Cosmic subjectivity in Qur'anic exegesis

Since the Qur'an repeatedly draws attention to the "animated quality of nature" – everything in creation glorifies God and prostrates to Him, God communicates with different natural entities, they seem to experience emotions, – can we deduce some degree of subjectivity in the cosmos? In other words, are cosmic entities conscious, alive, and knowledgeable, and if so, are they endowed with some sort of agency? While there is no consensus on what exactly constitutes subjectivity, in this research it is used as an umbrella term for four criteria: consciousness/life, knowledge/wisdom, agency/ability to teach and transform, and interconnectedness/blurring of lines between different entities. The applicability of these criteria to the natural world is examined in six different works of tafsīr belonging to different schools of thought and time periods – Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī's Al-Kashshāf, al-Rāzī's Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, Ibn 'Ajība's Al-Baḥr al-Madīd, ʿAbduh and Riḍā's Tafsīr al-Manār, and Quṭb's Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān. The close reading of the exegetes' commentaries demonstrates that they all accord some level of subjectivity to the cosmos, though they disagree about its scope and nature. What these different versions of cosmic subjectivity share is the search for a moral and other-oriented character in the cosmos. While the moral thrust of Qur'anic cosmology is not new, the works of exegesis reveal its expanded arc: the natural world is not only created with a moral purpose, but itself serves as a moral agent promoting this purpose, either metaphorically or literally. Whenever the cosmos acts as a subject, it does so by acknowledging and endorsing the good and the true and by serving others (the Creator or His creation). The study ends up by engaging the perspectives of the mufassirīn in a dialogue with some contemporary theories to emphasise the relevance of their moral vision of the cosmos in the Anthropocene, a dire stage of universal history that calls for new ways of perceiving the natural world.