Message On Green Living Hits Home for Muslims in Indonesia

Fidelis E. Satriastanti, Jakarta Globe 9 Apr 10;

Are you sick of accords and protocols on fighting global warming that never produce anything tangible?

If you are Muslim, then you should take the issue into your own hands every day, Islamic scholars heard on Friday, as 120 participants from 14 countries met at an international Islamic conference on climate change, in Bogor, West Java.

Emil Salim, a presidential adviser on the environment and sustainable development, told the conference, titled Muslim Action for Climate Change, that the lack of awareness of environmental issues in Muslim countries was alarming.

The former environment minister said many Muslims live their lives only from a religious point of view, without considering other issues addressed by Islam, including maintaining one’s home and land well.

“One primary point of view is to embody friendliness toward ecology,” Emil said, adding that an Islamic boarding school in West Java had initiated programs like planting trees as a means of preserving fresh water, which Muslims use to wash before praying.

Emil was addressing conference attendees from Egypt, Britain and Jordan, as well as 90 Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia. The two-day conference ends today and will see scholars discuss what Muslims can do to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A meeting of leaders in Turkey in 2009 agreed to spend seven years coming up with ways to protect the environment, according to the Alliance of Religions and Conservation Web site.

The project is investigating every level of Muslim activity, from daily life to annual pilgrimages, from holy cities to the future training of imams, the Web site says.

The proposals include developing major Muslim cities as green models, building eco-friendly mosques and developing an Islamic labels for environmentally friendly goods.

The proposals will be managed through umbrella organization the Muslim Associations for Climate Change Action. There have been proposals to ban plastic bottles during the hajj and build mosques designed to conserve energy, but they have yet to be implemented on a major scale.

Fazlun Khalid, founder of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, slammed the failure of agreements on global warming.

“We have so many climate change negotiations and agreements. Not one of them gets very far. Remember the Copenhagen Accord or even the Kyoto Protocol? Not one turned into real action,” Fazlun said. “Real action is when you make it real in your own home.”