The untold stories of “Islamic” architecture and urbanism: rationality and power manifestations

Despite various attempts and approaches to scrutinize the concept of Islamic architecture, the prevailing discourse, set by orientalists since the nineteenth century, still holds true to some extent. It mostly focuses on the physical products of Islamic architecture and cities, with little attention paid to the underlying production mechanisms. Hence, the term “Islamic architecture” has been the subject of extensive debate, but still no consensus being achieved. Scholars are divided between those influenced by the orientalist’s static approach, and those arguing for the dynamic approach (Allahham 2004). This paper attempts to rethink the discourse on “Islamic architecture and cities” through exploring the untold stories of the actual conditions under which Islamic built environments were developed, with a close look at the changes in the political system that predominated throughout Islamic history. To achieve this, the paper employs Ibn Khaldun's perspective on the political modes and the rise and fall of states as a theoretical framework. The paper concludes that adopting political royalty modes and rational politics has gradually changed the built environment production mechanisms from being Shari‘a rights-based mechanisms to power-based mechanisms applied through rational politics, with the latter producing authoritarian built environments. As such politicized built environments are the center of the existing discourse, this paper exposed the fallacy of the current discourse and the inadequacy of the existing conception of “Islamic architecture.”