Gai Eaton

The Quran tells us: “Your Lord inspired the bee, saying: Choose dwellings in the hills and in the trees and in what is built; then eat all manner of fruit and follow humbly the ways of your Lord made smooth”; in other words, follow your Shar?‘ah, for that is your path and your destiny. This again brings out the Islamic view that each of the diverse non-human “communities” has a particular relationship with its Lord, but the Lord is one; ours as well as theirs. The relationships differ and so the paths differ, but the goal is the same. It is the harmonious interaction of all the components of the cosmos, both animate and inanimate, which reflects in countless different ways the unity of the Real. The killing of an animal except for food, and then only the permitted minimum, and even the unnecessary cutting down of a tree or uprooting of a plant goes, as it were, against the grain. It exceeds, from motives of greed, the bounds laid down for humankind. There is no place here, no excuse, for the luxuries of modern civilization.

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