Agriculture Reference
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order the townspeople to do so. Similarly,
if the source of drinking water was fouled,
he could order them to rectify the mat-
ter. In modern times, the regulation of
the water supply of the towns has been
under the municipalities, and in recent
years there has been canalisation in most
of the towns.
pitcher, unless some charitable soul had
constructed, as a work of piety, a public
fountain ( sabīl ) in form of a waf .
In general, gardens within the urban
boundaries were irrigated by means of
canals ( sāiya , pl. sawāī ) led off the water-
courses or, when there were only wells,
by means of simple channels leading
from basins filled with water by means
of norias [see nāūra ] or more simple
water-raising contrivances. It is surprising
that al-Muaddasī, usually so meticulous,
does not speak about the installations
and arrangements at Fās, remarkable as
they are. This capital city had indeed not
merely a large number of springs, but
also a river, the Oued ( wādī ) Fās, where
“the Fāsīs have taken off water which
they need for driving mills, carrying away
their rubbish, filling their fountains and
basins, and irrigating their gardens. To
achieve this end, they undertook consid-
erable construction works, whose ancient
date does not allow us to get an exact
idea about them”. It is a fact that the
town has long had a network of water
channels, some above ground and some
below, which take the water as far as indi-
vidual houses, as well as drains crossing
the various quarters. Inevitably, disputes
often took place between the people of
Fās and the country-dwellers on the river
banks upstream from the town, since the
latter had no right theoretically to take off
water. There existed a special legal struc-
ture to regulate these conflicts, whilst,
for the upkeep of these water channels,
special workers (the wādsiyya , from ādūs
“pipe”, pl. wādes ) were placed under the
authority of an amīn al-mā al-ulw for the
drinking water and an amīn al-mā al-muāf
for the drains.
Although the town's population had at
its disposal an unusual abundance of water,
the water brought into the houses was not
generally drinkable. Hence at Fās, as in
other Moroccan towns, one used to see
(A.K.S. Lambton)
7. Irrigation in North Africa
and Muslim Spain
The present article is limited to a
consideration of the supplying of drink-
ing water to the towns and villages, as it
appears from the mediaeval texts, in addi-
tion to a consideration of the customary
rules concerning the ownership, use and
repartition of water used for irrigating
gardens.
The works of the mediaeval historians
and geographers give hardly any informa-
tion on the system adopted in the rural
areas, but for al-Andalus, there exists a
rich geoponic literature which has been
recently utilized. Irrigation in Spain bears
the stamp of the Islamic period and that,
in particular, a large part of the relevant
technical vocabulary is Arabic or mod-
elled on Arabic expressions, even if the
very characteristic irrigation pattern still
remaining in the huerta of Valencia does
not stem from the Arabs.
In regard to the towns and the places
of some importance, a geographer like
al-Muaddasī rarely neglects to mention
the source of the local inhabitants' drink-
ing water ( ª urb ): springs, wells or cisterns
in which rain water was collected, and,
less frequently, rivers, streams or simple
perennial watercourses. Women who did
not have either a tank or a private well
(equipped with a water-raising apparatus
in a more or less developed form) had
to have recourse to one of these sources
for drinking water, filling there their
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