Between remembrance and forgetfulness: heart perception, oneness and the human-landscape relationship in a Bashkir Sufi circle

ABSTRACT

wIn this article, I explore human-landscape and human-nature relationships from the perspective of Sufi ontologies by examining how Sufi Muslims revive the sacred landscape in Bashkortostan. I foreground an alternative mode of knowing, the heart perception, to analyze how they experience the landscape’s aliveness. I argue that this mode of experiencing the natural environment goes further than the idea of the sentience and agency of non-humans in the post-humanist turn and the literature on sentient landscapes. Indeed, Sufi ontologies foreground the presence of the Divine in human-landscape and human-nature relationships, shedding light on how my interlocutors differentiate between humans with an ‘open’ or a ‘closed heart’ to warn of the dangers of forgetting their ancestors’ knowledge and care for nature. By foregrounding the heart perception, I explore this diversity of human beings and ways of relating to the landscape between remembrance and forgetfulness.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-landscape relationship
• Sufi ontologies
• sentient landscapes
• post-humanism
• Islam
• Russia

Introduction

In this article, I explore human-landscape and human-nature relationships from the perspective of Sufi ontologies and the centrality of oneness in the Islamic tradition by examining how a circle of Sufi Muslims in Russia’s Urals connect with and revive the Bashkir sacred landscape. During three summers in 2018–2021, I conducted fieldwork and interacted with murids (disciples) of a Naqshbandi Sufi tariqa (order) in Bashkortostan and local volunteers close to this circle.¹ Together with my interlocutors, I participated in pilgrimages to Narystau, where sahaba (companions of the Prophet) are believed to be buried, Aushtau, the gravesite of a saint near a healing spring, and other gravesites of awliya (saints) and ishans (healers) in village cemeteries. I also visited the grave of the famous Naqshbandi sheikh Zaynulla Rasulev (1833–1917) in Troitsk near the border with Kazakhstan. The grave of his son, the Mufti Gabdurakhman Rasulev (1889–1950), in Ufa, is also a pilgrimage site for the murids, as is the grave of the ishan Muzhavir-Hazrat (1876–1967) near the town of Sibai. Finally, I visited the grave of the mythical hero Ural Batyr (from the eponymous Bashkir epic). My study of the relationship of Bashkir Sufis and volunteers to the landscape is, therefore, related to pilgrimage activities that mostly take place during the summer. As I will explain in the following sections, since my fieldwork took place in this context, I was able to get closer to the way my interlocutors cultivated a specific faculty of knowing and perceiving reality: the heart perception. By foregrounding this mode of knowing in my study I want to add another perspective to the way human-landscape and human-nature relationships have been approached in the recent scholarship on sentient landscapes, post-humanism, new animism, indigenous studies and multispecies studies.

As the anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando (2017, p. 108) remarks, post-humanism can be understood as a post-secular project that seeks to undo the exclusive humanism integral to secularity by recognizing the agency of non-humans and things and emphasizing entanglements between human and non-human worlds. Indeed, in the literature on sentient landscapes (e.g. Povinelli, 1995; Cruikshank, 2005; Di Giminiani, 2018; Coțofană & Kuran, 2023), the emphasis is placed on a landscape that, rather than being a passive entity, is alive and communicating and composed of subjects, for example, in the form of animate rivers, mountains, rocks and trees. This literature aims to challenge the binaries inherited from enlightened modernity such as the dualism between nature and culture (Descola, 2005; Latour, 1991) and human and non-human. The concept of sentient landscapes thus seeks to overcome the way in which nature became conceived as an object and the human as subject in Western thought. To go beyond this divide, authors such as Philippe Descola (2005), Viveiro de Castro (2004) and Tim Ingold (2000, 2006) have found inspiration in animistic cosmologies. Fernando (2017, pp. 111 and 115), meanwhile, observes that post-humanist scholarship tends to give the indigenous animist a central position. She further notes that it continues to privilege the material and the visible as the site of the real, for example, by sidelining the supernatural (ghosts, spirits, etc.) in favour of the natural (trees, mountains, rocks, etc.). In this sense, she argues that the post-humanist turn does not constitute a full departure from a secular-modern conception of knowledge, while animism represents a redemptive path for secular moderns, ‘trying to think and live beyond the stale confines of the conventionally secular’ (Fernando, 2017, p. 117).

Drawing on Fernando’s observations and on Sufi ontologies, I want to propose a new way of looking at human-landscape and human-nature relationships by privileging an alternative mode of knowing beyond secular reason, namely the heart perception I have mentioned above. By foregrounding this mode of knowing I also aim to engage with Fernando’s (2017, p. 121) proposal to ‘retrain our modernist sensory capacities to perceive the ghost’. As I will explore in this article, this mode of knowing goes beyond these sensory capacities to embrace an invisible, not-immediately perceptible reality. This invisible realm refers not only to the supernatural in the form of invisible beings such as spirits and angels, a dimension Fernando argues is neglected by the post-humanist literature, but also to the Divine, the realm of God.² The mode of knowing that I will explore in the following sections and that emphasizes this presence of the Divine further helps me to rethink the question of a ‘human exceptionalism’ (Gergan, 2015, p. 262) in the literature on sentient landscapes.

In the post-humanist turn, monotheistic Western Christianity and the figure of the Western colonizer are regarded as drivers behind the human impulse to control and exploit nature. Indigenous animistic cosmologies are viewed as different from the Christian tradition, which often opposes them (Vilaça, 2019), since these cosmologies do not distinguish between human and non-human worlds in the same way as does Christianity. As Kuran (2023, p. 253) observes, ‘When we speak of Western values meddling in Indigenous affairs, we imagine a secularized or Christian West that aims to annihilate local beliefs, often deemed superstitious’.³ A Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture is also linked to the modern neo-liberal exploitation that threatens the indigenous way of life (Malitz, 2023, p. 161). In his book Beyond Nature and Culture, Philippe Descola (2005) sees the connection between the human control over nature and Western Christianity as originating in the position that this tradition assigns to the human in relation to creation. He observes that in Christianity, the human is transcendent in the physical world as ‘humans had to become external to nature and superior to it’ (Descola, 2005, pp. 43–44). He further relates the human being’s right to administer the earth as the ‘viceroy of creation’ to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century through which Nature became constituted as ‘a field of inquiry and scientific experimentation’ (Descola, 2005, p. 45). Indeed, the invention of Nature as an autonomous ontological domain and ‘an object to be exploited and improved’ is premised on the idea that the human is distinct from this reality that s/he tries to understand (Descola, 2005, p. 45).

In the connection he establishes between a secular-modern form of knowledge and Western Christianity, Descola departs from a particular conception of the relationship of God to creation and of human knowledge itself. For Descola (2005, p. 44), God is a ‘transcendent being’ not present in creation. In addition, he asserts that human beings participate in God’s intelligence, a faculty he describes as the reason and knowledge that set them apart from the rest of creation, thereby establishing their supremacy (Descola, 2005, p. 44). In the following sections, I will depart from the heart perception as an alternative mode of knowing to complicate this image of the place of the human in creation in monotheistic traditions. Indeed, the Muslim ontologies and epistemologies that I will explore by analyzing my interlocutors’ mode of relating to their surroundings adopt a sophisticated view of the presence of the Divine in the world beyond the image of a purely transcendent God. According to these ontologies, God is both present in the world by disclosing Himself in creation, and absent/transcendent (Vicini, 2024). Beyond the question of the immanence and transcendence of God, the emphasis on oneness in the Islamic tradition also helps me shed light on the question of the relationship of human beings to their surroundings. For my Bashkir interlocutors, the landscape surrounding them is alive within the Islamic monotheistic tradition. In the following, I draw on their spiritual experiences to rethink the idea of a sentient landscape beyond animistic cosmologies. Finally, Muslim ontologies complicate the thesis advanced by Descola that the position of the human being as a ‘viceroy of creation’ in the Christian tradition serves to assert his or her superiority over nature. Hence, the scholar of Islam William Chittick (1986, p. 678) remarks that in the Quranic message, ‘Man can be the vicegerent of God, ruling over creation on his behalf, only on the condition of submitting his own will to God’s will’. This quotation refers to a state of servanthood and implies that there is a diversity of human beings: some submit themselves to God’s will, while others follow their own desires. My Bashkir Sufi interlocutors captured this diversity by referring to humans with an ‘open’ or ‘closed heart’. I will now elaborate on what my interlocutors’ experience of perceiving the surrounding landscape through the open heart implies for a reconceptualization of the human-landscape and human-nature relationship in contemporary times.

Experiencing the landscape through the open heart

As I have observed, a central dimension in the practices of the Naqshbandi Sufi circle with whom I interacted is the revival of the Bashkir sacred geography through pilgrimages on land that once belonged to various Bashkir clans, for example, the Kudei clan of the Sufi warrior and hero Salavat Yulaev. With this revival, disciples build new mosques near the graves of awliya (saints) and ishans (healers) and restore the tombstones on these sites. The Bashkir sacred landscape comprises holy graves, battle sites and the natural landscape. The memory of the Ural Batyr epic connects the Bashkir disciples to mountains and rivers, while the graves of saints are not separated from the surrounding nature. Hence, when we encountered apple trees during a pilgrimage, disciples told me to eat apples that had fallen near the grave of an ishan because of their unique benefits. An older imam in the town of Troitsk also mentioned the famous Naqshbandi sheikh Zaynulla Rasulev’s knowledge of healing herbs, which he collected deep in the mountains ‘where no cockerel could be heard’. Dogs would stop barking when he passed, and he communicated with birds, said the imam. Muslim saints are also buried on the sacred hill of Toratau where the Bashkir clans gathered in ancient times to make decisions.⁴ Finally, a Sufi imam told me that the graves of awliya are often located at the top of a mountain, as it is a place that stays pure; a fire blaze or flood cannot reach it. Even wild animals do not climb to mountaintops, else they would be visible to eagles and left without protection, he added.

When conversing with my interlocutors while participating in pilgrimages and religious ceremonies, they shared different modes of connecting to the landscape. The sacred sites, the gravesites of saints or natural sites, receive the divine light, nur. As the murshid (spiritual guide) told me when he invited me to visit Mount Ieremel: ‘Allah’s gaze is directed towards this place’, the soul receiving its nourishment there. The sacred landscape reminds my interlocutors of the original message sent by God, the Islamic revelation and the Ural Batyr epic. Finally, the natural environment discloses God’s signs while the ‘fruits of the land’ are perceived as divine gifts. Since it relates to the Divine, the Bashkir Sufis further experience the natural world as being alive and communicating. When I met a disciple in his thirties, Azat, in one of the cafés of the halal chain Barakat in Ufa, he asked me ‘What is dhikr?’⁵ Pointing to his chest he exclaimed that as we inhale and exhale our heart says ‘Allah, Allah, Allah’; our whole organism is doing dhikr. If we look around us, everything is worshipping God. He referred to the verses of the Bashkir Sufi warrior and poet Salavat Yulaev. The birds’ choir worships God from morning to dawn, but the nightingale sings day and night: the nightingale more than any other worships God. White roses, red, all do the dhikr Allah.

With these words, Azat illustrated a creation that is alive and like the human in its worship. It is when the human worships God that s/he becomes united with creation in dhikr. A post on the Naqshbandi order’s Russian Facebook group, quoting the late grand sheikh’s words (dated December 2022), expressed the human care for creation.

Don’t tread even on an ant without a reason. It feels pain, fears death; hence, it runs away. You must remember that it also glorifies the Lord and thus, if it won’t harm you, you should not kill it.

Referring to the ‘great chain of consciousness’, scholar of Islam Mohammed Rustom (2017) observes that Muslim metaphysicians have seen ‘the universe and all its contents as alive’. Similarly, the Islamic theologian Munjed M. Murad (2022, p. 195) describes the cosmos as a congregation of worshippers that includes ‘angels, lightning, mountains, dogs, grains of sand, stars, rivers, spiders, stones, seaweed, birds, clouds, and countless others’.

In the Islamic tradition, since the human possesses free will, not all humans worship God or worship Him in the same way. For my Sufi interlocutors this diversity of human beings also influences the way in which they relate to the natural environment. Indeed, my interlocutors frequently distinguished between humans with an open or closed heart in our conversations to illustrate these differences. When evoking dhikr, Azat implied that humans with an open heart could perceive the creation as worshipping. Referring to the Sufi mystic Rumi, Murad (2022, p. 196) likewise observes that ‘those shackled inwardly to their desires for the material world cannot hear the spiritual voices of nature’ and the uninitiated perceive ‘all inanimate objects as being void of life’. He also refers to the mystic-philosopher Ibn Arabi as saying that the ‘worshipful speech of natural phenomena’ is unveiled by God to certain Sufis who retreat into the wilderness.

For my interlocutors the human experience of the natural environment in this way depends on the ability to use the heart as an organ of perception. In the Sufi tradition, the heart needs polishing, like a mirror, in order to receive the divine light. The awliya, saints, help the Sufi disciple open the heart, thereby unveiling this heart perception (Di Puppo, 2024). During a pilgrimage to the grave of an ishan, on land that had once belonged to the clan of the murshid, Aisylu, a woman disciple with a gentle presence and demeanour told me:

Where the awliya are buried – you see this circle – there falls the nur Allah. The nur Allah blesses the grave of His beloved slave. And those, who come there to pray, receive it. The heart plunges into the nur Allah. The sacred places … It is alike an ablution for the soul and heart, as if receiving purity. And a reminder that we too are going there one day, we are not here eternally.

The nur Allah is the divine light, the heart of the pilgrims plunging into it. My Sufi interlocutors thus described sacred sites as places where humans can open their hearts. How, then, is the heart perception connected with the state of servanthood or the abovementioned submission to God’s will?

Servanthood, heart perception and oneness

The awliya and prophets are servants of God; this spiritual state of servanthood is perfectly manifested in the Prophet Muhammad. In the Sufi tradition, only the ‘Perfect Man’ (insān al-kāmil) or ‘Universal Man’ can be a vicegerent of God (Murad, 2019, p. 304).⁶ Referring to Ibn Arabi, Murad (2019, p. 303) observes that the human, a being made in the image of God, has the potential to reflect God in a total way; however, only certain humans become fully realized as ‘Perfect Men’. The servant of God is the human who submits to God’s will and does not follow his or her own desires. According to Murad (2019, p. 311), it is in this way that human beings lose ‘their lordly prerogatives when their actions are motivated by their own desires rather than God’s’. The fully realized human is aware that his or her lordship is relative since the absolute lordship belongs to God alone (Murad, 2019, p. 312). My Sufi interlocutors thus emphasized that humans should perceive the land, its fruits and the saints buried in it as ‘gifts of God’. Over a meal shared in the basement of a small mosque built by the Sufi order near the grave of an ishan, the murshid told me that God had sent many awliya to the Bashkir people because the ancient Bashkirs were content with everything God had given them. To illustrate this virtue of gratitude he narrated a story. The Prophet Musa (Moise) asked God ‘When will you be satisfied with me?’ to which God answered, ‘When you will be satisfied with what you have received from me’.

This virtue of gratitude implies that the human should perceive creation as originating in the Divine. It also implies an attitude of care and protection towards nature. Murad (2022, p. 191) states that ‘those that follow the proper courtesy (adab) towards God refrain from an attitude of fault-finding towards creation, composed as it is of the many gifts from God’. When they referred to humans with open hearts, my interlocutors spoke of the ancient Bashkirs, their ancestors. To illustrate their care for the land, disciples told me that as semi-nomads, they would leave the land of their clan for a part of the year to allow it to rest. During our conversation, the murshid remarked that the French and Russian scholars who visited Bashkiria referred to its inhabitants as ‘children of nature’ because they lived in harmony with nature, taking from the land only what they needed. ‘They would not build mines, blow up or extract from the subsoil, in order to become wealthy. They related to nature as to God’s creation, as to the living’, he said. In their narrations, the murshid and murids further noted that it is only by remembering their land’s divine origin that the ancient Bashkirs were able to remain masters of it; they used the Arabic word asabiya to refer to this ownership. Over the centuries, the Mongol rulers and then the tsars granted them this right.

I now come back to my initial question: how can we approach human-landscape and human-nature relationships by drawing from Sufi ontologies? As I will explain, a central dimension that these ontologies point to is the presence of God. The literature on sentient landscapes tends not to address the question of God and rather emphasizes the intersubjectivity in the relation between the human and the landscape. For example, Di Giminiani (2018, p. 7) defines it as ‘a relation between two subjects, land and people, both endowed with sentient abilities’. As I have observed, this scholarship often takes inspiration from indigenous cosmologies, in particular animism, ‘where the status of personhood is extended to different categories of nonhuman beings’ (Di Giminiani, 2018, p. 11). The focus is, therefore, placed on the agency and personhood of rocks, rivers and mountains, for example, by asking if rocks (Povinelli, 1995) and glaciers (Cruikshank, 2005) listen. New animism also emphasizes the personhood of non-human entities as in Harvey’s observation (2005. p. xi) that ‘the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human’.

As a subject, the landscape is ‘entangled in complex, ever-changing ways with human lives’ (Allerton, 2009, p. 236); it shapes and is being shaped by humans. The way the landscape exerts itself on humans also concerns memory, as the landscape remembers religious and spiritual presences (Mitchell, 2020, pp. 436–437). Mitchell (2020, p. 437) uses the concept of milieux de memoire to refer to the landscape as ‘not merely a vehicle for the representation of memory, but itself generative and constitutive of memory-as-experience’. He further defines landscapes as experiential milieux and ‘places to sense’. Similarly, referring to its relationship with humans, Ingold (2000, p. 149) writes that the landscape is cared for and nurtures in turn. It is not merely a ‘surface to be occupied’ that is presented to life (Ingold, 2006, p. 16). Humans are part of an environment, and the environment is part of us (Mitchell, 2020, p. 438).

My Sufi interlocutors’ approach to the Bashkir landscape resonates with these accounts since, for them, the landscape is not a ‘work of the mind’ (Mitchell, 2020, p. 437) or a blank canvas on which they imprint the memory of human actions. Murad (2022, p. 192) aptly remarks when referring to the specificities of the human perception of reality in Sufism: ‘the sight of the sacred in nature is not a projection of the human onto nature, but something objective – to project a doctrine onto reality would be incongruous with the spirit and even goal of Sufism, which is to conform to the Real (al-Ḥaqq)’. For my interlocutors, the landscape is also not simply a physical environment, as it is inhabited by invisible beings in the form of angels, dead saints and ancestors. Moreover, as I have observed, the perception of the physical landscape can take different dimensions depending on the ability of the human to experience reality through the heart or not. Hence, the human with a closed heart perceives the landscape as a material resource and not as a spiritual landscape connected with God. During a car journey back from a pilgrimage, Rafik, a disciple in his forties, commented on the different ways in which Bashkirs had related to their land over the centuries. He said that it was only with the move to a capitalist economy in the twentieth century that the land became perceived as a saleable entity; prior to this, Bashkirs had always experienced the land as spiritual.

Returning to the presence of the Divine in Sufi ontologies, the human-landscape relation is not simply approached as a twofold inter-subjective relation as in the literature on sentient landscapes. Instead, it is seen as being part of a trifold relationship between God, humanity, and the universe (Murad, 2022, p. 197). Seen from this perspective, the relation that unites humans to the landscape – a nurturing landscape and a human caring for it (Ingold, 2000, p. 149) – is always contingent on God. Hence, it is not the land that nurtures humans directly as God remains the giver of life; He nurtures humans through the ‘fruits of the land’, He provides for them. The relationship of care and protection that binds humans to the landscape is, therefore, ultimately a relationship with God. Indeed, the aliveness of the landscape, the way it is experienced by my interlocutors as communicating, is connected to the state of worship. This state of worship implies that a remembering landscape (Mitchell, 2020) is a landscape that remembers God. In this sense, the state of remembrance that binds the landscape with the human differs from Angé’s and Berliner’s concept of ‘ecological nostalgias’, where nostalgic attachments emerge in interspecies encounters (Angé & Berliner, 2021, p. 6), and longings bring together humans, plants, animals and ancestors (Angé & Berliner, 2021, p. 5). Remembering is not oriented towards a past that triggers these nostalgic attachments but towards eternity, God (Di Puppo, 2024).

The state of worship further throws light on the landscape’s subjecthood and agency, which is emphasized in the literature on sentient landscapes. Rustom (2017) observes that in the Islamic tradition everything that is part of the great chain of consciousness – stones, plants and animals – ‘is an alive, aware, and conscious agent’. And yet, from the perspective of oneness and of the doctrine of wahdat-al-wujud (oneness of being) as found in the works of the mystics-philosophers Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra, while entities are alive none can exist independently from God, and this is also true for humans. Rustom (2017) quotes Ibn Arabi on the relationship between God and creation:⁷

Nothing can emerge from Him but living things. Hence, all of the cosmos is alive, for indeed the nonexistence of life, or the existence in the cosmos of an existent thing that is not alive, has no divine support, whereas every contingent thing must have a support.

The heart perception means that the human becomes aware simultaneously of the aliveness of all things in the cosmos and of the source of this aliveness: God. In the Sufi tradition, it is through the process of taming the nafs (the ‘lower self’ or ego) that the disciple experiences this awareness.⁸ The scholar of Islam Toshihiko Izutsu (1994, p. 16) observes of the spiritual state of fana in Sufism: ‘Since there is no ego-consciousness left, that is to say, since there is no epistemological subject to see things, there are naturally no objects to be seen’. Our everyday experience of the phenomenal world as composed of ‘innumerable things’ corresponds to the limitations of our own epistemological faculties in our positioning as ‘subjects’. Only when the subject-object relationship collapses in the process of spiritual transformation are we able to perceive reality as it is: single. In the state of baqa (‘survival’ or ‘subsistence’) that succeeds fana, the demarcations of the phenomenal world are again observable as in ordinary perception. However, from this ‘perspective’, phenomenal things are perceived as real only insofar as ‘they are considered in relation to their metaphysical source’ (Izutsu, 1994, p. 10).⁹ Seeing things in relation to their metaphysical source means experiencing the world as theophany, ‘a theatre within which higher realities display themselves’ (Chittick, 1986, p. 674).

Finally, the heart perception throws light on the connection between the human’s place in creation as a vicegerent of God and the human-nature relationship. As I have observed, only by submitting to God’s will, having passed beyond ‘limited, individual motivations’ (Chittick, 1986, p. 677), can the human be this vicegerent. The heart perception or ‘heart knowledge’ that is proper to the human having overcome these limitations differs from another conception of knowledge that emerged during the Enlightenment period. With the Enlightenment, knowledge became centred in the rational faculties and, thus, restricted to an immanent, empirical world. As I have noted above, Descola (2005) establishes a connection between this conception of knowledge and the position of the human as a ‘viceroy of creation’ in the Western Christian tradition. He refers to the modern scientist when describing how ‘a tiny portion of being was detached to serve as a fixed point’ in order to ‘determine a place in which the mechanisms and regularities of nature could be discerned’ (Descola, 2005, p. 45). For Descola, the process by which Nature is transformed into a field of inquiry has its origin in the separation of the human from nature. From the perspective of Muslim ontologies, however, this process is not attributable to the position of the human as a vicegerent of God. On the contrary, it corresponds to a limitation of knowledge: the human with a closed heart, who cannot be vicegerent, no longer experiences the world as a living theophany. Hence, s/he perceives the land and nature as inanimate resources to be controlled and exploited, thereby following his or her desires instead of submitting to God’s will. As the heart perception, through which the human perceives the landscape as alive, originates in the remembrance of God, it is human forgetfulness that renders it inanimate. How do my Sufi interlocutors refer to these two states – remembrance and forgetfulness – in relation to the human-landscape relationship?

Between remembrance and forgetfulness: the human-landscape relationship

In the previous section, I have argued that in Sufi ontologies the relationship of care and protection that unites humans to nature and the land should be considered from the perspective of a trifold relationship between God, humanity and creation. The sacred landscape reminds humans of God, their place in creation and their duty of care, and humans are, moreover, responsible for preserving the land and its fruits as ‘gifts of God’. The Bashkir traditional flute, kurai, an instrument made of an umbelliferous plant, illustrates how my interlocutors perceive the natural environment as bringing them closer to the Divine. After a dinner in the company of disciples and volunteers in a private home, we listened to the host’s son playing the kurai flute in his bedroom. As he played a beautiful melody, Guzel, a woman disciple, told me in a whisper that the instrument was a gift from Allah, not man but nature had fashioned it. While conversing with the murshid over tea in a green place on the outskirts of Ufa, he too explained that the kurai is spiritual in nature since it allows humans to open their hearts. He then alluded to the original covenant between God and humankind as a melody¹⁰ that is preserved in ancient Bashkir songs played with the kurai.

As I have written above, my Bashkir interlocutors actively cultivate the memory of how their ancestors related to the land and nature. During the meal we shared in the basement of the small mosque, the murshid told me that, to protect the land, the ancient Bashkirs ‘gave up their lives just as they drank water’ since they possessed the awareness that ‘the reality is eternity’. Continuing this theme, he suggested that contemporary historians were unable to comprehend the ancestors’ way of life since they were unable to experience this same ‘feeling of eternity’.¹¹ Other disciples also alluded to the knowledge of the landscape and of nature possessed by the ancestors, which was in danger of being forgotten. One summer, I sat in a Bashkir café in Ufa with Alsu (a disciple) and Gulnaz, both of whom belonged to a volunteer group. They had ordered kumis, the traditional Bashkir drink made of mare’s milk, while they told me of their work of preserving the ancient names of places.¹² For example, they said that the original name of the river Beloe in the capital of Bashkortostan, Ufa, is Agidel. Alsu further spoke of the dangers of forgetfulness, observing that globalization makes aborigines (she used this word) forget about their roots. Economic elites exploit this forgetfulness to access their territories and land resources, she said. Evoking the greediness of ‘kapitalisty’ (capitalists), she referred to the ‘Rockefellers’ and ‘Rothschilds’ who threaten the aborigines’ way of life.¹³ A few days later, after we had spent a long day visiting the land of her clan and its beautiful natural sites, such as steep rocks overlooking a river, Alsu and I met in the same Bashkir café. She immediately asked me not to write the names of the sites we had visited in order to protect them from those wanting to exploit their resources. As an example of a place needing protection, she alluded to a battle site where numerous Bashkir shuhuda (martyrs) had lost their lives.

The disciples and volunteers thus alluded to modernity as damaging the aborigines’ connection to their land. As I sat in the Bashkir café with Alsu, tears rolled down her cheeks as she recited aloud the principles transmitted by Ural Batyr to the Bashkirs and other people, explaining that she cried every time she read the epic. The parents of Ural Batyr, Yanbirde and Yanbike, lived in eternity not knowing where they came from and not experiencing any division from nature and animals, she said. Then, there was an ocean, the mythical great flood. At the end of the epic, she explained, water goes underneath the earth, and a small piece of mountainous land appears on which the Bashkirs have lived ever since. She then described the sacred hills and mountains as a ‘plug’, they maintain a balance with the subterranean water world; without them, the water would rise to a dangerous level. This, she concluded, is the knowledge that the ancients had of the landscape.¹⁴ In relation to this ancient knowledge, Alsu also described the masters of the waters, the roads, the forests and the mountains, noting that Tengrism, the faith of the ancient Bashkirs, did not contradict the Islamic tradition.¹⁵ Before climbing a mountain, Bashkirs used to ask the master for permission, she explained. She then referred to the fires that had erupted in villages not long ago as originating in humans’ lack of respect towards nature; God had punished them.

In another instance that illustrated the way in which the Bashkir land reminds my interlocutors of the Divine, I visited the Imenlek Tau hill, a green hill overlooking Ufa, with a volunteer, Ildar, and a village mullah. This location was the site of the Kubovskoi battle between Bashkir batyrs (warriors), among them Tul'kusura Aldagulov, and the Tsarist army in 1736. The mullah recited a prayer for the shuhuda who had died defending the land. At the end of the prayer, he said that while we were praying, the dead had assembled near us, they could hear us. He remarked that our actions, including this prayer, were imprinted until Judgment Day; Allah sees them, the angels see them. Stamping the ground with his heavy boots, he then exclaimed that through these prayers the Bashkirs remember and connect with the land. As a simple Bashkir, he laboured this land and wanted to be satisfied and happy with this life, which is very short: we are on this earth only briefly.

In present times, some disciples experience the knowledge possessed by the ancestors or the heart perception I have mentioned above. In the company of the murshid in that green place on the outskirts of Ufa, Albina, a woman disciple with a lively demeanour, told me how she experienced other dimensions of existence, what she called the ‘thin, subtle world’. Those who have left this world are bodiless souls, appearing to her as subtle shades, she said, and in order to see these souls and for them to know that you understand them, you must feel subtly-subtly-subtly. Living in her village in the countryside with her mother she was always in this subtle world. When you feel this world, you understand the language of trees and leaves, she continued, there is energy in each, each speaks and gives information in its own way. ‘There are trees that I call ‘birches – big talkers (berezy-boltushki)’’, she said and added, ‘It is good for humans to know what the trees live in, what they experience. As they are standing there for many-many years, they transmit historical records, information’. In this way, Albina related how she experienced nature as being composed of trees that remember. During a pilgrimage to the grave of Ural Batyr, high up in the mountains, an elderly disciple with a white beard and luminous face similarly told me that the ancient Bashkirs communicated with birds and stored information in rocks for those coming after them.

As we were sitting in the green place on the edge of Ufa, the murshid also mentioned Ural Batyr’s choice to pour ‘living water’, which gives eternity, on the land instead of drinking it to become eternal. Commenting on this choice, Rafik, who was also sitting with us, pointed out that compared to the human existence, nature is eternal.¹⁶ The graves of saints are also a reminder of the brevity of human life; as Aisylu noted, they remind us that ‘we too are going there one day, we are not here eternally’. A further aspect of the remembrance of saints that my interlocutors emphasized was their protective role. The murshid said that the many saints who had lived and were buried on Bashkir land were ‘gifts of God’, their graves receiving the divine light. Several disciples explained that these holy graves protect the land and its inhabitants from calamities such as cyclones, fires and wars. Aisylu also shared another dimension of the revival of the Bashkir sacred geography or, as she described it, a network of holy gravesites secretly ‘connected with each other’. During a long conversation in an Ufa café one summer afternoon, she told me that the dead awliya had guided the living in the restoration of the sacred land. Responding to a question I had asked about Ural Batyr, she exclaimed: ‘Ural Batyr is with us! His grave is there. He revealed where he lies. Until then his resting place was unknown’. She referred to the hero’s gravesite, which I had visited, around which disciples had built a large wooden fence corresponding to his giant size. Ural Batyr revealed his resting place in order to return to the Bashkir people the memory of who they are, she continued. To show them the path they should take.¹⁷

The heart perception also implied that some of my interlocutors experienced the landscape as disclosing God’s signs, for example, by revealing invisible beings such as angels. During the conversation with the murshid and Albina, they described a dhikr ceremony on a hill in which two hundred believers had participated. During the ceremony, they had witnessed the apparition of thousands of luminous milky white balls of varying sizes. Soon after, ‘an enormous, beautiful, warm eye with greenish-bluish tones appeared in the sky’, remembered Albina. It stared a long time; none were afraid. Commenting on these apparitions, the murshid noted: ‘Allah says: where they do dhikr, I send my angels. They are present and they then report to Allah, although He knows everything’. Albina also remembered a dhikr ceremony in a wooden mosque where she sat in the corner of a room. As soon as the ceremony started, she saw similar white globes descending, ‘many-many’ of them. As if snow was falling, angels descended, the room becoming white.

Conclusion

The narrations of my interlocutors point to a mode of experiencing the human-landscape and human-nature relationships that goes further than the idea of the sentience and agency of non-humans in the post-humanist turn and in the literature on sentient landscapes. Indeed, the Sufi ontologies I have referred to foreground the presence of the Divine in these relationships. They also unveil a sophisticated view of human knowledge, one that is not limited to the rational faculties and whose scope varies according to the human ability to use the heart as an organ of perception. This extended understanding of human knowledge thus contrasts with the enduring tendency that is still prevalent in the post-humanist turn of defining the visible and the material as the site of the real (Fernando, 2017, p. 111). Murad (2023, p. 48), meanwhile, notes the absence of a clear line of demarcation not only between humanity and nature but also between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ in Islamic cosmology. Chittick (1986, p. 674) further observes that, ‘angels and other invisible beings are so much a part of the Islamic worldview that our immediate environment is not and cannot be a closed system, shut off from invisible influences, whether angelic or divine’. While Sufi ontologies embrace the existence of this invisible reality, they emphasize the relationship of all entities, visible and invisible, to God. When commenting on the presence of angels during the dhikr ceremony on a hill, the murshid remarked that they were sent by God and would report to Him, ‘although He knows everything’.

Sufi ontologies further unveil a nuanced view of the human in his or her relationship with the natural environment. Hence, due to the diverse ways in which they relate to God, human beings can both protect or endanger nature. Referring to the role of the human in safeguarding nature, Murad (2019, p. 314) observes that one Sufi explanation for today’s ecological crisis would be ‘the lack of saints or of Perfect Men’. During our conversations, the murshid in fact alluded to the protecting role of the men of the Unseen (rijal al Ghayb), an invisible Sufi hierarchy.¹⁸ Contrasting with this figure of the saint as protector, during our conversations, Alsu instead referred to the greed and limitlessness of human desires as represented by the capitalist exploitation that engenders forgetfulness among indigenous peoples. As Murad (2019, p. 313) states, ‘the primary enemy that humanity needs to defend the natural world from is itself’.

In conclusion, Sufi ontologies and epistemologies prompt the anthropologist to be more attentive to dimensions of existence that, although not immediately perceptible, are also not closed off from human knowledge. These ontologies further draw attention to the enduring influence of secularity in the post-humanist turn and the way secular knowledge continues to restrain our understanding of the real. A non-secular anthropology thus invites us to take into consideration not only the aliveness and sentience of the natural world and of the landscape surrounding us but also how this aliveness is connected to an invisible dimension, the Divine and the realm of God. I have explored elsewhere (Di Puppo, 2024) how a non-secular anthropology also implies approaching knowledge not by following a paradigm of control or power but by cultivating a readiness to surrender and be transformed. Knowledge through surrender as a mode of cultivating attention means becoming more alert to the ‘spiritual voices’ of nature and the world’s vibrancy and aliveness.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments on earlier drafts of this article and my Bashkir interlocutors for sharing their thoughts and experiences with me. I would also like to thank the regional study specialist Rustam Sagidulin for sharing his knowledge of Bashkir history and culture. In March–April 2022, during the writing phase of this article, I benefited from a visiting fellowship at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lili Di Puppo

Lili Di Puppo is a university researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the convenor of the European Association of Social Anthropology’s network ‘Muslim Worlds’ and co-editor of the book Peripheral methodologies: Unlearning, not-knowing and ethnographic limits (Routledge, 2021).

Notes

1 A volunteer group devoted to reviving the Bashkir traditions in whose activities I have participated counted both disciples and sympathizers of this Sufi circle. I keep the Naqshbandi order anonymous in order to protect my interlocutors’ identities.

2 See Schielke (2019) on the absence of God in anthropological theorizing despite the central place of the Divine in various ethnographies of religious lives.

3 With the concept of ‘sentient landscapes capable of xenophobia’, Coțofană and Kuran (2023) have pointed recently to the duality between the inherently ‘good’ indigenous population, and ‘good’ indigenous landscape, and the dangers posed by modern capitalist exploitation in the literature on sentient landscapes.

4 Toratau is one of four sacred hills (shihani). One of them, Shaktau, was destroyed in Soviet times for the purpose of exploitation by the limestone industry.

5 Dhikr is the remembrance of God. Throughout the text, I use pseudonyms when referring to my interlocutors.

6 As Murad (2019, p. 303) observes, ‘Perfect Man’ is the technical term for insān al-kāmil within the field of Islamic studies and is applicable to both men and women.

7 The Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi tradition was the most prominent in the Ural-Volga region. This branch of the Naqshbandi order begins with the Islamic scholar Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624/1625) known for his critique of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud in the work of Ibn Arabi. Despite this, the Bashkir historian Iskander Saitbattalov (2019) argues that the work of Ibn Arabi had circulated in Bashkir Sufi circles of the 18th-19th centuries, particularly his writings about the ‘men of the Unseen’ (rijal al Ghayb), an invisible Sufi hierarchy. The murshid also mentioned the presence of the men of the Unseen during our conversations. The scholar of Islam Hamid Algar (1991) has additionally provided a nuanced view of the reception of the work of Ibn Arabi in Naqshbandi Sufi circles. He is also the author of an article about the Naqshbandi sheikh Zaynulla Rasulev whose grave I visited in Troitsk (Algar, 1992).

8 My Sufi interlocutors identified the process of taming the nafs as a central element in the Ural Batyr epic. As the murshid told me, understanding the brevity of human existence, the hero sacrifices himself by pouring ‘living water’, which gives eternity, on the Earth instead of drinking it.

9 They are not perceived as self-subsistent, independent entities.

10 In the Islamic tradition, the Day of the Covenant is the ‘time’ before time when human souls testify that Allah is their Lord.

11 They told the murshid that no practical lessons could be drawn from the way the ancient Bashkirs lived, as they were constantly fighting and rebelling.

12 They help correct the mistakes that people make when writing these names, for example in Internet forums.

13 Another disciple also referred to the birth of the first bank in London as an historical event marking a threat to the aborigines’ way of life and their relationship to their land.

14 Pursuing this theme, she also told of the deep lakes on Bashkir land that are connected underground. In local lore, villagers see a horse disappearing in one lake and reappearing in another. To illustrate the lakes’ depth, Alsu told another story in which a peasant falls into a frozen lake along with a tractor; neither the body nor the machine was ever found.

15 In Islam, when on the road, one prays to the Prophet Ilyas, she remarked. Some disciples said that the Bashkirs were always monotheistic, seeing this as the reason why they immediately embraced the Islamic revelation brought to them by the Prophet’s companions. They further referred to the Islamic revelation and the indigenous Ural Batyr epic as ‘common’, as Aisylu told me.

16 As Albina told me, trees possess a longer memory than humans.

17 Soon after Ural Batyr had come back to the memory of the Bashkir people, the other holy gravesites ‘appeared by themselves’, she further explained. For my interlocutors, Ural Batyr is a prophet within Islam, God having sent a prophet to each ethnos. The late sheikh of the Naqshbandi order praised the Bashkirs for remembering their prophet to this day.

18 He mentioned that Zaynulla Rasulev was the qutb or spiritual pole of his time. See also Algar (1992). As he explained, the qutb strengthens the faith of humans in this place and time and possesses the ‘divine, secret sciences’.