At the US Social Forum
In this session we will address the global environmental crisis from an Islamic discourse based in our history of traditional Islamic sciences and scholarship. This session will focus on the responsibility that God has placed upon humans as stewards of the environment. We will gather some of the West?s leading Islamic scholars to address the global environmental crisis from this Islamic perspective.
This panel will fit into the crosscutting themes of environmental degradation, while addressing the roles Muslims are playing in the neoliberal world order. It is our hope to shift the discourse of our community to one of a conscious understanding of the destructive nature of neoliberalism to our planet and to begin a dialogue as to what would be an effective Islamic response to these issues that we are facing.
This session will be in English, though Arabic will be used throughout to quote classical Islamic texts. Translation of the Arabic will be provided by the scholars on the panel immediately after quoting the Arabic, as is standard in Islamic scholarship.
The biggest challenge that the Islamic movement in the United States faces today is the same as all the other movements in the United States who are fighting the cultural destruction brought on by globalization and neoliberalism.
Our concrete alternatives are affirming that Islam has answers relevant to both Muslims and humanity in helping to create a more just and humane world order. But to do this Muslims must again believe that the tradition that has been given to us is still relevant in a changing world.
Secondarily, we believe it is important for Muslims to begin to engage more generally with the other movements in the United States and we believe that the US Social Forum is a perfect venue for us to begin this work.
Happy Spring! Happy Norouz! Happy Spring Equinox!
This article by Dr. Ali Shariati, while focused on Norouz and Iran, is a wonderful testimony to the beauty of our natural world.
Nature is basically made up of repetition. A society is strengthened through repetition, sensations gain their life from it and Norouz is a beautiful, repetitious story in which the nature, sensations and the society are all engaged, yet it never gets old or boring.
Norouz, which has for long centuries been the master and the most gracious of all the national ceremonies around the world, maintains its young, strong, lively existence, because it is not an imposed, an artificial or a political ceremony.
It is the ceremony of the universe, the happiness day of earth and the birthday of the sun and the skies. The glorious day when every natural phenomenon evolves, blooms and resolutes filled with the sweet anxiety of many “startings”.
The more complex or heavier our artificial, technical civilization will become, the more urgent the need to reunion with and return to the nature’s embrace.
So let us renew our alliance with all our ancestors and with all the different races of our nation, as well as with our mythology in this historical intersection of time, beliefs and traditions.
Let us borrow the precious inheritance of love from them and promise to be faithful inheritors of it. Let us promise as a nation, never to die, or bow in obedience to other cultures, because our roots are deeply delved into the rich culture of humankind, piety of religions and nobleness of an ancient nation that is standing tall at the great passage of history and at the scene of the whole universe.
the struggle against corporate control of biodiversity.
During Ramadan, paradoxicaly, there is a heightened awareness of food. Each culture has its own special meals for this month – and we give detailed attention to preparation of iftar. Water, that many of us take for granted, tastes especially sweet at the end of the day.
But we are often not aware of where this food comes from, and how changes in agriculture is leading to an increasing corporate control of our food that has frightening implications.
The video below is a talk by the eminent environmental justice activist - Vandana Shiva - she discusses how the agricultural industry is changing, and the resistence against this attempted exclusive control of our food.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5820797504478488greenland going going… .
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.
By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone had anticipated — an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles a year — according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL. The volume of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.
“We are clearly seeing the effects of climate change starting to kick in,” Zwally said.
signs…
“Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences – the country’s top scientific body – has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.
Sandstorms, blowing in from the degraded land, are already plaguing the country. So far this year, 13 of them have hit northern China, including Beijing. Three weeks ago one storm swept across an eighth of the vast country and even reached Korea and Japan. On the way, it dumped a mind-boggling 336,000 tons of dust on the capital, causing dangerous air pollution.”
Wild Horses of Newbury
A beautiful short video on how two wild horses appear, as two ancient oak trees are prepared to be chainsawed down.
“Have you not seen how to Allah bow all who are in the heavens, and all who are in the earth, the sun and the moon, the stars and the mountains, the trees and the animals, and many of humankind (nas)” (Qur’an 22:18)
or, you can now also view the video on England’s Channel 4 website.
What planet are you on, Mr Bush?
More than 100,000 people took to the streets in more than 30 countries yesterday, in the first world-wide demonstration to press for action to combat global warming.The marches – timed to put pressure on the most important international climate-change negotiations since the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol eight years ago – took place against a background of a blizzard of new research showing that the heating of the planet is seriously affecting the world sooner than the scientists predicted.
