Prepare the Horses, the Apocalypse is Near: Ample Scientific Reasons to Believe

Eco-Alarmist Perspective on the Islamic World

Abstract

This paper is the first of a three-part series of papers that are concerned with the challenges that the Islamic world may face to confront the triple planetary crisis identified by the United Nations as pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss and to deal with the extremely difficult task of reducing consumption of finite natural resources. The paper uses the term “Islamic world” to refer to the part of the world where Muslims and their faith have been prevalent and socially dominant and where the Islamic lifeworld is still alive and functioning, even though many of them have secular rather than religious governments. As I write this paper, the Saudi Aramco CEO said that the global energy transition strategy was visibly failing on most fronts and advised policymakers to give up the “fantasy” of phasing out fossil fuels. Given the really decisive role of economists, developmentalists, and industrialists in policy- making in developing countries, including the Islamic world, for whom scientific ecological knowledge is apparently beyond their ken, and also considering the Janus-faced colonial mentality in postcolonial countries, this paper sets out to explain the nature of the crisis at hand by laying out the scientific arguments for “limits to growth. ” Accordingly, this series of papers is aimed at the power elite readers in the Islamic world. It began with an appeal to understand that the unprecedented crisis in our time posed a herculean task that requires a multidisciplinary approach involving holistic, integrated, and coordinated actions across a very wide range of sectors.