Crescent Magazine

Allah (Â) says in the Qur’an, “[Since they have become oblivious of their Lord], disintegration has appeared on land and in the sea as an outcome of what men’s hands have wrought; and so He will let them taste [the end result of] some of their doings, so that they might return [to conformity with their Lord]” (30:41). Nothing exemplifies this more aptly than the explosion of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, with British Petroleum (BP) being the main culprit and existential scapegoat. The scope of the continuing damage caused by the combination of runaway materialism/capitalism, corporate greed, arrogance, and imperial hubris; and the cost to the Earth and to future generations is incalculable. The same factors which came together to crash the world’s financial system have now come together to euthanize the world’s environment, to asphyxiate people’s livelihoods, and to suffocate the life out of the other creatures we share the Earth with. Certainly all this is not new; other disasters come to mind, however, each new disaster is worse than the one before and is always characterized as the worst one yet. And the character and the deleterious content of each disaster is commensurate with the level of God-denial, especially by the dominant power culture in the world.