Cities and Metaphors

In this book, Somaiyeh Falahat engages in a deep analysis of space in Fez, Tunis and Isfahan. Using the Persian concept of 'Hezar-to', she shows us how the relationship between spaces and in-between spaces constitutes a unique nature that reveals and conceals reflecting continuity and separation simultaneously. The work provides a significant contribution to the study of abstract space in the 'Islamic City'. Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley, USA This book is an invitation to take a fresh look at the historic Islamic cities, change our perspective and think about them in a new way. It explores the cities of Fez, Isfahan and Tunis from a phenomenological perspective to capture and describe the experiential and sensual aspects of the urban space, and to become sensitive to their interiority, ambiguity and liminality. Ali Madanipour, Newcastle University, UK. The importance of this book lies in its author's carefully substantiated argument that the sensually perceived, spatial characteristics of premodern Islamic urbanism have been neglected in scholarship; an oversight she attributes to an excessive reliance on cartographic methods for the comprehension of urban space and an inadequate conceptualisation of this space. Avoiding the first error by proceeding phenomenologically, and the second by unpicking and simultaneously developing, from an emic perspective, the etic concept of the labyrinth, Somaiyeh Falahat opens up new ways of knowing historic Islamic cities. Simon O'Meara, School of Arts, SOAS, University of London