Take up the Green Jihad

To keep in tune with EMPOWERING US’ Environmental Week, I thought I would carry out research via the inexhaustible internet. I have to add here that I was slightly apprehensive about what I would find (or how little I would find!) but I’m pleasantly surprised at what’s out there. Today I’d just like to remind readers of one of our many duties as a Muslim – our God-given responsibility to care for and safeguard our planet, what is ordained upon us by our Creator and the importance the Holy Quran gives to nature…

A fascinating article by Fareena Alam and Abdul Rahman Malik makes some crucial and insightful connections to Islam and the environment we live in…

Sacred balance

For most Muslims, Islam is more than merely a cultural or political identity. Religion matters – and thus any motivating argument about environmental activism must have at its core a message drawing on the sacred. The spiritual dimension, in other words, is at the heart of ‘Islamic environmentalism’. Nature is a sacred web of relationships, finely balanced and resonating with divinely given life. As the Quran says, “The sun and the moon follow courses precisely reckoned and the stars and the trees bow themselves in adoration and the heavens, God has raised them up, and set a balance. Transgress not in the balance.”

To transgress this balance is to commit a crime against God. Even the other creatures that inhabit this vast sacred dominion are not considered incidental. “No animal is there crawling on the earth and no bird flying on its wings that is not part of communities like yourselves,” the Quran reminds us. When we disrupt the natural order, we are upsetting communities as complex and diverse as our own. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) once said: “The Earth is like your mother; you came from it and you will return to it.”

The relationship is intimate. By polluting the source of life and damaging the Earth we are actually doing irreparable harm to ourselves. Men and women of faith never used to see themselves as separate from the environment. They were always attuned to the natural order and the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars guided their devotions. The reality of climate change and other “inconvenient truths” are indicative of how we have upset both the physical and spiritual order of the earth.

How, then, to reconnect? As Abdal-Hakim Murad puts it: “The Prophet Muhammad gave people something they could actualise in their worlds, in order to give them a form of life that would allow them to reconnect with nature. What is it that we in the modern world can offer?”

To answer this question, he does offer some practical advice. “We can be, as we so often are, moaning from the edges. It cannot be a menu of pure Luddite rejectionism. We need to make calls to people to be recognisably human in the middle of the modern world. Muslims engage in fasting, one of the most ancient of human rituals, perhaps like no other sacred tradition in the world. We pray not according to a timetable set by someone in some distant hierarchy, but in tandem with the planet beneath our feet, the sun and the moon. We break fast when the sun drops below the horizon and no amount of manipulation can alter that. To be embedded in the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is to be embedded in the natural world. That is the kind of Muslim voice I think should be heard. We must exist, in the things we say and do, with our lifestyle, to be living witnesses to a form of life that is genuinely pre-modern. We drive cars, become lecturers, use computers – but in the basic patterns of our life, we are following a form of life that is pre-modern.”
The word on the street

This practical message has resonance for a new generation of Muslim environ-mentalists. In London, a remarkable community-based group has grown out of the work of IFEES. The London Islamic Network for the Environment, established by the World Development Movement activist and former IFEES project manager Muzammal Hussain, aims to make the message real at the grassroots level – through local events and campaigns where participants can get their hands dirty.

Borrowing from the approach of other community-based social justice movements, Hussain has sought to promote regular local engagement, with monthly meetings and links with existing campaigns, bringing a unique Islamic take to such events as last November’s Campaign for Climate Change march. Both LINE and IFEES also worked with the London Sustainability Exchange (LSx) in an innovative project in Tower Hamlets to sponsor Friday sermons on explicitly environmental issues [see Mosque with a mission].

LINE’s local focus and Hussain’s open-door approach has led to the initiative being replicated in the Midlands (MINE), Sheffield (ShINE) and Wales (WELCOME).

So to sum up – remember what has been prescribed to you by your creator. We will all be held to account for our actions (or lack of) on the Great Day so alongside our other responsibilities and obligations as a Muslim, make ‘Green Jihad’ one of them!

“The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) once said ‘The Earth is like your mother; you came from it and you will return to it.’”