The Environment, The World System & The Muslim Scholar

Abstract

The causal link between the environmental crisis and scholarly activities may seem untenable at first glance. After all, what could scholars do, one may ask, to improve the environment? Common sense suggests that this is the domain of environmental science and engineering, not the task of humanities and social sciences; scholars ought not to be occupied with how many species are disappearing, as that seems to be the domain of biologists. If pollution is getting out of control, it must be due to the irresponsibility of policy makers whose inefficiency may seem to be the cause of it. If the humanities and social science scholars venture out of their specializations, they will find that they have everything to do with the rapidly deteriorating environment. By seeing the world holistically, they can identify the impending environmental crisis and help save the environment by studying the causal factors of its destruction. Conversely, they should bear in mind that their absence from this field will lead directly to its further deterioration. A better future lies in the activities of those scholars whose efforts can help create an environment conducive to sustaining the quality of life, not with the scholars who are preoccupied with choosing routes to economic and political modernity that will yield maximum economic growth and material wealth. Shifting from economics to political science, one finds that ‘security’, a notion central to the field, has acquired a different meaning. It is not military security or internal security of one or several states alone that defines the field, but environmental security, which is common to the whole planet. Deforestation exists because there is a market for timber, which is not due to the needy people who want to build a shack to live in, but due to the profit seekers whose activities have become devoid of ethics. Market is supposedly apolitical but it is also unethical. The population explosion, which is a direct result of certain distinct developments in the. field of modem medicine, is at the core of environmental destruction. It took 130 years for the world population to grow from one to two billion but it will take just a decade to climb from five billion to six billion! The debate ...