Free The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) by Joel Kotkin Page B

al-Islam. Connected to Cairo by southerly trade routes, Timbuktu by the fourteenth century had grown into a city of fifty thousand. 30
    The Persians controlled the even richer trade routes to India and China. 31 In cities such as Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz, burgeoning transcontinental trade, supplemented by local industry, created sprawling bazaars that, along with the mosque, served as the central points of a renewed Iranian urbanism. 32
    By the fourteenth century, both Persian and Islamic cultural influence began to have an impact on nomadic groups such as the Turks and Mongols, whose conquests gave them control over cities in Central Asia and India. These centers had origins that often predated the Islamic conquests, but the new urbane religion sparked brilliant new varieties of city life.

     

INDIA’S ISLAMIC REBIRTH
     
    India would emerge as a primary case in point. A major center of urban civilization during the Mauryan Empire between the fourth and second centuries B.C., 33 India would ultimately fall into a decline; with its urban centers largely atrophied, warring, competitive states wreaked havoc on one another, and long-distance trade suffered as a result. 34
    Equally critical, the Hindu-inspired caste system weakened India’s urban evolution by stigmatizing trade and depressing curiosity about the outside world. The eleventh-century Arab historian Alberuni observed:
    The Indians believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs. . . . They are by nature niggardly in communicating what they know, and take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste from among their own people, still more of course from any foreigner. 35
    The triumphant Muslim sultans, like their Arab predecessors in the Near East and North Africa, quickly reinvigorated India’s cities. They professionalized administration, improved roads, constructed inns for travelers, and encouraged trade links with the outside world. This boosted not only bustling trade cities, such as Cambay in Gujerat, but also the emerging administrative center of Delhi, a city conquered at the end of the twelfth century.
    When ibn Battuta visited Delhi under the rule of the Muslim Tughluq dynasty, he encountered “a vast and magnificent city . . . the largest city in India, nay the largest of all the cities of Islam in the East.” The capital had developed a large marketplace and drew scholars, scientists, artists, and poets from throughout the Islamic world. 36
    Although the vast majority of Indians in the country remained Hindus, Muslims dominated urban centers throughout the subcontinent. Muslim traders, along with some Hindu merchants, managed profitable coastal trade routes between the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. 37
    Large portions of India’s drugs, spices, luxury goods, and slaves also found their way to the coastal cities of China, where both Muslim merchants and missionaries had established a presence. Yet China was not destined to become part of the Muslim world. Instead, it represented a distinctly different center of urban civilization, one whose magnificence and power rivaled that of Dar al-Islam.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    CITIES OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
     
    A century before ibn Battuta, a group of Venetian merchants traveled across the vastness of Central Asia to the East. Like their North African counterpart, the Polos found that most cities across these vast tracts followed the faith of Muhammad. It was only in Lop, today located in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, that Islamic influence began to fade before more distinctly Chinese influence. 1
    Initially, the rise of Islam had represented something of a setback for China’s cities. Under the Han dynasty, which flourished at the time of the western Roman Empire, and again under the Tang in the seventh century, Chinese merchants had controlled the lucrative transcontinental trade route all the way to the edges of