Kahera - Reading the Islamic City: discursive practices and legal judgment

Reading the Islamic City

Chapter 1

Genealogies of Place

Almighty God make of it a house of knowledge and of legal science, so that in it Thy Book may always be read and thy laws always observed.... He [Idris] sketched the ground plan of the city of Fes on a Thursday morning... beginning with the qiblah direction [south] where he laid the foundation of a wall, and he named the first gate bab al-qiblah.

Al-Jaznai, Zahrat al-As

Perhaps the most profound implications of reading the Islamic city are corroborated by the fact that most scholars today generally agree that the madinah does not fit the stereotypical canons of Orientalism. As Estelle Whelan has so aptly observed, since the publication of Edward Saids Orientalism in 1978, every Western student of the Near East, regardless of his or her position in the ensuing debate, has been forced to examine afresh the assumptions underlying even the most respected historical studies. Actually, the constellation of particular descriptions and notions that characterize the madinah in recent studies reflect a complex set of interpretive and discursive practices. Perhaps Robert Mugerauers Interpreting Environments sums up the problem best. Mugerauer reminds us, the built environment can be seen either as the fairly anonymous product of the cultural forces and practices in effect at the time or as the result of deliberate creative effort... [or] because of the influence of the personal or collective unconscious. I will probe in this chapter Mugerauers emphasis on the built environment as a product of the cultural forces and practices. In keeping with this, we propose a rereading of Fes the madinah as a palimpsest, namely a topographical reading with the recognition of the collective unconscious. While this emphasis is unique, I will also probe the notion of the madinah as a palimpsest to explore the many discursive practices that are part of the effective history and juridical authority.

First, considering that Fes had two congregational mosques from the period it was first founded in the eighth to ninth century CE, I will examine the ruling that sanctions a single congregational mosque to interrogate the legal status of the madinah. Indeed the jurists of the five major schools of law (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, Hanbali, and Jafari) by reason of authority commonly held the view that the legal status of a madinah rested solely on the presence of a single congregational mosque ( masjid al-jami ) which prefigures the conditions of existence. In keeping with this, Baber Johansens study entitled The All Embracing Town and Its Mosques: Al-Misr al-Jami sheds interest on the concern by the Hanafi jurists who had sought to explain the legality of Friday prayer and the definition of a madinah. Rather, it is a strategic argument to consider the reasons why patronage gave de facto approval to one congregational edifice in the city of Fes; moreover, the status of the edifice allowed for the intervention of a jurist-consult to remedy the royal edict via his own legal interpretation. In the case of Fes, the jurist-consult embedded so much interpretive detail into a litigants complaint against the edict that the case could not be overlooked.

Second, in the hadith I am the city of knowledge, we encounter a dynamic relationship between many readings of landscape and Idriss verba concepta. Idris I, the original founder of Fes, and later his son Idris II, who apparently reconsecrated the city, made a supplication to God at the time the city was established, his verba concepta, is reflective of an eschatological order. But the power of the verba concepta fuses eschatological tradition with a long-standing practice of a corrective device: a supplication ( dua ) that employs religious commitment. Finally, owing to the importance given to calculating the direction of Makkah, the first discussion of this chapter deals with a general disagreement among the Maliki jurists concerning the qiblah direction. Such a practice would privilege the status of the congregational mosquewhich is always built facing Makkahthe largest and most prominent place of public gathering in the madinah, bringing into question the formal difficulties inherent in calculating the accuracy of the qiblah. Jaan Holt, for instance, has called this practice and structure, Architecture and the Wall Facing [Makkah].

If a man, alone in a room, decides his orientation to [Makkah],

the direction is ordained through the act of prayer,

and in his singularity is his absolute freedom from reproach.

The mosque is the place of human agreement to prayer.

In its making, it attests to this sense of agreement, and allows an individual the same freedom from reproach as if he were alone; yet it affords, thorough architecture, the generosity of the presence of many.

Holts poem launches an investigation of an exegetical problem that defines the axis of prayer ( qiblah ) based on authorized interpretations: these interpretations have become legally codified, and the developed manifestations of this mode of practice often control a topological understanding of the architectural space of the edifice. Typically, what has occurred in the text is a debate over adjudication to correct the alignment of the qiblah and the opposing forms of history and tradition.

The Power/Knowledge of Uqbas Dream

According to al-Nuwayris Nihayat al-Arab, Uqba ibn Nfi, the founder of modern day Tunisia , ( Ifriqiya ) did not know the qiblah, the axis of prayer , when he conquered the area in 670 CE.

But having addressed himself to God Almighty, he [Uqba] saw in his sleep a figure that approached him and spoke these words: Favorite of the Master of the Universe, when the dawn is come, take your standard on your shoulder. Then you will hear before you a voice cry and cry again God is Great and no man shall hear these cries: at the spot where the cries shall cease, there you shall place the qiblah and the mihrab of your mosque. Uqba obeyed these instructions in every detail, and the thing came to pass exactly as has been foretold. When the voice could no longer be heard, he stuck his standard in the earth and said, Here is our mihrab.

Uqbas dream would seem wholly inappropriate as a way to balance disparate modes of a legally accepted practice to determine the qiblah axis. But Uqbas dream was also quite influential because he is the most venerated companion of the Prophet known to the Maghrib; it is hardly surprising that the authoritative value attributed to him remained in place for many centuries after his demise. As a result, his inspirational dream corroborates the established practice based on what had been transmitted from the companions of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632 CE). By comparison we may recall that the Prophets mosque was constructed at the precise spot where his camel knelt upon entering the city of Madinah, Arabia, in the year 622 CE. Nevertheless the historians tell us that at the time the city of Qayrawan was founded, Uqba, the pious primogenitor of Tunisia, sanctified the settlement with a heavenly supplication ( dua ). The story is quite different elsewhere in the land, where the accuracy of the axis collided with a legal debate, and that accuracy would be tested as to whether a custom was stronger than law. Most Islamic legal scholars agree that there are at least three lawfully accepted ways to verify the accuracy of the qiblah direction. The first sanctions the belief that the direction of prayer was already established by the buildings (mosques) associated with companions of the Prophet such as Uqba. The fact that Sharaf al-Din Zakariyya (d. 1535) wrote A Treatise on how to obtain the qiblah direction without the use of an instrument is an attempt to overcome the problem. Furthermore it reinforces the centrality of a tradition such as Uqbas dream. Among other things, as a central concept, it attempts to grasp the richness of the collective unconscious of the city-community.