Islam and the Greens.

• Author: Rinehart, Larry
• Position: War and War Hysteria

"Islam stays with the dream life of the masses, the eschatological imagination of the lowly and oppressed."

Norman O. Brown (1, p. 92)

The lines of thought I am attempting to synthesize in this article were stimulated by Patrick Eytchison's two pieces in the Winter 2002 issue (#27) of this magazine. Eytchison argues that to understand the motives of the ruling class's "war on terror," we have to see Islam as a geopolitical opponent of the dominant West, equal or greater in magnitude to the specter of communism, especially in light of the approaching peak of oil production. In general, he focuses on the more reactionary forms of Islam which have sustained armed militancy in recent times, and which have reverted to conservative interpretations of medieval Islamic law (Sharia) under the intense pressure from Westernized elites to secularize Muslim cultures. But in speculating on how Islamic geopolitics might play out, he mentions the intriguing possibility of a "progressive fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence] moving towards some form of socialism from inside the tradition itself." (S/R 27: 17)

This got me to thinking. If Islam is potentially a movement of liberation from the dominance of capital, with socially progressive possibilities of evolution; and if the Greens are also such a movement, what might two such movements learn from each other?

It is probably fair to say that the cultural genealogy of most Green political and economic analysis has been Western-secular, framed by disciplines of post-Enlightenment European thought. Although spirituality and a sense of the sacred are clearly of vital importance to many Greens, the customary secularity of our critical discourse may lend an air of strangeness to the comparison of the Green tradition, still in its historical infancy, with a religious tradition nearly 1500 years old. A quick check against the key values, however, is immediately suggestive. Social justice, as relative economic equality and caring for the poor, is not only a central Islamic value, it is one of the major themes repeatedly stressed by Allah in the Quran. Ecology, not of course in the sense of the secular science, but in the sense of the underlying wisdom calling for balance between human and nonhuman parts of creation, is equally important to Islam. Sustainability in the mercantile aspects of civilization follows from the ecol ogical attitude of the tradition. Islam in its expansion fostered cultural diversity in the lands it...