This project examines the role of sabīls (charitable water fountains) in the urban waterscape of Cairo, documenting how residents work to make the built environment reflect their social and ethical aspirations. In contemporary Cairo, a plethora of these small informally-organized sabīls shape the city’s waterscape as they offer palatable and preferred forms of drinking water to passersby. Ethically, the establishment of a sabīl enables the accumulation of hasanāt, or merits accrued with god, in the Islamic tradition and are one of a limited set of posthumous avenues through which souls can shift the balance of good and bad that they take with them to judgment day. As such, people create sabīls as one way of building towards a future afterlife for themselves and departed loved ones.