Students’ Prayer Mats and the Burning Forest
Sleman, Yogyakarta (ANTARA) — There is something strange about our relationship with nature. We can pray for rain with deep devotion, yet show far less commitment to protecting the forests that store water.
In Kalimantan, when fires consume vegetation and smoke disrupts people’s lives, human prayer and action seem to stand on opposite sides. We ask nature to keep giving, while often forgetting that it, too, can be harmed.
A forest fire is not merely a collection of trees losing their green. Habitats disappear, the soil loses its protection, the air is polluted, and local residents’ lives are disrupted. The flames may be extinguished after firefighters’ hard work, but ecological wounds do not always heal with the final embers.
On National Santri Day, 22 October, this irony is worth bringing into the grounds of Islamic boarding schools, into study circles and even among the books we open on our desks. There is something unsettling about someone diligently nurturing their relationship with God while remaining unmoved as the Earth on which they pray slowly loses its vitality.
We are taught not to harm an ant, yet we often turn a deaf ear to the cries of drying rivers and felled forests. Is our piety confined to the prayer mat, or does it reach down to the roots of trees?
After all, we never worship outside the natural world. The water used for ablutions comes from the Earth. The air that fills our lungs is not produced by our piety. The food on our tables grows from soil and rain, and through the long labour of living things that rarely feature in our conversations about religion. Even the prayer mat we spread out carries a story of the Earth.
Perhaps this is where we need to broaden the meaning of adab (proper conduct). It is not only about how a student sits before a kiai (Islamic religious teacher), kisses a teacher’s hand or speaks softly. It is also about how people treat things that cannot respond in kind: a tree, a bird, a patch of land or a river flowing through a village without ever asking who owns it.
In Islam, the universe is not merely the place where we live; it is also full of signs of God’s greatness.
These signs can be recognised in two ways: through revelation written in the Qur’an, known as ayat qauliyah, and through natural phenomena such as the sky, the Earth, rain, trees and the order of life, known as ayat kauniyah. The first is read in the holy book; the second is read with the eyes, considered with the mind and felt with the heart. The two should go hand in hand and complement each other.