Confronting Climate Change and Fostering Islamic Economic Development Through Awqāf

Abstract

The modern world’s ecological and economic crises result from its reductionist, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview. This study of Islamic economics – based on its metaphysical and cosmological sciences – reveals a path to economic justice and ecological equilibrium that requires recovering the Islamic intellectual heritage and establishing corresponding Islamic scientific, technological, economic, and other social structures for spiritually meaningful work and integral development; a role awqāf traditionally played in Islamic civilization that needs to be recovered today. This path, which was lost during the colonial period, requires integrating the findings of modern science into higher orders of knowledge, allowing man to live in harmony with himself, his community, and nature. This achieves both “vertical” and “horizontal” equilibrium, the intersection of which symbolizes the integration of all of life around a sacred center. This can also increase the number and vitality of contemporary awqāf, which Syed Khalid Rashid so rightly calls for in his lead article (Rashid, 2018).