A handbook of building law by a master builder of Tunis who served as an expert witness in the courts: cases and judgements, in the Maliki tradition of North Africa and al-Andalus, on the rights of neighbours: overlooking, doors and windows, walls, drains, streets, dead-end lanes and the space in front of houses.
Ibn al-Rami was a builder, not a jurist, and his book records how disputes between neighbours were actually settled. The governing principle, drawn from a saying of the Prophet, is that there shall be no harm and no returning of harm: an owner may build as he likes on his own land provided he does no damage to others. From it follow the rules that shaped the Islamic town: a new window or door must not look into a neighbour’s house, a roof must not overlook his court, doors should not face one another across a lane, a drain must not foul a neighbour’s wall.
The book distinguishes the public through-street, which no one may narrow, from the dead-end lane, which belongs jointly to the houses that open on it, and it discusses the fina’, the strip of ground along the outside of a house that its owner may use without obstructing others. It quotes earlier judges and jurists of Tunis, Qayrawan and al-Andalus, and is the best evidence for the law that lies behind the blank walls and branching lanes of the Maghrebi medina.
The book, part by part
I Harm to neighbours
Overlooking, openings, heights, smoke, noise, drains; the principle of no harm.
II Streets and lanes
The public road and its width; the dead-end lane and the rights of its residents; the space before a house; rooms built over lanes.
Rules: The dead-end lane belongs to its houses · The public road: seven cubits at least