Embedding Sustainability in Saudi Sharia and Law Education: A Theoretical Framework Grounded in Islamic Environmental Jurisprudence

Education for sustainable development has become central to efforts to operationalise the Sustainable Development Goals in higher education. Yet Sharia and Law programmes remain an underexplored site for examining how sustainability can be translated into discipline-specific legal and jurisprudential learning, particularly in Saudi Arabia. This conceptual and documentary study develops a framework for integrating Islamic environmental jurisprudence (fiqh al-bi’ah) into Sharia and Law programmes in Saudi higher education. The documentary corpus comprises relevant Qur’anic passages and authenticated Prophetic traditions, authoritative classical jurisprudential and usul al-fiqh works, contemporary fiqh al-bi’ah scholarship, ESD and sustainability-competency and pedagogical literature, and selected official Saudi policy documents concerning higher education, sustainability, and national development. The framework comprises three interconnected elements: (1) jurisprudential foundations centred on tawhid (divine unity), khalifah (stewardship), amanah (trust), mizan (balance), and maqasid al-Shari’ah; (2) educational competencies that connect legal reasoning with environmental responsibility; and (3) curricular integration mechanisms informed by literature identifying active and problem-based pedagogies, case analysis, and community-engaged projects as promising approaches. Rather than treating sustainability as an add-on to religious education, the framework positions environmental responsibility as a matter of legal interpretation and institutional practice. It extends education-for-sustainable-development scholarship by bringing ecotheological integration into formal jurisprudential training, is directly relevant to SDG 4, SDG 13, and SDG 15, and offers propositions for subsequent empirical evaluation in Saudi universities.