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Cities in the Islamic world have a long tradition of ethnic and religious diversity. The neighbourhoods of these cities were often divided along geographical, religious, ethnic or vocational lines. In Abbasid Baghdad (8th-10th century), for example, merchants from Khurasan and Bukhara settled alongside their regional predecessors in the northern Ḥarbiyya quarter,  Shiites in the southern al-Kharkh district, while Sūq al-Talāthā’ along the shore of the Tigris consisted of a largely Christian population. In the course of the ninth century, after the return of the Abbasid caliphs from Samarra, the city’s quarters seem to have become more ethnically diverse and socially homogeneous. In a similar vein, the present-day neighbourhood of Bulaaq in Cairo consist largely of the city’s Christian population and throughout the Middle East Armenians have lived together in specific quarters such as in the seventeenth-century Julfa district in Isfahan or the twentieth-century rural town of Anjar at the border of Lebanon and Syria.

Some of these segregational patterns can be traced back to specific political, cultural and economic interventions, others were developed spontaneously because of a particular spatial, social  and economic organization and infrastructure and were linked to market logics. Some of these spatial patterns were resilient while other areas soon became much more ethnically diverse, but remained sometimes socially or vocationally homogeneous. Some of the residential patterns were/are long standing, others are linked to sudden population movements, triggered by migration patterns (forced or voluntary). By taking a broad comparative perspective from a long diachronic point of view, this session wants to trace (changing) patterns of spatial segregation and ethnic and religious diversity in cities in the Islamic worlds from Abbasid Baghdad until present-day Anjar and analyse the ways in which these spatial patterns influenced/influences the daily life of town dwellers. Although the focus is on Islamic worlds, the session also welcomes comparative papers also dealing with other parts of the world.

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• Spokesperson: Maaike van Berkel, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Co-organizer(s): Shaery-Yazdi  Roschanack, University of Antwerp | Peter Stabel, University of Antwerp
• Keywords: Segregation | Urban space | Islam
• Time period: All periods
• Topic(s): Social | Cultural
• Study area: More than one continent