Comparative analysis between Islamic environmental approach and contemporary approach

After the industrial revolution, men intended-more than ever-to use energy, specifically the fossil fuels. Moreover the quick growth of population have added considerably the speed of the critical status of environmental affairs. The side effect of industrialization result many problems such as the depletion of natural resources, the increase of polluting levels in surroundings, extinction of many species of animals and plants and the environmental crisis. Due to the above mentioned problems human approach toward nature has been changed. The approval of Stockholm Declaration in Environmental Conference of United Nations Organization is a turning point in formal human attitude during history towards natural resources and the utilization systems of ground. The mentioned declaration and 1974 Declaration of KOKOIK have confirmed the complexity and seriousness of social- environmental crises. Furthermore, they have emphasized upon the necessity of devising and demonstrating healthy environmental strategies in order to upgrade socio-economic and fair environmental developments. Also these affairs led to the "earth Commission" in 1992. During the mentioned commission, the 21 Declaration and Rio Declaration about environmental and development were approved. On the other hand religion have many instruction about protecting nature. In Abrahamic religions' view, the question about what has intrinsic value, is presented based on innate belief in God. That is, the intrinsic value in the universe belongs to God and value of other creatures is definable based on it. Therefore, all parts of the universe obtain value based on this relation and human being is responsible to provide proper care for them. It can be stated the criterion for an action in this view is consisted, which God is considered as human responsibilities (Abedi, Shahvali and Mohaghegh Damad 2007, 65).
Islam as a universal and holistic religion claims is able to answer variable needs in every epoch and have deterministic laws for all relations and ranks of human. However, it does not mean that it is defined clear laws for every specific and contemporary subject. It contains very general laws, which specific laws can be deducted for each subject. One of the subjects is “environment”. By looking in Islamic texts and the Quran it can be understood that environment and caring about it is considered as important subject in Islam. Many of Quran's verses imply about it. In addition, many of Quran's chapters have name that is the name of natural phenomena and even many times swear an oath is on a natural phenomenon. Human begin is invited to think and contemplate about them. Editing environment's law is long history in Islam. A set of Muslim scholars' fatwas about environment preservation, ancient monuments, city interconnections, the quality of operation, architectural structures, using passageway, drainage bases, public places, installing windows, place of industrial buildings, cleaning the urban passageway, and behaving with animals are evidences of this claim (Pak 2008, 141).
This paper presents a comparative study of Islamic approach with the contemporary approach in dealing with the environment. In this research, with comparing these two approaches, common aspects in contemporary conservationists’ statements based on Islamic visions, are revealed. The main question in this research is: why and how religious sources in various fields including environmental issues could be the solution? Do these instructions cover contemporary concerns in the field of environmental crises? After dealing with contemporary environmental crises, the need to change attitudes to the nature was realized by human. This is while the Islamic instructions have a lot of teachings in the case of conserving environment from 1,400 years ago. Therefore, the aim of this research is to expose the necessity of deeply studying the Islamic texts again and applying them in the related realm of natural environment such as architecture. A combinatorial research method is employed in this paper, which is based on the logical reasoning and quality approach. After studying the Islamic texts that is related to the natural environment and contemporary approach in this realm, the adaptive studying method of “Jorj F. Berdy” is employed for comparison of these two approaches. This method has four levels: description, interpretation, adjacency, and comparison. The items which is described and interpretation are environment, nature, balance of nature, development, avoiding damage of nature and components of nature. In addition, the defined criteria in this comparison are determined by documents studying and experts surveying of the “Delphi” approach. The final criteria is classified in three category: paradigm level, field level and component. After documents studying, adaptive studying, and analysis of these two methods in this research, the necessity of extracting the Islamic instructions and approaches for natural environment conserving is revealed. Besides this research shows that practice of Islamic instructions which are communicated to humans regardless of the particular time and place would have prevented the current environmental crisis and also shorten many ways that mankind had chosen according to his experience and avoid a lot of damages to the environment.The closer examination of these doctrines can open new horizons for the completion of these theories.