– 5 –

The End

God’s Promise

When the time comes, Isrāfīl blows the horn. An attentive angel, tradition has it, his luminous body is covered with down. I imagine bristles finer than the bees’ and just as receptive. The horn has long been poised to his countless mouths, poised all across his limbs. Wakeful, Isrāfīl has not once blinked for fear of missing the sounding cue. An immense angel, but his compassion is far greater than his size. Every day and once a night, he is overwhelmed by sorrow at the sight of hellfire, and he rains tears. God, the Compassionate, has appointed such a tender creature as the herald of the End. The end that, for all we know, may be near. The Qur’an cites God as saying, Truly, the Hour is coming, no doubt about it.¹

Both death and the end of the world are God’s promises. And the death throes will come in truth; this is what you have been trying to avoid. And the Horn will be blown. This is the promised day.² The Book repeatedly brings them together, and Islamic textual tradition follows suit by insistently joining the two themes. God calls it simply the day, the hour, the event, or the term, as well as, more imposingly, the Catastrophe (al-qāri’ah). Often, al-qiyāmah (the standing)—while awaiting divine judgment—stands for all other terms and is transliterated as kijamet (pronounced keeyamet) in the Bosnian Muslim dialect of Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian (BSC).

Apocalypse, a term loaded with Judeo-Christian history, which denotes unveiling and suggests the utter moment when the world is torn apart and the subject is fully present to the visiting God, can only serve as a loose translation. The freight of discomfort and fascination that apocalypse carries makes it an indispensable word, irresistible not least due to its present invocations, reinterpretations, and denouncements in the context of global environmental and climate catastrophe. Apocalypse, however, often strikes ears too flatly, its meaning drained by its prolific past uses, the warning it invokes emptied. I use the word cautiously, therefore, without wanting to disown it, especially not its Abrahamic lineage or its capacity to prophesize or threaten the possibility of the world’s doom.

The point of this final chapter is to bring to the fore the Islamic sense of the End, in the language of the Qur’an and the idiom of Bosnian Muslims, with the hope that the subject of finitude and the end-time prophecy—the old news and perennial themes—can be heard somewhat anew now that our biosphere is being fast undone.

To begin with, I attend to the Qur’anic conflation of personal death and the world’s devastation; their pairing makes the strongest impression on listeners. I then focus on the fact that both are divinely promised, and surely, God does not break His promise.³ The possibility of the End looms large, inspires dread as well as hopeful expectations, and, just as often, incites calm contemplation of one’s own death. Remembrance of death affords self-awareness, moments of return to God, cultivated or gained and lost, on the go.

Understanding the role of eschatology as both a mundane and profound reference for living a Muslim life helps make sense of the special significance that honeybees carry for the locals as beings vital to the world. The loss of their humming, honey-making, and dwelling—not just of their pollination service—is an omen of the growing unsustainability of the world. In statements that are taken to be self-evident and in propositions that are unfinished, suggestive fragments, apian and human fates are rendered inseparable.

The previous chapters showed how beekeepers, through practice, tune into insect distress audible in the wheeze of withered plants and discernible in diminished nectar, in the loss of flower fragrance, in the drawl of unseasonal elements. This chapter shifts attention away from the empirical arguments that people make for ecological disasters due to climate change. Instead, the chapter follows local contemplations, some of which are left unfinished, conceptually rough, or merely suggestive, and carries them onward through readings of and conversations about the Qur’an.

The Qur’an has inspired expansive meditations on matters of death, the end of this worldly life, and the eternal life to follow. Such meditations are expansive because they presume and elaborate on both Islamic cosmology, in which humans are one special kind among many beings, and Islamic metaphysics, in which the fabric and meaning of humans and other beings can only be grasped by attending to divine acts and attributes in relation to the cosmos. This breadth and depth make eschatology the most relevant theme in Bosnian Muslim stories.

Stories are often treated as useful tools because they help teach, describe, inspire, or better summon attention to some subject of concern, but they are presumed to be entirely fictional or symbolic, and, therefore, unbinding and open ended. Storytelling as such has become very popular in the contemporary arts, humanities, and social science scholarship as a means of retelling the material reality in deliberately enchanting or inventive ways, to expand modern notions of what the world is, and to critique or counter the destructive economic, technological, and interspecies relationships that rest on this confidence. Wonderful accounts of stones and weeds, elements and plastics, mushrooms, ghosts, and gods do expand the horizon of social theory and inspire readers to look at and relate to the world differently and imagine a hopeful possibility of an entirely different politics and planetary future.⁴ These inspiring stories, however, frequently betray discomfort or impatience with traditional, “old,” monotheistic religious myths, especially if such myths convey certitude about the world’s apocalyptic end.

On the other hand, the expansive cosmological and metaphysical elements of Qur’anic and prophetic tradition seem to embarrass those Muslims who trust that rationalist, naturalistic, scientific—in short, modern—narratives are the most economical, sensible, and effective ways to render the religious tradition relevant to contemporary Muslim lives and comprehensible to the secular or non-Muslim audience.

To the storytellers of both strides, the inventive and the sober, and to anyone else who cares to listen, I offer an ethnographic account— relating what people have said, read, thought, and done—with story elements that are mythical but indispensable and anything but arbitrary because they draw on and elucidate the Revelation. The book started with the tale of two angels who worryingly inquired about the state of this world. Those two angels suspected that the decline of honeybees, in particular, indicated the near end.

This chapter opens with Isrāfīl, one of the four great angels in Islamic cosmology, who is also awaiting the End. But this angel’s greatness also has to do with his foresight, as Isrāfīl is not worried about this world. With ears pricked for God’s forthcoming cue, his eyes drift ahead to the next world: al-ākhirah.

With the awesome horn at the ready, angelic alertness, gentleness, and grief are modes of listening to God’s speech that restate the keyword of human responsibility in the light of finitude and eternity, the constant themes of Revelation. When the horn sounds—and the time is always ripe—what ends is the world that has failed to sustain, through listening, a divine desire that keeps up the world and flows with honey.

A Small and the Great Kijamet

“When a person dies, kijamet already sets in for him,” Shaykh Ayne says, retelling a saying attributed to the Prophet. I had just finished reading aloud from al-Ghazālī’s book on the remembrance of death over our meal.⁵ We often dined over texts in the kitchenette adjacent to Shaykh’s home library.

“Love whomever you will,” al-Ghazālī cites the Prophet, “but know that you’ll leave him.”⁶ Shattering prose for anyone in love. Remembering the eventuality of death is meant to intensify and improve the quality of one’s relationships in and to the present, lest we quarrel or take each other for granted.

But remembering death is also meant to spoil one’s pleasure, the Prophet has said. For everything in this life will come to pass, and the ephemeral, as sweet as it may be, should not detract attention from the eternal life to come. In this sense, the Prophet calls death a “precious gift to a believer” as well as a sufficient coach through life.⁷

One’s own death appears most improbable, al-Ghazālī writes, or at least seems to be far off in the future until, one day, it surely comes as a surprise. So, while there is still time, al-Ghazālī advises, let the human think “about his body and limbs that, inevitably, will be eaten by worms, that bones will rot. Let him think which of his lenses will the worm eat first: the right one or the left.”⁸ Decaying body and passing time, al-Ghazālī suggests, are part of the near world, dunyā, while “knowledge and sincerely good deeds” remain forever because their record shapes one’s course through the next world, ākhira.⁹

The Qur’an repeatedly reminds its readers and listeners of their coming death and pairs up the imagery and evoked experience of dying with the event of qiyāmah. A verse frequently cited reads: Every soul will taste death and you will only be given your full reward on the Day of Qiyāmah. So, whomever is drawn away from the Fire and admitted to the Garden has succeeded. And what is the life of this world except the enjoyment of delusion.¹⁰

The taste of death is the last thing a soul tastes in this life. Worldly life, no doubt, offers tastes of pleasure, and the Qur’an encourages Muslims to enjoy rather than deny themselves the worldly joys—tasty food, perfumes, fine clothes, sexual play—which are God’s gifts for as long as they indulge in the permissible and with a good measure. One’s last taste, however, proves all pleasures deceiving insofar as they have came to pass and their very impermanence is a sign of their partial reality, their essential nonexistence, and their contingency on the everlasting God, the Living and the Self-Subsisting. By bringing together the events of personal death and al-qiyāmah, this verse, well loved among Muslims, reminds the listeners that the tasting—which is the immediate, visceral way we grasp pleasure and pain—is a mode of experience that carries on, with the soul, after death and that the eternal quality of this experience is determined on the day of rising and judgment. Death, in short, proves finitude and fulfills a divine promise to “every soul.”

Shaykh Ayne’s comment, however, suggests an even more vital relationship between death and the world’s end. Death is already the world’s end, he says, for the person dying, and the world’s end is somehow like an individual death. The two are sometimes described as the small and the great term, event, hour, day, or, indeed, al-qiyāmah.

The Qur’anic chapter titled “Al-Qiyāmah” helps me follow Shaykh’s thread. It also links death and the End but does so in reverse order from the verse above, from the torn skies to the worn-out body. It begins with God swearing by the Day of Qiyāmah in response to the people’s mocking disbelief in its coming, then depicts the day when Earth is shattered: When the sight is struck, and the moon eclipsed, and the sun and the moon joined—on that Day, a human will cry: “Where is there to flee?” No way! There is no refuge. With Your Lord Alone is the comfort, that day.¹¹

From the day of Earth’s doom, the chapter fast-forwards to the Day of Judgment, when the record of everyone’s past deeds is reviewed: Human shall be informed that day of that which he has sent forth and of that which he has left behind. The next verse takes us to a deathbed: When the soul has reached the collar bones and it is said “Who can cure him?” and knows it is the time to part, and a leg twines with a leg, to your Lord that day it will be driven.¹²

The act of dying existentially, unwillingly, enacts shahādah, the quintessential Islamic truth claim—lā ilāha illā Allāh—there is no god but God. I am no god, after all, since I am dying. Isrāfīl’s horn blasts much the same message to the whole cosmos when, finally, all its beings, including the angels in the near heavens, perish, testifying in the act that they are likewise no gods: have no life, no power, no existence of their own. Finitude is always on the stage of this world, so even a distracted audience takes notice sooner or later. But the human self, more than anything else, acts and imagines itself godlike, unwilling or unable to conceive of its life as anything but enduring. Death delivers a divine promise to each and all. At the same time, the Qur’an suggests, when one breathes one’s last breaths, the agony comes with revelations: that the soul is about to transcend the body—it is time to part—and that there is nowhere to run but to “Your Lord.” ʾIlla allāh, but God.

Personal death is the strongest argument the Qur’an makes for the inevitability of the world’s end, the world being likewise a subject in relation to God whose end is sworn. So when the oceans boil over; when the skies split, red like roses and as murky as burned oil; when the stars dim, the whole, vast universe is folded into nonexistence, like writing scrolls are rolled up.¹³ When the noble and close angels perish and Isrāfīl’s splendid horn is put to rest at his hirsute side, then, finally, the angel of death ‘Azrā’īl is asked to extinguish himself. “Dear Lord, help me out,” he pleads, raising his hands. Having dealt death on others since the dawn of time, the angel finds himself all thumbs when it comes to his own “I.” When all is rolled back from manifest reality into the realm of possibility within divine knowledge, God asks, To whom belongs the power today? None is left to reply. illā Allāh, except God: To God, the One, Prevailing.¹⁴

The Qur’an conveys the voice of God: We created not the heavens and the earth, and that between them, in play. We did not create them except in truth; but most of them do not know it.¹⁵ The formal Revelation, to be taken on faith or doubted, expresses the truth and reality of God, the Real or the True, being among God’s names (al-H.aqq), and the meaning of life in the light of that truth and the eternal life. The Day of Qiyāmah, make the truth manifest, the Qur’an claims, not just out in the open but also, profoundly, within: On the Day when the [horn] blasts, and the second blast follows, hearts that day shall tremble.¹⁶

Because time is fleeting and death is a stalker, Al-Ghazālī recommends that his reader contemplate death with a “present heart.” Shaykh Ayne explains how: with zikrullah daimen, he says, keeping up an ongoing (daimen) remembrance of God, the source of presence.¹⁷

Listening

Al-Ghazālī, the famous medieval Islamic scholar and Sufi, remains Shaykh Ayne’s favorite source ever since he read him in Arabic as a young man of fifteen, but reading this book aloud over dinner was a mistake I soon regretted. As a long-time student and teacher, I tend to treat texts as readable anywhere, at any time. To treat books like teaching and learning tools presumes a great deal of appreciation for texts but also implies a callousness of sorts, a thick-skinned sort of reading due to casual handling of citational sources.

Shaykh Ayne started seriously associating with books at a younger age than I did. At five, he was reading the Qur’an in Arabic in the warm glow of candlelight at the turn of the 1940s, under the guidance of his father, an imam and a beekeeper, the way his father had learned from his father, and so on, throughout the generations of this imamic family, which traces its roots to an ancestor appointed to Western Bosnia by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in the fifteenth century.¹⁸

Once the boy’s Qur’anic lessons were completed, his range of readings in Turkish and Arabic expanded to include core texts in Islamic jurisprudence and creed as well as great Islamic exegetes and thinkers, including al-Ghazālī. In 1970, Ayne was assigned to the post of imam in a small semi-urban mining community and secretly embarked on the Sufi path, becoming a dervish. Secretly not only because the socialist government was intolerant of Sufi lodges and practices but also because some Sufis shun public displays of devotion.

His appointment left him time to read, but his day-to-day job also presumed he would tell stories to the members of his mosque community, the lore that draws on the Qur’an but weaves its revelations into a rich kilim of characters and narratives from cosmology and sacred history, from the Prophet’s life and his community, or from biographies and legends about memorable Muslims through the ages.

As a dervish, Ayne began training with Sufi masters, which, first of all, presumes listening. His first Shaykh was a carpenter by day with a basic knowledge of Quranic Arabic and neither the time nor interest in reading anything other than the Qur’an. Ayne’s two other guides were close friends and giants of twentieth-century Bosnian Sufi thought, both extremely well read. One was a brilliant mathematician who cherished anonymity, and the other, Shaykh Mustafa Čolić, was an imposing figure and an exuberant character, an imam and speaker with a public profile, not the kind to hide. Their citations ranged from the classics of Islamic theology and philosophy to their contemporary interpreters and the canon of European philosophy.

For these two intellectuals, the Qur’an was the primer and the cornerstone for their writings, reflections, and teachings. A dervish listens to the guides who know more than he does—dervishes in Bosnia are rarely women—and the listening, which is a demanding task, is a way of training. A genuinely good storyteller is one who, first of all, has learned how to listen.

The stories heard and told are returning to and reopening the Qur’an, the vibrant reference, with its 114 chapters and whose literary quality in the original Arabic is both stunning and abundant in interpretive possibilities, as the Book’s countless commentaries in prose and poetry testify. The Qur’an as the fount of storytelling is binding, but, at the same time, the tradition is capacious, giving rise to always new—and newly indebted—accounts and inflections.

Shaykh Ayne’s Sufi teachers in particular were expounding on the potential for a multitude of retellings and hearings, the potential that draws on the nature of reality itself as an ample and growing plenitude, kathrah, the domain of ongoing divine self-revelations. The unique God discloses His uniqueness by engendering singularities: things, events, beings, and words that are irrepeatibly distinct. Divine self-disclosure yields prolific manyness from without and within: We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves¹⁹ so that the listeners themselves are not only different from one another but also diverge from their own selves from one moment to the next, as God’s presence advances with showers of changing moods and circumstances.

Listening and understanding vary with perspectives, experiences, dispositions, and feelings. Exegeses of the Qur’an and the Hadith, the body of the Prophet’s sayings, are serious disciplines that devote painstaking attention to the original circumstances of Revelation and recording, chains of transmissions, and authoritative interpretations. Shaykhs are expected to know the exegeses well, and others are expected to remember the limits to their knowledge. Perspectives are irreducibly varied but not equal: the more the perspective can acknowledge and integrate a multitude of vantage points on reality, the better the insight.²⁰

Because the Qur’an is at the heart of storytelling, listening presumes training to better hear its message, in whatever imagery tacitly or explicitly evokes it. The poetic quality of Qur’anic expression makes an impression on the reader, but Qur’anic recitation—with its rules, melodies, breaths, and voices that deliberately make sounds, words, and verses stand out—furthers the emotional and visceral experience of listening. Moreover, accomplished storytellers like Shaykh Ayne and his teachers are compelling attention because they embody the message and bring it to life by living and feeling what they tell. They speak to and from a present heart, which is an organ the Qur’an presumes is involved in the reading and listening of the Revelation. Truly, remembrance of God brings comfort to the hearts.²¹ The following verse elaborates on the felt quality of reception: God has sent the best statement, a consistent Book, wherein is reiteration. It makes the skins of those who fear their Lord shiver, then their skins and hearts soften at the remembrance of God. Such is God’s guidance.²²

When Shaykh Ayne and I read al-Ghazālī on death that day, we did not listen to the prose with the same degree of attentiveness. Nor did we listen with the same organs: I listened with my ears and he, presumably, with his skin and heart. He leaned into the chair, shoulders hunched, his breath depressed. He suddenly looked much older and far more frail, his face cloaked in thoughts I dared not prod. Instead, I scrambled to get him to check his blood pressure. Then I fixed him a tea to lift his spirits—a mix of rose, lemon balm, and valerian—and left him to rest.

Our conversations regularly circled back to death and the world’s end, and Shaykh’s reactions were often strong. Though the composed elder displayed little of his inner states, I could tell that at times, remembrance would strike deep. This capacity of stories to wound and profoundly shake as well as to fill with hope or overwhelm with joy came from the listener’s intense, underlying relationship with the Qur’an.

Within Shaykh’s world, listening is an art of a living heart.

Remembering

For some Bosnian Muslims, remembrance of death is a deliberate spiritual exercise for cultivating presence, but for most, it is also a part of the quotidian. Personal practices and popular stories play up and improvise on Qur’anic themes to remember the imminent ends.

Five daily prayers, mandatory for Muslims, revolve around the opening chapter of the Qur’an, which one recites in a standing position, praising God, Lord of the Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Master of the Day of Judgment. The standing during prayer, known as qiyām, is meant to foreshadow and prepare one for standing on the Day of Judgment. The end cycle of prayer finds a Muslim sitting, back straight, knees turned forward, eyes turned inward, asking for the good of this world and the good of the next. With that wish, the head turns to the right, invoking peace to the angels on one’s right-hand side; the fellow Muslims who are close by in prayer; and, beyond, to everything and everyone in the direction of the head’s pointing. Then the head swings to the left, wishing peace on everything in the other direction.

Daily talk spontaneously drifts toward death, one’s own, pending, the news of other people’s passing, and memories of the dear ones who are deceased. Death is closer than your shirt’s collar is a popular folk saying that dresses wisdom into most quotidian garbs.

The subjects of death and kijamet come up in conversation as invitations to shift perspective, to consider life more urgently in light of its passing before we go back to where we were. These are moments of becoming briefly present.

Beekeepers are no exception.

In the summer of 2017, my sister Azra and I have come to the field apiary by the bank of the Sava River for the length of the black locust and false indigo forage to lend a hand to our friends, itinerant beekeepers Sabaheta and Nedžad, with a honey harvest. Nedžad wheeles in full honey frames to the field tent where the three of us work, and Sabaheta closely supervises our amateur efforts at uncapping the combs. The wheelbarrow slips through the canvas door swiftly, as we draw the sides of the tent tightly behind us to keep out the bees that trailed the loot.

Taking a break in the tree shade by the tent, in the afternoon, we learn that the couple is in mourning: Sabaheta’s first cousin’s son has passed away. He was allergic to bee stings, we are told. The last time a bee stung him, he barely survived, so he kept his distance from apiaries ever since and watched his step while outdoors. Sabaheta’s cousin worked on the main street at the town butcher. The windows and doors of the shop were kept closed. The air-conditioning was set at temperatures uninvitingly low. Still, a bee wandered in, with no business there—bees are not usually attracted to meat—other than to find him, as our beekeepers put it. It stung him before he noticed that it had landed at the base of his throat, where the soft collar of his shirt parted. The well-built young man, just married, collapsed within minutes, as anaphylaxis seized his body.

“Your death cannot be avoided,” Sabaheta says, looking into the distance, her fingers smoothing the edge of her finjan. “The when and how are out of our hands. You go under, empty handed, arms outstretched,” she carries on, thinking out loud, “except for your deeds. Their record goes along with you.” With this image, we wish God’s mercy, “Rah.metullāh!” on the young man and step back into the tent where, within its soft, embryonic walls, honey in combs awaits delivery.

We first met the couple in 2015, just after they had harvested meadow honey in the Kupres highlands in southwest Bosnia. At that time, we learned of their tragic loss during the war. The beekeepers’ friends, seated with us at the picnic table, told us what they knew: Sabaheta had been pregnant when their hometown of Žepče came under siege in the 1990s. In a makeshift war hospital, while Nedžad was in the army trenches, Sabaheta gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The shelling was constant; the electricity and water supply at the hospital were not. Either at the overwhelmed facility or on the way back from it, something happened, and the newborns’ lives were cut short.

The 1990s war provided plenty of opportunities to make finitude an immediately relevant theme, brought home by mass casualties and familial tragedies. War stories, unsurprisingly, circle around death and mortal peril, and the troubled national history since the peace of 1995 often prompts people to describe life as “mere surviving.” Remembrance of death is intensified by the experience of precarity, but the everyday rites of remembering have a deeper history and carry Islamic connotations, though to different degrees.

In Western Bosnia, sometime in July 2017, we meet a beekeeper named Hajrudin. Employed as a policeman, Hajrudin spends his free time running a school for beekeeping and the study of the Qur’an with his Muslim friends. Classes for both are offered to students of all ages free of charge and are housed in a modest building by an apiary built on an Islamic land endowment with gifted funds. Honey sales and ongoing gifts sustain the school and pay the teachers’ salaries.

Hajrudin is easygoing, his wife and daughters lovely—the younger studies Turkish, the older pharmacy—so we are having a good time together, talking bees and the girls’ study plans when our host mentions his dream from the previous night.

I had a dream last night that I’m preparing my own burial. I’m digging the grave. My brother Muslims come along to give me a hand, and together we dig. It’s a fine spot in the cemetery, sort of central. Next, we prepare the boards for my corpse. My deceased father is there, looking on. In the dream, we all know that I will die by the nightfall; minutes go by, I’m parting with the world. And before I die, I wake up thinking the dream is so true. Any waking day you may go. And that’s how a human should live right now. Try and do some hajr [good, from the Arabic khayr], in whichever form. Because all the rest will come to pass.

Returning

“In the end, everyone returns to God. You can’t avoid it,” beekeeper Sulejman tells my sister and me a few days later in the same region of Western Bosnia. It was the first time we meet, and my questions during this introductory conversation were largely focused on the details of Sulejman’s apicultural practice, and yet the beekeeper’s reflections had a wider range. The apiary itself inspired his meditations on finitude.

“I’m not a shaykh, and so I don’t bear the grave obligation [to remain mindful at all times], but still, I cannot forget death,” Sulejman says. I’m working here, in this near world, but it’s passing, and I’m on my way there, to the next, ākhira, which is lasting. And the honeybees are here. What I do know, is that bees’ song, their collective humming is the sound closest to human zikr [invocation]. Truly. Especially in the spring, sometime in the second half of April, when fruit trees bloom, every single hive is sounding the invocations: Hū-Hū. The sound is beyond words, the feeling it inspires. Those of us who work around the hives at the time, work in silence. Perhaps it’s only in Sufi gatherings that you can experience something similar. A beekeeper becomes hooked on that, rather than on honey, you don’t want to lose that, the chance to work with bees.

Sulejman contemplates death in terms of a return to God, which is an ongoing Qur’anic trope. As He brought you into being, so you shall return, one verse reads.²³ Or, in the following lines, which Muslims recite for comfort: But give good tidings to the patient, who say, when a misfortune strikes them, “Indeed, we belong to God, and indeed to Him we shall return.”²⁴

The return makes sense of life as a journey away from and back to God, while the point of remembrance is to cultivate the sense that, all along, humans travel in the presence and company of none other than God. That realization ideally ensures that one wakes up and lives more fully before death comes in with the revelation.

The sense of the journey and divine company gives deeper meaning to daily activities—“the honeybees are here.” Sulejman hears the bees doing zikr, a loan word from Arabic (dhikr) that means “remembrance of God” and commonly refers to individual or collective melodious, immersive, ongoing invocation of God. He hears bees chanting the root of all divine names: Hū. Bosnian Muslims who frequent Sufi gatherings commonly observe that honeybees’ humming resembles dervishes’ voices and breaths joined in devout chanting. A local Sufi lodge plays up these similarities between insects’ and humans’ devout humming in a yearly performance of what is known as the Bee dhikr. Seated on the floor in a ring around Shaykh, dervishes invoke divine names, their voices first slow and soft, then growing stronger and faster, giving the sensation of an airborne bee swarm before coming to settle down again, rippling out in whispers of God’s Beautiful Names.

Sulejman’s meditations on bees’ humming in springtime also suggest that bees help summon the beekeeper into the present and that beekeeping is about keeping up the possibility of a devout, multispecies remembrance. Keeping bees is a way of keeping company with God for whom and with whom the bees buzz adoringly.

Sulejman’s life history promoted mindfulness of death and return. In the 1990s, teenage Sulejman, his family, and residents of a small town in central Western Bosnia fled the armed advances of Serb nationalists. Many of his fellow Bosnian Muslims were captured at the time and imprisoned or executed. He returned home five years later when the war ended, carrying hives of honeybees. With that small initial apiary, he rebuilt the devastated homestead and started life anew.

His contemplations about the lifelong process of returning to God keep him from settling into routines too comfortably, though. Thinking eschatologically does not depress one’s mood; it is a way of thinking on one’s feet, looking forward while pursuing, in the moment, the kinds of values that are everlasting.

Rising and Standing

Bosnian Muslims speak of dying as preseljenje, meaning “a relocation,” and the vernacular at once tones down the significance of death and imbues the context of dwelling and moving with double significance. The Arabic loan word for this world, dunja, “the world close at hand,” always resonates with its implicit counterpart, which is “the world after,” ahiret. For those who were taught to listen to and read the Qur’an, and those who grew up listening to the stories that are the living, growing, shifting thesaurus of the Islamic universe, everyday language suffuses reality with reminders of God. Remembrance is meant to develop one’s character, improve one’s conduct, promote doing good, and cultivate the sort of knowledge that prepares one for the encounter with God. Sufis presume much the same while emphasizing the inner realm of strivings that aim to enliven one’s heart.

The heart’s presence with God is a spiritual form of relationship that begins the eschatological process in the here and now. As Shaykh Ayne frequently said: the standing before God takes place now, one’s deeds, good and bad, are already swinging the scales, one’s death is every moment when the soul is wakeful to the afterlife, the Fire and the Garden open up and close with heartbeats in one’s breasts.

The eschatological events after the earth’s undoing—a whole series of trials that Islamic textual tradition has elaborated on, building on the hadith and the Qur’an with the aid of contemplation and inspiration—proceed both within the subjective heart reality and outward in resurrected bodies and on the surface of a remade Earth. According to al-Ghazālī, the story goes like this:

God raises to life the angel Isrāfīl, who blows the horn for the second time on the rock of Bayt al-Maqdis in Jerusalem. The tremendous instrument plays up its forty circles of light, the circumference of each like the earth and sky combined, and the radiant holes open up with divine treasure houses until the saved spirits of things “go out with a drone like the droning of bees and fill the entire space from the East and the West. Then, with God’s guiding inspiration every soul goes to its body, the beast and the bird and all those creatures having a spirit [rūh].”²⁵

The spirits are wedded with the bodies, which have grown from some trace—whether forensic or subtle, commentaries diverge—from the earth that was itself brought back to life.²⁶ Having burned for a thousand years, the charcoal-like planet is rained on, the showers descending from the “sea of life” within divine treasuries until the earth is covered by an ocean and begins to quiver with life.

Al-Ghazālī’s account brings us to the point where all beings, “the beast and the bird,” not just humans, are raised as witnesses. The proposition can be traced to the following Qur’anic verse. There is no creature that crawls on the earth, nor bird that flies on its wings, but that they are communities like yourselves—We have neglected nothing in the Book—and they shall be gathered unto their Lord in the end.²⁷ Commentators disagree on the question of when the animals are gathered and what their share is in the justice dealt, but the most expansive interpretations on the subject, in keeping with a body of hadith, suggest that animals, too, will be recompensed for their injuries, and their grievances, both against each other and against the humans, will be heard.²⁸

Animal witnesses in the eschatological proceedings reiterate the ongoing Qur’anic theme of utter human responsibility for all deeds, as per the following verse: So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.²⁹ The verse is emphatic: the animals will be gathered, for nothing is left out of divine concern or divine record. The Book, commentators suggest, may refer to the Qur’an or to what is known as the Preserved Tablet, which keeps a record of all existents, or to the Mother of Books, the source of all revealed scriptures.

The focus of eschatological stories in most accounts, however, remains with the trials of humans for whom the stakes are highest, and who are said to be stunned and left waiting on the day of standing for fifty thousand years, sweating and profoundly uncertain about what will become of them. The length of the wait suggests the tremendousness of the ordeal for the species that the Qur’an describes as hasty and impatient by nature.

Bosnian Muslim references to the End, from patient meditations to passing daily reflections on death, evoke the eschatological proceedings that are waiting on the horizon. Death is the first step toward eternity, and the present is the place of great consequences. It is also the time to live by Revelation, to be enlivened by its reminders of the One, the Living (al-h.ayy), who gives life and death and whose name is the Immutable Sustainer (al-qayyūm). The Qur’an refers to the Revelation as “Remembrance” (al-dhikr) and quotes God as promising: So remember Me, I will remember you.³⁰ To be remembered by God is to be remembered eternally.

Conversely, the Qur’an forewarns, living in forgetfulness earns you divine neglect on Judgment Day: [God] will say: “So be it. Our revelations came to you and you forgot them, so today you are forgotten.”³¹ Another verse reads: And be not like those who forgot God and so He made them forget their souls.³² The loss, the verses intimate, is utter: one cannot find God the Forgiving if one has forsaken one’s soul. There is no self to redeem in the afterlife if the soul, while living, has not found itself through remembering God.

Tales of Discomfort

Islamic eschatological myths, the lore new and old, meditate on and elaborate on the divine promise that all things perish except His face.³³ The steadfastness of this promise leaves no room to doubt the coming end, the small and the great, while divine insistence that none other than God knows the timing recommends being on the alert as well as being fully committed to the present, which decides the eternal outcomes. The present in which, the Sufis say, it is possible to die before death so that the heart’s eternal life begins without delay.

Eschatological stories ultimately make their listeners uncomfortable. That is their point. For someone like Shaykh Ayne, such discomfort is a sign of accomplished listening skill, while for many Bosnian Muslims, the thought of death or kijamet occasions a sort of brief discomfiting that is manageable and at home in everyday conversations.

The capacity for discomfort is what recommends the image of apocalypse to contemporary thinkers of the global ecological and climate catastrophe. An anthropologist and philosopher renowned in Euro-American academic circles, Bruno Latour recommends the apocalypse as “a prophylactic,” a way to better grasp the gravity of climate change projections, given the current trends of anthropogenic warming, in order to organize for countering the catastrophe. In Latour’s words: “Fusion of eschatology and ecology is not a plunge into irrationality, a loss of composure, or some sort of mystical adherence to an outdated religious myth; it is a necessity if we want to face up to the threat.”³⁴

While the sentiment of the statement is rooted in an age-old environmentalist logic—the sheer awareness of catastrophic potential should mobilize public responses—the hasty dismissal of the “outdated religious myths” makes the call to action particularly insensitive toward the plural nature of religious traditions and to the multitude of meanings that are continuously inspired by the old myths. The dismissal intimates a typically modern impatience with things that are “old,” the baggage of inheritance that presumably bogs down the imagination. The relevant stories, the assumption goes, are the ones newly invented. The moderns always have the last word.

Katherine Keller is another thinker who has tried to recover the rallying power of the apocalypse. Keller, however, turns to the Book of Revelation, the final text of the Christian Bible, and rereads the ancient imagery for fresh insights into current environmental devastation and to imagine probable climate futures, the bleak as well as the hopeful, that might emerge from the rubble. Keller’s powerful rereading wrests the tradition from stuffy assumptions and stiff, literalist interpretations, reclaiming it from an irrelevance that is too often ascribed to the scriptural traditions in the context of climate emergency. At the same time, Keller forwards a minimalist metaphysics and polite theology that dulls the most poignant points of Abrahamic tradition, including the notion of God who knows perfectly well what He is doing. Consider the following quote: “We have dremread the text from any recourse to divine control of earth’s destiny. Control is not the issue. The issue is what we do, how we live, together. And somehow, sometimes, the Spirit dwells divinely in our togetherness—making it possible. But not making it happen. That’s up to us.”³⁵

The Muslim sources that inform this book, on the contrary, paint the maximal image of God, the Doer of whatsoever He will.³⁶ The Qur’an speaks of God as being closely involved with the world, down to every insect, as well as being most concerned with the intimate affairs of each and every heart, down to its passing moods: And know that God intervenes between a human and his heart and that to Him you will be gathered.³⁷

This is not a God who kindly lets us live here forever if we so chose but is, on the contrary, the God who promises that everyone will die, as per His plans. The God who anticipates humans' wreaking havoc on the planet, whose existence and presence underwrite all sorts of animacies and activisms, both ruinous and remedial, and, when the time comes, bring about the world’s end. This God greatly inconveniences modern human sensibilities, not least our species’ presumed sovereignty that is at the heart of Western modern humanism and the environmentally ruthless development, along with the most sacred creed of the supreme human will.

Revelation in Islamic sources revolves around the divine promises that only make sense in the light of finitude and eternity. Imminent death and the world’s end reiterate the ecological salience of the tradition, which incites those who care to listen to remember God and stay mindful of human responsibility. Remembrance, dhikr, is a thoroughly antiapocalyptic practice that relates humans to the world intensely, tenderly, and warily as the place of searching for the self and God. Dhikr is also an ecological practice, as all species of beings, the Book says, save for humans and jinn, unswervingly invoke God.

Bees Die like Humans

I was often told in the field that “bees die like humans” (pčele umiru k’o ljudi). My interlocutors pointed out that the vernacular set apart human and apian deaths (umiru) from those of other animals (uginu). At the level of language, the verb form in common—umiru—makes honeybees and humans somehow kindred in their deaths. I spoke to people who felt that the habit of speech is meaningful, though no one quite knew definitively what species of commonality it implied.

Some Bosnian Muslims thought the saying emphasized a shared sensitivity. “What is not good for the bees is not good for the people either,” beekeeper Sulejman suggested. Others speculated that it may have to do with bees’ intelligence, language, and social lives, which are uniquely sophisticated among animals. Everyone presumed that the saying referred to the divine revelation, which the Qur’an described as bestowed on both humans and honeybees. The bestowal of Revelation, somehow, makes the two species’ lives and deaths inextricably connected and imbues bees with special eschatological significance.

If the honeybees die out, the world will end, beekeepers and bee lovers tell me. The statement is made as a self-evident truth, sometimes presumed to be grounded firmly in Islamic textual tradition. As, for instance, when high-profile businesswoman and hobbyist beekeeper Adisa told me she heard a wise old woman in her neighborhood say: “Forty years after the bees vanish, kijamet will set in.” When I press for further details, Adisa shrugs her shoulders, guessing: “She must have read about it in the old books.” The expression old books (kitabi) usually refers to inherited manuscripts in Turkish, Arabic, Arebica (a Bosniak-Persian-Arabic script used during the centuries-long Ottoman period), and Persian, found on the shelves of some Bosnian Muslim family libraries. The reference also presumes that readers are not just well read in multiple languages and cultures of Islam but are also endowed with insights that come from lifelong devotion and contemplation.

Beekeepers, for the most part, blended their apicultural insights and concerns over the bees’ growing endangerment along with contemplations of the Qur’an to reason that honeybees’ loss portends the end of the world. As Sulejman puts it:

It is now a challenge to hold onto the bees. We can learn much from them, which is why I often say that we have to serve them well, rather than be their masters. They already have their One Lord. But the human now disturbs them greatly. She [personal pronoun for a bee is she, in BSC] does what she does by means of divine inspiration and will keep doing it until . . . it will be the Day of Qiyāmah. We have made such a mess, since we always strive to adapt everything to our own needs. We do it with other beings too. It’s just that the honeybees are very sensitive.

Another beekeeper, Imam Hasim, similarly contemplates the human-apian bond. “Bees are a gift from God,” Hasim says. “They are inspired by God, and their inspiration should teach us lessons, but, sadly, what do we learn? We are devastating the bees without realizing that by undermining them we are undermining ourselves. Bees are perishing everywhere. The human, insān, has now brought them to the edge so they can barely survive the winter.”

That honeybees are vital pollinators goes without saying for beekeepers like Hasim and Sulejman, but what they emphasize is the importance of bees’ inspiration and the revelatory lessons they hold for humans. When their inspired work ceases, Isrāfīl’s horn is bound to sound.

World without Bees

The endangerment of honeybees has prompted eschatological speculations beyond Bosnia. Amid the ongoing species extinction, it was the dying honeybees, the world’s most beloved insect, that incited a particular form of “despair,” as noted by environmental philosopher Freya Mathews.³⁸ The mass decline of managed colonies from 2005 to 2008, due to the complex environmental, epidemiological, and cultural pressures and glossed as colony collapse disorder (CCD) or colony decline disorder (CDD), inspired blunt news headlines such as “Beepocalypse” and “Bee Armageddon.”

Sensationalist headlines aside, the crisis has spurred speculative writing under the theme of the “world without bees.” A feature on Greenpeace’s website in 2017 opened with the question “Can you imagine a world without bees?” The author promptly answered “I can’t” and shifted readers’ attention from a bleak future to timely environmental policies, such as the ban on bee-harming pesticides that the article endorsed.³⁹ Major news media outlets ran stories that pondered what would happen if bees went extinct. Experts debated the extent to which the ongoing decline of managed pollinators threatened the multibillion dollar agricultural and modern food industry and whether a “pollination crisis” could stoke worldwide food insecurity.⁴⁰ Popular science books and blogs, apiarists and hobbyists, grassroots activists, and bee-friendly laypeople pondered whether humans would survive the bees’ die-off. Another Greenpeace campaign presented an image of a honeybee lying on its back, with the simple caption “If they go so do we.” A quote attributed to Albert Einstein, prophesizing that the earth would outlast the loss of bees by a mere four years was widely cited, its oracular appeal unaffected by openly stated doubts about its authenticity or the accuracy of its doom timeline.⁴¹

Biologists and entomologists strove to put things into perspective, suggesting that the decline of honeybees would not mean the end of the world but merely bleak landscapes and bland diets devoid of staples that make meals tasty and nutritiously rich. These sober accounts sometimes frankly admitted high uncertainty regarding all predictions. In the words of North American biologist Laurence Packer: “We rarely understand the extent to which the continued existence of one species is dependent upon the presence of another.”⁴² Writing for a general audience, Packer carefully reviewed the great extent to which the commodity-dependent urban existence is contingent on pollination and anticipated that the loss of bees would be catastrophic for biodiversity and food security, with the consequences cascading onwards “through the terrestrial ecosystems of the world.”⁴³

Fig. 5.1 Being inspired

English-language publications that speculate about a world without bees entertain the proposition that human and apian fates are inseparable and, just as often, backtrack from the boldest implication of the claim to rally people for bee-friendly actions, however low-key, or to have the readers imagine conditions under which humans and their planet would carry on with or without the bees.⁴⁴ Recurrent apocalyptic insinuations nonetheless remain attractive and effective, not least in their power to solicit impassioned denunciations.⁴⁵

Popular apocalyptic speculations that spiked in the wake of CCD might have disinclined scientists from researching the implications of climate change on bees. This much was suggested by the science director of the eminent International Bee Research Association (IBRA), Norman Carrack in 2018 interview with ScieTech Europa Quarterly. Commenting on a puzzling scarcity of publications in IBRA’s journal on the subject of bees and climate change, the director hypothesized: “One of the problems here is perhaps that people have made the wrong argument. For instance, social media often sees a supposed quote from Albert Einstein that if bees disappear then people have around four years to live. There is absolutely no record that Einstein ever said that, and what is more, the statement simply isn’t true: most of the world’s major staple food crops are wind pollinated.”⁴⁶ The insects are crucial for the pollination of crops, especially the foods that contribute variety and nutritional value to the human diet, as well as for the conservation of wild ecosystems, Carrack explains, but they are not indispensable. “The world would not starve without insects,” Carrack is quoted saying, “but would be a very dull place.”⁴⁷

At the Beginning

In Bosnian Muslim stories, there is no world without honeybees. I want to take this local proposition at face value and think through its unfinished suggestions on the meaning of honeybees’ Revelation and the meaning of divine revelation to the world. Following the statements of my interlocutors, with whom I have been thinking and learning to listen, my reflections are spurred and bound by Islamic tradition, beginning with the following verse in “The Bee” chapter of the Qur’an: 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.⁴⁸

The Qur’an is taken to be God’s last word—“My coming and the coming End are this close,” the Prophet of Islam reportedly said, pressing together his index and middle fingers—but the end of the scripture did not end divine revelation. For as long as the world is going, God continues to reveal divine attributes and give news of their work at present through the material, sensual, and conceptual forms that make up the cosmos. What, then, is the Revelation to the world?

A saying attributed to the Prophet much contemplated by the Sufis conveys God’s words: “I loved to be known so I brought out the world.” This hadith describes cosmogenesis, the world’s originating moment or, more specifically, the originating impetus at the heart of it all. In the time before time, when God was Alone in relationship with Self, His desire for self-knowledge initiated the manifestation of prolific, ever-renewed entities and possibilities that the inexhaustive divine reality presumed. The Living One, who is unlike any other, could only manifest as the manyness of singularities. The world is implicitly the world of many knowers, each capable of (and, being engendered by desire, desirous of) receiving the news of God. All species of things, in their different ways and to different degrees, know God and simultaneously broadcast back to the divine self the echoes of multispecies knowing, which comes and returns to the One source. There is no shortchanging a single knower, for each is indispensable, being the very singular way in which God’s love of self-knowledge comes about and is met.

While the world continuously reveals and veils God, honeybees are the world’s remaining prophetic species.

The bestowal of Revelation, a special form of divine self-disclosure, singles out honeybees and humans: humans because of the heart’s capacity—a gift—for getting to know and reflect on all the attributes of divine reality. That, at least, is the ideal to aspire to. The Prophet is the model to emulate, as his mission, a hadith says, is to help Muslims “to perfect character (ākhlaq),” while his character was described as the Qur’an itself. The tradition suggests that taking Revelation to heart is a way for humans to assume and disclose divine qualities. Honeybees live, forage, and dwell by Revelation wholeheartedly; honey flows from it. Truly in that is a sign for people who reflect. The fruit of pure inspiration, honey is a viscous, fragrant, sweet form of remembrance, dhikr, which is another word for divine revelation.

For those who have learned to listen, honeybees are revelatory. Every revelation, however, presumes another veiling—veil, in the Islamic sense, meaning that which is both a limit to access and the point of intimate contact. Tradition has it that there are seventy thousand veils of light and dark between the world and God. It is because of the veils, Ibn al ‘Arabī writes, that we look out and say “This is the world!”⁴⁹ If the veils were to be lifted, the lights of divine Being would manifest, and this would no longer be named the world but the God. Veils never lift entirely, for every form of divine self-disclosure—any feeling, thing, being, or idea by which we get to know God better—is also another way in which our comprehension limits the divine reality of God’s infinite self-knowledge. Desire is essential to knowing; otherwise, veils would be met with indifference or frustration. In the words of Ibn al ‘Arabī, the eyes of the world are enamored with God and are God’s lovers in the world, whatever their object of love because all entities are media for God’s manifestation.⁵⁰

Honeybees are a special veil, says Zejd, a local dervish with whom I love to think. Death and the End, Zejd writes, are the moments when a veil is lifted between one’s heart and God. You were indeed heedless of this. Now we have removed from you your veil, so today your sight is piercing.⁵¹ Anything in the meantime that stirs the veil carries an apocalyptic charge of bringing one to presence, refreshing the desire to know the self and God through the world of His beings while there is still time. While the bees are still swarming.

NOTES

1.40:59.

2.50:20.

3.3:9.

4.See Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, “The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction,” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), ix. In an introduction to an insightful volume on elements, editors Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert make an argument for re-enchanting modern understanding of environments and atmosphere with readings from premodern and early-modern Western sources. The historical sources offer ideas of elements that are capacious, and yet, the editors explicitly state, the theological and metaphysical considerations in their sources are not of interest. John Milton is celebrated for his vitalism while his religious eschatology is left aside. 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. Isabelle Stengers, a most adventurous thinker, is interested in the experiences of Virgin Mary pilgrims and the power of nonhumans to make us think and feel, but their theological discussions have no consequence for the analysis of politics that matter. Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory,” 3–34.

5.Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 8, trans. Salih Čolaković (Sarajevo: Libris, 2010), 351.

6.Al-Ghazali, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 8, 370.

7.Ibid., 353, 354.

8.Al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 8, 371.

9.Ibid.

10.3:185.

11.75:7–12.

12.75:26–30.

13.20:104; 55:37.

14.40:16.

15.44:38–39.

16.79:6–8.

17.Shaykh often mixes Arabic with loan words and Arabic transliterations into BSC. Here, zikr is a Bosnian Muslim loan word from Persian via Ottoman Turkish, denoting remembrance and a form of invocation (dhikr, in Arabic). Daimen is a transliteration of the Arabic adjective denoting “lasting.”

18.The appointment letter is written in the Dīwānī style of Arabic calligraphy, in which the letters are wavelike and penned in precious ink. The letter sparkles discreetly to this day, on the rare occasions when Shaykh unfolds it.

19.41:53.

20.Čolić, Et Tarikatul Muhammedijjetul Islamijjetu, 14–26.

21.13:28.

22.39:23.

23.7:29.

24.2:155–156.

25.Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali, The Precious Pearl, Kitab al-Durra al-Fakhira, trans. Jane Idleman Smith (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1979), 49. A twentieth-century Sufi, Said Nursi, imagines the resurrection as “the springing to life in an instant of the hundred thousand electric lights of a large city on a festival night, switched on from one center.” Said Bediuzzaman Nursi, Rays: Reflections on Islamic Belief, Thought, Worship and Action, trans. Hüseyn Akarsu (Clifton, NJ: Tughra, 2010), 35.

26.The issue of resurrection is presented in the Qur’an in the form of an argument for a claim, which, the Book anticipates, sounds outrageous. Voicing the incredulous Arab contemporaries of the Prophet, the Qur’an says: What! when we become bones and fragments, will we truly be resurrected as a new creation? And retorts to the mocking challenge with Say, “Be you stones or iron. Or some other created thing your minds presume still more difficult to raise.” And they will say, “Who will restore us?” Say, “He who brought you forth the first time.” Then they will nod their heads at you and say, “When is that?” Say, “Perhaps it will be soon.” 17:49–51.

27.6:38; see also 81:5.

28.A hadith I often heard retold across Bosnia speaks of a woman who earned the Fire for having locked up the cat without food and water until it starved. Shaykh Ayne tells a story that reiterates the Prophet’s message with an opposing example. A young, virtuous woman who lived in Ottoman times, Shaykh says, used to spend her wealth building mosques. What earned her the eternal Garden, however, was something else entirely. One day, the story goes, while visiting a mosque construction site, her eye was caught by the sight of an ant stuck in wet mortar. She plucked it out with her little finger. Compassion moves at the smallest twitch, the story suggests. God’s Mercy moves it and takes note.

29.99:7–8.

30.2:152.

31.20:126.

32.59:19.

33.28:88.

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

35.Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2021), 196.

36.85:16.

37.8:24.

38.Mathews starts with the powerful hold honeybees have over “us”—her presumed modern readers—to rethink “who is the honeybee, and what have we done to her?” While premodern cultures explored such questions with cosmological stories, the moderns seek answers by means of science, Mathews writes, because science, “for better or worse,” is the modern way of making sense of the world. Mathews’s ambivalence arises from her recognition that the “scientific approach may be part of what has led to the honeybee’s endangerment,” presumably through disenchantment but also through apicultural practices that made honeybees a workforce of industrial agriculture, which she resolves with philosophical speculation on hive consciousness and deep resonance between the planet and the beehive, the work of pollination and the metabolic synergies that keep up the biosphere. Mathews deliberately steers inquiry beyond the instrumentalist arguments about the value of the pollination service and shows that even ethical consideration fails to match the affective surplus that bees’ plight generates for a modern audience. Freya Mathews, “Planet Beehive,” Australian Humanities Review 50 (May 2011), http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2011/05/01/planet-beehive/.

39.“Politicians Need to Hear Our Buzz and Act,” Luis Ferreirim, “Can You Imagine a World without Bees?,” Greenpeace, Stories, Nature, April 27, 2017, https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/7578/can-you-imagine-a-world-without-bees/. See also UNFAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), “Imagine a World without Bees,” UNFAO YouTube channel, video, 01:26, posted May 18, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el-Z5tgyQXY.

40.Honeybees’ decline has been framed as a pollination crisis, which is essentially a threat to the world’s food security. In 2006, J. Ghazoul wrote an admittedly skeptical response to that claim, arguing that insect pollinators are marginal to food production, that the declines were confined to industrially employed bees and bumblebees in North America and Europe and that there is insufficient evidence for concern that anthropogenic factors lead to insect declines. Jaboury Ghazoul, “Buzziness as Usual? Questioning the Global Pollination Crisis,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20, no. 7 (July 2005): 367–373. A comprehensive response was issued in 2010 by Potts et al., which reinstated the importance of pollinators for food security and biodiversity, arguing that 75 percent of all crops used directly for human food worldwide depend on insect pollinators, and 80 percent of wild plants depend on the insects for their production of fruits and flowers. They also presented a wider range of evidence for the loss of diversity and the abundance of wild bees in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and parallel losses in plant communities dependent on pollinators. The bulk of evidence from metastudies shows a widespread pattern of loss of pollinator diversity and abundance as a result of agricultural intensification and habitat loss, and since most natural landscapes around the world are anthropogenically modified, the authors suggest that the losses are likely to be ongoing around the world. Simon G. Potts et al., “Global Pollinator Declines: Trends, Impacts and Drivers,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25, no. 6 (February 2010): 350, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.01.007.

41.See, for instance, Allison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, A World without Bees (New York: Pegasus, 2009), 7.

42.Laurence Packer, Keeping the Bees: Why All Bees Are at Risk and What We Can Do to Save Them (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010), 5.

43.Ibid., 4–5.

44.See Marla Spivak, “What Will Happen If the Bees Disappear?,” CNN, March 6, 2015, https://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/17/opinion/spivak-loss-of-bees/index.html.

45.See Christopher Ingraham, “Call Off the Bee-Pocalypse: U.S. Honeybee Colonies Hit a 20-Year High,” Washington Post, July 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/; Shawn Regan, “What Happened to the ‘Bee-pocalypse’? A New Study Explores How Pollination Markets Saved the Bees,” PERC, posted July 12, 2019, https://www.perc.org/2019/07/12/what-happened-to-the-bee-pocalypse/.

46.Scitech Europa Quarterly, “Bees and the Changing Climate,” Environment & Sustainability News, accessed February 16, 2018, https://www.scitecheuropa.eu/bee-populations-changing-climate/84417/.

47.Ibid.

48.16:68–69.

49.Ibn al-’Arabi, Mekanska oktrovenja, 695.

50.Ibid., 475.

51.50:22.