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Nature and the
Environment in
Contemporary
Religious Contexts
Nature and the
Environment in
Contemporary
Religious Contexts
Edited by

Muhammad Shafiq
and Thomas Donlin-Smith
Nature and the Environment in Contemporary Religious Contexts

Edited by Muhammad Shafiq and Thomas Donlin-Smith

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2018 by Nazareth College, Hickey Center for Interfaith

Studies and Dialogue

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0530-8

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0530-8
 Dedicated to the
sweet memories of Doris Hickey
and all those who have worked to
build bridges in our world.
The Hickey Center is thankful to Mary Van Keuren
and Anastasia Tahou for editing and assisting
in publishing of this book.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ xi

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Part I. Our Human Contexts within Nature

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7

Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism
Katherine Keller

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19

Measured Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International
Development: A Comparative Look
M. Ashraf Adeel

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37

Modernity, Secularism, and the Exclusion of Nature:
Why Religion Matters
Hussam S. Timani

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 53

Animal Talk: What Ethical Lessons do Animals Teach on Aggadic
Midrash about the Environment?
Daniel Maoz

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 67

A Vast Net of Interconnected Diamonds: Buddhist View of Nature
Tatjana Myoko V. Prittwitz

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 85

Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an Ecological Theologian
Jamison Stallman
viii Table of Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101

Pope Francis’ Encyclical and Catholic Magisterial Statements
on Ecological Ethics
Nancy M. Rourke

Part II. Imperatives from Sacred Texts and Traditions

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 123

Who Will Inherit God’s World? The Righteous of Sura 21 and Psalm 37
Barbara Pemberton

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 145

Interreligious Encounter in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament:
Models for the Anthropocene
Richard C. Salter

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 165

Green Book: Qur’anic Teachings on Creation and Nature
Fatih Harpci

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 183

The Protection of Nature and the Environment: A Case for Restoring
‘Dharma’ in the Hindu World
Narwaraj Chaulagain

Part III. Practicing the Imperatives

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 205

Pope Francis, Care for Creation, and Popular Movements
Marvin L. Mich

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 225

Three Sages: Conversations on Ecology
Monica Weis

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 235

Prospects for Dialogue between Russian Orthodox and Muslims
on the Environmental Crisis
Andrii Krawchuk
 Nature and the Environment in Contemporary Religious Contexts ix

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 251

The Flowering of India: A Mughal Manifesto for Environmentalism
Michael D. Calabria

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 273

Deforestation in the Congo Basin and Global Climate Change: An Ethic
of Environmental Responsibility based on African Spirituality
Leocadie Lushombo

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 291

‘That We May Sow Beauty’: Reading Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
Classics for Interreligious Dialogue about the Environmental Crisis
Elizabeth Adams-Eilers

Contributors ............................................................................................. 311

Index ........................................................................................................ 315

 PREFACE

There was no interfaith dialogue when I was a student in the 1970s at

Temple University’s Department of Religion. However ecumenical
dialogue was well established and the department had an ecumenical
library where I worked as a fellow under the guidance of Professor
Leonard Swidler. It was a great opportunity for me to read and learn about
ecumenism, gaining an understanding of how Christian communities had
struggled to overcome their differences.
I learned about the significance of dialogue, a gateway to understanding
difference, building bridges, reconciling, and cooperating for a greater
cause. My exposure led me to participate in ecumenical meetings and
conferences. But the discussion and papers presented there were about
Christian theology and denominational differences. Jews, Muslims, and
others had little space. When I enquired about this from my Jewish friend,
I was told that it was still good to participate. When Jews, Muslims, and
other faiths increased in number, the doors would open.
The doors were opened in the middle of 1980. Ecumenical experts
began to discuss amongst themselves the words interreligious and
interfaith dialogue. Soon the words interfaith dialogue became more
known in the communities and gradually replaced ecumenical dialogue.
I came to Rochester, New York in 1989 and was engaged in an
interfaith forum representing more than twenty-five faiths. I think
Rochester may be the first interfaith city to form interfaith commissions
and signed inter-community agreements to foster relations. The Catholic-
Jewish agreement was signed in 1989, the Christian-Muslim commission
formed in 1994, the Commission on Jewish-Muslim Understanding in
1997, and the Catholic-Muslim Agreement in 2003, resulting in the
Muslim-Catholic Alliance (MCA) to combat hate and stereotyping.
Rochesterians considered the interfaith movement to be the second
civil rights movement, supporting the mission of the first civil rights
movement and expanding on racial justice to include religious, ethnic, and
cultural justice and harmony. As educational institutions responded to the
first civil rights movement by emphasizing the teaching of African and
African American studies as well as women and gender studies on college
campuses, it was essential to expand it to global and interfaith studies to
meet the challenges of our contemporary world.
xii Preface

In 1999, representatives from the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu,

and Buddhist religions in Rochester came together to establish an
academic center for interfaith studies to teach and train people of all faiths
to stand against hate and build bridges of respectful understanding. From
this effort, the Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue (CISD) found its
home at Nazareth College on November 28, 2001, shortly after the
September 11 tragedies. In 2004, the Center was integrated academically
and, in 2011, was renamed the Brian and Jean Hickey Center for Interfaith
Studies and Dialogue in honor of two of the Center’s most dedicated long-
time supporters. At the same time the Interfaith Studies Chair was created
through the generous support of the International Institute of Islamic
Thought in Herndon, Virginia.
The Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue promotes
scholarship, skills, and strategies for living justly in a religiously diverse
and pluralistic world. The Center fosters this capacity through: increasing
religious literacy; teaching skills for individual and community-wide
communication on matters of religion, faith, and spirituality; and
contributing to the growing scholarship of interfaith studies. Our
strategies, both locally and globally, are:

• to establish safe environments conducive to understanding the

diversity of faiths in our world and our community through
hospitality and open dialogue;
• to provide educational resources and to create scholarship that will
help establish an environment of understanding and equality;
• to inspire individuals, communities, and institutions to live and
communicate more effectively with those from other religions and
faith backgrounds.

In fulfilling the goals associated with our youth and our community,
we came to realize a need that has been present with us from our birth at
the beginning of the 21st century: the need to study the interfaith
movement as it has blossomed in recent years. This study occurs when we
gather experts from diverse disciplines together with professors of religion
and theology to discuss topics of importance to the interfaith movement.
At first, these gatherings resulted in a great deal of creative and critical
talk among the participants but little publication of what was said. At the
suggestion of the participants and many others, we began the Sacred Texts
and Human Contexts series of conferences and publications. The purpose
of both is to bring together experts in interpreting the traditions of the
world’s religions to examine common issues.
 Nature and the Environment in Contemporary Religious Contexts xiii

The series provides a forum for the interfaith movement to express new
ideas and offer critical reflection on old ideas in order to stimulate the
intellectual life of a global society. We had our first conference, which
dealt with the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on dividing
and uniting humanity, in June, 2013 at Nazareth College. More than 250
religious studies professors and religious professionals participated and
more than 70 academic papers were presented. The peer reviewed papers
resulted in a publication of twenty-six chapters titled Sacred Texts and
Human Contexts: A North American Response to A Common Word
Between Us and You. Our second international conference, which dealt
with the topic of wealth and poverty, was held at Fatih University in
Istanbul, Turkey in 2014. The peer-reviewed papers were published as
Poverty and Wealth in Judaism, Christianity and Islam by McMillan
Palgrave in 2016. The conference committee then decided to include all
faiths in future conferences. Therefore, our third international conference
was on nature and the environment in religions and was held in May of
2016. The peer-reviewed papers were submitted to Cambridge Scholars
for publication. Our next conference is on women and gender in religions
and is scheduled for July 30-Aug.1, 2017 at Nazareth College.
No institution can thrive without collegial and financial support. The
Hickey Center is blessed with an abundance of support from Nazareth
College by President Daan Braveman, Esq.; Vice-President of Academic
Affairs, Dr. Andrea K. Talentino; Dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences, Dr. Dianne Oliver; the Religious Studies Department –
especially Dr. Susan Nowak, S.S.J., its chair, and Thomas Donlin-Smith,
advisor to the Hickey Center; Brian and Jean Hickey; the International
Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) at Herndon VA; and countless members
of Nazareth’s administration, faculty, and staff.
The discernment of the scholarly needs of the interfaith movement and
designing of the programs to meet these needs would not have been
possible without a team of committed religious leaders, professionals, and
academics, all dedicated to the common cause of respectful tolerance and
peaceful coexistence among faiths. The Hickey Center is fortunate to have
Dr. Nathan Kollar, chair of the Center’s advisory board, who worked
diligently during all these years. We are thankful to all members of the
conference committee including Dr. David Hill, Oswego State University
of New York; Dr. Mustafa Gokcek, Niagara University; Dr. Richard
Salter, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Dr. Etin Anwar, Hobart and
William Smith Colleges; Dr. Matthew J. Temple, O.Carm., Nazareth
College; Dr. Nancy M. Rourke, Canisius College; and of course, Dr.
Thomas Donlin-Smith, co-editor of this scholarly endeavor.
xiv Preface

An entity such as the Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and

Dialogue is always in need of institutional bonds of interfaith ideals and
friendship. When the bond is evidenced by participation and financial
support, the ideals become realized in shared programs and research. Our
institutional colleagues are found in the Department of Religious Studies
at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, cosponsors of this conference; the
Dialogue Institute of Temple University with the support of my teacher,
Dr. Leonard Swidler; the Department of Religious Studies at St. John
Fisher College with the support of Father William Graf; Bediüzzaman
Said Nursi, chair in Islamic Studies, Department of Theology and
Religious Studies, John Carroll University, with the support of Zeki
Staritoprak; and the College of Arts and Sciences and Department of
History at Niagara University with the support of Mustafa Gokcek and
others.
In addition to all those mentioned above I must mention my family.
Their understanding is amazing especially that of my grandchildren who
are so often disappointed that their grandpa is busy with college work at
home and can hardly spare enough time to play with them. Thank you to
all my family for their patience and their support of this most important
work of interfaith.
The Hickey Center is indebted to its founders and the community
leaders and individuals who give us hope for the future and support our
mutual quest for respectful religious and cultural dialogue and peaceful
coexistence.

Thank you,
Muhammad Shafiq, PhD
Hickey Center, Nazareth College
 INTRODUCTION

THOMAS DONLIN-SMITH1

This volume is the third collection of essays gleaned from three Sacred
Texts and Human Contexts conferences sponsored by the Hickey Center
for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue since 2013. These conferences have
created an expanding community of interfaith scholars from around the
world who enjoy the intellectual and spiritual challenges of honest and
focused conversation on topics of common concern. Even as I compose
this introduction to the book, the fourth conference (on issues of sex and
gender in the religious traditions) is just a few weeks away, and I am
increasingly excited at the thought of reconvening our conversation
partners once again for a new exploration of our religious traditions and
their varied expressions in diverse human contexts.
The central question posed by this book is: “What do our sacred texts
and religious traditions say about the human relationship and
responsibilities to the earth and its nonhuman species?” Although this
single question animates the book, the scholars answering the question
come from four continents, focus their attention on aspects of six different
religious traditions, and apply a variety of academic disciplines and
interpretive methods to their work. Such diversity is the source of the
profound intellectual thrill and moral value we experience in interfaith

1
Dr. Thomas Donlin-Smith is a professor of religious studies at Nazareth College.
He teaches courses in biomedical ethics, ethics of the professions, religion and
politics, religion and science, comparative religious environmental ethics,
Christian ethics, and religious studies theories and methods. Dr. Donlin-Smith’s
research interests include theory and method in the study of religion, religious
ethics, and the relationships among religion, science, and politics. He directs the
Nazareth College interdisciplinary program in ethics and is an advisory board
member of the Brian and Jean Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue.
He has served on numerous institutional ethics committees, human subjects
research committees, and institutional animal care and use committees. He
received his B.A. from The Ohio State University, M.Div. from Wesley
Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
2 Introduction

conversation, but it can also present a challenge when it comes to weaving

the threads of thought into a single, coherent volume! Some essays cover
overlapping themes or materials and are therefore closely related to each
other; others are more distinctive in material or approach. Some essays
focus on traditional scriptures while others are based on a more elastic
understanding of “sacred texts” and examine texts, stories, and thinkers
from the wider history of the religious traditions (e.g., Bonhoeffer and
Merton). Furthermore, the range of traditions under examination has been
expanding over the three volumes of this series from an initial focus on the
three prominent Abrahamic religions to a consideration in this book of
religions originating in South Asia and Africa as well. We trust that the
adventurous reader will enjoy this sprawling journey into the thought-
worlds of diverse cultures and scholars as we address together the crucial
environmental issues of the twenty-first century.
For persons committed to any of these religious traditions and
concerned about contemporary environmental issues, the guiding question
of the book is of obvious importance. However, it is fair to ask whether
this question has any significance for individuals or organizations whose
assumptions are more secular. There are at least three reasons to answer
affirmatively. First, as any member of a diverse society should understand,
there is great humanistic value in understanding our fellow citizens. As
any participant in interfaith dialogue could tell you, understanding
religious texts and traditions is understanding people, the people with
whom we will debate and create a common future. Religion remains, for
better or worse, a powerful shaper of persons’ worldviews and values and
to ignore it is to self-inflict a diminished capacity to relate successfully to
others. Second, although much foolishness and cruelty have been
perpetrated in the name of religion, the scholars represented in this volume
are interested in gleaning the profound wisdom of the ages also present in
the religious traditions. Religious texts and traditions compile some of the
best of human thought and aspirations from across billions of people and
thousands of years. Why would we deny ourselves such a resource when
facing the formidable challenges of our environmental crisis? Finally,
religion has indeed been complicit in environmentally destructive human
beliefs and behaviors; these too need to be understood. At least as far back
as Lynn White’s famous essay, it has been well understood that religion’s
record on the environment (as on every significant human issue) has been
decidedly ambiguous. It benefits us all—religious and secular alike—to
understand ways in which religion has functioned contrary to ecological
health so we may avoid such mistakes not just in religion but in our
secular ideologies as well.
 Nature and the Environment in Contemporary Religious Contexts 3

Any attempt to apply religious sources to a contemporary social issue

inevitably runs into the epistemological question of the relationship of
religion to various other sources of wisdom. In particular, in this case,
there is the question of how religious guidance relates to the insights from
biological science. The reader of this volume will soon see that, for most
of the scholars here, there is very little sense of conflict between religion
and science. Most of the authors take for granted the scientific consensus
that we are indeed living in a period of unprecedented human-caused
environmental crisis. The human context from which they consult their
religious texts and traditions is one of serious ecological peril although
experienced in different ways and to different degrees in different parts of
the world. Religiously-inspired climate science denial might be a
significant phenomenon in some quarters, but the scholars contributing to
this volume are interested not in denying, but in making use of, the best of
human knowledge from all sources. They have little desire to argue
scientific points from a nonscientific basis: they leave scientific questions
to the scientists. However, not all questions are scientific questions. What
these scholars of religion can provide is insight into religious persons’
worldview assumptions, guiding stories, motivating role models, ways of
reasoning, and moral principles, and thereby clues into ways of inspiring
more environmentally responsible behavior in the future.
Although, as noted above, it is a challenge to organize such wide-
ranging material, and some essays might have been placed elsewhere in
the book, the volume is arranged into three parts. Part One, “Human
Contexts Within Nature,” introduces the general issue before us: that all
our diverse human social contexts are contained within the context of
nature and that this global natural context is suffering unprecedented
stress. Authors writing from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist
perspectives whet our appetite by reviewing our planetary situation in the
new Anthropocene Age, analyzing some of the attitudes and behaviors that
have brought us to this point, and identifying images and themes from
their traditions that might help us move into the future more
constructively.
Part Two, “Imperatives from Sacred Texts and Traditions,” provides
examples of scholars discerning and interpreting moral imperatives
regarding the environment from sacred texts. Whether the source text is
the Bible, the Qur’an, or the DevƯ MƗhƗtmaya, the authors of these essays
are working the hermeneutical circle. In each case, the scholar brings the
concerns of their contemporary context to texts deemed to have sacred
authority yet reflecting human contexts of other times and places in order
to distill insights and moral imperatives of value for their current situation.
4 Introduction

This dynamic conversation across time and place is inevitable in anything

that can be called a tradition. It entails a complicated process of
determining which aspects of that tradition are most useful for the present
environmental context, and the stakes are especially high when one
regards these traditions as sacred and that present context as dire.
The essays of Part Three, “Practicing the Imperatives,” while providing
further examples of discernment of moral norms from religious texts and
traditions, also describe action inspired by the imperatives. They tell us of
religiously informed people engaging in sacred art, interreligious dialogue,
community organizing, and environmental activism as they work to bring
about positive change for our imperiled planet. In keeping with the broad
scope of the book, the examples come from different continents, centuries,
and religious contexts, but the common theme is recognition of the value
of other-than-human nature and a commitment to act upon that recognition.
Although this volume was developed around the concept of “sacred
texts” engaging diverse “human contexts,” there really are no simply
human contexts. The human, social, or cultural is always enmeshed in the
natural, environmental, or biological. Realizing that there is no pulling
them apart is an example of the kind of shift of consciousness required by
life in the twenty-first century. Our age of unprecedented eco-social
urgency requires a dramatic reconsideration of many of our fundamental
concepts and assumptions. People who are committed to the world’s
religious traditions face this challenge the same as anyone else, but with
the additional complication that some of those concepts and assumptions
are not only fundamental to their worldview, but also regarded as divinely
validated. The scholarly work reflected in this book contributes to this
reconsideration effort. In so doing, we participate in what Thomas Berry
called the “Great Work” of our time, the dramatic shift of human thought
and behavior to forms more conducive to a future for the biosphere of our
beautiful planet earth.
 PART I

OUR HUMAN CONTEXTS WITHIN NATURE

 CHAPTER ONE

ECOLOGIES OF DIVERSITY:
BEYOND RELIGIOUS AND HUMAN
EXCEPTIONALISM

CATHERINE KELLER1

Abstract: If the climate crisis must now be treated not as a set of

exceptional emergencies but as an inescapable emergence, it belongs at the
center of religious, and therefore interreligious, concern. Theology as
political can contribute to the struggle for a just and sustainable planetary
future, but only inasmuch as it exposes and exceeds a secularized political
theology of sovereign power. Such sovereignty comes dominated by a
series of exceptionalisms: religious, national, economic, and anthropic. A
theology of ecosocial justice will have multiple religious sources; here, for
instance, a Christian struggle beyond anthropocentrism takes invaluable
cues from an ecological Islam.

It is heartening in this multiply stressed moment of planetary existence

to be thinking together about the living context of the world religions. The
world—our environment, at multiple scales—is being invited to come out
of the background and into the focus of religious sensibility. The Protestant
theologian Jürgen Moltmann formulates the challenge concisely: “The so-


1
Catherine Keller is professor of constructive theology at the Theological School
of Drew University. In her teaching, lecturing, and writing, she develops the
relational potential of a theology of becoming. Her books reconfigure ancient
symbols of divinity for the sake of a planetary conviviality—a life together, across
vast webs of difference. Thriving in the interplay of ecological and gender politics,
of process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy and religious pluralism, her
work is both deconstructive and constructive in strategy. Note: I thank my research
assistant, Winfield Goodwin, for his invaluable editorial help.
8 Chapter One

called great world religions will only prove themselves to be ‘world

religions,’ when they become earth religions and understand humanity as
an integrated part of the planet earth.” 2 Of course the world religions,
particularly in their Abrahamic modes, have often been nervous about
their own earthiness, fearing it could lead to idolatrous nature-worship,
pantheist naturalism, modern reductionism, atheism, materialism. But
thank God (by whatever name you call upon him, her, or it) in the context
of a conversation on “Nature, Environment and the World Religions,” I do
not have to make a case for the deep earthiness of our faiths. We can think
from the shared presumption that the planetarity of a world religion no
longer refers simply to its universal outreach or truth claim. Planetarity
now, as always, signifies at the same time our ecological responsibility.
I do not therefore have to take time to persuade the participants in a
conversation on religion’s living context that the earth—as the context of us
all, as the world that we humans coinhabit alongside all those nonhuman
others with which we are intimately interrelated—is characterized by a
rapidly mounting crisis. Even before the great political pivot against all
environmentalism, we knew we were in trouble. As the ice melts and the
seas rise, as the oceans get poisoned, the forests burn, and the droughts
intensify, as the food supply decreases and we continue exponentially to
increase, as humans—and disproportionately the human communities that
have been systematically disadvantaged by our global socioeconomic
practices—become subject to increasingly devastating displacements, and
face therefore new levels of violence, every religious resource we can
muster will be needed. Even before the new wave of potentially fascist
anti-immigrant politics became manifest, we realized that migration,
poverty, race, and xenophobia—particularly Islamophobia—cannot be
understood in abstraction from the effects of climate change. Participants
in this conversation knew already that we were facing a new kind of
emergency situation before its stunning political acceleration.
There are really just three points I want to make in this paper. I offer
them in the hope that they help us communicate with each other about this
planetary crisis. By talking together we hope to get and to give hope. Hope
for a collective planetary future that is worthy of the earthly hopes of each

2
Jürgen Moltmann, “Eine gemeinsame Religion der Erde (A Common Religion of
the Earth): Weltreligionen in ükologischer Perspektive (World Religions in
Ecological Perspective),” in Verlag Otto Lembeck 10/1605, “Okumenische
Rundschau” (2011), 26 (my translation). As discussed in my Cloud of the
Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 279-80.
 Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism 9

of our traditions. Those hopes come encoded in our sacred texts—particularly

in the prophetic, messianically energized eschatological traditions. Hope of
course is itself a deeply and problematically religious idea, one that is all
too easily abstracted and diverted from our earth future. Hence the phrase:
hoping against hope.
My first point here is that the coming climate emergency should not be
treated as a state of exception but as a now inescapable emergence. The
legal notion of the state of emergency is driven by a politics, indeed a
political theology, centered in an emergency power defined as the power
of the exception. However, multiple, distinct, historical exceptionalisms—
the racial exceptionalism of White Anglo-Saxonism, the nationalist
exceptionalism of United States power, the economic exceptionalism of
contemporary regimes of global capitalism—in fact propel the current
emergency. And, exceptions end up proving their rule. Given our
conference topic, I will focus upon a very old, very theological, and very
unexceptional interplay between a human and a Christian exceptionalism.
My second point will be that an alternative political theology is
needed. It requires an alternative to the sovereign power of the exception.
But it would need to be an alternative capable of rising to the occasion of
coming catastrophe. The key to this alternative is what I have elsewhere
called “entangled difference.” Here difference itself is to be read not as
separation but as inseparable relation. In the midst of our differences, we
may exclude or ignore the depth of our relations. But the vital truth is that
we do not thereby become ontologically independent of those relations or
of that depth. If we are constituted in and by relations—good ones, toxic
ones, and unknown ones—then our very differences form the interlinkages
that make us up. This is true of individual, economic, ethnic, and of course
species diversity. And in this conversation we attend particularly to this
truth as manifest in religious diversity, whether we respect our differences
or practice a barbaric indifference. In our interfaith reflection on nature,
we may begin to consider that just as all creatures develop
interdependently, so too, naturally, do our religions. This is the ecology of
the creation: we are all in it together. This insistence may help us to face
planetary catastrophe, in order to prevent it as much as possible, and to
adapt to it non-barbarically when it cannot be averted.
So then catastrophe itself can here and now become a catalyst for
transformation. That allows me to state my third point in one sentence: if
we ask what can turn catastrophe into a catalyst, the answer must begin
with “hope.”
10 Chapter One

(1) Let us consider the first thesis, then: that this unprecedented
emergency should not be treated as a state of exception but as a now-
inescapable emergence. Just what will emerge is unpredictable. It will
involve catastrophe, no doubt, but how extreme that catastrophe will be
depends on global human response. Is the right image of the human
response so far that of a car speeding down a mountain toward a cliff with
still time to brake? Or rather, as many environmentalists now say, are we
already going off the cliff?
Climate change will intensify all manner of already existing conflicts
and inequalities. It does not so much cause them as it inflates them. The
example of Syria and the rise of ISIS is telling (even Prince Charles told it
in Paris). In the context of five years of unprecedented drought and
Assad’s repressive response, the refugee crisis has become dire. At the
same time, a broader anti-immigrant affect drives the electoral successes
of right-wing parties in Europe. And now we face the trumping of
democracy in the United States, in the election of an anti-immigrant and
climate-denialist president. Does this all suggest a merely accidental
connection between Islamophobia and environmental catastrophe?
These totally different issues require a range of political responses. But
it may be crucial to think them together, in relation one to another. I would
suggest one possible approach to doing so. It draws upon what is called
political theology, a current discussion in political philosophy much more
so than in theology. It considers the major concepts of modern politics to
be secularizations of theology. Sovereignty itself is modeled upon divine
omnipotence. Political theology gets largely defined by the German legal
theorist Carl Schmitt’s work from the 1920s on. It centers in this
proposition: “Sovereign is he who decides in the exception.” 3 The
exception is kin to the miracle—a novum that interrupts business as usual,
a power that makes the rules but need not play by them. A medieval model
of divine sovereignty thus is secularized in the Western form of political
exceptionalism. In other words, it is a sovereignty derived from a
presumption of Christian supremacism. That dominant theological legacy
draws its force from the theology of a single, exceptional incarnation.
It is then a Christian exceptionalism that sanctified modern secular
models of imperial sovereignty. If we had time, we could track the
particular forms of Anglo-Saxon racial exceptionalism, of United States
exceptionalism, its American dream and its manifest destiny, and then of


3
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
 Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism 11

the hypersecularized exceptionalism of neoliberal global capitalism.4 But

given our interreligious focus, I would draw attention particularly to the
way this exceptionalism unfolds in a thousand-year arc of crusades. It
begins with Pope Urban II in 1096, with an aggression meant to bring
European powers to a new unity. This papal power play exemplifies
Schmitt’s politics of friend versus foe. Fast-forward to Bush II invading
Iraq almost a millennium later, declaring thereby a new crusade. 5 He
powered up a coalition of the willing, united Islamophobically in the
interests of big oil and the sovereignty of neoliberal capital. As Giorgio
Agamben argues, the state of exception—suspending the applicability of
international law concerning prisoners—insidiously became the rule.6 He
recalls the camps, the lager, of the second World War, and he gestures
simultaneously toward the proliferation of new camps: the massive
refugee camps dotting the political landscape of Europe today. 7 But
neither Agamben nor the other leftist interpreters of political theology
analyze the ecological context of these current dehumanizations.
Nonetheless, once one perceives the link of various waves of
Islamophobia—waves both religious and secular—to a founding Christian
exceptionalism, one might wonder: does climate change not remain
peripheral to it? Or might one begin to recognize that what is enabling
climate catastrophe is at root another effect of the same Christian
exceptionalism? This time it is taking the form of our human
exceptionalism: the notion of the human as not just different from other
creatures, not just uniquely talented, but as the supreme exception—the


4
For an incisive analysis of the history of White supremacy and American
exceptionalism in the context of contemporary instances of violence against people
of color in the United States, see Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground:
Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015). See
also William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes,
Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2013), and Joshua Barkan’s Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government
under Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
5
For an extended discussion of this legacy of exceptionalism in the case of
political crusades in the distant and not-so-distant past, see “Crusade, Capital, and
Cosmopolis: Ambiguous Entanglements” in my Cloud of the Impossible, chapter 8.
6
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
12 Chapter One

denaturalized creature who transcends the material interdependencies of

the earth.

(2) Creaturely interdependence forms the content of the alternative

that I propose to the politically theological exceptionalism. Isn’t this
human exceptionalism, however, based on the very first chapter of what
for many of us is sacred text—on Genesis, with its creation of the human
in the image of God? For decades, Christian ecotheology has been
returning over and over to that chapter. Some come to question the
sacrality of Gen 1.26-28 as it grants special status, dominion, to humanity
to fill up and subdue (kabash in Heb) the earth. Certainly the text has been
used to justify the modern Western domination project. But other
ecotheologians argue that if the text is read in context, dominion can only
mean environmental responsibility. After all what God declares “very
good” is not the exceptional human but rather “everything that God had
made” [1.31]. The entire Genesis collective, what Lynn White in 1966
called “the democracy of all God’s creatures.” If “to except” means
originally “to take out,” the imago dei does not then mark us as the
exception to the creaturely collective; rather, we arise as its communicative
exemplification. Our distinctiveness is indubitable: we are created in
imago dei, to partake of God’s creativity, called to exercise our creativity
with stewardly care. As the papal encyclical reminded us of Genesis 2.15:
“to till and to keep the earth,” not to exploit and to waste it. And so
certainly the Christian counter-tradition that heeds “the cry of the poor, the
cry of the earth” has at least evolved a minority alternative to the
economic, political, and anthropocentric exceptionalism of western
civilization.8
And, as far as I can discern, the theologies that emphasize the gift of
creaturely diversity tend also to recognize the gift of religious diversity.
Interfaith relations and ecological relations both express a deep—an
ontological—relationalism, as is clear in the half-century traditions of
process theology, for example, and of ecofeminism. A main reason I chose
to study with a process theologian, John Cobb, is that he taught that it is
not just secular liberalism calling Christians to be open to learn from other
religions. It is Christ calling us. Not just to the conversion of others, not
just to conversation, but to mutual transformation. Cobb’s focus was on


8
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Papal Encyclical
Letter (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2015).
 Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism 13

Buddhism. And much recent comparative theology moves between

Christianity and Hinduism.
But we pluralist Christians have not gone far—if I may risk choosing
an example particularly relevant to this conversation—not far, that is, in
recognizing how much we may need to learn from our sibling religion
Islam precisely to help us overcome the Christian anthropocentrism. The
2015 Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change offers an apt and
timely entry point: “If we each offer the best of our respective traditions,
we may yet see a way through our difficulties.”9 Consider this citation it
offers from the Qur’an: “No living creature is there moving on the earth,
no bird flying on its two wings, but they are communities like you” [6.38].
The elegant evocation of the importance of animal communities does not
contradict the bible; it adds something of crucial importance: birds, bees,
bears; these are not just creatures, but communities, like ourselves. This
lends them a specific register of relational complexity, and therefore of
social dignity. And this: “Surely the creation of the heavens and the earth
is something greater than the creation of humankind, but most of
humankind do not know [this truth]” [40.57]. I know of no sacred text of
Christianity that in this way directly and pointedly names the whole
cosmic context as at once greater than the human and also largely
unknown to be such. This sense of cosmological mystery does not
diminish human distinctiveness—the point is not to blur difference.
Instead, the text beautifully undermines human exceptionalism. And it
forges a new sense of tawhid, a unity of peace that is not sameness but
honors difference, what Abdul Asiz Said and Nathan Funk call “peace in
Islam” as “ecology of the spirit.”10 Ibrahim Ozdemir and other Muslim
environmentalists stress the following remarkable passage: “Don’t you see
that it is God Whose praises all beings in the heavens and on earth do
celebrate, and the birds with wings outspread? Each one knows its own
mode of prayer and praise. (And God knows well all that they do.)”
[24:41-42]11
May I respond: and do we not see how this text says something terribly
fresh? It echoes old Hebrew psalms of trees clapping their hands, of all the

9
http://islamicclimatedeclaration.org/islamic-declaration-on-global-climate-change/
10
Abdul Aziz Said and Nathan C. Funk, “Peace in Islam: An Ecology of the
Spirit,” in Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, Richard C. Foltz, Frederick M.
Denny, and Azizan Baharuddin eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003).
11
Ibrahim Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics from a
Qur’anic Perspective,” in Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust.
14 Chapter One

earth worshipping the Lord, but the Islamic text makes explicit that all
beings pray. This simple acknowledgement undermines our sense of being
the exception before God, and it frees prayer itself from anthropocentric
talktalktalk into a form of cosmic attunement. Such cosmic attunement as
we might want to relearn from the birds now, as we spread our wings to
face the consequences of our species’ predatory self-destruction.
Put more abstractly, the alternative to sovereign exceptionalism can be
couched as “entangled difference.” Our differences do not get diminished.
Rather, they get emphasized—sometimes exaggerated, sometimes opposed
—within our entanglements. This relationality echoes that of quantum
entanglement, the physics that attests to the instantaneous “intra-activity”
(Barad) of all things, at the most minimal material level of the electron,
across any measurable distance whatsoever.12 Recognizing that all relations
are relations of difference—that however much we differentiate, decide
and separate, we can never quite extricate, that indeed at the most basic
material level we remain ontologically non-separable from the universe of
relations—keeps us thinking, perhaps even praying, cosmically. And the
cosmos turns us always in our time back to our own planet and its ecology
of badly frayed relations.
Entangled difference applies as much to interfaith exchange as it does
to intercreaturely integrity. Do I become less Christian if I learn more from
Islam? No. My Christianity just gets more complicated—folded together
with the faiths of others. It was folded together with Judaism and with
Hellenism from the start. Every new dialogue is an enfolding. Not a
homogenization. In Christianity this critical insight seems to have been
embodied in the early Renaissance by Nicholas of Cusa, who studied the
Qu’ran and called for a religious peace based on awareness of divine
mystery. In Cloud of the Impossible, I borrow from him a mystical
language of enfolding and unfolding: the divine complicatio and
explicatio. No one, and no one religion, cognitively masters God; the
divine infinity is everywhere, and therefore unfolds in different ways
exemplified in diverse religious Ways. I find Cusa’s argument from
1453—forged then in the face of the catastrophe of the Ottoman defeat of


12
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no.
3 (Spring 2003): 801-831. For an extended discussion of Barad’s work and more
generally of the entanglement of quantum physics and negative theology please see
“Spooky Entanglements: The Physics of Nonseparability,” in my Cloud of the
Impossible, chapter 4.
 Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism 15

Constantinople—still oddly credible. It lends ancestral help in constructing

an interreligiously apt Christology.
Christ is then not the supreme exception but the great exemplar, the
embodiment of a love that seeks to materialize in all ways, in all creatures,
in all prayers. So it helps us who are Christians to challenge the notion of
the single, ontologically exceptional incarnation. We can have recourse to
the medieval tradition of Christ the exemplar. It is arguably more faithful
to the sacred texts than any Christian exclusivism. Even of John 14.6, the
bane of religious pluralism: “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” This
gets routinely mispronounced as, I am THE way, THE truth . . . In context,
however, the text has nothing to do with other religions. He was saying to
his disciples, who were expressing fear of losing their way if he dies, that
he had already entangled them in his life, in his way.
We might say now that Christ is for his followers of course the way.
He leads us on a path of radical hospitality and respect for the stranger,
and therefore in later terms to interfaith exchange, and beyond, to the
shared work of the earth. That is the work of resistance to the approaching
barbarism: the work of a just love.13 It is perhaps not far from the way of
an ecological tawhid. Which is not to say it is the same: The point is not to
impose homogeneity upon diversity, but again, to connect our differences
intentionally. If we can systemically interweave our religious diversity
with our remaining ecological diversity—that is, if we can entangle our
very human religious diversity with an attention to the nonhuman heaven
and earth—our species may just have a chance of a viable future. Of
course, it is a chance to be yanked from the jaws of emergency. So then let
us insist on a new collective emergence. It would be the way of a political
theology of the Earth.

(3) This at least is the hypothesis of my final point, which responds to

the question: How do we shift climate catastrophe into catalyst? Hope, I
claimed above. Not optimism, not denial, not despair. Without hope,
nothing—nihil, nihilism. We will surrender to the seductions of
consumerism, the intensities of more immediate crises or the paralysis of
despair. But what does hope hope for? Hope as a normative value arises
from the biblical text. It comes from the prophetic tradition of the novum,
in Isaiah: “I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not
perceive it?” So the novum must not be confused with the exception,


13
Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism,
Andrew Goffrey trans. (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).
16 Chapter One

which will only prove the hopeless rule of the same old sovereignties. This
hope is for a transformation of the heavens—hashamyim—the atmosphere
and the earth, a radical renewal of everything, of the genesis collective.
The great textual danger those of us who have some voice among the
Abrahamisms must address may be the tendency to a passive reliance on
omnipotent power either to intervene as the miraculous exception or just to
control it all. The latter means that when we trash the earth, it must be
God’s mysterious will. Then our hope is just for a supernatural heaven, not
the renewed heavens and earth. Such exceptionalist hope is the very hope
we must hope against. For as the great theologian of hope Moltmann puts
it, “We have no need to leave this world behind in order to look for God in
a world to come. We only need to enter this world with its beauties and
terrors, for God is already there. God waits for us through everything that
God has created, and speaks to us through all of the creatures.”14
The ancient prophetic writings of hope all took place in the face of
historical crisis. The book of Revelation may be the most extreme. The
image of the whore of Babylon, indeed much of the text, trends
misogynist. But John’s hallucinogenic vision at the same time outs the
total destructiveness of a power-hungry world empire, offering in great
detail the economics of its global trade: the “cargo of gold, silver jewels,
horses and chariots, slaves….” The apocalyptic trauma however does not
end, as rumor would have it, with the end of the world. “The end of the
world” is not a biblical production but a later discursive reduction. The
book actually ends with a renewed, urban planet: “Let everyone who is
thirsty come. Let everyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” (In
our epoch of expanding drought and of the poisoning of the waters of the
earth, this has new meaning. We may now hear the reverb with another
ecoreligious register, the chants of Standing Rock Sioux demonstrators:
“mni wiconi, water is life.”) The text itself is not gift but poison if it
supports fatalism, antagonism, and human helplessness.
Perhaps catastrophe can become catalyst only if we read our
apocalypses through the prophetic tradition of justice, mercy, of tawhid.
Then, even amidst the terrors of the earth, we know ourselves awaited.
The prophetic tradition works beyond theism, as in for instance the text of
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Like
Pope Francis, Klein shows the double jeopardy of environmental and
economic depredation:


14
Jürgen Moltmann, The Living God and the Fullness of Life (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 171.
 Ecologies of Diversity: Beyond Religious and Human Exceptionalism 17

The double jeopardy of social injustice and global warming should not
discourage us. Climate change, with its rising flood waters could become a
galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme
weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other
ways as well . . . It is a matter of collectively using the crisis to leap
somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now.15

The relation she envisions between ecological and economic struggles

is hopeful indeed. And what is that galvanizing force of which she speaks
but the hopeful catalyst that can shift emergency into creative urgency?
An analogous relation obtains between climate change and religious
difference. It is a relation that has the toxic potential, a potential that has
all too frequently become actual in history, to fuel the fires of planetary
apocalypse. Alternatively, in an interconnectivity raised to mindfulness,
we can claim our interreligious and our intercreaturely solidarity. This
broad coalitional possibility will, as the papal Encyclical demonstrates,
necessarily involve political resistance to predatory capitalism. So then a
catastrophic triple jeopardy becomes a triple hope. This is the way that a
political theology of the earth remains political, theological and earthly: it
reveals the entangled differences of our texts and our contexts. In the face
of a catastrophe that exposes our delusions of independence and control as
self-deception, new modes of earthly collaboration might just be possible:
of cooperation among and beyond religions, of earthly conviviality among
and beyond the human.
The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change concludes with a
HadƯth related by Abu Sa’Ưd Al-KhudrƯ: “We bear in mind the words of
our Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him): The world is sweet and
verdant, and verily Allah has made you stewards in it, and He sees how
you acquit yourselves.”16
And as Saffet Catovic, one of the co-authors of the Declaration,
recently put it in aptly down-to-earth language: “With this climate change
issue, especially these last two years, religious leaders around the world
are not praying against each other, they’re praying with one another for a
common cause. Because the realization has set in that we’re gonna have


15
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2014), 7.
16
http://islamicclimatedeclaration.org/islamic-declaration-on-global-climate-change/
18 Chapter One

nothing left.”17 In the hope of creative interaction between our faiths, and
for the sake of our common home, I pray with you today.


17
http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-12-30/muslim-environmentalists-give-their-religion-
and-their-mosques-fresh-coat-green. I report with great pride that Imam Catovic is
currently a student in Drew University’s Graduate Division of Religion.
 CHAPTER TWO

MEASURED ECOLOGICAL HUMANISM

OF THE QUR’AN AND INTERNATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT:
A COMPARATIVE LOOK

M. ASHRAF ADEEL1

Abstract: This paper compares three of the leading Western theories of

environmental ethics, i.e., ecological humanism, individualistic biocentrism,
and holistic biocentrism. The Qur’anic view of nature and its implications
for environmental ethics and international development are then dealt with
and it is argued that, despite some differences, the Qur’an’s attitude toward
nature is more in accord with ecological humanism than with biocentrism.
Ecological humanism, I argue, is a more practicable view because, while
insisting upon judicious use of nature’s benefits for man’s sustenance, it
does make room for such use by not making man and the rest of un-self-
conscious nature equal in value with man. Measured ecological humanism
of the Qur’an is similar in this respect although it provides a metaphysical
basis for gradations in existence. In contrast, biocentrism places man and the
rest of the nature at the same footing in terms of their value. The crucial
point argued, however, is that the Qur’an does not allow individual or
collective imbalance when it comes to man’s use of natural resources. Its
ethical principles imply a balanced or “measured” use of resources while
working in “harmony” with nature rather than in conflict with it.


1
M. Ashraf Adeel is a professor of philosophy at Kutztown University of
Pennsylvania. He has held a senior visiting fellowship at Oxford, a professorship at
University of Peshawar, Pakistan, and was the founding vice-chancellor of Hazara
University in Pakistan. He specializes in contemporary philosophy of language and
science as well as contemporary Islamic thought.
20 Chapter Two

Introduction
Environmentalism is an important trend of thought that has originated
as a reaction to a ruthless exploitation of nature by the so-called
technological civilization of our times. Since, however, all civilizations of
the world have been affected by various kinds of environmental degradation
and hazardous technologies, it is no surprise that environmentalism has
turned out to be a global movement. Views of nature and man’s relation to
it are being explored from the point of view of all the major cultural
traditions of the world. The purpose, generally, is twofold: (a) to underscore
what was wrong with the modern Western notion of “development through
exploitation of nature,” and (b) to uncover fresh metaphysical and ethical
insights that could be brought to bear on the issues involved in man’s
relation to nature. In this brief essay I confine myself to casting a look at
some of the recent trends in environmental ethics in the Western
philosophical tradition, namely, ecological humanism, individualistic
biocentric ethics, and holistic biocentric ethics.2 It is argued that ecological
humanism is an ethical position with better claim to philosophical
credibility. The Qur’anic view of nature and its implications for environmental
ethics and international development are then dealt with. It is argued that
the contemporary state of development in the world violates the Qur’anic
principles of balanced development for all human communities as well as
harmony between man and nature in all developmental work.
Contemporary state of development is both lop-sided and has produced
conflict between man and nature in the form of environmental crisis.

1. Ecological Humanism
Ecological humanism is the name adopted by Andrew Brennan for his
own position in environmental ethics as he develops it in his Thinking
about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value, and Ecology3. Brennan
wants to avoid the extremes of so-called shallow and deep ecological
ethics and presents ecological humanism as a middle of the road position.


2
I am not able to discuss environmental virtue ethics in this short paper. However,
given the fact that the Quranic ethics is a virtue ethics primarily, I believe an
environmental virtue ethics can be derived from the Quran and relates to ecological
humanism of the Quran.
3
Brennan, Andrew. Thinking about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value, and
Ecology. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1988).
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 21

Before I explain Brennan’s viewpoint, it seems worthwhile to make a few

remarks about the difference between shallow and deep ecology. In his
article “Recent Positions in Environmental Ethics Examined,” Sprigge
explains the difference in the following words:
By a shallow eco-philosopher . . . we may understand one who is
concerned at the pollution of our environment and the exhaustion of
resources, at the destruction of rain forests and so forth. But his concern is
solely with the threats to human welfare now and in future generations
posed by such things. For him nature matters as a resource for human
needs, basic, scientific, and recreational, not as having some value
independent of what there is in it for humans. The deep eco-philosopher,
in contrast, believes that nature, understanding by this primarily ‘wild
nature,’ must be respected as valuable in itself.4

Brennan wants to avoid both shallow and deep ecological ethics and,
hence, argues for ecological humanism. Ecological humanism is based on
the idea that human identity, individually or as a race, largely depends on
man’s place in the larger bio-system. He says: “My current experiences…
would not be what they are were I not living at this time, in this society, of
this species and carrying within me a distinctive history of previous
experiences . . . The other side of the same coin, however, is that my
experiences and doings essentially involve the social and physical world
that I inhabit.” 5 This intrinsic linkage between man and nature makes
human good inseparable from that of nature. Therefore, in order to
promote the good of man, we must concern ourselves with the good of
nature. Brennan wants to argue that nature is neither simply a resource for
man nor is it intrinsically valuable independently of man. Identity of man
and value of nature are integrally linked with each other. He says: “The
ecological history of a mountain range involves an account of the species
which have over time grown on it, grazed it and quarried it. We can leave
our marks on mountains and a chalk cliff is little more than a pile of
skeletons. But such things likewise leave their marks on us: as challenge to
climbers, providers of desolation to ramblers, objects of beauty and awe to
observers.” 6 He continues this line of thought by saying that “[o]bjects
systems, even the land forms around me, deserve my respect, deserve


4
Sprigge, T.L.S. 1991. “Some Recent Positions in Environmental Ethics
Examined.” Inquiry, 34:107-28 (1991), 108.
5
Brennan. Thinking about Nature, 180.
6
Ibid., 196.
22 Chapter Two

ethical consideration simply by being what they are, where they are and
interacting with other items in the way they do.”7
Apparently this is an interesting position. However, in order for this
position to live up to the demands of being a genuine ethical theory, it
must clarify as to why normal people would be motivated to act upon it.
An ecological humanist can appeal to the issue of the survival of the
human race in order to bring out the motivational force of his/her theory.
He/she can argue that if the current exploitation of nature continues, we as
a human race will not be able to survive in any desirable way. In
destroying nature we destroy the context of our own identity and moral
worth. However, whether or not such reasoning will appeal to deniers of
an environmental crisis is an open question. Such deniers question the very
premise that there is an environmental crisis. They question the idea that
nature is being disrupted by human activity to a point where survival of
the human race is or is going to be at stake. Available evidence, according
to them, is simply insufficient to imply such a conclusion. In a way these
deniers reject the very presence of ecological evil in our contemporary
world. For them, therefore, there is no motivation to try to avoid it and
actively pursue its opposite, i.e., various ecological goods.
How can an ecological humanist, then, persuade such critics of the
environmental movement that they have a moral responsibility to save
nature as the context of human identity and survival? Obviously one
recourse that an ecological humanist can have against such deniers is to
point to the overwhelming scientific evidence for the existence of a
contemporary environmental crisis. But the critics already declare that as
insufficient. The only other recourse that one can think of here for the
ecological humanist is an appeal to Pascal’s wager. Whether or not the
current scientific evidence points to an environmental crisis is a
“momentous question.” Even if the probability that it does is low (by the
deniers’ lights), believing in the existence of an environmental crisis
cannot be harmful. If a crisis actually exists, we’ll be saving the human
race a tremendous amount of harm by having and acting on such a belief.
On the other hand, if such a crisis turns out to be non-existent, the
comparative losses of a false belief in its existence are going to be hugely
less harmful. Therefore, it appears that ecological humanism is not without
rational motivational force even for the deniers of environmental crisis.
Let us turn now to some other approaches in environmental ethics.


7
Ibid., 198.
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 23

2. Individual Biocentric Ethics

Paul Taylor’s ethical position in his Respect for Nature: A Theory of
Environmental Ethics can be described as individualistic biocentric
ethics. 8 He points out that in the past ethics has been exclusively
concerned with human behavior toward each other. According to Taylor,
both humanistic ethics and biocentric ethics deserve equal legitimacy and
are appropriate in their respective areas. Biocentric ethics is based on
respect for all living things. It recognizes each living thing to possess
intrinsic value. Taylor says:
The biocentric outlook on nature also includes a certain way of perceiving
and understanding each individual organism. Each is seen to be a
teleological (goal-oriented) center of life, pursuing its own good in its own
unique way. This, of course, does not mean that they all seek their good as
a conscious end or purpose, the realization of which is their intended aim.
Consciousness may not be present at all, and even when it is present the
organism need not be thought of as intentionally taking steps to achieve
goals it sets for itself. Rather, a living thing is conceived as a unified
system of organized activity, the constant tendency of which is to preserve
its existence by protecting and promoting its well-being.9

So all living things are of equal value, according to biocentric ethics.

The fundamental requirement of this ethics is that humans should attach
equal importance to the good of all living things. Sprigge sums up
Taylor’s position in the following words:
…[I]t [each living thing] has its own good which it is better that it should
realize than fail to realize, and reflection shows that every living thing has
equal, or rather an identically absolute, inherent worth, i.e., it is no more
and no less important for one living thing (be it animal, plant, or even
bacterium) to reach its good than another. An enlightened moral agent
will, therefore, feel the same duty to act in ways respectful of the pursuit
by other things of their good, of whatever specie they may be. It matters
not whether the living thing in question be conscious or not. Just as
humans have no more inherent worth than non-human animals, so do
animals have no more inherent worth than plants. One must not say that
the fact that they are not conscious puts plants on a lower moral plane than
animals. The most that one can say is that there are certain goods which


8
Taylor, Paul W. Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. 25th
anniversary edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2011).
9
Ibid., 44-45.
24 Chapter Two

have no place in the life of plants, since they can only pertain to conscious
beings.10

The fundamental point of Taylor’s biocentric ethics, therefore, is that

all living things are centers of “teleological drive” and, hence, deserve
equal respect. Consciousness or sentience is not made the touchstone of
value by Taylor. Taylor and other deep ecologists believe it to be sheer
elitism to confine moral worth to conscious beings alone.
Taylor is not a through and through deep ecologist, however. Most
deep ecologists are holist in their outlook insofar as they hold communities
of individuals to be more primary than the individuals. Taylor does not
countenance such a position. His biocentric ethics is explicitly
individualistic. It emphasizes the inherent worth of each individual living
thing and the respect for its pursuit of its own good. He says:

All organisms, whether conscious or not, are teleological centers of life in

the sense that each is a unified, coherently ordered system of goal-oriented
activity that has a constant tendency to protect and maintain the
organism’s existence.
Under this conception of individual living things, each is seen to have
a single, unique point of view. This point of view is determined by the
organism’s particular way of responding to its environment, interacting
with other individual organisms, and undergoing the regular, law-like
transformations of the various stages of its species-specific life cycle.11

His central idea here is that individual organisms are the locus of value
because they fulfill their own good through their individual drive. As
Sprigge puts it: “Total eco-systems only matter because individuals find
their good within them; there is no overall value of the whole, since the
whole (it is claimed) is pursuing no good of its own. Nor do species as
such have any value.”12
Therefore, it is the individual organism, and not the eco-systems or
species as such, which is the locus of moral worth. This individualism of
Taylor contrasts sharply with the holism of Holmes Rolston III.


10
Spriggs. “Some Recent Positions in Environmental Ethics Examined.” 116.
11
Taylor, “Respect for Nature,” 122-23.
12
Sprigg, “Some Recent Positions in Environmental Ethics Examined,” 117.
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 25

3. Holistic Biocentric Ethics

Rolston III, in his Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the
Natural World, agrees with the general elan of Taylor’s biocentric ethics.13
He agrees with Taylor that all living organisms possess moral worth. Each
organism, he says, has its own good to pursue because it is a system that
processes information. Information is processed by it, however, to reach
the goal of its own good. To make its good contingent upon consciousness,
therefore, is nothing more than a prejudice in favor of human and animal
considerations. Rolston believes that traditional humanistic ethics has
suffered from this prejudice. He says: “Kant knew something about others,
but . . . the only others he could see were other humans, others who could
say ‘I.’ Environmental ethics calls for seeing nonhumans, for seeing the
biosphere, the Earth, ecosystem communities, fauna, flora, natural kinds
that cannot say ‘I’ but in which there is formed integrity, objective value
independent of subjective value.”14 This way of putting the matter really
brings the basic point into sharp focus. Ethical sensitivity, Rolston insists,
must be able to recognize “others” other than human others. Otherwise it
stands the danger of becoming subjective and parochial defeating the very
purpose of morality.15
Rolston, however, is not an individualist in his biocentrism. His
environmental ethics takes species and ecosystems as primary as far as
values and worth are concerned. The good of the individuals is important
in itself, but it is much more so as a moment in the life of the species or
the eco-system. He says:
...[L]ife is a sacred thing, and we ought not to be careless about it. This
applies to life not only with the capacity for experience, but to the lesser
zoological and botanical species. Species enter and exit the natural theater
but only over geologic time, to fit evolving habitats. Individuals have their
intrinsic worth, but particular individuals come and go, while that wave of
life in which they participate overlaps the single life span millions of
times.16

From this holistic point of view, therefore, the preservation of species

and eco-systems matters in itself. Rolston insists, therefore, that human

13
Rolston III, H. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural
World. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
14
Ibid., 340.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 309.
26 Chapter Two

beings should act responsibly and ensure that “fecundity of nature in

producing new species is not reduced.” But as the above quotation shows
Rolston does not ignore the intrinsic worth of individuals either.
Therefore, he seems to be looking for an ethical sensitivity that attends to
all the different levels of values and is also free of any prejudice in favor
of sentience.
The three philosophical positions detailed so far are Western in their
origin. However, as noted earlier, environmental concerns have become
global concerns in our day and time. They need to be explored, therefore,
from the point of view of other cultural tradition as well. Here, I give a
brief critical evaluation of ecological humanism and individualistic and
holistic biocentrism before presenting what I take to be the Qur’anic
attitude toward nature.
Our fundamental objection to biocentric ethics of both types is based
on what biocentricists refer to as prejudice in favor of consciousness. It
doesn’t seem either scientifically or metaphysically appealing to ignore
consciousness as a factor in allowing for intrinsic value gradation in the
biological world. Plants, animals, and humans belong to different grades
of life and while they all possess intrinsic value, it makes little scientific or
philosophical sense to accord them all an equal status in the matter without
an eye to the levels of their sentience. If nothing else, the nature of the so-
called “teleological drive” is different in different grades of organisms;
and quality of this drive is definitely related to consciousness and various
levels of it. So consciousness needs to be taken into account while
introducing gradations of intrinsic value in nature. So instead of bestowing
a blanket equal value on all living things, biocentrism might as well view
the situation in terms of various grades of sentience-related values
conferrable on various grades of life. This will be realistic and will do
justice to lots of empirical facts of the biological world as well.
Taylor’s position regarding the equal intrinsic value of things natural is
quite explicit. For example he says: “The killing of a wildflower, then,
when taken in and of itself, is just as much a wrong, other-things-being-
equal, as the killing of a human.”17
Rolston, however, does allow for gradation of value in nature but
delinks it from consciousness or sentience. About gradation of value he
says:


17
Taylor, Paul W. “In Defense of Biocentrism.” Environmental Ethics, 5 (1983),
242.
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 27

Perhaps the intrinsic value of plants lies on the attenuating slope of a curve
somewhat like those encountered in physics, where an actual field of
force, measurably present at some location, falls off rapidly with distance
and soon in practice vanishes, although it never in theory reaches zero. A
small magnet has in theory an infinite field: in practice, the field is
insignificant twenty centimeters away. Combining such curves for several
groups would produce descending differential value curves along
gradients, gradual or steep, with the general picture that the intrinsic value
of sentient animals would be lower than that of humans, that of insects still
less. The value of plants would be practically nil, a barely usable idea in
ethics. Nature crosses various thresholds of emergent values.18

However, Rolston goes on to clarify the basis of his view of intrinsic

values of things in nature by saying that “some values are already there,
discovered, not generated, by the valuer because the first project here is
really the natural object, nature’s project: the principal projecting is nature
creating formed integrity. Beside this, the human projecting of value is an
epiphenomenon.”19 This goes to show that as far as intrinsic value goes, all
things in nature possess it independently of consciousness, even for
Rolston.
The same criticism can be leveled against ecological humanism as
well, though from a slightly different angle. In linking up the identity of
man and the value of nature with each other, the ecological humanist also
ignores the question of the primacy of status between man and nature. It
seems to be true that man’s identity, individual or collective, cannot be
understood without an essential reference to his natural context. It seems
also to be true that value and worth of nature cannot be understood without
taking man into account. However, to leave matters at that general level is
not very discriminating philosophically. The character of the relationship
between man and nature will be placed in a much better relief if arguments
for their equal or non-equal status are made obvious. Brennan seems to
ignore this important issue and, therefore, ecological humanism also
suffers from a blanket approach regarding the question of values in the
world insofar as it ignores the primacy of levels of consciousness.
However, the strength of ecological humanism vis-à-vis biocentrism
lies in its refusal to bestow independent value on nature. The notion that
nature possesses intrinsic value independently of consciousness is an
intractable one. Even when one takes proper care to avoid making values


18
Rolston, Environmental Ethics, 119.
19
Ibid., 117.
28 Chapter Two

entirely subjective, and acknowledges their objective bases, one doesn’t

find it very illuminating to make them entirely independent of consciousness.
Our mental attitude of favor or disfavor toward objects is one of the pre-
requisites for the emergence of value. Biocentric ethics, therefore, seems
to lack proper sensitivity for this connection between sentience and value;
and that is what appears to turn ecological humanism into a better option.

4. Measured Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an

The Qur’an has a definite view of nature and its relation to God as well
as man. Such a view, obviously, has implications regarding the correct
religious, moral, and scientific attitude of man toward nature. Environmental
ethics in Islam is based on some of these implications of the Qur’anic view
of nature and man. Here we look into only some of the most fundamental
features of this view.
It may be noted here that Muhammad Iqbal is one of the earliest 20th
century thinkers of Islam to have realized the pivotal significance of the
Qur’anic view of nature for the culture of Islam. His discussion on the
subject is scattered in different lectures of The Reconstruction of Religious
Thought in Islam. 20 In our times, a penetrating and comprehensive
treatment of the subject has been undertaken by Fazlur Rahman in his
Major Themes of the Qur’an.21 In my remarks below I generally follow
these two thinkers as far as my rough outline of the view of nature is
concerned, although the deductions about environmental ethics and
development are my own responsibility.
In the Qur’anic scheme of things nature, like man, is a created system
(2:117, 3:47) and hence is not completely independent. On the one hand it
is related to God, its creator, and on the other, man, its primary
beneficiary. The Qur’an does not, therefore, place everything in the
universe at the same metaphysical and moral plane and appears to be
firmly committed to the principle of gradation in its metaphysical and
axiological outlook. While primacy in the ultimate sense belongs only to
God, for nothing else is completely self-sufficient, man is more primary
than nature. This is so because nature, according to the Qur’an, has
“surrendered itself to God’s will” (3:83), i.e., is “Muslim,” while man has


20
Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934, 2000).
21
Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Quran. (Chicago: University of Chicago,
2009).
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 29

been given the “Trust” or freedom of choice to obey or disobey (33:72). This
freedom of choice is, of course, connected with man’s consciousness.22 In
other words man’s consciousness is what places him at a higher plane vis-
à-vis nature.
Having said this, however, it must be quickly clarified that the Qur’an
insists on the causal autonomy of nature. The Qur’an says: “Verily, all
things we have created in proportion and measure” (54:49). “And there is
not a thing but its (sources and) treasures (inexhaustible) are with Us; but
We only send down thereof in due and ascertainable measure” (15:21).
Commenting on these verses, Fazlur Rahamn says that “[i]f things should
break their laws and violate their measure, there would be not an ordered
universe, but chaos.” 23 Nature, therefore, has its own laws or measures
which cannot be violated without creating chaos. Hence, though created by
God, it has been made completely autonomous as far as its laws are
concerned. Of course, the ultimate significance of natural processes is to
be understood only through a divine and human reference. Value of nature
comes from the divine plan for man in the context of his/her life in nature.
It is not independent of man.
Related to this autonomy of nature is the Qur’anic idea of regularity
and balance in the universe. The Qur’an says: “He who created the seven
heavens, one above another: no want of proportion will thou see in the
creation of The Most Gracious. So turn thy vision again: Seest thou any
flaw? Again turn thy vision a second time: (thy) vision will come back to
thee dull and discomfited, in a state worn out” (67:3-4). Everything, in the
scheme of nature, therefore, is well regulated and completely
proportionate. All processes of nature, and all events and objects, therein
fit into each other with perfect neatness, in the Qur’anic view.
Now the Qur’an declares this gigantic and well-regulated universe to
be an aya or “sign” of God for man. In other words axiological
significance of nature is related to man. Also, again and again the Qur’an
refers to the utility of nature for man. “Do ye not see that Allah has
subjected to your (use) all things in the heavens and on earth?” (31:20).
This places nature in a subordinate position to man.
Man’s individual and collective identity, however, is also not
independent of nature. Man, according to the Qur’an, has been created
from clay. The Qur’an says: “And We did certainly create man out of clay
from an altered black mud.” (15:26). Another verse says: “Who perfected


22
Cf. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Chapter Four.
23
Rahman, Major Themes of the Quran, 67.
30 Chapter Two

everything which He created and began the creation of man from clay.”
(32:7). There are other verses to the same effect. Verses also point to the
process of procreation, saying, for example: “Indeed, We created man
from a sperm-drop mixture that We may try him; and We made him
hearing and seeing.” (76-2). The point of these verses seems to underscore
the linkage between man and nature. Foundation of man’s identity is in
nature. Man as an individual and as species is connected with “clay”—-a
basic metaphor for nature—-as well as the natural process of procreation.
In summary, nature in the Qur’anic view is a created, causally
autonomous, perfectly balanced, and useful system which should serve as
a “sign” for mankind. It has been created with a serious purpose (21:16-
17) and is not to be taken lightly. Man’s identity is to be understood in the
context of this autonomous and balanced nature. It is this position that I
call measured ecological humanism.
Given this view of nature and man, the central Qur’anic ethical
principle also turns out to be linked with regularity and balance in nature.
The Qur’an says: “The sun and the moon follow courses (exactly)
computed; And the herbs and the trees both (alike) bow in adoration. And
the Firmament has He raised high, and He has set up The Balance (of
justice), in order that ye may not transgress (due) balance” (55:5-8). The
same idea of “balance” has been underscored at other places in the Qur’an.
The point to be emphasized in the context of our discussion on
environmental ethics is that the above verses talk of balance in nature and
then immediately relate it to balance in human actions. This obviously
means that man cannot transgress the limits of balance in his actions
toward either man or nature. Therefore, any exploitation of nature or man
that upsets the balance in nature or history is an ethical crime. All
transactions of man with nature and man must be regulated by a
consideration of maintaining the balance of nature and society as best as
we can understand.
This broad Qur’anic principle regulating man’s actions in relation to
nature and societies in history immediately implies that various eco-
systems in the world must be preserved and its bio-diversity protected.
This also implies that societies must stand in a balanced and just relation
with each other. This is so because destruction of certain eco-systems or
species definitely upsets the balance of nature. In the Qur’anic view such
destruction is a form of “corruption” on earth. I must hasten to add that
here the Qur’an seems to take a utilitarian view of the situation. When eco-
systems and species are destroyed, the utility of nature for man is
jeopardized. Nature is not the property of a few generations. The Qur’an
relates its utility to all mankind. Therefore, no single generation can and
 Ecological Humanism of the Qur’an and International Development 31

should arrogate itself to exclusive ownership of various subsystems of

nature. Destroying any one of them smacks of such arrogance. It upsets the
utility of nature for the coming generations and is, therefore, blatantly
unethical.
Another way of looking at this matter is through the lens of humanity’s
collective ownership of the earth. In his Global Political Philosophy
Mathias Risse formulates this idea in the following words:
Suppose the population of the US shrinks to three, but they control access
through border-surveillance mechanisms. Nothing changes elsewhere.
Surely these three should permit immigration since they are grossly under-
using their area. We can best explain this view by the fact that all of
humanity has claims to the earth. The resources and spaces of the earth are
valuable to and necessary for all human activities to unfold, most
importantly to secure survival. Moreover, to the extent that resources and
spaces have come into existence without human interference, nobody has
claims to them based on any contributions to their creation. If we assume
that the satisfaction of basic human needs matters morally, it follows that
all humans have some kind of claims to original resources and spaces
(resources and spaces that have come into existence without human
interference) that cannot be constrained by reference to what others have
accomplished.24

Given this collective and inter-generational ownership of the earth and

its resources, there can be no question that the use of these resources is
open to individuals and societies only insofar as they do not deprive other
human individuals and societies from a similar use. If they do so, they
would be violating the ethical balance that the Qur’an insists upon in
regard to such use.
Another related but fundamental principle of the Qur’anic
environmental ethics, in my opinion, has to do with the notion of the
causal autonomy of nature. Given the fact that natural processes are
causally autonomous, man cannot but work in collaboration with them
rather than against them. The whole modern idea of “exploitation” or
“conquest” of nature for progress and development is fundamentally
flawed from this point of view. The robust autonomy of nature in its causal
laws requires that we should seek ways to work in “harmony” with nature
rather than trying to conquer it or exploit it or enter into conflict with it.
The Qur’an would insist that man must learn to respect the autonomy of

24
Risse, Mathias. Global Political Philosophy. (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 33.
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 CHAPTER XI
The Undertow

NONA’S absorption in her work of nursing Lieutenant Martin had

naturally separated her from any complete knowledge of what was
taking place outside the hospital during the time.
In a half-way fashion she was aware that Barbara Thornton was
spending a good many hours away from her nursing duties and was
tremendously interested in the entertainment for the American
soldiers which she had in charge.
Mildred Thornton spoke of this once or twice to Nona, saying that
she hoped Barbara would not over-fatigue herself, as she seemed to
be a little nervous and restless. But of course Barbara had not been
working for some time and had gotten out of the discipline. Mildred
even discussed writing her brother Dick to come to see Barbara for a
short time if it were possible. Then she changed her mind in regard
to this, knowing that Dick was doing ambulance work in a part of
France where at this time his services were most necessary.
Moreover, Barbara had insisted, not once, but half a dozen times,
that no matter what happened, she would not interfere with her
husband’s work. She had promised him this and had promised
herself.
Besides, Barbara was slightly irritated by her sister-in-law’s
suggestion that she was not perfectly herself. In fact, she had never
been more interested in anything in her life than her present
occupation. The entertainment which she was engineering was to be
the most successful one any soldiers’ camp had ever enjoyed.
Nona also asked Mildred as a special favor that she would not
mention to Eugenia any nervousness she might feel concerning her,
as Eugenia had given her consent to the entertainment and Barbara
did not wish it withdrawn.
Barbara had been in correspondence with a number of prominent
persons in Paris, and a distinguished French actress, Madame
Renane, had promised to come all the way to camp to give a
recitation for the American soldiers. Madame Renane was to remain
over night at the hospital as Madame Castaigne’s guest.
Berthe Bonnèt was also to recite. Berthe had known Madame
Renane in Paris and was anxious to have the great lady become
interested in her ability.
Then Lieutenant Kelley had been permitted to waive his dignity as an
officer sufficiently to assist in the training of a fine chorus of the
American soldiers. Two or three of the men were found to be
professional singers and were to take part.
At one moment Mollie Drew solemnly agreed that she would sing the
few old Irish ballads which had entertained the soldiers on less
important occasions, yet the next she was apt to say that no power
upon earth could induce her to appear.
So, Barbara was apparently going through the trials which beset the
theatrical manager before an important production and had at least
this reason for her nervousness. Moreover, what she was pleased to
call rehearsals took a great deal of time and strength. As these
rehearsals could only be held in the evenings, Barbara had finally
managed to persuade Mildred Thornton, whenever she was free, to
play the accompaniments for a number of the singers, as Mildred
was an exceptionally well-trained pianist.
She had also induced Eugenia to purchase a piano, insisting that
nothing would give greater and more innocent pleasure to the
American soldiers in their vicinity.
So, Barbara could scarcely be accused of idleness, even if she had
altered the nature of her Red Cross duties. Nor was there a girl in
the hospital excepting Nona Davis, perhaps, who did not, in a small
measure, share in Barbara’s plans.
Eugenia thought of this fact one day, as she observed Nona going
through the hall on her way to Lieutenant Martin’s room.
Madame Castaigne would not have felt it loyalty to discuss the
matter with herself, but in a way Nona Davis was her present favorite
among the original group of Red Cross girls. She was devoted to
Mildred Thornton and had seen more of her than of Nona or
Barbara. But Mildred was undemonstrative, and her deep affections
were given to her own family and to the Russian General to whom
she had become engaged during her fine work as a war nurse in
Russia.
At one time Eugenia may have considered that she was especially
attached to Barbara. But although she was not supposed to have
noticed, she, too, had seen that Barbara Thornton had changed
since her marriage and not for the better. Yet there must be some
hidden reason for Barbara’s present restlessness. Eugenia hoped
that her work outside the hospital might be an outlet and that she
would buckle down to more serious work later, else her coming
abroad for the Red Cross was a decided mistake.
But now Eugenia decided that Nona looked a little tired and
wondered if more work was being put upon her than the other
nurses. She did not wish this. Lieutenant Martin had been a trying
patient, not because he had been so ill, but because his nerves had
been so overstrained by the severe demands he made upon himself
in camp.
However, he was growing better and Eugenia had several times
thought of removing Nona from the case. Yet Lieutenant Martin had
begged so hard, had promised such impossible improvement and
reformation that she had been turned aside.
Moreover, Eugenia liked the young officer with his stern sense of
duty, his strong will and high temper. With these traits of character
there were other far more appealing ones, and he was one of the
finest types of a soldier. Besides, Eugenia was amused by Nona’s
present softening influence upon him. Eugenia knew she could
reduce him to whatever terms she desired by threatening to change
his nurse.
So she said nothing to Nona at the moment of seeing her in the hall,
only smiled at her in a fashion which had the most surprising
influence upon the people working under her. Eugenia’s approval
seemed to make all the cogs in the wheel run smoother.
Madame Castaigne was on her way to a small room which was
reserved as a kind of reception room at the front of the hospital.
Someone had sent up a card asking to see her and she always saw
people when this did not interfere with her work.
Ten minutes later she stopped by Lieutenant Martin’s room and after
knocking Nona admitted her.
Nona was now on duty a part of each day, as her patient did not
require a special night nurse.
The room looked very clean and comfortable, with its white bed and
white walls, and some few photographs which Nona had discovered
and placed around. And the patient appeared extremely cheerful and
handsome.
The bandage had been removed from his head and Eugenia thought
she had seldom seen anyone reveal breeding more distinctly.
He and Nona had been laughing over something the moment before
she entered and Lieutenant Jack Martin’s gray eyes were still so
filled with amusement, his whole expression had changed.
“Miss Davis is a great bully. You would not guess it from looking at
her, would you, Madame Castaigne?”
Eugenia shook her head. “Well, if she is I am just coming to relieve
you of her—oh, only for a little while.”
And Eugenia’s sudden understanding made the young man flush.
“Nona, someone named Philip Dawson has just been seeing me and
says he knows you and if you are free, will you take a walk with him?
I told him I rather thought it might do you good to get out of doors
more. He is waiting for your answer.”
Nona hesitated an instant.
“You don’t mean that fellow Dawson has presumed to come here to
the hospital to call upon you?” a masculine voice growled.
“Do you know anything against Mr. Dawson, Lieutenant Martin?”
Eugenia inquired. “I was under the impression that he was one of the
most brilliant of the newspaper men who are to follow the fortunes of
our American army in France. I believe also the correspondents are
to be accredited as officers without special rank. But is there
anything that is personal?”
Lieutenant Martin looked very much as if he wished to answer “yes;”
nevertheless he shook his head.
“No, it is simply that I don’t like him. I presume he is clever enough.
But if Miss Davis does not mind, I am not sufficiently well for her to
leave me this afternoon. Tomorrow perhaps—”
“Nonsense, Lieutenant,” Eugenia laughed. “I’ll see that you are not
neglected. Go on, Nona dear, and decide when you talk with Mr.
Dawson. I found him very agreeable. He is in the reception room.”
More than an hour later Nona and Philip Dawson sat down in an
orchard several miles from the American hospital. They were under
one of many peach trees now covered with ripening fruit, as it was
late summer.
“I am glad you have liked our walk, Miss Davis. Yes, I have explored
this French countryside for many miles. Is it not splendid, whenever
there has been the least chance, the French have gone on
cultivating their orchards and gardens with their wonderful, patient
thrift? I am going to find you some fruit, then, later, when you have
rested, perhaps you will walk up with me to the little French
farmhouse over there, as I should rather pay for it. The French
people will probably refuse, so you must help me. But one never
knows how many people they may be trying to support from one of
these small farms.”
Nona allowed Philip Dawson to sacrifice his handkerchief and to peel
her a great number of peaches which she ate with the deepest
satisfaction.
She had just had a charming afternoon. Her companion had been
gay and agreeable and had told her many interesting facts. Unlike
the greater number of the members of his profession, he seemed to
have but little personal vanity and seldom figured as the hero of his
own stories.
She had been right, during their one brief former meeting, in thinking
she would like him. She had already forgotten any peculiarities in his
personal appearance. His hat was on the ground at this moment and
his high forehead and humorous eyes, his fine mouth, made his face
too interesting to be ugly.
“Do you know I have been envying Lieutenant Martin recently, Miss
Davis? I have been to the hospital to find you several times since my
first walk with you, but always before you and Madame Castaigne
have been too busy to see me.”
“Then you have heard about Lieutenant Martin?” Nona answered. “I
thought the matter had been hushed up. But he should hear you say
you were envious of him. Of all the impatient, bored invalids I have
ever nursed, he is almost the worst. But I am sorry for him. He is not
interested in anything apparently except his soldiering, and is so
afraid the men in his unit will be ordered into the trenches before he
is able to join them.”
Philip Dawson took out a cigarette.
“Do you mind my smoking?” he queried. Then, when Nona shook
her head, he went on:
“Yes, I heard about Martin soon after the trouble. The truth is, I have
been quietly trying to find out the reason for the difficulty ever since it
occurred. You see, newspaper men often do a kind of detective
work, since they have rather exceptional opportunities for
investigating and are a kind of unofficial intelligence bureau, and we
have all the same mania these days.”
Philip Dawson smoked a moment or two in silence.
“Miss Davis, I wonder if I should tell you something disagreeable. I
hate dreadfully to make you uncomfortable and yet, perhaps, it is just
as well for you to be on your guard. You may be able to help.”
“Please don’t talk in riddles,” Nona returned with some irritation.
“Besides, I wish you would not spoil our afternoon.”
Philip Dawson smiled.
“It may not be so bad as that. The truth is, I suppose you may have
guessed this yourself. Most of us who are interested in finding out
who is responsible for the injury to Lieutenant Martin, believe the
man who struck him had a personal reason for getting Martin away
from camp for a certain length of time. So far we don’t know the man
and we don’t know the reason. It may have been personal spite or it
may have been due to his great diligence in investigating the
German spy menace. There are two or three of our own men under
suspicion, yet so far there is nothing sufficiently definite for any
accusation. It is abominable, isn’t it?”
Nona nodded sympathetically.
“Yes, it does spoil my afternoon in a way to have to think there may
be traitors in our own American camp. But I really don’t see why I
should be on my guard, or what I can do to help, except perhaps to
warn Lieutenant Martin, and he hates to discuss the subject, says he
prefers anything to a scandal in camp. Besides, I am not the proper
person to talk of it.”
“No,” Philip Dawson agreed. “When Martin is well enough his
superior officer will discuss the situation with him. Martin is one of
the favorite officers of the Colonel of his regiment. But the truth is, I
might as well tell you frankly, one of the suspicions is that there is a
woman who is also concerned in the trouble. As I said before, the
information is far too uncertain to take seriously, yet there is just one
chance in a hundred she may be someone whom you know.”
“Someone whom I know,” Nona repeated rather stupidly. “But that is
out of the question. I only know the dozen or more nurses who are at
our American hospital, and Madame Bonnèt and Berthe. I have met
no one else since I came to France this time, and I don’t see why I
should so often be involved in suspicions of this kind. Please let us
go on back.”
Philip Dawson got up instantly. He was one of the agreeable persons
who did not dispute small matters.
“Just as you like, only come first to the little French farmhouse. You
may find it sufficiently interesting to forgive my being annoying.”
 CHAPTER XII
The Casino

THE soldiers had brought in small branches of trees and whatever

wild flowers they could find in the countryside. The wild asters were
in bloom and a few cornflowers and some wild trillium, so that the
bouquets were of tricolor.
At the back of the stage in the Casino hung two great flags, one the
French, the other the United States. The flags were the property of
the American hospital, but Eugenia had loaned them to Barbara,
under the promise that they were to be treated with especial care.
The chief decoration, however, hung suspended above the front of
the stage. This was a great wreath made from leaves as nearly like
the laurel as could be found and tied with two great bows of ribbon,
the one showing the design of the French, the other the design of the
American flag.
This wreath and another smaller one, which was at present not on
display, represented many hours of work by the Red Cross nurses at
Eugenia’s hospital. But the wreaths had been Barbara’s idea.
Indeed, she had revealed herself as a fairly good general in the
amount of work and enthusiasm she had inspired other people into
exhibiting toward making her entertainment for the American soldiers
an unusual success. The paramount difficulty was that the Casino
could hold only a limited audience and that the entire camp of
American soldiers would have liked to have been present, as well as
the adjoining French camp.
But at least Barbara understood some of the rules of the game, for
she had left the selection of the audience entirely to the discretion of
the officers at camp, only reserving the privilege of inviting Madame
Castaigne and the staff of nurses and physicians at her own
American hospital.
However, Madame Renane was Eugenia’s guest and, in a measure,
the guest of the American hospital staff, and as Barbara was one of
their Red Cross nurses, it was natural they should feel a kind of
proprietary interest in the occasion.
The patients at the hospital, who were sufficiently convalescent,
were also invited. Among them was Lieutenant Martin, who asked
Nona Davis as a special favor if she would go with him and sit next
him during the performance.
As a matter of fact, Nona would greatly have preferred
accompanying Madame Castaigne and Mildred Thornton. Madame
Renane was to be with them and remain with them until her part of
the program, and Nona would have enjoyed the opportunity of
knowing the great French woman more intimately. Nevertheless, she
did not feel that she could refuse Lieutenant Martin, as he was still
her patient and had not been out of doors except to walk for a few
yards at a time.
So as to secure their places before the crowd of soldiers appeared,
he and Nona started a little earlier than the others. On their way to
the Casino, Nona became the more convinced that she might not
have so agreeable an evening. For, however much he might be
trying to conceal the fact, Lieutenant Martin was again not in a
specially amiable humor, although recently he had been showing
more self-control. Neither was he in sympathy with the prospect
ahead of them.
“Seems utter nonsense to me, Miss Davis, this business of coddling
solders and keeping them amused as if they were children who
needed toys. Surely there is work enough to keep everybody
occupied and we should all be tired enough to wish to go to bed
when work is over.”
Nona shook her head.
“Nonsense, Lieutenant. I hoped you intended to reform since your
illness and become a more popular officer. I had a talk with your
Colonel and, although he seems to like you pretty well, I am
convinced he believes your stern views are simply due to the fact
that you are so young and have had so little experience of life. The
Colonel is a dear himself; I nearly fell in love with him. Pretty soon
you will be going back to work, so please promise me to remember
that you yourself have not always been so averse to being amused,
even to being coddled during these past weeks.”
And Nona laughed with a faint suggestion of teasing.
She liked Lieutenant Martin, but he was too narrow and too self-
assured, requiring to be snubbed now and then, and Nona had the
subtle knowledge, which most girls and women do have, that he
would accept occasional discipline from her rather better than from
anyone else.
She saw him flush a little now at her speech.
It was still not dark and they were walking slowly.
“Oh, well, I have been ill and a man is unlike himself when he is ill,”
he answered, trying not to display temper. But Nona did make him
angry, perhaps oftener than she knew, although she was every once
in a while aware of it. But Nona’s coolness, her little air of aloofness
after doing her full and complete duty as a nurse, would have
annoyed any man, who chanced to believe he was falling in love with
his nurse.
However, Lieutenant Martin meant to go slowly and circumspectly,
being determined in the end to have his way. He had not forgotten
Nona’s attitude toward him, nor her words, when he had once or
twice ventured too far in his revelations.
“Patients who are convalescing always think they are in love with
their nurses. Please spare me the illusion,” was a never-to-be-
forgotten reply.
“I will try to make the men in camp like me better if it is possible,
when I return,” he answered. “It is not agreeable, is it, to be
unpopular? But then you have never known that misfortune,”
Lieutenant Martin continued, with such humility and good humor that
it was Nona who felt reproached.
“You have read ‘Vanity Fair,’ of course, Miss Davis. Funny, I keep
thinking of certain portions of it tonight! That is because my mind is
ever upon this war! But do you remember when Amelia and George
Osborne and Dobbin and Becky and Sir Rawdon Crawley were all in
Brussels and there was a great ball given by a Duchess on the night
of June 15, 1815, the night before the Battle of Waterloo? That night
there were many people more interested in the ball than the enemy
at the front. I always recall the command that came: ‘The enemy has
passed the Sambre and our left is already engaged. We are to
march in three hours.’ I keep hoping and waiting for a message of
that kind, only I trust our American soldiers will be in camp and ready
to march on the night that command reaches us.”
Nona shivered a little.
“Please don’t talk of war tonight. Of course I long for our American
soldiers to get into action, I mean great numbers of them, not just a
comparatively few soldiers, such as are here now. Nevertheless, I
think I dread the moment when that word shall come more than
almost anything in life. I shall worry over you, too, Lieutenant Martin;
you see, one is always especially interested in one’s patients.”
“Thank you,” Lieutenant Martin answered so sternly that Nona was a
little embarrassed and a little amused.
“No, I had forgotten that part of ‘Vanity Fair,’” she added quickly. “I
only remember the conclusion, which I learned by heart when I was
a small girl and took a more misanthropic view of life: ‘Ah! Vanitas,
Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his
desire, or, having it, is satisfied?’”
Unconsciously Nona sighed as one naturally would after expressing
such a sentiment.
But she was stirred out of her self-centered mood by Lieutenant
Martin’s suddenly stopping and directly facing her.
“That is nonsense; when Thackeray expressed a sentiment like that
he was simply tired and disappointed with his own work for the
moment. Life isn’t all vanity and it means a great deal to do one’s
task once it is started. Besides, finding love means happiness, and
love and work are the fulfilment of desire. As for being satisfied, no
one wishes to be satisfied who has any brains.”
Then, observing that Nona appeared even more than mildly
surprised by such a wholly unexpected outburst, Lieutenant Martin
laughed.
“That does not sound like me, does it? You scarcely look for a
sentiment of that character from me. Well, I realize your friend Mr.
Dawson would have expressed the idea far better and it may be
impertinent for a soldier to differ with a great novelist’s philosophy of
life. However, I have said exactly what I feel. You see, as a soldier I
like a fighter, never a quitter in any cause.”
But by this time Nona and Lieutenant Martin had reached the
Casino, where Barbara and Mollie Drew, who were already there,
found them seats.
Later, Nona was pleased by the places Barbara had chosen, for after
Eugenia and Madame Renane and Mildred arrived, she discovered
that she had a fairly distinct view of them.
Tonight Eugenia looked unusually tired and worn, in spite of her
determined effort at animation and the entertainment of her guest.
But then anything apart from the regular routine of her hospital work
appeared to arouse in Eugenia unhappy memories. This large
gathering of gay and comparatively untried soldiers could not but fill
one with the recollection of what the French soldiers had suffered in
the past three years. Surely the American boys would be spared an
equal ordeal!
Madame Renane, Nona found oddly interesting.
She was plain, as many French women are, according to our
American standards. She must have been nearly middle-aged and
was even a little stout. Her brown hair, which was arranged simply,
had some gray in it; her face was pale, her expression quiet, except
for her eyes. They mirrored a hundred emotions, a hundred ideas.
She sat very quietly beside Eugenia during the first of Barbara’s
entertainment, applauding with as much enthusiasm and abandon as
anyone in the audience at the conclusion of each act, not all of which
were of a professional character.
The chorus of American soldiers, whom Lieutenant Kelley had
trained, led by Guy Ellis, sang almost every well-known American
patriotic air, the French and American soldiers cheering whole-
heartedly, without favoritism.
Then Mollie Drew, looking very pretty in a white dress, with her red-
brown hair piled high on her head and her cheeks flushed from
excitement to a deep rose, sang in a small voice her two most
popular Irish ballads, “Mother Machree” and “A Little Bit of Ireland.”
In the last rows of seats it was impossible to hear her; however, this
did not take away from the applause she received from every listener
in the room.
Mollie refused to sing an encore, but returning to bow her thanks to
the audience, a soldier presented her with a great bouquet of red
hothouse roses.
Not many roses were blooming these days in this neighborhood in
France; besides, Mollie’s roses bore the unmistakable suggestion of
Paris. But then, although Guy Ellis was only a private in the
American army in France, his father was a New York millionaire and
intensely proud of his son, and Mollie scarcely needed to find the
card hidden inside.
A quartette of French soldiers from the nearest French camp, all of
them with well-trained voices, sang the Marseillaise as an
introduction to Madame Renane’s appearance.
She had disappeared from the audience before they began and after
the last verse, when her countrymen had gone, she came quietly out
on the improvised stage.
It may be that certain of the American soldiers were disappointed in
Madame Renane’s appearance, having expected someone younger
and more beautiful.
But this did not interfere with the united cheer with which they
greeted her, the entire audience rising to its feet and the soldiers
waving their hats.
Madame Renane had been accustomed to many greetings. But the
surprise and the ardor of this one seemed almost to unnerve her for
a moment. Then she removed a little American flag which had been
pinned to her dress and waved it enthusiastically in response to the
cheers.
When the audience had resumed their seats and were quiet again,
the great French woman said simply, speaking of course in French,
but as slowly as she could, that the soldiers might understand:
“It is a great pleasure to me that you wish to hear me recite to you
tonight. I am a French mother who has lost her son in this war. All
honor to the American boys who have left their homes and come to a
far country to help us toward victory. Let France be your adopted
country, let every French woman be your adopted mother, until your
own land and your own mothers shall claim you again.”
What Madame Renane said was so simple that any other woman
could have used the same words. But behind her words was the
personality of a great woman and in her voice the music of a great
actress.
Next she recited a gay little French poem, filled with the courage and
good humor of life in camp.
Then Madame Renane spoke again:
“It has been difficult to decide what to recite to you tonight. A speech
from one of my plays might not interest you if you were not familiar
with the story, since I cannot speak your language. But there is one
story which the whole world knows, the story of, perhaps, the
greatest soldier and patriot of France. I mean the story of Jeanne
d’Arc. There are those of us in France who have wished recently that
Jeanne would come to us again, or someone like her.”
Afterwards, Madame Renane recited in the words of a great French
writer the life of Jeanne, the Maid sent of God:
“And the Angel appeared unto her and the Maid understood.
“The humble Maid, knowing not how to ride a horse, unskilled in the
arts of war, is chosen to bring to our Lord his temporal vicar of Christ.
Henceforth Jeanne knew what great deeds she was to bring to
pass.”
Madame Renane told the entire story, from Jeanne’s first vision at
Domremy, her meeting with King Charles at Rheims and her instant
recognition of him, disguised in shabby clothes and hid from her
among his courtiers. She told of Jeanne’s victories, of her triumphs
and of her martyr’s death.
And as she spoke the great French actress seemed to be Jeanne
herself. The American soldiers forgot her middle age, her quiet half-
mourning costume, and saw that wonderful young peasant girl, first
in her peasant’s dress in the woods near her father’s home, listening
to her voice. She was only a dreaming girl then, with her short hair,
her bare feet and peasant’s smock and those great wide-open gray
eyes.
Then Jeanne as a soldier in a suit of armor on her wonderful white
horse, riding always in front of her troops to the glory and salvation
of France. At the last she is again a frightened girl, torn from her
friends, betrayed and forsaken.
The room was perfectly still for a moment after Madame Renane had
finished. For she had created an impression too vivid to be lost
immediately. The American boys and their French companions were
seeing not the modern battlefield, which was ever before their
thoughts, but the older one the great actress had intended them to
see.
However, Madame Renane stood waiting, perhaps expecting the
applause with which she was familiar. Then she recognized the
silence as the finer tribute. For she put out her hands in a beautiful
gesture and added:
“May I say one of Jeanne’s own prayers to you tonight, before my
farewell?
“‘Oh, Jesus Christ, who hast surrounded the heavens with light and
kindled the sun and the moon, command, if it be thy will, the martyrs,
not one only, but all, to clasp their hands and on bended knee to
remove the great sorrow from France, and by that holy and august
merit ordain that they may have a righteous peace.’”
Then Madame Renane with a little nod of appreciation and thanks
quickly left the stage.
She came back later to receive the smaller laurel wreath, which
Lieutenant Kelley presented her in the name of the American camp.
But, like the French woman she was, after holding it for a moment
and pressing her lips to the evergreen, she flung the wreath back
into the audience.
“Keep it, my Sammees,” she exclaimed, “for the laurels of France
are for you!”
However, when, after a few moments, Eugenia Castaigne joined the
great French woman, she found her deeply depressed.
“Ah!” she murmured, “you have asked me here to amuse your
American boys and what have I done? If I have done anything I have
made them sad. You do not wish a French tragedienne these days;
what you want is your Charlée Chaplin.”
And she spoke with such a funny combination of sorrow and chagrin,
and withal pronounced Charlie Chaplin’s name with such an
amusing French accent, that Eugenia, who had been sternly holding
back her tears all evening, broke into a laugh.
“We may have Charlie Chaplin many evenings, you but one,
Madame Renane, and you are mistaken if you do not know you have
given us the highest kind of pleasure, which is inspiration.”
When the greater number of the audience had departed, Nona and
Lieutenant Martin walked slowly out together. Lieutenant Martin was
tired and did not feel equal to talking to many of his comrades.
However, Madame Bonnèt and Berthe were waiting near the door to
speak to him, and as Berthe’s recitation had been one of the most
successful of the evening, Lieutenant Martin felt he must
congratulate her.
They were talking only a moment or two, but Nona stood a little
apart. She was glancing carelessly about, when she saw standing
only a few feet behind Madame Bonnèt a little French girl, holding a
French soldier by the hand.
Another moment she continued staring and then touched Lieutenant
Martin on the arm, directing his attention to what had attracted hers.
Madame Bonnèt observed them both.
“Why are you both so interested?” she asked. “It cannot be possible
you know my little French girl? She wandered into our camp only two
or three days ago, bringing a French soldier with her, some poor
fellow who has been injured and has forgotten his own history. She
says they have been tramping from village to village, hoping to find
his regiment or someone who would recognize him. People have
been kind to them everywhere and have fed them along the way. It
seems the French soldier was stripped of his uniform, his number,
everything that might identify him. Only his little friend insists upon
calling him Captain. They came to the American camp by mistake,
believing it a French one. Then some of the soldiers brought them to
me and I am caring for them before they move on again.”
Nona went over to the little girl and held out her hand.
“Jeanne,” she began, “you will not recognize me, but I saw you one
day from a car window and we talked to each other. It is late tonight,
but I am coming to Madame Bonnèt’s tomorrow to talk to you again if
I may.”
Jeanne made a little curtsey.
“I do remember and I shall be happy to see you,” she returned, with
unfailing French courtesy.
 CHAPTER XIII
A Closer Bond

NEXT day as soon as she had the opportunity Nona walked over to
Madame Bonnèt’s.
She had made an effort to see Barbara and try to awaken her
interest in their little French acquaintance, but again Barbara had
disappeared. But then she naturally had a good many things to
attend to in connection with winding up the business connected with
the entertainment of the night before.
And Nona did not object to going to Madame Bonnèt’s alone. This
was one of the things she had been fond of doing ever since her
meeting with the splendid French woman. However, one could not
expect the privilege often, for no one was so busy as Madame
Bonnèt, nor had a greater number of calls upon her time. Scarcely a
soldier in the division located within her village, but came to Madame
Bonnèt for advice or sympathy whenever anything went wrong.
Nona was never to forget the morning of this day when so many
strange things were to occur.
It was a day caught between summer and early fall, with the beauty
and fragrance of both. Moreover, in the French country there is ever
a curious appeal that only a few lands have. It is a sense of intimacy,
a sense of nearness to nature, as if she were really the great mother,
viewing birth and life and death with a wonderful patience, knowing
that within her lie always the seeds and the garden for the new
generations to come.
Besides, Nona had brought Duke with her. He seemed to like to walk
with her more than with anyone beside his mistress. But recently
Duke had been growing noticeably older and wore a look of noble
depression, which one observes now and then in the aging of a fine
dog.
Nona went past Madame Bonnèt’s former home which she had
given up to the American officers, only glancing up at the tower
where she and the other nurses had seen their first American drill
upon French soil.
Of course, Madame Bonnèt had probably taken Jeanne and her
soldier into her own tiny home with herself and Berthe, finding a
place for them somehow.
But perhaps the little girl and her companion would be outside in the
garden. As Nona went down the path between the vegetables she
had the impression that there were figures near the dove cote, a little
hidden from observation.
Within a few yards of them she stopped and to her own annoyance
uttered a slight exclamation.
Barbara Thornton and Lieutenant Kelley were deep in some kind of
intimate conversation.
Nona saw that Barbara flushed with anger on recognizing her; there
was in her manner almost a suggestion that she believed Nona had
purposely come to spy upon her.
But Lieutenant Kelley came forward immediately.
Nona thought he looked tired and a good deal older since his arrival
in France. But then she knew how hard the younger American
officers were working with the idea of being able to assist in the
training of the new troops when they arrived.
“Is there anyone you wish, or anything I can do for you?” he asked
with his usual courtesy.
Nona shook her head.
“I am sorry to have interrupted you. I was merely looking for Madame
Bonnèt. A little French girl is here with her whom I wish to see.”
“You mean Jeanne?” Lieutenant Kelley answered “Isn’t it strange,
her coming here to our camp. I saw the little girl with the French
solder only yesterday and recalled our having seen her at the
railroad station that day on our way to camp. But you are not