This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison's theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012-2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a 'critical community' within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change.

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This article examines how the engagement of diverse religious organisations and individuals in grassroots politics impacts the nature of politics and coalition building through a case study of an urban grassroots political coalition in Australia: the Sydney Alliance. Based on eight-months of exploratory ethnographic fieldwork in one campaign team, this article argues that whilst religious organisations bring significant symbolic and institutional resources to political coalitions, and can be flexible coalition partners, they tend to moderate both conservative and progressive political tendencies within a coalition and demand focused attention from organisers and leaders to manage the coalition dynamics. This article examines the way many religious activists understand their political action to be an inherent and necessary part of their religious practice: problematizing the characterisation common in much social science literature that religious engagement in more progressive politics primarily serves political, and not religious, ends. In doing so, it shows how political action can be directed both outward towards the work, and inward towards the ‘church’.

Social movement theorists have often posited that religion and political activism are inherently opposed—that religion cannot liberate people from situations of social or political discontent in the same manner as activism. Through a study of Muslim environmental activists in the United Kingdom and United States of America, this article directly challenges this belief—not only by charting the theoretical problems of this belief within the social movement theory corpus, but also by demonstrating that Muslim environmentalists in the US and UK are both religious and politically active simultaneously. Environmental activism is drawn into Islamic practice in such a way that activism becomes religious practice in the lives of these Muslim activists.

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