I thoroughly enjoyed the readings for this week, in particular Anand Taneja’s “Sharing a room with sparrows” and his characterization of and elaboration on the “ethics of the garden” (230). Azad’s readings elucidate a new way of defining our relationship to the natural world that emphasizes our connection to more than human life; it further, through the process of changing our perceptions of the non-human world, challenges our current consumerist and capitalist ideologies defending the degradation of the environment. Being confined in a cell with birds first, unsurprisingly, led to frustration and anger stemming from Azad’s predisposition that the space belonged to him. After futilely attempting to get rid of the animals, Azad’s individual transformation began to occur, and the animosity that dominated his relationship with the birds metamorphosed into a profound connection. Taneja’s translation: “‘it is not right that we live in one home, but we live as strangers’” describes the realization that triggered Azad’s evolution of self (233). This line also attracted my attention as the moment Azad realized the misconstrued nature of his predispositions, thus triggering the reconstruction of his relationship to the birds, and the ecological world at large. The use of “strangers” here resonates deeply. Many of the ways we interact with the more-than-human world we surmise are independent of the environment. We often see ourselves as separate from the natural world, despite being entirely entangled in it. Ignorance and an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ fallacy have further supplemented this ideology. Our current way of thinking, strengthened by industrialization and a capitalist economy, has rendered us strangers to the ecological world that surrounds us. Azad’s experience, and Muslim ecological thought, that practices “becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings” (237), reveals as well issues of environmental justice and the disproportionate exposure of environmental harm to communities deemed as dispensable: people of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities, women, people with disabilities, the elderly, non-human species, etc.. Taneja’s “Hindustan is a dream,” additionally, presents questions regarding one’s sense of self and the ways that one is perceived by others that further discusses how we, despite all being “formed by [our] relations with this land and with the others who make up this land,” currently detach ourselves from a meaningful connection with it (8). Reimagining these relationships, as he discusses, can help us transcend past malicious exclusion and marginalization on the basis of religious affiliation. Moreover, this framework provides insight into establishing thoughtful personal, social, and ecological connections in place of deliberate ignorance and oppression–both individually and systematically. The “self-examination and self-transformation” needed to rescind predispositions and prejudices, Taneja argues, is even more possible through an altered experience of time (240). Azad’s experience confined to jail, and the time in lockdown we spent during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I agree, offered the unique temporal qualities needed to foster those transformations. However, Azad’s experience remains distinct from ours, in its ability to rebuild his ecological relationship, because of its inevitability. In our current lives, we have countless distractions and ways of avoidance that keep us disconnected from the natural world (i.e. urbanization and technology). Because our interaction with the environment is a choice, I wonder what (if anything) can trigger the same individual transformation that Azad experienced? Is there a way to force a confrontation with our predispositions like the sparrows did?