An essential element of all life, as well as a cleansing and ritual substance since time immemorial, in Islam water acquires its richest and most profound presence in the everyday, theological, artistic and philosophical realms. The fact that Islam is one of the great water civilizations is due to the intimate contact that many of its peoples had, and still have, with the desert and the oases, which made them value and sanctify it with particular fervour; also to the fact that they were the heirs to the ancient middle-Eastern civilizations linked to important rivers, dams and mountains; and due, too, to the manifold routes they covered by land and sea in their journeys of pilgrimage, trade and exploration. An indispensable element in the personal and collective rituals of Muslims, and a fundamental Koranic concept bound up with images of the garden, Eden and Paradise, from theology to philosophy inspired by the Graeco-Romans, passing through physics, town planning, medicine and mysticism, as well as literature, poetry, architecture and the visual arts, the influence of water is even now visible in the most varied literary, poetic, philosophical and artistic records.

This book looks at the theological, philosophical, literary and artistic concepts relating to water in classical Arabic-Islamic culture, and particularly in the time of al-Andalus. As well as a detailed analysis of classical Arabic texts, it interprets a wide range of visual and architectural images concerned with the paradigms of water, gardens and the ideal place of Paradise. The book includes a great number of illustrations with comments, which, like the text, bring us up to contemporary Arabic times, and show how some present-day Arabic artists and poets come to terms with their symbolic and cultural past, renewing it or breaking away from it.