The Historian and the City Between Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi

2018 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic & Islamic Studies Lecture Series

presents

Nasser Rabbat
Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, MIT

The Historian and the City Between Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi
This lecture addresses the writing on the city at an especially critical historical juncture: the fourteenth century, when the dominant polity in the central Islamic world depended primarily on legitimization through power (sultan). The analysis revolves around the writing of Ibn Khaldun and his student and colleague al-Maqrizi. In his Muqaddima (Introduction or Prolegomena), Ibn Khaldun presents a lucid review of the nomadic/settled dychotomy as an engine of state formation, of the characteristics and conditions of urban life, and of the rise and fall of cities as a function of the rise and fall of states. Al-Maqrizi, focusing particularly on Cairo in his encyclopedic Khitat, uses his master’s theoretical framework to offer an overtly emotional and moralizing historical analysis of the consequences of human action on the urban landscape. His book actually prefigures —though in a less self-conscious way and in a melancholy tone—the questions fin de siècle archaeologists encountered as they tried to "historicize" by reconstituting as wholes the fragments of city spaces and structures they had uncovered. As such, the Khitat may be considered a truly pioneering urban history, perhaps cosmocentric and depressed, but certainly reflective and imbued with a strong sense of purpose.