Eco-heritage literacies and the sociolinguistics of Islam in Qatar’s Qur’anic Botanic Garden

This study extends emerging work on a sociolinguistics of Islam (Bhatt, Barnawi, and Ahmad 2025) by examining how meaning-making is shaped through the design of the Qur’anic Botanic Garden in Doha, Qatar. Using walking ethnography and linguistic landscape analysis, the study analyzes how the Garden aligns ummatic forms of Islamic authority grounded in Qur’anic and Prophetic traditions with ʿurfic forms of locally embedded ecological practice. The findings show how multilingual plant signage presents Qur’anic Arabic alongside Modern Standard Arabic, English translation, scientific nomenclature, and vernacular plant terms, making visible the relationship between scriptural tradition and local ecological knowledge. Beyond textual forms, Islamic environmental ethics are also communicated through silent theology, conveyed through sensory zoning involving sound, scent, and water, as well as through the selection of Qur’anic and regionally significant plant species. These arrangements are conceptualised as producing eco-heritage literacies: ways of relating Qur’anic and Prophetic citation to vernacular plant knowledge and broader ecological understandings, enacted through embodied modes of encounter that cultivate ethical orientations toward the natural world.