Sabil (fountain)

Fictional Arab people South Arabian deities A sabil or sebil (Arabic: سبيل, romanized: sabīl; Turkish: sebil) is a small kiosk in the Islamic architectural tradition where water is freely dispensed to members of the public by an attendant behind a grilled window.

[5] They were built at crossroads, in the middle of city squares, and on the outside of mosques and other religious complexes to provide drinking water for travelers and to assist ritual ablutions before prayer.

The word sabil comes from the Arabic verb root sabala (سبل) meaning "to let fall, drop, to let hang down, to close eyes or to shed tear".

This service was free to members of the public, and was paid for by the revenues or funds of a charitable endowment, an Islamic waqf, provided or set up by the patron who commissioned the building.

While water was implicated in architectural design across the Muslim world, the sabil as a recognizable structure with a particular purpose is associated mainly with the Mamluk Sultanate and with the Ottoman Empire, with both Istanbul and Cairo having numerous examples.

The earliest (surviving) sabil in Cairo is the one installed by the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad at the corner of his father's monumental hospital-madrasa-mausoleum complex during restorations in 1325–26.

[8] This was in part because the Ottoman governors and elites of this period had relatively limited resources and Cairo itself had become densely built-up, leaving little space to build more.

As such, the small but multi-level "sabil-kuttab" structure became a cost-effective option for political elites to offer charitable services to the general population, which in turn helped them publicly display their piety.

[2][4] Like other public monuments, they were often inscribed with Ottoman Turkish verses that formed a chronogram using the Abjad numbers to date the construction.

[7] Until the spread of in-house plumbing by the end of the 20th century, sebils and other fountains were essential for the daily life of the inhabitants of Istanbul.