Read Online The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) by Joel Kotkin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joel Kotkin
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successful merchant in Mecca, a long-established trading and religious center on the barren Arabian peninsula. This city long had been influenced by first Hellenistic and then Roman rulers; its varied population included pagans, Jews, and, after the second century, Christians. 6
Mecca and the other trading cities of the Hijaz, in the northwest corner of the peninsula, lacked the strong agricultural roots common to many early cities. Its dry, unforgiving climate—one tenth-century Arab topographer described the city as being afflicted with “suffocating heat, a pestilential wind, and clouds of flies” 7 —left only commerce as the basis for its economy.
Most Meccans were descended from bedouins, who wandered the vast expanse of the Hijaz in search of grazing land and water for their flocks. Organized into clans, bedouins supplemented their meager incomes by protecting or raiding caravans. These clans were frequently contentious, respecting only basic family-based loyalties. Ibn Khaldun noted that such strong links were natural outgrowths given the harsh environment of bedouin life. “Only tribes held together by a group feeling,” he observed, “can live in the desert.” 8
By the early decades of the new millennium, some of these clans settled in cities such as Mecca and started their own caravans, profiting from the growth in trade between the Levant and Yemen. Mecca slowly grew into a settlement of as many as five thousand.
The old clan loyalties of the desert culture posed a distinct threat to this nascent urban community. Meccans lacked the common ethos and rule of law applicable to unrelated people that had held cities together since Mesopotamian times.
Muhammad, a member of the Qurayshi, one of the more powerful clans at Mecca, grasped the need for such an order, a higher purpose that would replace the chaos of the blood feuds inherent in the old clan society. His system of belief, Islam, was both a religious program and a call for social justice and order.
Muhammad’s ideas, revealed in the Koran, concerned themselves with the traditionally weaker members of society. He demanded that women, long subject to abuse of all kinds, be protected from harsh treatment. Men were limited to four wives, unlike in the past, where wealth was the only limiting factor, and commanded to treat them with proper respect.
The poor, too, were to be protected. Alms giving became a necessary expression of faith. Among the wealthy, instructed the Koran, “there is a recognized right for the beggar and deprived.” 9
Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of Muhammad’s message was his notion of greater ummah, or community, bound by a single faith. This concept overturned both traditional pagan worship and the ancient primacy of clan affiliations. The traditional leaders of the clans seem to have understood this. In 622, they forced the Prophet and a handful of followers to flight, or hijira, to the rival city of Medina, two hundred miles to the north. That city, with its large Jewish colony, proved more receptive to the Prophet’s monotheistic message. 10
Swelled with new converts, Muhammad’s forces occupied Mecca in 630. Soon the ummah was spreading rapidly across Arabia. The Arabs, once a feuding group of clans, now became a single, highly motivated people. “Had you given them away all the riches of the earth,” the Koran says, “you could not have so united them. But God has united them.” 11
THE NATURE OF THE ISLAMIC CITY
After Muhammad’s death in 632, his successors, the caliphs, determined to implement the Prophet’s vision. The Muslim epoch represented a new beginning in urban history. Spreading through the Near East and North Africa and into Spain with remarkable energy between the seventh and ninth centuries, Islam broke dramatically with the long-standing traditions of classical urbanism, which, as Socrates saw it, found “people in the city” as a primary source of knowledge. 12 Islam would
Mecca and the other trading cities of the Hijaz, in the northwest corner of the peninsula, lacked the strong agricultural roots common to many early cities. Its dry, unforgiving climate—one tenth-century Arab topographer described the city as being afflicted with “suffocating heat, a pestilential wind, and clouds of flies” 7 —left only commerce as the basis for its economy.
Most Meccans were descended from bedouins, who wandered the vast expanse of the Hijaz in search of grazing land and water for their flocks. Organized into clans, bedouins supplemented their meager incomes by protecting or raiding caravans. These clans were frequently contentious, respecting only basic family-based loyalties. Ibn Khaldun noted that such strong links were natural outgrowths given the harsh environment of bedouin life. “Only tribes held together by a group feeling,” he observed, “can live in the desert.” 8
By the early decades of the new millennium, some of these clans settled in cities such as Mecca and started their own caravans, profiting from the growth in trade between the Levant and Yemen. Mecca slowly grew into a settlement of as many as five thousand.
The old clan loyalties of the desert culture posed a distinct threat to this nascent urban community. Meccans lacked the common ethos and rule of law applicable to unrelated people that had held cities together since Mesopotamian times.
Muhammad, a member of the Qurayshi, one of the more powerful clans at Mecca, grasped the need for such an order, a higher purpose that would replace the chaos of the blood feuds inherent in the old clan society. His system of belief, Islam, was both a religious program and a call for social justice and order.
Muhammad’s ideas, revealed in the Koran, concerned themselves with the traditionally weaker members of society. He demanded that women, long subject to abuse of all kinds, be protected from harsh treatment. Men were limited to four wives, unlike in the past, where wealth was the only limiting factor, and commanded to treat them with proper respect.
The poor, too, were to be protected. Alms giving became a necessary expression of faith. Among the wealthy, instructed the Koran, “there is a recognized right for the beggar and deprived.” 9
Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of Muhammad’s message was his notion of greater ummah, or community, bound by a single faith. This concept overturned both traditional pagan worship and the ancient primacy of clan affiliations. The traditional leaders of the clans seem to have understood this. In 622, they forced the Prophet and a handful of followers to flight, or hijira, to the rival city of Medina, two hundred miles to the north. That city, with its large Jewish colony, proved more receptive to the Prophet’s monotheistic message. 10
Swelled with new converts, Muhammad’s forces occupied Mecca in 630. Soon the ummah was spreading rapidly across Arabia. The Arabs, once a feuding group of clans, now became a single, highly motivated people. “Had you given them away all the riches of the earth,” the Koran says, “you could not have so united them. But God has united them.” 11
THE NATURE OF THE ISLAMIC CITY
After Muhammad’s death in 632, his successors, the caliphs, determined to implement the Prophet’s vision. The Muslim epoch represented a new beginning in urban history. Spreading through the Near East and North Africa and into Spain with remarkable energy between the seventh and ninth centuries, Islam broke dramatically with the long-standing traditions of classical urbanism, which, as Socrates saw it, found “people in the city” as a primary source of knowledge. 12 Islam would
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