The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries.

• Author: Meloy, John L.
• Position: Book review

The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries. By PAUL WHEATLEY. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2001. Pp. xvii + 572. $65.

The last page of the epilogue of this weighty volume is adorned with two pieces of Arabic calligraphy. The first states, "One would be a liar if one spoke all that one has heard." This statement reflects the capacious breadth of the late Professor Paul Wheatley's book, published posthumously, and points to the author's critical and judicious analysis of the evidence on Islamic cities of the first/seventh through fourth/tenth centuries. The study of the Islamic city has, of course, long been a subject of interest to scholars working in the field of medieval Islam. Wheatley has addressed a long-standing need in Islamic studies for an accomplished geographer and urbanist to subject the rich geographical and historical data of the Islamic past to critical analysis. Wheatley, who passed away before he could complete his editing of the book's seventeenth and last chapter, had the linguistic skills as well as the theoretical expertise to achieve the task at hand with skill and precision, just as he displayed these remarkable talents in his studies of urbanism elsewhere in Asia.

The book has three main goals. First, it stands as a critical study of the urban systems presented by the tenth-century geographer Shams al-Din Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad al-Maqdisi [al-Muqaddasi] (fl. 10th c.), a "pioneering urbanist" in Wheatley's view, whose classic work, Ahsan al-Taqdsim fi Ma'rifat al-Aqdlim, provides the rough contours for Wheatley's theoretically and empirically rich geographical eye (and is the source of the aphorisms mentioned above). Second, it provides the basis for a more systematic approach to studying Islamic cities, avoiding an essentialized conception of "the Islamic city." Third, since the book was written as much for comparative urbanists as for Islamic historians, it serves as a treatise on the nature of urbanism, and in this respect adds to the author's earlier studies on the origins of Chinese, Japanese, and southeast Asian urbanism. It is this readership that accounts for the inclusion of appendices--lists of the relevant Islamic dynasties, modern and variant place-names, and a glossary--which might seem superfluous to specialists in the region, and about which he expressed concern that these might seem "otiose" (p. xviii). His concern is unjustified...