Muslims and the City

The 46th Annual Conference of the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS), which focused on “Muslims and the City,” was cosponsored by the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program, Boston College, Newton Campus, MA (September 29, 2017). The Conference Program Chair, Kathleen T. Bailey, Associate Director of the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program, welcomed the guests and expressed the College’s excitement in hosting the event. Since NAAIMS President, Jon Mandaville (Portland State University, OR) was not able to attend, Bailey read the following opening remarks prepared by Mandaville: “The setting of Islam has been from its beginning in Mecca al-Mukaramah, a setting of cities stretching from Indonesia and India to the Middle East and North and West Africa, an urban dynamic with a focus on trade and industry, art and music, poetry, book markets and scholarship. Every Islamic city has its own distinctive features, whether it be calligraphy on the walls, music in the halls, soup kitchens for the poor, or hospitals for the sick.”

Four panel sessions analyzed critical aspects of the city: The opening session which examined “The City in Words,” was moderated by the Panel Chair and Discussant, Sheila Blair (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA).

The first presentation “How the Citizens of Damascus Protected their City in Words,” by Dana Sajdi (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA), focused on how “Damascene scholars visualized their city using words,” while “Dutch artists of the Golden Age and the Venetian painters of the late Renaissance immortalized their cities in images.” She examined how the tradition of describing and preserving a city in words began in the 12th century when a great Damascene scholar, Ibn Asakir, actually wrote down “a description of his walk in the city,” which inaugurated a “tradition of memorializing Damascus by its citizens which continued until the 20th century.” His elegant, descriptive style launched “a new way of walking, viewing, and writing about the city.” The discussant, Sheila Blair, noted that Sajdi’s presentation gave a “fascinating juxtaposition of the different ways that Muslims used words to describe their cities [in Damascus, while] chroniclers used verbal descriptions to ‘paint’ their cities.” Her presentation focused primarily on how “some native Damascenes described and remembered their city over the centuries for the purpose of revising, preserving, and protecting its image in words.”

During the Q & A period, Jonathan M. Bloom (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA), stated, contrary to Sajdi’s remarks, that “there were images and descriptions of Venice much earlier than the 18th century.” She noted that although she was aware of the “presence of earlier renditions of Venice, it was not until the 18th century that the Venetian cityscapes were a stable genre at the hands of Canaletto and others.” Bloom also asked Sajdi whether she had looked at the “descriptions of Damascus by travelers and geographers in addition to the textual cityscapes she had studied.” She stated that “the authors of Damascene cityscapes were actually responding to the administrative geographies issued by the Imperial City, Cairo, when it was under the Mamluk Empire. . . . [She added that] since the purpose of these administrative geographies was to scan for revenue, they represented Damascus’ hinterland as a rich productive area ripe for exploiting. The response of the Damascene authors was to emphasize the religious and cultural value of the hinterland and downplay its agricultural riches, and therefore, they were contesting Cairo’s imperial power.”

This was followed by a presentation on how “Calligraphy Keeps Decorating Mosques in the Modern Era” by Hilal Kazan (Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey). Kazan analyzed works of Turkish calligraphers and “compared inscriptions used in older or earlier mosques to contemporary architectural styles and techniques used today.” She highlighted the “relationship between space and text through selected examples to show the difference in styles of writing and modern compositions of classical Islamic calligraphy and techniques.” Her description of the mosque as being the most significant symbol in the religion of Islam and the social life and culture of Muslims explains why calligraphic inscriptions of Qur’anic verses are an essential feature in mosque designs.

Kazan stated that “beginning with the migration of Prophet...