Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the World:  Laying a New Foundation

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

International Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon, Virginia, May 2009

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Systems Framework of Islamic Normative Law

I. The Paradigmatic Clash Between Power and Justice
II. The Roots of Justice in Natural Law
III. The Roots of Justice in Islamic Normative Law
IV. The Historical Transformation from Adjunct to Systems Theory
V. Distinguishing the Spiritual from the Social

Part Two:  The Transcendent Purposes

I. The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Din
II. The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Nafs
III. The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Nasl
IV. The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Mahid

Part Three:  The Immanent Social Purposes

I. The Social Principle of Haqq al Hurriyah
II. The Social Principle of Haqq al Mal
III. The Social Principle of Haqq al Karama
IV. The Social Principle of Haqq al ‘Aql

Index

Part Two:  The Transcendent Purposes

III.  The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Nasl

The third maqsud or universal and essential principle of Islamic thought and of the maqasid as a framework for human responsibilities and rights is haqq al nasl, which is the duty to respect human community.  This purpose derives from the centrality of ultimate truth, haqq al din.  Human community is sacred because its component members are the link between the transcendent and the immanent.

The Qur’an reveals that all sentient beings, in fact all animals, have an instinct to live in pairs in order to produce progeny, and beyond that all sentient beings seek to live in community, in fact, even in multiple levels of community.  The transcendent purpose of community is to facilitate awareness of God.  Human community is sacred because its members individually are sacred.

The husband and wife pair and their extended family form the first level of community.  Traditionally, the village and tribe form the next level.  The highest traditional level of community is the nation, which may be defined as a community of people with the same sense of their past, the same values in the present, and the same hopes for the future.  A still higher level of human self-identity is one’s own civilization.  The highest level of community on earth is the human species, which has become increasingly important as persons and nations realize that they are mutually dependent on each other. 

In Islamic law nations exist as independent and sovereign actors with human rights, whereas in Western law only corporate states have legal existence, and only individual persons have human rights. 

The existence and sense of community at the higher levels is known in classical Arabic as asabiya.  This is sacred and must be respected so long as it respects the interests of others.  When it does not, this kind of asabiya is known as tribalism.  This once had survival value, but increasingly in the “global village” such tribalism is self-destructive.

The sacred nature of human community is one of the foundations of civilization that has been most threatened by the pressures for secular modernization.  The imposition of centralized secular power as a method of modernization without the concept of community-based coherence and responsibility behind it, the propagation of atomistic individualism as a means to societal transformation without a moral recognition of the value of the individual person, and the accompanying attempt to impose an omnivorous collectivity without an appreciation of the responsibility and value of free community, all combine to create a crisis in identity and authority that has profoundly unsettled most of the peoples of the world.

The efforts of the mobilizing state to monopolize personal and group loyalties at a single level of the political spectrum, and to diffuse legitimacy downward from the corporate state rather than to permit loyalty and legitimacy to spread upward from the families and communities of individual persons, have tended to cause a radical contraction of the individual away from nature and from other people into the material boundaries of the calculating ego.  The primordial loyalties of communal nationalism in the first instance have become a fulcrum either for a passive longing not to belong to any other group or for the blind aggression of defensive self-assertion.  Inevitably, the primordial instincts of literally billions of people to draw meaning in their lives from community will increasingly bring them to awareness of a higher reality and create a willingness to live for this reality, as well as even to die for it.

The jurisprudential principle or maqsud of haqq al nasl subsumes and requires principles of respect among communities, including among entire civilizations. We may accept the basic thesis that civilizations as the next to highest form of human self-identity, other than the human species itself, will be increasingly important in the ‘global village’ during the century ahead.  The challenge is whether we can shift to the opportunity mentality in order to transcend the Cold War psychosis and make possible a century of peaceful engagement designed to promote the interests of all persons, nations, and civilizations.

The question is whether mere tolerance is sufficient to meet the required standard of respect.  Is tolerance compatible with peaceful engagement?  Is tolerance even a human right as part of natural law?  Scholars of interfaith understanding and cooperation are now advancing the view that tolerance is a bankrupt paradigm of thought that must be replaced by a better paradigm if civilization of any kind is to survive the present century.

The generic word “respect” reflects three different levels of a new paradigm of thought.  They range from tolerance at the bottom as the least inclusive level, and diversity at an intermediate level, all the way to pluralism as the most inclusive level and in this sense as the opposite of tolerance.

Basic tolerance means merely, “I hate you, but I won’t kill you yet.”  Diversity means, “I can’t stand you, but you are here so I can’t do much about it.”  Pluralism means, “We welcome you.  We have so much to learn from each other because we each have so much to offer.”

Pluralism means that we shift from the mindset that calls at best for both individual and group suicide through assimilation, and that instead we pursue integration whereby the individuals of each group in society proactively bring the wisdom of their tradition to enrich the overall society by sharing responsibility in forming and implementing the society’s agenda.

Mutual respect must emerge from recognition that all the revealed religions contain a universal paradigm of thought.  Muslims call this Islam.  It is based on affirmation that there is an ultimate reality of which man and the entire universe are merely an expression, that therefore every person is created with some innate awareness of absolute truth and love, and that persons in community can and should develop from the various sources of divine revelation, including natural law, a framework of moral guidance to secure peace through compassionate justice.  Recognition of this wisdom is the essence of classical thought in both America and Islam.

Most Muslim radicals deny that this has ever been the mission of American exceptionalism as a unique phenomenon in human history.  At best they claim that this vision has been bawdrylized or prostituted to pursue the false gods of power, prestige, privilege, and plutocracy.  Even if the original American mission was to be a moral model for the world, these radicals say that the hubris of American self-worship has come to justify and mandate cultural imperialism as a tool to ensconce American power as the epicenter of the political cosmos.  The only options presented to its victims are cultural retreat or military defeat.

This confrontational view of the world, shared by so many on both sides of what they see as a growing civilizational divide, raises two questions.  First, for Muslims, is America inherently a fraud?  If so, can Muslims continue to live in the same world with Americans?  Second, for Americans, is Islam a fraud?  If so, can Americans or anyone else continue to live in the same world with Muslims, especially those with weapons of mass destruction, or is the world too small for both of them?  This is the dilemma that sustains the demonization of the other inherent in the threat mentality on both sides of the global confrontation between the hawks in America and their only perceived rivals on the global scene, namely, the Muslim hawks on the other side. 

This is a false dilemma.  The real threat is the threat mentality itself, because it leads to its own self-fulfilling prophecy.  Those who predict chaos and oppression unless they can impose their own power on the world are precisely the ones who are turning their fears of chaos into reality. 

Part of the problem is the universal temptation to define another person’s religion by defaming it in defense of one’s own.  This is the substance of classical apologetics, but in the current environment it can turn into a lethal boomerang.  This is so because to interpret another religion as inherently extremist plays into the hands of extremists in this religion by legitimizing their own perversions.  Far better as a global strategy would be to support those in every religion who are trying to marginalize the hi-jackers in their own religion by preserving the enlightened understanding that is mutually shared by the traditionalists in all of them.  This is the origin of respect and also its fruit.

The major intellectual challenge for Islamic scholars throughout their history has been to develop from the Islamic scriptures and from the ethical teachings of all civilizations a framework of moral guidance to secure compassionate justice through respect for all of God’s creation, and especially for sentient beings made in the divine image. 

The role of respect in the Islamic scriptures for followers of the Abrahamic religions, including Muslims as well as Jews and Christians, require respect for religious pluralism based on love. 

The first secondary principle or hajja in haqq al nasl, namely, respect for religious pluralism by recognizing the legitimacy of different religions in the plan of God, requires three tertiary principles or tahsiniyat, which are equality in human dignity, unity in diversity, and universal conditions for salvation.  The second hajja is the requirement of love based on three other tahsiniyyat, namely, one’s personal relation with God, forgiveness, and peaceful reconciliation.  Together these two hajjiyat of pluralism and love lead to respect for Jews and Christians and to acceptance of them as fellow peoples of the book.

The basis of respect for religions other than one’s own is clear from the “throne verse,” Surah al Baqara 2:256, which is the most beautiful verse describing the attributes of God.  It is followed by verse 257, which states simply, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (la ikraha fi al din).

This is axiomatic because ultimate or absolute truth does exist and it is human instinct to seek it, but no person or community can know more than a portion of this truth.  Certainly no one should claim to possess it to the exclusion of others, because this would be the same as claiming to be God.  This is clear from scholarly interpretation of the statement in the throne verse, “He knows all that lies open before men and all that is hidden from them, whereas they cannot attain to any of his knowledge except what He wills [them to attain].”  Some scholars consider that the words “open” and “hidden” refer to earth and heaven, but the meaning is essentially the same.

The word din used here for religion is the broadest of several related terms and refers to the unchanging spiritual truths that have been preached by every one of God’s prophets.  Twice the Qur’an refers to the shar’, which refers to the normative jurisprudential principles common to Judaism, Christianity, and all human communities.  The term din in reference to freedom of religion includes also the more restrictive terms minhaj, which refers to an entire way of life based on one’s own conscience and the wisdom of one’s community, and shar’ah, which refers to the governing laws of the particular community.  The still more restrictive term, shari’ah, is reserved for the normative principles and specific regulations that are binding only on those who profess to be Muslims, even though the principles are universal.

The first of the three tahsiniyat or tertiary principles under the hajja of religious pluralism is equality in human dignity.  The Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, was specifically ordered to treat all people equally regardless of their religion.  Shortly after the throne verse we find Verse 2:272, which reads, “It is not for you, O Prophet, to bring people to the path of right guidance, since it is God [alone] who guides whom He will.”  The circumstance of this revelation was the Prophet’s advice to his companions to give charity only to his own followers in Medina who were poor.  The above revelation came immediately, whereupon the Prophet enjoined his followers to disburse charity based on personal need without regard to religion.  Freedom of religion means freedom for all persons to be treated equally in dignity as human beings.

The reason for this requirement of equal treatment is the requirement of respect for every person’s free will.  Surah Yunus 10:99-100 reads: “If God had willed, everyone would have believed.  Will you then compel humankind to believe against their will?  No soul will ever attain to faith except by the Will of God.”  As a moral being, every person is free to discriminate and choose between right and wrong and to use one’s reason in conforming to one’s God-willed nature, but this is possible only through the grace of God.  No one knows what graces have been bestowed upon another human being or why a particular person was created to choose a path to God within a particular religious community.

The second tahsiniyah or most important third-level principle under the hajja of religious pluralism is recognition and pursuit of unity in diversity.  Throughout the Qur’an, we are asked to see the coherence of the universe in the diversity that points to its Creator.  If uniformity were the norm, there would be only one standard tree, one standard cloud, and one uniform sunset all over the world.  Furthermore, we are directed to see that all beings are created to form pairs and with a nature that seeks community.  This communal nature applies also to religion.

Sur’ah al Ma’ida 5:48 reads thus: “To you have we given the scriptures, just as we have given scriptures to people before you.  We have protected your scripture [the Qur’an] in its entirety.  So, judge among people from what knowledge has come to you, and do not be carried over by your vain desires.  Unto every one of you We have appointed a [different] governing system of law (shir’ah) and a [different] way of life (minhaj).  If God had so willed, all humanity would have been a single community.  God’s plan is to test you in what each one of you has received [in both scriptures and inspiration].  So strive as in a race in all virtues.  The goal of all people is to God.  God [alone] will tell you the truth about matters over which you dispute.”

This is why the immediately preceding verse, 5:47, states: “Let, then, the followers of the Gospel judge in accordance with what God has revealed in it, for those who do not judge in the light of what God has bestowed from on high are truly the iniquitous.”  In other words unity in diversity can come only when the diverse paths are respected as legitimate in the plan of God, even though the most comprehensive expression of truth may be found in the Qur’an, after which no further revelation is necessary.

The third tahsiniyyah is respect for the universality of salvation.  One of the clearest and most insistent messages throughout the Qur’an and in the teachings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad was the universality of salvation within the various religions that have developed in various times and places. 

Only three conditions are given as the requirements for salvation.  These are: 1) belief in One God; 2) belief in the justice of God both in this world and the next; and 3) the practice of good works.

Near the beginning of the Qur’an in the second surah, Baqarah 2:62, we have the standard formulation: “Those who believe (in the Qur’an), those who follow the Jewish Scriptures, the Christians (those who follow the teachings of the Gospel), and the Sabians – all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds – shall have their reward from their Lord, and they need have no fear, nor shall they grieve.” 

The Sabians may refer to a specific people, but, like much of the Qur’an, probably is more generic in referring to all monotheistic peoples, as well as to every individual who follows his own human nature and recognizes the essence of what all the prophets have taught.  Muslims in the East, from Persia to the Pacific, have always included the Lord Buddha in this category.  One of the early revelations in the Qur’an, Surah al Tin, refers symbolically to four religions.  According to many commentators, this surah takes its title from the first symbol, namely, the Bo Tree (Tin) under which The Buddha received enlightenment.

In Surah al Baqara 2:112 an even more generic formulation is given: “Everyone who surrenders his whole being unto God, and is a doer of good, shall have his reward with his Sustainer; and all such need have no fear, and neither shall they grieve.”  The literal translation is “everyone who surrenders his face unto God,” which is classical Arabic for one’s whole being.  Whoever does so is a Muslim and it is in this sense that the terms islam (the religion) and muslim (the person who surrenders to God) are used throughout the Qur’an. 

Another or fourth tahsiniyyah in Islamic jurisprudence under the hajja of religious pluralism in regards to organic communities is respect for the equality of prophets.  A central teaching in Islam is that God has provided a prophet for every people, beginning with the cavemen millions of years ago, and probably has done so for all the sentient beings on the perhaps millions of other inhabitable planets in the universe.  The Qur’an states that no community has been left without a prophet.  The hadith suggest that the number of prophets is 124,000, which means numerous beyond count.

Since all prophets taught essentially the same thing, the Qur’an specifically says that they are all equal, even though they may have had different emphases depending on their audiences.  This equality of prophets mirrors the Qur’anic emphasis on the equality of believers in the different religious traditions.

The standard formulation is first found in Surah al Baqara 2:136: “Say: ‘We believe in God, and in what has been bestowed upon us from on high, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendents, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus, and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction among any of them. And it is unto Him that we [all of us] surrender ourselves (literally “unto Him we are Muslims)’.”

This is repeated verbatim in the next surah, Surah Ali Imran 3:84, and is preceded by the rhetorical question in 3:83, “Do they seek perchance a faith other than in God, although it is unto Him that whatever is in the heavens and on earth surrenders itself, willingly or unwillingly, since unto Him all must return.”  The standard formulation is followed in 3:85 by the warning, “For, if one goes in search of a religion other than self-surrender unto God (literally “other than the din of Islam”), it will never be accepted from Him, and in the life to come he shall be among the lost.”

This emphasis on the equality of prophets as representatives of God is why a Muslim is not a Muslim unless he believes in the holy scriptures given to the Jews and Christians. 

The Qur’an is merely a continuation and restorer of the same message that came to the Jews and Christians in earlier eras.  Every prophet has this same task in continuing the eternal message of a merciful God to his creatures, who are free to reject this message but with divine help can not only accept it but rise higher than the angels.

The second of the two hajjiyat under haqq al nasl is love.  The first of the three tahsiniyya within the principle of love is one’s personal relationship with God.

The most pervasive teaching in the Islamic religion is the centrality of love.  Oddly, this is precisely the concept that its detractors insist does not and cannot exist.  Unfortunately, Islam has more than its share of professed adherents who share the conclusions of its detractors and accordingly exhibit arrogance toward God and exude hatred rather than love for Jews and Christians.  Such hatred is the origin both of terrorism and of terroristic counter-terrorism.

The word islam means submission to God but implies both love as the means to submission, as well as the resulting peace.  The Qur’an often uses the term taqwa, which means loving awareness of God.  The common word for love, hubb, as the basis for the reciprocal relationship of love intended between God and the human person first appears near the beginning of the Qur’an in the second chapter, Surah al Baqara 2: 165: “Those who have attained to faith love Allah more than all else.”

The combination of God’s love and mercy first appears in the next chapter, Surah Ali Imran 3:31, which introduces the Virgin Mary and the “Word from God,” Jesus, whose message is renewed by Muhammad.  The Prophet Muhammad is instructed to say, “If you love God (in tuhibbuna Allaha), follow me, and God will love you (yuhbibkum Allahu) and forgive you your sins, for God is much forgiving, a dispenser of grace.”  The term hubb is first used in conjunction with taqwa in 3:76, fa ina Allaha yuhibu al mutaqin “for God loves those who live in awe of God’s love.”

The first complete listing in English of all terms in the Qur’an referring to love may be found in the Concordance of the Qur’an in English by H. E. Kassis, University of California Press.  In addition to hubb it also lists the related terms radiya, shaghata, and wadud (waada and wadda). 

The favorite prayer of the Prophet Muhammad, and of millions of Muslims after him, is Allahumma, asaluka hubbaka wa hubba man yuhibuka wa hubba kuli ‘amali yuqaribuni ila hubbika, “Oh Allah, I ask you for Your love, and for the love of those who love You, and for the love of everything that will bring me closer to your love.”

V. The Spiritual Principle of Haqq al Mahid

The last of the four transcendent purposes in the maqasid al shari’ah is environmental justice.  This is known as haqq al mahid, which is based on the Oneness of God, or as haqq al bayah, which is based on the primordial commitment of humankind to serve as guardians of Creation.

The responsibility or fard ‘ain of every person, and the collective responsibility or fard kifaya of every community, is to recognize the sacred nature of everything in Creation in all of its diversity as signs pointing to the Oneness of its Creator and Sustainer.

The theory of haqq al mahid has always remained in the center of perception throughout the history of Muslim civilizations, even though otherwise they might not qualify as Islamic.  The practice was once far ahead of anything anywhere else in the world. 

Reviving what is now popularly known as Eco-Islam is being advocated by an expanding literature on the subject.  For example, Sigrid Noekel of the Munich-based Stiftung Interkultur in Eren Guvercin’s interview with her, entitled “Islam, Environment, and Sustainability, http://www.qantara.de, described the early Islamic harim and hima protective zones around springs and streams where in order to prevent pollution no settlements were permitted.  Entire meadow and forest preserves were maintained in order to provide emergency support during times of draught and famine.  Centuries of encroachment by expanding populations, however, especially in the modern period of corporate agriculture designed for exports and quick profits, have largely eliminated these traditional eco-Islamic practices, which were designed originally to maintain a balance between destructive exploitation and productive use.  During the past twenty years, environmental heroes and heroines in some Muslim countries are successfully challenging the vested interests by reviving these old conservation practices.

This new environmental ethic, which is arising from the resurgence of the traditional Islam that arose during the classical period of the 3rd through 7th centuries A.H., has been successfully championed even in Arabia, the land of the super-skyscrapers, which some ahadith associate with the crass self-indulgence that will mark end of the world.  In 1987, while I was studying in Saudi Arabia, a non-Muslim friend of mine from the University of Wisconsin was hired to plan a system of national parks.  After spending two years studying all the world’s major national parks for guidance, he came to the conclusion that by far the best guidance for a truly ecologically sound system of parks in Saudi Arabia came from the Qur’an.

The best literature on the normative principle of haqq al mahid includes one booklet specifically on it as a discrete maqsud, namely, Professor Mustafa Abu-Sway’s Towards an Islamic Jurisprudence of the Environment: Fiqh al Bi’ah fil Islam, ( http://www.iol.ie/afifi/Articles/environment.htm ), and many equally long and even more sophisticated articles, such as Frederick M. Denny’s “Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust Inviting Balanced Stewardship,” ( http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/slam/index.html ), and Ibrahim Demir’s “Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s Approach to the Environment,” posted on August 31, 2003, in ( http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/bediuzzaman_said_nursis_approach_to_the_environment/ ), as well as the booklet, Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, prepared by Richard C. Foltz at the University of Florida, Frederick M. Denny of The University of Colorado at Boulder, and Azizan Baharuddin, who is Director of the Centre for Civilizational Dialogue at the University of Malaysia.

All of these scholars emphasize that the maqsud known as haqq al mahid, from the verb wahada and the nown wahda, is primarily a spiritual concept that serves to justify and guide the implementation of environmental philosophy and action.  Indeed, the very idea of respecting and protecting the natural environment might be included in the ghraib or “the unseen” aspects of reality that can be known primarily by personal experience, that is experientially.

The Qur’an speaks of an inner truth in Creation.  Thus in Surah al Hijr 15:85 we read: “Wa ma khalaqna al samawat wa al ard wa bainahum illa bi al haqq, “and We have created the heavens and the earth and all that lies in between with an inner truth.”  And again in Surah Yunus 10:5, “He it is who has made the sun a [source of] radiant light (diya’) and the moon a light [reflected) (nur), and has determined for it phases so that you might know how to compute the years and to measure time.  None of this has God created without [an inner] truth.”  This is repeated again and again in different contexts, such as Ali Imran 3:191 and Sad 38:27, where the term batilan is used and best translated as “meaning and purpose.”

Introducing Surah 15:85 is 15:75, which reads ina fi dhalika la’ayatin li al mutawasimin, “In this are messages for those who can read the signs.”  The root verb wasama in its fifth form tawasama means to watch or examine closely.  Both of the classical commentators Razi and Zamakhshari say that mutawasim means “one who applies the mind to the study of the outward appearances of a thing with a view to understanding its real nature and its inner characteristics.” 

Part of the inner truth, which is beyond the competence of modern science to either prove or disprove, is the human responsibility to serve as a vice-regent or khalifa of the Creator in multiplying and conserving the bounties of God.  At the beginning of the Qur’an in Surah al Baqara 2:30 the origin of this trust or amana is revealed: “Behold, your Lord said to the angels: ‘I will create a viceregent on earth’.  They said, ‘Will you place in it one who will make mischief and shed blood, while we celebrate your praises and glorify Your holy name?’  He said, ‘I know what you do not know’.”  In the next verse, 2:31, we read wa ‘alama Adam al asma’ kullaha, “And we gave Adam the power of conceptual thought (taught him the names of all things).”

The Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, emphasized the sacredness of everything that is created by God, including the creative power of women manifested through the fruit of the womb, when he said, “Verily, this world is sweet and appealing, and Allah placed you as viceregents in it; He will see what you do.  So, be careful of what you do in this world and what you do to women, for the first test of the children of Israel was in women.”

Another part of the inner truth is indicated in Surah al Rahman 55:6 of the Qur’an, wa najmu wa al shajaru yasjudan, “and the stars and the trees bow down to God.”  Further, in Surah al Nur 24:31, “Are you not aware that it is God whose limitless glory all [creatures] that are in the heavens and on earth extol, even the birds as they spread out their wings?  Each [of them] knows indeed how to pray unto Him and to glorify Him.  And God has full knowledge of all that they do, for God’s is the dominion over the heavens and the earth, and with God is all journey’s end.”  Surah al Isra’ 17:43-44 expands even further on this: “Limitless is He in His glory, and sublimely, immeasurably exalted above anything that men may say about Him! The seven heavens extol His limitless glory, and the earth, and all that they contain.  And there is not a single thing but extols His limitless glory and praise.  But, you [O men] fail to grasp the manner of glorifying Him!”  The Qur’an summaries all this in the simple phrase, “whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God.”  This may be considered to be the central message of David and the Psalms, which modern man appreciates only as poetry, if at all.

This is another way of saying that the most fundamental inner truth of Creation is its consciousness.  Modern deists will admit that God as the ultimate consciousness did create the world, but they assert that at this moment consciousness ended, in other words, they proclaim the “death of God.”  According to this theory, God does not sustain His Creation nor did any of it have consciousness until it evolved into man, who, according to Tailhard de Chardin, will engineer his own evolution to the highest spiritual state verging on divinity.

According to Professor Hossein Nasr in the Dudleian Lecture, which he delivered at Harvard Divinity School on May 1, 2003, entitled “In the Beginning of Creation Was Consciousness,” all the world religions, other than orthodox Christianity, have understood the term “in the beginning was the Word” (in principia erat verbum) not as time-oriented but as a statement of timeless reality.  In other words, consciousness is an inherent part of all that exists.  This is not to say that there are many gods, which is pantheism, or that God is all that exists, or even that God pervades all that exists, which is the doctrine of panentheism.  The understanding of traditionalist religions is that consciousness is not merely a process of knowing but a state of being, and it is present in all living beings, not only in trees but even in the stars of distant galaxies.  This is why many of the so-called Sufis recite in their wird the verse of the Qur’an, “Even the stars and the trees bow down to God,” but in higher ways that you do not understand.

This holistic way of understanding reality is the opposite of the reductionist approach of modern scientism which seeks ultimate particles in understanding the cosmos in accordance with the principle that the whole is not greater than its parts, so that one could create or recreate the universe merely by mechanistically aggregating its smallest parts.

Nasr writes, “The consequence of cutting off man’s consciousness from the higher levels of consciousness, which, however, did not go away by our denying them, was the weakening of access to the transcendent.  Taking away the ladder or stairs to the third floor in this building means that you will not try to go up to the third floor any longer, and gradually the existence of the third floor becomes denied.  Therefore the quest for transcendence – for the empowering and illumination of our consciousness, which was the goal of all traditional civilizations, became irrelevant, explained away by many to be an illusion. … What it means to be human became horizontalized.  It was reduced to gaining more and more information but not luminous knowledge, which meant a negative transformation of human consciousness.”

“This leaves a deep negative effect,” he says, “on theological concerns, one of which is the lack of attention to nature as a theological category, a category that Christianity began to leave aside in the seventeenth century.”  Increasingly, modern theologians have accepted the scientistic view of nature and are restricting their explorations to theologizing within this restricted paradigm of thought.

He continues, “As a result of the loss of the presence of consciousness throughout reality … not only was the sense of the sacredness of human life put into question – because the word sacred does not mean anything in the context of modern science; it is just sentimentality.  And with the loss of the sense of the sacred came the loss by human beings of their home in the cosmos – that is, we became homeless in a cosmos that was seen as being no more than energy and matter. … The result has been a very profound sense of alienation, including psychological alienation, which is one of the maladies of the modern world. … The world around us from which we feel alienated becomes spiritually worthless, in a sense, and therefore is valued only as far as our own immediate impulses and so-called needs are concerned.”  The result is catastrophic to the world of nature, because we must then conclude that the environmental crisis is merely the correctible result of bad engineering and not a crisis of religious, theological, and spiritual understanding.

Nasr suggests that, “Our abominable treatment of nature is, I believe, a direct consequence of our alienation from a world in which there is no participation in a shared reality beyond the material.  … How is it possible for us to know the world out there if there is no common element, nothing that unites the knower and the known?  This enfeeblement of the methodology of epistemology, which was never a problem for traditional philosophies, has everything to do with the total and radical partition created between what we call consciousness and matter.”

This bifurcation or dichotomy of reality explains why even Muslim jurists do not sufficiently distinguish the transcendent purposes in the maqasid al shari’ah from their social applications, so that we can then holistically unite them as cause and effect.  Nasr writes, “This desacralization of the cosmos and the ensuing alienation has made a sham of the metaphysical and philosophical basis of ethics. … In all periods of human history, ethics was related to a vision of reality.  It had a cosmic aspect. … We have made any ethical act toward the world of nature contrived and without a metaphysical and cosmological basis. … In the sacred scriptures … animals and plants were seen as God’s creation, with spiritual value, as were rivers and mountains.  Those notions are now scientifically meaningless, and any environmental ethics based on that view of the world is [considered to be] based on mere sentimentality.  It is not based on reality, if you accept the scientific view of the world as reality. … If we reject the sacred, reject that it is the wisdom of God that is imprinted upon the DNA, that all creation bears the imprint of God – a meaningless statement in modern biology – where then does the sacredness of human life come from?”

He concludes, “I believe that ultimately, of course, consciousness will have the final say, but it is for us while we have consciousness – this great, great gift – to use it properly to understand what it means to live consciously, to live filly with awareness, to know where we are coming from, where we are going, and why we are here.”

The environmental movement to respect our home in the cosmos is new in America and Europe only because the sapiential basis of this respect has been lost.  There was no maqsud in the maqasid al shari’ah for ecology until recently because respect for the environment was part of the primary maqsud, haqq al din, which is the responsibility to respect God in the sense of loving awe in return for God’s love for every person. 

The purpose of human existence is clearly stated near the end of Surah al Dhariyat 51:56, “And [tell them that] I have not created the invisible beings and men to any end other than that they may [know] and worship Me.”  The invisible beings include jinn and angels, those beings who are normally concealed from the human senses.  The responsibility to worship God comes from the fact that God is worthy of worship.  Everything in God’s Creation is worthy of respect and even love, but not of worship, which is why the Qur’an warns so strongly against elevating any created thing to the level of divinity.

Muhammad Asad in his commentary on this verse of the Qur’an in footnote 38 writes, “Thus, the innermost purpose of the creation of all rational beings is their cognition (ma’rifah) of the existence of God, and, hence, their conscious willingness to conform their own existence to whatever they may perceive of His will and plan; and it is this twofold concept of cognition and willingness that gives the deepest meaning to what the Qur’an describes as ‘worship’ (‘ibadah).”  This ‘ibadah’ is often translated merely as submission to God, as is the term islam itself.  From this comes the sakinah or transcendent peace that is the fruit of such worship, because in this all beings fulfill their purpose and become what God has created them to be.

The environment and everything in it deserves respect because the diversity and coherence of the created world points to its origin in the Oneness of God.  Everything that God has created is considered in the Qur’an as a signpost.  Thus Surah al Jathiyah 45:1-6, the title of which means “kneeling,” opens by revealing that the visible signs in Creation of a consciously creative Power convey a spiritual message to humanity: “Ha Mim.  The bestowal from on high of this divine writ issues from God, the Almighty, the Wise.  Behold, in the heavens as well as on earth there are indeed messages for all who [are willing to] believe.  And in your nature, and in [that of] of the animals which He scatters [over the earth] there are messages for people who are endowed with inner certainty.  And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence that God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the winds: [in all this] there are messages for people who use their reason.  These messages from God do we convey to you, setting forth the truth.  In what other tiding, if not in God’s messages, will you, then, believe?”

Surah Ibrahim 31:20 develops this point further by asking us, “Are you not aware that God has enabled you to derive benefit from all that is in the heavens and all that is on earth, and has lavished upon you His blessings, both outward and inward?”  The word sakhara is often translated as “make subservient to,” but its second meaning is to use, or derive benefit from, or turn to profitable account.  Thus according to Asad, “Almost all classical commentators agree that God’s having made the natural phenomena ‘subservient’ to man is a metaphor (majaz) for His having enabled man to derive lasting benefit from them.”

The beginning of Surah al Rad 13:1-3 reads: “He governs all that exists. … Clearly does He spell out these messages, so that you might be certain in your innermost that you are destined to meet your sustainer [on Judgment Day].  And it is He who has spread the earth wide and placed on it firm mountains and running waters, and created thereon two sexes of every [kind of] plant; and it is He who causes the night to cover the day.  Verily, in all this there are messages indeed for people who think.”

The key to Islamic wisdom in respect for the environment is the term mizan or balance.  This is primary hajja or secondary principle of haqq al mahid.  Surah al Hijr 15:19 reads, “And the earth – We have spread it out wide, and placed on it mountains firm, and caused [life] of every kind to grow on it in a balanced manner.”  Surah al Mulk 67:3 announces: “Behold, everything We have created in due measure and proportion.”

In Surah al Rahman immediately after verse 55:6 stating that the stars and the trees bow down to God, verses 7-9 compare the balance in the heavens to the balance of justice required in human social life.  “And the firmament has He raised high, and has devised [for all things] a measured balance (mizan), so that you may not transgress against due balance.  Weigh, therefore, your deeds with equity (qist).”  Justice thus is a heavenly virtue inscribed in all of nature, not only in the fitra or nature of human beings.

Surah al Shura 52:17 compares revelation as a source of truth with the human faculty to differentiate between right and wrong as two complementary sources of human capability and responsibility to know and observe in practice the highest purposes in life as humans can best conceive them to be: “It is God [Himself] who has bestowed revelation from on high, setting forth the truth, and given man a balance (mizan, by which to weigh conduct).”  The development of the maqasid al shari’ah is the highest human effort to articulate such purposes and fulfill them in action.
The challenge is developed in Surah al Hadid (Iron), verses 25 and 20, warning that man’s technology, symbolized by the use of iron as a tool, can be used either to respect the balance of nature or to destroy it: “Indeed, [even aforetime] did We send forth apostles with all evidence of [this] truth; and through them We bestowed revelation from on high, and [thus gave you] a balance [wherewith to weigh right and wrong] so that men might behave with equity; and We bestowed [upon you] from on high [the ability to make use of] iron, in which there is awesome power as well as [a source of] benefits for man.” 

This surah in verse 20 warns against the ignorant who would subject the natural world to their own greed in violation of justice:  “”Know (O men) that the life of this world is but a play and a passing delight, and a beautiful show, and [the cause of] your boastful vying with one another, and [of your] greed for more and more riches and children. … The life of this world is nothing but an enjoyment of self-delusion.”

The issue of balance in the maqsud of haqq al mahid concerns the relative priorities in protecting the environment versus protecting the other essential purposes of human life.  This is part of the broader problem of relating the spiritual and the social as foci in a single paradigm of tawhid.

The rationale for placing high priority on protecting the environment, even at the expense of any adverse economic impact, was pioneered 150 years ago in the Western world by Henry Thoreau who wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” by which he meant that without appreciation of natural beauty the human spirit will decay and civilization along with it.  The ensuing classics in environmental theology range from Rachel Carson’s book, The Silent Spring, almost half a century ago, to the prolific writings of Wendell Berry today, including his book A Continuous Harmony.

  Some of the more startling warnings were presented at a panel discussion on “Spirituality and the Environment” hosted by Jerry Schubel, President of the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, in February, 2007, as reported by a participant, Hassan Zillur Rahim, and published in ( http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/spirituality_and_the_environment/ ), February 16th, 2007.  Dr. Schubel quoted E. O. Wilson’s famous prediction that within 50 years we will have lost half of all living species.  Schubel says that, “We are now going through the sixth greatest extinction” in the history of the earth.  “In the previous five extinctions, it is said to have taken 10 million years for the earth to recover each time.”  Other predictions are that the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap alone would cause a 20-foot rise in sea-level that would flood the entire sea-level country of Bangladesh, as well as most of the great cities of the world.

These predictions are based on worst-case scenarios and on debatable data, but these scenarios keep getting worse as feedback loops are discovered and more so-called exogenous variables are factored into the computer simulations.  According to an article in the Journal of Climate, reported in The Washington Post of May 25th, 2009, “If an unusually detailed computer simulation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has it right, global warming in this century is on track to be about twice as bad as predicted six years ago. … After running the model 400 times with slight variations in the inputs, the new predictions … are for a 9.4 degree increase in the median temperature, more than double the 4.3 degrees predicted in a 2003 simulation.”

As a lifelong professional in long-range global forecasting and as a former analyst at The Hudson Institute charged with evaluating all the leading global forecasts, my conclusion is that there is only one absolute truth in this profession, which is that all such forecasts are wrong, mainly because they either optimistically assume human rationality or pessimistically prefer the threat of irrationality.  This, however, is not or at least should not be the nub of the issue.  There is no debating the trends, nor is there any doubt that at least some of the threat is caused by reversible human activity.

The real issue is paradigmatic, because paradigms shape agendas, and agendas control policy.  The issue has even been seen as a clash among civilizations, though in reality it involves a clash within each one of them more than between any two of them. 

Dr. Hassan Zillur Rahim, a physicist and long-time editor of Iqra, the bi-monthly newsletter of the South Bay Islamic Association in South Bay, California, published an article entitled, “Ecology in Islam: Protection of the Web of Life a Duty for Muslims,” in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which was reprinted electronically on June 12, 2005, in ( http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/ecology_in_islam_protection_of_the_web_of_life_a_duty_for_muslims/ ).  In it he writes: “Qur’anic verses describing nature and natural phenomena outnumber verses dealing with commandments and rituals.  In fact, of more than 6,000 verses in he Holy Qur’an, some 750 or one-eighth of the Book, exhort believers to reflect on nature, to study the relationship between living organisms and their environment, to make the best use of reason, and to maintain the balance and proportion that God has built into His Creation.”

He continues, “Nature is created on the principle of balance, and as a steward of God it is the human’s responsibility to ensure that his or her actions do not disrupt the balance.  Stewardship does not imply superiority over other living beings, because ownership belongs to God alone.”  “A Muslim cannot love God in Heaven,” he writes, without also loving His creation.

Dr. Rahim emphasizes, however, that there are other “practical” considerations for the Islamic environmental ethic.  “Inherent in Qur’anic teaching” he says, “is the notion that ecology is not only religion but farsighted economics. … One of the great principles of ecology is diversity of life and the role it plays in making the earth habitable.  Without the biotic diversity of plants, animals, and microorganisms that share the planet with us, life as we know it could not exist. … All living species have a right to live and flourish on earth, not because of their potential use to humans, but because their presence sustains the harmony and proportion of God’s creation. … A diminishing biotic diversity whose principal cause is man changes his role from a steward to a predator. … Knowledge that gives man a false sense of sovereignty over God’s creation cannot be pursued or morally defended. … ‘Mastery of nature’, with its implied one-sided benefits for man, is a concept foreign to Islam. … Man is dependent on a world he did not create, and therefore he has no right to destroy it,” because that would be suicide, which in Islamic law is one of the worst crimes. 
As a “practical” consequence of man separating science and faith into categories that do not even overlap, Hassan Zillur Rahim quotes the warning in Surah al Rum 30:41: “[Since they have become oblivious of God in the pursuit of material power as a false god], corruption has appeared on land and in the sea as an outcome of what men’s hands have wrought; and so He will let them taste [the evil of] some of their doings, so that they might return [to the right path].”  It is noteworthy, as Abdur-Razzaq Lubis notes in his “Environmental Ethics in Islam,”  ( http://www.mandailing.org/Eng/envethicsislam.html ), that the earlier civilizations that carried arrogance to extremes, as recorded in the Qur’an, such as the ‘Ad and Thamud, were destroyed by environmental cataclysms.

One of the world’s most profound Islamic theoreticians, S. Parvez Manzoor, the Swedish Editor-in-Chief of the journal Islam-21 (referring to the 21st century), whose homepage, ( http://www.algonet.se/pmanzoor/Index1.html ), is entitled “Reconciling Transcendence and Existence: Parvez Manzoor on Islam, Modernity, and the Human Condition,” refers in his article, “Environment and Values: An Islamic Perspective,” ( http://www.islamonline.net/english/introducingislam/topic12.shtml ), to the “unprecedented dominion over nature” as “a singularly impressive feature of the modern, albeit Western, civilization.”  He perceives, however, that “the sheer impossibility of maintaining the wanton ethos of ‘progress and meliorism’ forever” already has and increasingly will eliminate “yesterday’s confidence in the powers of Promethean man.” 

He forecasts optimistically that “dominion ethics” may be replaced by “Franciscan conservatism,” based on the Qur’anic Weltanschauung, according to which “to infuse the natural world with transcendental ethics is the main purpose of man.”

Manzoor writes in his article “Islamic Conceptual Framework,” ( http://www.islamonline.net/english/Contemporary/2002/05/Article23.shtml ), “The creation of Man is a major theme in the Qur’an. … As the supreme creation of God, being His masterpiece, man has been endowed with all the faculties essential to his special mission.  First of all, he is a moral being and as such, he is a sort of cosmic bridge through which the divine will, in its totality and especially its higher ethical part, can enter space-time and become concrete.  Furthermore, gifted with ‘Aql, discursive intellect, and the power of conceptualization, Man has been given divine guidance in terms of moral imperatives – the revelation of God’s will in a prescriptive form.  In short, he is the highest of God’s creation, a theomorphic being. … ” 

This is why, according to Manzoor, “Every discussion of ethics in Islam must, of necessity, proceed from tawhid, as it is the sine qua non of Islamic faith” in its focus on the “principle of oneness” and on its “teleological axiom” that “God, who has created this universe, is also its final end.”  He writes, “The final end is actually one for the whole universe, including all beings and creatures.  That end is God.”

This is also why Manzoor writes perceptively that, “There is no division of ethics and law in Islam. The ultimate consequence of man’s acceptance of trusteeship is the arbitration of conduct by divine judgment.  Perceived thus as a preparation for the final trial, every human act, humble or grand, public or private, becomes charged with legal consequences.  All contradictions of internalized ethics and externalized law, of concealed intentions and revealed actions are resolved in the all-embracing actionalism of Shari’ah, because it is both a doctrine and a path.”

This is why, “Shari’ah or law, rather than theology, has been the main Islamic contribution to human civilization.  For a practical community, such as that of Muslims, existential imperatives (law), rather than moral or teleological speculation (theology), should be the matter of paramount concern. … The moral perspective of Shari’ah … is thus not a stereological ontology but a moral existentialism.”

“Shari’ah is also the methodology of history in Islam.  By its application, temporal contingencies are judged by eternal imperatives, moral choices are transformed into options for concrete action and ethical sentiment is objectified into law.  It is in fact the problem-solving methodology of Islam par excellence.  Theoretical Islamic search for an environmental ethics must pass through the objective framework of Shari’ah in order to become operative and be part of Islamic history. … Its answers are given in terms of a strategy for action; all this has universal validity.”

As will be discussed in Part Three on “The Immanent Social Purposes,” this action-orientation of the maqasid al shari’ah requires community solidarity in perfecting the societal institutions that shape public policy.  Without such reform within existing institutions, the effectiveness of individual action will continue to be marginalized by the existing political, economic, gender, and educational constraints. 

Hossein Nasr has been criticized for emphasizing so heavily the need for education of individuals to rise above the regnant anthropocentrism of contemporary culture toward a cosmicly holistic approach to life so that they can take personal actions in their daily lives.  For example, individual persons might deliberately consume less in order to counter the pressures of a materialistic culture toward consumption either as an aim in itself or as a form of what Thorstein Veblin in his masterful analysis, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, more than a century ago called invidious and conspicuous consumption.

Nevertheless, advocacy of a personal rather than a collective shift from a materialistic to a spiritual conception of reality, as Nasr and such leaders as Rabbi Michael Lerner advocate, is a call to recalibrate our priorities and concepts of cause and effect not merely at a philosophical and theological level but precisely as guidance and as motivation for community solidarity in social and political action to transform the institutions of society and overcome the built-in biases that shape agendas and control policy.  The issue is not either/or but how to pursue both the spiritual and the social in a tawhidi episteme of negentropic synergy.

In policy making the two poles of danger are either to overestimate or underestimate the threat of environmental collapse.  Most of the literature by scholars of every religion has emphasized the dangers of under-reacting.  The best presentation of counterarguments by scholars of equal competence was published in 2007 by The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a 120-page book entitled Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition: Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Wisdom on the Environment.  This is designed to point out the dangers of over-reacting at the expense of the economic goal of prosperity and the political goal of freedom. 

Maintaining the balance between the spiritual and the social premises of life is just as important as maintaining the balance at the level of program planning and courses of action.  Maintaining the balance at both levels is the major challenge to scholars and activists who are undertaking to develop for this purpose the set of human responsibilities and human rights known as the maqasid al shari’ah or purposes of both personal and community life, together with the lower levels of explication in the hajjiyat and the still lower level of programs and implementing courses of action known as the tahsiniyyat. 

The architectonics of the system are described in Part One above on “The Systems Framework of Islamic Normative Law.”  The ultimate translation into action is the subject of Part Three below on the immanent social purposes of Islamic normative jurisprudence.

PART ONE http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/rehabilitating_the_role_of_religion_in_the_world_laying_a_new_foundation_pa/0017352
PART TWO-1 http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/rehabilitating_the_role_of_religion_in_the_world_laying_a_new_foundation_pa/0017353
PART TWO-2 http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/rehabilitating_the_role_of_religion_in_the_world_laying_a_new_foundation_pa/0017354
PART THREE-1 http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/part_31/0017378