In the vast mangrove delta of the Sundarbans, where the Bengal coast dissolves into tidal rivers and dense forest, survival depends on more than a boat and a net. Before entering the forest to collect honey or cut wood, fishermen and wood-gatherers stop at small shrines along the treeline to invoke Bonbibi, a figure one 19th traveller called a “strange goddess”, believed to be the keeper of the forest.Bonbibi is, by origin, a Muslim figure. Her legend, interwoven with the tiger god Dakshin Ray and the mediating saint Ghazi Miyan, forms the cosmological grammar of an entire ecosystem: a shared sacred world in which tigers, humans, forest spirits, and Muslim saints negotiate the boundary between the wild and the habitable.What, exactly, makes this a Muslim ecology? Not the presence of Muslims as such. Hindu, animist, and tribal communities too invoke Bonbibi. What makes it Muslim is that an Islamic idiom – a saint, a sacred genealogy, a moral vocabulary of protection and transgression drawn from Islamic devotional practice – has become one of the registers through which an entire regional community, across religious lines, understands and regulates its relationship with a dangerous and necessary landscape.This essay is about Muslim ecologies: not environmental knowledge that happens to be held by Muslims, but ecological practice and ethical reasoning in which an Islamic vocabulary does identifiable work: dividing the forest, sanctifying a pond, regulating a water channel, restricting a tree. The claim here is not that Muslims have a special relationship with nature. It is that, across several regions of India, the vernacular life of Islam – its saints, its legal concepts, its devotional geography – has shaped how land, water and animals are managed. This history has gone almost entirely unrecognised in how India thinks about its environmental past and present.The Bengal DeltaThe story of Bonbibi is best understood not as folklore decoration but as a working cosmology for an unworkable landscape. The Sundarbans are a tidal forest where the line between land and water shifts with every monsoon, where the Bengal tiger is a constant and lethal presence, and where any human entry into the forest interior is, in a quite literal sense, a negotiation with death.According to the “Bonbibi Johuranama”, a narrative poem that has circulated among fishing and forest-dwelling communities for generations, Bonbibi is sent by God to protect the poor of the forest. She defeats Dakshin Ray, the tiger god and lord of the wild, but does not destroy him: she negotiates. The forest is divided – the deep interior remains the tiger’s domain, while humans may use the margins, provided they enter with humility and seek her blessing first. Ghazi Miyan, the Muslim warrior-saint, witnesses and seals this compact.This is, in effect, a zoning law expressed as theology. It tells honey-collectors and woodcutters where they may go, on what terms, and what ritual obligations attach to entry – and it does so by fusing an Islamic figure of sainthood with a pre-existing, non-Islamic tiger-deity and forest-spirit complex that long predates the arrival of Islam in Bengal.