The purpose of this study is to widen the scope of world literature and literature focusing on the environment by creating asymmetry shifting from an East/West comparative paradigm towards an East/East conversation between Japanese author Ishimure Michiko’s 'Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow' and author Abdel Rahman Munif’s 'Cities of Salt'. The authors, from vastly different cultures and parts of the world, write about the human interaction with the environment focusing on place in the wake of man-made environmental crises. They look at the relationship of the human and the more-than-human within the environment through the oculus of place. Viewing place as a central entity in combination with deliberate choices of narrative voice and structure creates a sense of longing, loss, and nostalgia after the shock of loss of identity and environmental change. These changes resulted from the rapid encroachment of industrialization into traditional spaces whose identities were largely formed by the environment and the space it has created for the people living within it. The importance and influence of place, in these cases, the desert and the sea, is so pivotal that it can be argued the central figures in these works are not the people, but the places whose voices are clearly heard under the roar of the modern industrial machine. Using the shamanistic narrator and the ecological Bedouin, Ishimure and Munif channel the voices of the sea and the desert. This allows the readers to experience their stories alongside the people who have lived, lost, and found their identities in these places thereby reflecting on the readers’ own relationships with the environment around them, and places that have informed their own culture, identity, and existence. The fact that both authors, from such vastly different parts of the world, write of similar themes in a universally understood perspective shows the importance and impact of such works, especially when read within the current landscape of growing environmental awareness.

Aristotle’s initial approach toward many animal species that he discusses in detail in his zoological works is often a diairetical dichotomy by dividing them at first into each a wild and a tame(able) or domesticated variant. A general rule on this as well as on possible tameability is given at the beginning of the History of Animals (488a), according to which an animal species’s being found in a tame variant also implies the existence of a wild variant (but not vice versa). This paper will look at the afterlife of this peculiar Aristotelian division as found with some selected medieval Arabic zoographical writers. For in some of them, such as in al-Waṭwāṭ’s (d. 1318 CE) Mabāhij al-fikar, this distinction is even employed for ordering animals within the text, quasi as an overall taxonomical approach, by which it gets far more importance than originally in Aristotle. Other authors just apply this bifurcal distinction within the discussion of certain animal species, which are grouped according to different taxonomical criteria. Yet even in this case, there is a deviation from Aristotle by either relying on a different list of species that are subject to this division, or by considering certain species as domesticated only, which goes against the above Aristotelian rule. In any case, and even though this is not made explicit, judging a certain animal species to be tame or wild tacitly implies a human point of view. It is the human who, by this division, decides which animal species are to be considered as included in a certain group of animals surrounding man, and which are not. Thus, the paper also wants to look for changes within these groups of animals that surround man in his daily life according to medieval Arabic authors from different places and times and, should such a shift exist, find possible explanations for it.

The notion of the world as a source of ‘God-knowledge’ is pervasive throughout the Islamic intellectual tradition. Often times, it is understood as a kind of “book of creation” (in variations of kitab al-kawn or kitab al-khalq wa al-tadbīr) by classical scholars that reveals the qualities of its divine source. This notion was especially useful in explaining Qur’anic references to the “natural” elements of the world like the mountains, clouds, stars, and trees. Yet, the Qur’an does not make a categorical distinction of a “natural world” as opposed to simply the world, the cosmos, or what exists. As such, the early Muslim philosophers utilized and promulgated the term tabi’a or “nature” as a potential equivalent to the Greek "natura" and "physis." This paper examines how tabi’a has been employed and referenced by classical exegetes in interpreting descriptions of the phenomenal world in the Qur’an. The tradition of tafsir or Qur’anic exegesis offers significant insights into how certain concepts and ideas were understood and perpetuated in Islamic thought and history. On this front, the paper looks specifically at al-Tabari’s (d. 923) Tafsir, al-Zamakhshari’s (d. 1144) al-Kashshaf and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s (d. 1210) Mafatih al-ghayb amongst others in terms of how they interpreted Qur’anic verses concerning nature and general depictions of the world. This paper argues that the selected use of tabi’a as opposed to terms like alam (cosmos) or ayat (signs) illuminates underlying metaphysical and theological implications in these commentaries as well as the influence of Hellenistic philosophy. The discussion of the paper is limited particularly to commentaries on a select few Qur’anic verses such as 31:10, 7:31, 2:60, 6:99, 33:72. Looking at these verses offers insight into how classical thinkers approached the Qur’an’s view of the world and/or nature and the extent to which they saw it as revelatory. Moreover, it demonstrates how the genre of tafsir was a ground in which philosophical claims regarding causality, divine power, and nature were contested and furthered.

Perhaps the most famous and widely discussed epistle amongst the Rasāil Ikhwān Al-Ṣafā is the twenty second, fi kaifīyat takwīn al-ḥaiwānāt wa aṣnāfehā1 (on the modalities of the coming to be of the animals, and their kinds). Various research papers, essays and critical introductions have dealt with different aspects of the fable. Many, though not all of, the academic works that cite and engage with the fable often discuss what readers find to be the perplexing and surprising outcome of the fable, and its final judgement. When scrutinized collectively, however, there appears to be a discrepancy in the way each paper or article recounts the climactic events of the fable. Specifically, the pivotal, concluding argument, put forth by the human beings—that ultimately becomes the determinative injunction of the lengthy court case —is understood in vastly contrasting terms. Generally, academic works regarding the concluding argument of the animal fable can be divided into three sections: those that consider the argument of immortality as the reason for the humans’ victory, those that understand the existence of saintly figures as the reason for victory, and those that extrapolate indirect conclusions and inferences not mentioned in the text itself, but rather read in between the lines and assumed from the context. This paper will attempt to provide a brief survey of the ways the extant secondary literature on the fable describes the final argument, followed by an attempt to identify possible factors and reasons for the aforementioned inconsistency. These factors include the ambiguous ending itself, the discrepancies in the manuscripts, and the translations of the texts that fail to fail to fully recognize and convey the differences in the text. Finally, a comprehensive and reconciliatory proposition will be made, through inferencing from contextual clues and reference to concepts found throughout the epistles, that aims to harmonize the conflicting interpretations of the text with the text itself.

Over the last thirty years, Muslim and other astronomers have detected thousands of planets outside of our solar system. They have also confirmed the existence of building blocks of life on other celestial bodies. With powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope now in operation, the discovery of extraterrestrial life could thus be imminent. However, while we are waiting for such an important event, aliens have already invaded the imagination of people in the Middle East and elsewhere. Flying saucers and intelligent visitors from outer space have secured a firm place in cultures across the world, including Islamic ones. Writers, filmmakers and other artists have creatively combined Islamic scripture and history with scientific knowledge, giving rise to highly original and profound views of our place in the cosmos. This paper will present the findings of a multi-year project that resulted in 2024 with the publication of an edited volume among other outputs. This conference presentation, and the larger project on which it is based, explains how a future scientific confirmation of the existence of alien life might impact Islamic theology and Middle Eastern cultures. Prior to this project, there has been no dedicated book either as a monograph or edited volume on Islamic exotheology in English (although some works more dedicated to the study of Arabic and Turkish science fiction have been published). Therefore, our research has aimed to produce a foundational reference on the subject. Based on a multilingual corpus of medieval and modern texts, our project members have gathered a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shia positions and from different Muslim contexts. We have also aimed to compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, our project addresses some of our biggest questions through an Islamic lens: What makes humans unique in the cosmos? What are the ethics of dealing with other sentient beings? And how universal is salvation? However, we do not claim to establish a single Islamic perspective on extraterrestrials. Rather, this paper and our larger project provides a range of opinions and intra-Islamic (Sunni and Shia) positions. We thus seek to provide an overview that is more representative of Middle Eastern and global Muslim communities in their rich diversity.