A new book, The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law, brings together 24 authors across 14 countries––including Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Qatar––to map out the history and promises of Islamic environmental thought. Dan Danielsen writes in the text’s foreword that the book “doesn’t add Islamic perspectives to existing frameworks” but “exposes what those existing frameworks took for granted.” The text is particularly significant given that the 2026 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 31) will take place in Antalya, Turkey; the host is a Muslim-majority country with its own deep relationship to this tradition.
NADIA B. AHMAD; [email protected]
Ahmad is a professor of law, operating at the intersection of environmental science, law, technology, and social justice. She is co-editor of the new handbook.
Ahmad told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “This is the first comprehensive, multi-contributor handbook to treat Islamic environmental law as a complete legal discipline in its own right… covering constitutional litigation, Islamic finance, marine law, animal ethics, militarism, water rights, and intellectual property. Protection of natural resources, water commons governance, conservation of communal land are issues that appear in Islamic jurisprudence going back fourteen centuries. The West has a great deal to learn from Islamic environmental thought. This is a legal system with actual teeth––yet almost entirely invisible to mainstream environmental law scholarship.
“Part of why nothing like this existed before is language barriers. The working language of international environmental law is Western European: English, French, Spanish. This absence is a design feature that determines whose frameworks count as law. Environmental law also gets treated as a phenomenon of the 1960s, Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, Stockholm 1972. That framing is really parochial.
“When the media covers environmental governance, they tend to write out the entirety of non-Western environmental law history and, more importantly, write out the causation. The countries now being asked to sacrifice development for emissions targets are countries whose environments were already degraded by extraction. Treating environmental protection as something invented by the countries that caused the problem, and now administered by the institutions those same countries control, is a continuation of the same arrangement under a different name. Meanwhile, Islam has been villainized for political and military objectives for centuries. That distortion has real costs, including making it harder for policymakers and the public to recognize a 14-century legal tradition as a serious resource for addressing the planetary crisis.”
Various chapters discuss oil as a source of conflict, Ahmad said, and “reveal how regions that have suffered occupation and militarization––including Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan, and now Iran––are Muslim-majority areas absorbing environmental burdens from wars they did not initiate. Military greenhouse gas output is the single largest category of emissions effectively exempt from international climate protocols. The countries most affected by climate change today are, in many cases, the same countries whose natural resources and raw materials fueled industrialization in the first place, polluted on the way in during extraction, and now being asked to bear the cost of adaptation for emissions generated by consuming what was taken from them.”