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Space and Muslim Urban Life: At the Limits of the Labyrinth of Fez
By Simon OMeara (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 172
pp. Price HB 65.00. EAN: 9780415386128
The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic
Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
Space and Muslim Urban Life is an analytical study of how the walls of
premodern (14001800) Fez define its space and how that space interacts and
resonates within the social context of Muslim urban life. It intends (and achieves)
a comprehensive, up-to-date contextualization of the early history of the
premodern Islamic medina and the role of walls in building the behavioural
norms that traditionally characterize Islamic society. It draws upon, and goes
much further than, the earlier scholarship of Ali Djrebi, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba,
Moncef M8halla, Roger Le Tourneau, Heghnar Watenpaugh, John Gulick, and
Henri Lefebvre. OMearas study of the walls of Fez throws light on other
historical Arab-Muslim medinas defined by their walls and the monuments and
institutions that engender and express the ideals and values that, largely, still
survive. He deals also with the Islamic legal discourse (the Book of Walls),
relating to the regulation and building of walls in urban spaces. The work is
timely in that it coincides with the celebrations commemorating the founding
of Fez 1200 years ago.
The book comprises five chapters, each representing a stage in the investigative
framework leading up to the final analysis and interpretation of premodern Fez
and the manner in which it apprehended its living space, externally and
internally.
Chapter 1, Premodern Fez (pp. 618) recounts the history of the founding of
Fez in 789 and its subsequent divisions into the medina (F:s al-B:l;) and Fez
Jed;d (F:s al-Jad;d) at the beginning of the citys golden age under the Marinids
and the Wa33asids (12761554). The account is drawn from multiple original
works on the citys history and describes the architectural composition of
premodern Fez and shows how the city was not only structurally defined by
walls, but historically determined by them, too (p. 4).
Chapter 2, Social and Religious Dimensions of Walls, begins by presenting
walls as a mechanism by which medieval and premodern Islamic law established
boundaries between the permitted (Aal:l) and the forbidden (Aar:m), the outside
and the inside, and the secular and the sacred. Here the focus is on the social and
religious dimensions of walls as thresholds (p. 20) and as cover (p. 26).
Whether premodern or modern, the wall is seen as empirically a limit, a frontier
and a liminal space between (Zwishchenraum) (p. 19), integrally related to
marking the transition from a profane to a sacred space like, for example, the
enclosure of the mosque; and from public space to the private or sacred precinct
of domestic space. After the wall as threshold, the door becomes the crossing
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Kenneth Honerkamp
University of Georgia
E-mail: hnrkmp@uga.edu
doi:10.1093/jis/ets095