Water is Never Neutral
Blowing up the "waters of life" was a war crime. It's also sacrilege.
The Hardest-Working Symbol
We’re at the midpoint of Lent. Having been a somewhat lapsed Catholic these many years, coming back to the penitential season isn’t quite the same as it is for people young or adults taking sacraments for the first time.
[And something’s happening with that, by the way: according to the Diocese of Westminster, in 2026 double the number of adults presented as Candidates or Catechumens compared with 2024.]
But it has been a chance to read and hear afresh the readings from Scripture and Church teachings and commentary on them. And you can’t help but be struck by the recurring motif of water, and its arc as a symbol from Chaos (Genesis) to Judgement (Noah) to Life-Sustaining (Moses getting water from the rock in Exodus 171) to Purification (the Syrian general Naaman bathes in the Jordan and is cured of leprosy, Pilate washes his hands) to Redemption (Jesus’ baptism, the story below) to Restoration (the the water of life in Revelation2, an eschatological nod to a return to Eden).
Readings this past week included the story of the Samaritan Woman (John 4:4-42), one of my favourites for a lot of reasons, not least because it’s got great banter between Jesus and a woman who becomes one of first evangelists. John’s account doesn’t give her a name but she’s recognised as Photine (‘enlightened one’) in Eastern Orthodox tradition as “equal to the Apostles” - she’s cheeky, has been married five times, and goes on to convert her family and neighbours.
They meet at “Jacob’s well” in her town of Sychar. Jesus is resting from travel and his disciples have gone off to find something to eat; the future Photine has come to draw water. As relayed by John, their chat plays with the themes of water and thirst of body and soul.
Water in a Dry Land
It’s the opposite of surprising that water would play such a central symbolic role in a religion founded near deserts. Not for nothing is “We made from water every living thing,” one of the best-known lines from the Qur’an (21:30)3. Or that refraining from water during the day would be part of the fasting ritual 4 .
It’s difficult for a lot of people who will read this to really think about their vulnerability to water - not enough will kill you quick; so will too much. Instability in the water cycle will kill you slowly with hunger if food supplies are interrupted with drought or flood.
Our blissful ignorance in Western countries is punctured occasionally. A few weeks ago here in Kent water stopped coming out of the tap for thousands of homes and businesses, after a preventable and warned-against failure in water treatment. But supply was restored and the event is so well-forgotten the CEO of South East Water remains securely in post.
In 2023, the Mississippi was so low from prolonged drought that saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico was days away from overtaking New Orleans’ water supply.
Around the other Gulf, the one that’s unavoidably been in the news lately, governments have gone to extreme lengths to make residents forget their water vulnerability.
Their blissful ignorance was briefly shattered when an airstrike on the Iranian island of Qeshm in the Strait of Hormuz targeted its desalination plant, reportedly knocking out regular access to fresh water for some 30 Iranian villages. Qeshm would be one of the places you’d target if, for example, you planned to land the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to invade territory around the Strait.
Iran announced it would retaliate in kind and within hours Bahrain, which hosts the largest US military base in the region, saw its own desalination plant hit.
The tit-for-tat strikes on the most basic life-sustaining civilian infrastructure would be denounced more loudly as a war crime if it hadn’t become so tragically common in Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza, and more.
Aquifers around the Gulf once were so abundant and overflowing that Bahrain’s very name derives from the underground springs that broke to the surface on land, turned salt water sweet just off the coast, and were so legendary they probably are reflected in stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Garden of Eden. Those very “waters of life”.
As Gulf economies developed they drank their groundwater dry. By the 1950s, a British observer in Qatar noted: “Doha was a big village in which everyone knew one another… There was hardly enough water for washing or cooking, and the little there was came from wells in the desert, which we used to boil and filter.”5
Water security was very present as a topic when I lived in Qatar 2019-2020. By some estimates more than 99% of potable water in Qatar now comes from desalination plants on its Gulf coasts.
The Saudi-UAE blockade of the country didn’t get as far as destroying water infrastructure. But the little peninsula that had imported almost all its food for 3 million inhabitants suddenly had to grow a lot of its own. And that required a lot more water.
Qatar engaged in a massive public works programme to increase its desalination, trying to shift some of that energy-intensive process to be powered by solar rather than gas, and built massive storage facilities for fresh water. With a $5 bn budget, and billions of litres stored, it gives Qatar a water buffer of…a week. That’s it. (Spoiler: it will take more than a week to rebuild a desal plant.)
As the Guardian noted after the strikes this week, as long ago as 1983 the CIA was warning that Gulf societies like UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi were extremely dependent on desalination and that it would be impossible to defend that infrastructure. It’s been an exposed jugular to Iran.
The vulnerability has only increased as gleaming Gulf cities became even more water-thirsty than their American counterparts they were modelled on. That 1983 CIA report noted that per capita water consumption in the Gulf was 25% that of the US. By 2018, water consumption in Qatar exceeded 595 litres per capita. Per day. As much or more than the most arid US cities.
War Crime of Madness and Sacrilege
There’s some intrigue about which country is responsible for the strike on Qeshm’s desalination plant. What’s not in doubt is that experts around the world absolutely freaked out at the news. Because they have been aware of the Gulf’s vulnerability to this - which threatens the existence of Gulf cities as we know it. On the eastern side of the Gulf. Qeshm itself is an outlier for Iran. While the country has recently become news-worthily water-stressed of late - some even speculated about the need to relocating most of Tehran’s 10 million residents because of water scarcity - other than it and a few other coastal communities desalination makes up a tiny fraction of the total. Not so across the Gulf.
Few acts of stupidity and depravity should surprise me about this war. But the idea that the US or Israel (itself highly dependent on desalination plants for water) would open the Pandora’s Box of turning water into a weapon is not just strategically suicidal given their Gulf Arab allies’ vulnerability. The idea that you’d target water - in the Gulf; during Ramadan, and Lent - is right up there with killing 150+ girls at school as the sort of thing that should lead not just condemnation in this life but damnation in the next.
Back soon.
Water from the Rock (Exodus 17:1-7)
1From the wilderness of Sin the whole Israelite community journeyed by stages, as the LORD directed, and encamped at Rephidim.a
But there was no water for the people to drink,
2b and so they quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses replied to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the LORD to a test?”
3Here, then, in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “Why then did you bring us up out of Egypt? To have us die of thirst with our children and our livestock?”
4So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? A little more and they will stone me!”
5The LORD answered Moses: Go on ahead of the people, and take along with you some of the elders of Israel, holding in your hand, as you go, the staff with which you struck the Nile.
6I will be standing there in front of you on the rock in Horeb. Strike the rock, and the water will flow from it for the people to drink.c Moses did this, in the sight of the elders of Israel.
7The place was named Massah and Meribah,* because the Israelites quarreled there and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD in our midst or not?”d
Rev 7:16-17
16 They will not hunger or thirst anymore,
nor will the sun or any heat strike them.e
17For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,*
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Even a cursory reading of the Qur’an reveals dozens of water references/symbolism across the text.
Not just for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. Jewish abstention from water during holy days theoretically can go for up to 25 hours and includes no brushing of teeth. Water fasts also used to be more commonly observed during Lent in some Christian traditions, which were once sort of like Ramadan but 2 weeks longer and no equivalent Iftar/Suhoor feasting. Fat Tuesday/Pancake Day really was your last call for a while.
A. Abu Saud, Qatari Women: Past and Present (Longman Group, London, 1984)