"The 'Médina': Colonial Nomenclature and the Haunting of Scholarship"
Mia Fuller Abstract: Numerous scholars have sought to identify the 'Islamic City' as a particular type of city, with distinct social, cultural, and morphological characteristics. Numerous scholars have also problematized the concept of the 'traditional city' in the minds, texts, and practices of European administrators and planners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonies. This paper builds on both of these trains of thought, in the context of the colonial Maghrib and with specific reference to the term madina, which is generally used synonymously with both the 'Islamic' and the 'traditional' city in that context. In Anglophone scholarship of recent decades, as in French scholarship before it, the term madina has become such common parlance that it requires no explanation: everyone 'knows' that it refers to the old, walled, indigenous, pre-colonial, predominantly Muslim, city. And since the end of the colonial era, that denomination has not changed: it is used by North Africans and foreigners alike. But what has not been sufficiently noted by scholars is that this particular usage of the term - as opposed to its more generic original meaning, 'city' - originated in colonial planning, administration, and toponymy. Thus, ever since French colonialists in North Africa, around 1900, began to use 'madina' more often than they did 'Muslim city' or 'native city', the madina, by definition, has been the Other to the city Europeans built for themselves outside the old walls; the non-modern, non-European city. Drawing on French archival and published materials, this paper explores the history and ramifications of the continued use of this colonial-era term. It suggests that we cannot entirely separate the concepts that informed the practices of French colonialism from the specific terms in which the French couched the elaboration of these same concepts. What originally was a situation of the French using an Arabic term has become one of Arabic speakers using what is now (also) a French term, and when North African planners work on the madina, they inevitably operate within a framework that was devised by colonialists. What are the implications of this for a genuinely 'postcolonial' approach to architecture, planning, and preservation in North African cities today?
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