Roundtable: Resurgence of the “Islamic City” in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The “Islamic city” as a monolithic concept and formation has been framed as a dead-end historical subject of study invented in the European imagination since the 19th century. Yet, critiques of Orientalism have not quelled an expectation that the resurgence of Islamic beliefs and politics would usher in a new phase of Islamic urbanism, particularly in Muslim theocracies such as Iran, but also Turkey and the Gulf. While urban historians critique and deconstruct the historical notion of the Islamic city as an orientalist creation, emerging Islamic states see the Islamic city in much more concrete terms, and, in fact, long for its recreation within the modern reality of Muslim majority cities. However, while those spatial strategies and architectural references are legible and dissectible to architectural historians, they might not always be as identifiable to the users of such spaces. In this roundtable, architectural and urban historians of the contemporary Middle East will discuss the complexities, challenges, successes or failures of such attempts at a revived and instrumentalized notion of Islamic urbanism over the past fifty years coinciding with the rise of political Islam in the region.

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