Le città del mondo musulmano tra globalizzazione e autenticità

This essays clarifies the conceptual framework that has been adopted in this issue of the journal. Since the 19th century, the imaginaton and the materiality of private and public spaces have been sites where ideas of authenticity and modernity were deployed, contested, and challenged in many urban areas of the Middle East and North Africa. After a brief assessment of the existing literature on urban history in Islamic contexts, the essays highlights how the notion of "Islamic City" is today problematized. A simplistic dichotomy between native/traditional and imported/modern is also problematized in favour of a more nuanced appreciation of anxieties, contradictions, multiple layers of identities, perceptions and conflicting interests.