Florindo Fusaro. La Città Islamica

"Attempt to identify the distinctive characters of the historical fabrics of the Islamic city in their current configuration, as a result of the permanence of methods and forms, and as a result of different stratifications and historical phases." This is the incipit by which Florindo Fusaro breaks into the literature on the Islamic city as a careful investigator of urban phenome-nology and of the anthropo-cultural dimension of architecture. Referring to the Chatremerre de Quincy semantic opposition between “type” and “model”, Fusaro high-lights how the city cannot be reduced to "an abstract model or scheme". Largely inspired by Quaroni's organicist vision but also by Muratori's territorial one, this work struggles between the impulse to classify the forms of the built environment to unmask the common roots of Islam and the need to narrate places in order to identify spe-cific local values. Fusaro focuses his reflection on the paradigm of the opposition and balance of oppo-sites in Islamic culture and architecture. The entire narrative path thus moves, alternately investigating the Islamic dualism of being a sedentary community and, at the same time, a nomadic one. On the opposition between the strong condition of closure, darkness and density of urban living, and the maximum openness, luminosity and extension of living in the horizontal and undefined landscape of the desert. On the conquest of a growing or-der, in the passage from the chaotic and wild world of the open space of the landscape to the controlled and domesticated world arranged within the urban walls, or again, from the organic world of the urban dimension to the intimate and geometric world of its sa-cred and domestic spaces. On the symmetry of opposites that he discovers in the tension between Muslim and non-Muslim districts of a city, between the vital and commercial dimension of urban places and the intimate and spiritual dimension of its buildings, be-tween the democratic use of public places and the sectorial use of private ones, very dif-ferent formal impulses but identically inescapable. On the contrast between the organic structure of Islamic settlements and the radiocentric dimension of the territory of Dar al-Islam. In this intricate maze of contrasts, Fusaro tries to explain the complex link between the city and the Islamic faith. Here, the Koran and the Sunna, seen not as absolute rules and measures but as precepts subject to human interpretation, show a way of being a community that is declined in the specificity of places but is, at the same time, common to the whole of Islam, making the inviolability of the principles of faith overriding with re-spect to the unmodifiability of forms.