Everything Glorifies Allah: The Speech of Creation We Cannot Hear

Stand in a garden early, before the traffic starts, and what you hear as silence is not silence at all. The Qur’an teaches that everything glorifies Allah, and that the quiet is only our own deafness to a praise that never stops.

The leaves are not moving. The soil is not saying anything. A tomato plant leans against its stake, green and patient and, to every sense you own, completely mute.

And maybe that muteness matches something in you. There are seasons when faith feels far away, when the world reads as empty machinery and worship feels like a room other people know how to enter.

This piece is for exactly that season. Because the world was never empty, and joining its worship takes one minute and one word you already know.

The created world moves around us as though most of it has nothing to say.

The tree is scenery. The grass is a surface. The mountain is a shape on the horizon we drive past without a second thought. We reserve the word “voice” for the few creatures loud enough to reach our ears, and we file the rest under stillness.

The Qur’an corrects that assumption at its root. It tells us that the silence we perceive is a failure of our own hearing, not an absence in the thing itself.

“The seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them exalt Him. And there is not a thing except that it glorifies His praise, but you do not understand their glorification.” Qur’an 17:44

Read the last clause slowly, because everything turns on it. The verse does not say creation is quiet. It says creation is glorifying its Lord constantly, in a language running underneath everything, and that we are the ones who cannot follow it.

The praise is real. The tasbih, creation’s own quiet “Glory be to Allah,” is happening right now. Our comprehension is the thing that falls short.

That is a very different picture of the world than the one we usually carry.

It means the garden at dawn is not resting in silence. It is full of speech, worship pouring out of every leaf and stone and grain of soil, and the only reason it feels still to us is that Allah did not give us ears tuned to that frequency.

The same wonder returns a few surahs later, spread across the whole of creation at once.

“Do you not see that to Allah prostrates whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth, and the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, the moving creatures and many of the people?” Qur’an 22:18

The sun and the mountains and the trees are named in the same breath as the angels. Their prostration is not a metaphor we invent to make nature feel spiritual. It is stated as fact, plainly, alongside things we would never doubt.

For most of us this stays an article of faith, believed and unheard. For the Companions, around the Prophet ﷺ, the veil sometimes thinned enough to catch a word of it.

Ibn Mas’ud, one of the Prophet’s ﷺ close Companions, reported that they used to hear the food glorifying Allah while it was being eaten, there in his blessed hand. Sahih al-Bukhari 3579

Sit with the ordinariness of it. Not a mountain splitting, not a sea parting. Food. A meal on a cloth, the most everyday thing there is, and it was praising its Maker aloud, and the people sitting close enough to the Prophet ﷺ, the one his people call the Beloved, were let in on the sound.

The tasbih was not created for that moment. It had always been there. What changed was that, near him, a few were briefly given the hearing the rest of us lack.

He ﷺ told them of it in himself as well. Before prophethood, he said, a stone in Mecca used to greet him whenever he passed. Sahih Muslim 2277

A stone. The very thing we reach for when we want an image of something inert and mute. Even that was awake, and aware, and moved to speak.

Modern science adds its own small, humbling footnote to all of this.

In 2023, researchers at Tel Aviv University placed ultrasonic microphones beside tomato and tobacco plants and recorded them. Stressed plants, ones going thirsty or freshly cut, emitted airborne clicking sounds, roughly a few dozen an hour, in a frequency range far above anything the human ear can reach. In the room, to any person standing there, the plants were making no sound at all.

The study is Khait and colleagues, published in the journal Cell in 2023, and it is careful work.

Now, hold this precisely, because the honesty of it is part of its beauty.

Science did not decode the tasbih of the trees, and it never will, because the Qur’an already told us we do not understand it. What the microphones caught is sound, physical and measurable, a stress signal other organisms may pick up. It is not the praise of 17:44. The verse is not a prediction that came true in a lab, and to read it that way would be to shrink revelation down to the size of one experiment.

The right response is smaller and truer than that. For every century before ours, a person could stand among plants and be certain, by every sense available, that they made no sound whatsoever. We now know that certainty was wrong. There was a whole layer of sound around us the entire time, and we simply had no instrument fine enough to register it.

If our confidence about physical silence was that mistaken, how much more humble should we be about the deeper silence, the one the Qur’an says is worship we were never equipped to hear?

The lab corrected our confidence about one kind of sound. The verse asks for a humility that reaches further, to accept that a worship we cannot perceive is real simply because the One who made it told us so.

What does it mean that everything glorifies Allah? The Qur’an states in 17:44 that every created thing exalts and praises its Lord. This is described as real, ongoing worship, not a poetic image. The same verse adds that human beings do not understand how that glorification happens, so it is a matter of belief in what Allah has told us, not something we perceive with our senses.

Does Quran 17:44 mean plants and objects literally worship Allah? Yes, in the sense the verse gives it. The heavens, the earth, and everything in them glorify Allah. Qur’an 22:18 names the sun, moon, stars, mountains, and trees as prostrating to Him. Classical scholars affirmed this praise is real while its exact form is unknown to us, since the verse itself says we do not comprehend it.

Do the plant sounds discovered by science prove the tasbih of creation? No. The 2023 recordings of ultrasonic plant sounds are a measurable physical stress signal, not the glorification described in 17:44. The verse says that glorification is beyond human understanding, so no instrument can capture it. The finding is a reason for wonder and humility about how much sound surrounds us unheard, not a decoding of the verse.

How can a person take part in the praise of creation? By saying SubhanAllah, “Glory be to Allah,” the same tasbih the Qur’an says all creation offers. Pausing to look at a tree or a plant and then saying it once joins your voice to a chorus that is already sounding.

Which hadith mentions food glorifying Allah? It is reported in Sahih al-Bukhari that Ibn Mas’ud and the Companions used to hear food glorifying Allah while it was being eaten in the Prophet’s ﷺ hand, one of several narrations where those close to him briefly perceived the praise creation offers constantly.

Is everything glorifying Allah in Islam literal or metaphorical? The mainstream understanding, drawn from the plain wording of Qur’an 17:44 and 22:18, is that it is literal, real worship offered by all created things. What is unknown is the form that praise takes, because the verse tells us directly that human beings do not understand it.

The point of this is not to leave you impressed. It is to change what you do with an ordinary Thursday.

Here is the concrete practice, and it takes almost nothing.

1. Give it one deliberate minute today. Step to a window, or outside, and look at one living thing, a single tree, a plant on the sill, the grass at your feet. Do not narrate. Just hold in your mind that it is, at this exact moment, glorifying Allah in a way you were told you cannot follow. Let that be true for sixty seconds.

2. Answer it with the same word it is saying. The tasbih of creation is not in a foreign tongue to you. Say SubhanAllah, “Glory be to Allah,” quietly, once, while you look. You are no longer only an observer of the chorus. You have added your voice to it, in the one language you share with every leaf and stone.

3. Anchor it to a thing you already see. Choose one recurring sight, the tree outside your door, the plant by the kitchen sink, and make it your reminder. Every time it catches your eye, let it pull one SubhanAllah out of you. A silent thing becomes, for you, a standing call to prayer.

None of this asks you to hear what you cannot hear. It asks you to believe the One who told you it is there, and to answer.

The garden was never quiet. It was worshipping the whole time, out loud, in a voice pitched just beyond you. Tomorrow morning, before the traffic starts, you can stand in the middle of all that praise and, for the first time, mean to be part of it.