Biography
Hina Khalid is a PhD student at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She is working on a comparative study of the theology and poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941). She is particularity interested in the possibilities of comparative theology across Islamic and Indic traditions, and in the ways that shared devotional idioms have formed in and across the Indian subcontinent. Her previous publications have centred on a range of topics, including issues of embodiment, gender, and spirituality across the Christian, Islamic, and Indic worldviews.
Paper Abstract
In this paper, I will articulate an Islamically grounded ecology, wherein climate change constitutes not just a contemporary crisis of material disruption but also a constitutive crisis of spiritual orientation. In the sacred cosmology set forth by the Islamic tradition, the world is perpetually pointing beyond its fragile fabrics to its enfoldment by a loving divine reality, such that the finite is 'brimming over' with the infinite. In this Quranic idiom, the world is suffused with signs (─üy─üt) of a spiritual beauty and inner integrity which tantalizingly transcend the quotidian imperatives of transactional instrumentality. Our interpellation of nature as an inanimate stockpile of resources stands in stark contradistinction to this 'encasing' of the world within a spiritual envelope. Indeed, a Quranically nourished ecology attributes a polyvocal plenitude to the world, wherein every creature praises God in its distinctive way. God's world thus remains vitally alive with sacred sound as it perpetually affirms and addresses its unshakeable ground of being. I take this sonorous vitality of the cosmos as a theological site to reflect on the question: within this chorus of joyous praise that streams forth from all things, might we also hear a faint cry of lament? And unto what obligations or orientations might this cry be calling us? If we are to take seriously the Prophet's injunction to cultivate 'radical hope' (as embodied in the Prophetic saying that if the Day of Resurrection descended whilst one was holding a sapling, one must yet go ahead and root it in the soil), our response to the earth's lament, I argue, must be rooted in the fecund soil of Godward anticipation and watered by flowing reservoirs of creaturely humility.