Water Provision in Early Islamic Cities: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Urban Water Governance

The need to supply water to the cities of early Islam, and share the collective resource between different urban users, created a fundamental relationship between rulers and citizens that required both top-down and bottom-up participation. Due to the limited nature of surviving textual and material sources of evidence, however, exploring the details of how this was achieved in early Islamic cities is a difficult task which requires the integration of both textual and archaeological data. This chapter considers key aspects of early Islamic cities, including their urban plan, social structure and organisation, to provide a holistic understanding of how water was supplied to, managed within and used by individuals in these urban settlements. While the roles of elites in planning, financing and constructing hydraulic infrastructure are paramount in the textual sources, several strands of evidence point to the roles played by both individual households and larger communities, such as tribal groups and military units, who must have co-operated to manage the water supply collectively. Though major infrastructure was predominantly planned and implemented by state authorities, often in cooperation with elites, the distribution of this water at the micro-scale frequently seems to have been mediated through communal action and private, often commercial, initiative.