Introduction — Managing and Understanding Water in the Abbasid Caliphate

Managing access to clean water remains one of the greatest challenges facing the Middle East today.Not surprisingly, it was also one of the region's major difficulties in the past.Yet, despite its significance, water has not been a prominent research topic in our field.Through the prism of water, a myriad of topics can be explored, including urban governance and planning, agricultural practices, trade and travel, science and technology, rituals, and public health.This special issue does not aim to provide a comprehensive history of water supply in the Abbasid Caliphate.Instead, each of its four contributions approaches the Abbasid era's rich water history from a different angle.Drawing on a wide variety of historical sources -archaeological remains, geographies, histories, normative and legal texts, scientific manuals -the authors demonstrate how the combination of genres and types of sources enhance our understanding of how people managed one of the region's most vital and scarce natural resources.The first three articles, by Josephine van den Bent, Peter Brown and Dionisius Agius, discuss water management in cities: Basra, Baghdad, Samarra and the harbour towns along the Red Sea coast.By focusing on the organisation of water in an urban context, the authors demonstrate that water scarcity is often not just a matter of limited resources, but, at times, primarily an issue of governance.Together, they uncover diverse ways in which water provision was arranged in these towns for both inhabitants and travellers.In analysing the individuals and institutions involved in water management, they do not limit themselves to forces from "above"-central authorities and formal