Bosnian scholar for taking lessons from religion for meaningful steps against climate change

At the inaugural lecture for Lady Fatima Endowed Faculty Chair, said to be the first of its kind in the world, at the Habib University, scholar from Bosnia-Herzegovina Dr Larisa Jasarevic on Thursday highlighted a widening gulch between data being generated on climate change and actions being taken to address it.

The lecture was titled ‘Thinking on the Tattered Planet: Ecostress, Religion, and the Gender Quarrel’.

Addressing the inaugural lecture for the Lady Fatima Endowed Faculty Chair in Women and Divinity at Habib University, she said the stories of the Prophet (PBUH) and Ahle-Bait taught us a lesson which, in today's jargon, could be called sustainable living.

"We are more or less eco-stressed," she said. Explaining the term 'Ecostress', she said it was the acronym for Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment - an instrument deployed by NASA on an international space station that monitors one of the most basic processes in living plants, the loss of water, the tiny pores in the leaves.

However, she added this radiometer was not registering multi-species signals of the stress, like transpiration in humans. "Honeybees, for instance, as social insects, cool the hive and not just themselves. And one of the ways they keep the hive cool is by creating a breeze. They stand at the entrance, they move their wings very rapidly and create this cool breeze that goes into the hive and cools it off," she went on.

"Think of it as an insect AC, air conditioning. But when the temperature gets extremely hot, they resort to an emergency heat response, which amounts to resident bees going about and issuing a heat stress appeal to mature foragers, who detect the signal and then rapidly go out to seek water, bring it back into the hive, and coat a tiny film around the comb, especially around the brood area to cool it down at a temperature of about 37 degrees Celsius."

Dr Jasarevic said the term ecostress, nevertheless, was very apt one because it can be used for a broader interpretation as all things were contingent on weather. "Not just living things, all things — fossil, building, infrastructures, nuclear weapons — all existing things are being stressed out by weather extremes."

She said that being stressed out, we were by default generating data on the emerging climate disaster but the forms of stress in plants, bees and other beings and things that make up our world surely could not only be grasped by numerical values.

The scholar said that there was a widening gulch between data being generated on climate change and actions being taken to address it. "Chasm between tall promises of mitigation and a dawning reality of the catastrophe exceeds the human capacity to manage," she highlighted.

"But what are we to do as the stress builds up against our very skins? How do we respond? What does religion and what does Islam in particular have to do and can offer at a time when the planet is rapidly being undone?" she asked.

She maintained that though NASA radiometer and heating data had very little to do with religion, if religion was what provided meaning to life, then nothing was outside its scope, not least the knowledges.

"Islam has very particular, very rich notions of knowledge and therefore has the capacity to redefine it and to keep redefining it. In other words, Islam, to be relevant to a crisis at hand, cannot be reduced to an archaeology that studies preserved specimens of knowledge," she remarked.

Dr Jasarevic said Islam helped us critically reinterpret and inhabit the sustainable living aspirations. "It teaches us lessons on sustainability premised on reverence, beginning with the lessons from the time when the concept was not theorized. It was lived by the Prophet [PBUH], Hazrat Fatima [RA], Ahle Bait and Sahaba," she said.

"The Prophet advises us to sparingly use water even if you have a river flowing in front of you," she said, adding that Islam was the middle way in every sense of the world and the middle way was also sustainability.

"Apparently, according to one study, hard sciences, technical sciences, natural sciences, attracted 770 per cent more funding for climate research worldwide than humanities and social sciences. And yet, one of the most daunting open questions is how to put the growing knowledge on climate change to good use, how to act on it. And the acting at the very least presumes major changes in thinking, doing, spending, valuing -in short major changes in the modern ways of being and living. Now all these ways can only be grasped, and figured out with the help of social sciences and humanities scholars,” she explained.

Shedding lighting on ‘gendered construction of knowledge’, the Bosnian scholar said ‘masculinisation’ and ‘feminisation’ of knowledge was reinforcing the widening gap between confident and technical grip on the hard facts of climate change and the inadequacy of responses that made a real difference.

The founding president of the chair, Wasif Rizvi, said: “An endowed faculty chair with such unique perspective shows strong resonance with Habib University’s distinct mission of crafting a thoughtful education experience for our students from all backgrounds.”

The event was attended by students, faculty, members of the community as well as researchers and scholars from around the country and beyond. Prominent industry leaders such as Zeelaf Munir, CEO of the English Biscuit, and Zehra Hassan, family office manager at the House of Habib, also graced the event along with donors of Habib University such as Shahbaz Yasin Malik, president and CEO of the Hilton Pharma.

According to a statement issued by the Habib University, the Lady Fatima Endowed Faculty Chair in Women and Divinity was a key advancement in the study of the status of women, their roles in religious traditions, interfaith dialogue and gender equality. Named after the esteemed Bibi Syeda Zahra (RA) who played a key role in the Prophet (PBUH)’s legacy, it seeks to honour the contributions of women such as Syeda Zahra (RA) and Bibi Zainab (RA), revitalising their significance in our collective consciousness that is constantly being overshadowed by the modern dominance of hyper-masculinist narratives.