Muhammad believed that the heat of the hammam (which in Arabic means "spreader of warmth") enhanced fertility, and his followers support this faith. Before Muhammed, the Arabs baths used only cold water and never bathed in tubs, which was considered as bathing in one's own filth. But when the Arabs ones visited Roman and Greek baths in Syria, they quickly estimated the pleasure of hot air bathing and adopted this way of bathing for their hammams.
 When the Arabs captured Alexandria in 642, they heated the Roman baths for six months with pergaments and papyri from the fabulous Ptolemaic Library. So, Egyptian history lost up to 700,000 works that may have been burned.
The Arabs picked up foreign bathing habits, but immediately interpreted them in their own ways. Visiting hammam gained religious significance and became an annex to the mosque, used to comply with the Islamic laws of hygiene and purification. Physical and intellectual development was deemphasized, and only the massage remained.
Cold water was no longer used in hammam and hammam itself turned into a quiet retreat - an atmosphere of half-light, quiescence and seclusion. Architectually, the building of hammam became smaller and modest. Although, the Romans built enormous central baths, the Arabs preferred several small baths throughout their cities, likely the Roman balnea. They still followed a progression through a series of hot rooms as in the thermae, but with different emphasis.
In the hammam the Roman tepidarium dwindled to a mere passageway leading from dressing room to harara (hot room) where, unlike the Roman caldarium, special massages were administered. A small steam room adjoining the harara replaced the laconicum. In the Roman hammams bather finished his bathing with a stay in the library or study, and the Arab bather ends where he or she began, lounging on couches in the rest hall while servants bring drinks and cool the bather with fans.
The hypocaust heating systems remained, but in some regions Arabs followed the Roman example of utilizing heat from their many hot springs. These hammams, called kaplica or ilica, have no sweat platform in the center of the hottest room. Instead, a pool of natural hot water heats the hammam. Because the water bubbled and flowed, the Arabs could take a dip in those pools without bathing in their own filth.
The oldest hammams were those of the Camayyad caliphs who subscribed to a semi-Bedouin way of life. They despised the regularity of towns and preferred nomadic life in the desert. Consequently, the first hammams were erected outside the cities, virtually in the wilderness. One of the oldest, the Kusair'Aman, rises unexpectedly from the flat barren plain near the Dead Sea.
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