Architecture and Urbanism in the Middle East

Labyrinth: Moroccan Medinas

Simon O’Meara

Simon O’Meara is Assistant

Professor of History of Art

at the American University

of Kuwait. He researches

the sociological dimensions

of Islamic art and architec-

ture, with a regional focus

on North Africa.

By anyone’s estimation, the medinas of Morocco are singular. To be sure, there is much
that is uncommon about these gated and walled premodern cities that today form just
one part of a number of Moroccan municipalities (e.g., Fez, Marrakech, Tetouan, and
Tangiers). And there is much that is evocative about the word “medina” itself, conjuring
up images, for example, of blind walls, hidden lives, and forbidding, twisting passage-
ways. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that these medinas are the fruition of a
long experiment in Arab-Muslim urban design that has its roots in the pre-Islamic past
and its decline in modernity.^1 In other words, for all their apparent inscrutability and
potent connotations of traditional Muslim life, these medinas are neither timeless nor
an immutable expression of Arab-Muslim, including Moroccan, civilization.

The duration and number of mor-
phologies in this urban experiment is
debatable, but not the fact that today’s
medinas belong to the final stage. For
the urban historian André Raymond,
this culminating morphology dates to
approximately 1500-1800 and is best
referred to as “la ville traditionelle,”
the traditional city, as opposed to “la ville classique,” the classical city, the stage that
preceded it.^2 Following another historian’s chronological model, this earlier stage dates
to the beginning of the 11th century,^3 when it in turn was preceded by another, slightly

1. Key articles in English on this subject include Hugh Kennedy, “From Polis to Madina:
   Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria,” Past and Present, Vol. 106 (1985),
   pp. 3-27; Jere Bacharach, “Administrative Complexes, Palaces and Citadels: Changes in the
   Loci of Medieval Muslim Rule,” in Irene Bierman et al., eds., The Ottoman City and its Parts:
   Urban Structure and Social Order (Rochelle: Caratzas, 1991), pp. 111-28; Donald Whitcomb,
   “An Urban Structure for the Early Islamic City: An Archaeological Hypothesis,” in Amira K.
   Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne, eds., Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The Urban
   Impact of Religion, State and Society (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 15-26.


2. André Raymond, Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period: Cairo, Syria and the Maghreb
   (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 35.


3. Jean-Claude Garcin, “Le moment islamique (VIIe-XVIIIe siècles)” [“The Islamic Moment
   (7th-18th Centuries)”], in Claude Nicolet et al., eds., Mégapoles méditerranéennes: Géographie
   urbaine rétrospective. Actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome et la Maison
   méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme (Rome, 8-11 mai 1996) [Mediterranean Megacities:
   Retrospective Urban Geography. Minutes from the Colloquim Organized by the French School
   of Rome and the Mediterranean House of the Sciences of Man (Rome, May 8-11, 1996)](Paris/
   Rome: Maisonneuve et Larose/École française de Rome, 2000), p. 99.

Figure 1: Fez, Ra’s Aluyun neighborhood