Pursuing Moral Dimensions of the Environment
A Study of Islamic Tradition in Contemporary Iran
Keywords:
Religious ethics, Islam, modern science, concept of nature, environmental politics, Iran, environment (as a disciplinary field)Abstract
With growing economic activity and urbanization, environmental problems have become one of Iran’s most urgent challenges. Noticeably, the government has incorporated environmental measures into the country’s five-year plans for the last two decades and has since developed elaborate scientilc schemes accordingly to combat the problems. Nevertheless, serious environmental diflculties persist in every major city. Confronting these problems, the Iranian authorities began to call upon religious leaders for help and mobilized them to heighten citizens’ environmental awareness, especially from the viewpoint of Islam. The movements and debates by these religious leaders elucidate how they engage with the leld of environment, which had hitherto been principally delned and organized by modern science. A case study from Tehran exempliles distinct ways in which moral dimensions of the environment are unfolding through religious ethics, along with the schemes of modern science.
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