Orient the prayer hall so that its principal wall, the qibla wall, stands square to the direction of Mecca, and mark the middle of that wall with a niche, the mihrab.
qibla wall ⟂ direction of the Kaaba; mihrab on the axis
Markets outside the walls, each trade in its own street
Keep trade out of the ruler’s city: move the markets to a suburb outside the walls and give each trade its own street or row, with the noisome trades at the far end.
At first the shops occupied the arcades along the four gate streets. In 773, the story goes, a visiting Byzantine envoy remarked that enemies could come and go freely among the merchants, and al-Mansur moved the markets out of the Round City to al-Karkh, south of the Sarat canal. There, al-Ya‘qubi says, each trade and craft was allotted its own streets and its own rows, so that no one mixed with another; the chroniclers add that the butchers were put at the far end.
The arrangement (trades grouped by kind, supervised by an inspector, and kept apart from the seat of power) became the norm of the Islamic market town.
Related rules
Build the congregational mosque as an enclosed courtyard (sahn) with a covered prayer hall (haram) on its qibla side and shaded porticoes (riwaq) on the others.
Build the tower for the call to prayer in the form of the regional tradition: square and stepped in the Maghreb and Spain, cylindrical and tapering in Iran and Central Asia, needle-like and polygonal in the Ottoman lands.
Lay out the capital as a circle with four gates at equal intervals, each facing the region its road leads to, and put the ruler’s palace at the centre, so that no part of the city is further from him than any other.
4 gates on the diagonals (Khurasan NE, Basra SE, Kufa SW, Syria NW); palace at the centre
Defend the circle in depth: a moat, an outer wall, an open space between the walls, and a massive main wall with towers; bring each road in through a gate that turns, and set a domed chamber over the main gate from which the country can be watched.
Leave the centre of the city open: set the palace and the congregational mosque side by side in a great court, and allow round its edge only the guard, the police and the offices of state: no private houses and no markets.
palace 400 × 400 cubits; mosque 200 × 200 cubits; Green Dome 80 cubits high
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Markets outside the walls, each trade in its own street”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/baghdad-markets-outside. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.