narratives of a number of historic medinas. Presenting a fresh perspective for the understanding of Muslim urban society and thought, this innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of Islamic studies, architecture and sociology.
Download or read book Space and Muslim Urban Life written by Simon O'Meara and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops an academic understanding of space by pursuing the structural logic of the premodern Arab-Muslim city, or medina. With particular reference to ""The Book of Walls"", a historical discourse of Islamic law whose primary subject is the wall, the book determines the meaning of a wall and then uses it to analyze the space of Fez. One of a growing number of studies to address space as a category of critical analysis, the book makes the following contributions to scholarship. Methodologically, it breaks with the tradition of viewing Islamic architecture as a well-defined object obs.
Download or read book Physical Space and Spatiality in Muslim Societies written by Mahbub Rashid and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahbub Rashid embarks on a fascinating journey through urban space in all of its physical and social aspects, using the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, and others to explore how consumer capitalism, colonialism, and power disparity consciously shape cities. Using two Muslim cities as case studies, Algiers (Ottoman/French) and Zanzibar (Ottoman/British), Rashid shows how Western perceptions can only view Muslim cities through the lens of colonization—a lens that distorts both physical and social space. Is it possible, he asks, to find a useable urban past in a timeline broken by colonization? He concludes that political economy may be less relevant in premodern cities, that local variation is central to the understanding of power, that cities engage more actively in social reproduction than in production, that the manipulation of space is the exercise of power, that all urban space is a conscious construct and is therefore not inevitable, and that consumer capitalism is taking over everyday life. Ultimately, we reconstruct a present from a fragmented past through local struggles against the homogenizing power of abstract space.
Download or read book Prayer in the City written by Patrick A. Desplat and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban contexts as a window on the diverse ways in which Muslims in different regional and historical settings imagine, experience, and inhabit places and spaces as »sacred«. Unlike most studies on Muslim communities, this volume focuses on cultural, material and sensuous practices and urban everyday experience. Drawing on a range of analytical perspectives, the contributions examine spatial practices in Muslim societies from an interdisciplinary perspective, an approach which has been widely neglected both in Islamic studies and social sciences.
Download or read book New Islamic Urbanism written by Stefan Maneval and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dawn of the oil era, cities in Saudi Arabia have witnessed rapid growth and profound societal changes. As a response to foreign architectural solutions and the increasing popularity of Western lifestyles, a distinct style of architecture and urban planning has emerged. Characterised by an emphasis on privacy, expressed through high enclosures, gates, blinds, and tinted windows, ‘New Islamic Urbanism’ constitutes for some an important element of piety. For others, it enables alternative ways of life, indulgence in banned social practices, and the formation of both publics and counterpublics. Tracing the emergence of ‘New Islamic Urbanism’, this book sheds light on the changing conceptions of public and private space, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the Saudi city of Jeddah. It challenges the widespread assumption that the public sphere is exclusively male in Muslim contexts such as Saudi Arabia, where women’s public visibility is limited by the veil and strict rules of gender segregation. Showing that the rigid segregation regime for which the country is known serves to constrain the movements of men and women alike, Stefan Maneval provides a nuanced account of the negotiation of public and private spaces in Saudi Arabia.
Download or read book Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe written by Barbara Daly Metcalf and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.
Download or read book Muslim American City written by Alisa Perkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how Muslim Americans test the boundaries of American pluralism In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation. Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents. Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life—particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping—Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.
Download or read book Print and the Urdu Public written by Megan Eaton Robb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins of society became a key player in Urdu journalism. Published in the isolated market town of Bijnor, Madinah grew to hold influence across North India and the Punjab while navigating complex issues of religious and political identity. In Print and the Urdu Public, Megan Robb uses the previously unexamined perspective of the Madinah to consider Urdu print publics and urban life in South Asia. Through a discursive and material analysis of Madinah, the book explores how Muslims who had settled in ancestral qasbahs, or small towns, used newspapers to facilitate a new public consciousness. The book demonstrates how Madinah connected the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity and delineated the boundaries of a Muslim public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces. The case study of this influential but understudied newspaper reveals how a network of journalists with substantial ties to qasbahs produced a discourse self-consciously alternative to the Western-influenced, secularized cities. Megan Robb augments the analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English, and Hindi papers, government records, private diaries, private library holdings, ethnographic interviews, and training materials for newspaper printers. This thoroughly researched volume recovers the erasure of qasbah voices and proclaims the importance of space and time in definitions of the public sphere in South Asia. Print and the Urdu Public demonstrates how an Urdu newspaper published from the margins became central to the Muslim public constituted in the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Urban Development in the Muslim World written by Hooshang Amirahmadi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
Download or read book Urban Spaces After Socialism written by Tsypylma Darieva and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2011-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought great changes to the new nations on its periphery. This text offers a detailed ethnographic look at one area of change - the use and understanding of public space in the region's cities.
Download or read book Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe written by Barbara Daly Metcalf and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-12-18 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.
Download or read book Reading the Islamic City written by Akel Ismail Kahera and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading the Islamic City offers insights into the implications the practices of the Maliki school of Islamic law have for the inhabitants of the Islamic city, the madinah. The problematic term madinah fundamentally indicates a phenomenon of building, dwelling, and urban settlement patterns that evolved after the 7th century CE in the Maghrib (North Africa) and al-Andalusia (Spain). Madinah involves multiple contexts that have socio-religious functions and symbolic connotations related to the faith and practice of Islam, and can be viewed in terms of a number of critiques such as everyday lives, boundaries, utopias, and dystopias. The book considers Foucault's power/knowledge matrix as it applies to an erudite cadre of scholars and legal judgments in the realm of architecture and urbanism. It acknowledges the specificity of power/knowledge insofar as it provides a dominant framework to tackle property rights, custom, noise, privacy, and a host of other subjects. Scholars of urban studies, religion, history, and geography will greatly benefit from this vivid analysis of the relevance of the juridico-discursive practice of Maliki Law in a set of productive or formative discourses in the Islamic city.
Download or read book Cities in the Pre Modern Islamic World written by Amira K. Bennison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wide range of case studies across the Islamic world Provides a new interdisciplinary perspective on the Islamic city Well illustrated with maps and photographs The mix of contributors is good, from well established and highly respected academics to younger, upcoming talents The issue of urbanism in the Islamic world is an enduringly popular area of study and investigation
Download or read book Cities and Metaphors written by Somaiyeh Falahat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing a new concept of urban space, Cities and Metaphors encourages a theoretical realignment of how the city is experienced, thought and discussed. In the context of ‘Islamic city’ studies, relying on reasoning and rational thinking has reduced descriptive, vivid features of the urban space into a generic scientific framework. Phenomenological characteristics have consequently been ignored rather than integrated into theoretical components. The book argues that this results from a lack of appropriate conceptual vocabulary in our global body of scholarly literature. It challenges existing theories, introduces and applies the concept of Hezar-tu (‘a thousand insides’) to rethink the spaces in historic cores of Fez, Isfahan and Tunis. This tool constructs a staging post towards a different articulation of urban space based on spatial, physical, virtual, symbolic and social edges and thresholds; nodes of sociospatial relationships; zones of containment; state of intermediacy; and, thus, a logic of ambiguity rather than determinacy. Presenting alternative narrations of paths through sequential discovery of spaces, this book brings the sensual features of urban space into the focus. The book finally shows that concepts derived from local contexts enable us to tailor our methods and theoretical structures to the idiosyncrasies of each city while retaining the global commonalities of all. Hence, in broader terms, it contributes to a growing awareness that urban studies should be more inclusive by bringing the diverse global contexts of cities into the body of our urban knowledge.
Download or read book Synagogues in the Islamic World written by Gharipour Mohammad Gharipour and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated volume looks at the spaces created by and for Jews in areas under the political or religious control of Muslims. Covering regions as diverse as Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it asks how the architecture of synagogues responded to contextual issues and traditions, and how these contexts influenced the design and evolution of synagogues. As well as revealing how synagogues reflect the culture of the Jewish minority at macro and micro scales, from the city to the interior, the book also considers patterns of the development of synagogues in urban contexts and in connection with urban elements and monuments.
Download or read book The Medieval Mediterranean City written by Felicity Ratté and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of architecture and urban design across the Mediterranean Sea from the 12th to the 14th Century, a time when there was no single, hegemonic power dominating the area. The focus of the study--four cities on the Italian peninsula, and four in Syria and Egypt--is the interconnectedness of the design and use of urban structures, streets and open space. Each chapter offers an historical analysis of the buildings and spaces used for trade, education, political display and public action. The work includes historical and social analyses of the mercantile, social, political and educational cultures of the eight cities, highlighting similarities and differences between Christian and Islamic practices. Sixteen new maps drawn specifically for this book are based on the writings of medieval travelers.
Download or read book Urban Spaces and Lifestyles in Central Asia and Beyond written by Philipp Schröder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contributes new insights to the scientific debate on post-Socialist urbanities. Based on ethnographic research in cities of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia, its contributions scrutinise the social production of diverse public, parochial and private spaces in conjunction with patterns of everyday encounter, identification, consumption and narration. The analyses extend from the transnational entanglements between a Dushanbe bazaar and hyper-modern Dubai to the micro-level hierarchies in a flat-sharing community in Astana. They explore competing notions of urban belonging and aesthetics in Yerevan, local perception of Central Asian Muslims in Kazan and Saint Petersburg, and more, providing a rich tapestry of academic study. Taken together, the case studies address cities as gateways to ‘new worlds’ (both local and global), discuss ambitions of states at taming urban landscapes, and illustrate current trends of economic, religious and other lifestyles in urban Central Asia and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.
