Islamic History and Literature

This research offers a comparative analysis of two heterogeneous regimes of rationality: the anthropological configuration emerging from Hājar 's narrative about Zamzam, and the rationality of contemporary multi-agent artificial intelligence systems. It argues that interpreting this narrative through the modern categories of common good, gift, or property produces an anachronism, as it presupposes a notion of property that is already established, whereas such a notion is not yet constituted in the narrative structure under study. Hājar 's narrative is thus understood as a configuration prior to the distinction between use, possession, and appropriation. The emergence of Zamzam, inscribed within a vertical causality and the order of rizq (the concept of subsistence farming), opens up a space of subsistence where the resource still escapes legal regimes of property. Jurhum's settlement therefore stems from a pre-legal organization of access, and not from a regulated commons. In contrast, multi-agent systems rely on a rationality of optimization, prediction, and algorithmic governance, where agents co-produce environments and structure the decision-making space. This dynamic marks the shift from a logic of subsistence to a computational rationality in which behaviors become computable variables. The confrontation of these regimes highlights a reconfiguration of governance forms, where cooperation and competition are integrated into dynamic information architectures, also perceptible in the contemporary transformations of awqāf under the influence of algorithmic efficiency logics.