U of A Sisters’ Circle

“… the environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.”

“As soon as nature became an ‘it’, there was bound to be this [crisis].”

 “In traditional societies, nature was seen as one’s wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute.”

 “The battle was lost as soon as the Hands of God were cut off from nature.”

“Secular humanism changed the views of people about all things from a theomorphic to a homomorphic or homocentric point of view.”

“… in the Muslim world…people are still tied to their faith, but as far as nature is concerned, they have lost the traditional understanding of it, and are just aping what is happening in the West.”

“…has so many beautiful verses [of poetry] on this subject. It is part and parcel of our culture. In fact, in order to become completely industrialized, the champions of industrialization and modernization are destroying that culture. We are negating much of our heritage.”

“Fish begin to stink from the head, not the tail.” Think of the heads of state and governments who make bad decisions based on faulty policies as the heads of the fish, but remember, it is the tail that propels one through the water.

“The pollution of the environment is kind of an eleventh hour externalization of the pollution within us.”

“… in order for [the Muslim world] to come out of its current position of weakness, Muslims have to go against their own traditional culture—a culture that was imbued with the love of nature, in a spiritual sense.”

“Now, if the rest of the world wants to industrialize at the expense of the natural world as did the West, if you want to turn the Amazon jungle into what the Europeans did to the forests of Europe centuries ago (when the lung of the earth was still functioning) the ecological balance…will be destroyed.”

“…if we try to destroy nature, nature will always have the final say. Nature has direct contact with God; it is not responsible to us. It is we who are responsible for its protection, because of the function that God has given us. He has given us intelligence, free will, and other powers which we must use rightly, always remembering that we are His vicegerents. We are not “our own man”; we are God’s man. And in the same way that God makes the sun rise and set every day, we must try to preserve the harmony of nature instead of destroying it.”