ABSTRACT
Access to water was the principal concern of every regime, city, town, village, and pastoral nomadic group in the medieval Islamic world. Since the bulk of the territories under Islamic political authority consisted of mountains, deserts, and semi-arid steppe lands, the overwhelming majority of the population was concentrated in cities, towns, and their immediate hinterlands that had ready access to water. In addition to the narrow coastal areas around the Mediterranean, the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, and the coasts of South Asia, the areas that received significant annual rainfall include parts of Anatolia, the highlands of Yemen in the southern Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas, the Zagros mountains in western Iran, and the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. Outside of these areas, there simply was not enough annual rainfall to support agriculture without some sort of sophisticated irrigation practices.
