OIB-COSIMENA Research Colloquium on Environmental Ethics
“Sincerely, I was astonished to learn about the growing Muslim environmental movements around the world and the theoretical basis on which they are founded; I now want to know more,” a participant stated after the first lecture entitled “Islamic Environmental Ethics from Discourse to Identity”. In that context, the speaker Dr Ahmed Abd-Elsalam (Max Weber Foundation/Orient Institut Beirut) offered a concise, yet comprehensive, overview of the growing phenomenon of ‘Eco-Islam’, which calls for the preservation of the ecological balance (‘Mizān’) within a sacralised understanding of nature, as presented in the Islamic tradition and sources. Through a detailed historical excursus of the main contributors to the development of ‘Eco-Islam’, which originated in the United States in the 1960s with Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar Prof. Dr Sayyed Hossein Nasr and later spread into Europe, Dr Abd-Elsalam summarised the main contributions to this blooming field.
In addition to citing the works of prominent figures, including Ibrahim Abdul Matin, Farah Khan and Fazlun Khalid, the lecturer shed light on the positive effects of the spreading of Muslim environmental communities in European countries such as Germany. As an attendee highlighted in the Q&A time, these communities have the potential to convey a positive image of Islam in Europe, as well as to unite young people from diverse backgrounds in the defence of common global causes, such as the fight against climate change. Likewise, in the following lectures, which examined peculiar aspects of environmental ethics, the interconnection between the topics of the colloquium, as well as with other fields of study, became manifest.
Remarkably, a participant who is specialised in urban architecture highlighted the benefits for practitioners in his field from deepening their theoretical knowledge of environmental ethics, inspired by the varied inputs received from the lecture “The Cornucopia of Environmental Islamic Studies”. During this fascinating presentation, Prof. Dr. Birgit Krawietz (Freie Universität Berlin) emphasised the need for a reinvented and significantly enlarged Islamic Studies in sync with globally informed Area Studies, which shall take an attentive look at current global environments, rather than limiting the research to the holy sources of Islam. Through the intriguing analysis of the concept of ‘Aesthetic Capitalism’ with a focus on the case study of Istanbul, she showed the interconnection between consumer culture, urban settings, and material culture. Thus, participants could reflect on the need to develop a critical approach to advance green discourses concerning Muslim societies and cultures, which they further discussed during the networking dinner, examining the context of Egypt. Moreover, as the colloquium intended to boost knowledge transfer, while linking Islamic and Western religious studies and concepts as a sign of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, the discussion of environmental ethics extended to the investigation of recent Christian contributions, shedding light on connecting lines, as well as differences across the Christian and Islamic discourse. In particular, the lecture entitled “Environmental Ethics in Christian-Muslim Dialogue” by Dr Christian-Andreas Stroebele (Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart) put forward an approach that starts from philosophical and interdisciplinary ethics and then reintegrates ethical norms, values, and insights into a theological context, following the ethical methodology of the Catholic theologian Alfons Auer.
As a result, with the rich array of insights from various perspectives discussed in the course of the eight lectures on gender and environmental ethics, participants could move to the last theme of the colloquium, which integrated the biomedical aspect into the larger discourse of Ethics in Islam and connected it to the previous topics.
