Abstract This article traces how Arab writers invoked vegetal life to think through questions of organic and political belonging in and around late nineteenth-century Beirut. Close readings of natural theologies by Ibrahim al-Hurani, Nawfal Nimatallah Nawfal, Husayn al-Jisr, and Salim Kassab show how they theorized a regime of vegetal belonging based around mulāʾima (divine accordance) that pointed in multiple political directions. On one hand, their plant knowledge undergirded emerging theories of territorial nationalism, human mastery, and settlement as civilization. At the same time, the work also harbored arguments about organic mobility, multispecies adaptation, and nonindustrialized lifeways that challenged the hierarchies and boundaries those theories presumed. By identifying the cross-pollination between Arabic ecological thought and emerging political vocabularies in the Levant, the essay shows how basic terms for thinking about human politics and place emerged in relation to more-than-human worlds. Arabic theories of mulāʾima also complicate the common assumption in the contemporary environmental humanities that attention to multispecies ecologies and plant mobility is necessarily progressive. Instead, we see how mulāʾima opened up various political possibilities, demonstrating an unfinished conception of belonging that both formed part of the complex genealogy of modern nationalism and exceeded its terms at the same time.
Susanna Ferguson (Sun,) studied this question.