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Accepted Paper:

Rethinking urban space in the Islamic city: the case of Late Islamic Zubārah  
Tobias Richter (University of Copenhagen) Alan Walmsley Paul Wordsworth (University College London)

Paper short abstract:

Discussing place and space in the 18th century town of Al Zubārah in northwest Qatar allows us to critically think through the conceptualisation of Islamic Urbanism in archaeology. Taking a critical approach, we aim to show how a particular historical context shaped Zubārah’s urban form.

Paper long abstract:

Much of our understanding of urban space in Islamic cities has been based on ideas derived from the archetypal, 'classical' Islamic city. While the concept of the 'Islamic city' itself has long been critiqued, traditional ideas remain commonplace in archaeological and historical treatments about place and urban spaces during the Islamic periods. Critics, for example Nadia Abu-Lughod, have long ago called for a more contextual approach that takes into account the particular historical conditions that shaped cities in the Islam world. It is now highly questionable whether there is, in fact, such a thing that can be called the 'Islamic City' that applies across the Muslim world. This opens up the opportunity to critically rethink the nature of urban space and place in the Islamic world.

In this contribution, we focus on the case of Al Zubārah in north-western Qatar to consider the shaping and formation of settlement urban topography in a late Islamic town. Few settlements of this date have been studied and common assumptions about the nature of space and place projected onto late Islamic urban forms from earlier time periods have prevailed. In this paper we seek to examine these assumptions and challenge them on the basis of recent work in Zubārah, an outstanding example of a Gulf town dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE.

Panel S23
Theorising city landscapes: boundaries and place in urban space
  Session 1