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Environmental and Economic Ethics: Revisiting the Islamic Tradition
Abstract
In this paper, I analyze classical environmental and economic thought as it is conceptualized and constructed within Islamic intellectual history, in relation to the question of moral accountability. Drawing from the classical Muslim scholarship on fiqh, kala?m, and ta?awwuf, I inquire which trends, movements, and ideas contributed toward environmental and economic thought in Islamic tradition. By bridging the gap between various classical sciences and traditions, in this research I will ask what defines environment, economy, and nature in Islamic tradition, given its polyvalent and multifaceted orientation. Looking at particular figures, such as al-Shayb?n? (d. 805), al-Mu??sib? (d. 857), al-Sulam? (d. 1021), al-Qushayr? (1074), al-Ghaz?l? (d. 1111), Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), and al-R?z? (d. 1210), among others, indicates that these scholars wrote on economic thought and preserving the natural habitat from a polyvalent and integrative perspectives, encompassing legal and theological questions from moral and cosmological standpoints. By retrieving Islamic socio-intellectual history, environmental degradation appears less a resource-problem than an attitude-problem, and pinpoints to the fact that the environmental crisis is not only an individual but also a collective issue. Hence, reading the classical Muslim legal scholars, theologians, and Sufis, presupposes that the fields of economic and environmental thought were not separated but rather amalgamated in a web of approaches, movements, and schools of thought that addressed, for instance, economic provision and conservation of nature based on the Qur’anic metaphysics. By the same token, this paper invites us to rethink Islamic tradition itself, its limitations and its potential impact in the context of current debates on environmental sustainability from a critical perspective.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
Islamic World
Sub Area
Islamic Thought