There is growing academic interest in what David Abram calls the “more-than-human” world, that is, cosmology that emphasizes the interconnectedness of human beings within a vast, animate natural world that decenters human perspectives and experiences. Renewed interest in the more-than-human world has spurred recent scholarship and theological reflection in the fields of animism, panpsychism, and ecocriticism. Increasing attention is being paid not only to more-than-human consciousness, but also to their potential communicative, expressive capacities. While Islamic sources have much to say about these topics, they remain understudied in the academic study of religion and in the environmental humanities. This paper considers the portrayed sentience, speech, and narratives—of more-than-human beings in Islamic cosmologies, pursuing a detailed analysis of portrayed human-nonhuman interactions and exchanges recorded in a sixteenth-century Kashmiri Persian hagiography, Dawud Khaki’s Rishinama (The Lives of the Rishi Saints), as a case study for consideration.
My broader research ventures a novel theory of an Islamic ecopoieses at the intersections of religious, literary, and environmental studies. Ecopoiesis is a concept encompassing both ecopoetics and econarrative and includes both prose and poetic environmental literatures. While ecopoetics is an established branch of ecocriticism concerned with poetic portrayals of the natural world. ecopoiesis, on the other hand, is not yet an established category of ecocriticism. Ecopoiesis refers to the creative processes through which ecological relationships, narratives, and spaces are formed, both in nature and in literature. It is related to how poetry, art, and storytelling contribute to the making and remaking of our environmental consciousness. True to its etymological roots, it is concerned with how ecological worlds are manifested and created. In the context of my dissertation, ecopoiesis is concerned with the ways in which literary works, whether prose or poetry, portray more-than-human consciousnesses and instances of human—more-than-human communication, and how literature serves as a venue for the “speaking forth” of the more-than-human world. The purview of ecopoeisis is the literary portrayal of more-than-human expression, sentience, and story. I frame this investigation within scholarly conversations on consciousness studies, and ecocriticism. An Islamic ecopoeisis considers how Muslims grapple with living in a world imbued with more-than-human consciousness and communication and how literature becomes a particular venue for this grappling.
To ground this proposal and a specific study of a primary Kashmiri source, I analyze, and make explicit, Islamic theories of environmental consciousness, specifically under the category of pan-psychism. Pan-psychism, or the notion of consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the material universe, has been taken up by a range of philosophers and scholars within and beyond the Islamic tradition. Preceding this, I situate this investigation in the context of recent scholarly conversations on animism, environmental consciousness, and more-than-human consciousness. I pursue a thorough survey of accounts of more-than-human consciousness in Islamic primary sources, including the Qur’an, hadith, prophetic biographies, hagiographies, and literary works. It is evident that a hallmark of Islamic panpsychism is the portrayal of the more-than-human world as communicative, capable of worshiping God, praising the prophets, protecting Sufi saints, and offering advice or counsel to those who can perceive these expressions. To center and guide this analysis, I explore three guiding categories to frame more-than-human expression and human—more-than-human communication—tasbīḥ (glorification), zabān-e ḥāl (the language of inner states), and manṭiq-uṭ-ṭayr (the language of the birds). I explore how these concepts have been developed and expressed both in primary sources, in later philosophical and theological traditions such as in the schools of philosophical Sufism of Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra, and in more recent scholarship on this phenomenon in world literatures. I pursue a full etymological and philological survey of the Arabic and Persian terms of communication, expression, and utterance that arise in Islamic philosophical, scriptural, and literary instances, particularly gulgul (utterance), zabān (tongue/speech), qawl (saying/speech), and subḥ (glorification), among others. I consider how these have been applied to more-than-human beings in Islamic sources, in conversation with the guiding concepts of tasbīḥ, zabān-e ḥāl, and mantiq ul-tayr. I consider a potential critique that these impulses are merely an extension of fable traditions inherited by and in conversation with Islamic literature, suggesting these stories are rooted in—and necessarily grappling with—deeper assumptions of Islamic cosmological realities
I bring this framework of an Islamic ecopoiesis to bear on an analysis of Kashmiri Sufi literature, particularly Rishi Sufi nature poetry and hagiographical depictions of Rishi Sufi poet-saints. I consider how Kashmir shapes the ecological imaginary of the Persianate Islamic world before historically contextualizing the Kashmiri Rishi Sufi order, which was noted for its emphasis on asceticism, retreat in nature, and environmental stewardship. I explore the verses of three Kashmiri Rishi poets—Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, and Shamas Faqir—before turning to a primary analysis of Dawud Khaki’s Lives of the Rishi Saints (Rishinama), a sixteenth-century Kashmiri Persian hagiographical collection of Sufi saints of the Kashmir Valley. The Rishinamas, contain stories of Sufis who retreat into nature for private meditation (khalwa) and, similarly undergoing spiritual purification and entering a state of alchemical perception, engage in conversations with nonhuman beings such as spirits of waterfalls,forest spirits, rivers, snakes, and bears to receive spiritual wisdom, protection, and advice. The figure of the wandering Rishi Sufi in nature becomes a spiritual, ecological archetype for Kashmiri Sufism, and the Rishi Sufis serve as exemplars of spiritually-refined individuals operating in an Islamic cosmology: the more-than-human world is conscious, communicative, and individuals of spiritual attainment have a capacity for receiving and conveying the utterances of creation, serving as an exemplar of an Islamic ecopoiesis. This paper offers the first full, critical study of Khaki’s Rishinama, and the first to consider it as example of a broader canon of Islamic ecological literature.
There is growing academic interest in what David Abram calls the “more-than-human” world, that is, cosmology that decenters human perspectives. This paper considers the portrayed sentience of more-than-human beings in Islamic cosmologies. Through a theoretical lens of ecopoiesis — the creative processes through which ecological relationships, narratives, and spaces are formed, both in nature and in literature—I analyze portrayed human-nonhuman interactions recorded in a sixteenth-century Kashmiri Persian hagiography, Dawud Khaki’s Rishinama (The Lives of the Rishi Saints). This Kashmiri Persian hagiographical collection of Sufi saints of the Kashmir Valley contains stories of Sufis who retreat into nature for private meditation (khalwa) and, similarly undergoing spiritual purification, engage in conversations with nonhuman beings such as spirits of waterfalls,forest spirits, and rivers. The figure of the wandering Rishi Sufi in nature becomes a spiritual, ecological archetype in Kashmiri Sufi traditions.