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Are the Bees Still Swarming?

A Tale of Two Angels

Two angels in the near heavens open their eyes once every hundred years. “Are the bees still swarming?” they ask. Their fellow angels who keep watch on Earth respond: “The bees are still swarming.” “What about the sheep? Are they still lambing?” the two angels wonder aloud. “The sheep are still lambing,” the other angels reassure them. “And the fish? Are they still spawning?” the two ask finally. “The fish are still spawning,” the watchful angels kindly reply. “Well, then,” the two angels conclude their inquiry: “the End [Kijamet, pronounced Keeyamet] is not just yet,” and they close their eyes for another spell of silent invocation.

This book is written in the loaded, uneasy moment of the “not just yet,” a moment made present for listeners by the tale of the two angels each time it is retold in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). That the End is looming is no news to Bosnian Muslims. The finite nature of Earth, the cosmos, and all living things is the basic lesson of the Islamic sacred texts, and the acceptance of personal death is a way in which Muslims live in Islam.

And yet the power of this wisdom tale is such that with each retelling, its warning sounds fresh, and the End the angels await looms closer still and more daunting. The tale seeks to awake humans distracted from matters of finitude and forgetful of the solemn divine reminder that one day the world will end. In a few short moments, it teaches remembrance of this world, its importance and impermanence, and its utter frailty and sacredness, since the world both reveals and veils God and subsists on God’s attention. Remembrance is a practice essential to being a Muslim. Forgetfulness, conversely, is the road to ruin. And be not like those who forget God, so He makes them forget themselves. Those are the defiant.¹

The story also rehearses the order of things: a cosmology in which Earth is tied to the heavens, angels are mindful of the animals, and God’s invocation is every being’s vocation. Addressed to humans, the tale omits explicit mention of us while all along hinting at the very human, ruinous dispositions at work in the world and our species’ grave responsibilities in the face of the coming End.

The appeal of the wisdom tale lies in how it reminds us of the End. It invokes tenets of the Scripture and the rich tradition of its commentaries, but it points out into the living world. It raises questions. The angels themselves can do no better than inquire and investigate. If you want to know the state of Earth, pay attention to animals, the tale suggests. And the angels’ first concern is with the honeybees. Are they swarming?

For years now, I have been paying attention to the beekeepers and the honeybees as they forage for nectar and pollen through the deranged seasons, strange weather, and changing ecologies of BiH. From 2014 to 2019, I conducted what anthropologists call an ethnography: a field-based observation and hands-on, close involvement with cultural practices. To this day, I keep bees.

The following pages convey the results of my investigations, gathered on the trail of seasoned apiculturists who are traveling familiar routes through environments traditionally known for copious honey flow. These environments are rapidly changing. With the materials on hand, I cannot tell the climate future of honeybees or pollinators at large. Nonetheless, the range, form, and quality of alterations I have recorded add a precious and missing record of the ongoing impacts of climate change on interspecies relations between plants, bees, and humans. This record is important given how little is known about the effects of global warming on what biologists call pollination ecologies—the blooming field of interactions between plants and insects that keep the earth green and alive and, in turn, replenish the atmosphere under the local skies. The honey ecologies that preoccupy local beekeepers presume a still wider range of signs, meanings, and vital attractions that keep this world thriving. The waning of honey appears to them as a sign of the times.

By sharing my notes on how local beekeeping fares through changing climates, I also hope to diversify the questions and concerns about what is going on at present. The beekeepers themselves often wonder aloud on this topic. Their questions remain open as they try out old and new strategies to sustain the bees and to pursue prized honey and pollen. Whether such strategies entail more agile traveling and forage forecasting or tireless, diversified planting to improve the odds of honey and pollen harvest, they show well the extent to which resourceful responses are both fostered and foreclosed by the very local grounds where people act.

When one raises unnerving questions in specific places amid the clutter of ecological-historical circumstances that spell out limits of action and depth of attachments, complex and daunting questions, such as those about the effects of climate change, take on a loamy meaning. Values that are sought in the here and now by particular people and bonds presumed and tended among humans, animals, and plants are all too rich to be assimilated into formal terms and assessments of climate risk.

Unease may be the first step in grasping the “not quite yet” that has a hold of us, whether or not we are awake to the possibility that we are living in the end times. Catastrophic thinking, however, can be darkly seductive, which makes it rather unpopular among scholars, scientists, and public environmentalists. Apocalypticism is the most blatant form of bleak expectations and the most controversial. Describing something as “doomsday thinking” can lead the listener to belittle its logic and relevance. The worst trouble with the invocation of the looming apocalypse, however, is not so much that it seriously considers the world’s imminent collapse but that it too often hastens to resignation and the dead end. This book, therefore, is neither apocalyptic in the usual sense of the word nor is it averse to the apocalyptic traditions that deeply inform modern Western imagination, religious as much as secular. It brings forth and foregrounds Islamic eschatological lore: teachings, contemplations, and mindfulness about living in the light of imminent death and the world’s ultimate ruination.

Eschatology, as such, is the fiber of Islamic tradition. It informs all dimensions of faith practice and religious thinking to animate projects as diverse as charitable giving, child-rearing, and political or militant mobilizing. Political and militant Muslim eschatologies, with their grave speculations, gory imagery, or overly simplistic rendering of the good and the evil, here and in the afterlife, tend to capture media and scholarly attention. This book, by contrast, points to the profuse but more subtle relevance of Islamic eschatology in canonical texts, in the living spiritual tradition of Sufism, and in contemporary Muslim lives.²

Eschatology makes sense of life. Highlighting the finitude of all things, it revalues each life and the sheer effort of living well. It teaches how to live. The pages of the Qur’an, which Muslims read devoutly, recite in their daily prayers, and retell or cite to each other for comfort or as food for thought, are eschatological more often than they are not. Read with me, for instance, the following lines: Death throes will come, in truth; that’s what you’ve been avoiding. And the Horn will blast—it will be the promised Day.³

But the eschatological tone itself is all important for the divine message to carry well, and that tone always blends warnings with comfort and cheer. The Qur’an, too, is the message of the “not just yet,” and the news of divine promise it delivers is at once sober and sweet. O Prophet, truly we have sent you as a witness and a bringer of glad tidings and as a warner.⁴

A dear friend, Zejd, a Sufi dervish with formal training in Islamic theology, once wrote a story to help me convey what eschatology does. Here is Zejd’s story: A man walked far to seek out the blessed Prophet of Islam. He had heard the revealed message and taken it to heart, but he wanted much more precision on the subject of this looming End: What it is like? When it will be? and such. The Prophet heard him out and smiled. Instead of soothing the man’s fears or furnishing the missing details, he simply asked in turn: “And what have you prepared for It?” The Prophet, in other words, shifted the man’s perfectly reasonable questions to what counts: There’s the solemn certainty of the End—when the Hour comes, God knows when—and you and your doings will be seen in its light. Doing well in the present, the rest of the book shows, entails doing what foresees and forestalls the coming apocalypse.

It is such practical-minded eschatological activism that concerns me in this book. This sort of practice, however, is closely tied to contemplation, not least because these grave subject matters encourage pondering profound questions such as the nature and meaning of existence. Thinking about life and death, in other words, entertains metaphysical questions about what is real and what really matters.

Metaphysics, meaning foundational ideas about the world we live and die in, may seem out of place in mundane settings such as apiaries or gardens or a distraction at the height of an ecological crisis. On the contrary, such questions are already implied as we go about our daily business and, although often unstated, bear powerfully on how we handle ourselves and approach others, including plants and animals, and even how we relate to the weather day to day. Metaphysics is central to the stories we tell each other about the state of our world and its current course toward ruination or chances for remediation.

That the biosphere is going to rack and ruin also decidedly shows a metaphysical crisis of the global, late-modern cultural economy as devastating as the effects of the fossil fuels that are spinning its wheels. The deepest metaphysical questions are most readily glossed over as we make arguments for and against business as usual, voice our hopes about livable futures, and consider proposals for piecemeal adaptations or radical alternatives: Who or what are we? What is this place, Earth? And what the heck are we doing here to begin with?

The wisdom tale about the two angels offers poignant clues about basic Islamic metaphysics. Whereas in the hadith, the Prophet’s question that Zejd related to me—“And what have you prepared for It?”— focuses on humans and emphasizes the importance of human deeds for living and dying well in God’s good pleasure, the angel’s story slightly shifts the perspective.

Told from the angels’ point of view, the wisdom tale foregrounds vital relationships between Earth and the heavens in which humans play a particular part. Angels are deeply interested in the animals, and their repeatedly stated concerns and watchfulness are expressions of divine care for animal flourishing. The local listeners are presumed to know that the suspected threats to animals are due to people making a mess of things on Earth or, in Qur’anic terms, doing fasād.⁵ The angels’ story further teaches that the fate of the world is inseparable from animal well-being. This particular wisdom tale (hikaja, from the Arabic h.ikāya, meaning “story”) is a clever folk commentary on the Islamic textual tradition that speaks of God as the Nurturer or Lord of the Worlds.

Tendency to focus on the human, and man in particular, as the principle agent in the narratives of this world’s history, are as strong in modern Islamic thought as they are in modern projects the world over, but that sort of humanism whittles down the teeming worlds of other beings that God invokes in the revealed words. Divine self-descriptions as the Nurturer and the Lord of the Worlds in the Qu’ran presume more than a human cosmos while verses—and their commentaries—stress that everything, not just humans, subsists on divine care and attention. Moreover, the world itself is the divine self-revelation that is on- going, as the organic, sensuous signs are lavished upon the cosmos at large and grasped, piecemeal, by each existent according to its singular disposition and species-specific receptivity. Everything in cosmos responds to the divine revelation with praise. Since humans are more ambivalent, defiant, or indifferent—indeed, this is the brunt of our species exceptionalism—Qur’an appeals to the humans.

Put together, the two stories—the angels’ and Zejd’s—suggest that preparing for the Hour entails doing what is necessary for personal salvation, but that such doing requires, by default, fostering conditions for swarming, lambing, and spawning. Put differently, forestalling the apocalypse presumes that humans give earthly beings their due, honoring God’s interest in and presence within other divine subjects. Islamic eschatology is irreducibly ecologically minded; it is, in a word, an eco-eschatology.

At the start of my study, I knew very little about bees. I knew that their honey was praised in the region for its nutritional and medicinal qualities and that people casually described honeybees as divinely inspired. It was obvious to me that the apiculture in BiH did not share the same load of predicaments that overwhelm commercial pollinators in North America and Northern Europe, especially given the small scale of the local operations and honey gathering that preoccupy the apiarists. What I knew and had read by then, however, did not prepare me for appreciating the bees’ essential relationship with the weather.

The May Storms of 2014

The rain has finally stopped. I step into the sunlit terrace to take in the damage. It has been raining so relentlessly for so long that our steep piece of land in the mountains has turned into a web of creeks rushing from high up down into the valleys far below, overwhelming the river’s watershed in the lowlands with rocks, wood, silt, and debris.

Our flower gardens are sunken, vegetable lots erased. The house was kept dry by makeshift channels dug out in the middle of one long night with pick-shovels, in emergency mode, by three pairs of hands—my sister’s, our father’s, and my own. Our mother, recovering from a broken leg, was inside with the cat and otherwise employed with prayers, since our tools could only go so far in keeping us all safe. The edges of our land and the fields had already been furrowed by a creeping landslide, and it was only the many trees in our orchard, like troupes of rooted angels, that kept us firmly grounded in the soggy soil.

Stuck inside in the previous days and waiting for the skies to clear, my frustration grew as fast as mold, giving way to dread as I seriously began to wonder whether the rain would ever stop. The old customs of weather—sunshine after rain—could no longer be counted on. On days when the skies cleared, we hurried outdoors to get things done, but the clement spells did not last long: clouds soon gathered, and rainstorms like we had never seen came down like bleak curtains over the familiar world we knew, loved, and feared we might have lost.

On the face of things, the summer-long bad weather affecting our village was not a disaster. At least, it did not register as such in the local, let alone global, media, which was focused on disaster relief and post-disaster recovery in the regions of BiH that had flooded earlier in May following a cyclonic storm. During that storm, three days of extreme rainfall deluged the industrial and agricultural areas located across the watershed of central and northeastern Bosnia. The Sava River, which skirts the country’s northern border, peaked with flash floods, its level rising to flood threats faster than anyone could remember.

It did not help that the national river infrastructure was poor due to war damage and peacetime neglect, that there were no early-warning systems in place, or that the river management was inadequately coordinated between the administrative units that make up the deeply divided Bosnian state. Sava River management also requires international cooperation since it courses through three other nations: Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia, but the peacetime relations of these former Yugoslav states remain tense since the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia and the 1990s wars that followed.

Once the rain stopped, foreign relief agencies and self-organized groups of Bosnian citizens poured in to help the displaced and stranded people with emergency aid and to initiate cleanup and recovery projects. Come June, the natural disaster was technically over. It was not the first episode of extreme weather in the region, but the fierceness of the storm and the scale of devastation made the May 2014 floods the watershed event in conversations on global climate change threats to the Balkans region. At least it became such in the statements issued by government officials, United Nations (UN) agencies, the World Bank, and international donors.

On the ground, a different conversation about disaster circulated. “This is worse than war,” I heard people in the village say. Referring to the 1990s conflict still fresh in their memory, my neighbors compared the extreme weather event with warfare and found the storm and ongoing downpours even more unsettling.

While the war raged through Bosnia in the 1990s, civilians fortunate enough to have access to land, however small, grew food, foraged, and found comfort in nature. Even the smallest green plots between parking lots were cultivated, while urbanites raided the suburbs, thickets, and forests for wild fruit, berries, mushrooms, herbs, and edible weeds. The extreme weather, however, made the most elemental media of life hostile. Stuck indoors for much of the summer, we felt as if we had been banished from the very earth and atmosphere.

Kijamet, as invoked by the two angels in the wisdom tale, was another way people described the weather catastrophe.

A Surprise Swarm

Sitting on the terrace of our family village home during a sunlit spell at noontime late in June, I am taken by the restored beauty of our land. The paths and gardens had been wrecked, but the damage seems manageable, especially as the clouds and the monochrome sheets of rain lift and the landscape in view emerges, radiant. Mists rise from the warming earth, crowning the fruit trees of our unruly orchard garden with fine, fading halos.

All of a sudden, I feel something stirring about the garden. The feeling is strong. Neither sensuous nor visceral, something is turning my whole person outward, making me curious, expectant, for what I do not know. I stand up, draw to the edge of the terrace, scan the surroundings, hold my breath, and listen anxiously. Then, finally, I see it. There, by the plum tree, a bee swarm is in the making.

Tens of thousands of luminous wings catch the light, shimmering with the energy of an insect call to gather the dispersed collective. Their buzzing resonates until every branch in the orchard seems to join the honeybees’ invocation. The very air swirls as the bees circle above the crown of the tree, then alight, one by one, forming a cluster. I quickly jump from the terrace and head toward the tree cautiously, trembling with an unfamiliar excitement as if my nerves had become insective, more numerous and more reactive, in the inner hive of feeling. I stand below them, awed.

In the lull between storms, this swarm has taken off from a hive in our neighbor’s apiary. She is a traditional beekeeper and lets her bees swarm at will every season, except that she follows the advance signs of swarming carefully and then waits. When the bees take off, she is ready with implements, spells, and invocations to persuade the swarm to land. But this time, the bad weather has taken her off guard—she had not expected the bees to swarm amid lasting downpours, nor had she noticed any signals of their intentions to swarm. That morning, the whole family had gone to their far fields to collect hay for their dairy cow before the next shower.

Bees have their own way of forecasting weather. They run their hive activities in tune with daily and seasonal shifts in the elements, which profoundly determine the life cycles and secreting moods of the plants they feed on and pollinate. Seasoned local beekeepers learn to foretell the local weather by watching their bees.

I took it as a good sign that this surprise swarm was in the making, although the beekeeper had doubted swarm’s likelihood and the public weather forecast had anticipated no fair skies in the near future. But the bees knew. They had been patiently reshuffling their nest through the long-lasting storm, and as soon as the skies cleared for a spell, they burst out, full of faith.

I had just started researching local beekeeping that June. The enduring rainstorms had mostly ruined my field research plans by keeping me and the beekeepers from the apiaries.

Had it been otherwise, though, I would have put the May storm and the bad weather only too readily behind me, to focus, instead, on more pressing research questions I originally intended to study. The relentless torrents seized my attention, instead. The sudden visit of the swarm, on the other hand, recharged my wonder about honeybees.

A Swarm Spell, A Prayer

Once the swarm settles, I rush to get my neighbor, Kada, the beekeeper. I find her on the village outskirts, busy building a haystack with her four children and father-in-law while Bobby, their mutt, runs around the field all wound up. Ever since her husband’s small trade business failed and he joined the migrant workforce in Slovenia to pay off debts, Kada, in her midthirties, has been handling ten hives on top of many other duties in the homestead.

She remembers growing up with bees in her grandfather’s bee yard. She could always call on her father for advice or consult two retired beekeepers in the village. Her father-in-law helps reluctantly, as he is afraid of stings. But mostly, Kada improvises along the way, trusting the bees to do what they know best.

Her hive management is low-key. In preparation for winter, she treats the bees against varroa mites, using either organic or synthetic miticides. She also bundles up the hives with layers of newspaper and grocery store fliers; the colorful shreds that peek from below the lids through winter look as if the hive tops are sprouting in advance of spring. She aids the bees through winter’s dearth with food supplements and, when the flow is good, harvests honey.

The early summer routine of catching the swarms is demanding and thrilling. The swarms that are not caught soon after they exit are likely to alight high in the tree crowns. We have often watched Kada balance, barefoot, some fifteen meters above the ground on frail branches of old, local species of apples and pears, working out strategies to shake off the cluster into a skep, laid out with bunches of fragrant lemon balms that attract bees. Her father-in-law, fully dressed in a protective suit and wearing two veiled hats one on top of the other, typically frets below: “She will break her neck!” But unless they are caught while high up in the trees, the bees could soar higher, “head for the forest,” and be gone forever. The hassle at the apiary notwithstanding, Kada could never give up the bees, she says, once she has “learned to love them.”

At the news of a runaway swarm, Kada drops everything. Soon enough, with one retired beekeeper in tow, her hands gloved and her waist-long blond braids tucked in a veiled hat, she props a stepladder against the lean plum tree. She climbs. Holding a traditional conical wicker skep skyward so it gapes open just below the cluster, she gives the branch a determined shake. A sudden, massive buzz arises; the bee cluster drops and, missing the skep, breaks like a ripe fruit onto the white sheet spread out below around a spare skep, the sheet shimmering with sprinkled sugar.

Hours later, most of the bees have walked into the offered wicker nest. Kada gently wraps the sheet around the skep and carries it to her apiary just steps outside her house where corn and vegetable patches mingle with the orchard. She shakes the bees off into an empty bee box and closes the lid. Bismillāhir Rāhmānir Rāhīm, she whispers. In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the bees have been offered a new home, and only by God’s leave will they settle in and stay.

It is from this spot that, in all other early summer seasons, Kada has kept an eye on the boxes. Watching what the bees are doing at the hive entrances and listening to how the hives sound, she knows how to forecast swarms. The swarm’s advance is usually preceded by a familiar apian negotiation. The honeybee queen, known locally as matica, a bee mother, issues an insistent, high-pitch rallying call: poot-poot-poot, to which the resident bees respond with a sonorous kut-kut-kut. To speakers of the local language, Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian (BSC for short), poot sounds like “trip” (put), and the chant of keen responses sounds like a collective question—“when?” (kad?). These are the near signs of departure, and yet patience, watchfulness, and luck are needed to catch the exact moment when the swarm is cast.

When that happens, Kada and her kids run up to the hive to persuade the bees to stay with them. She points a water hose skyward, softening the strong stream with her fingers into a sprinkle while pleading and spell-making with the swirling streak of insects: Sjedi majka, sjedi majka (“Sit down, mother, sit down, mother”). Her older son plucks fistfuls of the apiary grass and tosses it up in the air, joining his mother’s bidding in his changing teenage voice: “Sit down, mother!” His younger sister quickly squats, taps her fingers lightly at the ground, then jumps up, clapping fast, barely holding in excited giggles. She keeps at it—squat down, jump up and clap, squat down—moving her body in a dance between the human and the apian, earthbound and airborne inclinations. The youngest ones, twins, squat at a safe distance from the white sheet that has been spread out around the skep that the humans have offered, along with sprinklings of sugar, in an invitation to the bees to stay. From the edges of the scene, the twins watch and learn what to do when honeybees are bent on leaving.

The lesson, in short, is to talk to them and treat them like kin.⁶ Kada appeals to the bees’ mother because she knows that the bees will stay if their mother stays. The spell often works like magic, and the bees land nearby. Only then can a swarm catching proceed properly.

Professional beekeepers or bee biologists might point out that the swarm tends to alight low, soon after exiting, but this explanation should not discount the whole work of the binding spell or its success. The point is not just to catch the bees but to recreate a bond between the honeybees and humans at the very moment they are almost lost to each other.

The spell does that by chanting, invoking, and replaying the grounds of apian-human connection. It asserts their affinities: both bees and humans are embodied beings, dwelling on the earth between the soil and the skies, living in a language culture, and thriving within families and societies. The work of the spell affiliates the bees and humans into a cross-cultural, interspecies kinship as the beekeeper Kada addresses the bee mother, matica, as her own mother. Kada’s children invoke the bee queen as their mother’s mother.

The swarm spell is also an attempt to translate between species. The rhyme is meant to be compelling to the bees: the human language becomes more concrete—sugar, water shower, soil; more rhythmic—clap-pause-clap; and more elemental—soil, water, air. But it is not entirely wordless. The speakers presume that the local language, BSC, essentially expresses the apian poots and kuts.

Fig. 1.1 Sit down, mother

The swarm spell also simulates imminent threats: the tossed-up earth is a code for an earthquake or, as some locals have suggested to me, a plundering bear attack. The hose shower is the language of rain. Sprinkled sugar speaks for care in the form of supplemental food. The spell is partly a trick and partly an honest warning that upheavals, bad weather, and dearth await. The spell seeks to charm the bees into sticking with the humans with whom they live and work.

Local Styles of Beekeeping

In local terms, Kada’s beekeeping is known as traditional. Whereas most local beekeepers pride themselves on an avid reading of international apicultural sources—published in Slavic and European languages or in translation—and keeping up with the latest bee research, apicultural technologies, and worldly news, Kada never reads anything about bees. She draws instead on an oral family tradition and, when in doubt, seeks advice from other practitioners.

The most traditional aspect of her practice is that she lets the bees swarm at will and then chases after them every summer. She keeps bees in Langstroth hives, the familiar bee boxes seen around the globe, but unlike modern apiculturists, she does not use movable frames—which is the key feature of such modern hives—to manage the living order of the resident bee population, including their seasonal swarming inclinations.

Swarming, in the simplest terms, is an event of a hive’s reorganization and apian social reproduction, a means by which bees rework their original community by splitting it up around new and old bee queens, or “bee mothers.” The group that departs with the older queen ingests essential honey supplies before leaving behind the insulated, climate-controlled, safe nest that has become congested, contaminated, or otherwise uncomfortable in search of a new dwelling and a fresh start. The collective left behind may cast a few more swarms before it settles around a newly hatched queen. That queen will mate with up to a dozen drones, and from the sperm that she collects, she will be laying eggs for the rest of her reproductive life.

With their offspring, the hive will have an entirely different genetic composition than the original collective, and their social tendencies—toward foraging, swarming, cleaning, and such—will be significantly altered. The hive left behind is a hive transformed.⁷

As for the departing swarm, there is no guarantee that it will make it safely through this rite of passage that forms the search for a new nest. In fact, most swarms fail. Local beekeepers report ever fewer sightings of feral hives in the regional forests and claim that honeybees can no longer survive in the wild due to pest infestation, recurrent droughts, and prolonged dearth.

While the sight of a swarm, as one local apiarist put it, makes a “beekeeper’s heart skip,” most professionals cannot spare the time to negotiate with absconding bees, nor are they willing to run the risk of losing honeybees. Professional manuals soberly describe swarming as “wasteful,” insofar as the swarming bees are allegedly distracted from foraging for honey and tend to cast too many swarms, most of which are too weak to provide for themselves in time for the winter. Still, whether to let the bees swarm or not is a highly contested issue among local beekeepers, who form a passionately opinionated community. Various styles of swarm management are tried out and advocated: from tight control of the bees’ seasonal growth and brood-food arrangements that aim to curb swarming entirely to various compromises that work with the bees’ schedules, priorities, and investments in rearing new bee queens. Nonetheless, the event of bees bursting out of hives is the clearest sign of “bees out of control.”

By the looks of it, a swarm is indeed a riotous event; the sheer energy of restless, darting, quivering beings is contagious. Bees from neighboring hives join in, swept by the swarming currents, and human onlookers find themselves genuinely amazed. A word for swarming in BSC is rojenje, which invokes quickening and fizzling before coming together. One says, for instance, misli mi se roje, “My thoughts are swarming,” in a rush of an inspiration or in an anxious flurry.

Swarming, however, is just as much an act of bees’ deliberation, long in the making, timed according to their sense of opportunities and priorities. Preparations for the swarm’s departure, as bee biologists and beekeepers know, are very complex and still inadequately understood, and the communication, coordination, scouting, and decision-making that follow are just as ingenious and nothing short of fabulous.⁸

A swarm is the incipient form, and a recurrent beginning, of an exceptionally sophisticated, deliberate form of a well-knit togetherness, which is the hive. The political form of the hive—political in the sense of being together through experience and language and working out a communal life—in the local language is not a “colony” but a društvo or a zajednica, the terms with thick regional histories that translate to “society” and “community.”

Along with these Slavic terms, the idea of umet also defines bees locally. Like many other key Islamic terms among Bosnian Muslims, umet is borrowed from Arabic (ummah) and denotes a faith-based community.

My interlocutors with theological training referred to a particular verse in the Qur’an to underline commonality between humans and bees. Found in the chapter titled “The Livestock” (Al-A‘nām), the verse refers to animals in general and translates as follows: All the animals walking upon the earth and all the birds flying on their wings are communities like yourselves.⁹ Classic Qur’anic explanations of this verse offer a wide range of interpretations that tend to meet on several basic points: animals are endowed with their own languages and engage in forms of adoration specific to their species. While all animals are an umet, the intricacy of honeybees’ social organization, the complexity of their hive products, and their mention in the Qur’an are the usual arguments that apiarists put forth to single out the honeybees as an especially faithful and knowledgeable community. “Honeybees know best,” the local beekeepers are fond of saying.

A Prophetic Species

The sense that bees “know best” when it comes to running their hive affairs is commonly shared across many styles of local apiculture. The extent to which human control over bees is curbed by this underlying confidence in the bees, however, varies. Kada’s hive management is minimal, but her spell pleads with the bees because when a swarm is cast, human control is, obviously, not an option. Even once a swarm is caught, there is no guarantee that the bees will stay. With a casual invocation of God’s name over the newly established hive, Kada acknowledges what seems like common sense to her: the fact that bees are, first of all, divine subjects.

She appeals to the bees to settle, but she appeals to the God that she and the bees have in common, the Compassionate and the Merciful, to bind them together back at the apiary. For Muslims, the invocation of God’s names is a preface or a coda to any act of significance. When followed by alh.amdulillāh, “Praise be to God,” and rabbi l‘ālamīn, “Lord [or Nurturer] of worlds,” a casual supplication shows good manners and states faith in good outcomes soon to follow. For out of kindness, the tradition guarantees, God will respond grandly to such praise. The two lines of invocation and praise make up the quintessential Muslim address. They begin the chapter that opens the Qur‘an and are recited in daily ritual prayers and everyday supplications. Kada, who is not much drawn to perusing the Islamic sources—she goes by the handful verses she learned by heart—takes it for granted that honeybees work and live by means of divine inspiration as well as that they associate with humans only for the love of God.

These are the basics of an Islamic understanding of bees, which profoundly orients local beekeeping, whether through the lively oral culture or the rich textual tradition. Among the beekeepers I have worked with over the years were many working and retired imams with a formal training in what is known as “Islamic sciences,” which include diverse subjects of study such as Islamic theology, Sufism and philosophy, ethics, and jurisprudence. A few beekeepers were Sufis: Muslims drawn to the inner path to knowing and loving God. For the Sufis and imams, the canonical sources—the Qur’an and the Hadith (records of the Prophet’s words and deeds)—and their commentaries as well as the classic and contemporary Islamic texts are a part of the written tradition that is just as pertinent to keeping the bees as are the beekeeping manuals.

The Qur’an describes the event of honeybees receiving a divine revelation. Two verses in the Qur’anic chapter titled al-Nah.l, “The Bee,” are commonly cited and recited in learned conversations about honeybees. In translation, they read: And your Lord revealed to the bee, ‘Take up dwellings among the mountains and the trees and among that which they build. Then eat of every kind of fruit and follow the ways of Your Nurturer made easy.’ A drink of various hues comes forth from their bellies wherein there is medicine for humankind. Truly in that is a sign for a people who reflect.¹⁰

The divine message revealed to the bee, at the very least, amounts to guiding instructions on how to forage and where to dwell. Foraging entails biodiverse landscapes—every kind of fruit—while divine bidding makes residence in apiaries incumbent on honeybees.

The bestowal of revelation on the bee is most noteworthy. Whereas divine guidance, the Qur’an says, is granted to every engendered thing,¹¹ the word wah.y and the verb form ewh.a from the same root in the Book primarily denote divine revelation or inspiration to human prophets and close friends. The prophetic species, honeybees follow the revelation unfailingly—in contrast to humans, my interlocutors often added regretfully, who can err or defy God’s words—and their inspired ways of living yield the cherished honey.

Given honey’s mention in the Qur’an and the pride of place it takes in what is known as the prophetic medicine—health advice passed on by the Prophet of Islam—the therapeutic and nutritional properties of honey have long been acknowledged in the regional herbal folklore and remedial home diets. Collection of honey has traditionally been the primary focus of the local beekeepers. In addition, since the 1970s, therapeutic properties of the whole array of other hive products have been appraised in a transnational effort to ground traditional uses of bee products in scientific trials, explanations, and proofs of efficacy.¹²

Consumed alone or combined with herbs, hive products, with honey at their core, are a part of nutritional, prophylactic, and medical regimes that people in present-day BiH adopt in case of illness or to aid a recovery. At the very least, a regular supply of honey is what most people aspire to secure for the sake of a sound diet.

The medicinal qualities of honey, however, have a still broader connotation in the Islamic sources and their local commentaries.

The Arabic term shifā’ (a cure or medicine) is used in the Qur’an to refer to honey and to the Qur’an itself, both fruits of divine revelation. The drink that comes from the bees’ bellies is a shifā’ (a healing), while the Qur’an is a guidance and healing for the faithful and a cure for that which lies within breasts.¹³ As a verb form, yashfi appears twice in the Qur’an to relate God’s healing touch. The bestowals of divine revelation and their remedial qualities in honey and in the Book that is meant to be read and recited in a beautiful—sweet—voice are staples for reflection.

The Qur’an urges its readers and listeners to ponder the meaning of the verses and to take a good look at the signs of the material world. For Bosnian Muslim beekeepers and bee lovers—imams and Sufis in particular—such reflection is a part of faith and of the apicultural practice. A nimble habit that travels from apiaries to home libraries, reflection ongoingly refines a growing yet unfinished understanding of bees through both hands-on observation and the contemplation of meanings across the pages of the Revelation.

Fig. 1.2 And Your Lord revealed . . .

This back-and-forth between the world and the divine Word is presumed by the Islamic devotional and reading tradition and suggested by the double meaning of the word āyah, which glosses both a thing out there in the sensuous world and a verse in the Qur’an. God reveals His presence everywhere and speaks through every form.¹⁴

The End Times

In the final days of the final times, the Qur’an will vanish from Earth overnight, one hadith reads.¹⁵ We are left to imagine the details. Every letter on every page will rise up on cue and flee. Every electronic transcription will abscond from the code stored online or on hard drives. Like bees who receive a message across the nest, no one knows from where or how, then surge one by one, together as one in a swarm to leave congested or infected hives. Like a giant swarm, the words of God will depart to the heavens for good. “No verse will be left on earth.”¹⁶

The Prophet’s saying speaks of the world on the brink of collapse, but the world that is essentially already ruined because the revealed knowledge has been practically forgotten and the Qur’an has already disappeared from people’s hearts. Revelation is revoked when human desire for divine news has been spent.

A body of the Prophet’s sayings speaks of social, political, and environmental upheavals that signify the coming end of the world. The final times, however, will be a long-lasting epoch. The Arabic phrase ākhir al-zamān (transliterated in BSC as ahiri zeman) refers to the historical period that began in the seventh century when the Prophet of Islam delivered God’s final word: the Qur’an. The last Prophet and the last revelation announce the beginning of the end of Earth’s history.

The Hadith speak of major and minor signs of the times, but their iterations across the chains of transmission can hardly be used to chart the exact course of historical events. That has not prevented Muslims over time from trying to work out a chronology of collapse. At their most ambitious, such attempts seek to derive a definitive sequence of affairs and a conclusive cast of characters from the materials whose suggestive power rests in their multivalent nature as well as in the gripping details that impart ultimate significance to everyday disasters.

The signs of the times described in the Hadith, however, do suggest a worldwide dynamic of a race to ruin. Capital expands, consumption is exuberant, fantastic technologies manage the sky and the land, and eminent swindlers paint the hell of a present as heaven to win a global fan base. There is much useless killing. Punishing droughts persist over wastelands, and land “sinks” in the East, in the West, and on the Arabian Peninsula. Thick smoke envelops the atmosphere. When profound disorder fills the earth, the cosmos heaves in response and revolts once and for all. The sun rises from the West.

As with all other matters, the Prophet’s sayings on the final times are meant to be taken as an extended commentary on the Qur’an whose ample references to the End, convey a bottom line: it is God’s well-kept secret. The Hour will come, God promises, when least expected: in a blink of an eye, or faster still. Indeed, God is able to do all things.¹⁷ Not even the nearest angels know the particulars. They can do no better than watch for the signs and dread the event that weighs heavily on everyone in the heavens and the earth.¹⁸ The same is true for the Prophet, God’s closest friend. They ask you about the Hour: When will it come? You don’t know, so how can you tell. To your Lord alone belongs the knowledge of it. You are but a warner for whoever fears it.¹⁹

What the Prophet conveys instead is how to relate to the grave divine promise, day to day. The answer, in a nutshell, is with keen mindfulness. Whenever the Prophet raised a morsel of food to his blessed mouth, a hadith conveys, he feared that the End might surprise him before he swallowed. And he was just as expectant of his death. If there was no water to perform ablutions while traveling and the nearest well was an hour’s journey away, the Prophet performed ritual purifications by touching soil, for fear he might not live long enough to reach the water source.

My principal guide through the subjects of Islamic thought and practice was a wise, gentle Sufi elder, Shaykh Ayne. For him, the final times was a default reference to our present, while eschatology was the cornerstone of our conversations, not as a discrete subject but as an underlying awareness about the finite nature of all things and a weariness about the coming Hour.

Shaykh walked me through the seminal texts—the Qur’an and the Hadith—and taught me to read them for their timeless messages and insights into the present. He was uninterested in teasing out the unfolding of the apocalyptic plot but was deeply intrigued by the human dispositions and collective drives that obstinately wrecked and ruined the earth at present to the point where the Gentle and the Patient, the names by which God is known in the tradition, winds up the planet, the cosmos, and all the engendered worlds.

One book in Shaykh’s library particularly impressed me. Entitled The Path of Muhammad,²⁰ the book is a work by by one of Shaykh’s teacher’s, Mustafa Čolić, an imam and a Sufi of an extraordinary insight. Published in 1998, nearly four hundred pages long, the book is a commentary and a translation of an excerpt from the sixteenth-century classic by Sufi scholar Imam Birgivi.

Shaykh Čolić’s book reportedly sold like hot cakes, though, as Shaykh Ayne amusedly noted, the general agreement was that Shaykh’s comments were too challenging for most readers, including those well read in the Islamic sciences. In his role as an imam, a knower of great repute, and a witty speaker, however, Shaykh Čolić regularly lectured and conversed in public and private gatherings, and so his speeches took this dense text onto a well-traveled life course. As so often happens in Bosnia, Islamic textual knowledge flows off the pages, trimmed but also enlivened and clarified by the spoken word.

The section dealing with the signs of the times, a mere fifty pages, sits among discussions of a range of other Islamic creeds derived from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings. All the signs of the times, Shaykh suggests, can be taken both literally and as allusions to deeper meanings, depending on the listener. The readers’ particular positions and personal dispositions color the meanings, like glass colors the water or light it receives.²¹

Appreciation of multiple perspectives, however, does not mean that anything goes. A sound understanding of Islamic sacred law and the creeds is the common ground on which to build further understanding. Dogmatic interpretations are futile, Shaykh writes, because they strive against the evident plurality of perspectives and deny the multiple nature of the world itself, which comprises both sensuous things and the imperceptible realities that compose and surpass them. Reductive, or dogmatic, tendencies are raging, according to Shaykh Čolić, and include rationalist and formalist currents of modern Islamic thought, which condemn a pursuit of metaphysical meanings as well as socialist ideologies of historical materialism, secular Western philosophies, and “godless sciences and technologies,” which deny all but biophysical reality confirmed by human senses or instruments.

The whiff of the great smoke that the Qur’an mentions arising to envelop the earth, Shaykh writes, is already here, miasmic in the industrial air pollution. The Arabic word dukhān, translated as fume, smoke, gas, or dust, can be taken literally as that which pollutes the air and obscures the vision in the wake of fires and storms. Early commentaries suggested that dukhān referred to the great famine that struck a tribe of the Prophet’s opponents, clouding their vision. The greatest fumes and fogs at present, Shaykh writes, are those occluding minds and deadening hearts with knowledge that tries to reign in the expansive range of ongoing divine self-disclosure to the measure of what humans deem possible and plausible.

Shaykh Čolić’s commentary on the signs of the end times gives valuable and timely insight into the nature of the disorder that ultimately dooms the planet. “Since all that is manifest points to what is non-manifest, all objective events and things at once point to subjective activities and matters, therefore, all material catastrophes allude and stoke contemplation towards metaphysical (related to mind-reason, spirit-soul) catastrophes.”²²

The manifest and nonmanifest are complementary qualities of the reality that both integrates and surpasses them, and their dynamic interplay is an ongoing subject in Shaykh’s writing on Islamic metaphysics. The point I take for this book, however, pertains to the nonevident catastrophe at the core of final times, which has to do with human dispositions. Human (insān), in the sense that Shaykh elaborates through his works, is a being special in the light of the inner domain glossed in the Islamic sources as “heart.”²³ Heart is, potentially, a tremendously capacious entity where the inner and outer, the manifest and nonmanifest, God and human meet. The human heart can also fester with disorder that incurs more damage, on the inside and the outside, “than seventy devils together.”²⁴

Shaykh’s comments also suggest that the portents of ākhir al-zamān are always timely, abounding in particular historical connotations and foreshadowing the ultimate events at the end of time. Signs of the times, in Shaykh’s reading, are the signs brewing at all times.

Eco-Eschatology

What follows is not a comprehensive analysis of the Islamic teachings on the final times but rather an attempt to take on the atmosphere of the looming End to ponder the timely signs of the unfolding ecological disaster. I take a page from Shaykh Čolić’s book to think about our dire present with honeybees and their keepers, their faithful, seasonal pursuits of honey and bees’ famished foraging through weathered landscapes. I also study Islamic sources with local fellow readers, listen to the popular as well as learned commentaries, and, just as importantly, draw on years of field observations gathered into the beekeepers’ and my notes.

Focus on honeybees helps me open up a special window onto the Islamic eschatology, one that views the final times ecologically through relationships between humans and animals, among other species, and God.²⁵ An eco-eschatological perspective attends to Islamic textual sources to better understand Bosnian Muslim tales and concerns about the bees and the changing planet. At the same time, it is the particular Muslim eco-practices and commentaries on the field evidence of climate change crisis that highlight elements of the Islamic tradition that are often underappreciated in contemporary conversations about Islam.

I also read across humanities, social, and natural sciences for critical insights into our catastrophic times. The worldwide ecological and climate catastrophe and the evident failure to effectively curb global emissions and warming trends have prompted academics and public intellectuals to scrutinize our anthropocentric—human-focused—ways of knowing and relating to nature. Within humanities and social sciences, self-reflective scholars have lately been keen to shift the focus of their studies beyond the modern idea of the human as a sovereign creature entitled to use with impunity everything between the land and the skies. Current works in interdisciplinary scholarship and the visual arts are now highlighting the myriad ways in which animals, plants, and other species as well as natural elements deeply shape our histories and economies and our human ways of being, knowing, and dwelling within the world shared by many species.²⁶

My Islamic sources and Muslim interlocutors, however, will not let me lose sight of divinity, which is seldom of concern to the burgeoning field of multispecies ethnography and human-animal studies. The divine is not simply omitted, but it is ill fitting within the field of the new eco-scholarship. Namely, scholars and artists are becoming conceptually adventurous because moving beyond the modern idea of human entails a readiness to duly consider other propositions about the human place in the world. Indigenous and nonmodern cosmologies that describe landscapes as imbued or animated by spirits and nonhuman beings are now given another chance at being heard. Truth claims that cultural relativism could once accommodate and, for all practical purposes, dismiss as irrelevant are now recognized for their potential to disturb modern certainties about what exists and how things are, as well as to effectively counter land-use policies, extractive enterprises, or conservation plans that rest on the assumption that the environment is merely an economic resource.²⁷

Monotheistic cosmologies, on the other hand, tend to be dismissed or glossed with hastiness untypical for scholars.²⁸ The idea of One God in the Abrahamic traditions, not as the subject of a personal, religious belief but as an expansive agency to reckon with, cannot be shoehorned into the burgeoning visions of the plural world, the multiverse in which many forces and claims about what matters can coexist, but not one can get the last word. For all its expansiveness, this “new age of curiosity” draws the line at the subject of revealed religion, which arguably remains the most discomfiting, indeed, irritating, issue for secular thinkers.²⁹

Similarly, metaphysical questions—about ultimate values and the meaning of human, presence, or the world—are being widely reopened in the light of ecological catastrophes and the prospects of postsustainable future. The metaphysics that now come to the fore, however, are the ones newly invented and vocally opposed to the old, theological traditions, that, assumption goes, are conceptually threadbare and, anyhow, nearly transcended with globalization of modern secularism.³⁰

Rare attempts to think ecologically with the Abrahamic religions often proceed by reading that is openly unbound by the tradition, and tones down most inconvenient elements, such as the apocalypse or the idea of a resourceful, competent God whose knowledge encompasses the future and the fate of the earth and the universe and their dwellers. Ecological rereadings of Christian theological sources in particular tend to present a minimalist metaphysics as the very condition for considering—generously and seriously—religious texts, experiences, and utterances.³¹

This book intends to reread Islamic sources, reverently, treating them as founts of theoretical inspiration. In other words, I think with the conceptual tradition that is obliging Muslims—and their anthropologist—with metaphysics in its most expansive sense, including the idea of God who promises to bring the world’s end. I suggest that ecological thinking and antiapocalyptic activism can arise precisely from an engagement faithful to the boldest claims of the Revelation, and that religious traditions can nurture adventurous thinking among many people, not just professional scholars.³²

This book proceeds by setting forth two related popular eco- eschatological propositions. One is that honey is waning, which is both an empirical statement about the effects of climate change on local landscapes and a weary comment on the profound meaning of the planetary crisis. The second proposition is a that honeybees’ endangerment foreshadows the world’s collapse, a confident assumption among Bosnian Muslims that does not merely rest on the adverse effects of honey’s scarcity on hives’ health. What is it about honey and bees that makes them vital to the world? Why are they invested with such an ominous capacity?

My point of departure for entertaining these questions is the hadith about the vanishing of the Qur’an. The Prophet’s saying forecasts a bleak moment when God’s revelation finally withdraws from Earth—the sign that the wasted planet is doomed. This saying is one of many that concerns the state of knowledge in the final times and anticipates a historic moment when publications are prolific and a mass of information is circulating, but genuine knowledge is on the wane. In Shaykh Čolić’s commentary, the knowledge in decline refers to several related forms of grasping the meanings that are not obvious. To begin with, there is ilum, the knowledge of Islamic sciences; tesawuf, taken broadly as a nonreductive interpretation of religious teachings, and marifet, which refers to deeper forms of insight found through contemplation and inspiration on the path of seeking God.³³ What makes these forms of knowledge “genuine” is the extent to which they are true to the Revelation and keep it a lively resource. A resource for grooming the hearts, which receive news of God and are seats of knowledge about God. An eco-eschatological reading of this hadith about the vanishing of the Quran and its commentaries proceeds from the premise that within the Islamic worldview, divine revelation has always been more than the written word.

There is also the divine message bestowed on the bees, the fruit of which is honey: the healing and the sign for people who reflect. For there to be honey, however, the entire world is presumed to be coming together— skies with soils, plants and proboscises, nectar secretions with seasons— to nurture the prophetic species.

Entities and actions within soil—minerals, acids, nutrients, and resident rock types—draw particular plants and prime their nectar-secreting tendencies. Local clouds and wind currents are mercurial elements that spell out density, sugariness, and chances of nectar flow. Foragers track the sun’s course across the sky to map round-trip routes from nests to nectar sites, with an innate solar compass that connects hives to the center of the solar system even when the sun is obscured or invisible. Earth’s magnetic fields resonate with bees in flight, perhaps by means of a magnetic element in their abdomens (scientists are debating), but whatever the structure of apian magnetorception, there is more than a poetic resonance between the micro and the macro, the bees’ bellies or bodies and the earth’s innards where geomagnetic fields spawn and fizzle before extending into outer space to fend off “solar winds.”

This coming together is the way the cosmos—that rattlebag of everything other than God, from weeds to solar winds—responds to tireless divine bidding and displays godly presence: All those in the heavens and the earth ask of Him; every day, He is upon some task.³⁴ Islamic thinkers usually speak of the cosmos as al-kathra, the evident plenitude of differences, all of which are revealing—and veiling—the One unique divine reality that engenders them and ultimately integrates and transcends them. The Qur’an presents God as the Lord of the Worlds and points to scriptures and to the things in the world as manifest signs of God’s actions and attributes. Shaykh Čolić speaks of divine self- disclosure in complementary forms of the worlds and the books (alemi, kitabi), or of beings and words (ekvani, eklami).³⁵ In other words, the world is the sensuous news that God delivers at all times and a close regard of these signs is a counterpart to listening and reading the Qur’an.

The waning of honey, divine revelation at its sweetest, is analogous to the vanishing of the Qur’an from Earth. For the premonition of the hadith to make ecological sense, one needs to wonder, what is divine revelation to the world? What, in this worldview, could bring down the world?

The rest of the book fleshes out an eco-eschatology, showing how ecology and eschatology are related in the Bosnian Muslim every day, how modern ecological thought and Islamic sources complement each other, not least in their divergences, and why ecology these days cannot afford to ignore eschatology, just as no religion of any contemporary relevance can ignore the global ecological disasters underway.

Honey Ecologies

Pollination ecology refers to pollen flows within a habitat that mostly take place through plant-pollinator interactions. Key events in life cycles of plants and insects are timed to a host of environmental cues and well synchronized between pollination partners so that the flowers’ pollen offerings readily meet adult insects’ appetites.

Given the importance of pollination for reproduction of plants in both natural and agricultural ecosystems, pollination ecologists throughout the twenty-first century have been preoccupied with the growing anthropogenic assaults on plant-pollinator interactions, from habitat loss and pesticides to invasive species and insect declines. The implications of global climate change for pollination networks and their conservation are still inadequately researched.

Later onset of winter and earlier springs are among the most obvious indicators of global climate change, and how the coupled plants and pollinators respond to these trends is an open question. This prevailing uncertainty is partly due to the fact that experimental and field studies are still rather few, considering the number of species involved and the specificities of their relationships in different climates and environments. Difficulty of anticipating future trends also stems from the sheer variability of responses noted thus far, including both synchronous adjustments of plants and their pollinators and pollination partners’ lives growing out of sync.³⁶ While pollination networks are generally described as robust, pollination ecologists suspect that the potential for plant-pollinator decoupling is great, especially with future warming and extreme weather trends.³⁷

Local beekeepers’ interest in seasonal interactions between bees and plants, on the other hand, is practical and focused on nectar. They also keep an eye on availability of pollen in local landscapes, since its collection by the bees is essential for the hive’s nutrition, brood development, and, ultimately, apian survival. To improve the chances of honey flow, many beekeepers enthusiastically plant flowering trees and plants and collect and cast seeds of melliferous—honey-yielding—wild bloomers in the areas surrounding their apiaries.

Mobile beekeepers travel with their bees across the country, actively following seasonal blooming trends. Honey forecasts are sometimes gauged with electronic hive scales. The scales are fitted to trial hives to track nectar inflows in the field and send updates to the apiarists’ cell phones. Most reliable anticipations, however, come through beekeepers’ scouting of familiar or new areas. Cruising and on foot, they closely watch the plants’ development and the ambient weather for the signs and prospects of honey flow.

When I started fieldwork in 2014, a local saying that “honey’s on the wheels” summed up an agile strategy to chase after honey that could no longer be counted on to flow where the apiarists’ hives were poised to meet it. Not even avid planting could secure honey harvests. Worse still, forage yielded so little nectar that the bees continually needed supplemental feeding. By 2019, honey was becoming so scarce that even those who traveled in pursuit of it were recurrently disappointed.

The rest of the book describes how beekeepers cultivate conditions for flow and hunt after honey as well as how they handle dearth and disappointments. Chapters conveys beekeepers’ savvy observations within bee yards and across countrywide forage sites, learned from many years of experience and informed by deep knowledge of the insects and their favorite plants. Apiculturists’ interests and notes paint a picture of honey ecologies, which are nectar-minded but are also, by default, mindful of wider conditions for nectar secretion and the bees’ ability to forage.

As such, honey ecologies add complementary concerns to the vital and still emergent inquiry into the effects of climate change on living landscapes. Local beekeepers’ concerns point beyond the timings and durations of the seasons—namely, earlier offset of spring, extended summers, and the later winter—to chronicle instead a hurried trend of disturbance in the quality of seasons. Beekeepers’ observations of honey ecologies in the weird new weather suggests that vital relationships between elements, plants, and insects are not just mismatched but tattered in many different ways.

To begin with, seasonal outlooks are becoming hard to predict. Spring tends to come earlier every year, but it can also be significantly delayed. Winters are interspersed with “false springs,” the events that send premature warming cues to bees and plants and are often followed by a drop in temperature, frost, or snow. Spring no longer appears to be a season that arrives with definitive atmospheric and environmental changes but rather is a mixed-up season, sometimes jump-started with snowmelt and sudden spikes in temperatures, then stalled by spells of cold weather. Air temperature in the spring tends to be unseasonably high—high enough for the nectar of spring bloomers to evaporate—while rainfall patterns dramatically vary from year to year. Past summer droughts extend well into the spring, or cold, extreme rainfall lasts into the summer months. Season as a category now barely holds. As one seasoned beekeeper, Sead, puts it: “Spring is no longer spring, summer is no longer summer, winter is no winter. What we have now are extremes.”

When we met in the summer of 2016, Sead was a retired electrical engineer with a well-kept beekeeping diary. He was comparing the recent years at his small apiary in western Bosnia with what beekeeping used to be over his forty years of experience with bees. “I swear to God,” he says, “something arrived in nature that changed everything. Everything.” Unseasonal and extreme weather changes interfere with bees’ foraging and plants’ flowering and nectar secretion in various ways, some of which are obvious: flowers suffer from frostbite or heat damage, pollen and nectar offerings are washed off, and bees are rained in.

Next, apiarists have noticed that the duration of bloom and nectar secretion is much shorter than it used to be. Mehmed, a resourceful beekeeper from central Bosnia, remembers that the ringlets of snow-white black locust—the first strong flow in the region that yields thick nectar with a glow of rose gold—used to last three weeks: “One week the florets are opening, next week they’re in full bloom, and the third week they’re waning.” Now, “within a single week”—he claps his hands at this—“they’ve come and gone.”

Furthermore, beekeepers note a greater variability in weather and forage conditions in landscapes within relatively short distances. Traditionally, mobile beekeepers exploited a rich range of microclimates across BiH that spelled out different forage possibilities. The black locust, for instance, is known to flow early and copiously in the riverine climate of the country’s northeastern regions. With the plant development and nectar secretion becoming increasingly uneven, nectar prospects now vary greatly within the same forage area, and beekeepers are pressed to seek out nooks that seem particular auspicious and quickly move with the bees should nectar fail to flow on a given site.

What is more, blooming schedules of local species of trees seem scrambled. Many beekeepers cultivate different varieties of fruit trees to extend the duration of nectar flow within a season. Mehmed, too, has lovingly planted the bee yard by his home with apple, pear, and cherry trees. Among them are early, midseason, and later bloomers, but lately, he reports, all varieties can bloom at the same time. Late bloomers in the orchard can also surprise him with the earliest blossoms.

Differences in blooming schedules for the same species of plants across microclimates and at different altitudes have always been important to beekeepers. Mehmed used to wait for the blossoms of the South European flowering ash, known as manna ash, by his bee yard to wane before he transferred a batch of his hives to the nearby mountain. That way, his bees would arrive just in time to catch the beginning of feathery yellow mana ash bloom, customarily delayed at an altitude of roughly a thousand meters. Nowadays, he says, baffled, mana ash can bloom at the same time at different altitudes. Or the highland varieties can bloom first.

Overall, summer temperatures are generally extended into late fall, but contrary to expectations, the extended summers cannot be presumed to afford longer growing or foraging seasons. In the aftermath of heat waves and droughts in the region, autumnal landscapes are left withered. Nectar is scarce. Instead of being winter-weary and preparing for hibernation, hives continue active flight and brood building well into December. The hives’ residents at this time, known as “winter bees” that are typically fewer in number but longer-living, are spending their bodily fat reserves and consuming hive winter food stocks. Consequently, food supplies may be low when the winter sets in and the clustering bees need them most, while the resident bees may be too exhausted, literally, to build the hive back up come spring.

And the strangest of all. Beekeepers are consistently noting days and weeks when environmental and atmospheric conditions seem perfectly conducive to flow and yet hives are empty of nectar. Or, bees are ignoring what seems like an ideal forage. Quoting Mehmed again: “There are chestnut trees in bloom, their blossom crests thick, like startled cats’ puffed up tails, but you look and see there’s not a single bee on them! Incomprehensible, what is going on? The blossom like that, worthy of every attention, the blossom to admire, and you think to yourself, ‘It’s impossible that it has not a drop of nectar, not a speck of pollen.’ You look, and there’s nothing. What is going on? That’s the greatest puzzle.”

Other local beekeepers also express their bafflement at the signs of changes they are noticing. Pulling on their expertise, they sometimes speculate about particular circumstances that led to a failure of forage, but they tend to frankly admit the limits of their knowledge, especially when the events are without precedent and the usual signs are off. Mehmed thinks it is up to scientists to further investigate the strange new trends, but he insists that the disturbances newly noted are not the beekeepers’ problem: they ought to concern us all. “What is going on?” Time and again, he raises this open question.

Multispecies, Muslim Hope

“Ākhir al-zamān?” I ask Mehmed. “Of course it is ākhir al-zamān,” Mehmed replies, then makes this matter-of-fact statement open ended: “But still . . .”

What I learned in the course of my study with the local beekeepers is that climate change and the final times are both relevant descriptions of our present, but each only marks the beginning of an inquiry. “What does it mean when plants no longer attract insects, that there is no nectar? Do the plants lack desire, or do they lack conditions for reproduction? What is going on? And the main question: Is this telling us that the majority of plants will disappear?”

Questions such as Mehmed’s that arise from local honey ecologies undergoing sweeping change are important because they state the many great unknowns entailed by the rapid alterations that are churning the biosphere. The greatest insights that emerge from current scientific studies of climate, ecology are, likewise, not definitive answers or confident projections of the future trends but rather thoughtful brainstorms on the multitude of elements that beg consideration, honest reflections on the gaps and blind spots in the conventional studies, methodologies and theories.

Mehmed is devoted to the honeybees and has been a full-time beekeeper ever since he withdrew from his post as an imam in the local mosque. His university training in Islamic sciences, he says, brought him closer to the bees. Over the years of our friendship, I have observed the ways bees keep up his interest in the Islamic sources. Mehmed and I discussed Qur’anic exegesis in his bee yard and poured over books on the veranda of his home overlooking the hives. But more tacitly, keeping bees was another of way of keeping the faith alive within an eco-practice that referenced Islam as a wordbook of values and inspirations to counter disasters and disarm despair.

“Honeybees are still doing what they are inspired to do. They’ve accepted the revelation and are working accordingly. She [the pronoun for bee is “she” in BSC] keeps searching for nectar, even if there isn’t any. I watch her, she too is hoping. She too is hoping, I see it, because she keeps trying hard.”

Mehmed interprets the honeybees’ striving as “hope.” His interpretation presumes both that there are core similarities in species relationship to the world and that some conducts and dispositions—such as striving and hope—are properly Islamic across the species of divine subjects. Qur’an describes animals and plants—but also things that modern people consider inanimate, such as planets, wind, or stones—as divine subjects who live in Islam, that is, abide by divine commands and praise their Lord. Mehmed takes this multispecies Islam for granted then goes further by noting that bees, too, are hoping, Hopefulness is explicitly recommended as a part of faith—to humans, for humans alone can succumb to despair. To despair is to doubt divine mercy, which the tradition describes as exceedingly vast and encompasses all things.³⁸

There is no giving up, Mehmed says at the tail end of 2021, another dismal year for nectar flow. He describes the preparations he undertook for the next year—he helped new swarms build up food stocks for the winter, among other things—and the forage sites he planned to visit again. Honeybees, Muslim beekeepers usually say, are an admirable source of inspiration for humans, but on this occasion, Mehmed does not explicitly say that he takes cues from the bees. Rather, he describes the perseverance that he and the bees have in common, though nectar was a mere trickle for several years in a row. Under the dire circumstances, the thing to do across the species is to strive faithfully.

Fig. 1.3 Spring is no longer

Quiets of Disaster

“Have you heard the joke about God deciding to bring about Kijamet [the End]?” a taxi driver asks my sister and I. Curious, we shake our heads at his gaze in the rearview mirror. “So,” the taxi driver proceeds, looking pleased at the chance to tell the joke, “one day, the time has finally come and God glances at the world. The first thing he happens to see out there is Bosnia. ‘Hmm,’ God says, ‘it looks like I’ve already been at it, there.’”

The joke bespeaks irreverent ways in which some contemporary citizens of BiH invoke God and apocalypse. BiH is a multiethnic country where three dominant nationalities—Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs—are formally associated with Islam, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, respectively. Secularism is also an enduring legacy of Yugoslav Socialism, and religious lives and institutions have been both revived and, some suggest, compromised by their often overt associations with political parties and issues of governance.

Within the Croat-Muslim Federation, one of two entities of BiH in which I focused my study, Bosnian Muslims form an ethnic majority, but Muslims in Bosnia, as anywhere, display various forms and degrees of practical commitment to Islam. In other words, being Muslim does not imply a default familiarity with the textual tradition or adherence to religious rituals, let alone an interest in cultivating an Islamic ahlāq: a virtuous character. Among the people I worked with are imams and Sufis who tend to be exceptionally devout and conversant with the Islamic tradition as well as Muslims for whom religious teachings are conveyed through a largely oral culture and who abide by the mores and rites of the tradition more selectively. Or not much at all.

General statements about a Bosnian way of being a Muslim are therefore bound to be imperfect. In the following pages I have particular people in mind and will be citing their words and describing their practices, but I am also interested in making broader claims about Islamic ecological or eschatological insights in Bosnia and beyond. In doing so, I read texts and listen to the tales for what the tradition recommends in a way of living a life. I also hope to capture a whole range of lived orientations toward the Islamic tradition that thoroughly saturates Bosnian culture, even on occasions when it seems least obvious or in instances that seem particularly irreverent.

The keyword in the taxi driver’s joke is Kijamet, a local transliteration of the Qur’anic Arabic word al-qiyāmah, one of many names that designate the eschatological events of the world’s end. Al-qiyāmah, in particular, refers to the standing after resurrection in hopeful or fraught expectations of divine judgment. Colloquially, Kijamet in BiH glosses the apocalyptic event itself, as in the event expected by the two angels in the tale begins this chapter. Kijamet also locally refers to catastrophes of any sort and to catastrophic weather events in particular.

Invoking Kijamet as a mundane catastrophe, the dark joke can be heard as a bitter commentary on the quotidian reality of a country that has not recovered from the 1990s genocidal war and the collapse of socialism. Many of its citizens feel bogged down in the political stalemate, ethno-national warmongering, economic precarity, and growing class disparity that prevail since the internationally brokered peace agreement. The population of the mobile—young, educated professionals and blue-collar workers—is massively emigrating in search of jobs and better lives. I hear in the joke a reference to the state of a day-to-day crises, a life lived through low-key emergencies, the quiets of disaster, and disorders that are chafing and undermining existence in the wake of loud catastrophes and their aftereffects from the war to the storms.

Like all good jokes, the taxi driver’s is a capacious comment that leaves room for multiple interpretations. When attention shifts from the country’s political situation, which tends to preoccupy the media and the scholars of the region, the disaster the joke denotes is environmental.

BiH is heavily dependent on coal for electricity and winter heating and, at the time of my research and writing, was expanding the national fossil fuels energy sector. While the country’s contributions to the global CO₂ emissions are comparatively negligible, the outdated power plants are routinely polluting local air in gross violation of global environmental standards on emissions of pollutants while also generating deposits of toxic sludge and mining waste that are likewise sources of serious public health hazard. Coal and far dirtier substances like heavy fuel oil or automobile tires also heat businesses and households through the winter.

The country is often described as “postindustrial,” although cities around BiH are currently suffering heavy pollution from privatized units of former socialist enterprises. Compared to the socialist era, the dirty industry at work is now small in scale, but the ongoing production—of industrial coke, steel, cement, cellulose, and leather, to mention a few sectors—is environmentally unregulated while its waste is disposed of haphazardly: to compounds, rivers, forests, and to third parties without technologies of waste management and without liabilities.

In addition, former industrial zones across the country are laden with highly toxic chemicals, such as lead, chlorine, polychlorinated biphenyl, and by-products of toluene diisocyanate (TDI), to name a few. These lethal remnants of socialist enterprises are stored in rusting, leaky containers and hastily buried or deposited in the open air. Exposed to weather, contaminants move with soil, wind, and rain. Absorbed by plant roots, leaves, and nectaries, toxic loads imbue pollen dust and flow with nectar through the honey seasons.

Due to disastrous environmental policies and practices, and considering that the national administration of resources and infrastructure is diverted by the ethno-national electoral priorities, the country is exceptionally unprepared for extreme weather and for the battery of other adverse effects anticipated with the future of climate change.

Forage Frontlines

Local beekeepers try to avoid industrial and urban pollution and the rampant new peri-urban development and seek out heavens of “genuine nature” (prava priroda). They establish apiaries in mountains, in forests, and on village outskirts. Mobile beekeepers tour the country’s back roads, staying clear of intensely farmed areas so that bees can collect honey and pollen free of pollutants and pesticides.

The former frontlines of the 1990s war are now among the most attractive nectar forage fronts. Having fled the warfare, only a few former residents have returned to the interstate border areas where economic opportunities after the war have become scarce. Once ravaged by conflict and still littered by landmines, the country’s edgelands are overgrown with vigorous plants, invasives, and melliferous trees, which thrive undisturbed by development or agricultural schemes. During the blossoming seasons, small batches of colorful hives are parked in itinerant beekeepers’ favorite nooks at a safe distance from landmine warning signs, and the land is abuzz with foraging bees. When the weather is right, honey flows along the new forage fronts.

To secure a welcome for their hives, the visiting beekeepers, Bosnian Muslims, forge working relationships with the areas’ inhabitants, either the Bosnian Croats, predominantly Catholic, or Bosnian Serbs, who are mostly Orthodox Christians. To thank them for hosting the hives, the beekeepers treat the residents to the honey they harvested. When residents are elderly, ill, and lonely, as so often happens to be the case on the forage fronts, beekeepers provide seasonal care, bring medicine, run errands, and, for the length of the flow, keep company. Multiethnic, interfaith relations, ranging from tense to tender, that spring up across the forage frontlines are as brief and intense as the blossoming seasons. They do not attest to an ideal, multicultural vision of a postwar BiH any more than the flourishing frontlines foretell the country’s environmental future, but they do showcase possibilities—for flow and friendship, land’s reclamation, and face-to-face negotiations of differences that matter—unfostered by conservation schemes and unforeseen by formal politics.

Contemporary eco-thinkers, more generally, have taken a fresh look at landscapes wrecked by extractive and industrial enterprises or military operations to point out novel ecologies that are emerging through wreckage despite the odds.³⁹ Eco-stories told from within deeply disturbed grounds depart from “doomsday scenarios” to inspire readers with glimpses of alternative futures.⁴⁰

Stories in this book, however, describe a different genre of hope, grounded in awareness of finitude and expectations of death and the world’s catastrophic end.

Listening: An Art of a Living Heart

My closest local interlocutor and teacher on the subject of Islamic cosmology and eschatology was Shaykh Ayne, a retired imam and elder of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. An imam is the one who leads the ritual prayers and, more broadly, someone who is trained and competent to lead members of a community in the formal matters of Muslim creed and conduct, the way of Islam, commonly referred to as “the straight path.” Shaykh is an honorific for an elder or teacher blessed with the power of insight and endowed with the order’s permission to guide others along the fast track to knowing and adoring God. The English word order is a rough term for Sufi “associations,” which in Arabic are called tariqa (tarkiat in BSC), meaning a “method” and a “way” treaded by those who are drawn to a particularly contemplative and felt form of devotion.

Shaykh Ayne was an immersive storyteller. He rendered canonical sources, the Qur’an, the Hadith, and their commentaries into memorable wisdom tales. Through stories, he taught about Islam the way his Sufi elders and his father, an imam, taught, by transforming the textual tradition into an oral culture.

Sufism in scholarly literature is sometimes discussed as a discrete field of practice, an esoteric, ascetic, mystical, or ecstatic strain of devotion apart from mainstream Islam or too lettered for ordinary folk. On the contrary, Sufi stories (and songs and poetry) that circulate within tariqa are meant to reach and move the diverse listeners gathered among its members and sympathizers. Moreover, wisdom stories are well loved by Bosnian Muslims and travel widely beyond Sufi gatherings. The fact that Shaykh Ayne, like many of his teachers, spent adult life as both a Sufi dervish and an imam speaks to the close associations between sharia, the letter of the law, and the heartfelt quest for divine closeness and insight. It also suggests that storytelling is more generally a method of conveying Islamic teachings and manners through a Muslim community.

Shaykh Ayne’s stories painted more than human cosmologies in which humans coexist with animals, plants, angels, and jinn, and in relationship to things and elements that were matters of God’s concern. The point of telling the stories was to build the listener’s character, inspire their devotional practice, and invigorate human sense of care and responsibility.

The first time we meet, Shaykh Ayne asks me whether I know what Sufism is. I tell him I have a rough idea: it is a way of practicing Islamic metaphysics. Shaykh smiles in response, then tells the following story.

A young dervish travels to a city market far from his humble dwelling in the mountains. He buys a bunch of dates. The way back home draws out under the sun’s harsh rays. At long last, the dervish arrives home, covered in dust and sweat, draws fresh water from the spring, and sits down to a feast. He unwraps the dates, and there, wandering amid the glistening reddish-brown fruits is a single ant. The dervish wraps up the bundle, straps on his sandals, and heads back to return the ant to the market. “So that the ant can search for his community,” Shaykh explains. “That’s the living Sufism.”

Shaykh’s teachings were brimming full of ecological undertones. The caring way in which Shaykh Ayne related to plants, insects, and birds on our outdoor excursions and the prayerful moods he would fall into when faced with wind, sun, or rain I took as signs of his living Sufism. The degree of reverence and the breadth of contemplation were certainly particular, but the general eco-sensibility was something I could relate to. The subject of eschatology, to which our conversations returned in one way or another, was more difficult to grasp the way Shaykh intended it.

To really ponder death, to sit with it, to feel the dread of being caught unprepared, to live as if the apocalyptic event could swipe you off your feet in a blink of an eye or sooner still is easier said than done. There is a gap between knowing something and taking it in, to the point that it shakes you at the core and restrings your relationships with the self, with God, with all.

For that to happen, it was not enough to ponder the stories. I had to be taught to listen differently and to relate to the Qur’an, which, for Shaykh, was the ultimate reference. At least, that sort of training was implied—it took me a while to realize—in a visiting relationship with a Shaykh.

Long-term field research, which is the hallmark of an ethnographic method, often entails close working ties with people whom anthropologists consult in order to grasp something of vital importance in the field they study. For this anthropologist, visiting Shaykh Ayne was a sort of a professional friendship. On the other hand, a Shaykh is an experienced guide with teaching methods of his own and a lesson plan that amounts to nothing less than bringing his listeners and students closer to God.

Our association, thus, began with a misunderstanding. I arrived to Shaykh’s home, expressing an interest in learning about “living Sufism,” by which I meant the way Sufis engage with and experience that which profoundly defines them and which they hold dear. This is how anthropologists typically speak of a “living” practice. For Shaykh Ayne, however, living Sufism meant an ongoing quest for enlivening the very human subjects. I was being an academic, bent on doing research and Shaykh was living a life of one searching for divine encounter.

In the years to come, while I was duly taking notes, Shaykh was trying to break my habit of casual listening. His lessons struck me, finally, when at the tail end of 2020 this precious friend passed away.

Bee Caring

While doing this research project, I kept bees on my family land. We are still at it. Trials at our apiary are not related in this book’s pages, but keeping bees and caring for the land were integral to writing this book. Keeping the bees, for whom I care dearly, like keeping company with Shaykh Ayne, made me far more attentive to the signs of our times. Caring for the hives, which is becoming more difficult each season, makes me feel more vulnerable, as my home and the hives sit side by side under the same unhinged skies.

The small apiary is in an orchard on our father’s land on the slope of a lowland mountain in northeastern Bosnia. Had it not been for a spectacular medieval Bosnian fort chiseled into a cliff that attracts regional tourists, the road leading to our village would be far less traveled. The population here, as in villages across Bosnia, is dwindling, as people are marrying out, migrating to other Bosnian towns or still farther north, to the European Union labor markets.

The road dead-ends at the mountaintop and forks to our hamlet at about seven hundred meters above sea level. It runs by a mosque on whose side leans a turbe, a small structure built around the tomb of a seventeenth-century imam and a Sufi Shaykh. Tombs of those who are said to blessed with God’s friendship are found across Bosnia, and people travel from afar to deliver their prayers, leave alms, and on these auspicious sites, petition God for their wishes and troubles. Off the road, just short of where the asphalt turns into gravel, a steep, brief ride through shrubbery delivers one to the flat foothold on our land that rises up in slopes suddenly and fans out like a funnel.

Along with two small forests, the orchard is all that remains of our father’s land-rich parents’ inheritance. Landholding in this region was somewhat spared the early attempt at socialist collectivization in the 1950s, but it was soon lost in the fast exchange of values that took place when the predominantly rural BiH hastened onto the Yugoslav path of modern development.

Our father was among the village’s early messengers of the new modern world, which was far from our hamlet but not out of reach for the mobile and the brave. He cashed in lands, forests, fields, and orchards to purchase a Vespa motorcycle and also, perhaps (our mother doubts it), to pay for his university studies. He must have looked smart on the motorbike.

Like many of his contemporaries, the professionals and new urbanites, he did not so much turn back on the land as he turned nature into a playground. Hiking, biking, and picnicking were a part of our parents’ well-traveled lifestyle, which uprooted feelings for any particular place and sought in a leisurely manner nature in general. Or else, pursued “culture” across Eastern and Western Europe, that Yugoslav professional salaries and well-received passports made accessible, for a while.

Once the land was sold, my father moved to the city and his aging mother followed along. A strong woman who would not complain unless it made a difference quietly endured the city winters and, with the first spring thaw, fled to her mountain village, rented rooms to stay, and worked the remaining family land through the frostbitten fall. It was only her determined seasonal returns that forced our youthful parents to pay the land a visit back in the day. But all that changed.

After the village soil gave my father’s mother all-seasons residence, the loss bent my parents to the orphaned loam, and they took to it. Over the years, they built a perfect retreat in an imperfect weekend cottage on which every door squealed and not a single one closed properly. The summer kitchen shack’s door actually does close with the aid of a shoestring.

Weekend houses in the 1980s were the vogue among the Bosnian Yugoslav urbanites who grew disillusioned with industrialization and weary of modern, hectic lifestyles. Country retreats, not coincidentally, became more appealing in the wake of major industrial accidents in Tuzla City’s chlor-alchaline complex in 1980 and again in 1985, followed in 1986 by the fears of the fallout radiation of “Chernobyl clouds.” Meanwhile, the economy unraveled as the cycle of financial crisis shook Yugoslavia, which was never to recover, and introduced supply chain shortages, currency devaluations, and subsistence anxieties that unnerved many socialist moderns.

In pursuit of healthy foods and wholesome lifestyles, and along with scores of other Bosnians of their generation who had the means, my parents tracked “back to nature” to my father’s native village for holidays and weekends, grew food, picked mushrooms, preserved berries, and overplanted trees and flowers. Today’s orchard is a thriving inheritance of past relationships to land, including our father’s father, a grafter without a peer who could make two different apples grow out of a single tree. The trees bear his presence better than the single faded photo he left behind before his trace was lost on the northern fronts of the Second World War.

During the 1990s war in Bosnia, our village was on the safer side of the combat zone. During the hungriest, coldest years for the town of Tuzla, sieged and shelled, the village was a shelter for the four of us: mother; Azra, the youngest of the three sisters; Brenka the goat; and me.

When the war was over, our parents retired from defunct state companies, and, after a few failed attempts at private enterprises, they moved to the village. First, like my grandmother, they resided in the mountain home from thaw to frost, then for good. They went to the city only reluctantly, to see physicians, do banking, or visit family and friends. While our mother made rounds, our father stayed by the car parked on the roadside and just about kept the engine running, ready to flee. And so, for years.

I traveled back from the States to spend summers doing research in Bosnia and spend time in the village. Azra traveled from Cuba on a break from filmmaking school. Summers gathered us in the village on vacations. When the research project on beekeeping started, we built an apiary. That apiary, we quickly learned, committed us to the land year-around, with tasks of care that someone had to pick up while I was abroad. The bees’ needs rounded and grounded our family through seasons.

My mother stayed on after my father passed away in 2016. Generous research grants afforded me longer spells in the field and by the apiary. With Azra back from film school we started making a documentary film about beekeeping and Muslim end time lore. I began dreaming of a life by the bees on our mountaintop and, eventually, planned to build a tiny house on our land.

“This is a disaster in the making,” the building engineers we invited, pronounced, surveying the steep sides of our land. Everywhere, they saw signs of landslide movement: surface waters and underground streams, cracked and furrowed soil, and leaning trees. There were wicked forces, deep below the grass, brewing our land’s imminent collapse, the engineers said. Sure, all right, a disaster in waiting. But not only that. Fluid is the very ground of all our whereabouts, no matter how paved and grounded, in the ākhir al-zamān, the times of global environmental disasters and climate change. At the spot that a geodetic engineer evaluated as the soundest, we decided to build.

From the top of our land, you can see far along the valley below as it folds into mountains after mountains along the horizon. You can also see rapid changes taking place closer below: the town and villages are swelling up and burning coal, which is still the primary means of heating and burning car fuel. You can see mountains ripped apart and machine-eaten in the distant quarries. And far away but not far enough from anyone, sickly emissions are rising from Tuzla’s coal-based power plants. From this vantage point, at the place that fed us and kept us warm throughout the war, the place from which the 1990s frontline shelling was barely audible as a distant noise, we learned in the course of these beekeeping years just how exposed we are to bad weather.

Unpromising climate is a sign of our times, beyond Bosnia. There is no place high enough or far enough to afford a refuge, although there are different vantage points; from some, the climate change appears manageable, from others, our planet’s future appears unlivable.

Learning to listen to Islamic eschatology has been a search for the vantage—or the mood—from which to think, live, and care while doing this research. If you threw a rope to the deepest ground, a hadith says, it would fall upon God. God is all encompassing, the prophetic saying suggests, al-Wāsi’ (the Vast) being among His divine names. Divine attributes that the Qur’an particularly describes as all embracing are mercy and knowledge. Starting from this premise, there is no room in Islamic perspective for despair. Nor can a careful listener of the Qur’an afford to be unconcerned about the state of the troubled world and one’s hand in it, or think himself or herself excepted from the warnings. The whole point about watching for the signs of the bad end is to work—and pray—wholeheartedly against it. The Qur’an quotes God: Soon I will show you My signs, so do not hasten Me.

NOTES

1.59:19. Throughout the book, I provide translations of excerpts from the Qur’an that aim to convey something of its literary quality while also trying to stay as close as possible to the meanings grasped by authoritative translations and commentaries. My knowledge of Arabic is inadequate for the task, and so I have leaned on commentaries given to me by Shaykh Ayne and other local experts while making use of classic translations by A. J. Arberry, Abdullah Yusaf Ali, Mohsin Khan, and Muhammad Pickthall, as well as the recent translation under the chief editor, Hossein Seyyed Nasr. In addition, I have consulted the translation to BSC in Besim Korkut’s Kur’an s prijevodom (Medina, Saudi Arabia: Hadimu-l-Haramejni-š-Šerifejni- l-Melik Fahd, 1992).

2.For readings of pop-apocalyptic genres in the contemporary Muslim world, see David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011). Jamel A. Velji develops an interesting argument for the salience of the “apocalyptic” in Islamic history in Velji, An Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Apocalypticism and Eschatology) (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). The most insightful and comprehensive overviews of Islamic eschatology are the following: William C. Chittick, “Muslim Eschatology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132–150; William C. Chittick, “Eschatology,” in Islamic Spirituality: Foundations, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 378–409; Hamza Yusuf, “Death, Dying, and the Afterlife in the Qur’an,” in The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Hossein Seyyed Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 1819–1855; Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Sebastian Günther and Todd Lawson, eds., Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and the Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

3.50:19–20.

4.33:45.

5.See chapter 4 of this book.

6.With a nod to Donna Haraway, who has written the most compelling call for making kin across species. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

7.As Jürgen Tautz puts it, the colony changes with each queen like a “genetic chameleon.” Jürgen Tautz, The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 45.

8.Thomas Dyer Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) and The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

9.6:38. The original Qur’anic Arabic, dābba, is more expansive than the English “animal” or Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian ‘životinja’ would suggest. See Sarra Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71.

10.16:68–69.

11.Our Lord is He who gave each thing its form then guides it, 20:50.

12.Therapeutic uses of hive products, known under the international label of “api-therapy” is sometimes dismissed in a knee-jerk fashion, as in Mark Winston’s otherwise resourceful book on the wide range of meanings of the honeybee. See Mark Winston, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 142–148. Winston calls api-therapy “cultish” and attributions of medicinal properties to bee products merely anecdotal. On the contrary, api-therapy is guided by the principles of modern evidence-based science and comprises a massive field of international and interdisciplinary experts who are publishing, in English, results of research conducted mostly outside of Euro-American knowledge production centers. Among the wide range of journals publishing studies on medicinal uses of hive products are Trends in Food Science and Technology, Arabian Journal of Chemistry, International Quarterly Journal of Research in Ayurveda, and Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine. In 1971, Apimondia, the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations, which gathers annually for a meeting of professionals, bee scientists, and commercial, UN, and nongovernmental partners, organized a symposium on the uses of bee products in human and veterinary medicine. Apitherapy from then on was granted a formal venue within Apimondia, while the establishment of a Standing Scientific Commission on Apitherapy in 1983 provided an axis for annual gatherings, transnational research collaborations, and an exchange of research data and concerns. Bosnian journalist and beekeeper Nijaz Abažić closely followed Apimondia proceedings and is largely responsible for popularizing api-therapy in Yugoslavia, starting with his 1967 The Secrets of Bee’s Honey. Nijaz Abadžić, Tajne Pčelinjeg Meda (Sarajevo: NIP “Zadrugar,” 1967).

13.41:44; 10:57.

14.Sarajevo-based artist, Meliha Teparić has inscribed this water fountain for the bees with Qur’anic verses on the honeybee, as a part of an art installation project that we planned at our village apiary.

15.Ismaīl Ibn Kathīr, The Signs Before the Day of Judgment (London: Dar Al Taqwa, 1997), 7.

16.Ibid., 6.

17.16:77.

18.7:187.

19.79:42–43.

20.Imam Birgivi’s text was on the school curriculum across the Ottoman Empire and still used in early twentieth-century Bosnian madrasa, during Shaykh Čolić’s schooling. Mustafa Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu: Evidencije i definicije islamskih šerijatskih učenja i vjerovanja (Visoko: Kaligraf, 1998). Čolić’s translations and commentaries of other parts of Birgivi’s work were prepared for publication by his dervishes, after Shaykh’s passing, in two books: Mustafa Čolić, Et-Tarikatul-Muhammedijjetul-Islamijjetu, učenje i moral Allahovog Poslanika Muhammeda a.s.: Srčano zdravlje i bolesti metafizičkog insana (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn-baba Zukić, 2016) and Mustafa Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu, učenje i moral Allahovog Poslanika Muhammeda a.s.: Zdravlje i bolesti jezika i ostalih organa metafizičkog insana (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn-baba Zukić, 2020).

21.Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu: Evidencije i definicije, 264, 267.

22.Ibid., 268. Čolić has referred to objective things and events as išaret (from Arabic ishārah), which is a technical term in Sufi thought for meanings gained at the level of a deeply mindful heart by means of contemplation and inspiration. I translate freely from Čolić’s books, hoping to convey the gist of his arguments, although my discussions do not delve deeply enough into Čolić’s work, which is exceptionally complex and articulated in the language that is quite his own.

23.Shaykh Čolić has translated, with comments, al-Ghāzalī’s famous discussion on the heart. Mustafa Čolić, Zagonetnosti i Nepoznanice Metafizičkog Srca (Metafizičkog Čovjeka) (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn-baba Zukić Hukeljići-Živčići, 2000). For most insightful considerations of the heart in Islamic spiritual tradition, see Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 289–320; William Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

24.Shaykh Ayne used to relate a saying attributed to the Prophet: “One’s nafs [soul] is more dangerous than seventy devils.”

25.Although ecology does not readily come up in mainstream conversations on Islam, the Quran and the Hadith lavish exceptional attention on plants, animals, and the elements, as a number of scholars of Islam and Muslim intellectuals and environmentalists have argued. The core texts of Islam recommend deep concern for animal welfare and promote planting, fruit farming, nature conservation, and careful use of resources. At the same time, environmental ruination is intensifying in predominantly Muslim countries as anywhere else in the modern world, and Islamic tradition is rarely the framework that guides animal farming or environmental management in Muslim majority statea. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an outstanding contemporary thinker and interpreter of Islamic and Sufi sources, has long been arguing that the environmental crisis is also the spiritual crisis of modern humans, Muslims included. The argument is familiar and still profound even in this restatement: once nature is profaned, once it is reduced from the domain of Divine Self-Manifestation, whereby every leaf reflects the Face of God, to extractable resources and inert, nonhuman entities, humans are locked out of a meaningful universe. The cosmos shrinks to the measure of the human intellect and the scope of lone human imagination, which for all their glory are limited. In addition, overemphasis on narrow politics by Muslims and commentators on Muslim affairs alike has overshadowed most other dimensions of Islam. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), and Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (Chicago: Kazi, 2003); C. Richard Foltz, Frederick M. Denny, and Azizan Baharuddin, eds., Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust (Cambridge: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2003); Richard C. Foltz, Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures (London: Oneworld, 2005); Mawil Izzi Dien, The Environmental Dimensions of Islam (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2000); Fakhar-i- Abbas, Animal’s Rights in Islam: Islam and Animal’s Rights (Riga: VDM Verlag, 2009).

26.For excellent examples, see Human Animal Research Network, Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015); Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Stuff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and “Elemental Love in the Anthropocene,” in Elementary Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 298–309; T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016); Donna Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 157–187; Anna Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking),” in The Multispecies Salon, ed. Eben Kirksey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 87–110; Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (November 2012): 141–154, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements,” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 1–26; Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

27.Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (April 2010): 334–370, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548–1360.2010.01061.x; Anders Blok, “War of the Whales: Post Sovereign Science and Agonistic Cosmopolitics in Japanese-Global Whaling Assemblage,” Science, Technology & Human Values 36, no. 1 (November 10): 55–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910366133; Stacey Ann Langwick, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

28.See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 218.

29.A “new age of curiosity” is a term I lift from Michelle Foucault’s wistful 1980s vision of the coming age that would reinstate bolder concern for “what exists and what could exist” and “regard otherwise the same things,” and I repurpose it as a shorthand for a host of contemporary theoretical ventures that, jointly, have broadened the investigative range of the social and humanities. Foucault’s complaint about the stifling of Western social thought is still current (see Peter Skafish, “Anthropological Metaphysics/Philosophical Resistance,” Theorizing Contemporary, Fieldsights, posted on January 13, 2014, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthropological-metaphysics-philosophical-resistance), but the inquiries into “experience” are currently “thinking paths and possibilities” (see Michael Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Routledge and Chapman & Hall, 1988], 328). The new age of curiosity goads inquiry beyond human to animal, vegetal, and microbial lives. Animal and animality studies poke at the former certainties about the human-animal distinction while multispecies ethnographies flesh out ecologies of species companionships and coconstitutions under anthropogenic pressures. Turning to the matters that previously sat idle and low in the old hierarchies of animacy has been even more daring, opening up things at hand as well as liberally defining nonhumans, as Isabelle Stengers says: “whatever forces thought” (see Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux Journal 36 [July 2012]: 7, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/). The newly spurred interests in nonhumans frequently bring together politics and metaphysics, asking again, “What can be known?” and “What matters?” New curiosity is recommended as self-transformative. Stengers suggests we shed the “sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice” and stay open “to wonder” (Mary Zournazi and Isabelle Stengers, Hope: New Philosophies for Change [New York: Routledge, 2003], 244–272). Latour, in particular, is politically minded when he says it is high time to “go back to the old question of ‘what is X?’” (Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter [Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013], 21). He opens inquiry into modes of existence, to populate the cosmos with a diversity of beings, granting them a substantial reality within a “richer ecosystem” (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 11, 18). The way to negotiate the Pluriverse, however, is to forge a minimalist metaphysics (Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter [Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004], 61). Multispecies and animal studies are more interested in earthbound ontologies, with Donna Haraway’s pathbreaking work, her often-cited praise for the “mortal world-making entanglements” (Haraway, When Species Meet, 4) and the gamey proposition that posthumanities is “another word for ‘after monotheism’” (Haraway, When Species Meet, 245). An exception is Anat Pick’s book, which aspires to a “rapprochement between the material and the sacred,” even if Pick’s text does not quite show the way (Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film [New York: Columbia University Press, 2011], 17). With a similar ambition, a volume edited by Stephen Moore is exploring the concept of “creaturely theology” (Stephen Moore, ed., Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology [New York: Fordham University Press, 2014], 11).

30.In the words of environmental philosopher John Foster, the “secular, naturalistic general picture is now (despite various forms of rearguard religious protests against it) the working worldwide image of the advanced societies, and it is implicit in the terms in which these societies have globalized themselves through science, technology, telecommunications, and the capitalist-individualistic economic model. It is the human self-recognition, we might say, that keeps the internet functioning.” This thinker who is otherwise deeply critical of the modern culture that is driving the planet to the edge assumes that religion can only speak from the fringes in the tone of protest and that globalization has achieved a consensual human self-perception. John Foster, After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval (New York: Routledge, 2015), 118–119. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University, 2015), 35.

31.A noteworthy example is a volume edited by Stephen Moore, which starts from the premise that the expanded range of inquiry beyond human has already set conditions for rethinking the role of the divine. Moore, Divinanimality. See also Anat Pick’s suggestive Creaturely Poetic.

32.Zournazi and Stengers, Hope, 244–272.

33.Shaykh Čolić’s books are an extended commentary on the sort of knowledge that is in decline: Mustafa Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu: Zbirni Ilmihal islamizacionih stanja i pitanja za odrasle i dorasle, Ilmihal za Odrasle i Dorasle (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn-baba Zukić, 2000), 224, 231.

34.55:29.

35.Throughout his works, Čolić uses Qur’anic Arabic terminology to develop an analytical language that is conversant with philosophy but thoroughly indebted to the Revelation and is, at times, lucidly vernacular. His discussion of forms of divine self-revelation is synthesized in Kelamske i Tekvinske Božanske Obznambene Objave i Pojave i Njihovi Kira’eti (Čitanje i Učenje) (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn-baba Zukić Hukeljići-Živčići, 2003).

36.For an overview of phenological studies to date, diversity of species responses, and methodological challenges entailed in grasping the current and future trends, see Camille Parmesan, “Influence of Species, Latitudes, and Methodologies on Estimates of Phenological Response to Global Warming,” Global Change Biology 13 (2007): 1860–1872; Stein Joar Hegland, Anders Nielsen, Amparo Lazaro, Anne-Line Bjerknes, and Ørjan Totland, “How Does Climate Warming Affect Plant-Pollinator Interactions?,” Ecology Letters 12 (2009): 184–195; Camille Parmesan, “Range and Abundance Changes,” in Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 25–38; Eric Post and Michael Avery “Phenological Dynamics on Pollinator-Plant Associations Related to Climate Change,” in Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 42–54.

37.See Thomas Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, eds., Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Jedediah Brodie, Eric Post, and Daniel F. Doak, Wildlife Conservation in a Changing Climate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

38.Textual references that relate good faith with hope and cheer are many. Most commonly cited in local conversations are Qur’anic verses “my Mercy encompasses all things” (7:156) and “do not despair of God’s comfort. Indeed no one despairs in God’s comfort except the unbelievers” (12:87).

39.Eben Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes,” 157–187; Bridget Guarasci and Eleana J. Kim, “Ecology of War,” Theorizing Contemporary, Fieldsights, posted January 25, 2022, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ecologies-of-war.

40.“Contemporary writing on the environment is largely focused on doomsday scenarios,” Eben Kirksey notes in the introduction to the book that grounds reasons for hope in disturbed landscapes and unscripted multispecies affinities. Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies, 6. Scholars writing about animal extinction and endangerment are experimenting with new and older narrative styles and affects, including nostalgic, utopian, contemplative, and even comic, to move the audience to register, mourn, or counter damages and losses that are becoming routinized: Hayden Fowler, “Epilogue New World Order—Nature in the Anthropocene,” in Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures, ed. Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015), 243–254; Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Stacey Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers thinks that “we have a desperate need for other stories” and calls for tales about achievements, however small, that would reseed “the devastated desert of our imagination.” Isabelle Stengers, In the Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities with Meson, 2015), 132.