Radical Muslims, Environmentalists, and the Green Jihad

Rep. Keith Ellison, the Muslim Congressman from Minnesota who shed tears in protest over the congressional hearings on the growing radicalization of Muslims in the U.S. , wrote the foreword to a book entitled Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet. In Arabic, “deen” means religious creed. The author of Green Deen is Ibrahim Abdul Matin. He wrote his book to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between Islam and modern environmentalism.

It turns out Ellison would have been a good witness to how Muslims are being radicalized as foot soldiers not only for global Jihad but for a “green” future. It is an unholy alliance that threatens our future but which escapes the attention of media predisposed to believe that radical Muslims working with environmentalists could only produce positive results.

What is fascinating is that Matin works in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental planning department as a policy advisor for New York City’s long term sustainability, and was one of the Muslims promoting the idea that the new mosque being considered near Ground Zero should be a green one. In fact, Matin devotes one whole chapter of his book to “Green Mosques” and provides a list of environmentally friendly practices that can and should be implemented at each local mosque. Being the progressive Muslim that he paints himself to be, Keith Ellison was very impressed with Matin’s abilities and proudly decided to endorse his book.

One of the reasons Ellison decided to work with Matin was because of his own growing personal involvement in the green movement, which surprisingly enough, is becoming more popular among Muslims. In an interview posted on the DC Green Muslim’s website, Ellison commented that “my involvement in politics is really rooted in my desire to try to promote unity among people, trying to promote unity with the Earth and creation, and trying to promote justice.” Ellison is also involved in an organization called the “Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM).” Ellison, the first Muslim Congressman in U.S. history, thus believes in green Islamic social justice of sorts—a veritable Islamic political ecology.

Ellison first met Matin in 2008 at a Muslim American seminar caucus in Washington, D.C. Matin was a fellow of “Green For All,” the very organization founded by communist Van Jones to help promote the financial wonders of the so-called Green Economy. Matin also helped organize Green For All’s National Day of Action calling for “Green Jobs Now” which more than 50,000 people attended. Ellison was very impressed by Matin’s influence at the caucus: “Ibrahim made an important connection that day—that the faith community needs to be involved in the green movement.” He went on to conclude his foreword by saying that “Green Deen brings faith communities into the environmental movement by changing the conversation from the facts of global warming to the fact that we all live and work here together and have a collective responsibility to keep this place clean and safe for everyone.”

While there is certainly no small controversy over exactly what a caliphate may be, especially with regard to how Sunnis and Shias view it, or how closely it may be tied to the ushering in of Sharia law, Islamic totalitarianism, terrorism and violence, it is a word that shows up often in Matin’s Green Deen. Matin innocuously translates the word “caliphah” to simply mean “steward,” a very environmentally-correct term. While this may satisfy the environmental consciousness of modern Western elites, this definition is, of course, very far removed from how most of Muslim history has understood this word.

However, no matter how green a Muslim may or may not be, by definition, the caliphate must still be an Islamic theocratic state under the dominion of Allah. Even though Matin maintains that he wrote his book to help rebrand Muslims from being considered terrorists to environmentalists, he still prefaces his entire book with the idea that “the earth is a mosque.” This means at once that the environmental holism being espoused by Matin must necessarily be subject to Allah’s totalitarian authority over the earth. In other words, environmental holism and Islamic totalitarianism go hand in hand in Matin’s Green Deen.

With the likes of the OPEC oil cartel largely run by the Middle East, coupled with the environmental restrictions on the home front, perhaps the earth indeed is becoming one giant mosque. Worse is that Matin’s Green Deen only promises to become more hellish, leaving America increasingly exposed to the harsh natural elements of the sun, storm and wind. Yet, Matin views such exposure as a gift from heaven. For him, solar and wind power are Allah’s answers to America ’s energy problems: “energy from heaven comes from above. It is not extracted from the Earth and it is renewable…energy from above is a gift from heaven.” The problem now, however, is that America ’s electrical grid is not ‘smart’ enough yet to incorporate Allah’s heavenly gifts into her energy system.

However innocent some green Muslims and environmentalists may or may not be in this whole ecological experiment that America is increasingly rushing headlong into, ratcheting up secular problems with apocalyptic concerns and solutions will only feed radicalism and religious fervor. It also draws in the naïve and unsuspecting to do things that they would not normally do. By apocalypticizing their worries and concerns, environmentalists have managed to take something as banal and neutral as handling natural resources and have turned it into a gigantic worldwide ethic of ecological social justice requiring immediate action that now is even beginning to draw in the Muslims as well.

Muslims like Ibrahim Abdul Matin and Keith Ellison would do well to think again about the differences between Gaia, considered the spirit of the earth by environmentalists, and Allah. Though both have totalitarian goals, they are by no means the same. Ecological pantheism cannot be mixed with monotheism, even if the Muslim religion is symbolized by a crescent moon. At some point, these two ideologies will collide, and even though I am not a betting man, I would put my money on the growing juggernaut of Western pantheism. It has already largely devoured the Judeo-Christian worldview in America , and is well on its way to spitting out the pieces of what is left of free market capitalism.