The Ark of Salvation
Abdal Hakim Murad
Dean, Cambridge Muslim College
24 March 2022
A version of this talk, with references, may be found in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics (2019), pp.163-72. See also the author’s Travelling Home (2020), chapter 10.
The Ascension
Muslims recently commemorated the occasion of the Ascension, laylat al-mi’raj. This traditional event allows communities to reflect on a transhistorical moment which in many ways is the culmination of prophetic history, as Islam sees things. Described in many hadith reports and elaborated in sometimes rather baroque ways by thousands of poems and litanies in every Muslim language, the event has the Man of Praise praying in congregation with the earlier prophets in Jerusalem, and then taken by Gabriel on a great ascent through the seven heavens into the presence of God. A number of symbolic events then occur. I would like to begin by reciting one text which summarises much of the traditional teaching:
‘The Holy Prophet perceives Majestic Oneness take formless form, clear as a full moon in the night sky, thus perceiving Allah as lovers of Reality will perceive Him in the highest dimensions of Paradise.
Essence communes with the beloved Prophet in modes unimaginable, where neither word nor voice nor sign nor touch is needed. With Divine Tenderness far beyond even the Prophet’s enlightened expectation, the Voice of Truth resounds through his entire being: ‘I am your secret heart, your true desire. I am your perfect refuge, your only love. I am the Divine Reality you worship. For Me alone, o Muhammad of light, you have sighed unceasingly throughout the long journey of prophecy.
You have secretly called out: ‘Why can I not directly behold the beauty of the Essence of Beauty?’ Come now, friend of all souls. The love I feel for you is beyond My love for the whole creation. All humanity is your humble servant. Whatever you desire from the infinite treasure-house of Divine Power and Blessing is yours for the asking – thousandfold healing, thousandfold illumination, thousandfold love.’
Beloved Messenger, your soul will never turn from the experience of this. Return now into temporality and invite humanity, the created expression of My Essence, to come unto Me, to gaze at last upon the Source of Truth and Beauty. Traveling beyond time and eternity, you have interceded for them all at the Abode of Essence. I grant to your community the Daily Prayers of Islam, which when performed with purity of heart will lift them into Paradise while still on earth. Every level of heavenly experience is contained in the Prayer. The Prayer will lead them along the very way of ascension that I led you.’
The fundamental Muslim practice of five daily prayers is thus believed to be a recollection of the Prophetic ascension, its basic postures of standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting are said to be based on the worshipful forms of the angels whom the Man of Praise saw on his celestial journey.
The Australian theologian Rod Blackhirst evinces this koranic ethos in an essay on Muslim prayer. For Blackhirst, the prayer gifted at the Ascension is a primordial enactment of humanity’s status as bridge between heaven and earth: the Prophetic follower worships in a fully embodied way, in a mind-body synergy particularly characteristic of Islam’s sense of itself as the reclamation of a lost Abrahamic primordiality, al-hanifiyya. The entire Muslim life is shaped by forms of worship which engage the body and spirit with the movements of sun and moon, and hence represent the believer’s full belongingness to the created order. Nonetheless he is, like Adam, ‘between water and clay’ – the water which is of heaven, and the clay which is the stuff of which he is made. This Abrahamic cosmology depicts religion as being of the fitra, the koranic term which denotes nature and what is natural: not as fallen, but as a theophany made of grace and a reminder of God’s presence as al-Qarib, the Near.
The prayer is also a recollection of the salvation to be offered by the Prophetic intercession; since the Man of Praise is directly addressed in the final invocation. The response prayer to the Adhan likewise recalls the Praiseworthy Station, understood as the intercessory right of the sealing Ishmaelite messenger. Hence on the ship of salvation, the ark which carries the last Abrahamic community over the foaming seas of the eschatological age, the Intercessor is not only the one who is saved, but the one whose example in this life, and whose intercessory prayer in the next, delivers others. Here the name of the Ark’s builder Noah is recalled: he is najiyullah in the Hadiths, the one saved by God, but he also prays to save others, who are a numberless host, Abrahamically, as many as ‘the stars in the sky’.
In other Ascension narratives we encounter a second well-known incident, which also concerns salvation. Here, Gabriel comes to the Man of Praise and offers him two chalices, one of wine and the other of milk. When he chooses the latter, Gabriel tells him, ‘You have been guided to the fitra’, a word often translated simply as ‘nature’.
These Hadiths and the luxuriant commentary literature which grew upon them are evidently constructed to make a defining point about the nature of Ishmaelite religion. If we begin with the two chalices. we find, very probably, a polemic against Christian sacramentalism. The wine is not for the Prophet’s people. Muslim commentators, explaining this well-known Sharia negation, claim that intoxication diminishes the imago Dei, and hence commits an offence against God’s purposes; moralists predictably add information about alcohol’s social effects. Alcohol is, in this sense, a symbol of the son who fails to board the ship, and becomes the weapon and sign of his profane mastery over what remains of the world: the last four kings of Tahiti all died of alcohol poisoning, leaving the road free for the colonisers.
Stories about Salvation
Others will note that a polemical point about salvation is apparently being made as well. Wine is nature denatured, the fermentation being a sign of humanity’s departure from what God has originally made. The milk, by contrast, is a useful and straightforward symbol of a pure nourishment unaltered by human plans, ego, or intervention. So ‘you have been guided to nature’, hudiyta li’l-fitra, is being constructed as an important structural principle in the newest Abrahamic dispensation.
Let us consider another of Islam’s founding stories about salvation, this time a seemingly much more earthly one. This is the religion’s reparative recital of the story of Isaac and Ishmael. The latter, although firstborn, was, for the Biblical authors, the heir ‘according to the flesh’. Only the former, with his sacrifice understood by Christians as a Eucharistic anticipation, is claimed by pre-Muslim interpreters to be the heir in the spirit. A fierce and unyielding binary is thus introduced.
Christian art frequently alluded to this by contrasting Ishmael’s mother Hagar with the Virgin Mary. Rubens, for instance, in his depictions of the women paints Mary in blue – the colour of heaven and virginal purity, while Hagar wears red: the colour of the flesh, eros, carnality. And medieval Christian polemics sometimes used the ‘concupiscence’ represented by Hagar as a sign of Islam’s falsity: Islam, for Aquinas, is ‘a garden of nature’. And here he is in fact not far from the concept of fitra apparently assumed by the ascension narratives.
So fitra is in some way constructed as a watchword of Islam and its soteriology; Islam is din al-fitra, the fitra-faith. The medieval Qur’anic commentator Tabari wrote that fitra is what differentiates Islam from the baptism of Christianity or the circumcision of Judaism, There is something covenantal and initiatory about it.
All this makes sense against the backdrop of Islam’s understanding of itself as the sealing or closing dispensation within the historia monotheistica. Islam, as the unexpected Ishmaelite religion, the vindication of the outcast, is the third side of the great equilateral triangle, it is the third of the three visitors to Abraham beneath the oak of Mamre. And as the ascension narratives affirm, it seems to be linked not only to an Abrahamic restoration – and of course the Blessing of Abraham forms a key component of the canonical daily prayers – but to something more ancient, a natural form of religion, the religion of milk, of unmediated encounter with the divine in the substance of nature.
This is perhaps why the shrine of the Ascension, the Dome of the Rock, is constructed according to an octagonal plan. Octagrams of overlapping squares are called in Islamic geometry najmat al-Quds, the Jerusalem Star. Eight-pointed stars and the octagons which are related to them are very ancient Near Eastern symbols, once representing Ishtar, or Venus as the evening star; the overlapping squares are understood as a reconciliation of dualities and complements, and hence of fertility. According to the Hutchinson Dictionary of Symbols, the shape is ‘linked to creation, fertility and sex’. This is also the primary resonance of the crescent and star motif which Islam gradually came to adopt as its symbol: cyclical, selenic, fertile, nocturnal. The crescent again connects with Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham’s ‘family according to the flesh’, who lie buried in the Hatim, the crescent-shaped enclosure beside the Ka’ba in the Great Sanctuary.
This theological awareness of Islam as a latter-day retrieval of a very primordial, pre-axial form of religion, the fitra, helps us to understand certain very recurrent themes of the Qur’an. The scripture presents the natural world as an array of divine theophanies: saying that ‘wherever you turn, there is the face of God’. The word for natural signs, ayat, is the same word used for scriptural verses, so as well as al-Qur’an al Tadwini, the written Qur’an, there is al-Qur’an al-Takwini, the creation Qur’an, whose signs we are invited to read, and which, like the written scripture, comprise a bodying-forth of the effulgent Divine breath.
So the Qur’an says (41:53): ‘We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in their own souls until it becomes clear to them that it is the Truth’.
Even more notably, we find a range of verses insisting that all things praise God, for instance 17:44: ‘There is no thing which does not glorify Him with praise’. And also 24:41 ‘Have you not seen that everything in the heavens and the earth, and the birds in their arrays, sing God’s praise? Each one knows its prayer and its glorification; and God knows what they do.’
The seeming archaism of the Muslim scripture, and the insistence on chanting in a natural cosmos which seems to be animated and alive, inclined Herder to describe Islam as a sort of shamanism. Schleiermacher, too, in considering the religious claims of Islam, also dismisses it as a shamanism. Here is an example of Schleiermacher’s judgement: ‘Islam is presented as a self-consciously monotheistic religion that nevertheless emphasised the action of the sensual world upon the emotions, thus bringing it closer to pagan polytheism’. And Schlegel saw in Islam’s garden-like paradise ‘the vestiges of heathenism’.
These judgements on Islam’s theology of nature in some ways continued medieval Christian criticisms. The Renaissance, too, had not been terribly interested in virgin nature. Islam here is, to use the old category, essentially Semitic, reverting substantially to Hebrew ideas of the indicativity of nature, and the value of the body, and of its natural functions, in the spiritual life. Hence celibacy has seldom been celebrated as a virtue among Muslims.
Muslims here, as so often, agree with Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik where he says: ‘Judaism rehabilitates the flesh … attaching the quality of divine image to the biological forces in man’. It affirms ‘The goodness of the whole of man, of the natural’.
And the American Muslim writer Nur al-Jerrahi even says, ‘physiology is theology’, recalling the Ghazalian idea of Prophetic compliance as the creation of a harmonious human body-subject maximally open to Divine effulgence. Nature itself is the ship of salvation; it is not the storm which we hope to survive.
We might say that the son who refused to board the ark, thus denying the khilafa principle, and whose defiance and ignorance is recorded in Sura Eleven, is the principle of Cain, murderer of Abel; or the neolithic over the Palaeolithic; the writer who scorns memorisation; the divider of the sensory from the supra-sensory, and, ultimately, the technologist who, as Heidegger dismally observed, blankets the garden-world in greyness and makes of it a wasteland. It is the appearance of images, the belief in a linear time in which God can ‘appear’, because he had somehow been ‘absent’. It is the intercalatory month. It is the replacement of the organic with steel and glass; and with a similar corrosion of the human soul, leading, in our time, not only to the environmental collapse which defines our so-called anthropocene age, but to the biopause: the self-sterilisation of modern elites, whose birth rates and reproductive capacities are steadily and apparently terminally declining. The Qur’anic phrase may well be applied against this Islamophobic class: inna shani’aka huwa’l-abtar: ‘your insulter is the one without progeny.’ For as one modern commentator explains it: ‘The most noble animals refuse to breed in captivity’.
This idea of the full membership of the saint in the natural world is further underlined by the Recital’s vision of paradise, which is eroticised: sexuality in this life is understood not only as an invitation to be fruitful and multiply, but as a proleptic anticipation of the life of the blessed. Again, this drew predictable and fierce condemnation from medieval Christians, who assumed that the celibacy of the saint was itself a proleptic, lived anticipation, of an asexual heaven.
Death, then, in a sense becomes simply a transferral from one garden to another, now a place free of the element of trial; as in Judaism and the primordial religions there is no doctrine of original sin of the Augustinian type. The Native American writer Vine Deloria, in his rather anti-Christian book God is Red, writes this: ‘for Christians, their estrangement from nature, their religion’s central theme, makes this most natural of conclusions fraught with danger.’
‘Shamanism’, a characterisation intended as an insult, was the judgement of many European readers of the Qur’an in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But other minds of the European Enlightenment, particularly in its romantic literature, rather liked Islam’s sacralising of nature and its teaching about an integrated body-subject; this is evident, for instance, in Goethe’s poem on the Man of Praise, the Mahometsgesang, which describes him as a mountain stream, full of life, which brings the pure water of heaven to the land, raising up not only great cities, but also enhancing the fecundity of nature:
Drunten werden in dem Tal
Unter seinem Fusstritt Blumen und die Wiese
Lebt von seinem Hauch.
Later, lower, in the valley,
Where his steps trod, flowers bloom, and the green meadow
Has been given life by his breath.
Goethe, in his no doubt insufficient and partial reading of the Qur’an and Muslim poetry, had been attracted to the biophiliac and world-affirming aspect of the Prophetic charism, and the poem enjoyed a certain traction, being set twice to music by Schubert, for instance. But to return to the Muslim scriptures, the idea of the Man of Praise as an emblem of the life-force spills over into a range of hadith which record his encouragement of planting trees and other plants. For instance, this hadith narrated in the collection of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj:
‘Never does a Muslim plant a plant or sow a seed, so that a bird or a man or an animal eats from it, but that it shall be recorded as a charity for him.’
And a famous eschatological hadith: ‘If one of you is planting something, and the Day of Judgment begins, finish planting it.’
So the Prophet’s colour is green: his turban, and the dome over his grave; his city is the verdant oasis of Medina, one can imagine the Ark, as ship of salvation, safinat al-najat, flying a green ensign, a Banner of Praise anticipating his famous role as standard-bearer of Divine mercy and revivification at the Day of Judgement.
So focused on the animated quality of the natural order is the Recital that we even find passages about insects, notably the Qur’anic tale of Solomon who diverted his magnificent army at the request of the queen of the ants, who wanted to protect her anthill from trampling.
And in sura 16:69: ‘Your Lord has granted revelation to the bee: make your home in the mountains, and on the trees, and the trellises which they erect, then eat from every fruit and follow humbly the ways of your Lord.’
And other ayat could be cited: evidently the Recital of the final Abrahamic replenishment sets out to sacralise biodiversity. Virgin nature is our most proper habitat in this primordialist and naturalist vision, which sees the ship of faith as onboarding nature: the animals sail with us, we preserve them, they have the right to this; almost as though in this world the khilafa principle of human shepherding and custodianship delivers a sort of saving grace to the animals as well. However this is not, as in the vision of the moderns, the localised and rather desperate conservation of endangered species in parks and zoos, concentration camps for animal survivors removed from their habitats by materialism’s lust for lebensraum; what is saved is implicitly creation itself, in its natural and balanced plenitude: khilafa entails the preservation not of examples of what humanity has destroyed, but of the mizan, the biophiliac balance, itself. It is a ship of life, conserving the stupendous miracle of the double helix, which is the matrix for consciousness and hence for the consummation of the Divine purpose.
All this, for Muslims, confirms the idea of Islam as the religion of milk, of unfallen nature, to be joined through the movements of worship which emphasise our proper belongingness in the world; as in most primordial communities the direction of prayer is horizontal, not vertical, time is lunar and not solar, and there is no intercalation, and we exercise our innate ability to recognise holiness when living properly in our bodies, recognising the nature and holiness of nonhuman persons and the entire natural world. This reveals modernity as an exercise in alienation, as Layla AbdelRahim writes: ‘A function of civilisation is ‘to stamp out our yearning for wildness.’ ‘Children are born wild and dream of a wild world that exists for its own mystery.’
The Sunna as Sheild
The sunna, then, the Islamic instantiation of primordial living, functions as a shield against the alienation imposed by technical modernity. To follow its norms is to wear a kind of hazmat suit, which shuts out the chemical toxins of a disrupted world. In its insistence on natural living and moderation it does not only preserve its adherents from many entailments of the toxic world of secular consumption, but even more importantly, from the diseased attitudes which have initiated it. The sunna, by allowing us to live in accordance with how things are, is an ark of salvation. In a text which many Muslim eco-warriors like to cite, the Qur’an says this: (30:41) ‘Corruption has appeared on earth and in the sea because of what the hands of men have wrought; thus does God make them taste some of the consequences of their actions, so that they might perhaps return’.
By adopting the Sunna we find ourselves shielded from the worst poisons of a necrophiliac modernity: we connect again with the motions of sun and moon, we celebrate the sanctity of nature, we fast and we venerate holy places, we repeat an oracular chant whose origin was received in the jalal, the mysterium tremendum which made its holy recipient sweat and shake; we understand and honour gender, we live for a transcendent purpose, and that form of life is all-embracing: the Sunna-ark is not for boarding part-time; this din al-fitra is not a leisure activity, and we do not recognise a spurious dualistic division between sacred and profane, any more than our Palaeolithic ancestors did.
Perhaps one of the most striking demonstrations of the primordiality of the Qur’anic voice is its insistence that we are in community with non-human orders of creation, which are also considered to be sentient communities. One of the paleo-anthropological criteria for distinguishing the Paleolithic from the Neolithic is that the former created a self which was defined by ‘coordination with nature and other humans’, whereas the neolithic self defined itself in relationality with other humans’. And here we face something that does seem strangely reminiscent of shamanism. In particular, I would like to focus on one verse, which appears in Chapter 6, entitled Al An‘am, ‘the Cattle’, aya 38. Here is a cautious translation:
‘There is not an animal in the earth, nor a bird flying on two wings, but that they are nations like yourselves. We have neglected nothing in the Book. Then unto their Lord they will be gathered.’
Passages such as this form part of the Recital’s condemnation of Arab pagans who, in roughly Durkheimian vein, had long defined their tribal identity in terms of animal totems (the Man of Praise himself had been born into the clan of the shark). As part of its function of delineating tribal identities paganism had maintained elaborate rituals of animal mutilation and other animal-linked practices which the new ship of salvation viewed as abominations, and this chapter, al-An’am, receives its name because it deals with various such sacrificial and votive rites (vv.137-147). In place of a universe directed by tribal deities in which humanity was divided by totems and fetishes, the new monotheism preached a fellowship of believers which was summoned to see the animal order as a sign of creation’s unity and integrity under the One God, with the right to share in the salvation from the deluge offered by Noah.
The aya seems straightforward in its affirmation of animal and bird life, presented and valued as sentient orders of creation; and yet it triggered centuries of intricate debate. Two themes proved particularly taxing for the commentators: the citing of animals as ‘nations like yourselves’ (umamun amthalukum), and the gathering of animals ‘unto their Lord’. In what sense, later authors of tafsir commentaries wondered, could animal communities be like us? And is it true that like their human counterparts they will be resurrected to face God’s final judgement? The modern Tunisian theologian Ibn ‘Ashur laments that this is a ‘verse which begins obscurely, and ends more obscurely still.’
The Koran’s initial targeting of indigenous Arab religion quickly took on wider implications as part of the continuum of late antique debates over the implications of monotheism for attitudes to the world. The markedly upbeat affective elan of the koranic revelation reflected the text’s own self-understanding as a historic reparation, as it says, a shifa’, a healing (17:82), not only of paganism, but, as it asserted, of the ‘religions of the Book’. When the new Recital burst into the former provinces of Christian Byzantium it was widely received by its audience as a synthetic corrective, repairing the penitential and severely ascetical temper of early Christianity and pushing the dominant monotheistic style back in a generally ‘Semitic’ direction, albeit in an axial mode which could not accommodate the principle of a chosen people. In a Mediterranean world where a pessimism about the world and the body had become normal among Christians who had inherited many of the world – and body – denying assumptions of late Hellenistic religion, the Ishmaelite ark saw itself as sailing in with an unmistakeably life-affirming – though hardly indulgent – worldview, the purpose of the ship being, precisely, to conserve reproduction and therefore life among the human and non-human orders of the biosphere. Its anthropology repudiated patristic teachings on original sin, and encouraged a pious style of travelling to God through the world, rather than reaching Him by creeping around its edges. The new scripture’s ceaseless conjurations with the material universe as a palette of signs pointing to God and brimming with His immanent qualities stood at the heart of Muslim styles of contemplation, in a new, and noticeably more positive dispensation which was unmistakeably biophiliac and lyrically celebratory of the natural order. The poetry of Islam, with its typically ecstatic invocation of love, focussing on nature, humans, and the divine beloved, was the natural voicing of this new and more biophiliac culture.
Animal Welfare
It is perhaps due to this twofold koranic challenge to Arabian and ancient Christian views of the natural world that we find the early Muslim scribes keen to record a very large bulk of prophetic directives on animal welfare. These have been investigated in a recent book by Richard Foltz, a text alert to the vast improvement, as he sees it, brought to formerly Christian and pagan territories by the arrival of this new and reparative dispensation. Foltz even goes so far as to conclude that ‘the mainstream Islamic legal tradition accords more rights to non-human animals than do the legal systems of the contemporary West’, a polemical statement which he believes is supported by the witness of the classical Sharia canon and the pro-nature vision of the new, sealing revelation, with its retrieval of the fitra principle of primordiality.
The Founder, as a man exampling Islam’s distinct blend of a primordial sense of appurtenance to nature with an extremely uncompromising and simple monotheism, a kind of ur-monotheismus, seems to have dispensed a good fraction of his moral teaching with reference to the animal kingdom. Some of his dicta are evidently attacks on pagan practices, as in the hadith where he says: ‘May God curse anyone who maims animals’. But a larger genre indicates a more general insistence on ethical treatment of the animal order, which are symbolically protected by his ark. Some examples:
‘It is a great sin for a man to imprison the animals which are in his power.’
‘A dog was once panting by a well, almost dead with thirst. Beholding it, a harlot of the Children of Israel removed her slipper, dipped it in the water, and gave it to drink. For this, God forgave her her sins.’
‘We were once on a journey with God’s Messenger, who left us for a short while. We saw a hummara bird with two young, and we took the young fledglings. The hummara hovered with fluttering wings, and the Prophet returned, saying: ‘Who has injured this bird by taking its young? Return them to her’.’
‘The Prophet forbade that animals should be set to fight each other.’
In some cases we find the Prophet challenging the culture of hunting which had existed in Arabia from time immemorial. While hunting game for food is still permitted, sport hunting is to be prohibited:
‘There is no-one that without reason kills a sparrow or anything higher thereto, but that God shall ask him about it.’
‘The Prophet cursed anyone who took an animate creature as a target.’
Such texts have a straightforward moral and hortatory purpose, emphasizing the essential goodness and worth of God’s creation, the evidencing of which is to be a particular theme of the final stage in the Abrahamic history. More curious are the hadiths which seem to invest animals around the Founder with a near-human degree of consciousness, and it is here that the puzzlement over our Koranic verse originates, and we find, perhaps, some sort of explanation for the Enlightenment descriptions of Islam as ‘shamanistic’.
What are we to make, for instance, of the following tale, narrated in Abu Daud’s collection of hadiths? The hadith has the Man of Praise going into a farm where a camel is experiencing a fit of groaning, with its ‘eyes streaming’. The Prophet, unafraid, walks over to it and rubs its ears, and it quietens down. He asks who the camel belongs to, and a man identifies himself as its owner. The Prophet says: ‘Do you not fear God concerning this beast which He has let you own? It complained to me that you starve it and tire it by overworking it and using it beyond its capacity.’
In the same hagiographies we find that key instances in the Founder’s career depend on animals for their successful outcome, and that these animals are presented as recipients of some kind of divine inspiration. Perhaps the best-known example is the Founder’s choice of a site for his home and mosque when he arrived as a refugee in Medina. Seeing that rival clans wished to have the political advantage of having him as their guest, to preclude disputes he let go of the reins of his camel and said that providence would guide it to the correct place. The site the camel chose is now the location of his mosque and grave. In another incident the Abyssinian Christian army which had come to destroy the Ka‘ba is confounded by two animal interventions: firstly, its fearsome battle elephant refuses to march on the Holy City, and secondly, the invading army is pelted with stones by birds. A no less celebrated case is the rescue of the Man of Praise from pagan pursuers during his exodus to Medina: as he hides in a cave, pigeons make a nest and a spider weaves a web over the cave entrance, a miracle which served to persuade the search party that no-one could have entered the cave for days.
In these hadiths which show the Man of Praise or his city saved by the intervention of animals, one is struck by the fact that these creatures are presented as consciously acting under divine tuition. This seems anomalous in a new religious culture in full revolt against a pagan animism in which desert creatures, and even trees and rocks, had been reckoned to contain genii of various kinds. A kind of Humean generalization about the ‘rationalizing’ shift from polytheism to monotheism would presume that ancient superstitions about souls inhabiting the natural world would be vigorously suppressed in favour of a belief in divine and human monopoly of consciousness and agency, but in the primal Islamic case something more complex seems to have emerged. Again, we appear to revert to our characterization of the Ishmaelite religion as a reprise of very ancient and even primordial styles of sacrality, coupled with the fierce rejection of any hint of polytheistic belief. The Muslim tradition itself promotes this self-understanding: the Meccan shrine is claimed to have been the worshipping place of Adam, long predating the Jerusalem temple. Islam, taking itself as the final moment in the monotheistic drama, also claims to be a significant rehabilitation and invocation of pre-Abrahamic forms of worship and relationship with the world. It is thus that the mediator-sage who can communicate with animals bears a book which instructs its audience to consider them as ‘nations like unto yourselves.’
Animal Nations
Having very briefly sketched Islam’s self-understanding as the recovery of a biophiliac and primordial religious style, let us now proceed to survey the exegetic literature on our chosen koranic crux, which seems to deepen the Noah story so indicatively. Here is the verse again: ‘There is not an animal in the earth, nor a bird flying on two wings, but that they are nations like yourselves. We have neglected nothing in the Book. Then unto their Lord they will be gathered.’
Firstly, we must consider the puzzle represented by animal ‘nations’. The word is umam, the plural of umma, an Arabic term almost invariably applied to human collectivities: the Muslims themselves constitute an umma, of course. In arguing against pagan cruelty, scripture here appears rhetorical in suggesting that birds and animals form communities, or, one might say, peoples. But the rhetoric does not invalidate the comparison, and the commentators needed to determine exactly what kind of nations animals form. The preferred view was that each species was an umma, so that Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209) produces a hadith in which the Prophet describes dogs as an umma.
More tricky is the question of how these species might be ‘like ourselves.’ The tafsir commentaries offer the following possible interpretations.
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‘Nations’ indicates that their members resemble each other, can reproduce with each other, and find comfort (uns) in each other.
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They are ‘like humans’ in that they are also created by God and depend on His provision.
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They are like us, and unlike the inanimate realm, in being capable of mutual communication.
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They are like us insofar as they are reached by God’s grace, care, mercy and compassion.
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They resemble us in being resurrected, to receive their rights (huquq).