Murdering Earth: Knowledge as Domination

The Prophet (ﷺ) had laid siege, along with his companions, to the fort of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadhīr as a repercussion for their breaching of the covenant made with the Muslims, the conditions of which were recorded in the historic Charter of Madinah. The Muslims had promised the Jews of Banu Nadhīr that their properties, life and wealth would be safe provided they would not turn their backs against the Muslims by supporting other hostile tribes in their want to stop the message of Islam. After the disclosure of the plot to assassinate the Prophet (ﷺ), the Muslims were present outside the fort of Banu Nadhīr for six or fifteen days (according to different accounts). The following day, the Muslims were ordered to burn the trees outside the fort to strengthen the siege and force them out—an action that invited the mockery of the Jews of Banu Nadhīr at the Muslims’ supposed abandonment of the moral dictum they professed regarding the abstinence from cutting down trees, damaging land, and harming livestock. The revelation was quick to respond to the charge and proclaimed: 

Every date palm that you [i.e., the Muslims] cut (and burnt) or left standing on its roots was by Allah’s permission and to humiliate the sinners. (Surah Hashar, Verse: 5)

A reinforcement of the moral dictate towards nature, just as much a profession of an exception under an extreme circumstance, this verse far from replaces the universal and original commandment. This incident was not solely political; it highlighted and laid down man’s attitude towards nature. 

I have always been curious about the ideas and thought processes—the Weltanschauungs—behind the actions of men.¹ Unlike primitive man, whose actions preceded any analytical thinking beyond the action itself, the developing human mind across and since the centuries and into the Hellenistic Ages developed complex ideas and worldviews, setting the standards for his modes of action and inaction aiding in developing more complex civilisations. Therefore, it can hardly be argued that the ubiquitous civilisation that we find in the modern world today, and the actions resulting from the type of subjectivity it has created, are all a result of an impulse or were bound to be the fate of human civilisation due to their inherent nature, a supra-rational will—or Geist as Hegel would term it—that guided them to it. Surely, the Modern Western Civilisation that resulted from the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment—the last laying the political and socio-technological foundations in the French and Industrial Revolution respectively—and which has ever since spread across the globe with no precedent in known history, has laid a particular Weltanschauung which has guided the actions of men in a particular way towards himself and his surroundings. 

This summer has particularly been hotter than any that I have lived through my life in Lahore. Intuitively aware, as we all are, that the climate of the world has been worsening—with increasing levels of heat yearly, an elongation of the summer months and winters now lasting two or three months—I came across a research study that explicated and affirmed that growing urbanisation has led to an increase in the mean temperatures since the year 1985.² Lahore, however, is but one sample of the overall worsening global climate, with the World Meteorological Organisation estimating that by 2050, about half of the European population may be exposed to high or very high risk of heat stress during summer, particularly in Southern Europe and increasingly in Eastern Europe and Western and Central Europe.³

What has been all the more shocking (yet understandable as we shall explore) is President Trump’s declaration to incentivise coal production and reduce subsidies on solar energies, a decision in part attributed to Republican politics and not any weaknesses in the evidence regarding climate change.⁴ However, all this is in not, as we implied, a mere jest which has culminated in an absence of concern towards nature with increasing burning of fossil fuels, factory and industrial waste and the extermination of the natural environment in a race for, in an almost faustian manner, rapid urbanisation.⁵ This deleterious attitude towards nature is also not generated strictly by capitalism, for capitalism itself is, as Oswald Spengler would argue in his seminal work; The Decline of the West, a symptom of the weltanschauung of the modern western civilisation, or its Prime Symbol.⁶ This, as we shall now see, is what has given rise to the way modern man has configured his environment and economies at the expense of nature, with little concern towards it. 

Wael B. Hallaq, a leading Islamic legal studies scholar of Palestinian origin, in his ground-breaking historical-analytical work The Impossible State, exposits for us this peculiarity of modern western civilisation’s—on whose worldview the whole world currently operates—attitude towards nature, its origins, as well as its harmful implications. In the fourth chapter of his book, he begins to trace the underlying reasons for what he calls the West’s subtraction of the value from the fact, by which he means the disconnected and mechanical attitude that man has adopted towards his environment. 

Hallaq states that the modern West has an obsession with gaining knowledge to control and utilise nature. This, he argues, is deeply rooted in the philosophical idea of ‘the autonomous self,’ championed by the lauded philosopher Immanuel Kant, and which would become a tenant of Enlightenment thinking. According to this idea, the maturity of a civilisation is defined by a profoundly autonomous impulse lodged in the self, which guides not only moral but also rational behaviour.⁷ This idea of an autonomous impulse, Hallaq notes, is supported by the foundational notion of freedom that in actuality gives rise to it. That is to say, once man acquires his freedoms from the burdens of authority, historically lived trauma, corruption, political oppression, material depredation, serfdom and slavery amongst others, he becomes truly free and harbouring an autonomous will. 

However, such an exit from authority ultimately means freedom to control and dominate, which, according to Hallaq, is one of modernity’s essential paradigmatic elements.⁸ From this a priori will, then, modern man seeks knowledge. He has an innate desire to acquire knowledge to dominate the material world, because that will is, as we explained, based on a particular notion of freedom. This uniquely places man above all nature as a sovereign being.

Such an idea, when analysed within an Islamic paradigm, would perhaps not sit well with the erudite Persian polymath Fakhr ad-Din Rāzi, who offered a more nuanced understanding of man’s status among God’s creation, one endowed with potential for both good and evil. This, Hallaq avers, has become the dominating ideational basis of post-Renaissance thought upon which modern political, economic, and social structures were built. But this sovereign man with an impulse to dominate necessitates the presence of something to be ‘the dominated’ which, in the eyes of the western man, came to be nature. Nature could be manipulated and controlled. Positivism and pragmatism thus became the core expressions of modern western culture.⁸ 

Hallaq then traces the inception of this relationship between man and nature and situates it in the early periods of the Enlightenment. He argues that until the Enlightenment era, Europe was dominated by ideas regarding nature that placed an inherent value in it and did not detach from the hierarchical structure of the world, dominant in the Hellenistic and Middle Ages. In such a worldview, nature was not value-less nor worthless; bodies were thought to move by a world-design with intent and passion instituted into the world by God. However, in the 17th century, natural philosophers such as Issac Newton, asserted that God was not in constant contact with the world. While He may have laid the blueprint, He could not be credited with the ongoing creation of the world or nature. The fatal result of such a worldview was to be the emergence of a severance between the Creator and the created, matter and spirit. Ultimately, this led to an even more troubling conclusion: that matter was direction and value-less, that it was brute. This rendered matter spiritually meaningless, which by necessity entailed that its only purpose to exist was to be at the service of man.⁹

Hallaq then decries the conclusions of such a weltanschauung, evident in modern aphorisms such as “natural resources,” a term found everywhere in social, political and educational institutions. From the primary and secondary school textbooks to advanced research and policymaking, nature was attributed with the epithet of resource. Nature no longer had any inherent value, was inert, and had no real moral responsibility towards it by man. It could be used, abused, manipulated, and wasted without moral repercussion or accountability.

One can not help but recall Oswald Spengler’s prophetic words regarding the relation between modern faustian man and nature. He argued that capitalism was just the faustian will to power expressed in economic form, that the underlying nature of the Western civilisation was a will to power, to dominate. To him, while other civilisations simply used nature, Western man sought to dominate and violate it. Nature, once a benefactor to mankind, was now tied up as a slave. Western man, Spengler would lament, longs for technology; perhaps the longing that was once harboured towards God to attain his pleasure was after his exclusion by the western man left to be directed towards the only thing left—nature, with an insatiable need to dominate it. 

Man is born in a historical world but he comes to senses in a continuum of time. Many of us assume, before the coming of intellectual maturity and exposure that the present state of the world is historical, that it has always been like this in its organisational setup. Political, social, and economic realities are often taken as a given, to always have existed in the same way. This subconscious idea regarding the world is perhaps attributable to the Ptolemaic conception of history that thinkers like Spengler so critically charged against, for it presented an anachronistic view of world history with the West and its culmination as the centre and purpose of all world history—represented by the ancient, medieval and modern scheme. But as we explore and decolonise the dominant weltanschauung, we realise that man has lived differently and that there is more to learn from what has been laid to waste and destroyed of the past civilisations by the modern West. That the present form of dealing with nature is not one of an inherent relationship predetermined within them, and that the exploitation and increasing decay we see of our only inhabitable planet is a specific mode of conduct alien even to the people of the West themselves during the Middle Ages, before the onset of modernity. 

Our destruction of the environment is not one carried out in jest, unplanned and unjustified rationally and morally, but one supported by a culmination of enlightenment ideas. But if this is the case, then just as this attitude of man towards nature has come as a result of a particular worldview, so too it would only go with a worldview that would thenceforth guide the actions of men. 

As the Prophet (ﷺ) and the companions burnt the trees and God freed them of the accusations of moral bankruptcy, none of us knew that Islam was not only being protected from extinction against the hostile Jewish tribe, but that we were being given a universal moral imperative: man and how he must deal with nature. In Usul al Fiqh, the very command of an exception presupposes that the rule is different—which we all are aware of, as highlighted in the prophetic teachings of caring for and not violating nature, even in the harshest of human contacts—in war. Whereas modern man cuts trees and forests in an incalculable amount to build concrete buildings and polished roads, the pre-modern, and certainly the Islamic, subject was guided to cooperate with nature and recognised that he had a responsibility and a moral obligation to treat it correctly. Whereas man today wastes water and wastes in it, the Muslim was taught to not waste it even if he were performing ablution by the banks of a river.¹⁰ Man today has returned to his primitive nature, where his actions are driven by an impulse to dominate. But even if the outcomes of his domination today are sophisticated and technical, they are bereft of a consideration for the consequences of his actions due to an insatiable will to progress at the expense of all else, especially nature. To the Muslim man, it would have been unthinkable to cut down swathes of trees for purposes of profit and urbanisation, to spill harmful elements into the bodies of water he carefully learned to use for ablution. 

The work of reform, perhaps, starts with our admission of these ideas underlying our actions which have had and continue to have tragic consequences for our surroundings. Where a teacher, a preacher, or a politician would be addressing his nation not with the ideals of domination and competition at the expense of nature—which, if ceases to exist, all domination would end—but with the guidance of a God-centric value system and structure that professes nature not as a ‘resource’ but as a creation of God possessing inherent value and to be of benefit to man in ethical ways, not an end of the noose which he controls and dominates. 

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Photo by Liam Charmer on Unsplash

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1. “Weltanschauung” is a German word that translates literally to “worldview”. It refers to a comprehensive perspective or framework through which an individual or group interprets and understands the world and existence. [↩]
2. Abbas, Sohail, et al. “Urban Growth and Its Effect on Temperature Trends of Lahore City, Pakistan.” ResearchGate, 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378302722_Urban_Growth_and_Its_Effect_on_Temperature_Trends_of_Lahore_City_Pakistan. [↩]
3. “Extreme Heat Grips Europe.” World Meteorological Organization, 3 July 2025, https://wmo.int/media/news/extreme-heat-grips-europe. [↩]
4. Hedgepeth, Lee, and Marianne Lavelle. “In Trump’s Megabill, a Clean Energy Phase Out and a Big, Beautiful Tax Break for Met Coal Exporters.” Inside Climate News, 2 July 2025, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02072025/big-beautiful-bill-met-coal-tax-break/. [↩]
5. The term “Faust”, comes from the legend of Faust, a character in German folklore (made famous by Goethe and others), who sells his soul to the devil (Mephistopheles) in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. [↩]
6. A prime symbol (German: Ursymbol) is the core, intuitive idea or spatial metaphor that shapes how a particular civilization (“Culture”) perceives and experiences the world. [↩]
7. Hallaq; The Impossible State, pg. 75 (Columbia University Press; 2014). [↩]
8. Hallaq; The Impossible State, pg. 76 (Columbia University Press; 2014). [↩] [↩]
9. Hallaq; The Impossible State, pg. 77 (Columbia University Press; 2014). [↩]
10. The full narration goes: Abdullah ibn Amr reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, passed by Sa’d while he was performing ablution. The Prophet said, “What is this extravagance?” Sa’d said, “Is there extravagance with water in ablution?” The Prophet said, “Yes, even if you were on the banks of a flowing river.” (Source: Musnad Aḥmad 7065). [↩]