Making of the Village in the Islamic World : Architecture, Rural Life, and their Entangled Histories

Architectural and urban histories of the Islamic world have mostly focused on cities and urban communities, leaving many societies in rural areas largely unnoticed or marginalized. This book addresses this gap, exploring the making of villages and the architectural history of rural settlements across the Islamic world.

Bringing together chapters and case studies from the early modern period to the twentieth century, exploring rural landscapes from the Middle East to the Balkans and North Africa, and combining fieldwork and archival research with historic travelers’ accounts and contemporary chronicles, the studies presented here reveal that there is much to learn from these hitherto neglected sites.

Three chronological sections examine the premodern world; Islamic villages in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts; and the transformations and modernizations of the twentieth century, respectively. The chapters themselves shed light on subjects ranging from infrastructure, urban planning, and architectural design in Islamic rural landscapes; to the importance of villages in global trade routes and the spread of goods, artworks, ideas, and material culture; and the dynamics of rural Islamic societies and how their interactions affect the growth of settlements.

Revealing how villages in the Islamic world evolved across diverse cultural, political, economic, and physical contexts – and how they can give potent architectural form to Islamic cultural identities – this book provides an invaluable resource for researchers in Islamic architecture, architectural history, urban studies, Islamic studies, and heritage studies.