“Signs on the horizons”: Nature Writing and the Islamic Tradition.
A talk given at the Nature Writing and Decolonisation Symposium at the UEA.
Religion is often left out of conversations around decolonisation. But as part of the colonising mission, religion was also colonised. A good example of this is the East India Company divorcing Sufism from Islam to make Sufism more palatable to the West. In this talk I will explore the Islamic understanding of the natural world and discuss Islamic ‘nature writing’ and nature writing more broadly.
‘To what extent has the superstition of the shamans spread itself!’ This was how the German philosopher-poet Herder, concluded his brief discussion on what he saw as nature worship in Islam. Nietzsche said Christendom ‘destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilisation […] because it said yes to life.’ Schleiermacher wrote that Islam ‘emphasised the action of the sensual world upon the emotions thus bringing it closer to pagan polytheism.’
These European thinkers saw Islam’s intense reverence for trees, rocks, rivers and animals, and concluded that the privileging of nature to this extent and intensity could only be as the result of a shamanic or pagan worldview. I am aware that the overarching theme of this panel is nature writing beyond the European tradition but I think the European view of nature and Islam is a good entry point into the subject of my talk today.
So what exactly did these intellectuals see in Islam that led them to this conclusion? They saw a religion that structures its day around the rising and the setting of the sun and follows the lunar calendar like the primordial societies before them. They read the recurring verses in the Qur’an repeatedly urging people to look at the world around them: ‘consider the natural world around you’; ‘Do you not see?’ The entire Qur’an is characterised by its constant highlighting of nature as in this verse in a chapter titled ‘The Overwhelming’ :
‘Look at the camels how they are created
Look at the sky and how it is raised
Look at the mountains and how they are set
Look at the earth and how it is spread.’
Perhaps they might have heard the verses of the Qur’an on nature, verses that have been described by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad as incantatory: ‘Wash shamsi wa duhaa haa/ Wal qamari izaa talaa haa/ Wannahaari izaa jallaa haa/ Wallaili izaa yaghshaa haa.’ By the sun and its brightness/ And [by] the moon when it follows it/ And [by] the day when it displays it/ And [by] the night when it covers it.
Perhaps they noticed the literature generated by Islamic societies, was a literature that is overflowing with nature. Particularly in the Persian literature being translated at this time, Rumi, Hafez, Saadi.
Although the suggestion that Islam is pagan is not something a Muslim would agree with, and although those European thinkers weren’t exactly being complementary when they described Islam as shamanistic, they cut through all of the stereotypes and the orientalism of their age, to the core of Islam. For all of their flaws, and deficiencies, there is a history of European intellectuals recognising the centrality of the natural world in Islamic belief, praxis and literature. You could say that in their own way, they understood more about Islam’s relationship with nature than is understood today.
It is not a coincidence that these observations about Islam corresponded with an increasing interest in the Qur’an during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Muslims, the Qur’an is the Book of Nature. The titles of the chapters are indicative of the positioning of nature within the religion: ‘The Cow’ ; ‘The Bees’ ; ‘Thunder’; ‘The Ants’ ; ‘The Spider’ ‘The Fig’ ; ‘The Sun’ ; ‘The Moon’; ‘The Stars’ ; ‘The Morning Brightness’; ‘The Fading Day.’ These are just some of the chapters named after natural phenomena in the Qur’an.
Like many faith traditions, Islam views nature as a book to be read and reflected upon. In the Islamic worldview, the natural world is a revelation that mirrors the Qur’an. In the way that each verse of the written Qur’an is called an ‘ayah’, a ‘sign’ so too is every phenomenon in nature. In this sense, there are two Qur’ans the Qur’an tadwini, the written Qur’an and the Qur’an takwini, the Creation Qur’an which can be deciphered in nature.
The Qur’an is full of recurring refrains urging people to look, to listen and to consider, the natural world around them. It says:
‘It is He who sends down water from the sky. With it We produce the shoots of each plant, then bring greenery from it, and from that We bring out grains, one riding on the other in close-packed rows. From the date palm come clusters of low-hanging dates, and there are gardens of vines, olives, and pomegranates, alike yet different. Watch their fruits as they grow and ripen! In all this there are signs for those who would believe.’ 6:99
Nature plays an integral role in Islamic rituals. The life of a Muslim is attuned to the natural world. They know what time the sun rises and sets and prayer times are in concert with the movements of the sun. Muslims pause to pray at certain points of the day: before dawn, after midday, late afternoon, before sunset and at night.
Ablutions before prayer also involve natural elements, washing oneself with water or using handfuls of dry earth to wash if water is unavailable. It may surprise some people to know the word sharia itself is rooted in the natural world, it means well trodden path to water. The positions of the prayer also recall the natural world, the standing represents vegetal life and the bowing, animal life whilst the sitting position represents the mountains sitting on earth.
In the Islamic paradigm the natural world is alive and sentient. The Qur’an says everything hymns his praise, from plants and animals, to stars and rivers. The entire cosmos is absorbed in a symphony of glorification that humans are unable to understand. The great Muslim scholar and poet Rumi said, ‘there is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.’
But perhaps the most striking aspect of the Islamic outlook on nature is the centring of the non-human animals. “There is not an animal in the earth, nor a bird flying on two wings but that they are nations like yourselves.” Muslims understand this verse to mean that animals also have their own rituals, worship & culture (!) And many other religions and spiritual traditions relate to nature in this way.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr summarised the Muslim attitude towards the natural world some fifty years ago, explaining how ‘the trees have their due as do animals or even rivers and mountains. In dealing with nature man must pay what is due to each creature and, each creature has its right accordingly…The rights of creatures were given by God and not by us, to be taken away when we decide to do so.’
It’s not just animals and plants that are understood as communities with rights, sentience and emotional lives but every natural phenomenon. Mountains have feelings. The Prophet of Islam said ‘Uhud is a mountain we love and a mountain that loves us.’ The Islamic tradition is full of stories of stones speaking, trees weeping at their separation from the Prophet of Islam; of animals complaining to him of being mistreated by their owners. These are not parables or allegories, these events are considered to have actually happened by followers of the faith.
But to view nature as sacred is not to view it as simply idyllic. Islam considers nature as a manifestation of the 99 Divine Names of God, which encompass his beauty and the wrathful majesty. He is Al-Qabd, the Withholder and Al Bast the Extender. Nature is both beauty and horror, tender and fearsome, and deserving of respect and care in all these states.
The Islamic view of nature as living beings in their own right means that the preservation of nature is not fuelled by a desire to conserve her for the enjoyment of future generations of humans nor is nature to be protected because our survival relies on her. We are literally instructed to, ‘walk gently upon the earth.’
Nature is to be protected for nature’s sake. In a well known hadith, the Prophet of Islam said ‘Even if the end of the world comes upon you while you have a sapling in your hand, plant it.’ If we were to approach this from the resource mentality present in some of the climate change activism today, this scenario begs the question, how many future generations would enjoy the sapling’s beauty? How long would the tree support biodiversity for? How much oxygen would the tree produce for us? How ancient is the tree and how much history will the tree have witnessed? Conservation in Islam can be summed up by this idea of planting something without any expectation of return or prospects of future enjoyment. That nature has the right to exist outside of our own interests. That the act of planting a tree is important enough to continue doing even as the world ends. The image of planting a tree at the end of the world is powerful one.
How does this understanding of nature feed into Islamic literature then? It might be anachronistic to apply the term ‘nature writing’ to the literature of Islam. I am using the term ‘nature writing’ to denote any piece of writing that engages with the natural world. In reality, a distinct, cordoned off genre of nature writing doesn’t exist in the Muslim world. But from its beginnings, Islamic literature is teeming with what Seyyed Hossein Nasr calls a ‘theology of nature.’ Muslim writers took their cue from the Qur’an, which itself could be considered a piece of nature writing with its lyrical imagery of plants, animals and landscapes. Despite the nuance being lost in English translations, the poeticism can still be appreciated here: ‘And a sign for them is the night; We withdraw the day from it and see how they are plunged in darkness; And the Sun runs his course for a period designated for him that is determined by the will of the Almighty, the All Knowing. And the moon – We have measured mansions for her to pass through until curved like a withered date stalk she returns.’ [36:33]
The most well known pieces of literature to come out of the Islamic world centre nature: Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Saadi’s Secret Garden, Hafez’s Rose and Nightingale conceit ; Rumi’s reed flute and reed bed in the Mathnawi; Ibn Tufayl’s Alive Son of the Awake. Islamic ‘nature writing’ which comprises of a rich tradition of mystical poetry and prose, often employs intense natural imagery to convey profound spiritual and metaphysical concepts.
Motifs from the natural world are used to convey deeper spiritual meanings. Some of the more famous symbols include flowers and fragrances , birds, bodies of water, be it the river or the ocean, the night sky, mountains and ornate gardens all feature heavily in Islamic literature.
Nature writing in the Islamic tradition is specific to place and elevates the local, from Rumi in Persia to the Wali Songo in Java, they all used the local culture and nature in their work. There is no concept of an ideal in nature, that is then imported across the globe.
To give examples, the stork is venerated in Turkey; Sindhi and Punjabi texts speak of the crow at length; the dove and the cuckoo is emphasised in Persian texts. The cypress tree is idealised in Turkey and the Banyan tree is praised in India.
Another key feature of Islamic nature writing is its orality, even the prose text, Dalail al Khayrat, the Guides to Goodness, a book of prayers on the Prophet of Islam is recited aloud and its prayers largely centre around nature: ‘Bless the one who was greeted by rocks, to whom trees prostrated, who had wild animals cling to the tail of his cloak when he walked the desert.’ In the chanting of prayers, Muslims become a little closer to achieving the perfect worship of nature which speaks in lisan ul-hal ‘the tongue of its whole being’ a language most humans are unable to understand.
In the past, in Islamic societies as in other societies,you could be interested in the sacred, in the knowledge of the physical world and in the creative arts. In the so called Golden Age, Muslims were at the forefront of advancing the natural sciences precisely because they considered nature to be sacred. The famous natural scientists of the Muslim world, Avicenna, Al Biruni, al Kindi were also deeply engaged in the mystical aspects of Islam in their personal lives. A respect for science, religion and the arts coexisted in the same breath. In the post Enlightenment world, science and the sacred have been divorced from each other.
An example of medieval Muslim nature writing could be the famous ‘Trial of the Animals’ also known as ‘The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity’ which was written by a group of Muslim scholars in ninth-century Iraq. In this story, representatives from the entire animal kingdom bring their grievance against humans before the court of the Spirit King. The animals present their case, complaining about the abysmal way humans have treated them. The Spirit King rules in favour of the animals and warns the humans:
‘Should you err, the animals will begin to disappear, one by one, forever, from the face of the earth; and the air in your settlements and fortresses will become dangerous to breathe…the seasons will be reversed and your climates turned on end…the animals you eat will bring sickness and death upon you…’
Muslims are also reminded that humans are not separate from nature. As the Qur’an says ‘We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves – do you not see?’ (41:53) This is often explained alongside a famous saying of Hazrat Ali who said ‘You Presume you are a small entity, But within you is enfolded the entire universe.’ Is this not how scientists describe humans when they say each cell is like a universe?
In the Islamic worldview, an important act of worship is seeing the presence of the divine in nature, Muslims are told ‘wherever you turn, there is the face of God.’ Reza Shah Kazemi writes how ‘the external ‘signs’ of God on the horizons rejoin the internal ones within the soul; the outward revelations elicit inward inspirations; the theophanies of beauty, holiness and majesty infuse the soul with boundless love, grateful contemplation, and reverential awe in the Face of God.’
There is a tendency to be intellectually embarrassed about sharing a religious view of nature in certain circles. This exists even in some parts of the Muslim world, decades ago when there was a severe drought in Damascus, the city’s religious scholars suggested a communal Rain Prayer and were roundly mocked and called backwards by the country’s journalists and scientists. But it is worth remembering that the vast majority of the world lives by religion and that all faith traditions will have their own stories of the sacred in nature. It is also worth pointing out that it is often countries with predominantly Muslim populations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh that are subjected to the fall-out from the climate catastrophe created at our hands and yet we have no understanding of what their outlook on nature might be.
If we turn to contemporary anglophone nature writing, even the mere allusion to religion or faith is qualified with the usual caveats, a pilgrimage is prefixed with ‘unpious’, a mystic is ‘part-time’, an author is ‘almost’ Animist. This is all the more surprising given the coterie of Scottish writers, such as Neil Gunn and W.H.Murray, who were deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism.
This attitude is changing though. The most recent census in England and Wales revealed shamanism to be the fastest growing religion and the younger generation is increasingly interested in folklore customs as a way to connect to the planet. There is also a growing interest in spirituality in mainstream nature writing, particularly in the beliefs of indigenous populations across the world who are at the forefront of securing rights for nature. Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass has laid the ground for a more spiritual outlook, Karen Armstrong recently published a book titled Sacred Nature. Anjana Khatwa’s forthcoming book Whispers of Rock explores the Hindu understanding of nature through dharti, a connection with rock and soil. The logic-chopping discourse that has dominated nature writing for a time is being supplemented by a more spiritual ecology from other parts of the world.
Some of this work has been here all along, I have recently started to read what you might call British Muslim nature writing. One such example is Yahya Parkinson, born in Scotland in 1874 he converted to Islam sometime around his twenty seventh birthday. Yahya worked in a textile factory by day and by night he studied Greek and astronomy and wrote essays and poetry.
In his poem Woodnotes Wild, he talks about the evil of Empire and draws attention instead to nature. He writes:
Empires are but transient glories
Worn upon the brow of ages,
Hollow mockeries of a grandeur
Only glittering on the surface.
’Way with such a fleeting glory;
Give to us the love that’s lasting,
As the earth on which we’re living
As the heavens in its beauty,
As the star-lines in its brightness,
Or the star-depths in its deepness;
Spacious as the very cosmos,
Bounded not by earthly limits;
Love far greater than a mother’s
Who will die to save her offspring,
Give her life for their protection;
Not a love the tiger knows of,
Or the lion in the desert,
Or the bird has for its young ones;
But a love as comprehensive
As the human thought can fathom.
Yahya’s poem centres the non-human perception of the world, highlighting the emotion of love from the perspective of lions and birds. His poem continues:
Only they alone are righteous
Who have love for all their brethren,
In this sphere of pain and labour;
And for every moving creature
Living on the world’s wide body;
Love divine and everlasting;
Deepest of the soul’s outpourings,
Breathings of a thing diviner
Than the swimming, glowing cosmos;
Than the blaze of constellations
Showering star-dust through the spaces;
Flower of all the human yearnings
For a better frame of spirit.
Give us but the power of living;
Teach us we are one with nature,
Part and parcel of the mountains,
Of the rivers and the ocean,
Of the air and rustling plane-trees,
Flowers and earth and ocean fauna;
We by Nature’s bonds united
Like the stars to one another.
Yahya believes that we are one with nature, that humans are bound to nature like constellations of stars, and we exist in one community. He calls our attention to look at the signs on the horizons and within ourselves. Faiths across the globe practice this act of paying attention, it is the paying attention that forges a relationship with the natural world. As the era of the Anthropocene is poised to be officially announced in August 2024 and a depleting, increasingly de-natured nature stands on the material horizons, the Islamic paradigm offers an opportunity to ask what the signs on our internal horizons showing us?
There is space and I think an increasing demand for nature writing to include what Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad describes as ‘the metaphysical, not only the physical reasons to fight for the animal and trees.’