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
The market inspector keeps the street and the trades
Let the market inspector (muhtasib) keep each trade in its own row, forbid shopkeepers and householders to build benches, awnings or walls out into the street, see that drains are covered and streets cleaned, and keep trades that make smoke, stench or noise away from where they do harm.
The office of hisba (the enforcing of right conduct in public) made one official responsible for honest weights, the quality of goods, and the good order of the streets. Ibn ‘Abdun’s manual for Seville is full of practical rules: the dimensions of bricks and tiles, the cleaning of the river bank, the placing of the potters and the tanners, the prohibition of encroachment on the public way.
Around the Friday mosque of a western Islamic city the result was a zoned centre: booksellers, perfumers and the silk market near the mosque, noisier and dirtier trades further out, and a closed market hall (qaysariyya) for the precious goods, shut and guarded at night.
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, “The market inspector keeps the street and the trades”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/hisba-market-order. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.