Islam and the Challenge of Civilization by Meddeb Abdelwahab; Kuntz Jane;

Author:Meddeb, Abdelwahab; Kuntz, Jane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

CHAPTER 6

The Physics and Metaphysics of Nature

The notion of nature does not exist in the Bible, any more than it does in the Koran, where it is assimilated to creation. Thus perceived, Nature is a divine gift bestowed upon Man to have dominion over and enjoy. Humans forever marvel before the spectacle of divine Creation, a boundless work founded upon the separation of heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night.

In the heavens, God placed the sun, the moon, and the stars. Of the earth, he made a stable abode, a bed, a carpet. He raised mountains and created rivers, gardens, and fruits. The winds, which bear beneficial rain, are “good tidings before his mercy” (Koran 7:57). In this manner, the Holy Book renders nature sacred, involving the hand of God in every corner of creation. The divine is manifest everywhere and at every moment. A kind of pantheism emerges from this vision, one that certain spiritual masters of Islam exploited, with the belief that God is immanent, present in nature and person. But let us not get ahead of ourselves here. Before further examining this concept, and to illustrate the constant reference to divine action in natural phenomena, I will cite the most appropriate and eloquent Koranic verses for the occasion: “Is He not best who created the heavens and the earth and sent down for you rain from the sky, causing to grow thereby gardens of joyful beauty which you could not otherwise have grown the trees thereof?… Is He not best who made the earth a stable ground and placed within it rivers and made for it firmly set mountains and placed between the two seas a barrier?” (Koran 27:60–61).

At the risk of appearing to digress, I should like to point out that this enigmatic “barrier” or “isthmus” (the Koranic term being barzakh, a word of Persian origin1) would later take on the meaning of a spiritual topography, the barzakh being the intermediary space where creative imagination is at work. It is also the middle passage that welcomes the dead awaiting resurrection on Judgment Day. But such spiritual and eschatological considerations divert us from what I intend to focus on here. Before returning to the reference to the garden, it might be useful to recall the importance of water, whose benefits are so often extolled in the Koran. The Holy Book emerged in a desert milieu, where dryness and water shortage are the rule. No surprise, then, that the least presence of water is associated with the miracle of the origin of life. “The heavens and the earth were a joined entity, and We separated them and made from water every living thing” (Koran 21:30). This verse is often written out in calligraphy to celebrate the tapping of springs, the building of dams, and the creation of public fountains in both town and countryside. But beyond the link to ecology, beyond the influence of milieu on the written word, or even the spoken pronouncements of an

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