More-than-Human Songs in the Garden of 'Nightingales': The Kashmiri Rishinamas an Islamic Ecopoetics

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.