Muslim culture is characterized by the extraordinary mobility of its people. For centuries, Muslims have matter-of-faculty traversed distances that daunt even the modern traveler in the Middle East. But Islam was born in a land with hundreds of years of experience in trading on land-routes between the Yemen and the Mediterranean. And the revelation of Islam was entrusted to Muhammad, a man from a trading family who had himself been to Syria at least once by camel-caravan. By the middle of the 7th century, the armies of Islam controlled territory from the Pyrenees to Central Asia. These peripheral areas were kept within the dar al-Islam (House of Islam) as much by the constant provisioning by caravan as by military garrisons and governors. Islam's secondary -- and for the most part peaceful -- expansion along the coastal regions of India, southeast Asia, and north Africa also followed in the wake of routes opened by traders. Accessibility, whether for commercial or for military reasons, was always to be a significant factor in the choice of sites for the many new cities founded by Islam.

In addition to a long established commercial tradition, Islam imposed upon its followers the supreme reason to travel: the performance of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and other holy places on the Arabian Peninsula. According to the Qur'an:

'Pilgrimage to the House is a duty to Allah for all who can make the journey.'
(Sura 3:974)

However, religious and commercial activities were by no means mutually exclusive: It shall be no offense for you to seek the bounty of your Lord by trading.
(Sura 2:199)

From early Islamic times, Muslims who made the hajj carried goods with them on their return from Mecca to defray the costs of travel. By the 9th century, the practice had begun of visiting the shrines in lower Iraq where Ali, the fourth caliph, and his sons, Hassan and Husayn, had been martyred. Other shrines of saints in other parts of the Islamic world also increasingly attracted pilgrims in search of baraka (blessings). Thus it was, that for commercial, religious, or educational reasons, much of Islam was constantly on the road.

Three specific kinds of structures contribute to the typical Islamic market: a network of covered streets; a securely gated and covered edifice in the midst; and khans, the urban equivalent of the caravanserai. Any Muslim settlement with a market also had a number of hammams (public baths) since Islamic law demanded complete immersion on certain occasions and at least one bath -- and often more -- was found in the market district.

It is important to realize that while all towns of any pretension had a central market with covered streets, khans, a secured structure, and a hammam clustered around the congregational mosque, capital cities and larger towns were composed of many quarters, each containing the cardinal elements of a town -- mosque, bazaar, and hammam -- on a small scale and without the specialized structures of the central market. Like the central market, these elements were often grouped at the crossing of roads at the chaharsuq (literally 'four sides' or 'four roads'). This concept is expressed in the most common names for markets in Islamic countries: the Arabic suq for the covered streets of the market and, by extension, the market itself; and the Persian chahar-suq or chahar-su for the major intersections within the covered network of market streets.

As in the Classical world, Islamic suqs were normally covered and, if a statement applicable to the entire Islamic world can be made, it is that beaten earth, mud, and wood tended to be replaced by brick and stone vaults or domes whose most permanent expressions do not commonly survive from before the 15th century. Canvas awnings or tents, however, were the more usual protection for markets that sold foodstuffs and livestock in open areas. These transformed the areas into temporary but regularly occurring markets. Important exceptions were the horse markets of Mamluk Cairo and Aleppo for horses were prestige wares in the Mamluk aristocracy and were sold at the foot of the citadel inside the city walls. The stone facades of certain buildings in Mamluk Cairo, the madrassa of Sultan Hasan for example, display a permanent reminder of these temporary markets - the fenestration on the side of the building facing the maydan, an open area, does not begin for some meters from the ground, leaving a blank wall against which awnings could be pitched on market days.

The segregation of goods and trades, so characteristic of Islamic markets, is also of Classical origin and was paralleled in medieval Byzantium. When Ibn Battuta visited Constantinople in 1331, he noticed that the spacious, paved bazaars were organized strictly according to what was being sold. He also remarked that each bazaar had gates that were closed at night. This is a feature of a specific Islamic market structure usually called the qaysariyya, an oblong hall, roofed and colonnaded, often (and always in Ottoman Turkey) domed, with a door at one or both of the short sides that was securely locked at night. Its form is derived from the Classical basilica, and its name is said to commemorate a covered market built in Antioch by Julius Caesar and called kesaria by the Byzantines.