In some discourses, the city is regarded variably as a site of corruption, materialism, alienation and anomie; a place where spiritualism, and thus humanity, is absent. The European Romantics' celebration of the natural environment was usually conceived in oppositional terms to the "dark Satanic mills' of the industrial metropolis. In American post-war psychology, cities, with their higher rates of poverty and crime and the mental problems these generated, were unfavourably compared to communitarian rural life.¹ Mao Tse-Tung reviled cities (and cosmopolitan Shanghai, in particular) as embodying all that was worst about the decadent and degenerate West.² In the 1960s, Marxist theorist Guy Debord described urbanism as a highly commodified space, invoking 'separation" and anomie.³ In Turkey more recently, political Islam has also evoked a consciousness of the negative effects of an urban lifestyle which would alienate individuals from their community. Istanbul, a site of mass emigration and urbanisation with an ambivalent status between East and West, offers a fine target.⁴ The idea that a purifying Islamic "reconquest" of the city is on the cards has been around since the 1950s.⁵