The media continues to influence our lives with an ever growing capacity, for it is no longer solely in print form and thus commands a much larger potential of accessibility in a much shorter span of time and space. For many, the print edition still offers the best experience of the news but with a much smaller frequency, velocity, and flexibility. Such an influence that comes along with the amount of exposure and yet instant mutability of new media forms brings up concerns about the “values” that set the main guidelines for this power and change in media outlets. This was our main topic of discussion this past March and April in Singapore, Jakarta, Melbourne, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, and Shah Alam. We are thankful to local organizers in these cities for their cooperation. We are especially indebted to Professor Radhi al-Mabuk from the University of Iowa and Professor Jon Pahl from The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, who generously spent their time with us during this tour and gave presentations in each of these cities on our behalf. You will find in this issue brief notes and photos from the “Media and Values” panels, in addition to two other The Fountain Talks events in Austin, TX and Manhattan, NY. We would like to offer our appreciation to the local organizers of these events. For more information, please visit www.fountainmagazine.com.

“An Ardent Prayer” leads the current issue. It is the prayer of a painful heart filled with sorrow for our weakness in responding to the blessings bestowed on us; a heart that is concerned with the troubles of our society and yet hopeful for the divine mercy as he prays to be treated not according to our distance from Him, rather in light of His proximity to all of His creation.

“My Treasure Jars” comes from a lifetime resident of the Appalachian Mountains. Belinda Sturgill shares with us a very thoughtful piece on what a woman, a mother, and a grandmother can leave behind as a legacy to her family, to her nation, and to humanity. This is an award-winning essay from The Fountain Essay Contest of 2010.

Our interview with Dr. Priya Natarajan from Yale University is another “treasure jar” in this issue. She describes her job as “building a story line for the universe.” Who else other than a cosmologist could dare to offer such a description of her work? Or perhaps we should put the question the other way around: who on the face of this earth does not want to learn the story line of the universe?

ENIAC had cost around $500.000 and was capable of 5000 simple operations per second. Today, basic personal computers (PC) cost around $500 with enough processing power to perform millions of operations per second. An average PC is enough in terms of computing power for everyday use like word processing, checking emails, and computer games. However, some areas in scientific research require computers at the frontline of current processing capacity, called Super Computers. Twice a year, the TOP500 project, which started in 1993, ranks and publishes details of the 500 most powerful super computers in the world. The IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was announced as the fastest supercomputer in the world as of May 2008.

In computing, “flop” (Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a measure of a computer’s performance which is similar to calculations per second. The IBM Roadrunner had cost $133 million and had a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, which is around 1.7×1015 operations per second. The Roadrunner was delivered on 21 tractor-trailer trucks to its current location. Supercomputers are an essential component of research in areas like computational biology, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and cancer research, which requires high computing power.

While computers get faster every year, their computing power is way behind when compared to a human brain. They consume hundreds of times more energy than a brain. It is estimated that a computer will be able to simulate a human brain in seven years, yet we are decades away from expecting a computer that can think like a human and make decisions. The brain is one of the most miraculous parts of the human body, full of mysteries. It works more efficiently than any machine developed in the last 50 years of the computer history.

However, the human brain is not the only body part which has an incredible computing power. In 1994, Leonard M. Adleman, a professor at the University of Southern California, introduced the idea of using DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) to solve computational problems [3]. This idea then led to a new field of science, called DNA Computing, which combines two disciplines, biology and computer science, to build the fastest and smallest computers ever. DNA is known as the blueprint of life, with unique properties such as self-assembly, molecular recognition, minute size and high information density.

Computationally challenging problems have known solutions, but enormous amounts of resources (time and/or cost) are required to find the optimum solution. Some problems, such as optimization, can be solved by generating many possible solutions, and then selecting the optimum one. Standard computing methods can generate or test a possible solution one at a time. On the other hand, parallel computing methods can carry out this process simultaneously for thousands of possible solutions.

Similarly, enzymes can work in parallel for replicating and repairing DNA strands. They can even work on the next strand before the first one is replicated. An enzyme can replicate a DNA strand 500 times in a second, which is equal to 0.001 MIPS (million instructions per second). The computations in DNA can reach to 1014 MIPS, while a modern computer runs at an average of 1000 MIPS. DNA computing is not only faster in processing, but also much more efficient in energy consumption. The energy consumption of a DNA operation (on one strand) is about 1010 times less than the energy consumption of an operation on modern computers.

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most studied problems in computational mathematics. Here is an example of the problem: a traveling salesman needs to visit 20 cities once, with predefined starting and ending locations, and certain rules. The complexity of the TSP problems increases exponentially with the number of cities, so problems with only hundreds of cities will take thousands of years to solve by modern computers. If there are 18 factorial possible paths in this problem, it will take 2 whole years for a computer with 100 MIPS of processing power to generate the possible paths and find the correct answer. However, all possible paths can be generated in a very short time by using DNA computing. A simplified version of the Traveling Salesman problem presented by Adleman involves the following scenario:

A salesman wants to visit the cities (Figure 3) Monroe, Gainesville, and Conyers, starting from Athens, and arriving at Atlanta last. Each city should be visited only once. The cities are not fully connected. While some cities are connected to another in one direction, others are connected in both directions. Our objective is to find the shortest route to visit all cities once. The solution for this problem is a travel from Athens -> Gainesville -> Monroe -> Conyers -> Atlanta.

When we convert the problem to a molecular language, each city is coded as a single-stranded DNA molecule with 8 nucleotides. We can think of nucleotides as bytes in computer programming, which will take the value 0 or 1. Nucleotides exist as four bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). All cities are coded with eight nucleotides as follows:

City Code

Athens ATGC CATG

Gainesville TCAG GTCA

Monroe GACT TGAC

Conyers CGTA ACGT

Atlanta AGCT TAGC

Connections between two cities are coded with the last 4 nucleotides of the departure city and the first 4 nucleotides of the arrival city. For example, the connection between Athens (ATGCCATG) and Monroe (GACTTGAC) is coded as CATGGACT. The complementary codes for connections (the Watson-Crick complements), where every C is replaced by a G, every G by a C, every A by a T, and every T by an A, and connection codes are given below:

Connection Code Complementary Code

Athens – Gainesville CATG TCAG GTAC AGTC

Athens – Monroe CATG GACT GTAC CTGA

Gainesville – Atlanta GTCA AGCT CAGT TCGA

Gainesville – Monroe GTCA GACT CAGT CTGA

Monroe – Conyers TGAC CGTA ACTG GCAT

Conyers – Atlanta ACGT AGCT TGCA TCGA

Conyers – Monroe ACGT GACT TGCA CTGA

The mixture for performing reactions will include DNA strands and their complements for 5 cities and 7 connections between cities in our example. If an Athens molecule (ATGC CATG) encounters the complement strand of an Athens-Monroe (GTAC CTGA) connection in the mixture, a hydrogen bond will be formed between strands (Figure 4). Other strands will continue forming bonds for valid connections between cities, building a complete travel path with the help of DNA ligase. There needs to be enough copies of each DNA strand to generate all possible travel paths.

ATGC – CATG

| | | |

GTAC – CTGA

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) will be used to make multiple duplicates of DNA strands containing Athens (start) and Atlanta (end) cities. The result of PCR will be the amplification of correct travel from Athens to Atlanta, which makes it easy to separate. PCR is a method by which a few strands of DNA can be copied into millions in a very short amount of time. This also makes PCR a very important method to increase small amounts of DNA found in blood or hair samples, which could be enough to carry out analysis and reveal a person’s identity in forensic science.

Electrophoresis follows the PCR process to sort the resulting paths according to their sizes. Since every city is coded with 8 nucleotides, the correct path should include exactly 40 nucleotides representing a full path for 5 cities. The gel electrophoresis process uses an electric field to separate DNA strands by size as they travel through a gel matrix. The speed of DNA molecules differs by their size, which results in the sorting of the molecules by size. After this step, DNA strands starting with the code of Athens, ending with the code of Atlanta and with a size of 40 nucleotides are separated from the mixture.

The last step will be reading the code and removing the DNA strands that didn’t contain all the cities. Adleman used a common method known as affinity purification for the separation process. Finally, the mixture has the DNA strands with the correct travel path, starting from Athens and arriving to Atlanta, and traveling through every city once. All the laboratory work looks complex for this simple problem, but as a new concept for computing, it is revolutionary. In its ability to perform parallel computations, DNA computing shows great promise over traditional computing approaches.

Data density is another unique advantage of DNA. Billions of DNA strands can be stored in a regular laboratory tube. A DNA strand is composed of bases A, T, C and G spaced evenly, 0.35 nanometers apart from each other. The data density of DNA is around 106 GB (gigabytes) per square inch, which is 100,000 times larger than the data density of today’s storage technologies (7 GB per square inches). Moreover, DNA is a durable and strong molecule; the information stored within it can be kept for thousands of years in the right conditions. In 2008, 80% of the woolly mammoth genome, several thousand years old, has been identified from tufts of frozen woolly mammoth hair [4].

DNA is also created with remarkable mechanisms such as built-in error correction. The double stranded nature of DNA provides a double check on pairing. Error repairing enzymes are always ready to search for anomalies during the DNA replication process. It results ina ratio of one error per billion replications. DNA is located and protected at the center of each cell with a perfect balance. The miraculous architecture of DNA has waited for thousands of years to be understood by humans and be used for the benefit of the world. Further studies on DNA might open new opportunities to help researchers in solving technologically challenging problems.

Acknowledgment: This article was produced at MERGEOUS [5], an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realms of science and religion.

Halil I. Demir is a postdoctoral scholar in the area of Informatics, and lives in Iowa.

References

[1] ENIAC, Image Credit: Wikimedia, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Eniac.jpg

[2] IBM Roadrunner, Image Credit: Wikimedia,

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Roadrunner_supercomputer_HiRes.jpg

[3] Leonard M. Adleman (1994-11-11). “Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems.” Science, 266 (11): 1021–1024.

[4] Miller, W (et al). 2008. “Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth”, November, Nature.

[5] Mergeous, http://www.mergeous.com

In earlier times, our houses, roads, and neighborhoods were all neat, nice and warm. Our pleasures and enjoyments, our understanding of aesthetics, our perception of the arts were each a reflection of our spirit and of the profundity of our world of thought. Our homes were a place of rest and relief in the soft and smooth bosom of nature. Our neighborhoods were each a display and a stage where our world of thought and philosophy of life were exhibited and staged. Our roads that were crowded with mosques, Sufi lodges, schools, and other educational institutions and that made us think, feel, and emotionally inspired as if they were corridors opened to the metaphysical realms were the quintessence of liveliness and exquisiteness, getting us to a journey to a world of fancy evoking more charms and delights than that which is real-a journey imbuing our hearts with the most romantic feelings. Such was our places that we have gotten to know and possessed the experience through those still in existence; and we have seized up those that ceased to exist through the lens of the remains of those yet left.

Once we could constantly feel the mother nature extremely close to us physically and emotionally as if we were held and fondled lovingly in our mother’s bosom; we would never had the feeling of being away from the beauties but would make ourselves acquainted with the manifestations of the Most Beautiful of the Beautiful at different wavelengths at every single day. We would open our windows and doors whenever we wished and let those bountiful Divine beauties becoming manifest all over the place flow even into our bedrooms. We would turn our cottages, houses, villas, and mansions into a nice, charming spot in the universe in proportion to their caliber and could live the joyest of pleasures and the highest of excitements in such a miniature place of bliss. Again whenever we wished we would turn from our dwellings towards our surroundings, fill our ears with multifarious tunes and melodies resonating in the bosom of the entire existence and entertain our hearts with the most pleasing of the musical sounds.

Those days, we would imbibe-as if drinking in sips or taking breaths-all the beauties of our gardens and orchards that were more beautiful than the ornate tails of peacocks and more flamboyant than the wings of butterflies; we would live unquenchable joys and pleasures while taking a glance at the vicinities evoking in our minds the spectacular views of heavenly panoramas.

Just like our homes, our streets, neighborhoods and even towns and cities-with all parts and in all aspects, were like a special spot in the heart, a perspective of our sentiments, and an image of our thoughts reflected in various shapes. We would scent out and find in them the inclinations of our souls, their connectedness with our aspirations and all the immensity and profundity of the features making up our identity. No matter whether worn-out or well-kept, colorful or faded, our homes and streets were like living beings whispering constantly the lyrics of an immense message of the past.

All those buildings and residential areas with their cultivated, delicate, elegant, and oriental characteristics-exactly similar to the polite and courteous people dwelling in those houses, walking through those streets, and residing in those neighborhoods, were somewhat romantic, and more than that they looked like the corridors of heavenly pavilions and the shades of heavenly sceneries.

Some houses from among them were so exuberant and dynamic just like an establishment dedicated to worshipping or educating people. Looking from this perspective, they looked as if one could see the pure companions of Paradise in them. As every soul and sound in them spur mysterious inspirations-like a bud putting out new shoots, we would be filled with amazement and feel ourselves face-to-face with the most invisible and the most unknown of the lights, patterns, shades and hues.

Some of those houses would plant themselves in front of us as if they were petrified records of history and relate many, many stories to us through the fading and rusts here and there, through their calcified façades and their ages old artistic styles, and through the signs of wear and tear formed on their walls as a result of the happenings in the course of time.

As soon as some of those houses came into our view with a stance and style of their own-resembling our virtuous mothers with their loose outer garments evoking chastity and respect in us, they would make a way into us with seriousness, dignity and awe, and would blow self-control and possession into our spirits.

Still some other houses would look like a sign and symbol indicative of the beauty, profundity, grace, elegance, and mellowness of their indwellers through their pleasant colors of rosy pink, orange red, deep chestnut, violet, and lavender blue.

The expanse of our faith, the utmost end of our hopes, and the expectations of the furthest kind would come just before our eyes whenever we saw those houses reflecting the meaning, essence, tint, and style of a shared belief, a shared culture and a shared civilization with the heavenly profundity. The elegance, artistic style and beauty of those houses were so profound and so harmonious with the book of nature that the blueness of the azure sky and the gorgeous patterns of the earth were in close association with most of those houses, and as such one would think of each and every one of these houses as a cradle swaying between the lights, colors, and patterns of the earth and the skies. While one looks around or contemplates right before them, they would feel themselves up in the skies according to the immensity of their imagination and would be mesmerized as if they were the children of incredible bounties.

It was this good taste and pleasure in our landscaping, architecture, and city planning evoking in mind and spirit the feeling of connectedness between the earth and the skies-the feeling that aroused in such people as Pierre Loti (1850–1923) to have their last sleep in the shade of our sycamore maples that are as peaceful as the gardens of Paradise.

Those who lived in our houses and neighborhoods would feel the melodies in all tones, see the flowers blooming in all shades of color in our gardens and woods almost all the time, and experience the joyest of pleasures at the face of the dazzling harmony of the entire existence. Through their openings-one to the skies and the other to the earth, these houses and mansions would make one able to behold such an immense size greater than a hundredfold of their vastness of size and would become a door to the infinitude beyond their spatial largeness.

It was like a fairyland enchanting everyone with those houses in our towns marked with congruence and harmony with one another and those in our villages with their beauties at different wavelengths-with all these houses that provided relief and gave pleasure to the senses; with our roads long drawn out in loops; with our spacious mansions and palaces holding their heads high, honest and blameless as if they personified in concrete form the independence of an efficacious heart in the highest degree. It was such an enchanting land with our houses of prayer as the very heart of this entire harmony; with the minarets at one corner of these places of worship-just like an emphatic interjection in a discourse-proclaiming the greatest truth several times a day; with little domes that are gathered around the essence hidden in the spirit and meaning both the minaret and the mosque communicate; and with a compact group of religious schools, healthcare facilities, hostels and soup kitchens that are like a group of hatches taking refuge in and walking around a sitter. It was such a captivating land with the gardens, woods, swinging cypresses, breezes blowing with fragrant smells, free-standing fountains, drinking fountains, and bowers all over the place that were designed with a unique taste, some of whom were in peace and watchful and some in loud clamor-all of them were in a race to convey a message to us.

People in those days would rush from cities to the country for a change of air and seek for the pleasure of cheerfulness and joy, peace and serenity, and privacy and seclusion, or they move from villages to cities which were not too noisy at the time, experience the elevation, solemnity and seriousness of urban life, and would become accustomed to more systematic and broadminded urban ways. With the belief that they attained more profundity in both thoughts and feelings in cities, they would keep moving there and back.

Alongside the general outlook of the urban and rural life with a shared intellectual and cultural attitude, one could notice the diversity within society that is worthy of mentioning. Every single village, town, or city was kind of reflecting the same matter in a distinct way and expressing, so to speak, a metaphor in a poetic manner in different ways of versification. To a certain degree, each and every single one of them revealed a different style in attitude, composition, and evocative qualities. Each one of them was a miniature of the entire world reminiscent of a feast and festivity in a state of exhilaration, warmth and fervent ecstasy-a miniature formed and built up through hard work and physical and intellectual efforts lasting for ages, attaining a profound aesthetic beauty, and dazzling with their animate and inanimate accessories improving them.

Metropolises were, so to speak, a concord of fineness and beauty in every way through the strenuous efforts of the grand architects and the landscapers with thriving aesthetic tastes. The beauties of our orchards and gardens impressing our hearts like a poem; the stretching of our plains and meadows in joy; the monumental stance of our hills and mountains; the gentle murmuring of our drinking fountains and rivulets into the hearts; the graceful tulips everywhere dimpling up to us as if smiling; the rubicund cheeked roses with diffusing fragrance that we know fairly well for ages; our sweet scented carnations and pinks that are sharp and biting to the taste as if saying, “there is no rose without thorns”; the pleasant daisies that are so common in our lands and thus suffer our aloofness and disregard; the small violets that are so beautiful and yet so low at the soil level as if they are the symbol of unpretentiousness and meekness; the lilies that are so choosy and unwilling to become familiar; the tender, delicate magnolias which are as sensitive as our hearts; the hyacinths as our next door neighbor and relative; and the camellias and orchids that we become familiar later on-all these beauties with a smell reminiscent of elegiac tunes and the colors bringing to mind the eternal beauties would inflame the hearts that were amorous with eternity and would constantly remind us of the realm to be sought. When the chirping of the birds, the humming of insects, the bleating of the sheep, and the breathings of those who love each other for the sake of God were added upon all these beauties, everywhere would become thoroughly imbued with the heavenly shades and hues. Everywhere was vivacious, warm, and joyous like the Garden of Eden and menagerie at such a blessed period of time when nature was preserved and forests were protected.

In such a world time used to pass so much differently that a few hours spent there would turn out to be so copious and fruitful; it would become perpetual, never passing out of our mind.

I do not know if we could unearth and breathe life into these memories we have witnessed and experienced or those we have been told and have still kept in remembrance; however, I will always miss the “Paradise Lost” with its gardens, orchards, gardeners, and everything within it.

In this discussion we will look at typical architectural forms of the Islamic city which reflect the social and cultural characteristics of Islamic community, and the impact upon the Islamic city and its Muslim inhabitants of the cultural invasion by modern Western (i.e.post-industrial) practices in urban design.

Architectural changes in the Islamic city

It is difficult to identify the architectural characteristics of cities in the Arab region before the advent of Islam because some have vanished and others have been greatly altered by developments after Islam. Most were established in the river valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the littoral of the Levant and the southern Mediterranean. The prevailing type of major human settlements the Muslims encountered was the Greek-Roman type, a chess-board plan of equal sectors around the forum as administrative and commercial centre. Otherwise, the settlements were clusters of houses, more like villages rather than cities, and separated by open lands. Archeological remains show that most of these houses had internal yards to cope with the climatic and environmental conditions. There were also advanced engineering systems to provide the cities with water and irrigation. Greek colonies had long been established in urban settlements in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, as well as in parts of Egypt and North Africa. These were taken over by the Romans when they extended their empire to the eastern Mediterranean areas. There, they built cities sited and garrisoned for military purposes but soon afterwards transformed into commercial centres with markets and factories. Roman cities were distinguished from other cities in the southern and eastern Mediterranean region by their rigidly hierarchic arrangement of buildings and houses-the governing elite being nearest the centre and the lowest classes being furthest away.

This architectural pattern remained in place unchanged till around the middle of the seventh century when the rule of Islam spread, with unprecedented speed, out of the Arabian Peninsula westward across North Africa, northward over Asia Minor, and eastward across the former Persian empire. The region then witnessed the highest architectural growth in its long history. The Muslims followed Islamic Law and Islamic teachings on social and cultural aspects of community life in managing the cities they had conquered and the new cities they founded. Of the latter the most important- Basra (I4AH/635), Kufa (17AH/639), Fustat (21AH/641), Qairawan (48AH/670) and others-were large garrison settlements to start with but, as provincial administrative capitals, grew in size and importance as centres of Islamic learning and civilization-Fustat, for example, became Cairo.

While city planning and building necessarily responded to local conditions, there are typical architectural features by which the Islamic city is distinguished. The most important of these is the congregational mosques, built to express and focus the religious commitment of the Muslim community and its solidarity. The commercial and administrative activities and associated buildings grew around this central symbol of the Islamic city. An equally significant feature was the division of the cities into quarters where the Arab settlers were first housed: in many cases the different quarters are still called by the names of the clans who first inhabited them. There were also separate quarters for non-Arab converts to Islam from among the conquered peoples and, later, quarters also for the non-Muslims, the different areas being linked by roads and lanes and joined to the common centre.

The city was surrounded by a wall which, in addition to providing

some defence in the event of military attack, protected the inhabitants against the sand-laden desert winds. Access into the city was by large gates in the city walls, then along the main spinal roads where the commercial activities were concentrated. Workshops and small factories were situated side by side, often co-operating in the production of different articles. Islamic schools were situated around the central mosque, often funded by the rentals from traders in the nearby marketplace which typically had associated craft-shops such as book-binding and book-selling, sign writing, carpet making, etc, close to the central area. Commercial centres also grew up around the main city gates, serving the residential areas of the city and outlying villages. From the commercial centre, streets and roads branched out, usually becoming narrower and more winding, more disposed to provide seclusion than general access, into the residential quarters. Here too, there were smaller mosques and prayer-halls, but this was, broadly speaking, the private as distinct from the public part of the city, and intended to provide peace and quiet, intimacy and security, to the inhabitants. This arrangement, with its public/private division is still visible in some of the older cities of North Africa.

The elevations on the Islamic city streets are distinguished by their plainness and simplicity, very few openings and the low height commensurate wh the width of the streets. In contrast to the simplicity of architectural expression of the exterior facades, the interior of the houses was rich in architectural details and ornamentation, varying according to the tastes and means of the occupants. Thus, while simplicity and likeness on the outside confirmed the solidarity and egalitarianism of the community, the variety and wealth of the interiors allowed for individual freedom.

As noted above, building design varied from location to location, with different architectural solutions being adopted to suit different conditions. The wind tower (malqaf) is an example. In the dry hot areas it is directed to the north where winds blow most times of the year. Thus air is funnelled from top to bottom through moist elements in order to increase the percentage of moisture in the air and so enhance the feeling of coolness during the hot summer days. In more humid areas, the air corridor is pointed to all four sides in order to increase the chance of catching the wind flow, and the air is directed from top to bottom through moisture-absorbing elements to reduce the effects of summer humidity.

Though a central market-place is a common architectural feature of Islamic cities, public squares never achieved the prominence they have in Western cities, with the exception of some examples such as Shah Square in Isfahan, an impressive 510 m by 165 m and surrounded by shops and overlooked by the splendid Shah Mosque with its many domes at the entrance of the main city market.

With the decline of the Ottoman Turkish state from the late seventeenth century onwards, as the trade and commercial life of the Islamic world was squeezed by the expansion of the maritime powers of western Europe, the Islamic cities fell into a corresponding architectural decline and chaos. Thus, the golden epoch of the Islamic city in the Middle East was during the period between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, continued into the eighteenth century in the area under Ottoman rule in such places as Istanbul, Bursa, Konya and Bosnia. In the nineteenth century, following the industrial revolution in Europe, European economic and military superiority began to curtail the independence of Muslim peoples all over the Islamic world, most of whom were eventually colonized. The changes that followed affected the social and economic life of the Islamic world and the changes were reflected in the architecture of the Muslims’ cities. Cultural values that had prevailed in the Islamic city were set back, and the Islamic city lost its cultural identity and its distinct architectural feel.

The modern city, needing to provide large populations with utilities and public services, called for new patterns in urban planning contrary to the planning patterns of traditional cities. These new patterns were imported to the Islamic world from the West together with Western technologies, and cities came to be designed for road networks for vehicles and utilities networks. Western architectural forms appeared in public buildings like banks, courts, universities, schools and administrative centres, as well as in private palaces and private homes. Thinkers and architects in the Islamic world have been deeply disturbed by these changes and have searched for forms which can link the contemporary Islamic city with the values, teachings and spirit of Islam, an effort that is part and parcel of the general quest to rebuild a contemporary Islamic civilization.

Traditional Islamic architecture and modern dwellings

According to Islamic tradition, man is the high aim or object of creation, born perfectible though capable of sin and charged with the responsibility of constructing a beautiful world, almost a reflection of Paradise. So, in Islam, a work of art can be regarded as the product of human will and effort, individual and collective, to make the world (and human life in the world) beautiful. That is one of the reasons why architecture has been prominent among other fine arts in Islamic societies.

Western domination of Muslim lands has had its effect on architecture. As in the modern West, Muslim intellectuals have ceased to see life an integrated whole, and deal with the problems that arise separately, with little care or attention to the consequences of their solutions for the life of the community as a whole. Modern attitudes give priority to the material dimensions of life, to the short cycle of production and consumption, investment and drawing profit. This makes it very difficult to build for beauty, to build for the generations to come. That is why newness and being modern is part of the self-consciousness of even the most important public building projects in the West, and it is difficult to see how aggressively modern buildings can become loved over the centuries in the way that the pre-modern traditionally built monuments are loved, and loved as beautiful even when they are in ruins. A modern building in ruins is unbearably ugly. The emphasis on material considerations has of course also meant a cruel functionalism, the reduction of building to the economic calculation of maximum rent per square millimetre of land, or maximum dwelling space for minimum production costs. The effects on design and choice of materials of these considerations has resulted in the towers of steel and cement which so alienate and depress modern city- dwellers. The contemporary Islamic city has not, unfortunately, escaped the pressures to conform to the styles dominant in the Western cities.

The modern Islamic city is no longer a unity or totality encompassing the family, the district, the natural environment, unifying action with the spiritual, the functional with the beautiful, the private secluded space for family residence with access to public space for communal, collective activities. Individualism has captivated almost all people, with the result that almost no one tries to build in accord or harmony with his neighbours, near or far, but tries to outdo them. Ostentation in exterior facades has come to characterize both private and public buildings, with individuals trying to show off their wealth or taste, and corporations or departments of state trying to project their power or authority onto the streets to impress passers-by.

When human existence began to be viewed as made up of disconnected material and spiritual elements, the arts, architecture included, inevitably reflected the change. Art is not now that beauty of man-made things which appears (and should appear) in the ordinary use of things, to add (like good manners) grace to ordinary living, to elevate the spirit. Instead, art has become that which is seen in special objects, prized and priced by specialists, pieces for the museum: the beautiful carpet is hung on the wall. Architecture of course has to be useful, practical, and has consequently suffered the worst extreme of the effects of commercialism and mass-production. Thus, families are not linked to each other by shared spaces leading into accessible areas where they do things in common like going to the mosque or the market, but are instead stacked one on top of the other in residential towers of steel, concrete and glass, as physically near to each other as ever but near without easy accessibility, so that people feel crowded without feeling together. The pressure of land values has become so intense in certain cities that, in some individual buildings, as many as 30.000 people may come and go each day, with all the necessary services laid on: as exercises of human power and planning, these buildings are spectacular achievements, but insofar as architecture is supposed to provide an environment which expresses the values of human life and symbolizes great human aspirations, these buildings are failures. The values they express are this-worldly materialism and commercialism, functionality disconnected from the higher purposes and the deeper needs of human beings.

Belief in eternity is central in Muslim life and has had a very particular influence on Islamic architecture. Belief in eternity leads a Muslim to see everything as formed in an infinitude of time and space which cannot be changed by man, cannot be divided into parcels. What first interests a Muslim architect is, rather than the size and shape of the site, the architectural features in spatial infinitude, that is, the relation of the site to its environment and how the whole space around the site fells. The site is seen in its full environmental context, not as a fixed and separate volume exploitable for some specific building purpose. That is why the traditional Islamic constructions, especially those for public use, were complexes of buildings– mosque, school, pool or fountain with faucets at the sides for ablution, library, bath houses, and residential rooms for teachers or students.What first catches the eye is not the individual buildings composing the collection, but the collection itself, so it is experienced as a whole with all its fronts, from top to bottom, from bottom to top. (In the West, the mediaeval collegiate buildings in the ancient universities like Oxford or Cambridge which were derived from Islamic models, are the nearest equivalent though. of course, being cut off from the normal life of the towns in which they were situated, these buildings do not have the feel of Islamic mosque-madrassa-market-place complexes.)

The infinitude of space in Islamic architecture showed itself both in the horizontal extension seen from windows, and in the vertical extension symbolized by the minarets and domes of mosques. Intimate courtyards, often arcaded with asymmetrical arches, set off by trees, gardens and flowers, and surrounded by high walls, symbolized privacy: while their firmness of construction symbolized the hope of eternity and beauty everlasting. The roof lines, bay windows and wooden latticework over windows, the terraces and the variety of interior ornamentation expressed spiritual richness, serenity and quiet, a kind of solemn peace at ease with itself-this is especially characteristic of Turkish architecture with its wealth of naturalistic motifs.

The older Turkish houses especially were dwellings providing both privacy and sociability-dwellings where the sanctity of family life was deeply felt but whose seclusion was not an isolation because the structure was complementary to similar residences spaced closely in the whole district. They inspired the feeling of a meaningful, modest existence and were lively, secure and spacious, homes in which the residents lived conscious of their own identity and of their belonging to their community.

Islam is based on unity in multiplicity and harmonious wholeness of opposites. It frees man from intellectual and spiritual fragmentation, unifying his life on the basis of tawhid. Tawhid, that is, attributing all existence to God and affirming His Unity, without associating any partners with Him, is the integrative principle of harmony, able to align the physical with the metaphysical, the functional with the ideal, the corpo-real with the spiritual, and the individual with the communal. All dimensions of man’s earthly life have their proper stations within the matrix of Tawhid so that each can serve its function and enable man to be at peace with his whole being, his self, his family, his community and the natural world, and ultimately to earn happiness in both worlds. Tawhid enables a Muslim to maintain a holistic view of life; to see the city and its districts and their functions, and his home, within the one same whole, as fully interconnected and interdependent. It is unsurprising if a Muslim is exceptionally challenged and alienated by the assumptions and values which underlie modern Western thinking and the cities it has produced.