Landscape and Mental Maps – A Few Rudimentary Notes
Landscape is surely one of the more vexing terms in the Romance languages. Ken Olwig points out that initially the term ‘landscape’ indicated a region which people have carved with an axe and a plough (that is, human labour was at work in order to construct it) and it belongs to the people that have carved it out.Footnote 5 Further, landscape was understood to be part of a cultural identity and a feeling of belonging to the place. Surely, although landscape signifies an arrangement of things on the land it is not just an accidental array of objects and artefacts scattered on the ground.Footnote 6 Landscape, as the argument goes, is not just simply out there to be studied as a natural phenomenon. It is certainly not ‘nature’ as landscape (as form, meaning and representation) is derived from and connected to human labour and creativity.Footnote 7 Landscapes simply do not exist without human agents and culture. Landscape is society's unwitting biography in which and through which ideas, codes of practice, religious norms and cultural standards take physical form. This is, perhaps, the most comprehensive medium through which societies and individuals have expressed their uniqueness, aspirations, status among many other socio-political needs.Footnote 8 The formation of landscape is inexorably linked to politics, power structures, and surely struggles over meanings and ownership. The creation or rather the construction of landscape is all about power and therefore entails struggles and the use of force. Thus, the construction of landscape is a continuous dialogue and indeed struggle among different forces. Landscapes carry signs and symbols which represent social norms, identity, memory, cultural codes, and surely the ways these were, and still are, fought over and debated among different forces. Landscape is indeed a text and context written by many participants following changing codes of practices, preferences, ideals and more.
The challenges of reading and understanding landscape are legion. It is simultaneously a system of signification but always open to a plethora of interpretations based on the reader's point of view, politics and, by implication, culture. The following excerpt from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities may help explain these trajectories and ruminations on landscape. In this work of fiction, which is set as an inter-lingual dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, Calvino expounds upon the complexities and reflexivity that inhere any city. The following description of Tamara, a fictional city, epitomises the problems involved in reading and depicting the landscape:
Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things. . . Other signals warn of what is forbidden in a given place (to enter the alley with wagons, to urinate behind the kiosk, to fish with your pole from the bridge) and what is allowed (watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives’ corpses). If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean School, the brothel. . . Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.
However, the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. . . .Footnote 9
This reading of the city's landscape renders very clearly the idea of landscape as text. It also makes it clear that any reading of the city's built environment is culturally based (and biased?) and inherently interpretative and reflects among other things the reader's own mental map of the city.
All human beings avail themselves of mental maps, as these sorts of images enable us to wend our way through changing geographic settings.Footnote 10 Like ‘real’ maps, the mental varieties are mnemonic devices that help us navigate through familiar surroundings on a daily basis by structuring and storing knowledge. Kevin Lynch considers the mental maps of urban dwellers to be cognitive images. Besides the images of individual residents, Lynch also believes that there is another type:
There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images, each held by some significant number of citizens. Such group images are necessary if an individual is to operate successfully within his environment and to cooperate with his fellows. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which in different environments is more or less compelling, more or less embracing.Footnote 11
Shared urban maps are predicated on mutual cultural perceptions. These images allow urban dwellers to feel relatively sure of themselves as they make their way through streets, neighbourhoods, institutions and public compounds. What is more, they help residents and visitors (e.g., travellers, tourists and merchants) process a litany of complex variables into a coherent, manageable body of knowledge with which to get from point A to B. Lynch also finds that people use images to connect to places as well as communicate and form strong ties with others in their environment. The individual map, in his estimation, conflates with the public one, thereby forming a common memory. Against this backdrop, Lynch has coined two terms that pertain to the skill of reading and experiencing the landscape: imageability and legibility. The first is “the quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer”.Footnote 12 Legibility is “the ease with which the parts of the cityscape can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern”.Footnote 13 In what follows I will employ Lynch's terminology and findings as part of my effort to further understand the ways in which locals have conceptualised their cities in Mamlūk Syria.
Insider's Look – Take I
How, then, did urban dwellers read the Mamlūk city? What were the mental maps that stood at their disposal? What were the images that had been ingrained in their consciousness and sustained their sense of place? Put differently, how did they read their own landscape? It needs to be said that detailed accounts of Mamlūk Syria's towns are lamentably scarce. However, two compositions by local residents have survived. The first is a text by the Ṣafad native Shams al-Dīn al-‛Uthmānī.Footnote 14 The second is the astonishingly comprehensive work of Mujīr al-Dīn al-‛Ulaymī (d. 928/1522). Both documents offer a rare and intimate look at how the empire's residents viewed their hometowns.
Shams al-Dīn al-‛Uthmānī served as the judge (qāḍī) and narrator (khatῑb) in various mosques of Ṣafad during the second half of the fourteenth century.Footnote 15 The present discussion is concerned with his narration Ta'rīkh Ṣafad (“the History of Ṣafad”), which was probably written sometime between 774/1372 and 778/1376.Footnote 16 In the introduction, al-‛Uthmānī promises his readers a comprehensive history of Ṣafad from the Mamlūk conquest in 1265 to the events that transpired during his own lifetime. According to al-‛Uthmānī, he endeavours to remove the “veil behind the beauty” of ‘his’ city and province.Footnote 17 Needless to say, people often develop a sense of loyalty to their extended place of residence.Footnote 18 Therefore, it is only natural that a deep sense of belonging and a burning indignation over the fact that Ṣafad and its environs were misrepresented and certainly under-represented were among the principal motivations behind the writing of Ta'rīkh Ṣafad. It also bears noting that this book is targeted at the judge's social milieu, namely people from a similar religio-scholarly background; or, as al-‛Uthmānī put it himself, “those whom God granted passion for noble knowledge”.Footnote 19
Most of the writer's actual description of Ṣafad is set within the framework of a dialogue between two fictional local residents: the first, the cynical (ba‛d ahl al-zarf), who harps on the town's shortcomings; and his imaginative positive interlocutor who sings its praises. Through these voices, al-‛Uthmānī discloses his urban perception and the central landmarks on his mental map of the Galilean town. According to al-‛Uthmānī, Ṣafad is a wonderful city, despite the lack of “regular urban planning”.Footnote 20 Although the book does not spell out what “regular urban planning” consists of, al-‛Uthmānī subsequently provides a smattering of clues. The conspicuous and menacing citadel serves as the focal point and the most iconic landmark of the author's mental map, as the fortress comes up several times in his description. The way the city soars over its immediate surroundings also draws considerable attention. For example, he recounts a local story according to which the city's name derives from the word aṣfād or shackles. This derivation implies that Ṣafad's residents are metaphorically shackled to their homes by the extreme cold of this high-altitude town. Al-‛Uthmānī also elaborates on the satūrā, which is apparently a sophisticated device for supplying water to the citadel's reservoir. According to the writer, the satūrā is operated by three mounted riders whose circular movement lifts buckets of water to the fortress’ main pipe. This supply is primarily intended for the soldiers that are stationed in the citadel, but surplus water is channelled to Ṣafad's civilian areas. The next largest edifice in this account is the Red Mosque, which was built shortly after Ṣafad fell into the hands of Baybars. The mosque's courtyard is depicted as a place of ‘mercy and grace’.Footnote 21
These attractions notwithstanding, al-‛Uthmānī is not content with enumerating the city's existing buildings and institutions. For instance, he chastises the community for its lack of a single madrasa and for failing to provide any religious education whatsoever. Moreover, he quotes a passage from al-‛Umarī’s work on intermittent water shortages that befell the town, despite the storage system that Sultan Baybars installed. While on the topic, al-‛Uthmānī describes the pathetic conditions of the local bath houses. In addition, he bemoans the fact that houses are clustered into an unmanageable heap and squares cannot be distinguished from the streets that merge into them. He pins the dearth of various urban infrastructure and facilities, such as a defensive wall, ribāṭs and madarasas, on the lack of generous patrons. This statement thus sheds light on how urban communities operated and how their own citizens felt they should be run. In order to compensate for these cultural-urban shortcomings, al-‛Uthmānī praises the area's natural landscape. For example, he mentions that local residents stroll in the deep gorges and ravines that surround the city, and the town's salubrious qualities, including its fresh air, render it an ideal place to recuperate from sickness.
In summation, al-‛Uthmānī provides a unique balance of commendation and rebuke. Furthermore, his account offers a rare glimpse at how contemporary citizens grasped provincial Mamlūk cities, as it is undoubtedly based on a certain reality that the author experienced as a denizen of Ṣafad. Along with the icons that comprise and sustain his mental map or imagery, The History of Ṣafad also stands out for what its author omitted. As evidenced by the accounts of Ṣafad that were written by visitors, al-‛Uthmānī left out elements that definitely existed in the city during his lifetime. Perhaps the most salient feature of this account is the author's willingness to highlight the city's inadequacies. This suggests that he had a vision, a notion, of what constitutes a city. Through his description of the advantages and shortcomings of his hometown, al-‛Uthmānī articulates a clear vision of urbanism. It is through this vision that he negotiates his criticism of Ṣafad. The writer measures Ṣafad against his own template of a city and builds his description accordingly. The outcome of this process is a highly specific mental map. In any event, he deftly deflects personal responsibility for these critical views by ascribing them to a cynical character. Since the History of Ṣafad was apparently dedicated to the province's Mamlūk governor, amir ‛Alamdār (in office 774/1372-778/1376) it stands to reason that al-‛Uthmānī was not at liberty to critique the personal shortcomings and apathy of state officials.Footnote 22 Besides reporting on the Ṣafad he actually experienced, al-‛Uthmānī paints a portrait of the desired, yet unfulfilled version of his hometown – an imagined landscape that serves as a foil for the imperfect and earthly city he knew.
Insider's Look – Take II
Unlike his Galilean counterpart, the Jerusalemite Mujīr al-Dīn demonstrates a deep and unabashed local patriotism, which runs like a thread throughout his book. Early on in al-Uns al-jalīl bi-ta'rīkh al-Quds wa'l-Khalīl, the fifteenth-century Ḥanbalī judge states his motivations for this undertaking. Apparently, he set out on this ambitious task of writing a book about Jerusalem (although Hebron is included in the title, the attention it receives pales in comparison to Jerusalem) because he could not find any existing book that fits the bill.Footnote 23 Mujīr al-Dīn's keen interest in the city's Islamic elements and heritage is manifested by the very structure of al-Uns. The author starts with a lengthy history of the pre-Mamlūk city, which indeed concentrates on its Islamic influences. For instance, he provides an in-depth survey of Faḍā’il Bayt al-Maqdis (“Virtues of Jerusalem”), a literary genre aimed at bolstering Jerusalem's lofty religious status.Footnote 24 Similarly, in Mujīr al-Dīn's exhaustive disquisition on local notables, most of the subjects are pious scholars of Islamic canonical texts. The final part of the book analyses the urban events that transpired during the judge's lifetime, especially during the reign of Sultan Qāītbāy. Footnote 25 At the very outset of the book, he declares that the primary objective of this undertaking is to provide a complete history of Jerusalem and Hebron.Footnote 26 Unlike other cities in the region, Mujīr al-Dīn felt that his hometown had yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. What is more, he is motivated by the fact that “I have seen people yearning for such a work”.Footnote 27 This book is arguably the most comprehensive history of the city during the Mamlūk period. Mujīr al-Dīn's vast and intimate knowledge of Jerusalem, the abundant sources that he leaned on and his meticulous approach make this thick tome an invaluable database on the city and other towns in the region.
Jerusalem, according to its native son, is a densely-populated city, quaintly nestled between mountains and valleys. Summing up his topographical survey of the city, Mujīr al-Dīn concludes that “[t]he construction of Jerusalem is of the utmost solidity and firmness; all [the buildings] are made of hewn white stone, with no bricks or any wood used in the roofs. Travellers have said that in all kingdoms there is no place more solidly constructed or more beautiful”.Footnote 28 This description of the stone roofs is indeed commensurate with the findings of the vernacular survey that I conducted of the city's Mamlūk-era structures.Footnote 29
The passage below not only confirms Mujῑr al-Dīn's infatuation with Jerusalem, but enhances our understanding of the centrality of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf on the mental map of the city's residents:
And as for the way Jerusalem is viewed from afar, it is a marvel renowned for its radiance and its fine appearance. . . If Gods allows an aspiring visitor to reach the noble al-Aqṣā Mosque and the noble Tomb of Abraham, from the moment he sees these glorified places, he will receive so much delight and joy as can scarcely be described, and he will be relieved of hardship and fatigue.Footnote 30
The importance of the Noble Sanctuary also comes across in Mujīr al-Dīn's topographical survey. Focusing on architectural marvels of Islamic religious or pious significance, Mujīr al-Dīn starts out with a detailed portrait of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, which is the hub of the surrounding concentric layers that comprise the rest of this survey. The description follows in concentric and growing circles from the Ḥaram to the rest of the city and beyond of mostly Islamic pious buildings and landmarks.
Especially relevant to understand his mental map is Mujīr al-Dīn's spatial descriptions of Jerusalem's topography. His account substantiates not only Ḥaram al-Sharīf's role as the pre-eminent religious and spiritual centre, but [to] the precinct's centrality in the mental map of the city's Islamic population. Indeed, during the Mamlūk period members of the elite of the Mamlūk Sultanate were heavily engaged with constructions within and without the compound. The Noble Sanctuary's religious standing lured numerous dignitaries to endow and build institutions in the vicinity, which were complemented with new gates and streets leading to the sacred area. In turn, the streets surrounding the holy precinct were adorned with bustling markets, bathhouses, pilgrimage lodges, madrasas and Sufi centres. In light of all the institutions and bustle, this extended area formed the epicentre of the inhabitants’ mental map.
However, all this applies mostly, if not exclusively, to the Muslim population, as the city's other communities had their own hubs and landmarks. Jerusalem's non-Muslim buildings and areas warrant little attention throughout the book. Mujīr al-Dīn does briefly touch on the existence of about twenty churches, but only mentions a few of them by name. The most conspicuous Christian institution in Mujīr al-Dīn's account is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, he refers to it as Kanīsat al-Qumāma (“the Church of the Garbage”), thereby distorting one of its real names, Kanīsat al-Qiyāma (“the Church of the Resurrection”).Footnote 31 This flagrant expression of contempt was hardly a one-time occurrence during the Mamlūk era.Footnote 32 As the sultanate's power eroded over the course of the fifteen century, the animosity between sectarian groups took a sharp turn for the worse. This socio-political development was punctuated with outbursts of violence.Footnote 33 Additionally, Mujīr al-Dīn practically ignores the city's Jewish populace. One of the only references to a Jewish synagogue comes as an aside to Mujīr al-Dīn's recollection of a lingering dispute between the local Muslim and Jewish community.Footnote 34
The Muslim-dominated east side receives his undivided attention, whereas the entire area west of the city's main boulevard—starting at the present-day Damascus Gate (Bāb al-‛Amūd) and running south up to the Gate of Zion (Bāb Ṣahyūn)—constitutes an exceedingly peripheral section of his mental map. His image revolves around Jerusalem's prominent Islamic area. The wide-ranging and highly-informative description of Islamic topics (buildings, events and people) stands in stark contradistinction to the scarcity of data on Christian and Jewish matters. It is quite evident that Mujīr al-Dīn's mental map is inconsistent with the city's ‘actual’ layout during his lifetime. While the citadel on the western edge of town certainly stands out on Mujīr al-Dīn's map, there is a void between this installation and the nearest cluster of Muslim buildings, most of which are to the east of the main thoroughfare. Lynch refers to these neglected areas on the urban mental maps of local residents as “edges” – “elements not used or considered as paths by the observer”.Footnote 35
The author's cognitive image of Jerusalem is clearly driven by his socio-cultural background and predispositions. More specifically, Mujīr al-Dīn's mental map is a product of his educational background as a religious legal scholar and his personal inclinations as a devout Muslim. In other words, the way he reads and narrates the urban landscape is directly influenced by his personal history and upbringing. His reading of the cityscape is organised around prominent, inherently Muslim cultural landmarks. On the other hand, the Christians institutions—even the most famous shrines—barely merit a word and have little impact on the way he negotiates the city. Similar to al-‛Uthmānī, it is rather obvious that Mujīr al-Dīn's focus is on Islamic cultural elements and spatial images.
Concluding Remarks
Al-‛Uthmānī and Mujīr al-Dīn indeed belonged to the same learned strata of Syrian urban society. For this reason, the extent to which these two authentic local voices can be considered representatives of the entire Muslim community is far from certain. Drawing on Lynch's hypothesis of a public common cognitive map, I contend that they do fit the bill. While the formidable citadel, the main Friday mosque and other Muslim elements are showcased in their mental images of the Mamlūk city, their sensory and spatial experience cannot be solely reduced to the landscape's Islamic components. The surrounding environment, external influences and the unique characteristics of each city are also featured in their intimate description of their respective hometowns. Both of these accounts, especially Mujīr al-Dīn's, indicate that there were substantial discrepancies between the authors’ mental maps and the existing urban landscape. If we compare description of the city against the landscape of the city as emerging from an extensive field survey and acquaintance with the contemporary Old City in Jerusalem the discrepancies are staggering. While the city holds, to this very day, a rather dominant ‘Christian’ landscape or at least an impressive number of Christian sites adorning its landscape Mujīr al-Dīn seems to omit them from mental map. He focuses almost solely on the Muslim contribution and constructions in the urban landscape. Thus, when we conflate the mental map of the storyteller (the conceptualised city) to the very landscape of the city (the tangible city) we become more aware of the depth and complexities of landscape as a system of signification which is assembled not only by those who constructed it but also by those who interpret it. As I conclude this discussion I would like to reiterate Beckingham's astute observation which started this chapter: “[T]he study of travel narratives, especially travel narratives about a culture quite different from the traveller's own, can be very revealing, not only about the culture he observed, but about the culture to which he belonged”.Footnote 36 Apparently one does not need to go far from one's native culture to narrate a city and tell its story in conjunction with one's own cultural perspectives. Both works discussed throughout this chapter are surely valid texts from which we can understand cities better. Be that as it may, they are also in the most de Certeauian sense ‘storytellers’ and therefore susceptible to a very culturally biased description of ‘their’ urban landscape. Understanding the complexities of landscape and the lively theoretical discussion that still accompanies analysis of spatial stories of the urban is exactly what I suggested in the introduction. However, unlike the pessimistic approach of Calvino I suggest (in a more optimistic vein) a methodology and a theory of the urban which help to get closer to a better understanding of the tangible and the socially constructed and conceptualised city and landscapes – that is the built environment writ large.
