Do Not Kick the Stone

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, the great commentator, states in his Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb that it is agreed among the scholars of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah that whatever is not alive cannot be capable of speech, and yet it is firmly established that inanimate things praise Allah through the tongue of their state, bi-lisān al-ḥāl — and Allah knows best.

The teachers of this path relate that belief, as the Prophet (peace be upon him) states in a hadith recorded by al-Bayhaqī, has seventy-odd branches, the least of which is to remove something harmful from a road — a stone in the path of horses, animals or children, or debris fallen from a height. The counsel given was never to kick such a stone aside but to pick it up and set it at the side of the road, out of respect, since it too is making dhikr of Allah — how, otherwise, could a Muslim ever bring himself to damage the earth, the trees, the environment? Sultan Meḥmed II, al-Fātiḥ, the conqueror of Istanbul, after whom a mosque is named, issued a declaration on becoming sultan that he would remove the head of anyone found removing so much as a branch from a tree — a severe punishment, only intelligible from this perspective, that all things exist in a harmony the deaf and the mute cannot hear, through no fault of their own. Every atom makes tasbīḥ of Allah by the tongue of its state; the only one who fails to make dhikr is the heedless Muslim, the ghāfil, or the hypocrite the Qur'an names munāfiqūn. The aim is to become one of the mufarridūn, those whose tongue is never dry of it, whatever others may think — that it is showing off, riyāʾ, or madness. Few besides the eldest teachers are said to have fully grasped this. It is why Shaykh Muḥammad Zāhid Kotku used to say, in his private gatherings: