The attempt to define the character and substantial characteristics of the “Islamic city” has been a long-cherished endeavour in twentieth- and twentyfirst- century Western scholarship of the premodern Middle East. A range of studies has sought to identify key trends in the development of the urban topographies of Middle Eastern cities over the transition from Roman and Sasanian to Islamic rule and then throughout the premodern period, as well as some of the features that might be considered definitional for a Middle Eastern city in that period. Quite a substantial amount of this work – albeit far from all of it – has been undertaken from an archaeological and architectural standpoint, with the literary testimonies of premodern Arabic and Persian authors being taken into account less frequently. In one sense this is quite surprising, since we possess a relatively large number of extant local histories of individual cities written from the ninth century onwards. We might expect these works to be able to contribute something at least towards the debate.

This might be a reasonable expectation, but is it actually an appropriate one? We often think of many of these Arabic and Persian local historiographical works as “city” histories and their titles certainly suggest that this is the case. Nevertheless, we might question the extent to which histories of individual cities actually give us historical depictions of those cities’ urban topographies. In a broader sense, the question could be posed as: are we correct to call these works, as we often do, “city histories,” or are they rather histories of something else? And, following on from this, can they contribute to the debates over the perceived nature and characteristics of cities in the premodern Middle East?

By the mid-to-late eleventh century, when al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādiī (d. 1071) came to finish his enormous and what we might call “genredefining” – at least in the sense that many later works cite it as a model for emulation – Tārīkh Baghdād, Arabic local historiography was already well underway as a branch of historical writing. Roughly thirty works or parts of works written before his history of Baghdad are still extant today, and there are references here and there – some far more incidental than others – to more than one hundred other works that have now been lost.