Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity and the Climate Crisis - Softcover

Rediscovering Nature

Excerpt from Chapter 5

Today more than half the world’s population live in cities. Our increasingly urban lives have ensured our almost total disconnection from the natural world to the extent that it is not uncommon to meet children who believe that milk originates in super market shelves. It is as well to be conscious of this as much is left out in their education both religious and secular to the extent that we are continuing to cause irreparable harm to the Earth. Muslims are not an exception to this having themselves adopted urban life styles and modern modes of living quite oblivious to where this is all going. Taking children to the zoo or visiting national parks are more in the nature of recreational activities that re enforce the idea of otherness. The educational element remain lamentably superficial and the spiritual is nowhere to be seen.

In the Islamic order care for the natural world expresses itself in every aspect of personal behaviour. The guidance for this comes from the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad’s teachings (Sunnah). It is integral to life, an expression of existence in submission to the will of the Creator in harmony with the cosmic pattern. There is a code of conduct that governs interpersonal behaviour and an individual’s rights and responsibilities within a community; it also deals with an individual’s behaviour towards other sentient beings and the rest of the natural world. As Muslim interaction with the environment evolved, it manifested itself in a range of rules and institutions, embodying a truly holistic expression of life. It took into consideration the prohibition of waste, being abstemious, being generous, being considerate, being moderate, unselfish, caring and sharing. The qualities of love, humility, trust and justice remained preeminent. Over the centuries, these values have been elaborated upon by a succession of mystics, scholars, jurists and teachers responding to real problems experienced by the growing community of Muslims in various parts of the world.

However, this Islamic mode of expression is now severely attenuated, having been swept aside by the forces of history, like the other older traditions, into a domain which treats the natural world exclusively as an exploitable resource. As what we now understand by modernity advanced, as the secular ethic progressively seeped into the Muslim psyche and as industrial development, economic indicators and consumerism became the governing parameters of society, there has been a corresponding erosion of the Muslim perception of the holistic and a withering of its understanding of the sacred nexus between the human community and the rest of the natural order:^[i]

The creation of the heavens and the earth is far greater than the creation of mankind.

But most of mankind do not know it”

(Qur’an, 40: 56).

As the Islamic tapestry unfolded in its expression over the centuries, we discover that there are no references to the environment or its isms as we now understand them in the Qur’an. The context in which we discuss this subject today originated as recently as the second half of the last century and Rachel Carson is recognised as having given impetus to this movement since her research was published in 1962 (see A Delayed Reaction, Chapter 2).^[ii] Neither can the word "nature" which is an abstraction be found in the Qur’an. The closest term in modern Arabic usage is bi’ah which connotes a habitat or a surrounding. Nevertheless, the Qur’an is inherently environmental in its approach.  It speaks of creation (khalq) and it contains over 250 verses where this word is used in its various grammatical forms derived from the root kh–l–q. It is used in many ways to describe what we see, feel and sense in the world. They contain references to the natural world from herbs and plants, to trees and plants, from fish to fowl, to the sun, stars and skies.^[iii] He (Allah) created everything and determined them in exact proportions (25: 2). The human community is but an infinitesimal part of the natural world but we have now lost sight of this through our proclivity for dominating it. The Qur’an observes, The creation of the heavens and the earth is far greater than the creation of mankind. But most of mankind do not know it (40: 56). Creation is the fabric into which the tapestry of life is worked.^[iv]

An Islamic approach to the environmental quagmire we now face provides us with a three layered response:

The first is to approach the Earth as sacred and identify how through abusing it we have desacralized our understanding of it and so rediscover what it is that we have lost in the process.

The second is to formulate an ethical understanding of our relationship with the natural world and build a knowledge base that would enable us to resolve the immediate crisis and motivate us to lay down a basis for long term behavioural change.

The third is to look at this through the prism of political economy and discover what it is that an Islamic approach to this subject can do to both improve our understanding of the current malaise and provide some answers as to how we can create a model of well being without having to subvert our own existence.

Sachiko Murata and William Chittick have an interesting approach in that they deploy traditional Islamic learning to teach modern courses on Islam. They chose as their model ‘a famous and authentic hadith [Prophetic teaching] that Muslim thinkers [and teachers] have often employed for similar purposes in classical texts.’^[v] Specifically, they cite a hadith popularly known as the Hadith of Jibril (Gabriel) narrated by Umar ibn al Khattab, the second caliph to succeed the Prophet after his death. This was the occasion when a stranger dressed in white sat by the knees of the Prophet, laid his hands on his thighs and began to question him about Islam. When the stranger had left the Prophet told them that, “He was [the Archangel] Gabriel. He came to teach you your religion”. The Arabic word the Prophet used for religion is din^[vi] (sometimes spelt deen) and the answers to the stranger’s four...