The hammam is the Islamic public bathhouse, which adapted the Roman thermae to the requirements of ritual purity and a more modest, sequential plan of cool, warm and hot rooms heated by an underfloor hypocaust. A near-universal fixture of the Muslim city, the hammam served hygiene, religious ablution and social life, and was commonly built beside the mosque and held as a revenue-bearing waqf. Its furnace also often heated water for an adjacent mosque, knitting bath, worship and endowment into one infrastructural cluster. Distinct hours or separate baths served women and men, making it a key institution of urban social life.
The hammam supplied organised water heating, washing and social space as a standard piece of city infrastructure, sustaining the late-antique bathing tradition that had lapsed in much of Europe. Its endowment links to mosque and bazaar made it a structural component of the Islamic urban core.