ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Truly, the angels lower their wings, taking pleasure in the seeker of knowledge. The inhabitants of the heavens and Earth, even the fish from the depths of the water, seek forgiveness for the scholar.

So goes a saying by the Prophet of Islam. This prophetic saying (hadith) praises the quest for knowledge in a curious way, as a pursuit that makes a human seeker of concern to the angels and the animals.

Scholarship, in the widest sense of seeking to know, whether by reading a text or doing long-term research among the things of the world, is somehow a trial with ramifications for the skies and the earth, the hadith suggests. We learn that the angels relish the sight of a knowledge seeker. Some versions of this prophetic saying and their commentaries suggest that angels lower their wings out of humbleness before the seekers or to envelop them protectively. My eyes, however, are just as caught by the second part of the hadith, which intimates a more somber, indeed cautious, multispecies response to human pursuits of knowledge. As the attention of the hadith widens to become ecological, human knowledge is no longer primarily an object of admiration or pleasure but rather something possibly pernicious, a liability that makes the fish in the depths of the sea wary. Nonetheless, the fish respond with compassion because compassion is at the root of existence and also, perhaps, because all beings know something about the grave implications of knowledge that humans must strive to find out. Perhaps it is the residents of Earth, the ones most vulnerable to human action (which, by default, enacts a knowledge of sorts), that rally the heavens, too, in invoking God’s forgiveness of humans. The prophetic saying gives insight into an eco-cosmological Islamic perspective on humans as beings defined by utter accountability.

The writing and research that have gone into this book have brought me much pleasure in learning and just as much worry about what I have discovered. When it comes to understanding and sharing the findings, my limitations have nagged me from start to finish. Luckily, in the course of the long endeavor that this book required, I have not been left to my own means.

Several institutions earn my hearty thanks for their support throughout the project. Foremost among them is the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which funded the field research from 2016 to 2017. A fellowship through the ACLS/Luce Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs saw me through the first year of writing. What is more, ACLS’s wonderful staff, whether they know it or not, have helped launch the documentary filmmaking on the subject of this research—a quietly held hope I have long had.

Just as wonderfully supportive was the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which cofunded the field research from 2016 through 2018. Wenner-Gren’s Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Ethnographic Filmmaking has helped make this book far richer than I could have imagined. While my sister Azra Jašarević and I excitedly embarked on the film production, the experience of thinking with the camera, “keeping the plot in mind,” as Azra insisted, has deeply affected my writing (it is a work in progress). What is more, the footage we collected in 2021 contributed essential material to the book’s story of climate change effects on local honey ecologies, which by then were becoming more palpable on the honey routes and more succinctly vocalized in beekeepers’ commentaries.

Most recently, a fellowship with the Independent Social Research Foundation through 2022 has enabled me to finish this book and begin the film’s postproduction. These academic institutions, with their staff devoted to the fellows, anonymous reviewers who are generous with their time and talent, and patrons committed to supporting scholarship through dire times on our planet, financially and otherwise, count among the blessings.

Students, colleagues, and friends at the University of Chicago get credit for helping me initially articulate the rationale for this project. Students who joined classes I taught between 2015 and 2018 made me only more eager to try to live differently, with and beyond the texts we cherished. I am also thankful to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, which welcomed me as a visiting scholar through 2022.

Jennika Baines, my editor with Indiana University Press from 2018 to 2021, gets all the credit for being enthusiastic about the project, being gracious with her advice, and steering my writing in a particular direction when she said that she hoped I would write a book her mother would appreciate. I tried. Allison Chaplin competently directed the manuscript through the last revisions. Nancy Lila Lightfoot saw the book through the production and shared precious news from the insect haven in her backyard garden.

I thank the anonymous reviewer—a beekeeper—for the Press for being frank about the kinds of materials that sustain attention of beekeepers. I hope such readers will find here an appeal to voice their field observations as crucial contributions to the emergent inquiry into the climate change effects on the green planet.

My deepest gratitude goes to Anna Tsing, who read the manuscript closely and generously more than once. Anna’s hopes for the project encouraged me when I was deeply uncertain how to write this book. Her readings helped me grasp the implications of my materials and have emboldened my arguments. Anna’s support brings to mind another hadith, which says that even the ant in his hole and the fish, send blessings on the one who teaches people what is good. Bless you.

One long conversation with Reza Aslan convinced me to give a second thought to the fiery species that I kept on the margins of my field notes. Reza may not be aware of it, but I owe the stride of chapter 4 to him. The way he carries his superb scholarship across multiple media remains deeply inspiring.

Caryn O’Connell, a friend, a bard, and an editor without peer, worked with me through the very first versions of the book through 2019, not least during her visit to Bosnia. Our cross-country journey was hilarious and not without its awesome moments, in the old sense of that word. Larisa Kurtović, a fellow anthropologist, was involved with this project over the years, the way true friends are: by being concerned with my well-being as much as with the vagaries of writing.

In Bosnia, my sister Azra often joined me on field research trips even before we started filming. Azra also got hooked on bees and began dreading with me the near future of climate change. Sharing both apiary tasks and unease makes the day-to-day more manageable and far more fun. My sister Mirza and her family provided all the commonsense advice and practical support one needs to function while writing while Mirza made filming arrangements on sites that are off limits to the first-time filmmakers. I cannot thank them enough. Pepe, the cat, is the sort of companion every library and in-home production studio needs to help keep human priorities in perspective.

And finally, my mother, Zumreta, who keeps up our piece of land almost single-handedly while I am occupied with writing. She grows and cooks our food, keeps the orchard and countless flower gardens for our resident insects and birds, brings me firewood when it is cold, and has helped me catch every swarm. Over dinners, she patiently heard out numerous drafts of this book. The blissful Garden is under your mother’s feet, a hadith, says, and I pray every step brings her closer to al Jannah.

The only cure for ignorance is asking questions, the Prophet is said to have said. I am utterly in debt to the many beekeepers and bee lovers across Bosnia and Herzegovina who have indulged my questions, hosted me at their apiaries over the years, gifted me swarms, hives, and jars of precious honey. The Velagić family, Enver and Adil, continue to mentor me in apiculture. May your honeybees flourish through the rough times.

The generosity of Enes Karić, a professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, University of Sarajevo, must be legendary in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. I thank him for being supportive of my research and writing. The staff of the Gazi Husrev-Beg Library in Sarajevo assisted me with gathering records on the history of apiculture in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Professor Behija Dukić at the University of Veterinary Science in Sarajevo kindly introduced me to many beekeepers. Her interest in the therapeutic properties of hive substances made me better appreciate the implications of artificial feeding for the species whose artifacts hold fast the attention of numerous clinical and lab researchers around the world.

Humans aside, the honeybees have thoroughly shifted my relationship with the world. I remain truly moved and amazed by them. Out of gratitude and compassion, I wish to care for them and their companion plants for as long as I can, at least within the bounds of our land or our village. I hope they invoke forgiveness on my behalf, for this poor human surely needs it, even before Jibrīl tends to my lot on the divine scale, his six hundred wings rolled up like a keen accountant’s sleeves.

Local Sufis have taught me what angels know very well; namely, that knowledge, though praiseworthy, will only get you so far. At the furthest limits of the knowable, by the shade of the Lote Tree beyond which even the greatest of angels, the loyal Jibrīl, pure intellect, cannot pass but halts sensibly. Another step toward the divine would enflame his luminous wings. Many dervishes and their guides are drawn further, because they cannot resist. Anyone who has ever been head-over- heels in love will understand something about the urge to go further, that seekers of God feel. Love, friendship, and adoration are separate English words for the feelings that go into the same brew within dervish circles. Love (+ friendship + adoration) is another means of knowing.

Shaykh Ayne, a Naqshbandi elder, graciously agreed to teach me even though the task burdened his frail frame and our companionship inconvenienced him. Out of wisdom, he taught me first of all what I did not want to learn. Had it not been for his gentleness and perseverance, I would have walked away from those introductory lessons of the first few years. I am eternally indebted to Shayk Ayne, but I trust that he has already been lavishly repaid for the trouble, in the Barzakh. Inshallah. Had it not been for Shaykh Ayne’s closest guides, the wise and witty Shaykh Mustafa, and the luminous, dearly loved Shaykh Halid, I would have been stuck when Shaykh Ayne passed on. They make true a line that Ibn al-‘Arabī bestowed in his book of prayers, that closeness is at the heart of distance.

I thank my uncle Faruk, who understood deeply what I was trying to write and for whom I did not need to put moods into words. I wish love and peace on him. The dwellers of Barzakh, the vast land that the tradition paints between the worlds where the wildest opposites reconcile, can have both at once, at last.

I thank all other Shaykhs and dervishes who have gifted me their time and insights. I single out one: Zejd. He is teaching me the ins and outs of unconditional gratitude. If I had any wings, I would lower them for him. Enough said.