Water · a Light

A caliph's wife paid for the water on the Makkah road

Zubayda bint Ja'far, wife of Harun al-Rashid, made the hajj and saw pilgrims dying of thirst on the route from Kufa to Makkah. She spent her own fortune on the problem: wells, cisterns, paved stretches, milestones and waystations along some 1,500 kilometres of desert road, and a spring channel at Makkah itself that carried water into the city. The road has been called Darb Zubayda, Zubayda's Road, ever since, and the archaeological remains of its pools and wells are still mapped across Iraq and Saudi Arabia. She died in 831. Her name survived not through a battle or a dynasty but through drinking water.

Zubayda bint Ja'far · died 831 CE