The Earth as New Margins: Towards an Islamic Ecoliberation Theology of the Earth

What is the earth in the Qur’an? How have Muslims historically and conceptually interpreted it? What are contemporary Muslim eco-theological approaches to understanding the earth in relation to environmental violence, injustice, and the margins? The earth has always been humanity's home and return. It is at once our source of origin in material reality and our departure point for the Afterlife. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of scholarship on the earth concept in Islam from a systematic perspective. The environmentalist concept of the earth is still a nascent and emerging category in Islamic theology, law, and ecotheologies. This paper first introduces the historical and theoretical foundations of the earth concept in Islam by briefly examining its meaning in the Qur’an, Islamic law, theology and mysticism. However, the main aim of this paper is to argue for an ecoliberation theology reading of the earth.

Mainstream Muslim environmentalist discourse on the earth has not sufficiently addressed socio-economic and material systems change. There is a need to engage with traditions that fill these gaps. The traditions of social ecology and ecosocialism are two necessary approaches for conceptualizing the earth from a radical economic perspective that materially challenges modern Western and capitalist renderings of the earth. The tradition of Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT) also provides fertile ground for reimaging a more radical understanding of the earth connected to notions of environmental margins, justice and social struggle. One issue is that ILT has mainly focused on issues of human margins (i.e. race, class, gender, religious pluralism) and thus needs to be further ecologized in order to integrate the environmental margins and pertinent ecological issues of our time (i.e. speciesism, anthropocentrism, etc.).

In the first part of my argument towards an ecoliberationist understanding of the earth, I introduce ecosocialism and social ecology’s view of the economy, ecology, and the earth, and analyze the main material social contradictions the earth faces under the global capitalist political economy. In the second section, I provide an ecological critique of several of ILT's main theological concepts, including 1) the preferential option for the margins and how it needs to integrate the earth as a new environmental margins from which to center ILT's hermeneutics, 2) how the process and contextual theology components of ILT must further ecologize in centering liberatory praxis, and 3) how Islamic socialism, as the political economy dimension of ILT, must be developed towards an Islamic ecosocialism.

Ultimately, I argue that integrating the social ecology and ecosocialist traditions’ perspective on the earth into Muslim environmentalist discourse, alongside the critical ecologizing of pre-existing ILT discourse, lays the basis for an emerging Islamic Ecoliberation Theology of the earth. The earth becomes as a new margins through which Muslim ecoliberationist theology analyzes power relations, the Qur’an, and engages in a praxis of struggle against environmental injustice and violence.