Muslim Environmentalisms

Religious and Social Foundations

Anna M. Gade

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231549219
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie islamique

How might our understandings of environmentalism and the environmental humanities shift if we incorporate Islamic perspectives? In this book, Anna M. Gade explores the religious and cultural foundations of Islamic environmentalisms. She blends textual and ethnographic study to offer a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of the legal, ethical, social, and political principles underlying Muslim commitments to the earth.

Muslim Environmentalisms shows how diverse Muslim communities and schools of thought have addressed ecological questions for the sake of this world and the world to come. Gade draws on a rich spectrum of materials—scripture, jurisprudence, science, art, and social and political engagement—as well as fieldwork in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. The book brings together case studies in disaster management, educational programs, international development, conservation projects, religious ritual and performance, and Islamic law to rethink key theories. Gade shows that the Islamic tradition leads us to see the environment as an ethical idea, moving beyond the framework of crisis. Muslim Environmentalisms models novel approaches to the study of religion and environment from a humanistic perspective, reinterpreting issues at the intersection of numerous academic disciplines to propose a postcolonial and global understanding of environment.

Notes

1. History of Religions, Islam, and Environmental Humanities

1. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily Gorman, “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (November 2010): 1–5.

2. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–18; and “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. See the discussion edited by Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’ ” in RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 2 (2016). Relevant work on postcolonial inquiry is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

3. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveirosde Castro, The Ends of the World (New York: Polity, 2016); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and, Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011).

4. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

5. “Gaia” is based in the field of astronomy dating back to the 1960s with James Lovelock’s original Gaia hypothesis. Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World Through Arts and Politics,” lecture at the French Institute, London (November 2011); and Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); James Lovelock, Ages of Gaia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 [1988]); and Rosemary R. Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (New York: HarperOne, 1994).

6. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

7. Edward Said writes, “ An excellent recent instance [of scholarly work on Islam] is the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, whose interest in Islam is discrete and concrete enough to be animated by the specific societies and problems he studies and not by the rituals, preconceptions, and doctrines of Orientalism.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 326.

8. For a criticism of Clifford Geertz on Muslim Indonesia in anthropology, see Mark Woodward, Islam in Java: Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1989); more general discussion of Geertz along these lines by an anthropologist is Daniel Varisco, Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

9. Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

10. Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2013); Anand Teja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); and Naveeda Khan, “The Death of Nature in the Era of Global Warming,” in Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance, ed. Roma Chatterji (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 288–99; and “Dogs and Humans and What Earth Can Be: Filaments of Muslim Ecological Thought,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 245–64.

11. More in-depth description and analysis of this material is in the author’s “Mt. Merapi, Prayer and Disaster,” one of four essays in Reverberations, blog of the Social Science Research Council, titled “Landscapes of Prayer” (2015), http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2015/05/22/mount-merapi-prayer-and-disaster/.

12. Environmental historian William Cronon and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan have developed this, respectively, at the University of Wisconsin; geographers also draw on the work of geographer Tim Cresswell, In Place, Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Anthropologists have long used the idea, such as Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places. Apparently drawing heavily on Arjun Appadurai in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7, nos. 2–3 (June 1990): 295–310, Thomas Tweed offers a theory of place making as an entire theory of religion based on Christian examples in Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

13. Clifford Geertz, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 167–234, which is a study of norms of haqq and adat along with Hindu dharma.

14. Nicola Tannenbaum, Who Can Compete Against the World?: Power-Protection and Buddhism in Shan Worldview (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1996). See also Clifford Geertz on global and local religious “styles” of global Islam in his masterpiece of comparison, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

15. Local Indonesian responses like this in relation to “great tradition” Islam is a point made by Zain Bagir and Najiyah Martiam in their general survey article “Islam: Norms and Practices,” in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. Willis J. Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (New York: Routledge, 2016), 79–87.

16. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” In The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125.

17. Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

18. Pak Asih describes the labuhan ritual and its changes in the ritual in a subtitled videorecordings titled “Mt. Merapi: Tradition and Disaster Response,” https://vimeo.com/album/2981130, within the author’s collection of online videos, Green Islam in Indonesia, referenced throughout this book.

19. Carolyn Merchant, Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2015).

20. For example, Nuki Amientien, leader of the religious madrasa Pondok Pesantren “Pabelan,” discusses her efforts to house and provide relief for members of the surrounding community in the midst of a water crisis brought on by the eruption in the online video “Environmental Programs at Pesantren Pabelan: From Organic Farming to Disaster Relief” (https://vimeo.com/48155550), in the online collection Green Islam in Indonesia.

21. This is a Malay/Indonesian variant of the Arabic word salama (related also to the noun islam, meaning “peace” or “safety”). A common way to say good-bye in Arabic is ma` salama (“go in peace”/“stay safe”), for example. Selamatan is also the name for a ritual meal on Java that brings toget...