Is There a Paradox of Liberation and Religion? Muslim Environmentalists, Activism, and Religious Practice

Abstract

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.

Religion in Coalition: Balancing Moderate and Progressive Politics in the Sydney Alliance

“…Whilst there are political benefits to the engagement of religious organisations in the Sydney Alliance, the religious participants themselves do not harness religious resources simply to achieve political ends-as is often portrayed in literature on religion and politics (Hancock 2015a). Rather, political action is often understood as being central to religious practice: participants serve both political and religious goals (Yukich 2013) by participating in the Alliance.…”

“…This can be explained by a tendency within social science to a 'myopia of the visible' (Melucci 1989, p. 44): conservative religious interventions in political life are often more controversial and thus attract more academic and media attention. There are some notable exceptions: a few social movement scholars have examined the role of religion in the US civil rights movement (Morris 1984), in the US central-American peace movement (Nepstad 2004), in the European alter-globalisation movement (Peace 2015), in US immigration activism (Yukich 2013), and in Islamic environmentalism in the US and UK (Hancock 2015a(Hancock , 2015b(Hancock , 2018; and there is a cluster of literature on the involvement of various religious communities in community organising initiatives in the US and the UK (Bretherton 2014;Braunstein 2017;Warren 2001;Wood 2002).…”

“…However, this characterisation of the relationship between religion and politics constructs a one-way street-religion serves political ends-which I argue is far too simplistic to adequately account for the relationship between religious belief and political action. Religious activists do not engage in political action only to achieve political ends-they may simultaneously seek to achieve religious ends through their action (Yukich 2013), or may intertwine their religious practice with their political action in such a way that religious and political ends become indistinguishable (Hancock 2015a(Hancock , 2018. Indeed, for many of the participants in my research, their religious practice was always and necessarily political-they were, in fact, one and the same thing.…”