Islamic Environmental Economics and Sciences of Nature
Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Islamic environmental economics views the natural world as manifesting God’s blessings and bounties (faḍl) and reflecting His Perfect Names and Qualities (āyāt Allāh or vestigia Dei). This has critical implications for Islamic environmental ethics and an Islamic theology of work that protects the environment. There is a profound resonance between knowledge and the creative act in this traditional Islamic perspective, and this resonance is rooted both in the human being’s role as a reflection of Divine Attributes as well as in the inverse relation that exists between the creative act of God and that of humankind. God’s creative act or “art” results in the manifested order; it is an externalization whereas the art of an individual is an internalization. The act of Divine creation brings into existence that which is made by God. The creative act of the human is in a sense a process that returns the maker to his or her inner essence wherein spiritual knowledge is realized. There is thus an intimate connection between work, spiritual realization, and protecting God’s creation in fulfilling a hierarchy of spiritual and other needs. From this point of view, the modern world’s ecological crises are seen to result from its reductionist, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview that desacralizes work and does injustice to the worker while threatening nature itself by treating both as resources rather than the sacred creations they are. Moreover, modern, mainstream environmental economic theory fails to recognize the extent of “market failures” because it does not recognize that the unicity or interrelatedness of creation reflects the unity of the Divine Principle. And government attempts to correct market failures themselves routinely fail because of overly powerful special interest groups operating under desacralized production processes without a proper theology of work. Thus, economics is not a “separate domain” from the rest of social life which requires the balancing of self-interest with social considerations for beneficent outcomes, contrary to the claims of mainstream economic thought. This study of Islamic environmental economics—rooted in Islamic metaphysical and cosmological sciences—reveals a path to ecological equilibrium that lies in the recovery of the Islamic intellectual heritage and in the establishment of corresponding Islamic scientific, technological, economic, and other social structures that integrate the findings of science into higher orders of knowledge resulting in spiritually meaningful work, vocational occupations, and integral development.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Waleed El-Ansary
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4403701137