What a sabil is.

A sabil is a drinking fountain built into the wall of a city so that anyone walking past could drink. Not a monument, not a decoration — plumbing, with a basin and a grille and usually a small arched niche above it. What made it a sabil rather than a tap was how it was paid for: endowed as a waqf, a permanent charitable trust, by someone who wanted strangers to have water after they were gone.

You did not have to ask. You did not have to be from there. You did not have to be Muslim, or Christian, or anything at all. The water was already paid for.

Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul are full of them. Some are plain stone. Some, like the Ottoman sebils, are extraordinary — carved, tiled, grilled in bronze. The word itself does double duty in Arabic: سبيل means the fountain, and it also means the path or the way.

Why we took the name

Because it is the only word we could find that is a water word, a giving word and a Jerusalem word at the same time — and because it sets the terms. If you name a company after free water, you have to actually move some water. That is what the giving is for, and why it comes out of our margin instead of being added to your basket at checkout.

And the coppersmiths

Copper is not a borrowed material here. سوق النحاسين — Souq al-Nahhaseen, the coppersmiths' market — is a real address in Jerusalem, in Nablus, in Damascus and in Cairo, and has been for centuries. Trays, coffee pots, basins, the sabil grilles themselves. What we make is not a new idea. It is an old trade, with the patterns put back on.

How we work