Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations. By Anna M. Gade

Abstract

This is the first ever book-length critical scholarly treatment of discussions on the relationship of Islamic values to environmental ones. Within the field variously known as “religion and ecology” or sometimes “religion and nature” that has been taking shape over the past two decades, sincere efforts have been made by those framing the discourse (almost exclusively Westerners or westernized others) to be inclusive of all the world’s religious traditions, and Islam, as one of the world’s major religions, has not been neglected. This is not to say that including it in the discussion has been easy, for two reasons that emerge in Anna Gade’s treatment: (1) an environmentalist reading of the Islamic tradition has often resulted in a “retrofitting” of Islamic notions so as to insert them into contemporary environmentalist frameworks that were formulated in Western contexts and not within the Islamic world itself; and (2) relatively few Muslims, whether intellectuals or ordinary folk, have taken up the challenge of articulating or putting into practice any kind of environmental ethic that could be seen as specifically or genuinely Islamic.