For the Future-Wary: Eco-eschatology in Four Steps

Abstract This essay gleans insights from local ecological practices and Islamic sources to address global climate futures. It outlines an eco-eschatology, as a disposition and practice of living towards the possibility of the end of the world. Key themes of eco-eschatology – attentiveness to the multispecies world, contemplation of human responsibility, hopefulness against the odds, and commitment to activism – are resonant with current eco-concerns. What eco-eschatology recommends, however, are due considerations of human contingency and divine agency in the climate disaster that makes us all muslim : subjects rather than sovereigns, at the mercy of what is, at the same time, beyond us and intimately involved with us.