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Month: December 2020

Response to Anna Gade’s Muslim Environmentalism: Religious and Social Foundations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)

Reading Anna Gade’s Muslim Environmentalisms was truly a pleasure, like reading much of my own personal and academic journey in Islamic studies, Southeast Asian studies, and religious studies, from being a student, santri in Jakarta and West Java in the late 1980s-early 1990s, when we read the Qur’an, hadith, and classical and medieval literature, when we learned that “environment” was an integral part of our religious knowledge and everyday practice, when we learned “cleanness” or al-nadhafah or al-thaharah, on the first chapter of the fiqh books, containing a popular hadith “to be clean is a part of faith”,and “no believer goes to heaven if he does not feed a cat”, and  more “environmentally friendly” mannerisms; when we responded drought by performing the rain-prayer (and rains did fall after that), and we lived with nature: paddy rice, creeks, chickens, ducks, birds, trees, ants, bugs, mosquitoes. My journey continued to the undergraduate study of the Qur’an and hadith alongside humanities and social sciences, and we started to hear about NGOs such as the famous Walhi (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia) associated with everything about environment, and the popular Ministry of Lingkungan Hidup, also dealing with everything environmental. At the same time, we learned about “Quranic verses on the environment”, and began learning about the connection in a systematic way. When I did my master in Edinburgh 2000-2001, I did not pay due attention to the subject. When I did a fieldwork for my PhD dissertation in 2006, I saw Nik Abdul Aziz, the spiritual leader of PAS in Kelantan considered “the most conservative state” in 2006, delivering a sermon with a symbolic gesture “Pick up the Trash” (Pungut Sampah). More and more about Islam and the environment. More recently, I was surprised by an unexpected requirement for our marriage at the Ministry of Religion (KUA) Yogyakarta in December 2018 to plant a tree in our house and take a picture of it. I study and teach more and more scholarly and comparative studies and courses which include “Islam and the environment”, “Islam and ecology”, ecofeminism, and more recently I wrote an invited entry on global Islam containing ecology under the subheading theory and practice in developing a comparative religious ethics.  

Today Muslim leaders, scholars, and activists have held local, regional, and international conferences and workshops, and many have created curriculum to include ecology, connecting scholars, activists, journalists, teachers, and have producd books, articles, and fatwas on Islamic eco-ethics. In educational and scholarly circles, Muslims normative approaches to the natural environment have changed and diversified. There are now more studies and the elaboration of the unity of God, the unity of humankind and creation, the balance in nature humans’ vicegerents of God on earth, and the humans’ responsibility not to destruct the world and to strive for environmental justice. There are more efforts to produce Islamic environmental law and authoritative legal opinions on key environmental issues.

Muslim scholars and activists have created a distinctly Islamic environmentalism, different from the Euro-American ones, while other Muslims emphasize the universality of the ecological values and activism (Foltz, Denny and Baharuddin 2003). Many Muslims have joined green movements, faith or secular-based, or else they have created their own environment-friendly spaces within their mosques, schools, and communities. Many Muslims have engaged the environments for the sake of Islam, and others have reinterpreted Islamic texts and tradition for the sake of the environment although the distinction is not always clear. In light of these contexts, scholars of the humanities have called for the study of Muslim theories of the environment as developed in the Qur’anic interpretation, hadith, Sufism, art, science, and diverse community engagements across local and global contexts. 

In Muslim Environmentalisms, Anna Gade offers insightful and engaging ideas and firsthand material about Muslim environmentalisms not as a complementary model but as a critique to the Anglophone, post-Christian, secular environmentalisms and humanities, including the world religions and religious and ecology frameworks; it is also a development if not a critique to the Islam and environment, and Islam and nature framework from within Islamic studies, using the Qur’an, hadith, fatwas, Sufi, and everyday ethics or adab, sustained by ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim island and mainland Southeast Asia. For Gade, Muslim environmentalisms combine both the scientific and morale, the phenomenal and the unseen, and the present world and the afterlife.  

One of the book’s arguments is that “not all environmentalisms of Muslims are religiously Islamic, but rather that all environmentalisms – religious or otherwise – are ethical commitments.” The question is whether all these environmentalisms – religious or otherwise, can be conceptually regarded as “Islamic”. Can a Muslim who says that they are doing just farming” without labelling it Islamic farming, be analyzed as a Muslim environmentalism. Is everything that a Muslim does inherently religious? What if Muslims do things secularly without Islamic means and meanings? As I understand them, Muslim environmentalisms are not about identity politics such as the Islamization of science (islamiyyat al-marifah promoted by the IIIT in the US, or ISTAC in Malaysia), the ayatization of science by justifying scientific findings with select Qur’an and hadith, or the bureaucratic model of integration of Islam and science in some Islamic universities in contemporary Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Muslim environmentalisms, as I read from this book, are ontological, epistemological, and axiological at once.  

I wonder how mainstream these Muslim environmentalisms have been among the 2.0 billions Muslims globally. If we observed only the fatwas, sermons, books, flyers, and madrasahs, labelled as “eco-pesantren”, “eco-masjid”, and other voices and programs labelled with “eco”, “environment”, “green”, and the like, we would probably observe small and only emerging phenomena in Muslim societies. In educational and da’wah spaces, the environment has not become an immediate concern, in contrast to issues of purifying and strengthening the faith (aqidah) and correcting the ritual (ibadah madhdah), and issues of poverty, illiteracy, and intra-Muslim conflicts. There are comparatively few “committed religious activists” who understand “cause and effect extending this world to the next through the environmental transformations and landscapes to come” (p.253). Climate change and global warming are not a consistent subject of sermons every Friday or pengajian every week. It is an add-on subject, depending on the preachers and activists’ concerns, priorities, knowledge, and experience. 

If we looked for surveys about Muslims views of the environment or climate change, we might  cite a Pew Research on US Muslim views. The 2017 survey states that being Muslim is about more than the core religious beliefs; roughly seven-in-ten, say “working for justice and equality in society” is an essential part of their Muslim identity and 62 % say the same about “working to protect the environment,” – which is higher than the share of U.S. Christians (22%) who said protecting the environment is essential to their Christian identity. It suggests many Muslims do say the environment is an essential part of being Muslim. But if we considered the environment not in the sense of an ism or ideology as in “environmentalism”, but in broader and inclusive ways of being kind and friendly to the environment, we would say it had been a mainstream theory and practice. 

It is safe for us to say that environmentalisms are not a uniquely modern project because the Qur’an, hadith and early and medieval scholarships address the earth, the worlds, plants, animals, big and tiny, and such sophisticated yet accessible religio-ethical concepts as tauhid, ‘ilm, ‘amal, khilafah, adl, wasathan, mizan, and maslahah – including the aim of the shari’ah of the protection of the environment rendered as “hifz al-bi’ah” in addition to religion, life, reason, property and progeny. 

If we agreed this were a mainstream ethics, we would need to also discuss gaps between commitments and actual practice, between the ideal norms and the everyday practice; how many Muslims, men and women, waste their food, water, fruits, soil, money, oil and gas, and other scarce resources; how many Muslims destroyed the forests for buildings and factories and did little for reforestation; how many Muslims threw their trash on the rivers and neighborhoods,which led to flood their cities, how many teachers or kiyais wasted food, smoked cigarettes, and do not always commit clean and sustainable acts. There is always a gap between theory and practice on Muslim ethics. On the issues of climate change, the lack of action for a sustainable ecology in Muslim countries has often been attributed to Muslims’ cosmology centering human submission (islam) toward God, rather than their responsibility in protecting the environment. The challenge remains in socialization and implementation. Deforestation, overexploitation, wastes in private and public spaces, overconsumption, pollution, and flooding in urban areas, have become the prevalent facts in many Muslim-majority environments.

Even if Muslim environmentalisms were a mainstream idea and practice, we would also analyze the characteristics of humans (insan) towards God, others, and the environment, described in the Qur’an: forgetful, wasteful, complacent, ungrateful, hypocritical, irresponsible, and corrupt (page 89). These qualities need exploration and discussion in relation to the keywords stewardship (khalifah), balance (mizan), and trust (amanah) – given the ambivalences of human qualities and the gap between words and action.

Muslim environmentalisms may be considered as part of Muslim humans-earth interactions that could reflect different forms: reciprocity or respect, domination or manipulation, celebration or submission.

One needs to test how significant and real, impactful and effective Muslim environmentalisms have been given the grave problems facing global citizens. How effective have been the rituals (including the hajj, fasting, and eco-salawat), elitist gestures and symbolic acts, and ceremonies in solving the local and global environment issues, given the pervasive roles of the nation-states, and multinational companies, globalization, modernization, commodification of spirituality offline and in the Internet? 

One of the book’s key arguments is that apocalypticism or eschatology (akhirat), albeit unapprovable, is central to Islam and central to Muslim environmentalisms. To earn reward and fear punishment in the life to come “inspires engaged action through recognition of clear and inevitable consequences.” (p.253) But this very same belief could have a limited impact in the real actions of many Muslims, men and women, old and young, poor and rich, in this world. The Qur’anic command: “Seek, through that which Allah has given you, the home of the Hereafter, and yet, do not forget your share of the world. And do good as Allah as done good to you. And desire not corruption in the land. Indeed, Allah does not like corrupters. “(28:77), has been often cited in sermons and fatwas. Because what matters most is the world to come, instead of acting here and now, many Muslims wait for the hereafter, or akhirat, and so they do not really care about the environment on earth in the real-world circumstances. They believe that their part and time is not here and now but in the akhirat. There are Muslims who feel content (qanaah), patient (sabar) and pasrah (tawakkul) indicating a jabary pre-destined ethico-theology, in coping with natural and human-driven disasters and crisis (fires, flood, and draught), even though more and more Muslims are engaged in activism and struggle for environmental justice.  

There are different ways in which Muslims have responded to the aftermath of natural disasters (bencana alam) such as earthquakes, the tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, by believing these as a punishment by Allah or a necessary event that no one cannot prevent but should be responded with patience and trust in God (sabar dan pasrah menghadapi musibah);  many have turned to focus their efforts at addressing the impacts by helping the victims, rebuilding the village, healing traumas, and so forth. Those who believe that natural disasters are the act of God tend to hold that humans are not the cause of the disasters and they tend to be reluctant to commit to conserving the environment. 

In scholarship, the marginalization of Muslim environmentalisms of 2 billions Muslims the majority of whom living in Asia, mostly in Indonesia, is due not only to the Euro-centric, colonial, and orientalism, but also to the lack of access to non-Arabic and non-English scholarships and especially thanks to the emerging Muslim scholars and activists from Asia or Anglophone scholars working about Asia themselves to produce knowledge and information about their environmentalism; they are yet to go global. 

In developing both the construction and critique, Muslim environmentalism may be expanded to include disaster relief programs like Muhammadiyah Disaster Management Center (2006) and other humanitarian NGOs and actions. It is also important to include the state’s efforts at dealing with the environmental issues even within their “developmentalism” that is subject to criticism, even without Islamic labelling. 

In Indonesia and elsewhere today, Muslim activists, preachers, and scholars have selectively borrowed from, and worked with, global ideas and best practices of environmentalisms of the international NGOs as well as the nationalistic projects. 

Moreover, gender dimension should be an integral part of these Muslim environmentalisms: women as both actors and victims and their relationship with multiple agencies.   

Another key argument of the book is that Muslim environmentalisms are not an alternative but a critique to the secular environmentalisms; it is also presented as an autonomous ethical theory and practice derived from within Muslim texts, traditions and practices themselves. The challenge is how Muslim environmentalisms can be in conversation and dialogue with secular environmentalisms they are critiquing. There is recognition of “the intertwined histories of Muslim and Christian Europe”, but can this intertwin continue to happen and even become recognizable in the contemporary world where Muslims and non-Muslims face more common problems including the environmental? 

Another dimension worth discussing further is the place of local knowledge, kearifan lokal, or adat, also mentioned in the book. One need to study the relationship between Muslim environmentalisms and indigenous environmentalisms sometime characterized with land ownership and preservation, spirit beliefs, ancestors, offerings, sacred nature, micro and macro-cosmos, and indigenous ethics and esthetics.  

Another challenge is how the contribution of Muslim environmentalism can go beyond humanities and Islamic studies and religious studies: social sciences, exact sciences, engineering, urban planning, biology, chemistry, astronomy, ocean, and earth sciences. In Indonesia, many Muslim scientists are working in hegemonically Western terminologies, concepts, ontologies, epistemologies and even axiology. If environmentalism were neither merely an addition to Islam, nor an add-on to the Islamic system, but an inherently ethical, Islamic concept, then the challenge is to mainstream it in both religious and secular spaces of Muslims in many levels.

There is criticism that contemporary religious ethics scholars have pointed out that the study of Islamic ethics has focused on cases and concrete actions rather than on general principles, and on communalistic rather than individualistic, in contrast to Western deductive and individualistic ethics. Anna Gade’s book offers both specific and general principles. Given the central idea of community (ummah, humans and nonhumans), I wonder about Muslim individualisms (rights and responsibilities) from within Islamic texts, traditions, and experiences. 

For Shahab Ahmed, also cited in the book, “all acts and statements of meaning-making for the self by Muslims and non-Muslims that are carried out in terms of Islam… should properly be understood as Islamic.” (p.544). This reconceptualization paves the way to even more diverse and dynamic understandings and practices of Muslim ethics in the past and the present, in the local and global context. I think Muslim environmentalisms are not confined to Muslim actors and not all Muslim actors are embodying Muslim environmentalisms.  

We also need to recognize the fact that although ethics is about good and bad relationships; it is in many cases not an either/or, black/white domains of life. Human beings have faced moral dilemmas, ambiguities, and contradictions in individual and social circumstances, despite their continued search for moral certainties and predictabilities. The important challenge may not be simply to formulate a continuity and engagement with our own intellectual moral underpinning but to remain open-minded to the new possibilities of new theories, approaches, methods, and even objectives of advancing Muslim environmentalisms. 

Muslim environmentalisms are not fixed, not rigid, not monolithic, and not final. Much are already there, elaborated clearly and convincingly in this fine book, but these are a work in progress: education, dakwah, research and scholarship, and more. Islamic interpretations, as Anna Gade said, “extend ethical dimensions to unseen futures in religious modes that are highly relevant to present and inclusive discussions in environmental humanities.”

The future of scholarship in religious ethics depends on the pursuit of normative-prescriptive and descriptive-empirical studies, with interdisciplinary and comparative studies, with collaborations among Muslims from the diverse schools of thought and traditions as well as non-Muslim scholars and activists everywhere. The normative studies may be well advanced by considering the classical and contemporary productions of an ethical theory with now more accessible Muslim and non-Muslim, Arabic and non-Arabic references and ethnographic work, thus contributing to the advancement of Muslim ethical theories, its multicultural origins, its rich intellectual tradition, its varied dimensions touching the diverse domains of life, and its diverse impacts on the Muslims, humankind, and al-alamin, all the worlds.