What gave places like the City of Brass and Iram of the Pillars the appeal that they obviously held for medieval Islamicate audiences – to say nothing of modern European readers who might have encountered them in translation? Partly, a background ideology of ruins that made these a safe-ish place for encountering the voluptuous pre-Islamic past without maybe having to admit that its superiority to the present might be anything more than architectural. From the Qur’an forward, ruin-gazing in Islam basically always comes with a reminder that the spiritual truths of the religion both trump and outlast mere buildings, no matter how grand the latter might be.
That’s an element of the story that non-Muslim readers (or even modern Muslims, for that matter) won’t understand without a footnote. However, there’s also an element to the utopian vision of the City of Brass that transcends the medieval Islamicate cultural moment enough to have reappered as a story pattern in modern movies from Indiana Jones to The Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s the act of stealing from dead people – a source of deep pleasure but also enough guilt that it needs to be punished, within the plot, by sword-wielding automata or a giant boulder or Ronan the Accuser or what have you.
How’s this different than winning the lottery, which is narratively boring? Why does stealing from a ruin amount to more than a windfall? Because it’s an act that embodies the hope, basically shared by everyone, that property relations are one day going to disappear. And then, because this is the most verboten of wishes under capitalism, a boulder gets dropped on us. If the punishment fits the thought crime, then we have to admit that the fantasized punishment ends up being a lot more drastic under capitalism (in Indiana Jones, e.g.) than it does under the monarchical despotism of the Arabian Nights. Capitalism judges us much more harshly for imagining alternatives to it than pretty much any earlier political/economic dispensation. If a city of brass is an urban apparatus that punishes us for stealing, then we live in cities that are brassier than ever.