The global environmental crisis disproportionately affects Muslims, insofar as its
effects are more severely felt in the developing world and fall harder upon the poor
than upon the rich. And yet, the issue has received little attention from contemporary
Muslim thinkers and activists worldwide, preoccupied with ‘more pressing’ issues.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Muslim philosopher who spent most of his career in the
United States, was among the rst contemporary scholars to begin talking about
environmental degradation as a crisis of the spirit, anticipating Lynn White’s seminal
essay, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’ in 1967 by several months in some
public lectures. But Nasr’s target audience was Westerners, and his ideas have never
had much resonance across the Muslim world. Twenty years after the ground-breaking
international conference on Islam and Ecology organized by Mary Evelyn Tucker
and John Grim at the Harvard Divinity School in 1998, the question still looms large:
What has been the impact of Islamic environmentalism and what has it achieved?
Muslim societies are spread across the globe and are as diverse as humanity itself.
Sadly, one thing that virtually all Muslim-majority countries share is the full range of
catastrophic environmental problems—pollution, biodiversity loss, desertification,
lack of clean water—which in most cases are steadily worsening with few if any
hopeful signs on the horizon. Governments show little will to take remedial steps, and
in some cases environmental activism is considered politically suspect. The oil-rich
Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf region are not only some of the world’s worst
environmental offenders, but despite their economic power and claims of piety they,
have shown almost zero interest in putting Islamic principles related to environmental
protection into practice. Across the Muslim world, environmentalists can be
perceived as Westernized in their training and outlook, which often does not help
their cause in reaching traditional communities.
Thankfully there have been a few rays of hope peeking through the smog of poverty
and maldevelopment that have plagued so much of the world’s Muslim population
over the past two decades, and many of these sources of light can be traced either
directly or indirectly to Fazlun Khalid. The founder of the Islamic Foundation for
Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES) who has spent his long retirement from
civil service tirelessly travelling the globe educating Muslims about Qur’anic environmental
teachings one village at a time, Khalid rightly deserves to be considered the
world’s number one Islamic (as opposed to simply Muslim) environmentalist.
Khalid describes his book as ‘an attempt to discover the relationship between
modernity and Islam in the context of environmental concerns’ (p. xv). At the heart of
his analysis is the fundamentally inequitable and short-sighted nature of today’s
global economy, which, as he points out, finances the destruction of the environment
through the endless multiplication of credit. Since the creation of credit is predicated
on the taking of interest, such a system is necessarily un-Islamic. ‘Money is the
universal God of our times’, observes Khalid, ‘it conjures up for us the possibility of
heaven on earth, it seeps into every corner of our lives and its virus-like nature is
devouring its way through the natural world, thus leaving behind a degraded earth
for future generations’ (p. 21).
The first two-thirds of the book are essentially a primer on environmentalist
thinking, presumably geared towards readers new to the topic. Khalid presents a
critical history of capitalism, the exploitation of natural resources, and the growth of
consumerism, occasionally interjecting relevant Quranic verses. The story will be
familiar to readers already versed in environmentalist discourse, but as a general
introduction to the problem and its causes it is engagingly written and flows well.
And while the narrative is rooted in the secularizing, industrializing, and colonizing
modern history of the West, Khalid exempts no one from responsibility for how
things are today, since ‘we are all without exception seduced by the trap of consumerism,
at the base of which is a political economy to which we all subscribe’ (p. 147).
Khalid provides an overview of Islamic environmental principles in Chapter 5. He
summarizes the environmentalist readings of the traditional sources (Qur’an, hadiths,
and Islamic jurisprudence) that have recently been made by a number of scholars,
while implicitly conceding that they are not being applied on any significant scale in
Muslim societies today: ‘…all Muslim countries are also locked into this global
system…and in many ways they also want most things the system has to offer…’
(p. 194). He concludes his book by returning to the idea that our attachment to the
notion of economic growth must be abandoned in favor of a ‘circular economy…in
which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value
from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the
end of each service life’ (p. 199).
Khalid seems to have intended this book as a testament, and one hopes that it will
stand as a lasting monument to his legacy. He is not an academic and his is not a
scholarly book, but he is a clear thinker and he knows how to present a compelling
argument. He is equally at home in Western and non-Western contexts, physically as
well as culturally, and he is able to communicate easily across cultures. Unlike Nasr,
his work is addressed in the first instance to devout Muslims like himself, but readers
from other backgrounds will find his presentation just as informative and inspiring.
Richard Foltz
Concordia University, Montréal
References
White, Lynn Jr. 1967. ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155: 1203-
207. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203.
