Journal of Researches in Islamic Architecture

Searching for the criteria of Islamic settlement in current situation of Iran is seen as an important issue in Iranian urban planning. One of them that is rarely taken into account by designers and housing planners is the Islamic house as a productive unit. The mission of this research is to find suitable kinds of production from Islamic point of view for conducting at home via searching Islamic basics and instructions. Then by referring to modernism as a key factor that has shaped the social context of contemporary Islamic world, situation of domestic production in it is reviewed and its undesired effects on home culture and design of Islamic world is considered. So the essential question of this study is the status of production and productive activities in traditional Islamic houses, the nature of modernistic view of the subject and contemporary condition of Iran and Islamic world. Here after general study of the matter in both traditional and modern era, an inquiry is conducted among house-wives of the city of Qom. The samples were selected intentionally upon their religious life-style to study that how Islamic view of home-based production is pursued in contemporary religious society. A composed questionnaire of closed and open questions was prepared and distributed among 35 families who partially known by research group. Some analyzes were about productive activities advised by Islamic holy texts such as weaving and keeping productive animals at home or those that could be seen in direct line with them such as home-based foods. One important analyze was due to meaningful differences between productive life-style of dwellers of apartment houses and those who lived in row houses with front-yards. This showed a considerable difference among them as front-yard houses showed much more potential for productive activities. Another main difference was seen between age-groups of 20-40 years old and 40-60 ones that the recent one were more active in home-based production. Some main analyzes were concentrated on kitchen space as modern center of production at home. The main phenomenon is that there is huge concentration of works in space in modern houses. The transformation from traditional wood hearth kitchens to modern open kitchen, although is viewed by some as a progressive process towards elimination of placing women as second gender, but could be interpreted more reasonably as a restrictive change in woman territorial claim on home area; this means that her mere functional presence at home was only limited to have lunch cooked and other jobs of her at home were conducted in lively spaces of home even with neighbor women; and this cannot be seen as servant-type works but as lively jobs of everyday; there, her freedom to choose jobs places around the house made her territorial claim on home very stronger. It is also true about working times of the kitchen while it was active one time a day for pre-modern wife, now it should be active almost all day long. Changing temporal division into spatial one that restricts women’s claim to kitchen, is main cultural result of modern housing in this respect, but even in this circumstances, the above mentioned religious force has yet strong effects. Sacredness of productive space of kitchen was asked through some different questions. A sign of sacredness in perception of kitchen for Iranian housewives has been old custom to separate food disposals from other debris especially in terms of using independent swage system (even specified swage well) for dishwashing which might consist of some remainders of food (specially bread and rice). It was asked in the questionnaire to make comparative statements about certain topics and this separation of swages was one of them. Only in two cases, it was seen unimportant. If we add to this the fact that 13 of 15 emphasized on necessity of not turning back to Holy Direction of Mecca (Qiblah- although it is not regarded in new house designs), it can be concluded that even now kitchen has some strong aspects of sacredness in imagination of these Muslim housewives. In summary, findings of the research show that domestic production is of great value in Islamic thought and this role has been manifested in the form of specialized home spaces (from temporal and spatial configurations made by productive activities) and modernity has confronted with this subject via two contradictive approaches (optimization of domestic work or omitting any productive work from home space). Since the second approach was the one preferred by modernists, results of modern culture for Islamic society brought about non-productive domesticity. But this does not mean that now there is no home-based production in contemporary Islamic societies. It is an important reality as well as an idealistic goal that should be considered in architectural design of future which could be realized by identifying of all required or desired home-based productive activities, appropriation of house designs for incorporation of them and making architects, designers and housing planners aware of their role and responsibility in materializing this idea to fulfill this need of dwellers.