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Paper short abstract:

With a specific focus on Senegal, this paper explores African Muslims' contributions to Eco-Islam conversations and initiatives, and the ways in which these build on, reflect, and influence African Muslims' global connections.

Paper long abstract:

Eco-Islam or Islamic environmentalism has its roots in the 1970s and was mainly led by Islamic scholars and activists from the UK, USA, and Indonesia. They started to think about Islamic principles that would help to combat environmental degradation and climate change. The Islamic notion that human beings are the stewards of the Earth that has been entrusted to them by God is a guiding inspirational principle. In the years 2000, often in preparation of high level diplomatic meetings around the environment, Muslim leaders convened for issuing their official statements and proposing their plans for action. In these earlier meetings, African participants were mostly only from Morocco, Egypt, Libya and South Africa. One of the few Black African Islamic leaders who played a role at this stage was Cheikh Hassan Cisse from Senegal. His following is not that big in his own country but all the more in other parts of West Africa and especially also in the United States – and it this latter link through which he got involved. This illustrates how pre-established global connections help determine who gets included in certain conversations (and how).

Apart from these high level initiatives which proliferated over the years, the more interesting conversations - and non-conversations - are nowadays to be found online. One would expect that such platforms facilitate global connections between Muslims who are interested in eco-Islamic initiatives, including between African Muslims and Muslims in other parts of the world. It appears however that often, the logics of these platforms tend to reproduce rather neocolonial perspectives, Africa merely featuring in the form of projects for which one can donate funds.

Beyond this, African environmentalist action based on Islamic values is happening on the continent, often also supported and sometimes initiated by African diasporic groups, such as ‘Touba ville Verte’, which aims to green the holy city of Touba in Senegal, and is very much financially supported by Murids in the diaspora – who, exposed to specific forms of environmental initiatives in the West, may feel attracted to this kind of action, thus creating transnational interaction and synergy. In my preliminary research, however, I also found that African Muslims still find it important to be included in more global conversations on the role of Islam in environmental conservation and eco-Islamic action and this on an equal footing, especially because Africans may have other problems and priorities in dealing with climate change and the like, and possibly also other solutions.

In this context, it should be clear that perceptions of climate change vary among African Muslims like among other groups, which makes that also in this field it will be important to study conversations over truth among African Muslims and between African Muslims and others, including the influence of religious traditions and experiences of environmental problems, the ways in which both Islamic environmentalism and climate change denial may fit in political agendas, and how social and other media are put to use in this. In this paper, I will do so by specifically looking at examples from Senegal.