_The Sacred Direction and City Structure: A Preliminary Analysis of the Islamic cities of Morocco

City planning in Islam appears to have been rather rudimentary compared to planning in the cities of ancient Greece and Rome; public space and buildings were less common, and the strict grid pattern of the classical city was unknown. Yet in most pre-modern cities of the Islamic Middle East a clearly orthogonal structure of housing and streets is manifest. In an earlier analysis of Iranian cities I demonstrated that their orthogonal morphology resulted principally from the rectangular irrigation and field systems into which housing spread and that slope characteristics played the predominant role in the orientation of those systems.’One factor which was investigated as a possible influence on the orientation of Iranian cities was the mosque. In Islam, Muslims pray toward the Ka’ba in Mecca, the sacred direction, or qibla. The mosque had then to have a qibla wall where the mihrab or niche was located that faced toward Mecca, and this almost always rectangular building also ought to have had rectangular streets around it, which would also be orthogonal to the qibla. If the mosque were built first, as it often was in newly established Islamic cities, then the street pattern could be expected to evolve around and from the mosque. In Iran, however, no such correlation between the qibla direction and the street pattern could be established; in those few cities that were oriented to the qibla the relation appeared to be a coincidence of slope and direction to Mecca. Possibly this was because most Iranian cities existed before Islam, and so the basic city structure and orientation were established before the Islamic period.