Agriculture and Water Practices in Islamic Societies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the History of Science and Environmental History

This paper explores the intersection of environmental history and the history of science within Islamic societies, highlighting how these fields can jointly deepen our understanding of past engagements with environmental challenges. Drawing on selective examples and prior scholarship, it examines water management practices across seasonal cycles, demonstrating how Islamic societies utilised scientific knowledge of climatic patterns to address ecological concerns within their cosmological beliefs. The study underscores that environmental practices, including irrigation and water storage for agriculture, must be understood within the cultural and intellectual frameworks of their time rather than through modern perspectives. It also considers how Islamic societies inherited and adapted Sasanian irrigation technologies, and how their agricultural practices evolved with the growth of centralised economies and market demands, especially as sedentary lifestyles increased and water systems began to deteriorate. This project further argues for an interdisciplinary approach in understanding the interdependent relationship between political stability, technological adaptation, and environmental management in the Islamic world, where water supply systems were both technologically complex and symbolically rich. Examining textual sources alongside archaeological evidence suggests that water technologies were closely tied to local environmental needs and perceptions of rivers as divine or healing forces, as reflected in regional literature and almanacs. The broader aim of this ongoing project is to advocate for a historical framework in environmental humanities that synchronises scientific, cultural, and environmental perspectives. By integrating insights from recent scholarship on pre-modern ecological perceptions and the Anthropocene, the study supports the importance of interdisciplinary methods to more fully contextualise historical responses to environmental shifts.