Rationality: Blight of the Muslim Built Environment

Westernization is an environmental blight because of human rationality.

After the enlightenment in the 18th century, human judgment became the demarcating criterion for all scientific and cultural developments including architectural and planning disciplines.

The modern Muslim world followed this epistemology, although the built environment is so complex for any human rationality.

Thus, the limitation of human rationality developed a narrow environmental knowledge that was imposed on the vivid diverse cultural and geographical regions of the Muslim world through modern and post-modern aesthetic values, industrialization, standardization, professionalism, planning codes and above all capitalism that has its own socioeconomic decision making process resulting in shallow cultural diversities.

The paper will argue that the Islamic legal structure is distinctly different. In traditional environments, the Islamic legal structure generated decision making process that empowered end-users who created unlimited environmental solutions to suit their diverse cultural and geographical specificities. Through certain principles developed by the Islamic legal structure, those solutions were screened and then successful ones were imitated resulting in similarities and environmental typologies for each region leading to deeper cultural diversities.

The traditional binding yet liberating Islamic legal structure (God’s Wisdom as most Muslims believe) has been replaced, ironically, by a contemporary suffocating environmental systems based on human liberty and rationality.