– 3 –

Planting on the Eve of Apocalypse

The Prophet’s Advice

Imagine you set out to plant a tree one day. A sapling is ready in your hand. Its trunk is smooth and slender, its riotous roots eager to dig in. The tender leaves foreshadow fruit, flowers, and shade, a dwelling for shy birds and ravenous insects. You get to work.

The soil yields to the shovel’s edgy advances, when suddenly the ground violently shakes. Your gut somersaults. The daylight sours, the sky is as molten lead.¹ Hills uproot and fly by as if they were tumbleweeds swept up by winds, unspooling along the way like carded wool.² You stumble, your feet as wobbly as rubber. The sun rises from the west. What to do?

Go ahead. Plant that tree, the story says.

I am retelling a story that Bosnian Muslims are fond of telling each other. Each teller relates the details somewhat differently, but the eve of the apocalypse they describe conveys Qur’anic imagery or, at the least, a Qur’anic sense of the Hour when the earth is beyond rescue. In some retellings, you are advised to plant on the eve of your death. The source of the story is a hadith, a saying by the Prophet of Islam, and its retelling passes on prophetic warning along with good advice. I have heard the story told to recommend planting but also to encourage doing and intending good, even when one’s efforts seem futile or thwarted by dire circumstances. The upbeat message seems obvious enough: one should keep trying for as long as one lives, even if the skies are falling.

Still, it is worth asking the obvious question: Why plant on a doomed planet? Whereas ecological activism typically springs with hopes of preventing or deferring a catastrophe, or at the very least counts on the possibility of remediating its disastrous effect, this story takes us over the edge, where the time is up and nothing can be done to prevent the world’s collapse. And yet, do plant, is the prophetic advice.

The wisdom that the hadith and its popular retelling convey is eco-eschatological in the sense that the ecologically mindful sentiments and actions it encourages are decidedly antiapocalyptic, and yet their meaning derives from the precarious state of the world that, precious and finite, is inevitably going to ruin.

This chapter relates three Muslim beekeepers’ earnest planting efforts on the grounds of their apiaries and beyond while pondering this popular story and prophetic wisdom in the wider context of Islamic ecological sensibilities at work in planting and doing service in the world.

Gardening is popular in Bosnia. Gardens and orchards have traditionally been integral to the local subsistence economy, and their importance has only grown in recent years. Their bounty stocks local kitchens and pantries with fresh produce, and grains, beans, and frozen and preserved fruit make up winter diets. The economic value of homegrown produce is significant for the average citizens, who live on relatively low incomes, and for the many unemployed Bosnians.

Local gardening, however, is more than a bare necessity. Growing one’s own food and collecting fruit have been part of a more general effort to secure nutritional and remedial diets in the national food market, where environmentally friendly farming and eco-labeling are not formally established but anxieties about food contamination by agricultural and industrial chemicals are high. Ideally, gardens are situated far from sources of urban pollution, industrial contaminants, and agricultural chemicals, but just as often, serious planting is underway in the midst or along the edges of extremely toxic landscapes.

Beekeepers tend to be especially enthusiastic gardeners, avidly planting at their apiaries and beyond, across the lands untended by their absentee owners. Given the high regard for the nutritional and medicinal attributes of honey and its value for both human and apian health, local beekeepers have traditionally planted to secure environmentally clean forage for their bees.

They have also cultivated pollen-rich and nectar-yielding trees and plants to sustain honeybees through dearth and to improve honey harvests. Planting for the bees’ sake seems more necessary than ever, just as it is proving ever more inadequate to counter the felt effects of climate change on honeybee ecologies. This is why beekeepers, of all local gardeners, are the best companions with whom to ponder the feat of planting on the eve of apocalypse.

A Hunch: Observing the Signs

“I have a hunch,” Šefik says, “a sign [išaret] of sorts, though it’s only what we think, but everything will change.” He is off-loading sacks stuffed with bottles of sugar syrup from the back of his van into a wheelbarrow. Senada, his wife and work partner, is unlocking the gates of their apiary. We are parked at the end of a dirt road, at some distance from a small village in Western Bosnia. Nearby creeks flush the air and meadows with cool morning dew even throughout the summer heat waves of 2021. The grass is so wet that the couple, taught by experience, are wearing tall rubber boots. My sister and I, who came to film the beekeepers at work, are bound to get our sneakers miserably wet.

“In ten years’ time, everything will change, and our lives will be entirely different . . . Just like ten years ago, I used to say that honey will soon be packed in very small jars.” That time has already come, Šefik says, slamming closed the back door of the van.

“All that’s happening in nature and on our planet Earth, I believe, are God’s decrees, and I believe the human has caused all this trouble.” Pausing to stretch his back, he spreads his arms: “See this, all that’s surrounding us.” In the silence that follows, our ambience comes forth to meet the senses: deeply green, serene, smelling of damp moss and Caesar’s mushrooms hatching throughout the woods. The land surrounding the apiary is flanked on one side by old oak, linden, and spruce forests, their crowns reaching dark and grand far above us. The other side looks out onto open plains, unfolding with meadows as far eastward as the eye can see, where the land and the sky, unawake, lie as one.

“It’s a God’s gift. And we? We need to give every day, too, to be happy [sretni]. We can talk more about that,” Šefik says, laughing, and pushes the barrow through the garden gate and into the apiary, its wheel squeaking its lone tune amid the quiet hives.

Nearly one hundred hives, painted in yellow and blue, are spread out in a densely planted bee yard. Šefik lifts the lid off the last hive in the first row, resting beneath the canopy of a handsome fig tree. Meanwhile, Senada, a quiet, wise woman, down-to-earth and caring, works the hives in the next row.

“This is cruelty to her,” Šefik says, pouring sugar syrup from a recycled Coke bottle into the hive feeder. “Her” stands for the bee, commonly referred to in the local language by female personal pronouns. Šefik speaks in a raspy morning voice, his figure a mere silhouette against the predawn horizon.

“This food is bad for her, but we have to give it when there’s no food in nature. We can talk about why we do that, but the bottom line is that honeybees can no longer survive without human help. At least not around here, where we live. We didn’t used to do it, but we are now struggling to keep the bees alive. And all we’re doing now, all year long, is struggling to keep the bees alive.”

It is August 2021, and Šefik and Senada are feeding the bees every second day to help them build winter food supplies. They feed them early in the morning to prevent hive robbery—the incidents of food raids committed by other honeybees, highly likely under the conditions of dearth. They feed them consistently while the population of summer bees is still active in the hives. Processing the sugar syrup to build honey stocks, local beekeepers feel, is strenuous work, which the winter bees should be spared. Due to hatch in these hives within weeks, winter bees, ideally, live semidormant lives, preserving their energy and bodily fat reserves until springtime when they help build back the apian population for the new foraging season. These bees’ bodies will produce the vital substances that nurse the egg-laying queen and help raise the new brood.

The local beekeepers consider sugar syrup a poor substitute for honey, which is praised for its nutritional, prophylactic, probiotic, and therapeutic properties.³ Sugar and pollen alternatives, commercial and homemade, however, have become indispensable not only to supplement the hive’s low honey reserves at the close or start of the foraging year but also to come to the bees’ rescue during the recurrent and long-lasting episodes of dearth. A bland sugar diet shortens the bees’ life span and compromises their strength and immunity.

“Instead of living for forty days, as they used to, bees fed on sugar can die within fifteen days. And so, what happens? With artificial food, we manage to produce the bees in numbers, but they die too quickly because they lack that goodness from nature, which is the God’s gift.”⁴ “Luckily,” Šefik adds, “the bees here manage to collect plenty of pollen; otherwise, they would perish.”

“What about the nectar?” I ask.

“Look, we are now beekeeping under altered agro-meteorological conditions,” Šefik says. By now, we have reached the apiary’s third row. The sunrise lights up the tin hive roofs with a rosy glow.

“The climate has changed and everything that nature has to offer has changed. It offers little because we have weather disasters.” He reviews the past year for me: “There was no spring [fruit] bloom, and the black locust was ruined. Freezing temperatures damaged the vegetation right at the start.” While spring frost damage was obvious to most and the late summer heat waves are widely broadcasted on local media with health warnings, it was the beekeepers, Šefik suggests, who noted signs of drought at the very start of the summer.

“People say ‘there are flowers,’ but flowers cannot yield nectar! The plant withdraws all the goodness to its roots, just to survive. So, yes there are flowers, but they don’t flow. Linden blossomed but did not flow; black locust did not bloom at all. And now, another ten days of drought are in the forecast.”

A drought has been ongoing since July all across the country, its effects exacerbated by extreme heat waves that set in at the turn of August. Then, just days before our visit, this far-western region of Bosnia was hit by a fierce windstorm. The rain descended in punishing showers, rapidly, like a raid, and withdrew just as quickly. When the skies cleared, the air temperature soared, and the moisture the soil and plants had received quickly evaporated.

“Here it’s not too bad,” Šefik says of this particular apiary, “because there is all this [morning] moisture, but it isn’t enough; the plants can’t secrete. By now, we should have here [flowing] thyme, wild oregano, wild mint, some seventy species of blooming plants, as well as honeydew on oak leaves. With that sort of food, she’d live well, but you see how it goes. She cannot bring in the essentials let alone build up winter stocks.”

Šefik is bottle-feeding the last hive in the bee yard. The syrup rushing through the bottle neck into the feeder is crimson colored by rosehips and an herbal blend of tea, which the beekeepers added to the sugar to enrich the poor food offering to the bees with vitamin C and other herbal compounds. In response to the rush of sounds and scents that the feeding introduces, the hive hums restlessly.

It takes the bees roughly twenty minutes to locate the source of nectar in the hive, Šefik says. After that, they calm down. Foragers set to work at the feeder, imbibing the syrup and processing it hundreds of times between their proboscises and honey stomachs, one drop at a time, before the sugar-based honey, enriched with bees’ enzymes, is stored in the combs. In the meantime, other foragers will search the area for pollen to collect, concoct it into pollen beads, and store it in cells for further fermentation. Šefik and Senada pack the empty bottles into sacks to reuse the next morning for feeding the bees at their second apiary, situated closer to the region’s chestnut forests that attract traveling beekeepers from across the country to this westernmost part of Bosnia. Chestnut, too, failed to flow this year.

“Beekeeping is now becoming a science,” Šefik says, getting ready to cut the grass at the apiary. Senada, in the meantime, is preparing the bees’ drinking fountains. Large jars are filled with water, their tops covered with a clean cloth that is tightly stretched and secured by rubber bands, then turned upside down so the air pressure seals the water in place. A dozen jars hang from the low branches of a tree, reflecting the garden and sky, like a mobile sculpture. The bees suckle the water that drenches the cloth at the jars’ mouths.

“A human who does not know how to adjust to nature can no longer keep bees,” Šefik adds. “There could be another year like 2015, when God has gifted us with an amazing flow, and everyone with bees, whether they know about apiculture or not, managed to harvest honey. But it’s questionable whether such a year can repeat, the way things are going. Bees have to be on the wheels, but not everyone can head up to the mountains! Besides, bees should be distributed everywhere for the sake of the country’s biodiversity.”

The science of beekeeping that Šefik describes and shows through practice is a science of experience. Its method amounts to a special attentiveness to the bonds between insects and their plants, and close contact with the species in their care. Apiarists’ observations glean insights into subtle, present changes such as early signs of drought that others can miss. They see hidden precarity where others see plenty, deep trouble brewing in the starved roots low beneath healthy-looking blooms.

In the course of the seasons and over the years, such close observations discern trends and afford foresight about worrisome futures. Ten years ago, Šefik foretold the scarcity of honey that has now become the norm. His prediction for the coming decade is at once more total and more vague—“everything will change.” Instead of foreseeing the details of climate change effects in the near future, he considers the signs of disturbance currently mounting at hand and their implications: consistently bad weather, its stress on the plants, and the compromised health, strength, and longevity of the honeybees.

The beekeeper’s science of experience is an applied science, bent on solving practical problems and guided by clear short- and long-term goals, though such goals range from keeping the bees alive through dearth to giving in order to be happy.

The seasonal nature of apian and plant lives requires that beekeepers plan ahead. The summer food determines the vitality of the next year’s generation of bees, plant seeds’ ripening through the fall foreshadows forage for the coming spring, and the health of trees’ wintering roots safeguards the prospects of future nectar flow. Adjusting to what is becoming of nature entails maneuvering present predicaments with apicultural and typically forward-looking responses.

The immediate response to an emergency, such as feeding the bees with sugar syrup, shapes forthcoming apian bodies and collectives. For this reason, the emergency food is not just given in a timely manner (to spare the winter bees hard work), it is also enriched by teas and fruit the apiarists have cultivated, collected, and cooked. Planting for the bees’ sake to secure pollen and court future nectar chances is a longer-term, ongoing venture that the beekeepers undertake and eagerly promote.

Fig. 3.1 Through the drought

Planting for Birds, Girlfriends, and Other Insects

“Look, anyone who has any idea of what’s going on in nature should plant at least five hundred woody plants.”

“Five hundred?” I ask.

“Aha.” Šefik nods, smiling, pleased at my reaction. He likes to impress others with the scale of his vision. Considering the range of the couple’s planting, however, the large number does not seem exaggerated. “Senada and I have planted some fifteen hundred trees, across our lands but also in the surroundings, wherever they’ll be of use.”

The apiary around us is shaded by many fruit trees, and the meadow fenced off below the hives blooms in all hues. The native plants and bushes, common buckthorn and blackthorn, guelder rose and wild rose among them, mix with the new arrivals to the region, like goldenrod and tall, densely blooming mullein. The beekeepers had eagerly planted these in their apiaries and had cast their seeds through the neighboring landscapes. Mullein, in particular, they collect to prepare medicinal tea blends at the herbal pharmacy they run out of their home on the outskirts of Cazin, a nearby town.

Their pharmacy sells honeys and other hive products; a rich assortment of herbal teas, tinctures, and ointments; and their own line of nutritional supplements, including aloe, beet, and chokeberry juices. Their professional interest in herbs, plants, and power foods grew alongside their apicultural practice, and the grounds of all three of their apiaries host rich herbal gardens, berry patches, orchards, and plots with staple vegetables. Ornamental plants are everywhere, mingling among tomato and pepper stalks and intruding on plots of echinacea and marigolds.

The small bee yard by their house in town is tucked into an amateur botanical garden teeming with hundreds of species of plants that the two have painstakingly curated over the years. Some, like potted aloe vera plants, are essential ingredients to herbal remedies for their pharmacy’s stock, but there are many more species thriving there that the beekeepers simply enjoy growing. Plants that are attractive to the bees are always the favorites, especially the blooming exotics like passion fruit vine and banana palms. Alongside them are weeds like common comfrey and purple deadnettle, which come in on their own, Šefik says, and are left alone. “Because, you know who comes to you?” he once asked me, then quipped before I answered: “The one who loves you.” The plants’ flourishing, I hear Šefik saying, shows off their attraction.

At the beekeepers’ two apiaries in the countryside, trees are the most prominent plantings. The apiary that hosts us this morning is lined along the edges by dense, ruffled hazelnut shrubs. Their catkins offer up the first rich pollen loads to the bees as early as February. Leaning against them, tall and tangled, are raspberry and blackberry brambles, whose blooms well up with nectar in June. Apple, cherry, and pear trees of native and hybrid varieties blossom throughout the spring before the black locust forests in the area light up with their droopy blooms. Native and red walnuts, whose seedlings Šefik brought from Turkey, bloom with rich pollen tassels in April.

“I’ve planted fifty linden trees here, and now my bees can visit them. I plant brekinja and Koelreuteria at each apiary. Even when chestnut forest flows, my bees are found foraging on Koelreuteria; that’s how much they love it.” Brekinja, known in English as “wild service tree,” is a native cherished for its medicinal fruits, bark, and, among the beekeepers, its nectar flow. Koelreuteria, originally an eastern Asian ornamental species and long at home in cultivated landscapes across the world, is new to Bosnia and rare. Flaming with extravagant orange blossoms, it is a notable bloomer among many other imported melliferous (honey-yielding) ornamentals on the couple’s premises: pink euodia, blooming in a fireworks pattern; catalpa, which yields white puckered florets with purple freckles; Japanese pagoda tree; and tall Paulownias with trumpet-like flowers. Local beekeepers are tree collectors. Through collecting and caring for the foreign species of trees, they have developed a new lore, discovered new preferred species, and determined tolerances to local conditions; they can now recommend and exchange saplings with growing expertise.

Šefik and Senada are especially enthusiastic about planting. Beyond the land they own, they also plant trees across expanses of private land that has gone wild and whose owners have long immigrated to Europe, the United States, and Australia. The couple introduces tree seedlings within foraging distance of their bees and whenever they notice signs of soil erosion and suspect risks of landslides. They cast widely wild seeds of bloomers attractive to honeybees.

They also propagate saplings of the nectar-yielding trees and offer them to neighbors, fellow beekeepers, and the many people who seek the couple out for herbal remedies, hive products, or advice on beekeeping. Whenever we visit, they pack our car full of potted gifts—flowers and tree seedlings to plant at our apiary—and sachets full of seeds.

At their apiaries and beyond, this couple is matchmaking between honeybees and their partner plants. Senada points out the bees gathering pollen on great mullein this morning, and Šefik is glad: “Whenever I see them bringing in pollen, I’m happy and relieved.” Nectar aside, he says, they pray to God there is enough pollen for the bees to collect. And they deliberately plant to foster pollen prospects.

Pollen in the hives is an extraordinary artifact. Deposited into special cells and mixed up with honey, wax, enzymes, and microbes from the bee’s mouth and foregut, pollen ferments to become an elaborate food supply rich in vitamins, lipids, free acids, and essential nutrients. In English, it is called bee bread (perga in Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian [BSC]), though it is fermented rather than baked and is packed with proteins rather than carbohydrates. Nurse bees eat it along with honey to produce bee milk with which to sustain the hive mother (the queen) and the brood.⁵ They also redistribute the pollen nutrients to other hive mates, complementing their honey diet. Bee bread increases bees’ longevity and supports the hive insects’ lifelong physiological changes, through which bees graduate from different social responsibilities, starting with nest cleaning at the youngest age to foraging in adulthood. In addition, while propolis—tree resins that foragers collect and work into “bee glue”—supports hives’ social immunity, pollen has been found to boost individual insects’ resistance to infection by pathogens and to promote honeybees’ innate production of antimicrobial peptides.⁶

“Go on, girlfriends,” Šefik says to the honeybees landing with pollen loads on their hind legs at a hive’s entrance. Then he pauses to explain himself: “They aren’t just bees to me; they are my girlfriends.”

Bees aside, Šefik points out that their planting ventures serve other insects and birds. Mulberry trees, in particular, he plants for the wildlife, as the trees generously yield the fruit that is relatively unappreciated in the local food culture. Birds feed on the berry patches as well. Blueberries quickly withered in the high heat of 2022, but the harvest was enough to share: “I love it when birds eat here, and we should be leaving enough [of crops] for the birds and ants and everyone else. People think that all this is ours alone. Well, it’s not! Properly ours is only as much as we can eat and drink, not more than that.”

Planting is one way of relating to the world of many species, the world humans serve rather than own. Šefik speaks of this using keywords like giving, love, and happiness. We ought to give something every day, to be happy, he said. Not the usual give and take, this giving expects no returns of equivalents, but other species’ thriving is the sign that love works in the world: it achieves an attraction between the species and yields pleasure.

With the bees, his girlfriends, the relationship is a serious commitment. Šefik says he loses sleep if he feels that the bees are lacking something he could provide them with, such as food, water, or herbal medicine. But the efforts at planting for the bees’ sake are increasingly foiled by the strange new weather. The familiar plants’ seasonal lives can no longer be anticipated. None of the trees, the countless plants in the gardens, or the bloomers they sowed in the wilds manage to secrete enough nectar to sustain the bees.

The near future, Šefik thinks, will only be more troubling. He foresees severe droughts. “The time is coming,” Šefik says, “when every single plant will have to be irrigated.”

Reading God’s Signs

The next morning, we repeat the feeding routine at the beekeepers’ second apiary. The environment here is much drier and the heat’s toll more visible on the plants. With nearby streams dried up and the grounds lacking morning dew, the bees are entirely dependent on the water fountains the couple refills every second day.

Šefik is thinking aloud: “We are now headed to the point from which we shall not know our way out,” he says, “all because of our modern ways of living.” Šefik’s concerns are grounded in the apiaries but extend well beyond them as he worries about what life will become with the loss of biodiversity and climate change. He blames modern agriculture, the fossil-fuel industry, pollution, and consumer culture, the anthropogenic pressures that are typically implicated in the global environmental crisis.

What Šefik envisions, however, is a point of no return, the eventuality of a postsustainable world that few contemporary environmentalists are willing to contemplate. Environmental philosopher John Foster calls this a “grievous” future whose shape we cannot know well in advance, and neither modern technology nor our present imagination can help us live toward or through it. The way forward, Foster suggests, begins by staring frankly at the abyss that opens at the thought of an imminent catastrophe, the possibility of our species’ extinction, and the eventuality of our personal death. Foster argues that confronting finitude and environmental tragedy can help cultivate a new species of hope that taps into the deep “dark” part of the human self, which we intuit even as it eludes our grasp. When we retrieve the inner human wildness whereby embodied beings think and live as an organic part of the ecologies they inhabit and that ground them, hope arises from that, unwilfully, and we can strive to “keep the human torch alight.”⁷

Šefik’s understanding of global environmental disaster draws on his intermittent participation with internationally funded projects in local biodiversity conservation and sustainable development as well as from his personal observations through apicultural and herbalist practice. At the same time, his idea of what nature is and means to the human self draws on the Revelation, which the Qur’an describes as the light that illuminates one’s course through life: We have made it a light by which We guide whom We will of Our subjects.⁸ God's name is the Light, al-nūr, as in the famous Qur’anic verse that begins with God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.⁹ Revelation, in other words, is meant to illuminate human self-understanding, those corners of inner being that would otherwise stay dark precisely because they would remain within the shadow cast by humans’ lone, self-wrought self-perceptions.

As Šefik put it earlier, nature is the realm “of goodness, which is the God’s gift.” The present trouble stems from humans breaking connections with the gift and its Giver.

“We have distanced ourselves from the nature,” the apiarist says, “and the human has to be connected with the cosmos, with one’s Lord, every second, no matter what you’re doing, because the inputs are coming from above, if only you know how to receive them. It’s like with bees; they’re receiving their revelation.”

Nature is a fraught concept in contemporary Euro-American eco-thinking. Some deem it lost under the sway of the pernicious influence of late modern humans while others suggest that nature has always been mixed up with human influence, although the Western mind and modern science presumed it to be an objective realm wholly separate from culture.¹⁰ Others are recovering the idea of the wild as an alternative to nature to capture unforeseen tendencies in nature or culture that are ecologically or politically promising.¹¹ In any case, conversations that revisit or problematize the concept and domain of nature evolve around relationships between human and nonhuman entities, be they biological species or any species of things, from atmospheric elements to cosmological beings, which conceptually adventurous scholars are now also considering.

Šefik’s notion of nature, however, is colored by the Qur’anic understanding of the cosmos as everything other than God but nothing apart from God, who brings it into existence and sustains it from one moment to the next. Everything there is, is a subject of God’s mercy and a pious Muslim subject in the sense of being gladly, adoringly surrendered into divine service, as per the following verses, for instance: Then He turned Himself to the heaven, when it was smoke, and said to it and to the earth, “Come forth, willingly or by force!” They said, “We come in willing obedience.”¹²

For humans, the natural world, the cosmos at hand, is the place and the means of relating with other divine subjects. Giving service and showing care to those who themselves are doing service to God and humans, for the love of God, is the intermediary way of relating to God through good works. And the practice of doing good, the Qur’an repeatedly says, goes hand in hand with having faith, as opposed to simply professing it.¹³

God’s nurturing relationship with the world is still more intimate insofar as the divine attributes, known in the tradition as God’s Most Beautiful Names, are manifesting in the sensuous world. God reveals Himself through properties and events at all times so that everything in the material world encounters humans with the latest news of God. These signs are meant as occasions for reflecting on and for getting to know God, who never ceases to speak. A Qur’anic verse well loved by Muslims says as much: And if all the trees on earth were pens and the sea ink, with seven seas to replenish it, the words of God would never be exhausted.¹⁴

The connection with God via nature is reflective but also more existentially vital to being a human than is reflection understood in the usual sense of the word as a discrete, mental activity of a thinking subject. The human, in the Qur’anic sense of the word al-insān, is the being with and in the name of God. While all things are divine subjects, and their glad service to God makes them Muslim, being a Muslim is a prerequisite for humans becoming an insān, a being drawn toward God. And while everything is in a constant process of change, and humans are particularly prone to differentiation, personal constitutions being diverse and each person constantly subject to passing moods, the divine self-revelation offered to humans through the pages of the Book or the beings in the world is incessantly singular. Insān is a being underway.

Revelation sustains the honeybees as the foraging, pollinating, honey- making, prophetic species whose relationship with God is faithful and always accomplished. For humans, Revelation is meant to guide the process of what the local Sufi thinker Mustafa Čolić calls insanizacija (“insān-ization”), which I take to mean getting to know one’s self as not god as the precondition for getting to know God. A prior receptiveness to divine self-revelation, however, sets the stage for self-knowledge, since a self reflects nothing but God Himself, though the reflected image depends on the surface of the mirror. The self-image veils God, and veils can be more or less luminous or revealing.

For Shaykh Čolić, the process of becoming an insān also hinges on the intention and desire to walk in the footsteps of the Prophet, whom hadiths quote as saying, “I have been sent to perfect good character.” Good character (akhlāq) shapes the whole range of polite conduct, from handling water to responding kindly to insults to meeting God. Precisely because humans, unlike bees, can lose and must struggle to maintain their connection with the divine, such loss is disastrous not just for the individual but, Šefik implies, for the world.

Signs of coming disaster are legible on the pages of the Qur’an, God’s Book, and discernible across the open book of nature. Šefik refers to the signs with the loan word from Arabic, išaret (ishāra): “Before the End [pred Kijamet] we shall witness all the signs, and they’ll be greater each day. We cannot know when, God knows [when is the Hour], but God’s Book speaks of it, and the portents are here.” Šefik stands still, taking time to think. He struggles to find the words. “It’s up to God’s will, but each day we’ll . . . I won’t say that we’ll be suffering [more], but, for sure, we will be realizing further what we have done [to bring this]. Each day we’ll be grasping deeper the meaning of what’s written in the God’s book, to the extent that we know how to interpret it. The great signs are already here . . . we speak of it as ‘climate,’ and the trouble is about climate, and we have caused it.”

At this point, Šefik changes his tone and gives a broad, sweeping critique of the carbon economy, unsustainable industrial growth, pollution, xenobiotics that are making landscapes and bodies toxic, global politics of complacency, the tendency of the general public to ignore the “alarm, blasting to all of us.” Šefik vents his grievances with sadness, not anger. The cheerful man, not prone to complaining, however, soon shifts his mood and says: “If we want to live better on this planet, we each should plant at least five hundred woody plants, to help out. Because it’s so nice here, right? Being here by the forest. This is a God’s gift.”

Both the Revelation and Šefik’s firsthand observations yield signs of the coming catastrophe: nectar dearth, severe droughts, the end of life as we know it, and, imminently, the end of the world. Wrecking the planet is the modern human industry in the widest sense of the word as well as the human distance from nature and God, whose gifts manifest in nature. And yet Šefik promotes tree planting.

“Why should we plant?” I ask.

“Plant a tree even if you knew you’d die in an hour,” he says, repeating the prophetic advice with a notable difference: the eve of the apocalypse, in his telling, is the eve of one’s own death. The conflation of death and apocalypse is not incidental, as the primary Islamic sources and their commentaries deliberately thread together the finitude of the self and the cosmos.

A verse in the Qur’an cites God: What else can they [the people] expect but that the Hour should come to them suddenly, and its portents are already here. And what if it comes and they are unaware and have not prepared for it? Mustafa Čolić’ glosses the Hour in this verse as both the private and the general apocalypse (smak), the perishing of both the macrocosmos and microcosmos.¹⁵

Fig. 3.2 Off to the next task

Both versions of the hadith circulate in casual conversations, and the point they jointly make is that neither the end of one’s life nor the end of the world intimates futility. Planting that tree is not meant to stall one’s death any more than it is meant to save the world. Planting is about doing the good that keeps the world whole, about being through giving, which serves the world of God’s creatures and earns God’s pleasure.

“Now, let’s go harvest chokeberries,” Šefik says, picking up a bucket. “They are ripe.” Senada is already way ahead of us, gathering mullein flowers in the meadow. Šefik heads to the chokeberry bushes, and my sister and I follow.

Something Is Off

“It needs another ten kilograms of food,” Mehmed says, closing off the hive he had been showing us. The hive holds the swarm he had caught at his apiary earlier in the summer. He is pleased with how the bees have developed thus far, except that the honey stocks are not yet ready for the winter. It is early August, and we are in central Bosnia, some three hundred kilometers east of Šefik and Senada’s apiary. Mehmed is holding off on artificial feeding for as long as there is a chance that the meadows might flow. Taking off the yellow beekeeper’s shirt and the veiled hat he wore while handling the hive, he explains: “These hills are full of different nectar-yielding plants. There is plenty of forage, and it’s blooming. There are north-facing slopes and south-facing slopes. In short, whatever exposition the plants like, they can find it here. If only other factors come together, the flow shouldn’t fail. But, by God, in the last years, something is off.” He shakes his head and looks off into the distance: “Something is off.”

Mehmed’s apiary is in his home’s backyard, which extends across several acres of land, well planted with fruit trees and berry patches. His appraisal of the surrounding hills conveyed a beekeeper’s and an orchardist’s consideration of the microclimatic conditions that are fostered by the angles of the slopes and their orientation, the plants’ exposure to the sun and winds, daily temperature oscillations within seasons, and the soils’ capacities for water retention. By all counts, it is a good place to keep bees. He inherited the orchard from his father, a traditional beekeeper, and has introduced many new fruit and flowering trees over the years.

Some twenty hives are in the bee yard, and the rest have traveled the country in pursuit of honey since the spring. They are currently at two different locations in the highlands, poised for the summer heather, the region’s last major nectar source.

Mehmed’s traveling apiaries fared poorly. Should the summer heather fail, he will bring them home early. “At least here, I didn’t have the situation where I had to urgently intervene to rescue the bees on the brink of starvation,” he explains. Midsummer, he had to evacuate his bees from the spot in the mountains to which they traveled, as in any other year, to take advantage of the later blooming season and the diverse meadow forage that flourishes at higher altitudes. Finding the hives dangerously empty of food on his field visit and seeing no near signs of nectar flow, he rushed the bees back to his home base, fed them homemade pollen patties, and then took the hives to the mountains southward.

On average, a honeybee society consumes 150 kilograms of food, nectar and pollen combined, a year. The fact that, lately, they can hardly manage to collect that much is alarming, Mehmed says. “Someone may think the lack of honey is the beekeepers’ problem. But shouldn’t we all be worried?” he asks me, laughing nervously. “In these times, the bees cannot sustain themselves without human assistance.”

The assistance Mehmed speaks of is the apicultural practice itself, which, in his words, has become “a struggle to keep the bees alive.” The practice involves careful management of the hives to ensure the bees’ health and strength, but the main forms of aid are itinerant pursuits of nectar and cultivation of bee-friendly trees and plants.¹⁶ When all else fails, there remains artificial feeding. Although Mehmed supplies the hives with the best possible food alternatives—sugar syrup enriched with herbal teas and patties he prepares from scratch—artificial food is considered a rescue response and a sure sign of an apiculture in crisis.

Mehmed has deliberately planted the apiary’s surroundings to ensure that sources of nectar and pollen are available across the growing seasons. When I ask him what he has planted for the bees, he simply replies: “Everything! For each season she [the bee] has something to pick.” He gestures in different directions across the area and lists the bees’ notable partner species. Among them, thickets of hazelnut (“you can’t breathe here in the spring from the amount of pollen in the air”) and groves of Cornelian cherry, an early and opulent bloomer, with nearly a hundred of its trees growing dense, low, interlaced canopies within walking distance from the apiary.

In the orchard itself, he has grown native and hybrid varieties of apples and pears, deliberately selected for the different timing of their blooms. Theoretically, the fruit blossoms should last at least twenty days on these premises. “Because here, there are the earliest, the early, the midseason, and the late bloomers. However, nowadays, within a single week.” He claps his palms saying this: “It’s all gone! Or else, the latest bloomers bloom first.” Mehmed takes a thoughtful pause, then adds, “Inexplicable!” and wipes his silver-rimmed glasses. He is a composed, cheerful character. In his early fifties, and looking younger than his age, he has a way of making the gravest statements with a small nervous laugh that intimates at once his unease and bafflement.

The order of flowering is upturned, Mehmed notes, and not just with fruits. He mentions as an example brekinja, wild service tree, which he is fond of cultivating on his land and in the nearby forests. “We know the sequence in which plants here develop, what comes before and what follows next, but that order no longer holds. Now brekinja blossoms before black locust!” The service tree is an important bloomer, and its flowering was timed auspiciously to follow on the heels of black locust and so fill in the gap until linden, the next significant arboreal flow.

Fig. 3.3 Black locust, nearly exhausted

The familiar blooming sequence of other local trees, such as the maple, as well as the different meadow flowers is likewise disordered. The beekeeper is relearning the disrupted rules of plant phenologies. The native plant species and the foreign ornamentals that have been at home at Mehmed’s apiary for nearly two decades are throwing up surprises. He sees the ornamental euodia bloom as generously as ever, but there seems to be no flow.

“We know from literature and from years of experience, that there are ideal meteorological conditions for different plants’ secretion. But this year, too, it happened: the conditions seem ideal, but there is no honey. . . . We have strong, healthy bees, capable of foraging, but there is no nectar. The problem we’re seeing in the hive is only a consequence of something that is going on in nature. Something is disturbed there.”

He takes my sister and me for a stroll through the meadow far behind the hives. Grasses are shot through with wild plants, white and purple wild clover, spiny restharrow blooming pink and armed with thorns, lacy yarrow, celestially blue chicory, and many more.

“Take today, for instance. Today we have ideal conditions for nectar flow. Did it rain? It rained, so there’s moisture. The temperature is right, the flowers look good—they are perky, as you can see, not dried up—but if we open up a hive, we’ll see there’s no inflow,” Mehmed says, his frustration building as he speaks. He pauses, laughs, then falls silent.

“I don’t know in which direction things are going,” he says finally, “but we, the beekeepers, aren’t going to give up. This isn’t just about the work; it’s the way we live. And I don’t want to and cannot live without her.”

Halal: Giving while Forgiving

Honeybees run deep in Mehmed’s family. He bonded with them as a child, by his father’s side, in this very orchard, which, back in the 1960s, hosted bees in traditional, whitewashed wicker skeps. The boy watched the summer skies explode with swarms. He rediscovered them as a young man enrolled in Islamic studies at the university while studying to become an imam. And Your Lord revealed to the honeybee—the Qur’anic verse begins. Reflecting on this verse and the famous fourteenth-century commentary by Ibn Kathīr, it dawned on Mehmed that foraging honeybees show God at work at the apiaries, guiding the bees while making Himself known to humans. The verse on the bees ends with In that is the sign for people who reflect.

On his days off from the battle trenches in the 1990s, Mehmed spent time with his wife, their young daughter, and the hives in their backyard. Intense, rushed days, he remembers, when the bees matched him up with the seasons and their honey harvests to the sweet life that the war besieged. On all other days through wartime, his wife, Fahreta, picked up the tasks around the apiary and their older daughter joined in as soon as she could stand on her own, the adult-sized veiled hat swaying on her toddler head like an overgrown mushroom cap on a slender stalk. When, after the war, Mehmed resigned from his post as a local imam, honeybees became his full-time vocation. Years later, the apiary remains a family affair.

Ever since their younger daughter, Dalila, a teenager at the time, was diagnosed with lymphoma, the hive products—honey, pollen, propolis, and royal jelly—became staples of the family’s diet,¹⁷ first to nourish the girl’s body through chemotherapy and promote convalescence, then as everyone’s prophylactic. To grow power foods for Dalila and secure produce free of contaminants and agricultural chemicals, the family’s gardens were expanded.

They added patches of chokeberries, raspberries, and strawberries, pots of aloes and live-forevers, beans, and squashes. The family still largely eats what they grow. Roses, however, grow everywhere throughout the gardens and the orchard because, as Fahreta puts it, “the human finds room for pleasure, everywhere.” The expanded food garden, too, is the honeybees’ heaven, and pleasure travels with them to its every corner. As a young adult and master’s student, Dalila still helped around the apiary while carrying her close interest in bees into the studies of microbiology; her thesis project tested the antibacterial properties of bee venom.¹⁸ The beekeepers’ older daughter, employed as a pharmacist, has no time to spare at the apiary, but her daughter, Najma, practically grew up with her grandparents’ honeybees.

Najma once showed me her littlest finger, excitedly explaining something in the tongue of a toddler I could not understand. Her grandmother translated for me: “She is showing you where a bee has ‘kissed’ her.” The adults turned the child’s first sting into a lesson on the human-apian relationship. Across the species, love is love, though it gives and feels differently.

Local beekeepers, and especially those who, like Mehmed and Šefik, are planting for the bees’ sake, are engaged in close, loving relationships across the species’ differences. With bees, we do not see eye to eye. We cannot exchange gazes between our respective organs of vision—the cyclopean three eyes on the bees’ forehead and the compound eyes on either side of the bee’s face, with thousands of lenses covered with stalks of hair, standing tall, at the microscopic scale, like prairie grasses, grasp a world of light, movement, and shape alien to us. Our close contact presumes avoidance of touching. Our fingers are too coarse for their frail, exoskeletal frames, while our skin hurts at their stings and clutches their barbed stingers irretrievably, rupturing the bees’ abdomens. The local beekeepers’ love for the bees does not count on these human tokens of intimacy—gazes and caresses—any more than it expects an apian recognition of the beekeepers’ presence, service, or affection. The beekeepers’ love does not expect a reciprocity, an exchange of likes, a tit for tat, kisses for kisses, a care in return for care. Instead, the emphasis is on human giving.

“The bottom line is this: What’s up to me, I’ll do it. Whatever I can do for my hives, I’ll do it. Will they give me back anything? They don’t have to. It’s my way of life. Perhaps next year they’ll give something back, but they don’t have to. Halal im bilo [I forgive them]. It’s enough that I come here, fill up my soul by the hives, and it is plenty.” Mehmed points to a canvas garden chair off to the side of the hives. He likes to sit there in the evenings, he says. As the crickets fire up the summer’s usual, the foragers are making their way back to the nests, and the hives are breathing out the scents of wax, tree resins, and the nectar becoming honey.

Halal im bilo means that what Mehmed gives to bees absolves them of any debts. They owe him nothing in kind—honey or hive products—nothing in turn. A Qur’anic Arabic term, halal, refers to the category of acts and objects that are permissible to Muslims; in other words, their enjoyment is rightful. Bosnian Muslims tend to call out halal on a range of transactions, be they of money, words, or deeds, to emphasize the gladness of giving or forgiveness of any eventual slights or imbalances. Halal resolutely renounces grievances—someone who has been hurt or insulted shows kindness and virtue by forgiving. Above all, halal counts on God witnessing and keeping track of even the smallest act. Those who hope for God’s mercy ought to be forgiving; those who depend on God’s generosity ought to be giving. Whereas this forgiveness is most explicitly emphasized in relationships between humans, I also see it tacitly informing Bosnian Muslim ecological sensibilities.

Mehmed is well aware that the Qur’an describes everything in the cosmos as employed with giving service: from the moon to the livestock. Attentive readings of those verses emphasize the fact that humans do not benefit from this service as rightful owners.¹⁹ The world is not at humans’ disposal. Rather, humans are utterly dependent on the world’s creatures and are especially accountable to God for the benefits and blessings they draw from a world that ultimately belongs to God.²⁰ While all things are employed by God and render service to others, including humans on God’s behalf, human living, by default, accrues due to all things that make living feasible. Mehmed gives to the bees, forgivingly, while all along the bees in his care are indebting him through service.

The generous God promises eternal rewards to those who give and forgive. But because He is above the condition of owing something to His subjects at any time, God rewards the good works of all creatures instantly: with pleasure. In the words of a nineteenth-century Sufi, Said Nursi: “Know that out of His perfect munificence, Almighty God placed the reward for work within it. He included the wage for work within the work itself. It is for this reason that in their particular duties, which are called creative commands, animate beings, and even from one point of view inanimate creatures, conform to the dominical commands with complete eagerness and a sort of pleasure. Everything from bees, flies, and chickens to the sun and the moon carry out their duties with perfect pleasure.”²¹

God’s creative command engenders things—His command, when He desires a thing is to say to it “Be,” and it is²²—while divine generosity ensures that God’s desire comes through with the command and that things come forth with pleasure.²³

The pleasure that Mehmed speaks of is sensuous: the peaceful, leisurely moments steeped in the sounds, scents, and textures of a summer evening. The pleasure is also more than that since Mehmed uses the word soul (duša in BSC), which is a complex term in Islamic sources. At the very least, the human soul is conceived as a double. It consists of a nafs, a subtle reality that craves and enjoys fleshly as well as sensuous or aesthetic qualities of this world (and the next), and rūh, which is the divine reality, the spirit breathed at the secret heart of a human being. Rūh craves divine attention and thrives on the deeds that seek to earn it. The use of these terms in Islamic sources varies; in everyday Bosnian Muslim conversations, duša often signals both nafs and rūh, while the use of Arabic terms usually serves to mark notable distinctions between the two.

Nafs, in particular, is the part of humans that inclines toward disorder and necessitates the prescriptive command, which amounts to divine instructions on how to distinguish good from evil, what duties to perform, and what to avoid in order to earn God’s pleasure. Humans (along with jinn) are the only species obliged by, as well as free to disobey, the prescriptive command.

Being generous is a highly praised virtue in Islam and a practice that counters the selfish tendency of nafs, which by nature is self- centered. Citing a hadith, Shaykh Čolić writes that a generous insān is one who complies with divine prescriptions while giving dues to God and, by default, to God’s beings, whose dues are the subject of consideration in the giving of alms or taxes. The apiarists described in this chapter make it clear that generosity is giving due to honeybees and plants being entrusted in their care. The reward is immediate and fills up the soul.²⁴

If You Saw the World Ending

Our visit is drawing to a close. We are standing at the edge of the bee yard by Mehmed’s garden chair, the seat of his evening repose. “What can we do? How much can we do?” he wonders out loud and in the next breath adds: “I do what I can. See there?” Mehmed asks, pointing out a cluster of tall trees nearby. “Those are linden trees that I’ve planted.” Five, he counts. “There are as many up there, and then more the further you go,” the beekeeper says, nodding toward the forests that skirt the surrounding hills.

The trees Mehmed points out are some twenty years old, with beautiful crowns naturally rounded as is typical for linden. I imagine they turn gloriously rich and fragrant in July, when they bloom. Along with all the other trees in Mehmed’s purview, the linden has not been secreting as expected and does not reliably aid the apiculture in crisis. The trees Mehmed plants and tends to are being uprooted from the seasons, their life cycles and species tendencies disjointed from the ambient conditions. Nonetheless, the prophetic advice to plant is deeply ingrained and remembered precisely at the moment it seems that the world one is planting is beyond redemption.

“If you have a sapling in your hand and you see that the apocalypse [Kijamet], has begun, plant it,” Mehmed says, clutching his fist as if it gripped a tree stem. “You are seeing all the signs of Kijamet? Well, don’t give up, plant it! What does that sapling matter, if the world is ending? It matters. Plant it!”

He gestures toward the first hive at the apiary, the one we opened earlier today that houses this year’s swarm, and says: “Will I live long enough to see these bees forage? Will they get to find honey next year? I don’t know, but I’ll do my best to turn them into a strong community, and next year, I’ll carry on, if I can, inshallah [God willing]. That’s the bottom line.”

Planting in the Paradise

Lacy phacelia flowers color purple the field that stretches ahead of us, then rise into a hill slope suddenly, like a hiccup that interrupts a flowing conversation. The higher the hill gets, the more scarce and withered the blossoms. “The common ragweed has taken over,” Adil says with a sigh, pointing out the hardy blades of an invasive species, an infamous allergenic, which is a recent arrival to the country.

Since the spring of 2021, Azra and I have followed Adil’s efforts at cultivating lacy phacelia, the plant that promises abundant nectar flow for the bees in his apiary. He had procured the seeds from abroad, plowed the field with his small tractor, spread out manure, and, finally, in May, cast the fine seeds. We had helped out with sowing. Even before the first flowers emerged, as early as mid-June, he noticed that common ragweed had overwhelmed the crop. In his words: “The weed won over. It’s wild, invasive, and has a tougher root, so it drains the nutrients and the moisture.”

As temperatures soared throughout June, the phacelia blooms quickly burned, except at the foot of the hill, where we meet Adil on this visit in mid-July. Morning dew refreshes the plants there, and the shade from the apiary’s many trees keeps the patch relatively cool through early afternoon.

As a young man, leading a faith community in a northeastern city mosque, Imam Adil once dreamed of a fabulous garden. In that dream, which Adil vividly remembers years later and relates to me with glee, he flew across fabulously lush landscapes, as light as a bee, finding each place more astounding than the one before it. The dream gave him a foretaste of paradise for sure, he says. Since Adil retired from the post of imam, he and his wife returned to his paternal village by the name of Rajska, which translates to Edenic and fittingly describes the places’ verdant, faraway charm.

Rajska is off the main road, deep within the woods, and at a safe distance from the commercial fruit farms that are infamous among the beekeepers for being highly contaminated by synthetic insecticides and herbicides. Adil has kept an apiary here throughout his adult life, visiting the bees on his days off from work. Now he lives full-time in the house by the apiary, which is an eclectic collection of aging boxes of all types and sizes. Rows of hives are screened from each other by high-climbing blackberry and raspberry vines. Shrubs of roses and jasmine and hollyhock in many hues make up the outer lines of the bee yard, which to the left grows into an orchard and up front becomes a thick vegetable garden pressing against a greenhouse. When he is not with the bees, Adil keeps his hands in the dirt. He tirelessly plants trees, though his wife and adult children worry that Adil, now in his seventies, is overextending himself. He undertakes these new planting ventures under the pretext that he plants on behalf of others—he tells me with a wink. With his wife’s help, Adil cultivates food, berries, and flower gardens. While the number of hives in the bee yard is steady at a hundred—he gives out each year’s swarms as gifts—the gardens and orchards keep expanding.

The land at and around the apiary is planted with hundreds of fruit trees. Adil has a story and praise for each variety: one apple is “clever,” he says, because it blooms in well-paced stages, another is “neat” because it requires no pruning. He has planted dozens of varieties of cherries and sour cherries, and each spring, he takes us to see the bloom of his favorites. Among these are Japanese cherries, which he calls “jewels.” He gave saplings of it to my sister and me earlier in the spring, along with other potted gifts for the land of our apiary: a black fig tree, a flowering bush that attracts bees (“a true ornament”), dozens of raspberry saplings to add to our berry patch, and a sack of hollyhock seeds.

Several years ago, we introduced Adil to the false indigo bush. From the sapling we brought him, he has propagated others, founding a small thicket on the wettest part of his land. Now he recommends the tree enthusiastically to his fellow beekeepers and passes saplings of it along with advice on how to control the spread of this vigorous grower. By the side of the village road, on the bank of the cool forest creek, he has established a plantation of Paulownia trees.

“This is the tree of the future,” he said, giving me a tour of the grounds in 2019. Adil listed the properties of the species that has been hailed globally as a fast grower and a versatile, promising resource in sustainable forestry, but he kept his focus on the paulownia’s reputedly high nectar yields. By the time the tree was discovered by the local beekeepers, Adil’s Paulownias were already several years old.

All around Adil’s land are forested hills full of black locust and linden. In 2021, as in the years before, black locust failed to flow. Adil suspects that the trees were impeded by late frost, which also disrupted the flowering of his fruit trees. Later fruit varieties blossomed through persistent cold showers that confined the bees to their nests. Paulownias flowered “somewhat,” he reports, unimpressed.

Still, alhamdulillāh, praise to God, Adil says cheerfully. It was the phacelia and linden that infused his hives with food in the nick of time. Everything else up to that point has disappointed: nectar that trickled in from trees and plants on Adil’s land and from the surroundings could not feed the bees. At the very least, Adil felt, the small inflow of nectar, along with the pollen that the foragers managed to collect, enriched the sugar and soy patties that the beekeeper fed the bees through early summer. Before the linden and phacelia flowed, it was a “catastrophe,” as Adil puts it. Now the hives have food for the rest of the summer, and there will be a modest quantity of honey for the beekeeper to harvest, which, in Adil’s words, is plenty to supply his family and friends. “You see, I could live without honey, but I could not live without bees,” he told me the first time we met in 2015.

We are now slowly climbing the hill planted with phacelia, looking closely at the flowers along the way, speculating how the ragweed might have gotten into the crop. Adil is wearing a floppy red hat that shades his face from the sun’s blazing heat. From the hilltop, we have a good view of the village in the valley and the hills rolling into the distance. Adil points out the black locust and linden forests in the area. When these trees flow with nectar, it is a paradise for bees, he says, then shrugs his shoulders: he would not know what to do with all that honey anyhow. “I now keep the honeybees mostly for the pleasure,” he says, “and for the sake of hizmet.”

Hizmet is a loan word from Arabic via Ottoman Turkish that denotes service to others, which is highly recommended in the Islamic tradition. The most beloved among God’s subjects is the one who is most useful to others is the gist of a hadith that Bosnian Muslims often tell each other, encouraging solidarity within the community as well as charitable works of any sort. Adil’s use of the phrase the community suggests a wider meaning.

“Not just to the humans?” I ask Adil to clarify.

“Of course not!” he keenly replies. “God created those animals and has entrusted them into your care. When you do everything you can, you earn a sevap [reward]. For every little bee you serve.” He gives a deep, hearty laugh at this, then adds: “There about five million of them here, you know.”

A hundred hives, five million of God’s creatures, whom Adil calls girlfriends. He describes his tender relationship with them as a service, giving to the creatures of the world their due, for God’s sake. The word sevap is another Qur’anic term (thawāb) denoting a reward, while the Revelation makes it clear that rewards pertain to this world and the next.

Mentioned with reminders of one’s imminent death, the Book encourages its readers to strive and pray for both kinds of rewards: the coveted ephemerals that make life enjoyable and the everlasting goods. Consider the following verses: No soul can ever die save by the leave of God, at an appointed time. Whosoever desires the reward of this world, We will give him of it; and whoever desires a reward of the other world, We will give him of that, and we will recompense the grateful.²⁵

The three beekeepers I describe in this chapter tie together a common theme. Mehmed gives to the bees all he can, renouncing expectations of returns. The service “fills up” his “soul.” When Šefik recommends that we humans “give something every day to be happy” (da bi bio sretan), he has in mind doing what makes one feel good and doing the good that rewards souls with eternal bliss. The bliss, however, is advanced in the present and is what nourishes the soul.

In the Qur’anic sense, the felicitous—translated in BSC as sretni—are distinguished on the very day that follows the world’s end, the day of gathering: And that is the Day that all shall witness, and We delay it only for a limited term. On the Day it comes, no soul shall speak save by His leave. Among them shall be the wretched and the felicitous.²⁶ The wretched and the felicitous are mentioned together throughout the Book, and it is the contrast of their deeds and ends that deepens the meaning of misery and joy in both the earthly and the eternal life.

Fig. 3.4 The sun rises from the west

Šefik’s contemplations are kindred. To emphasize the gladness that comes from giving, he invokes its opposite with his typical boldness: “The man who is not useful to self and others is miserable.”

Gladness stands for the Garden. The Qur’an quotes God: And as for those who are felicitous, they shall be in the Garden, abiding there for as long as the heavens and the earth endure, save as your Lord wills. Indeed, your Lord accomplishes what He desires.²⁷

The garden, however, is sowed here, in the loam of the earth. A popular hadith among Bosnian Muslim beekeepers says that a Muslim who plants a tree or sows grain reaps rewards for as long as its fruit is eaten by a person, bird, or animal. Adil quotes a hadith that is even more straightforward: whoever plants a tree, God plants a tree for him in paradise.

There is a logic to planting here and hereafter. If you plant a tree here and now in God’s garden, you join hands in the divine care for the world. Even if the earth is doomed and plant nectaries are exhausted, the merit of planting rests in the seedling itself, and it will bloom in all the worlds.

NOTES

1.70:6–10.

2.Ibid.

3.In cultural traditions across the world, honey is appreciated for its nutritional and medicinal properties, some of which are being reevaluated in clinical practices and researched in international interdisciplinary networks. Peter Molan, a biochemist, has devoted his career to exploring and promoting honey’s medicinal uses, starting with his article published in the 1990s that argues for reconsidering honey’s therapeutic potential. Largely thanks to Molan’s research efforts, medical grades of honey became part of clinical wound care. A number of influential works on the medicinal uses of honey and hive products circulated in translation throughout the socialist East during the 1980s. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, renowned journalist—and beekeeper—Nijaz Abadžić was the most responsible for popularizing international research on the nutritional and therapeutic properties of honey. His 1967 The Secrets of Bee’s Honey remains a classic reference for local beekeepers. Nijaz Abadžić, Tajne pčelinjeg meda (Sarajevo: NIP “Zadrugar,” 1967). Conversely, according to The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, a lead sourcebook of North American apiculture, “Honey is a sweet, viscous material produced by bees from the nectar of flowers, composed largely of a mixture of the two sugars glucose and fructose dissolved in about 17% water. It also contains very small amounts of sucrose, minerals, vitamins, proteins and enzymes.” As The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture points out, the major components of honey are sugar and water (the monosaccharides fructose and glucose make up some 70 percent; disaccharides, such as sucrose, amount roughly to an additional 10 percent; and the water content is anywhere from 17 to 20 percent). However, what chiefly contributes to honey’s character—its flavor and aroma—are minor constituents that are extremely complex and perishable, derived from both the plants from which honey is sourced and the chemical processes it undergoes in and between insect bodies and within the comb. Studies have identified 181 substances in honey, some of which have not been noticed anywhere else in the natural world. Chemical identification of components responsible for honey’s flavor and aroma has proven difficult. Many compounds are at play, including acids, amino acids, enzymes, and a range of molecules with an aromatic ring collectively known as phenols. Honey’s therapeutic properties are also associated with these subtle compounds that make up so little of honey’s measurable, identifiable body volume. Among them are flavonoids, phytochemicals described as strong natural antioxidants with a range of beneficial effects: antiallergic, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory. The phenolic content of honey varies according to the floral nectar sources and is further determined by the many environmental and atmospheric factors that distinguish honey across geographic areas and seasons. Furthermore, various forms of sugars found in honey have been associated with honey’s prebiotic activities. Fresh honey also contains probiotics. These microorganisms survive in honey several months after the harvest; consumed, they inhibit the growth of pathogenic microflora in the human and animal gut. Proteins, enzymes, and essential and nonessential amino acids make up a mere 0.5 percent of honey’s volume and, therefore, are not significant with respect to the required human daily protein intake. That being said, enzymes are vital participants in honey’s antimicrobial and antioxidant activities: they promote the absorption of calcium, starch, and sugars and serve a biological function in disease prevention. The amount of vitamins and minerals in honey is also small although, depending on the source, honey can supply chromium, manganese, selenium, and a number of other micronutrients that are important to human health but for which no daily intake values have been proposed. Honey is also a significant source of choline, a nutrient essential for many metabolic processes that support cell repair and cardiovascular and brain functions. Honey is furthermore a good source of acetylcholine, an organic chemical with neurotransmitting functions. I hope this lengthy note deepens the meaning and value of honey, the substance that is too unique and irreplaceable to be described as simply a sweetener or a carbohydrate. For further readings, see Amos Ives Root, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture (Medina, OH: A. I. Root, 2007), 888; Peter Molan, “Why Honey Is Effective as a Medicine, 1. Its Use in Modern Medicine,” Bee World 80, no. 2 (1999): 80, https://hdl.handle.net/10289/2059; Eva Crane, A Book of Honey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 39; Lai Moon Dor Ginnie Ornella and Fawzi Mahomoodally, “Traditional and Modern Uses of Honey: An Updated Review,” in Honey: Geographical Origins, Bioactive Properties, ed. Ruben Ramirez (New York: Nova Science, 2016), 81–98; Elena Saltykova et al., “The Effect of High-Molecular Weight Chitosans on the Antioxidant and Immune Systems of the Honeybee,” Applied Biochemistry and Microbiology 52, no. 5 (September 2016): 556, https://doi.org/10.1134/S0003683816050136; Tahereh Eteraf-Oskouei and Moslem Najafi, “Traditional and Modern Uses of Honey in Human Diseases: A Review,” Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Science 16, no. 6 (June 2013): 734, https://doi.org/10.22038/IJBMS.2013.988; Visweswara Rao Pasupuleti et al., “Honey, Propolis, and Royal Jelly: A Comprehensive Review of Their Biological Actions and Health Benefits,” Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity 2017 (2017): 1259510, https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/1259510; Stefan Bogdanov et al., “Honey for Nutrition and Health: A Review,” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 27, no. 6 (December 2008): 679, https://doi.org/10.1080/07315724.2008.10719745; Abadžić, Tajne pčelinjeg meda; Naum Petrović Jojriš, Pčele i medicina, trans. Aleksandar Đerdanović (Banja Luka: Romanov, 1974).

4.The life span of modern honeybees has been considerably shortened. Among the factors implicated are contamination by chemicals, parasite infections, inadequate food resources, climate change, and stress related to intense work schedules. For research that correlates the honeybee life span with the size of the hive and, hence, the intensity of insects’ collective work and development, see Olav Rueppell, Osman Kaftanouglu, and Robert E. Page Jr., “Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Workers Live Longer in Small Than in Large Colonies,” Experimental Gerontology 44, nos. 6–7 (April 2009): 447–452, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2009.04.003. Life expectancy also determines foraging behavior: bees with shortened life expectancies begin foraging earlier. See Michal Woyciechowski and Dawid Moroń, “Life Expectancy and Onset of Foraging in the Honeybee (Apis mellifera),” Insect Sociaux 56, no. 2 (July 2009): 193–201, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-009-0012-6. At the same time, experiments show that precocious foragers are also more vulnerable to the risks associated with foraging and tend to have higher mortality rates: Alberto Prado et al., “Honeybee Lifespan: The Critical Role of Pre-Foraging Stage,” Royal Society Open Science 7 (October 2020): 200998, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.200998.

5.Known locally as a “bee mother’s milk” (matična mliječ), the whitish, goopy liquid means much more to the bees than milk does to mammals. Young workers exude it from their mandibles and insert it fresh into cells, one tiny drop at a time, to feed small larvae. The diet of each type of larvae depends on its social sex and hive destiny: drone larvae are more lavishly indulged compared with workers and are weaned later, but the future hive mothers, ripening in long, cone-like wax wombs, are fed the most and most frequently. The milky substance will make them capable of mating shortly after they emerge from the queen cells and keep them reproductive throughout their lives. This royal jelly promotes prodigious early growth, whereby in a matter of several days, queen larvae increase in body weight by a thousand times (translated to human terms, it is as if a five-day-old infant weighed 3.5 tons). The bee queens, or “bee mothers,” as they are known in BSC, live up to six years, whereas their female hive kin last from fourteen to forty summer days to up to six winter months.

6.Foragers collect pollen from plant anthers with mouthparts and braid together the pollen dust that sticks to the bees’ bodily hair. Pollen grains are mixed up with bees’ saliva, passed onto the forelegs, and deposited into pollen “baskets” (corbiculae) on the hind legs, which weigh around one-tenth of the bees’ weight. It takes the bee anywhere from half an hour to four hours to collect the load. On a bee’s single leg is a stunning assembly of an estimated hundred thousand to four million individual grains of fine pollen dust, held together by means of static electric charge. Bees deliberately collect an array of pollen, and each type offers distinct bioactive components. Fermented bee bread is even more complex and varied: no two identical samples of bee bread are found in the hive. See, for instance, August Easton-Calabria, Kristian C. Demary, and Nola J. Oner, “Beyond Pollination: Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) as Zootherapy Keystone Species,” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 6 (February 2019): 161, https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2018.00161; Cédric Alaux et al., “Nutrigenomics in Honey Bees: Digital Gene Expression Analysis of Pollen’s Nutritive Effects on Healthy and Varroa-Parasitizes Bees,” BMC Genomics 12 (October 2011): 496, https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-12-496.

7.John Foster, After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval (New York: Routledge, 2015), 19. I appreciate many points that Foster’s daring book makes while I take issue with his laconic dismissal of contemporary relevance of religion. Not least, as a reader of traditional metaphysics, I can only puzzle over the fact that Foster proposes to treat what he defines as metaphysical problems by other than metaphysical means. As a reader of Islamic metaphysics, I further wonder at the proposition that material or social things are devoid of metaphysical qualities. In any case, while such critique is the staple of scholarly writing, I strived to keep such objections and responses minimal through this book while foregrounding the ethnography and engaging closely, instead, Islamic textual tradition.

8.42:52.

9.24:35.

10.For arguments about environmentalism after the end of nature or for ecology without a transcendental ideal of nature, see Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006) and Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The strongest argument for moving ecological politics beyond nature is still Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Most interesting, however, are the voices in the Euro- American academia that resist the wholesale rejection of the concept of “nature.” In the late 1990s, famous anthropologist Marilyn Strathern cautioned that the Western idea of nature is more complex and ambivalent than the nature/culture dichotomy suggested. See Marilyn Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagan Case,” in Nature, Culture and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 174–222. Philosopher Kate Soper acknowledged all the good reasons that supporters of feminist, queer, and other nonconformist politics object to the normative uses of nature and yet, Soper argues, the idea of nature is indispensable to our thinking and more expansive than it seems in the crude uses. See Kate Soper, What Is Nature? (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995). Eco-feminist Stacey Alaimo argues that nature—as the domain of material bodies and carnal experiences—was too long bracketed in feminist writing. In the interest of recognizing experiences of environmental injury, however, Alaimo suggests we need a more capacious understanding of the materiality that nature denotes and that extends from green to built to bodily worlds, especially under the conditions of pervasive toxicity. See Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Stuff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). The concept of nature carries a special valence with in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, arguably, the wider postsocialist Southeast Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ethnographers from the region show that nature, like culture, is a contextual term, strongly connected to popular health concerns, dietary and medical practices, and dacha lifestyles. Latour, Politics of Nature; Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture,” 174–222; Soper, What Is Nature?; Alaimo, Bodily Natures; T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016). See Melissa Caldwell, Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Susanna Trnka, One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

11.Wildness is variously defined as a tendency of novel ecosystems to go wild along unexpected trajectories; as a confusion of categories that takes place in symbiotic or parasitic entanglements; as relationships and dispositions that develop in the contexts of mishaps, as risky and out-of-control dynamics; or as the political place of everyday democratic politics. Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Eben Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

12.41:11.

13.98:7; 2:25; 7:42; 103:1–3.

14.31:27.

15.47:18; Here, in particular, I follow Čolić’s translation of the verse. Mustafa Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu: Evidencije i definicije islamskih šerijatskih učenja i vjerovanja (Visoko: Kaligraf, 1998), 223.

16.Mehmed himself uses herbal insecticides to counter hives’ mite infestation, administers herbal prophylactics to counter infection by the microsporidian parasites, and breeds his own queens. He does not treat his fruits and crops with synthetic agrochemicals.

17.Given prized place of royal jelly in the hive, its composition has attracted researchers’ interest for more than a century. Spectrometry revealed some 185 organic compounds, including amino acids and hormones. Among the proteins is a family of nine known as “major royal jelly proteins,” which are being investigated for their cross-species effects on longevity, fertility, and regeneration. Pasupuleti et al., “Honey, Propolis, and Royal Jelly,” 1–21; Derrick C. Wan et al. “Honey Bee Royalactin Unlocks Conserved Pluripotency Pathway in Mammals,” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (December 2018): 5078, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06256-4. See the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s bulletin on beekeeping products, available online. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “Chapter 6. Royal Jelly,” accessed January 2, 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/w0076e/w0076e16.htm. In addition, potential uses of royal jelly in the treatment of neurodegenerative and aging diseases, diabetes, and cancer are evaluated in an overwhelming number of studies; see, for instance, Mozafar Khazaei, Atefe Ansarian, and Elham Ghanbari, “New Findings on Biological Actions and Clinical Applications of Royal Jelly,” Journal of Dietary Supplements 15, no. 3 (October 2017): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/19390211.2017.1363843; Pasupuleti et al., “Honey, Propolis, and Royal Jelly,” 1–21; Rakesh Kumar Gupta and Stefan Stangaciu, “Apitherapy,” in Beekeeping for Poverty Alleviation and Livelihood Security, ed. Rakesh Gupta, Wim Reybroeck, Johan W. van Veen, and Anuradha Gupta (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 413–446. References to the extensive curative uses of propolis are found in Greco-Roman writings and in medieval and early modern manuscripts on materia medica across Eastern Europe, and modern research interest in propolis is notable across Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. See Andrzej Kuropatnicki, Ewelina Szliszka, and Wojciech Kroll, “Historical Aspects of Propolis Research in Modern Times,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2013 (2013): 964149, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/964149. Effects of propolis on gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria have been the subject of in vitro and animal studies; see, for instance, Olga Mirzoeva, Ruslan Grishanin, and Philip Calder, “Antimicrobial Action of Propolis and Some of Its Components: The Effects on Growth, Membrane Potential and Motility of Bacteria,” Microbiological Research 152, no. 3 (September 1997): 239–246, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0944-5013(97)80034-1.

18.At the time of my visit, Dalila was finishing her undergraduate studies in microbiology and writing her thesis on the subject of the inhibiting effects of bee venom on five bacterial cultures, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), known as a “superbug” because of its resistance to many antibiotics. Dalila carried the research project into her master’s program.

19.See, for instance, Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad Masri, Animal Welfare in Islam (Markfield: Islamic Foundation, 2007); Sarra Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Fakhar-i-Abbas, Animals Rights in Islam: Islam and Animal’s Rights (Riga: VDM Verlag, 2009).

20.Ibn al-’Arabi has a fascinating discussion of human dependence on animals and animals’ special connection with the divine in the chapter of Meccan Openings titled “On Animals” [O Životinjama]. Ibn al-’Arabi, Mekanska otkrovenja, 2:588–597.

21.Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, The Flashes Collection, trans. Şükran Vahide (Istanbul: Reyan Ofset, 2002), 169.

22.36:82.

23.Every possible thing craves existence, Ibn al-’Arabi writes. See William Chittick’s brilliant discussion of Akbarian ontology in The Sufi Path of Knowledge, especially pp. 84–94. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 84–89.

24.Mustafa Čolić, Evidencije i definicije islamskih šerijatskih učenja i vjerovanja, 382.

25.3:145.

26.11:103–106.

27.11:107.