| Author(s) | Abeer Al-Lahham |
| Affiliation | Assistant Professor, College of Architecture and Planning, King Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia |
| Title | Orientalism IN THE READINGS OF MUSLIM BUILT ENVIRONMENTS |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Architecture & Planning. Volume 16, No 1. (2004/1424) |
| Abstract | Accumulating knowledge of Islamic cities is located within the broad realm of urban studies which incorporates several fields such as urban sociology, urban politics, urban geography, and urban planning. As these fields were developed in the West (the base of the Orientalists), concepts as those delineated by pioneer Western thinkers such as Weber, Marx, and Durkheim shaped the thinking of Orientalists and many Muslim scholars in studying Muslim environments. Moreover, as most Islamic urban studies were carried out by Western scholars (Orientalists), particularly up to the 1970s, they were influenced by those Orientalists’ Western knowledge-base, values, and norms. As a result, following Western methodologies and approaches, most Islamic urban studies investigated Muslim built environments partially, focusing on the physical and/or the functional (institutional) structures only. That is, unaware of the peculiarity of the Muslim built environment, and influenced by Western concepts of society making, Orientalists as well as some Muslim scholars accepted the Western modes of environmental production as the only conceivable possible mode. They employed Western professional and epistemological concepts in studying Muslim built environments. This has led to misinterpreting and thus misunderstanding those built environments and their production process. Unfortunately, those studies became authoritative in the field of Islamic urban studies, thus widely adopted and accepted. |
