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This work is the product of a colloquium held in Cambridge about Islamic cities. It is the consequence of a typical career move by young academics these days: hold a conference on a big theme, and you have another book on the CV without too much effort. That is not to underrate the value of the work: it stands or falls on its own qualities. How then does it add to our knowledge of Islamic cities? As a colloquium, it is necessarily a little diffuse, as it depends on the interests of the participants.
In her introduction Bennison rightly calls attention to the question of what is an Islamic city. "Religion" appears in the subtitle, and the issue of spirituality is evoked a number of times even when it does not seem entirely necessary. The definition should, of course, be cities in the Islamic world or, given that many Islamic countries are multicultural, cities inhabited by Muslims. The introduction is a good summary of present thinking and refers to Abu Lughod's work, which usefully asks the question, What differences are there between a Muslim and non-Muslim city in the same country, for example, India?
In the initial section on the genesis of Islamic cities, Donald Whitcomb lays out a formal structure for an Umayyad city. In 1996 Whitcomb successfully showed that the earliest newly founded Islamic cities, the amsar, were derived from the urban model of the Arabian peninsula. Here, he goes further and attempts to apply the same model to Umayyad cities in the Levant. The result is not so successful for the obvious reason that most cities in Bilad al-Sham had a long history before Islam, and the Umayyads would have...