Islam should info ‘warming’
DOHA, Qatar, Dec 1, (AP): At Friday prayers in Qatar’s most popular mosque, the imam discussed the civil war in Syria, the unrest in Egypt and the UN endorsement of an independent state of Palestine.
Not a word about climate change, even though the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar is hosting a UN conference where nearly 200 countries are trying to forge a joint plan to fight global warming, which climate activists say is the greatest modern challenge to mankind.
“Unfortunately the Arab and Islamic countries have political and economic problems,” said Adham Hassan, a worshipper from Jordan streaming out of the al-Khatabb mosque in Doha. “Islam calls for the protection of the environment, but the Muslim countries are mostly poor and they didn’t cause pollution and aren’t affected by climate change.”
Of six mosques contacted by The Associated Press in the Qatari capital, only one included an environmental message in the Friday prayers, telling those in attendance to plant trees, shun extravagance and conserve water and electricity.
Qatar aims to raise the share of solar power in electricity generation to 16 percent by 2018, an official said on Saturday in a rare example of an OPEC nation embracing renewable energy.
Qatar, the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas, has the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Like other OPEC nations, it has been wary of a global shift to renewable energy, fearing it will hit demand for oil and gas.
“We are working on a project to develop 1,800 megawatts of solar power,” said Fahad Bin Mohammed al-Attiya, chairman of the organisers of talks in Doha from Nov. 26-Dec. 7 among almost 200 nations on slowing global warming.
The Quran, Islam’s holy book, is filled with more than 1,500 verses to nature and Earth. Yet the voice of Islamic leaders is missing from the global dialogue on warming.
That disappoints Muslim environmental activists, who believe the powerful pull of Islam could be the ideal way to change behavior in both poor countries, where many people’s main source of information is the mosque, and in some wealthy countries like Qatar where Islam remains important even as rapid growth has made it the world’s top per capita emitter of carbon dioxide.
“It’s absolutely frustrating,” said Fazlun Khalid, founder of the U.K.-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, which oversees projects around the world that use Islamic teachings to combat problems ranging from deforestation to overfishing.
Support
“We get very little support from Muslims,” he said. “They don’t connect. We have to wake them up to the fact their existence is threatened by their own behavior. Modernity and the economic development paradigm is about dominating nature. Islam, as you are aware, is submission to the will of the creator. We need to remind ourselves that we have to submit.”
As the annual UN climate conference neared its halfway point in Doha, the usual splits opened up between rich and poor nations over how to divide the burden — and financial cost — of protecting the world from overheating.
UN climate chief Christiana Figueres lamented that she didn’t see “much public interest, support, for governments to take on more ambitious and more courageous decisions.”
“Each one of us needs to assume responsibility. It’s not just about domestic governments,” she said.
World religions are seeking a more active role in climate change and sustainability issues. The Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change project — endorsed by Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism — was a regular presence at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, while the Dalai Lama has repeatedly called on governments to take climate change more seriously. Religious leaders in the United States have launched a movement known as “green religion” or “eco-theology, with groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network endorsing clean energy and calling on people to consume less.