It is a prominent feature in the culture of the Muslim world and was inherited from the model of the Roman thermae. In Islamic cultures the significance of the hammam was both religious and civic: it provided for the needs of ritual ablutions but also provided for general hygiene in an era before private plumbing and served other social functions such as offering a gendered meeting place for men and for women.
Heat was produced by furnaces which provided hot water and steam , while smoke and hot air was channeled through conduits under the floor. In a modern hammam visitors undress themselves, while retaining some sort of modesty garment or loincloth , and proceed into progressively hotter rooms, inducing perspiration. They are then usually washed by male or female staff matching the gender of the visitor with the use of soap and vigorous rubbing, before ending by washing themselves in warm water.
Public bathhouses were a prominent civic and urban institution in Roman and Hellenistic culture and were found throughout the Mediterranean world. They remained important in the cities of the early Byzantine Empire up to around the mid-6th century, after which the construction of new bathhouses declined and existing ones were gradually abandoned. Following the expansion of Arab Muslim rule over much of the Middle East and North Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries, the emerging Islamic societies were quick to adapt the bathhouse to their own needs.
Its importance to Muslim society lay in the religious requirement to perform ablutions wudu and ghusl before praying and because of the general Islamic emphasis on physical and spiritual purity , [1] [4] although the scholar Mohammed Hocine Benkheira has argued that hammams were not in fact necessary for religious purposes in early Islam and that this relationship was partly assumed by later historians. They also worried that spaces for collective bathing could become spaces for illicit sexual activity.
Nevertheless, this opposition progressively faded and by the 9th century most scholars were no longer interested in debating the validity of hammams, although it continued to be seen with suspicion in some conservative circles. Muslims retained many of the main elements of the classical bathhouses while leaving out functions which were less relevant to their practices. For example, the progression from cold room to hot room was maintained, but it was no longer common practice to take a plunge in cold water after leaving the hot room, nor was exercise incorporated into bathing culture as it was in classical gymnasiums.
