The idea of a garden has always been central to Islam for reasons that are at once hopeful,
because nature is so beautiful, and deeply melancholy because life itself can never be
made perfect.
For Islam, the world we inhabit will always be mired in khaṭīʾa or sin. No human enterprise
or institution can ever be without significant degrees of dhanb or wrong-doing: jealousy,
stubbornness, rage and lack of forgiveness predominate. Only in the next life can we
hope to escape the irritation and the agony; only in jannah or paradise, will we be assured
of true contentment. In paradise, to listen to the Quran, there be flowing rivers, flowers,
incorruptible waters and unchangeable milk, golden goblets, ‘virgin companions of equal
age’ and rows of cushions set out in the balmy shade of fruit trees.
Yet because this might all be a long way off, Islam recommends an unusual technique to prevent
us from losing our poise and despairing: we should become bustani or gardeners. The enlightened
should redirect their frustrations with the state of humanity towards the construction
of a hadiqa or garden which can, within its limited circumference, with due modesty, be
endowed with many of the qualities of the eventual garden of paradise.
Our garden should have flowing water, some reflecting pools, symmetrical flower beds,
fruit trees and places to sit. Everywhere where Muslim civilisation spread, gardens
developed along with it and in the drier regions, where nothing would grow, flowers and trees
were represented on carpets, which functioned as miniature mobile gardens that could be
carried on the back of a camel. When the Muslims reached Southern Spain, the climate allowed
them to create pieces of horticulture which astonish and seduce us to this day.
A telling observation about gardening is that almost everyone over the age of sixty-five
is concerned with it, and almost no one in their late teens has ever evinced the slightest
interest in it. The difference isn’t coincidental. A person’s enthusiasm for gardening is inversely
correlated to their degrees of hope for life in general. The more one believes that the
whole of existence can be rendered perfect, that love and marriage can be idyllic, that
our careers can reward us materially and honour us creatively, the less time we will have
for beds of laurel or thyme, lavender or rosemary. Why would we let such minor interventions
detain us when far greater perfection is within reach?
But a few decades on, most of our dreams are liable to have taken a substantial hit, much
of what we put our faith in professionally and romantically will have failed, at which
point we might be ready to look with different, and significantly more sympathetic eyes, at
the consolations offered by cyprus trees and myrtle hedges, geraniums and lilies of the
valley. No longer will gardening be a petty distraction from a mighty destiny, rather
a shelter from gusts and squalls of despair.
Islam is appropriately wise in its ambitions. It doesn’t tell its followers to plough
themselves a farm, nor does it advise them to focus on a window box. The scale is carefully
calibrated: neither too big to mire us in unmanageable expense and bureaucracy nor too
small to humiliate and sadden us. The garden becomes a perfect home for our remaining pleasures
in a troubled world; it’s where we can repair to contemplate islands of beauty once we have
come to know and sorrowfully navigated oceans of pain.