Ibnu Fikri
@walisongo.ac.id
Faculty of Da'wah and Communication
Universitas Islam Negeri Walisongo Semarang
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Main research interests include Environmental Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Islamic Studies, Manuscript Studies, Islamic History and Material Culture.
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
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Scopus Publications
IBNU FIKRI and FREEK COLOMBIJN
Wiley
15 IBNU FIKRI & FREEK COLOMBIJN Ibnu Fikri holds a PhD in Anthropology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is now lecturer at the Universitas Islam Negeri Walisongo (Semarang). His research interests include green Islam, anthropology of Islam, and Islamic Studies. His email is ibnufikri@ walisongo.ac.id. Freek Colombijn is an urban anthropologist and environmental historian at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His current research focuses on the circular economy and waste management in Indonesian cities. His email is f.colombijn@vu.nl. Various newspaper and scholarly articles have appeared in the past few years which enthusiastically claim that a Green Islam is emerging in Indonesia and that this movement is going to have a major positive impact on proenvironmental behaviour. ‘Indonesia: The home of “Green Islam”’ is one jubilant headline (Gelling 2009), and the opening sentence of another article runs: ‘A green, ecocentric approach to understanding Islamic teaching is revolutionising environmental protection in the world’s most-populous Muslim-majority nation’ (Bodetti 2018). The same articles argue that Indonesia has evolved into ‘a unique laboratory’ combining Islam and environmentalism, and therefore can act as a model for other Muslimmajority countries like Bangladesh, Egypt and Turkey. To add scholarly credentials to the argument, Austin Bodetti cites Australian sociologist Pam Nilan saying that, ‘There is no doubt that the new Islamic environmental consciousness strengthens the whole ecological movement in Indonesia.’ Kristina Großmann (2019) admits that Green Islam is not yet in a position to challenge the state development agenda based on fossil fuels, but does say that small-scale Islamic socio-ecological projects have been successful. In contrast to this optimism, on the basis of our observations of daily life in Indonesia, we question the belief that such a powerful Green Islam is emerging. For example, one of us (Ibnu Fikri) attended the dugderan festival in Semarang, the capital of the province of Central Java, in 2016. The dugderan festival was a public ceremony organized to celebrate the beginning of the fasting month, Ramadan, in which thousands of participants paraded from the town hall to the biggest mosque in the city. At the height of the festival, the Governor of Central Java beat the big mosque drum (bedug) to announce that the fast would commence the next day. After the ceremony had ended and the thousands of people had gone away, the ground around the mosque was littered with piles of plastic bottles and cartons left behind by the believers, who had brought their own snacks and drinks to the event. The visitors had not bothered to throw the waste away in the many rubbish bins provided, even though they had just been reminded of the importance of cleanliness during Ramadan. Judith Schlehe and Vissia Ita Yulianto give similar descriptions of waste left behind after ceremonies at which the speakers had reminded the audience of the environment. They quote ordinary Indonesians who do not think the environment, or throwing away waste in particular, is significant: ‘It is not important’, tidak apa-apa (Schlehe & Yulianto 2020: 45). Kompas, the acknowledged quality newspaper in Indonesia, pays little attention to climate change, which is considered less of a threat to society than terrorism, refugees or corruption (Wahyuni 2017). It is perhaps not surprising that, in a global comparative survey, Indonesia came out as the country with the highest percentage of climate change deniers in the world, ahead of such notorious competitors as the USA and Saudi Arabia (Milman & Harvey 2019). If great expectations of Green Islam seem to be contradicted by behaviour in daily life, this raises the question of what ‘Green Islam’ means to most Indonesian Muslims. Can we expect Islam to play a role in green activism in Indonesia, a country facing terrifying environmental challenges? In this article, we begin with an explanation of what various authors mean by Green Islam and what initiatives have been taken in this direction in Indonesia. In the next section, we give examples from our own fieldwork of how several groups of Muslims in Semarang live and experience the nexus between religious ideas and humanenvironment interactions. We argue that, in the cases studied, contrary to the scholars and journalists writing about Green Islam, Muslim religious frameworks do not lead to an activist environmentalism. There is no reason to expect that Islam is a major force for pro-environmental behaviour, and we are therefore doubtful about the potential of Green Islam in the short run. Many people, however, interpret their diverse interactions with the environment in religious terms, and Islam does certainly support and legitimize behaviour which is good for the environment, albeit more in the form of unforeseen side-effects. To see Green Islam in its proper context, it should be noted that Indonesia has a long history of environmentalist activism, in which Green Islam is only a recent offshoot. Possibly the first NGO in the field, the Netherlands-Indische