One author on the environment

This lesson asks you to assess how well different ways of lessening the harm of human activities on the environment, and of strengthening their good effect, work. The museum holds one text: one author's reading on pollution and on living with nature. It presents a view and does not measure effects, so your class must bring the evidence about the environment and judge for itself. ¹

The author gives a view on the relation between people and their environment, but the record does not say what happened to the water, the air or the land. Decide what you would measure before and after, and over what stretch of time.

The museum holds one text for this lesson, and the record on environmental protection in Islam reports its author's reading, attributed to him. Muhyi al-Din 'Afifi Ahmad holds that the pollution of water, air and soil threatens the safety of persons and societies, and that international conference resolutions went unimplemented ². Islam, he presents, took care that people make good use of their natural environment and coexist with it in a way that preserves its constituents ³, and the verses treating the cosmos invite reflection on man's relation to it ⁴. The record adds that further sources are needed for detail.

The author holds that international conference resolutions on pollution went unimplemented ². If you must judge whether a way of caring for the environment works, which is stronger evidence: a statement that people were asked to do it, or a measurement of the water, air or soil before and after, and why?

• Environmental protection in Islam: one author's reading, and exactly what the record attributes to him.
• Hima: a reserved pasture, as Ibn Hisham reports that the Prophet ﷺ reserved one around the village of Jurash.
• Shirb: how a jurists' encyclopaedia sorts waters by who owns them and how they are used.

Read about environmental protection in Islam. Write the evidence you would want before agreeing with the author, and three questions an ecologist would ask.