About Creation
By: Rianne C Ten Veen
Tags: Muslim, Islam, Creation, Environment

In 2009 I self-published a book based on my years of research on islam and the environment (‘199 ways to please God, how to [re-]align your daily life with duty of care to Creation’ [out of print now; ISBN-10: 184426629X; ISBN-13: 978–1844266296]) … with an update in mind, am here going to first share the ‘old’ version bit by bit. As a second post: about Creation*!

book cover of my book as self-published in 2009

“Assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of mankind; but most of mankind know not.” (Ghafir or Al-Mumin/ Forgiver or The Believer [40] 57)

According to Fazlun Khalid (Founder Director of Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, IFEES) “[t]he word nature, which is an abstraction, cannot be found in the Qur’an and the closest modern Arabic usage is the word bi’a, which connotes a habitat or a surrounding. […] The Qur’an speaks of creation (khalq) and it contains two hundred and sixty one verses where this word is used in its various grammatical forms derived from the root kh l q. These verses contain references to the human world; to the natural world of the Earth, from trees to turtles, from fish to fowl; and to the sun, stars and skies.“ Creation was created for the benefit of humanity, and humanity was created to know and worship God, demonstrating it in belief and deed. In his Eighteenth Khabar (58) Mohamed Ibn Arabi (1165 -1240 CE) states: “God, ever mighty and majestic is He, says: ‘O child of Adam, I have created you for My sake, and I have created things for your sake. So do not disgrace that which I have created for Myself with that which I have created for you.’”

In the foreword to Mohamed Al-Ghazali’s (1917- 1996 CE) thematic commentary on the Quran, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) London remarks: ”Muslims are enjoined, along with the rest of humanity, to ‘read’ the two great books of Revelation and Creation, i.e. the Qur’an and the natural world. Reading one without the other will result in an imbalance detrimental to the existence (and prosperity) of humanity on earth, indeed to the divine purpose of the cosmos.” Syed Ali Ibnul Hussain Baqri in his article ‘Quran penetrates all the faculties of life’ says something similar: “I see that there are two books of Allahtaala. One is Quran, a transcendental spiritual Holy Book. We revealed this Quran and we will protect this. Yes this is a spiritual and transcendental book, and the other one is perceptual and physical book. And the skies and the earth is cover of that perceptual and physical book, and what are in between are the verses of this Book. Now you see the suns, the moons, the planets, the stars, the galaxies, the birds, the gardens, the ocean, seas, rivers, cattle, the animal, the men, the women, the camels, horses, donkeys, elephants, trees, plants, mountains, fountains, flowers, stones, and every thing that you see is the Ayat [sign], the verse of this perceptual book.” When doing this, according to Muslih al-Din Sadi Shirazi (1213–1293 CE), “[e]very leaf of the tree becomes a page of the sacred scripture once the soul has learnt to read.”

Human well-being is highly dependent on ecosystems and the benefits they provide such as food and drinkable water, no matter how much we are forgetting this by living more and more in concrete cities detached from direct contact with the other “nations”. And as Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198 CE) inspires by naturally combining revelation and reason for the best understanding of existential questions, so do we need to learn about what we are doing to God’s Creation. For example, how often do we reflect that one fifth of the chapters of the Quran are named after parts of nature, from cow (chapter 2) to daybreak (chapter 113). And as according to Jalal al-Deen Al-Suyuti (1445- 1505 CE) “[i]t has been proven that the names of the surahs [chapters of the Quran] have all been given by means of tawqeef (Divine guidance through revelation)”, I believe God meant to bring our attention regularly to parts of Creation, and not just for the sake of it: “When the earth is shaken with its earthquakes and the earth yields up its burdens, and man says: ‘What is the matter with it?’ That day it shall proclaim its news, for your Lord will have inspired it.” (A-Zilzalah/ The Earthquake [99] 1–5). Profeet Mohamed asked: “Do you know what the earth’s news is? Its news is that it will bear witness about every man and woman as to what they did upon it. It will say: ‘He did such and such on such and such day.’ That is its news.”

As Charles Le Gai Eaton (Hasan le Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul Hakeem) (1921 — CE) poignantly remarks: “It might be said that we leave our fingerprints upon all that we touch, and they remain in place long after we have gone on our way. We forget so much of the past, but the past is still there and cannot be wiped out, unless God — under His Name “the Effacer” (Al-Afu) — chooses to erase it from our records.”

According to Khurram Murad what we must remember is that “to live by the Qur’an requires a major decision on your part: we have to completely alter the course of our life, irrespective of what may be the dominant thought-patterns around us, of what our society may be dictating, or what others may be doing. This decision requires major sacrifices. But unless we, as believers in the Qur’an being the word of God, are prepared to take the plunge, not much good will come out of the time you spend with the Qur’an.”

Weather differs month to month, day to day, even hour to hour. Climate is weather over the longer term. According to journal Science (July 2007) the coldest period in the past 800,000 years occurred around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets were at their peak. The scariest bit is that it was then only ten degrees colder than today, so though large weather temperature differences are normal and pleasant, major differences in climate are not.

Hereunder [RtV: in a next post] the bad news in a nutshell. For all the bad news, however, there is fortunately much good happening as well. Unfortunately this does not mean that ‘business as usual’ is an option. From personal experience I know environmentalists are regularly accused of being doom-mongerers, looking at ‘glass-half empty’ only, unrealistic people. The message (the facts) are depressing, I totally agree, but beware of ‘blaming the messenger’, it only distracts from working on solving the challenges. The aim of this book is to serve as a reminder for myself and hopefully for the reader to remember what we, as guardians of Creation, have done to God’s Creation, but more so be an inspiration in what we can all do, should do, together and as individuals, for the sake of pleasing God and those who get to live on God’s Creation after us and for the sake of our record on Day of Judgment…because, as I read on a banner at the Camp for Climate Action (www.climatecamp.org.uk) in August 2007: “this planet has no emergency exits”.

*Where I am copying the text verbatim, some references may no longer work.