Astonishing head, isn’t it? One would argue, with the hysterical wave of secularisation of knowledge within and without science, that there wouldn’t be any relationship between nature and the mystical part of religion and it’s cosmological myth. But this is not true. There is harmonious relationship between the religious spiritual journey and the perfect flow of natural, beautiful scientific laws. Sufi masters know this. They didn’t test it in laboratories or use mathematical formulae to predict its future; they meditated it in their minds and came up with surprising mystical mysteries. They feel it in their minds when they gaze the movement of universes within them.
The likes of Jalaludden Rumi, the master of higher poetry, described it in lines and stanzas with poetic figures where plain words failed. The mystics see God in the dance of trees and the musical flow of water. Nature is one of the many ways they use to create channels for communication with God. Through intuition and inspiration, Rumi saw what eyes couldn’t see in the movements of clouds and the fall of rain. This is why Sufi masters think that removing what is natural and replacing it with artificial is tantamount to destroying the aesthetic beauty of the nature and doing great damage not only to the climate but to the channels of revelations. Ibnul Arabi aptly described it in his magnum opus “Futuhat Almakiyya”, and Sayyed Hussein Nasr quotes him often in his books. What a sage!
Not only mystics, philosophers also used to study nature as a means of reaching to the God via rational means before the secularisation of natural sciences. When Aristotle came with the laws he derived from the motion of animals, he thought of it as a theological and teleological means of finding the ultimate Cause of causes. A prime Mover, in his words. Even those philosophers who are taken as the leading figures of atheism like Epicurus and Democritus, were not atheists in the modern definition of the word. They were not like Dawkins with his Blind Watchmaker or Harris with his universe coming from nothing. What a metaphysical stupidity! They wanted to find God in the unusual way by deviating from the mainstream interpretation and, as a result, they became atheists of their time. They studied nature in their attempts to find God and became theists of our time. Socrates used his persuasive arguments in the form of dialogue to show the relationship between the nature and the Nature. The former physical and the latter metaphysical. Perhaps this might be the reason why many Islamic thinkers and philosophers consider him as not only a master in “philo sophia” but a prophet of his time.
Thousands of years before the emergence of scientific communities and NGOs for working to save not only our planets but the cosmos in general, prophets and philosophers warned that there would be physical and spiritual disaster if people went on destructing natural by replacing it with artificial. There is a kind of entanglement between the serene and harmonic nature of our environments and the peace of the Nature. Removing one tree can cause a very big distortion to the musical flow of the Nature. We all see it, don’t we? The hazy weather and dusty air in the month of March in Northern Nigeria. The rain in the month of December in some states of the North. Though you might have heard those who know nothing about global warming and climate change saying that it was blessing having rain in the unusual month of December, but the truth of the matter it is a curse we caused with our handiworks. We remove trees and don’t plant another ones. Above all, a climate change is only a physical part of the disaster, who knows the size and the magnitude a havoc can wreak in our spirits that can’t be sensed with apparatus?
There is a very big problem facing us after we shun the advices given to us free of charge by our prophets, sages and scientists. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) forbids Muslims to cut a tree even in a wartime. Unfortunately, some of His followers are not only removing trees but heads! In one hadith (sayings of the Prophet), he says that whoever plant a tree will be rewarded according to the fruits the tree produced in its lifetime. Whoever rest under the shade of a tree you planted and ponder over the signs of God, you will be rewarded for the good job you did for a thinking stranger. Through these sayings, the Prophet of Islam encouraged his followers to plant a tree and not to destroy another tree. However, it seems we turned deef and dumb to these voices. I read it somewhere that some scientists, with the help of US government, tried to nuke moon some years ago! Yes, nuke the moon with a powerful atomic bomb thousand times as destructive as the one used during the world war II! After they destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the moon shouldn’t be allowed to to go scot free. What a devilish plan!
If we want to save our planet we should work tirelessly in making it green. To save our world we should feel the spiritual part of it. If we want to enjoy the aesthetic and spiritual part of our Nature we should not remove natural and replace it with harmful artificial. We can enjoy the technology and also go with the greenish nature of our planet. Where poets will go and sit to study nature and write in stanzas after we destroy it? After the depletion of the ozone layer, where will we go with the machines we produced that damaged the nature? The nature we kill will kill us one day. We will see a perfect example of cosmic boomerang.
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