The Holy Koran tells us that God is ‘The First and the Last, the Outwardly Manifest, the Inwardly Hidden’, al-Awwalwa’l-Ākhir wa’l-Ẓāhirwa’l-Bāṭin (al-Ḥadīd, ‘Iron’, 57:3). This statement can be read as an ‘ecological’ expression of the ‘science’ of integrative oneness, or tawḥīd. We translate this fundamental concept of Islamic faith as ‘integrating oneness’ rather than simply as ‘unity’ because of the literal meaning of this word: ‘to make [many things] one’. Far from implying simply a negation of the plurality of gods, and the affirmation of one sole God, this term has been metaphysically understood as the dynamic principle according to which the appearance of multiplicity is dissolved and the reality of unity is revealed. From this metaphysical foundation, a veritably ecological perspective arises spontaneously, and as it were ‘organically’ as a science of signs: the phenomena of Virgin Nature are all grasped as ‘signs’ of oneness, they are āyāt (sing. āya), this word referring in the Koran at once to verses of scripture, phenomenal signs and also to miraculous events. The entire Cosmos is thus to be interpreted, and revered, as a matrix of scriptural revelation of symbols, signs, intimations of the absolute, infinite and perfect nature of the Cause of the Cosmos. The forms of the Cosmos are penetrated by their Cause, their Substance such that ‘wherever you turn, there is the face of God’ (al-Baqara, ‘The Cow’, 2:115).
In this paper, we intend to draw out some explanatory metaphysical principles—inherent in this Koranic vision of the Cosmos—pertaining to the ecological crisis; and to argue that the solution to this crisis cannot be found on the level of social engineering but can be realised solely through a ‘metanoia’, or a fundamental ‘change of mind’, on the plane of the individual soul, according to the principle expressed by the following verse of the Koran: ‘Truly, God will not change the condition of a people until they change the condition of their own souls’ (al-Ra’d, ‘Thunder’, 13:11).