Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development: An Islamic Perspective

Islam safeguards and protects all aspects of human’s life and guides them with proper etiquette in dealing with their surroundings and environment. It also urges humans to preserve the natural resources for their needs as well as the needs of future generations. With this regard, Islamic legislations do not limit these virtuous actions to being merely recommended things to do, but rather Islam varies their relevant rulings between obligatory, prohibitory, recommended, and reprehensible, which indicate Islam’s special care on the environment protection matter. This chapter, therefore, reviews the Shariah's perspective on environmental issues and attempts to relate them to Islamic jurisprudence rulings through induction methodology, especially those matters related to what is known today as “sustainable environment”. This will show and prove Islam’s precedence in environment protection-related matters, which has laid the foundations of today’s sustainable development agenda. The study also adopts the Maqasid approach in addressing environmental issues, since the preservation of environment and its sustainability has been emphasized by Shariah, and negligence in return threatens environment sustainability or at least depletes its resources