ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Globalization of Muslim Environmentalism Contemporary Islamic Environmental Ethics While it is important not to romanticize the past - Muslims, like people of all cultures, have not always followed the spirit or the letter of their sacred laws - it would appear from the above that pre-modern Islamic societies possessed something that might be considered in contemporary terms as having constituted an environmental ethic.

And while one may likewise remain skeptical of arguments that Western imperialism alone is to blame for the erosion of traditional norms throughout the Muslim world, it does seem to be the case that traditional Islamic directives enjoining care and restraint in regard to the use of resources have become less apparent in the modern period.

In short, not only are Muslim societies today not models of environmental consciousness, in many cases they provide examples of the worst sorts of environmentally-destructive lifestyles and development policies. Many of the most severely degraded environments in the world today are those in which Muslims constitute a majority of the population.

While overall per capita consumption and pollution rates are generally less than in Western industrial societies, Muslim countries mostly suffer from acute environmental problems connected with poverty, overpopulation, and outmoded technologies. Unfortunately, it is also true that Muslim societies today are faced with so many severe problems of all kinds - political, social, and economic - that environmental protection often seems at best a secondary concern.

Few Muslims have yet come around to the way of thinking expressed by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, when he stated that “the environmental crisis is the playing field on which all other problems are played out,” or the popular environmentalist image in which the various human struggles going on in the world today are like “fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic.” We are so preoccupied with dealing with the threats approaching us head-on that we fail to notice what is happening under our feet.

To be fair, Westerners too have been extremely slow to recognize the severity of the threat posed by global environmental degradation.