Tomorrow marks the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, so this week on Pause for Thought we reflect on all creatures great and small.

I was brought up to pray. My earliest memories include the sight of my parents carefully washing up, rolling out colourful rugs with images of gardens and crescent moons woven into them and standing for the five times daily ritual of reciting, bowing and prostrating. Prayer was the spiritual clock that measured our day. A lesson I try to remember nowadays when I get lazy.

On days when my father made it home early and the weather was nice, we’d all go outside and pray the sunset prayer in our garden, standing together in a straight line under the trees: two crab apples, a few Canadian maples and a towering pine.

Ayman Ahwal knew something about prayer and trees. Much of his life was dedicated to connecting the two. Ayman found faith in the 1960s while wandering the Moroccan desert. Living with local tribes, he experienced the interconnectedness of life, death and the nature. He was transformed.

Living on the edge of poverty, driven by passion and devotion, he spent the rest of his life trying, as he would later say, to love the Earth. Whether it was promoting cycling when it wasn’t fashionable, or declaring a holy war on garbage and waste in Britain’s inner cities, Ayman belonged to a special group of people from whom faith, action and life were one seamless, blessed endeavour.

For the last few years, Ayman’s heart was in the Indonesia province of Aceh. Devastated by the 2004 tsunami, ravaged by decades of war and clear-cut by greedy multinationals, the prognosis for Aceh’s threatened rainforests and the eco-system they sustained was dire. Ayman helped establish eco-villages and a train an army of tree-planters.
“Even if the Day of Judgment should arrive and you are holding a sapling in your hand,” the Prophet Muhammad said, “plant it.” Tradition tells us that trees bear witness to the good or the evil done under them or, indeed, to them.

This past Ramadan, I joined a group of friends one night to once again pray with the trees. In an East London park we laid down our prayer rugs. The sounds of traffic nearby meant we weren’t very far away from the metropolis, but for an hour the rustle of leaves and the smell of long grass transported me to my childhood.

That night, Ayman lay peacefully at a Sufi hospice in Birmingham. A few days later he died. Most of his possessions were in the room with him. Friends paid for his funeral service. At the burial, mourners remembered how fondly he spoke of seeing God’s garden.

Far away in the forests of Aceh, the trees wept.