Drinking water for everyone

Ask where the water comes from, who pays to carry and maintain it, and who benefits, and compare this with what you know of your own community.

See how one public water supply was kept going. The sabil is a charitable building endowed to give people fresh water every day all year round ². Sabils drew water from wells, pools and springs or from rain and floods through well-built channels or pipes hidden in walls; some had one or two cisterns ^3 4. They received great care in their siting, building and decoration, and in the many endowments that kept them working ². The record on the waqf says that for mosques and public utilities there were two types: waqfs consisting of the mosque or utility itself, such as a school, bridge or fountain, and waqfs producing income to maintain and run it ⁵.

Since a waqf is perpetual, its goods need upkeep. Where goods are rented out, maintenance is paid before the beneficiaries; where beneficiaries only use them, they bear it, and the qadi may intervene if they neglect it ⁶. When goods are damaged or destroyed without a tort, jurists differ. The Shafiis and Imami Shia hold the waqf continues while anything usable remains; the other schools accept, under conditions, selling the remains and buying new waqf property, called istibdal ^6 7.

It is easy to take "sabil" as the name of a drinking building only. The derivation is disputed: some take it from asbala al-ma', to pour water; others from ibn al-sabil, the traveller on the road ⁸. Al-Haddad 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 ^8 9. The word then clung to water buildings alone until it prevailed over other terms, especially in the Mamluk period ⁹.

Ask whether the endowments really kept such buildings working. Al-Haddad finds the Hijazi sabils close to those of Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt and Syria, with local traits ^3 10. For how waqfs fared in practice, the waqf record follows the Encyclopaedia of Islam: chroniclers criticised abuses under the Mamluks, and founders wrote strict conditions, such as no rental beyond three years ^11 12 13. In 789/1387 Sultan Barquq tried to liquidate some great waqfs as illicit, but the jurists did not authorise him ¹¹. The article adds that after Muhammad Ali's confiscations primary education was left without income ^14 13.

The waqf record says that under the Fatimids al-Muizz ordered the funds moved to the treasury ¹¹, and that the jurists did not authorise Barquq to liquidate some great waqfs ¹¹. Take a position: who should bear the cost of public drinking water, a fund a founder set aside for the purpose, public money, or those who use the water? Answer the strongest objection to your position with at least one thing the records say: why does your position still stand?

• The sabil: where its water came from, how it was built and the endowments that kept it working.
• The waqf: the two types of waqf for public utilities, the rules for upkeep, and what happened to endowments in Egypt.
• The sabil-kuttab: a two-storey building with a public fountain below and a Qur'an school for children above.