The Islamic and Byzantine City

Constantinople, the Christian capital of Byzantium until its conquest by Muslim forces in 1453 (officially renamed Istanbul in 1930), and the Roman-patterned cities of Aleppo and Damascus in Syria and of Tunis in North Africa, are noteworthy examples of existing cities whose plans were transformed by Islamic occupation. These walled cities had inherited from the pre-Islamic period regular streets and processionals, churches, covered markets, and a clear division, according to principles of Roman property law, between public (both secular and religious) and private space. Over time, the major changes were to create, from those regular divisions, the narrow labyrinthian paths and dead-ends that are associated with the Islamic city.

Sauvaget, in his pathbreaking studies of the transformation of Damascus (1934) and Aleppo (1941), traced these changes, attributing them to the substitution of Islamic law for Roman law, a theory more fully explicated by Hakim (1986), who examined Islamic legal precedents as they developed primarily in the Maghreb (western North Africa). In Islamic property law, responsibilities to one's neighbors, including the protection of their visual privacy, took precedence over a priori protection of the public way. As a result, buildings began to infringe on the streets, unless neighbors objected in the courts, and the residential neighborhoods became honeycombed into cells of semipublic space. Given the greater segregation between male and female space in Islamic codes of modesty, markets and residential zones became more spatially differentiated, with markets, courts, mosques, and industrial districts more specialized. These changes, which occurred over time in both preexisting "Christian" cities and in formally planned army camps and princely towns, gave rise to many of the characteristics now associated with the Islamic city.