Throughout the Islamic world there prevails today an excessive passion for concrete only matched by an equally strong contempt for greenery. Everywhere the observer is struck by the sight of greenery in fast retreat; forests devastated for commercial purposes, or for no purpose at all; orchards uprooted for urban expansion; gardens and green areas left to abandonment, vandalised, often depository of urban waste; and so on. Also common amongst the Muslim communities settled in the West is to make the concreting of their garden their first deed on the purchase of a new house. Muslim streets are, in fact, easily recognisable in most urban places, thoroughly concreted, no greenery to be seen. Somehow, the impression left to any neutral observer by this is that Islam is fundamentally hostile to greenery, and the colour of its flag, green, has been usurped.   

Nothing, though, could be further from the truth, as will be seen in this chapter. And nothing highlights Islam’s love for greenery than this  instance from early Islamic history noted by Harvey. During the first Muslim military campaigns, Harvey notes, Abu Bekr, the first Caliph (632-634), in setting the war machine in motion, gave the order that no palm trees were to be destroyed, no cornfields burnt, no orchards cut down.[1] Unlike the Greeks, who ravaged the fields of the fellow Greeks with whom they were at war, cutting down their olive groves, the Muslims were at pains to avoid destruction and, as soon as possible, restored peaceful government and prosperity to the countries they overran.[2]

Today’s Muslim twin passion for concrete and hate for greenery is a new phenomenon in Islamic society. Without elaborating on this too much, this could be due to the fact that today’s Muslim ruling elites, one country or two excepted, so obsessed with all aspects of the material, and devoid of any sort of vision that deviates from the crude or vile, have an excessive passion for concrete and an absolute contempt for all things naturally beautiful. This attitude, of course, they force upon their people, just as they force other deviant practices, via the media, education and so on. De-Islamising Muslim society by these elites, previous colonising powers, and other forces, has had its effect, too. The violence inflicted by invaders: crusaders, Mongols, Timur, and Western colonial powers, and subsequent, secular, Westernised elites in power has forced Muslims to deviate considerably from their former antecedents and deeds whether with regard to respect for water as a scarce resource, love for sciences, gardens, environment etc, in order to survive.  De-Islamising society has destroyed from within Muslims and Muslim society what was intrinsic to Muslims: extreme precision, order, cleanliness of streets and cities, etc. All these have been suppressed in the course of history, and by force. The instance highlighted in the preceding section of how Muslims were forced to de-bath, that is to destroy their baths, has been generalised to all other aspects of Islam. The brutal colonial occupation, and loss of fertile lands to colonisation, has forced Muslims to turn into deforesters par excellence, a remarkable instance seen in Algeria, in particular, following the French colonisation. From great preservers of greenery prior to the French occupation, the Algerians turned into the greatest deforesters of all after 132 years of French presence.[3] The trauma caused by Mongols, crusaders, occupation, etc…has ended in killing many early noble features of Muslim society, such as the love for books. In Baghdad  in 1258, in Aleppo  in 1398, when it was taken by Timur the Lame, the massacre of people and the destruction of books were, indeed, equally violent in tenor.[4] And the same in Spain, courtesy to the Church, which had Muslim books burnt in mass auto da fe.[5] Somehow in the Muslim psyche, books and loss of life became very much associated. Never would Muslim society have the same love for books as it did in the early centuries of Islam.

These shifts in the Muslim psyche and attitude relate to every aspect of Islamic civilisation, including gardens and gardening, for indeed, the barrenness and hostility to greenery common amongst most Muslim societies today is in very sharp contrast to what prevailed in early Islam, a love, a passion for gardening, mixed with the art of gardening.