Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Religion, Secularism and the Challenge of the Environmental Crisis : TheIsmai

bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim mr. president mr. la Fani dear friends the center belonging to the smiley community feels like a home for me because throughout my life in one way or another I was Allah honey summarized for you I've been associated in some ways with this mighty community since one of the instructors not a professor at Harvard few years older than the person was to become the Imam of the community and has been so for over 50 years was very very close to me he's come to our house all the time he didn't much Persian food from my mother's cuisine as I have practically and whom I have always loved very much and in the older days I used to be oftentimes you consulted by in many matters including mother some architecture and art and his quest for knowledge was something insatiable unreal a divine gift which is also a gift for the Smarty community with the emphasis upon education which the community has been carrying out both here in europe and exalt communities as well as within Pakistan and India and later an establishment of a major university in Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union and our own universe itself in Pakistan branches London and many many other activities of the kind I feel honored that throughout my life I've had opportunity provided to me by God to be in a humble way associated with some of the very important efforts that the often carried out in these matters but tonight I'm not going to talk about these cooperations I'm going to be talking about a subject which was chosen by the people who invited being honored me in delivering the inaugural talk at this beautiful new center and there's the question of religion secularism and their environment first of all it's a remarkable fact itself fifty years ago not a single Islamic Center would have ever invited a public lecture to talk about the environment the fact that this is done itself is a turning of a page to nothing it's insignificant and we have a long history as to why it took the stomach wore such a long time to become aware of the environmental crisis and specially the religious scholars in Islamic world I should turn to that in a moment but first the thing I want to say is that there's no issue more important in the world today besides of course the spiritual life of man and woman than the environment I read a wonderful sign somewhere in your city that we're all the guests of the environment that's right we're very bad guests however who are killing our hosts left and right but just existing modern manages existing destroys the world that's that's to be modernist to destroy the world of nature that's the great tragedy of oedema shall try to find out why the environment environmental crisis is not only a reality is the center of reality of life and it's a very great tragedy as soon as a little economic downturn in the main motor of the destruction of environment which is Western civilization especially the United States immediately environmental issue is forgotten studied when is spoken about by people in democratic party was supposed to be its defenders not to talk about Republicans Oliver none of the planets in which there is no environmental crisis but but for those who live on this planet even for them this is something that is oftentimes put aside as soon as another very small issue compared to the possible disaster and catastrophes that we're going to set the two faced comes up and this is not true only of the West it's true of every country in the world after the great disaster in Japan derive the radioactivity which still around in Japan had all heard for a while there were these big posters in opposition totally to Western technology and uses of atomic power but the insistence of every country to try to live in a way which is totally in contrast with harmony with nature but you call modern life brought back the instances of the government that somehow they were going to fix the situation one way or another and the opposition gradually died out but nevertheless despite the fact that we live in a world in which the powers that be do everything possible to prevent people from waking up to this crisis with all kinds of lullabies to keep us asleep nevertheless there is a gradual rise that awareness that if you do not come to understand our correct relationship with the world of nature we're not going to be around we're not going to be around to even talk about the future it's all we call in Persian just poetry in the negative sense share it's not really serious I didn't want to insult poetry of course I love poetry but I'm using a Persian expression when you want to say something that's not serious it says share that in the sense that it's just words not real substance and so I think it is important to take every opportunity possible every opportunity possible to come back to this issue I've spent over 50 years for over 50 years of my life thinking and writing and lecturing about this matter from the days when as a young student at Harvard MIT I used to walk alone around Walden Pond about one o'clock in the morning when there's nobody else around the ball in the pond Bosh with Thoreau wrote this classical book and meditating upon nature and what was happening to do what I miss mention of rules 1:28 was suddenly cut off the outer part of nature from the greatest city of Boston through the so called belt that is still used and no longer animals were able to cross and to come into Arlington where I used to live that time until now much of my intellectual activity and spiritual activity has been spent on this matter I'm sort of a kind of veteran wounded in many many wars that have been carried out very difficult once I gave the keynote address at the first Earth Day in Stockholm which was a very difficult task a soviet union of the time and China both thought that the environmental crisis was the capitalists plot carried out by capitalism and that communist countries that no crisis whatsoever and I had to give the keynote address and it got me so angry when the swagger delegate was sitting like this in front of it and somebody said made this asinine statement and he said I no no of no more communist River than the Volga it's a purely communist server from opted until floors of the Caspian Sea and it pollutes the next thousand kilometers all the way to the coast of Persia of Iran of gill Animas and Iran and all the fish being environmentalists all of the fish that you try to put cultivate in the north as soon as the wise enough the all Sherman come to south that's what much was called Russia and caviar is really Persian caviar just called the Russian again the caviar refused to stay up in the north and I got the Soviets very language to Gaurav and walked out who cares they fell the Soviet Union fell apart and as soon as they fell apart they found out that two-thirds of all the rivers are Poland was so polluted that they could no longer be used and thirty years after fall of the Soviet Union much of southern Russia and many of the Eastern European countries are extremely polluted not that the West is much better but listen the Western people came to recognize it so I've had the experience of speaking a great deal about this matter to many different audiences from the highest authorities to students to hippies to industrialists and alike but tonight this is primarily an audience that I believe is mostly Muslim and is mostly suppressive smiley or related to matters pertaining to Islamic civilization and so rather than speaking only in general terms I will try to narrow down my comments mostly to the Islamic world but not completely the first question to ask is the meaning of the title of my talk is religion is what role does religion play in environment the asset leaders question contains a great paradox great paradox there's no doubt although many have tried to denied it after I wrote the manner nature man and the articles many people have come around to realize this that as long as men and women of course by man and mean OMA and son not male as long as men were lived according to religion there was no environmental crisis no one can deny that sin that the goats were eating up the trees in the Middle East 2,000 years ago as the same thing as having the Hudson River polluted are all this kind of nonsense like that is really irrelevant it's not true the science of philosophy or anything else or history for that matter there's no doubt that as long as human beings lived according to religion we didn't have an environmental crisis secondly the environmental crisis started in that for one part of the world where humanity decide to push religion to the side not totally destroy it but marginalize it that's the West the environmental crisis began in the Ruhr Valley in Lowell Massachusetts in Liverpool places like that where industries began heavily in the 18th century where writers like Charles Dickens began to write about the monstrosity of the time but that time it was small enough and nature big enough so you moved to the next hill and you don't have to worry to this very day when you travel in Midlands of England you see this beautiful green valley and then you come up the hill the next is just completely black soot you have to hold your nose to go through and then come the next value again semia Pennsylvania very very similar situation this hilly states in eastern part of the United States which have the oldest history of industrialization so this is a historical fact that the environmental crisis begins by that part of the human collectivity which decided to marginalize religion no one can really fear that all the secularists today are against what I'm saying hundreds of books have been written to try to sir no religion is at fault or shall come to rather than a moment but this fact is not to be refuted because it's impossible to refute it however at the same time at the same time we see that in the West ninety percent of the people who are very much interested in the environment are secularists not all fifty years ago was one hundred percent well I always give this story when I published man and nature there is a Chicago came all the way to Tehran to invite me to give the rock lascivious lectures because bhenchod did the great historian of religion was one of the very few people aware of the significance of the environment a crisis of which nobody spoke at that time I know the role of religion in it had written by the religions of India and the importance of nature with a very exceptional romanian scholar so to send a professor of chemistry john rust all the way to the Middle East to accept me to to de Martin to give the lectures which I did at that time the greatest although the audience had many theologians it was a sponsored by the part of science and the Divinity School got together the many theologians there and the many scientists and liberal arts and so forth the greatest opposition to what to say came from Christian theologians that's only in the nineteen sixties that's only 50 years old fifty years ago you would not could not find a single Christian theologian who tried to defend nature against its abuse from a Christian point of view why is the soul this is the same religion that produced Francis of Assisi who talked to the birds and wrote that beautiful addressed to the Sun on the moon why did this happen why did this happen this is a very complex matter I cannot go into it now but very quickly was the rise of the Scientific Revolution the fact that the Catholic Church burned his hands the playin trials and after that decided not to have anything more to do with the cosmos with the world of nature and they said we don't care within you said the world is square or trapezoid or rectangle that's not our business ours is the way of love and no religion came here the way of love alone has to have something about the world of nature says that never the world of nature our self knowledged and just a sentimentality is not going to do it 300 years pass on the Galileo trial until the Catholic Church realized that they had to have a doctrine about the world of nature Protestantism although early in the sixteenth century including Martin Luther himself was the keeper of the fish he was the keeper of the fish in a pond in Germany an early Protestantism there are thinkers in it up to the 17th century philosopher so-called German Theo so first there were people who were interested in nature but gradually died out and the piranhas tourism became very a cosmic totally indifferent to the world of nature it did not produce one single major thinker about nature so what happened in the West is that in the 19th century when a reaction sent but was set in especially first in Germany and then in England and blessed to leiserson in France against this new ugly modernization and industrialization that people were seeing the reaction didn't come from Christian circles he came from people like William Blake he came from people like Wordsworth he came from Lord Alfred Tennyson Tennyson was learning Arabic or was going blind it was not at all interested in Christianity anymore Wordsworth was neither and Blake was considered to be a pagan and you know the Christian Church consumed their pagan altars one of the deepest religious poets of the English language but he wrote some of the deepest poetry about nature all of you know there is this famous poem Tyger Tyger burning bright poems like that which really praise the beauty of and power of nature but the mainstream religion in Europe was concerned with other issues theology morality politics all kinds of other issues and because at that time Western religion began to take pride in progress as proving the superiority of Christianity about other religions saying that Western progress had occurred in the West that is modern progress because of Christianity and that Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth did not have the same advantages to offer and so you had the Ruhr Valley in Germany rather than in India they took great pride in that no no theologian today will ever speak like this anymore that day is over but I'm talking about the historical background which led to this so those people who criticized religion for having a role or to some extent right but this was not the whole Christian historical tradition there were days when Christianity produced great mystical thinkers about nature the division and Ettore of originals weren't the greatest masterpieces in the Latin language about the world of nature but the last three four hundred years were marked actually by religion in the West giving up the world of nature and therefore living living nature in the hands of two forces a totally secular science which is modern science has nothing to do with the transcendence to which the world spiritual meaning of nature is totally irrelevant it's purely subjective or non-existent and of course greed and power over nature how to milk the cow to give you the maxim of the milk how to so-called developed development is the most dangerous word in the English language for the future of humanity in a certain sense if you mean by that mean economic regular economic development because it means the expansion of something infinitely in a finite space which means they will explode mathematical is impossible and logically simple and so for this very very reason people were not really concerned with what was going on these new isms had taken hold and those people thought of humanity our humanistic I thought of the future of humanity never thought that human means neither home to live in even people had good intention in the 19th century forth for the poor for the oppressed for this than that even Karl Marx his intentions were not always bad he was thinking of the plight of the poor except it was an atheist and it destroyed religion and trying to help the poor but the original anthem is their kind of secularized charity although Marx was a Jew Marxism is a secularized Christianity but the supreme virtual christianity of a charity this is charity without God that's what Marxism was and many moments like that were created in 19th century so when the environment crisis really began in the 20th century Western religion at first didn't want to be concerned with it he took it a great deal of time to divorce itself from taking pride in having caused the environment across us that in the name of progress of course not not saying in Watchmen grass but the taking a great pride that the West produced bothers science and you people couldn't do it when the Jesuits went to China to approach to do missionary activity for Catholicism what did father Ricci present to the Chinese said look all the signs that we have a you don't have he didn't talk about the meekness of Christ and the humility of Christ he talked about Western science that's how they convert people in Africa to Christianity by giving them some kind of medicine for the cows not by just reading the book of John that's not that's not it so this event was a very very major central event that shook Western religion there's no doubt about it so this story of religion being responsible for the environmental crisis is not true but there's some truth in what happened in the way would happen in the West that is the Western religious view except for marginal figures here and there there are some marginal figures I will not go into them now I don't have time but acceso for some marginal figures lift out the significance of the spiritual quality of nature nature became the nature of Francis Bacon something to be manipulated that made use of other wrote wants in a strong language that nature was turned from being a wife was legitimate rights to be turned into a prostitute and so the Western man began to process two thousand h éeer for the next three centuries until it reached a point when the crisis really began and that process of course has not stopped i have not been to your city for 20 years and i've see half of the city is gone as far as the trees were concerned where the trees go where all the beautiful forests of around here that disappeared and boxes have taken the place which we call apartment houses the ugliness that is not unique to your city but is all over the world i said unfortunately tragically are two things in which mankind are united one is the destruction of nature and was in the in the creation of ugly atmosphere ambience in this place so what they're in Beijing or Vancouver or Paris or Tehran my own city where I was born doesn't matter I know I'm not trying to criticize others that began Cristal myself with what happened to the city in which I was born in City after her own everywhere is the same everywhere is the same and causes the same cause the same that is the divorce of our understanding of nature from the sacred and spiritual from the sacred the spiritual now we come to the second factor secularism did that have a role in the environmental crisis and the answer to that is very very much so and again then now the story is reversed secularism was ready born after the Middle Ages but it step-by-step it was that everything in Europe became immediately secularized there are many villages until a few years ago in Italy before the television came in I feel like medieval villages people are still living in a religious world and sacred world as so so was that the Kim immediately but he went step by step but the important thing is that it became the dominating paradigm it took over the universities the educational system and therefore people were trained children were trained no matter what their parents taught them at home a secularized view of the world of nature so even those who were Christian at the church on Sunday from Monday until Saturday they lived in a secularized world very little challenge came from the Christian side of what was happening to God's creation you might say that is the secularization of the world so sicker ISM became me the most powerful force and many of the so-called new social sciences along with the Natural Sciences were cultivated in a secularist ambience look at political science we sell political science I'm sure the Simon Fraser University big Department two-thirds of all the world's problems today involve religion but no one ever took teaches religion political science departments that's taboo that's tough as if it didn't exist so drawing writing about Vancouver without writing about rain thank god we've had no rain the last two days but but in the long run in the long run I don't want to insult your beautiful city but it's it's like that how can you teach political science government in a pledge to Harvard University of Columbia this major American universities as if religion didn't exist was 3/4 of all the problem exists in the world today even was happening Burma the massacre of Muslims is acceptable religion not only the palestinian-israeli question all the what's going on inside the Islamic world but also outside of the star world world in India and the Muslims and Buddhists and all kinds of things in Africa everywhere you see this going on there are a very few very very few in fact conflicts which do not involve religion and when they do sometimes when it's political expedience hidden but what's happening in Ukraine now well one of the most important problems the difference between Orthodox Russian Orthodox or Ukrainian Orthodox Christians and the Catholic Orthodox that's also us Catholic or on the side of the Vatican and this goes back to medieval history I haven't seen it'll single word about this in any American press but it's there almost every conflict today in a sense religion came back in the 20th century and so the confidence that is always involved religion but the sciences that came out during the settlers period usually left religion aside everything became secularized until finally the study of religion itself became secularized what's going on now in American and Canadian universities and what you teach religion on the condition you don't believe in it it's like teaching music under condition and being musically deaf that's only done from the field of religion but not for any other field of course we push there are other possibilities it's not the same always but that's the prevalent idea so in such an atmosphere everything that we looked upon was looked upon intellectually from the Secretary's point of view Western philosophy became secularized Western sociology psychology various disciplines and it was quite obvious therefore that the environmental crisis could never be seen as the crisis from a secularist point of view because if you do not accept the sacred quality of nature if that is destroyed nothing is destroyed they didn't exist to start with you only talk about certain parameters until human life itself becomes threatened until ecosystems become threatened and that happens gradually in the early 20th century and the very word ecology enters into the English language in a new meaning now which now we call environment before YouTube called ecological studies environmental system to the fore but dominated by secularism so there's no doubt about that that the beginning of a study of the environment in the West begins from a secular point of view and most of the people who really began the environmental movement brought the consciousness of environment movement to America which was the motor for the destruction of the world from industrial point everybody else was copying what was going on in America were young American people who had really opposed the whole thesis of their own civilization the baccata came to be known as hippies in the 1960s there were really quite remarkable young men and women most of them from well-to-do families didn't go with the classical theories of sociologists that always come from poverty non total nonsense and didn't come from poverty at all it came from well-to-do families the young no longer found meaning in life and so they rejected the Western Way of life and they turned to alternatives including the love of nature including the Native American tradition and the love of nature or Asian religions and so forth and so on all kinds of things that came to the fore and that gradually brought religion back upon the scene brought the religion back upon the scene but paradoxically as we sit here right down I just sit here right now the New Age religion so-called which are not serious religion to our man-made constructs of the 20th century they are taking little bits here from Buddhism and Islam or some Hinduism or some other reason putting it together but nevertheless people who follow these perspectives are much more interested in the environment than the most devout Christians in America the more devout you are usually in Christianity the lesser insists in their environment like for example the Southern Baptists were called fundamentalist Protestant fundamentalists who never miss going to church every Sunday they're the group most opposed to all environmental serious environmental studies in the United States and same with the Catholic Church the people who are really sort of old-style Catholics they think this is all nonsense and if the world comes to an end so much the better that Christ will come back and it's only the modernized Catholic who dilute are interested in this so Christianity in the West has had a tremendous problem of how to come to terms with the environment at a time when it's most devout followers have not shown much interest in the environment now the case of other religions of the world is totally different and I wish our time here to talk about Hinduism and Buddhism and so abroad I'm going to turn right to Islam the case of a song we're criticised oftentimes in the West I'm reading this sentence I Miss America myself as a Muslim why it is that let's say from 50 years ago when the attention was begun among religious circles in the West to the environmental crisis why wasn't this done among Muslims it's a good question good question there's a very very complex set of answers for this first of all Islam was never sick arised as Christianity was Islamic thought was not secularized the same way although in the 18th century that began the so-called reformist movements leading to Wahhabism and things like that which whittled down the reality of religion but did not secularize it completely the consequence of course was leap was leaving a void so that in Jeddah today you do not have a single Arabic restaurant it's all Appleby or McDonald's at the center of the Kaaba just a few miles down the road this unbelievable paradox of Wahhabism and butchers were very devout Muslims but the latest Western technology fills everything there's nothing left of hijazi culture so that does the consequence of it but that was very different from having bail on Karl Marx that's a very very different thing the Islamic world you never was challenged in the way that the Christian worldview was to secularize it there once a Christian with a girlfriend of mine was saying that you know that it was the you on us is that in the West there are many people who do not hear the voice of God anymore I've met Muslims who do not heed the voice of God I've never met a Muslim but they do not hear his voice this is a comment was made to me by very profound French Catholic philosopher I was quite quite profound quite quite profound that is the Muslims did not lose faith in the same way that but as what happened in the Christian was now a few people are are found here and there but there are an extremely small minority so a very different dynamic in the phenomenon I've coming to deal with nature now since all of these major events which were helping in the destruction of nature and the environment were taking place in the West and the Islamic world like the rest of the world was simply trying to catch up with the errors of the West where they were put in this sense they're trying to catch up period by catch up with what the leftovers of the breadcrumbs at the Western table or with the errors that the West was making so if the West was polluting rivers would pollute the seven said the West will find the solution I mean I Spit as a person who spoken in Pakistan and India and not only my own country many many country by this issue and always the argument is oh the West is called these problems they're omnipotent omniscient they'll find the solution we'll get it from them that's the attitude of most people who are not inferiority complex which includes almost all the East with a few exceptions here and there and that's why in fact the minorities living in America Muslim minorities plays such an important role in the future for the rest of the Islamic world but I will not get into that but then even the Islamic world this would seem to be a problem when I was living in Tehran the population of Tehran were 300,000 and you could see Mount Damavand the highest peak in Western Asia 19,000 foot mountaha van from the roof of our house now you can't even see your cousin's house next Rama God I have the pollution throughout to talk about Mount Damavand at that time nobody realized what was coming about and so the waking up to this crisis has been much much slower and the habit exceptions sure kept ro with Grand Mufti of Syria before it's a great tragedy for this wonderful country he died he was a real environmentalist it was amazing with the Grand Mufti I was a very good friend of mine and I'm not a Mufti I'm not a religious figure in that sense I have a lot of freedoms to say things but people don't but he only was the Grand Mufti of Syria was a person who spoke in these terms and he wanted the mullahs of Fridays to preach about the environment in masala time but here a great problem came up in Islamic world which the West does not have and that is the almost every Islamic country what the preachers preach on Friday is ordered by the government controlled by the government such a wonderful free country like Egypt would you not have democracy carried out through what I call a moody child instead of a coup d'etat which is what they call him motionless or the marriage will continue to pay money to the army has carried the kukuda that was against American law to do it in such a country even during her Mubarak nobody had the complete freedom to preach whatever they wanted just when a little bit out of line you disappeared for a while and you probably were exiled to Kuwait or somewhere like that song that's why we have so many Egyptians in Kuwait and even in a place like Malaysia when my dear friend dr. back from Mary come from it sound like 34 years ago the the Friday sermons are closely watched and controlled now one of the things is governments do not like is anything that would stall safai what they believe to be economic progress and so there is a very strong opposition government wise in the United States and Islamic country but does not exist States in order to be able to bring up environmental issues I'm not saying this is 100 percent I never did say that but it's much stronger than in the West I mean a minister preaching on some Sunday morning even in North Carolina if he gets up and talks about that God doesn't want you to destroy his nature he's not going to be put into prison whereas somebody saying something like that in Cairo maybe Islam might be its last sermon that so you have this problems a practical problem the practical problem is extremely important because although most Muslim governments don't really care with this economic progress or not it just will remain in power but remain empowered as we talk about economic progress and so anyone who tries to stop the so-called jump forward is then opposed by political forces but a deeper level on a deeper level the Islamic world has a much easier path and does the Christian world in dealing with the environmental crisis first of all it has now had 400 years of a secularized history classical Islamic thought is much more impregnated by philosophies of nature Islamic poetry Persian Arabic or do Cindy all the different languages of full of nature poetry which are non nature poet as we call it in English because we will consider often to be secular secularized people didn't Christian didn't like nature poetry usually they're Pro founded religious by nature poetry and many of you come to sub count of India if you were a bit old robber caught some poems for you from Satya novices and so forth like the Jahan for Amazon engage Iran for a Mizzou's that is I'm a very famous poem of sati or Sharon burana olam column azuz that is I am joyful be the world because the world belongs to him I love the world of nature because God loves that world love nature and it's very beautiful poems the personal language and similar was in Arabic and so forth our culture was impregnated from the very beginning by a refusal to separate nature and super nature is one of the weaknesses of classical Christian theology which made the secularization of nature so easy in the West Fabio rumor have the separation in Islamic languages very easily and the word sometime use now are contrived translation modern translation if you read Avicenna sohrabardi there's no word for nation and super nature in the sense that you read medieval european texts so the Islamic world intellectually has it much more easy and culturally much more easy because our culture I said like poetry prose histories and so forth and so on are replete with a kind of cosmic dimension of Islam and that goes back to the Quran the Quran addresses not only human beings but also the cosmos of all the sacred scriptures of the world with the exception without a Jing the sacred scripture of Taoism which is almost equal to or on no other scripture speaks as much about nature we take all the verses in the New Testament there's no reference to nature if you take the Old Testament references in Genesis Deuteronomy and so forth and so on I'll add them all up together they're just a small amount compared to all of these verses in the Quran of the 6000 some verses in the Quran over 1/3 directly are related to nature speaking about nature in one way or another even God swears by natural things by the pomegranate by the Sun and the moon the verse that I read a sham sobre la Maria Sudan the Sun and the moon prostrate themselves before God there's a very very strong sense of Quran that Islam is not only for human beings it's a cosmic reality all creatures participate in Islam and this is so strong and so powerful that if Muslims really come to themselves it's much easier to be able to develop an environmental philosophy which would not be incongruent or with their religion or artificial as if you add artificial tail to a donkey it's part and parcel of the Islamic world view that's what for centuries many missionaries accused of Islam Muslims have been naturalistic of Islam being a naturalistic religion and even the great Sufis and mystics well called natural mystics whereas Christians will call supernatural mystics all the nonsense that now has disappeared even among Catholic writers they don't write things like that anymore but even in 10 to 40 physical jackman returned people like that used to have this theory of natural and supernatural mysticism mystic natural red mystics or natural things like that and Christians when they were attacking installments centuries pass always saw Islam has been naturalistic as if it didn't come from God but now of course things are very different this what appeared to enemies of Islam at that time has been simply naturalistic shows the integrative power of Islam in being able to integrate the natural and the human they're not separated from each other two intertwined the word that is used for this wonderful journal sacred web is really a piranha term deep down metaphysically there's a web that connects us all to God and that is not only human beings all creatures call - Anu sub over from the heat of Quran says it's not only a school - a and all things him the praise of God and so there is this community that we share with all creatures birds are called communities in the pariah it's not only the community in Vancouver or Toronto human beings these birds everything has its own community and is the total community which really is the total creation of God and there's nothing outside of that and it's so easy to develop an Islamic authentic Islamic philosophy of the environment it's not so difficult to do I've done my share I'm not going to be writing any more about these matters in sha allah are the people better than i will come along and completely what i've been doing for many many decades done a written a great deal on this but unbelievably rich tradition to be able to revive a philosophy which is needed more than anything otherwise dungeons to quote sadi and then pollute tehran more and more every day is a kind of suicide or read the quran and then pollute the river next-door through all the garbage and the running water like so many of us do in other parts of Middle East this is a kind of suicide and the song world can no longer afford it North can anyone else let me conclude because I want to give you a chance to ask me some questions and I've spoken almost enough but there's one more point I want to say the environmental crisis itself for those who really have eyes to see of the perspicacity is both the proof of God's transcendence and the proofs of the interconnected about connectedness of all beings john donne roar no man is an island we human beings are not an island unto ourselves we cannot be happy without the happiness the rest of creation we have killed enough massacred enough of God's other creatures now is the time to pay as a kind of yama yama for all of us and god will judge us in the future whether we're able to live in harmony and peace with the rest of his creation or commit suicide there is no third choice and it is great work that is before us I hope and pray the Muslims the whole and especially groups that a smiley community which have has a long history a very very profound treatments of this issue going back to Nasser aha straw and the great classical writers of 900 years ago will step forward and provide leadership and guidance not only for the Muslims but perhaps for the whole world thank you

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Published: Thu Dec 10 2015