Reading the Islamic City by Kahera Akel Isma'il;

Author:Kahera, Akel Isma'il; [Kahera, Akel Isma’il]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2011-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Discursive Readings

The city walls, with all of their history, mythology and murderous insularity, portioning out their shade between inside and the outside,

Stretching into people’s lives and houses and shops, as if drawing fixed borders for the city, outside of which one cannot move. . . . The city walls still remain, enclosing everything inside, opening onto the desert, hearkening to the voices of the dead and the raging winds.

—Izz al-Din Tazi1

In the preceding chapter, I discussed the methodological relationship between custom, legal practice, and legal opinion to demonstrate how the power of adjudication had the potential to regulate the topos of the madinah. The previous chapter also suggested the power of adjudication was necessarily a legal strategy, suggesting that a jurist had a great deal of power/knowledge. The exigencies of specific circumstances—extra muros sites, spaces, and indeterminate landscapes—in which the power of adjudication performs a dominant role are the objects of this chapter and chapter 4.

According to my argument, discursive readings of the madinah reveal a myriad of extra muros sites, spaces, and indeterminate landscapes beyond the boundaries of the city. It is also my contention that while the city walls provided insularity—primarily as a defense mechanism—for the residents of the city, as Izza al-Din Tazi has noted, the walls also demarked spaces that were “portioning out their shade between inside and the outside.” Inside the walls, there is the physical environment “stretching into people’s lives and houses and shops,” in which the aggregate of dwellings are contiguous. Outside the walls, we may presume that there exists a hybrid identity, an indeterminate landscape “opening onto the desert.” Our task in this chapter is to define the character and the nature of the terrain outside the walls.

We undertake this task by examining the full importance of extra muros sites so that we can interrogate the physical context of dwelling in that setting. Second, it is our aim as well to examine the statutory restrictions that exemplified an indeterminate landscape, because such legal restrictions nevertheless envisioned plausible arguments in favor of men. I believe this to be so because the underlying social, economic, and religious activity and legal practice remain autonomous bodies of discursive rules where patriarchy is dominant and when law is cited to regulate the hybridity of these types of spaces. Crucially, and in marked comparison, Foucault argues that “It is not a matter of imposing law on men, but of the disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather than law, or, as far as possible, employing law as tactics, arranging things so as this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.”2 While the scope of our arguments are situated in “the disposition of things” and in an indeterminate setting where public gathering, dwelling, and worship occur, one also notices on the part of the jurists an arousing legal recognition of the category of “maleness.” The “arranging of things so as this or that end may be achieved through a

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