Land and water: the base of food

This lesson asks you to explain why each key component of food security matters, such as availability, accessibility and sustainability. The museum offers rules about land and water from one legal tradition; the components, the data and Canada's own cases are for your class to bring. The fit is loose: these are rules about land and water, not measures of any component of food security. ¹

For each rule, ask whether it makes more food available, or decides who may use what exists. Match each rule to the component of food security your class has named.

Read how the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence shares public water when it is short. In the record of shirb: when water is short or the channel narrow, the one who was first to bring the land to life has priority; if both came together, lots are drawn ². If some need water for their land and others for drinking and their beasts, the one needing drink goes first ². If the river is great and the channel wide enough for all, each waters when and what he wishes; if the water is little, the first waters his land and lets it go to the next, and so on ². The jurists cite the story of al-Zubayr and an Ansari about the channels of al-Harra ². The cost of cleaning public canals comes from the treasury of the Muslims, and if the treasury has nothing the ruler compels people to repair the river if they refuse, to prevent harm ³. These are rules as the jurists set them out, not a description of what happened.

The record of shirb gives a disagreement about the water of a well or spring on owned land. The Malikis and Shafi'is hold that one whose spring bursts on his land, or who digs a well there, owns the water, but must give the surplus ⁴. The Malikis also hold that he may prevent others from it or sell it, except when someone fears death or grave harm, in which case he must give it free ⁴. The Hanafis hold that water of wells, cisterns and springs is not owned but permitted in itself, and that the digger has a right of priority on his land but may not keep people from drinking or watering beasts from it ⁴. The Hanbalis agree ⁵. The record gives each view with its holders, and the museum decides nothing between them.

These rules come from the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia, which attributes each position to its school ⁴. Al-Maraghi presents agriculture as the oldest livelihood, after Ibn Khaldun ^{6 7}. What happened needs another kind of source. In his chapter on the grants of the Sawad, Miskawayh says that over the years the irrigation channels decayed, public works lapsed, and the cultivators were reduced to fleeing, suffering in silence, or handing their land to the grantee ⁸; the officers in charge of public works left them, and their costs were apportioned among grantees who were slow to pay ⁸. Ibn Khaldun holds that when people sit idle from making a living, the markets of settlement go slack and cities fall into ruin ⁹; that is his own explanation.

The jurists differ on the water of a well or spring on owned land: it is owned in the Maliki and Shafi'i view ⁴, and permitted in itself in the Hanafi view ⁴, yet each view limits what the owner of the land may refuse to others. What does the difference in starting point change in practice, what does it leave the same, and why?

• Shirb (the right to water): the kinds of water, the sharing of public water, the cleaning of canals and the schools' views on selling water rights.
• Agriculture in Islam: al-Maraghi on agriculture, dead land and surplus water.
• Mu'izz al-Dawla's grants of the Sawad: what Miskawayh says the policy led to for the land, the channels and the cultivators.
• Injustice heralds ruin: Ibn Khaldun's chain of effect.

Read agriculture in Islam and shirb, the right to water. Choose one rule from each and say which component of food security it touches, and why.