Scholars frame Islam’s urban ideal as paradoxically producing no urban order

Evidence

The urban ideal of Islam created no forms, no urban structure … It replaced the solidarity of a collective community with an anomalous disorganised heap of disparate quarters and elements. By a really very remarkable paradox, this religion endowed with the ideal of urban life produced the very negation of urban order. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 199

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of the ‘Islamic city’ as a disorganized heap is a construct of orientalist urban planning theory?