A fountain for a neighbourhood

This lesson asks you to evaluate the environmental, social and economic factors to weigh when designing and building structures that meet specific needs of individuals and communities. The museum offers one structure built for a public need, the sabil; your class must bring other structures and judge the factors itself. ¹

Sort what you find into three kinds: what it takes from the surroundings, whom it serves, and what keeps it running. Note which of your points the record states and which you add yourself.

Al-Haddad, whose study the record on the sabil follows, counts sabils an important branch of civil building in Islamic architecture, falling under what he calls "charitable buildings or foundations" ². Sabils received great care in their siting, building and decoration, and in the many endowments that kept them working ³. They drew water from wells, pools and springs or from rain and floods through well-built channels or pipes hidden in walls, and some had one or two cisterns ^{4 5}. In the Encyclopaedia of Islam's account of the waqf, a person, intending a pious deed, declares part of their property unalienable and names persons or public utilities as beneficiaries of its yield ⁶.

It is easy to take "sabil" to mean only a drinking fountain. The author holds that in the Middle Ages sabil did not mean only a drinking building but was a term for many buildings endowed "in the way of God": water sabils, troughs for animals, sabil schools for orphans, sabil khans for strangers and sabil mills ^{2 7}. The word then clung to water buildings alone until it prevailed over other terms, especially in the Mamluk period ⁷.

The record says sabils drew water from wells, pools, springs or rain, and that many endowments kept them working ³. If you built a fountain for your own neighbourhood today, which would you plan first: the water source, the people it serves, or the money to keep it running, and why would the other two fail without it?

• The sabil: its names over the centuries, where its water came from, and the care it received.
• The sabil-kuttab: a two-storey building with a public fountain below and a children's school above.
• The waqf: how the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes founding a charitable trust.

Read about the sabil. Make three columns, environmental, social and economic, and place under them what the record says about its water, its users and its endowments.