Islamic Environmentalism and Epistemic Waste

ABSTRACT Environmental ethics is concerned with how humans use and relate to the environment, including its conservation and protection. In recent decades, works on Islamic environmentalism have increased multiplied with efforts to ground an ethics based on the resources of the Islamic scholarly tradition. In this article, I offer an approach to environmentalism that is based on a Qur’anic epistemology of divine names. Utilizing Said Nursi’s (d. 1960) Qur’anic commentary, the Risâle‐i Nur , I argue that waste ( isrāf ) occurs when the epistemic meaning carried by all of creation is not engaged with or read. An Islamic environmental ethics should look to how one interacts with the physical world in light of its relation to the Creator and how it serves to convey meaningful speech content through the manifestation of divine qualities.