INDONESIA’s highest-ranking Muslim clerics are leading the charge for a pace-setting and highly relevant form of Islamic expression, environmental activism.
Eco-religiosity, the best thing to happen in the realm of faith, may shortly edge out doctrinal conservatism with its excessive focus on ritual observance to the utter neglect of planetary ethics.
Preachers, academics and politicians met last year to establish the Muslim Congress for a Sustainable Indonesia, designating mosques as places to “green the mind and the heart” with the installation of solar panels and water recycling systems.
Imams are becoming “environmental preachers” delivering sermons aimed at mobilising support to help push Indonesia’s transition to a clean economy.
The eco-Islam movement is also penetrating religious schools to enlist students in the climate change battle.
Indonesia has the foresight to stimulate climate activism by harnessing the power of religion and directing it towards the noblest purpose.
How this column wishes this progressive move can be taken in Malaysia.
We can strive to do better than Indonesia by establishing a National Interfaith Congress for a Sustainable Malaysia roping in every mosque, church, temple and gurdwara, and every religious school run by any religious group.
It is time for Malaysia to drop the old-school routine of doing only what is prescribed by our religious traditions while staring nonplussed at the environmental challenges facing humanity.
Top-ranking Indonesian Muslim clerics possess a far greater sense of climate urgency because they are fully aware that inadequate action means the destruction of society.
Jakarta is slowly sinking into the sea, a consequence of non-existent urban planning and unfettered development made worse by rising sea levels.
One week of heavy rains in several parts of Indonesia last October created more than 150,000 flood victims. Seventy disasters were recorded that week.
Malaysia too is facing a climate crisis with climate change inducing extreme rainfall events precipitating massive flooding and multiple landslides.
In just one month towards the end of last year, more than 120,000 flood victims had to be evacuated.
The low level of public concern over the deteriorating environment, exacerbated by a broad lack of religious attention to the climate emergency, belies the huge publicity given to environmental, social and governance practices.
Much of it could be greenwashing as has been exposed in many countries.
Malaysia’s CO2 emissions ranking has worsened in comparison with Indonesia and Singapore.
Just watch the daily traffic logjams in Klang Valley and figure out the amount of petrol burnt.
The gradual sinking of Jakarta into the sea ought to ring alarm bells throughout Malaysia because we share the same ocean.
Penang is showing early signs of distress with Batu Ferringhi beach and other public beaches losing a titanic struggle against erosion, as giant protective sandbags are torn apart or washed away by strong waves. Coastlines in other states are also retreating.
When neighbours and even faraway friends are being hit by climate change, should we stay largely unconcerned because there are no volcanoes in our land burying cities in thick ash? Massive flooding during the Christmas season in the nearby Philippines forced the government to move nearly 600,000 people to safety.
Governor Henry Oaminal of Misamis Occidental Province told a news agency: “We’ve had floods before but these are the worst rainfall and water flow levels we have ever had.”
Last May and June, unusually heavy monsoon rains inundated swathes of Bangladesh and India killing hundreds and displacing millions.
In August to September, one-third of Pakistan was submerged with 33 million people affected and more than 1,100 killed.
“It is water everywhere as far as you could see. It is just like a sea,” a mournful Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif commented.
Climate Minister Sherry Rehman said: “This is very far from a normal monsoon - it is climate dystopia at our doorstep.”
A record deluge in March last year submerged entire towns as fast-moving floodwaters burst river banks and broke over levees across Queensland and New South Wales in Australia.
Queensland University of Technology environmental expert Hilary Bambrick declared: “Australia is at the forefront of severe climate change.”
A brutal winter storm brought Christmas chaos to the US last year, leaving 49 dead in what the authorities called the “blizzard of the century” with a perfect storm of fierce snow squalls and sub-zero temperatures.
To understand how climate change will devastate the economy, take a flight to Kenya.
Continually rising waters over a decade in the lakes of Rift Valley have merged two lakes and halved the distance between others, destroying rural settlements and businesses. Every Kenyan is now talking about climate change.
Widow Evelyn Ajuang, who lost her farming income when her village and surrounding lands were inundated, told a news magazine: “Climate change is why I don’t think I will ever return to my home.”
The floods are gone in Malaysia, but are we ready for the return of its dreadful twin – the merciless drought and scorching heatwave?
Hot on the heels of the rains’ departure a week ago came the rising temperatures.
Exactly starting at this time last year, the dry season turned up and water levels at dams plunged drastically with six states facing water shortages by February. Paddy farmers cried for rain.
Climate change, still in its early stages in Malaysia, is nature’s gift to our people – a medicine to counteract the slow-killing twin poisons of racial polarisation and religious exclusivism.
Of the two poisons, the popular notion that racism is the worse is false: multi-ethnic workplaces are showrooms of diversity and office colleagues of many hues lunch together in halal restaurants.
It is religious exclusivism or communal religiosity that will drag Malaysia down the hellish road to Africa.
What is religious exclusivism or communal religiosity? It is the notion that your religion has exclusive possession of the vital truth of salvation and that it is the only way or the best way or the complete way of salvation.
This notion breeds contempt for other communities and serves as the backdrop for the ceaseless communal warfare embroiling most African nations.
The poison is destabilising six out of eight countries in South Asia and in Malaysia, the poison ensures that communities stay mentally distanced.
A window of transformation – in fact it is a window of real salvation – has been opened by climate change.
No global force can unite all the diverse religious communities in Malaysia except climate change.
If we do not unite and galvanise every person into action, the nation will eventually face a death blow.
And yet we can’t unite because our priests, ustaz, bishops, monks and pastors have failed to inspire their congregations to appreciate the salvific value of all other religions in their midst. The people lack unity.
Use this window opened by nature to bring about a much-needed transformation of our religious orientation, steering all groups away from communalism towards universalism, away from ritual obsession towards planetary ethics, away from “only my religion can save humanity” towards a vision of universal salvation through compliance with nature as the face and hand of God.
“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide,” UN Secretary-General Antonia Guterres warned at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue last July.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
