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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 340-341



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Book Review

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


The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries. By Paul Wheatley (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001) 572 pp. $65.00

This book is a geographer's contribution to the debate about the nature of the city. Based on the writings of the tenth-century geographers, above all al-Maqdisi (also known as al-Muqaddasi), it offers a mass of information about the economic life of the tenth-century Muslim world, neatly set out province by province. It also has two appendixes, dense annotation, and an unusually detailed bibliography, which will prove extremely useful to specialists as well as scholars in neighboring fields.

In other respects, however, this is a slightly odd book. Although Wheatley, who died in 1999, knew the Muslim sources well and could read the originals in Arabic, he chose in this book to follow authoritative opinion, presumably because he felt that, as a geographer, he lacked the credentials for independent judgment on matters of Islamic history and culture. For example, he accepts the wholly unpersuasive thesis of Miguel that al-Maqdisi was an itinerant missionary on behalf of the heretical Fatimids without further discussion, even though al-Maqdisi repeatedly (and sometimes unself-consciously) identified himself as a Sunni of the broadest kind.1

In the same vein, Wheatley starts the book with a long chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia entitled "The Roots of Islamic Society," though Islamic cities owed neither their form nor their function to either pre- Islamic Arabia or the Arabian phase of early Islam, as he himself points out. Why does he provide thirty double-column pages on the subject? The real reason is probably that most books on Islamic culture start in pre-Islamic Arabia, and Wheatley did not want to deviate from the norm. The reason that he gives, however, is that northwestern Arabia [End Page 340] contributed "a paradigm for ordering institutional and group action at all levels of society" (32). What paradigm? He wrote only that it "consequently [subsequently?] conditioned the way in which men comprehended their environment, including all levels of the settlement hierarchy, and prescribed the manner in which, within the fused framework of tribal sabiqa [?] and Islam, they attempted to order that system and the nodal centers comprising it" (32). It is difficult to make sense of this passage, but four lines are, in any case, a meager harvest. If the paradign were real, the chapter would have to be shaped as an account of its nature.

Wheatley's analytical language often verges on the unintelligible. According to the introduction, the purpose of the book is "to elicit from not always ekistically forthcoming sources the faded lineaments of thirteen settlement systems that agglomerative and accessibility factors had molded into pyramidal urban hierarchies by the tenth century" (xiii). Exactly what does he mean? According to the conclusion, "The imbricately structured layers of meaning, memory, and association evoked by these urban forms, in retrospect seemingly scaled harmoniously to the measure of humanity, can only be imagined" (337). Is this how geographers speak? The title of the book refers to a statement by Mohammed voicing fear that his people will return to the desert, "forsaking the places where men pray together" (41). That, at least is a definition of Islamic cities that everyone can understand.

 



Patricia Crone
Institute for Advanced Study

Note

1. See al-Maqdisi (trans. André Miguel), Ahsam al-taqasim fi ma'rifat al-aqalim, Introduction, xx.

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