Environment and climate

Family: Evolution, origins and modern science · 4 entries

Guide. The curated guide for this theme has not been written yet.

Entries on this theme

Event

• Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah's detachment to the sea coast (the Khabat raid)

  c. 629 CE · c. 8 AHA detachment the Prophet sent to the sea coast under Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, provisioned with a single bag of dates; Ubada ibn al-Samit tells it: Abu Ubayda rationed the dates until each man received one a day, and when hunger wore them down God brought out for them a sea creature on whose flesh and fat they lived twenty nights until they grew fat; the commander propped up one of its ribs and the tallest man on the biggest camel passed beneath it. When they asked the Prophet about having eaten it he said: a provision God provided you.

Concept

• Environmental protection in Islam

  Muhyi al-Din Afifi Ahmad holds that pollution of water, air and land threatens people and societies, and that resolutions of international conferences were not carried out (p. 119). He presents Islam as asking people to use their natural environment well and to live with it so as to keep its essentials (p. 120), and reads the Qur'anic passages on the cosmos as calling for reflection on the relation between humans and creation (p. 121). These are the author's readings; further sources are needed for detail.

• Hima (protected reserve)

  A reserved pasture closed to all but those for whom it is set aside; in Ibn Hisham the Prophet set a hima around the village of Jurash with marked boundaries for the horse, the riding camel and the plough-ox, declaring the property of any outsider who grazed it forfeit, and wrote to Hamdan that the heights and lowlands of their land were theirs to graze while they prayed and paid zakat. Al-Hamdani's gazetteer still maps the tribal himas by name two centuries on — the hima of Dariyya, of the Qutayf and of the Nuta among them.

• The submission of creation (willing and unwilling)

  Sha'rawi holds that all that is in the heavens and the earth has submitted to God, willingly or unwillingly. For beings not under obligation, willing submission is the obedience of subjection, and unwilling submission is what the human has no choice over, such as birth, death and sickness. He holds that the chosen submission of the believer is to match God's law by doing and refraining, and that the universe is in harmony when the human is in harmony with it. He rejects reading unwilling submission as compulsion in religion.

What is missing? Tell us · A theme is open when it has a reviewed guide, 10 questions, 25 entries across 5 classes, and voices from several traditions and regions.

Controversial topics

• Sexuality and gender diversity
• Converts and those who leave
• Images and figural art
• Takfir and its critics
• Dissent, heresy and freethought
• Conquest and its debates
• Violent extremism and the Muslim response
• Islam and atheism or secular thought