Japan Launches Major Study Of Arab Society: Urbanism in Islam

By Alice and Yasumasa Kuroda

Japanese concern with Islam prior to 1945 was motivated more by national interest than scholarly interest. For the same reason, interest in Islam and the Middle East surged tremendously during the first energy crisis in 1973. Following that event, several institutes designed to study the Middle East were established by Japanese government agencies and business organizations.

Last year, however, mobilizing 128 scholars from these institutes and universities throughout Japan, Yuzo Itagaki of the University of Tokyo launched a large-scale cooperative study of the Arabs under the title "Urbanism in Islam." The study is supported with some $4.4 million from the Ministry of Education's "Scientific Research on Priority Areas" program. Although it is supported by the government of Japan, the cooperative study appears to have no direct linkage to Japanese government policy toward the Middle East. The study treats Islam as a religion developed in an urban setting, thereby linking the study of Arabs to the study of urbanization.

In fact, 60 percent of the scholars in the study are from fields outside of Middle East. They appear to be motivated by a desire to replace stereotypes of the Arabs with more realistic images, and also to learn from the Arabs about their urbanization process. The study group publishes a newsletter called Madiniya (Urbanity in Arabic) edited by Akira Goto of the University of Tokyo.

Challenging Western Assumptions About Urbanism

The study challenges the traditional paradigm of cities based on the Western model. It focuses on Islamic cities and Mesopotamia, the site of the world's first (Sumerian) cities. It represents a departure from viewing urbanization as if it were conterminous with Westernization, and a new paradigm for the study of Arabs by non-Arabs.

The study is divided into four major groups: 1) 13 research teams on different but related subjects, 2) three data collection and retrieval groups, 3) a group that evaluates and assists projects of groups for the two previous categories, and 4) a coordinating body that manages all these groups of scholars. Data entries are in English, Japanese, Arabic, and other languages. Some of the scholars have already traveled to the Middle East to do their field work.

The study does not exclude non-Japanese participation in the project. The group invited Anouar Abdel-Malek from Egypt and Nurcholish Madjid from Indonesia to spend several weeks in Japan. Tsugitaka Sato of the University of Tokyo is preparing for the first international conference on urbanism in Islam to be held in Tokyo on Oct. 23-28, 1989.

Sato, upon his return from field work in Cairo, Ibnis, Algiers, Rome, Athens, and Damascus, commented on the inclusive nature of the Islamic world. Unlike residents of Japanese cities, urban dwellers in Islamic cities form extremely heterogeneous societies including Arabs, lbrks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and others. In spite of diverse ethnicity and religiosity, these cities seem to maintain order and safety. Sato contrasts this inclusive and tolerant nature of Islamic cities to Japanese exclusiveness. Perhaps this is an area in which the Japanese can learn from the Arab history of diversity, creativity, and tolerance. Furthermore, his colleague Itagaki claims that the history of Arabs is the history of coexistence among different religious groups who placed utmost value on safety and fairness to all. Islam, as an integral component of the People of the Book, developed contractual business relations among different religious communities in order to make the region safe and fair to all. Itagaki warns Japanese against viewing the Arabs through the Western perspective and urges that Orientalism free itself of the Occident.

Alice Kurodo is president of Minerva Research Inc of Honolulu and a former member of the University of Hawaii faculty. Yasurnasa Kuroda is a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and teaches courses on the Middle East and Japan.