ABSTRACT
Contemporary Muslims’ concern about Islamic understandings of nature can be traced back to a series of lectures in 1966 delivered by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, linking environmental degradation to spiritual and moral crises of the modern world. Yet, four decades later Nasr said, “general indifference to the environmental crisis and apathy in seeking to find solutions to it based on Islamic principles continued until the 1980s and 1990s, when, gradually, voices began to be heard concerning this issue” (Nasr 2003, 86). This does not mean that nothing happened in the four decades. For example, in the mid 1980s Fazlun Khalid developed the Islamic Foundation For Ecology and Environmental Sciences (www.ifees.org.uk/), which is now active in a number of Muslim countries. In terms of publications, the anthology Islam and Ecology (2003), which is part of the Harvard Series on World Religions and Ecology, has prominently marked the new development.
