Qur’an Recognizes Importance of Animals, Insects. We Can Help Save Honeybee Colonies
By Said Ahmed-Zaid
Idaho
During the long summer evenings, I like to spend time in my garden watching different insects and animals foraging for their daily livelihood. And bees are my favorite. I like to watch them relentlessly collect nectar and water from dawn to sunset. I remember how they constantly visited the flowers of the lavender bushes we planted in our backyard years ago. Those bushes are now gone, and so are the bees. We have new flowering bushes in our garden, but lately, I have not seen a single bee.
I have always felt comfortable around bees and I have never been afraid of them. As a child, I used to gently grab a bee from its side wings with two fingers while it was sipping water from a fountain. I would examine it for a while as it wiggled from side to side, and eventually I’d release it.
My father was a beekeeper who developed this hobby due to mere happenstance. In the mid-1960s, he worked as a clerk at city hall in the small town where I grew up. With his meager salary being hardly enough to feed a family of five children, he liked to go hunting on weekends and brought back wild rabbits, quail and other game.
On one occasion, he took me hunting with him in a nearby forest. Hearing some buzzing in a tree, I pointed to a big black blob on top of a tree and asked what it was. He looked up and told me that it was a wild beehive.
The next day, my parents got up before dawn and drove to the forest on a motorcycle. When they arrived at the location of the beehive, they gently nudged the blob until it dropped inside a basket, which they covered with a piece of cloth. To this day, I am still trying to picture my mother riding behind my father while holding a basket full of bees with one hand and holding on to my father for dear life with the other. Eventually, they both made it safely to the house.
My father built a cylinder-type home from flexible plywood and dropped the hive in it. He made small entrances for the bees on the front disk and placed the beehive high above ground near the entrance of our house. The bees settled in their new environment and got to work.
Several months later, my mother noticed some drops of a viscous fluid on the ground. She soon realized that it was raw honey overflowing from the unsealed edges of the makeshift beehive. My father opened the container and discovered several layers of honeycombs. We feasted on the providential substance, which prompted my father to teach himself about becoming a beekeeper.
We moved the following year and took our bees with us to a new orchard with plenty of space and flowers. Eventually, my father taught himself how to become a beekeeper, and bought several commercial beehives and the necessary equipment to extract the honey from the honeycombs without damaging them. At the height of his enterprise, he was taking care of nearly 80 beehives. Each hive had its own personality and temperament. Beehives that were more docile were placed close to our house, whereas the fierce ones were located farther away.
These fascinating creatures have been immortalized in Chapter 16 of the Qur’an: “The Bees.” Verse 16:68 describes the dwellings of these insects in mountains, rocks and trees. It is interesting that these creatures are addressed in this verse with Arabic female pronouns. Modern science teaches us that it is indeed the female workers that gather the pollen and make honey in an extra stomach dedicated for this purpose.
The Qur’an is full of other examples describing communities of insects and animals, and it urges us to study them and learn from them. I have watched a swarm of bees in the summer hover over a beehive and create a ventilating effect to cool the temperature inside the beehive. In the winter, the bees will move closer together to generate heat and warm the whole colony.
I was saddened to hear that worker bees started disappearing in Florida in 2006 after abandoning their queen and hive. By June 2007, similar disappearances had been reported in 35 states in a mysterious phenomenon termed colony collapse disorder. The number of bees has continued to decline in recent years because of the introduction of new pesticides and specific pests from Europe.
The good news is that scientists are now investigating how these industrious insects live in the wild and why they are more resilient than the domesticated honeybees. In his book, “The Lives of Bees,” authority Thomas Seely tells a captivating story about how wild honeybees may hold the key to reversing the catastrophic die-off of the managed bee populations.
Seeley explains that bees in nature differ substantially from the domesticated honeybees living under human management. He argues that the toolkit of survival skills developed by wild bees over 30 million years can be adapted by beekeepers to generate new solutions for the challenges faced by bees today.
Returning to nature may be the key for saving our honeybees — for the enrichment of their lives as well as ours.
(Said Ahmed-Zaid is a Boise State University engineering professor and the 2004 recipient of the annual HP Award for Distinguished Leadership in Human Rights. - Idaho Statesman)
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Understanding Modesty in an Islamic Context
By Abdul Malik Mujahid
Chicago, IL
Most of the Muslim world sees America through the eyes of Hollywood movies, which is far from an accurate portrayal of American morality. Nonetheless, there certainly is a big cultural gap in the way people in the West deal with modesty and privacy of the body, and the way individuals in the Muslim world do, regardless of their level of Islamic practice.
This Islamic sensibility of considering the human body of a very personal realm is connected to the concept of honor, dignity and privacy. This is not limited to Muslim countries. In fact, it is found in many Eastern cultures as well, such as in India and China, at a far higher level than in the West.
What is Haya? Haya, Satr, Nikah, and Hijab are four important concepts that help explain Islamic precepts relating to modesty.
Concept of Haya
The concept of Haya is considered a major Islamic virtue and an integral part of human character.
Ask anyone in the Muslim world, Muslim or not, and he or she will know what the Arabic word “Haya” is. But if you ask them to define it, they will be hard pressed to do so. Haya is in the grain of personal and social morality, values and behavior.
There is no exact English word which can convey the whole meaning of the Arabic term Haya. Most people translate it as modesty, shamefulness, and shyness. But all these words have negative connotations, which the word Haya does not have. Haya, unlike shyness and bashfulness, does not indicate that a person lacks self-confidence. In fact, in Islamic history, the person most noted for Haya was the third Khalifa Othman ibn Affan, may God be pleased with him.
A person with Haya is not a shameless person. He or she is chaste, moral, restrained, upright, and virtuous. He or she is not immodest, immoral, indecent, lewd, unabashed, unashamed, unblushing, and unchaste. No, we are not talking about angels here. A Muslim goes up and down in his or her faith and practice, but the ideals of Haya are such.
Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, said that every way of life has its distinct character and for Islam it is Haya (Muwatta). He also said Haya is the fruit of faith. (Bukhari, Muslim).
Haya is not morality to be imposed, but something that must arise from within a people. But at the same time, it is not a private affair. It is an established and accepted social morality which members of society collectively regard as desirable.
A state, therefore, is expected to be the organ through which any society mediates its moral values. This is the reason we find that the Malaysian government asked for the removal of nude scenes from the Hollywood film Schindler's List, for example. It's ironic that many television stations in the Muslim world look for Christian-themed films from America to run on their stations because they feel these come close to the Haya standards of their societies.
Public Haya is also the reason that even in secular Muslim countries you will not find collective shower rooms in school dorms, community gyms, or army barracks where persons of the same gender freely undress and shower in front of each other. I remember choosing not to stay in a dorm in Chicago at a high cost to me because of this common shower area issue.
Haya is the reason many Muslim men and women prefer to be seen and treated by a doctor of the same gender. Haya is also the reason that Muslim men and women avoid situations where they will be alone with a non-related member of the opposite sex.
It is also because of Haya that you will not find the demonstration of public affection between spouses in public. That loving relationship is considered a private joy.
It is due to Haya that while romance is there, even in the secularist-run television stations of the Muslim world, bedroom scenes, explicit language, and sexual innuendo are not part of the shows. Of course, all of that is being challenged by satellite television, which brings the Hollywood version of America to Muslim homes around the world.
While Haya is an expected norm of personal behavior defining social morality, the basic Islamic personal law taught to Muslim children in homes or weekend schools around the world, from the United States to the United Arab Emirates includes the following concepts of Satr, Hijab and Nikah.
The Code of Satr
Satr is another important code to understand. Muslim men and women are asked by Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, to observe Satr. This means Muslims must keep their bodies from the navel to the knees covered in front of others of the same sex. The only exception to this rule is one's spouse.
Satr explains why in the traditional dress of Muslim countries, there is no exposure of the human body. Muslims will go to great lengths to avoid this. In many villages, people have refused to see physicians if they needed to undress for them. This prompted Imams to preach that a Muslim can undress in front of a physician if this is required for treatment.
The Etiquettes of Hijab
"Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and be modest. That is purer for them. Lo! God is aware of what they do..." (Qur’an 24:30-31)
Due to secular fundamentalists who have banned the "headscarf" in Turkey and France, many people in the world now think Hijab means headscarf. In the fight for the hearts and minds of Muslim women, the headscarf has become a symbol of assertion for Muslim feminists as well as a symbol of women's oppression for most Western feminists. However, the concept of Hijab has a much broader meaning than a piece of cloth on a woman's head.
The etiquettes of Hijab go beyond a dress code. It defines the relationship that men and women in a Muslim society maintain with each other. It lays out the guidelines for interaction between the sexes, particularly those not related to each other by marriage or blood. In essence, it is a set of legal and social norms that define gender relations in the public and private space in the Muslim world.
Even Muslim architecture incorporates the element of Hijab in defining public and private place within one's own home.
The Institution of Nikah
Nikah means marriage in Arabic. This is the only relationship in which an adult man and a woman can see each other's bodies. It is not surprising, therefore, to note that dating still remains unheard of in the Muslim world, despite the practice's introduction through Western television programs in the region.
Extramarital sex is considered a major sin in Islam, and Muslims are encouraged to marry. This is why in several Muslim countries governments offer a stipend for eligible couples to get married if they cannot afford to.
Of course, there are people who do have affairs in the Muslim world. But this is considered a serious crime against one's family, the community, and a major sin from a spiritual perspective.
The institution of marriage in the Muslim world has been seriously challenged by the cultural imports from the West. However, its strength despite these pressures, prompted former US President Jimmy Carter to note that the only countries in Africa where AIDS has not become an epidemic are Muslim countries.
Conclusions
The concepts of Haya, Satr, Nikah, and Hijab are Islamic values, norms, and etiquettes. Although not all Muslims may live up to these ideals, social morality is still defined by these norms in the Muslim world. And nudity is nothing but the antithesis of Haya, even by those who may not be living by these ideals in the Muslim world.
Breaking these norms is taken extremely seriously in Muslim societies. Many states treat crimes against these norms so seriously that they use capital punishment.
Unlike what some in America lead us to believe, no one hates America in the Muslim world because of democracy and freedom. It is the immorality of America (championed by Hollywood), along with American foreign policy which defines the conflict between the Westernized elite and religious elements in Muslim societies.
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