Land, Law and Water Politics: IbnʿAsākir’s Chapter on Umayyad Canal Building in the Hinterland of Damascus

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ABSTRACT Ibn ʿAsākir’s Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq includes a number accounts regarding the water distribution regime in Damascus and its hinterland under Umayyad rule in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. In studying these reports, I shall attempt to answer key questions that are otherwise hard to address: how did the early Islamic elites insert themselves into existing water regimes; did this cause friction; to what extent did the Umayyad caliphs consider themselves responsible for providing water to their subjects; was there a pattern of continuity or of rupture in the management of water and its infrastructure before and after the Arab-Muslim conquests; and how did local communities attempt to assert their water rights under a new regime? I suggest that, at a key moment of scarcity in the water supply, the Caliph Hisham instituted a new water distribution regime planned according to timed rotations of water rights.