An Analysis of the Fundamental Historical Religious-Cultural Components of the Islamic Iranian City in the Early and Middle Centuries

Despite a vast literature regarding the concept of “Islamic City”, still there is not a clear cohesion in regards to the the utopian and historical approaches of these studies. This important issue has caused the role of the different multifarious and influential factors in shaping the “complex cities of the Islamic period” to be ignored. Reading the content related to the Islamic Iranian city requires a realist and historical understanding of the issue from its different aspects. The approach of the current study is qualitative and it is a historical study. Furthermore, the analytical dimensions of the text entails a “process” understanding of the birth and transformation of the city, rather than a “product-centered” examination of it. The period length of the study covers up until the Safavid period. The findings reveal sixty key fundamental components in this field, and in three layers of “history of Arabs”, “Iran’s culture”, and “the Islamic Iranian civilization”. In isolation, the components do not belong to the specific “religion-culture” of Arabs nor Iranians and are a result of a synergistic relationship. A macro approach to the collection of the components makes possible the understanding of how the external process of emergence and growth of the city could be shaped, and also it makes possible the explanation of the phenomena, events and religious and cultural transformations of the Islamic Iranian society and city in the aforementioned centuries