its main street—its mirbad (open marketplace)—at sixty cubits; the other streets at twenty cubits; and each lane at seven cubits. In the center of each allotment, they set aside a broad, spacious area for tethering their horses and burying their dead. They built their homes close together, and they did so only on the basis of a considered judgment upon which they had agreed, or an explicit text that could not be contravened.
Bashīr ibn Kaʿb narrated from Abū Hurayra that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “When people dispute over a road, let it be seven cubits wide.” Abū Ḥafṣ al-ʿUkbarī also narrated, through his chain of transmission from Ibn ʿAbbās, that the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “If you differ over a road, make it seven cubits wide.” Another wording states: “If you quarrel over a lane, make it seven cubits wide, then build.” Through his chain of transmission from ʿUbāda ibn al-Ṣāmit, he narrated that the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “Among the judgments of the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) was his ruling concerning an open space shared by people, whose occupants then wished to build in it: seven cubits of it were to be left as a road.” He said: “That road was known as the Mītāʾ, the public thoroughfare.”
Aḥmad said, in the narration of al-Marwazī, when he was asked about the hadith of the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace), “When there is disagreement over a road, it is to be made seven cubits wide”: “This applied before boundaries had been established. Once they had been established, nothing was to be altered.” In the narration of Ibn al-Qāsim, he was asked: “What if the road is broad and wide, like these streets?” He replied: “Yes—and this is more serious than someone who encroaches upon a boundary between himself and his partner: the former takes from one person, whereas the latter concerns the entire Muslim community.”
Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Baṭṭa said: “The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said this only concerning owners of jointly held properties, when they needed to divide them and disagreed over the extent of their needs and the dimensions of their passageways. He said: ‘Make it seven cubits wide.’ All of that was before the road had been set aside. But once roads had been laid out and their landmarks identified, Allah has forbidden anyone to place anything in them except with the agreement of the imams.”
As for water brought forth from the earth, it is divided into three categories: river water, well water, and spring water. Rivers, in turn, are divided into three categories: