Services the community looks after

This lesson asks you to name services that a government or the community looks after, such as the market, and to say what people in the community must do for them. The museum offers one office that watched over markets and streets; your class adds garbage collection, snow clearing, and fire and police services. ¹

For one service, ask who runs it, who may use it and what it is for.

Think about what people do so that a service works well, and what might go wrong if they did not.

Jurists wrote handbooks for market officers to work from, and Ibn al-Ukhuwwa's Ma'alim al-Qurba is one of them ^{2 3}. In its chapter on streets and markets, the officer stops people sitting to sell in narrow streets, stops shops pushing their platforms out into the passage, and forbids tethering animals or throwing sweepings in the road ⁴. Ibn Khaldun writes that the officer of the hisba keeps the streets from being blocked, and acts without waiting for anyone to bring a complaint ⁵.

Think of a street you walk along. If a shop pushed its platform out into the passage, who would be bothered, and why would it be fair or unfair to ask the shop to move it back?

• Hisba and the market inspector: the story of the office, from the market of Medina onwards.
• The muhtasib: what the job was and what the person who held it had to know.
• Ibn al-Ukhuwwa: the author of the handbook that describes the officer's work.

Read the card on the hisba. Make a chart with three columns: who ran it, who used it, and what it was for.