ABSTRACT
In Middle East, where religion is central to many people’s lives, water has a very strong spiritual value. The reverence stands in sharp contrast to the perception and usage of water in everyday life, where it is often wasted and undervalued. Poets and writers throughout the Islamic world have been inspired by the Koranic descriptions of lush heavenly garden, al janna, underneath which rivers flow and where there are “rivers of water unstalling, rivers of milk unchanging in flavor, and rivers of wine—a delight to the drinkers.” The Koran conceives of water as the first element, the primary substance from which God—whose “Throne was upon the waters”—created all else: “Allah has created from water every living creature.” The ambivalent nature of water in the hammam ritual is illustrated in a more abstract manner in the flood myth, a universal catastrophe recorded in the Bible, the Koran and, in its earliest version, in the Babylonian Epic of Athrakhasis.
