Sharing and carrying water

This lesson asks you to explain how municipalities process water and manage how it is used. The museum holds no record on treating water. It offers three records on managing and supplying it: the rules for sharing public water, the public water building known as the sabil, and a method for laying out the route of an underground water channel. How water is cleaned and how a modern municipality works are for the class to bring. ¹

The expectation asks about management. For each record, find who may use the water, who looks after the channels or buildings, and how the supply was brought to the people.

Imagine a channel that runs past several fields and carries too little water for all. The Kuwaiti Encyclopedia of Fiqh, which the museum's record of shirb follows, reports the rules the jurists give. When water is short or the channel narrow, the one who was first to bring the land to life has priority, and 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. For a channel dug by several people, the ruler divides the water with a board pierced with holes in proportion to shares ³. Beside such rules stood a building, the sabil, a charitable building endowed to give people fresh water every day all year round ⁴.

The records preserve no sentence in which al-Karaji says why he wrote about finding water. They show the problem his manual meets: the chapters cover indications of water, soil types, measuring devices, opening tunnels and cleaning them ⁵, and the heading on folio 26r of a later copy introduces levels that the text says the author devised ⁶. Biographies associate his principal mathematical works with Baghdad and Buyid patronage and describe later engineering interests ^{7 8}.

The jurists do not all answer who owns the water of a well. The Malikis and Shafi'is hold that someone who digs a well on his land owns the water but must give the surplus ^{3 9}. The Hanafis hold that the water of wells, cisterns and springs is not owned but permitted in itself; the digger has a right of priority on his land, but may not keep people from drinking or watering their beasts from it ^{9 10}.

When water is short, one rule gives the first turn to whoever first brought the land to life, and another gives it first to whoever needs the water to drink. Which is the fairer rule for a village, and why?

• Shirb: the rules for turns at the water, for wells and for shared channels.
• The sabil: the endowed water building, and what it was called.
• Al-Karaji's qanat methods: the levels and drawings for laying out the route of a hidden channel.

Read about shirb, the sabil and al-Karaji's qanat methods. Write three rules for sharing water in a village, using only what the records say, and compare them with how water is shared in your own town.