In the Islamic city, streets were governed less by a fixed master plan than by a body of customary and juristic rules that allocated rights between neighbours along the narrow lanes. The fina was the strip of public way immediately in front of a house over which the owner held customary use rights, while the dead-end cul-de-sac (darb) was treated as the shared private property of the few households it served rather than a public through-route. Building disputes over light, overhang, drainage and projections were settled case by case under fiqh principles such as the avoidance of harm. The result was the organic, branching, privacy-protecting street pattern characteristic of the medina.
This customary, rights-based street law produced the distinctive fine-grained, dead-ended and irregular fabric of the Islamic city without comprehensive planning. It is a documented historical alternative to the master-planned grid, governing urban form through neighbour rights rather than top-down layout.
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