Abū ʾl-Munajjā Solomon ibn Shaʿya was the official in charge of agriculture under al-Afḍal, the viceroy of Fatimid Egypt. Over a period of six years beginning in 1113, he planned and built a canal in the eastern sector of the Nile Delta that significantly improved the irrigation system. Although al-Afḍal had named the canal after himself, the grateful peasant farmers of the Delta dubbed it the Abū ʾl-Munajjā canal. According to the fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Duqmāq, it was either for this reason or because of the huge cost of the project that al-Afḍal had al-Munajjā thrown in jail in A…