“While science and technology is advancing the path to sustainable natural resource conservation and management, we the humans must think of it through a sacred lens as well.”
Dr. Ashraf Zainabi
At the end of Surah Al-Mulkof the Qur’an, lies a verse that reads more like an environmental warning than a spiritual reflection. “Say: Have you considered, if your water were to become sunken into the earth, then who could bring you flowing water?” (Qur’an 67:30). This question, posed over 1,400 years ago in a pre-industrial desert world, now echoes with unsettling relevance. As we confront vanishing rivers, sinking groundwater, and global water conflicts, this verse stands as a striking moral interrogation. It compels us to rethink sustainability not as a matter of technological convenience, but as a spiritual and civilizational responsibility.
For much of modern history, natural resources, especially water, have been viewed through the lens of abundance. But the 21st century has forced a paradigm shift. Reports from the United Nations warn that more than 2 billion people already live in regions of water stress. India is among the top countries most vulnerable to groundwater depletion. Glaciers in the Himalayas, our water towers, are melting at unprecedented rates.
In Kashmir, once-immaculate lakes like Wular and Dal are shrinking. Wetlands have been devoured by land reclamation. The spring-fed rivers that gave identity to towns now carry plastic, sewage, and industrial waste. What was once unthinkable, that a water-rich region could run dry, is now a creeping reality.
The above Qur’anic verse, posed not as prophecy but as a question, forces us to acknowledge the very thing modernity hides: our dependence, our vulnerability, and our limits.
Across religious and philosophical traditions, water has never been seen merely as a utility. It is life itself, sacred in its presence, catastrophic in its absence. The Bhagavad Gita warns against overconsumption and calls those who hoard and exploit without sacrifice as “thieves.” The Bible links environmental ruin with moral collapse: “The land is defiled because they have broken my covenant.” (Isaiah 24:5). Indigenous cosmologies treat rivers as ancestors and forests as kin.
These are not poetic excesses. They are ontologies of caution. They embed ecological restraint within ethical frameworks. The Qur’an goes further by framing nature’s stability as conditional. If balance is violated, if excess becomes normal, then loss, whether through drought, contamination, or desertification, is not a glitch but a consequence.
In Surah Ar-Rum (30:41), the Qur’an says: “Corruption has appeared on land and sea due to what the hands of people have earned, so that He may let them taste some of what they have done.” The modern ecological crisis, by this lens, is not just a technical failure but a spiritual and moral feedback loop.
This sacred framing is not incompatible with secular philosophy. Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist, wrote that the “essence of modern technology” lies in enframing the mindset where the earth is seen as a “standing reserve” of resources to be exploited at will. This mirrors what the Qur’an warns against: the delusion that nature is inexhaustible, or that we are exempt from its retribution.
“While data on environmental issues is abundant, meaningful action is stalled by a lack of humility. True sustainability requires us to move beyond policy frameworks and treat the crisis as a matter of ethics, personal accountability, and faith in a purpose larger than humanity.”
Likewise, Chief Seattle’s famous lament still resonates: “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” The question is not whether these worldviews are religious or rational, ancient or modern. The question is whether we have the humility to listen.
The moral weight of the Qur’anic verse grows heavier when seen through the lens of social justice. Water scarcity is never democratic. When rivers are diverted, it is not the elite but the marginalised who suffer first. Urban poor communities in cities like Delhi, Chennai, and Srinagar often rely on tankers, while manicured lawns and private pools remain unaffected.
In Islamic legal thought, water is considered a shared right. The Prophet Muhammad reportedly said, “People are partners in three things: water, fire, and pasture.” That principle, if operationalised today, would radically transform debates on privatisation, dam projects, and corporate water extraction.
An ecology must, therefore, also be a just and sacred ecology. Sustainability that does not address caste, class, and regional disparities risks reinforcing the very crises it seeks to mitigate.
What would it mean to build sustainability around such a question as posed in Qur’an 67:30?It would mean acknowledging that climate resilience isn’t just about engineering dams or desalination plants. It’s about preserving the dignity of what sustains us, the wetlands, watersheds, aquifers, and the people who live closest to them.It would also mean that every river polluted for profit, every forest cleared for vanity infrastructure, every glacier ignored in carbon policies, is an act of forgetting. Forgetting that we do not create water. We only receive it.
The Qur’an doesn’t answer the question in verse 67:30. It leaves it hanging, echoing, waiting. Because the answer is already known, but it must be rediscovered, not intellectually but existentially.
If our water were to vanish, who could restore it? The scientist may say: we’ll find a way. The industrialist may say: we’ll bottle it and sell it. But the Earth may respond: I warned you. In an age where environmental awareness is growing yet action remains tepid, perhaps what we lack is not data but the courage to be humbled, to realise that sustainability is not only a policy framework but a question of ethics, accountability, and ultimately, faith in something beyond ourselves.
(The author is a teacher and a researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora of Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
