Hussein A. Amery

Islamic water management

Abstract Islam offers its followers extensive guidelines on all aspects of life including how they should use and manage the natural environment. This religions teachings on matters related to, for example, family affairs and inheritance are well developed and widely applied in the Islamic World. However, the hydrological dimensions of Islam are underdeveloped. This paper is a small step towards the development of Islamically-inspired water management principles. It illustrates that the Koran and hadith have relatively elaborate strategies for water conservation and pollution-prevention. The rationale that water management policies need to fit the cultural norms of the affected people guided the approach to this paper. It hence argues that a carefully-calibrated, Islamically-grounded water management policy is likely to lead to wider acceptability and broader compliance by Muslims because it reflects their value system.

Water security as a factor in Arab‐Israeli wars and emerging peace

This article argues that securing water use and supply from the West Bank aquifers and from the Jordan River and its tributaries contributed to Israels decision to occupy the West Bank and the Golan Heights during the 1967 June War, and the security zone in south Lebanon during the 1978 invasion of Lebanon. There is overwhelming support for this argument, despite the varying levels of attribution with respect to its causality. In light of the increasingly intense competition for water resources in the Middle East, being clear about the historical contributors to these wars may help in speeding the successful completion of the negotiations over the Golan Heights, south Lebanon, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

The Litani River of Lebanon

MORE forcefully than ever, politicians and analysts assert that the next casus belli in the Middle East will be control and use of water. Security of water supply is becoming at least as important as territorial security. Thus resolution of water-related issues is essential for the success of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Many Israeli policymakers view the water supply from the Litani River as a promising solution to their countrys impending water crisis. However, the Litani River, whose entire basin is in Lebanon, is crucial for rebuilding and effectively integrating that country in the post-civil-war period. Specifically, the waters of the Litani are essential for agricultural and industrial development of southern Lebanon. This competition for water, a prized resource in a water-scarce region, makes the river a potential source of serious international conflict in the future and complicates the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The conceptual premise of the analysis presented here is that countries suffering from resource scarcities, be they perceived or real, tend to reach beyond their borders. If access to foreign resources is obstructed or denied, countries with superior capabilities seek to establish such access by pressures that may range from peaceful interactions such as trade agreements to coercive actions involving the military (North 1977; Gurr 1985). HYDROPOLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST The regional context is one of potential conflict between states in the basins of the Jordan, Nile, Euphrates, and other rivers. Riparian states share a substantial percentage of their surface water resources with neighboring states. The diverse and opposing ethno-religious groups, which include Turks, Arabs, and Israeli Jews, exacerbate the situation. For example, in the late 1970s, a water pipeline from the Nile River to the barren Israeli Negev desert was proposed by Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat. However, that gesture of peace prompted negative responses in Egypt, Israel, Ethiopia, and Sudan. In Egypt, planners asserted that the waters of the Nile would be insufficient to meet their own countrys future needs. Although many Israelis were optimistic about the proposal, some officials objected because they thought it was dangerous to depend on a former enemy and untried friend for such a vital resource (Gerti 1979). Ethiopia reacted by declaring its intent to construct dams on the Blue Nile, the largest tributary of the Nile, which led Sadat to threaten military intervention (Starr 1991). Relations between the two countries were tested again in 1989, when it was rumored that Ethiopia, with Israeli aid, was building dams on the Blue Nile. The recent end of the civil war in Ethiopia and the potential settlement of the conflict in southern Sudan bode ill for Egypt, a downstream state. Political stability and rapid population growth in drought-prone upstream countries will likely result in further efforts to harness the Nile drainage to improve their agricultural and manufacturing sectors. The Euphrates River rises in Turkey and crosses both Syria and Iraq before emptying into the Persian Gulf. All three countries depend in some measure on the river for economic development, Iraq and Syria perhaps more so than Turkey, simply because the latter has significantly more alternative surface water resources. Turkey recently completed the mammoth Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates, the first in a series of seven dams on that river (Kolars and Mitchell 1991). Relations between the three riparian states deteriorated when Turkey diverted the water from the Euphrates during January 1990 to fill the massive reservoir. Consequences of that action in Syria and Iraq included power shortages, water rationing, and failed crops. In 1975 Iraq mobilized its armed forces against Syria, and war was narrowly averted, when Syria reduced the flow of the Euphrates to fill the al-Thawra Reservoir. If Turkey and Syria implement all their development plans along the Euphrates, at least fifteen billion cubic meters of water may be extracted for irrigation. …

The role of water resources in the evolution of the Israeli–Lebanese border

The current location of the border between Lebanon and Palestine, todays Israel, is a product of various competing forces. The Zionist Organization aspired to include the entire Galilee region up to the lower reaches of the Litani River (also known as the Kassimiyah River) within Palestine. The river itself was the desired northern border of the country. The Zionists supported their position by employing instrumental arguments that were largely related to the availability of water resources. On the other hand, residents of the upper Galilee, todays southern Lebanon, demanded that they be included with Lebanon. They used their trade links with Beirut, and cultural and familial ties with other parts of Lebanon to support their position. These instrumental and expressive arguments appear to have assisted in the demarcation of the border between Lebanon and Palestine. Currently, access to the water resources, not necessarily control over them, is likely to influence negotiations between Israel and Lebanon over the future of the Israeli-occupied ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon.

Special issue introduction - From region to countries: engineering education in bahrain, egypt, and turkey

rior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, Americans tended to have relatively little interest in the region of the world they understood abstractly as the “Middle East.” Indeed, over the previous three decades, the Middle East had emerged as visible to Americans mainly in news reports about conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians and about potential threats to the supply of oil. Largely ignorant of the peoples and histories making up this part of the world, Americans tended to lump them together with a regional identifier. After September 11, this tendency continued, but with the additional unfortunate feature of connecting the region and the peoples within it to terrorism. Indeed, one effect of the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been to further cement American attention on the Middle East, as military strategies unfolded in maps that included the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to extrapolate from the few to the many. At the same time, the experience of September 11 generated expanded interest among engineering students and engineering faculty in the United States in achieving greater understanding of peoples and issues in the region. For example, students enrolled in an Introduction to Global Issues course taught by one of us, nearly all of whom had been born after the Iranian Revolution and Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979, began raising serious questions about the Middle East, in many cases for the first time in their lives. They moved beyond regional generalizations to inquire into contrasts among people from the region, such as differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and, for one student group, different views of technology held by Muslim engineering students and leaders of a local mosque. Interest in the Middle East also expanded among engineering faculty and administrators. For example, at engineering schools whose oil-related programs have historically attracted students and faculty from the “Middle East” region, admission officers developed strategies to keep their institutions attractive to international students. Student organizations throughout the country sought to create more welcoming environments for those Middle Eastern students who did come. Nationally, university administrators have responded quickly and enthusiastically to funded invitations to build new educational institutions in the P

Water security for Kuwait: assessing the feasibility of water imports from Iran

According to a recent paper by Schwartz and Ibaraki (2011), overuse and depletion of groundwater resources have caused the extinction of whole civilisations. Water-scarce countries seek additional supplies through a variety of methods such as conservation, drilling additional wells, building desalination plants and importing water. Kuwait, where surface water is totally absent, has aquifers that essentially ran dry in the 1970s. After seriously exploring the idea of importing water from neighbouring Iran, Kuwait stopped short of doing that. Using a human security framework, this paper outlines the political, economic and security issues that coalesced to undermine this potential source of water for Kuwait.

Resolution of international water conflicts: from the US Southwest to the Euphrates River basin states

Environmental security models predict that natural resource scarcities, in particular freshwater, can increase the probability of conflict within and between countries. This is an especially critical problem on internationally shared rivers in the arid Middle East. Riparians in the arid US west have long relied on interstate water compacts to manage their interstate waters effectively and to resolve their conflicts peacefully. This paper identifies a hitherto ignored research path. It lays out the rationale for systematically analysing the strategies used in the US compacts in order to derive conflict-mitigating approaches that could be adapted to the Euphrates River basin states.