Muslims across the world to celebrate Earth Day with Green Khutbah Campaign
TORONTO, March 30, 2019 - Muslims across the world will commemorate Earth Day on Friday, April 19, 2019 with the Green Khutbah Campaign as faith leaders deliver a sermon to raise awareness on climate change.
“We are encouraging mosques, schools, universities and Islamic Institutions to devote their Friday Khutbah to celebrate the blessings, graces and beauty of all of God’s creation and to raise awareness about climate change,” said Muaz Nasir, the publisher of the Canadian environmental website, Khaleafa.com and one of the founders of the Campaign.
This year the theme of the Green Khutbah Campaign is ‘Everyday is Earth Day’.
“We chose this year’s topic with this thought in mind: at this very moment in time - right here, right now - we are at the tipping point in history for whether climate change can be reversed; or whether it will continue unchecked having irreversible consequences on this earth,” Nasir added.
The Campaign was launched in 2012 in Canada and, every year, Imams across the world are encouraged to deliver a message that remind their congregations of the Qur’anic message to be stewards of the earth and its environment.
The Green Khutbah Campaign commemorates Earth Day that will take place on Friday, April 19.
The first Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970, activated 20 million Americans from all walks of life and is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement.
More than 1 billion people across the world now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.
“Leading climate scientists now believe that a rise of two degrees centigrade in global temperature, which is considered to be the “tipping point”, is now very unlikely to be avoided if we continue with business-as-usual; other leading climate scientists consider 1.5 degrees centigrade to be a more likely “tipping point””, according to the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change.
“This is the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change, which will expose yet more millions of people and countless other creatures to drought, hunger and flooding. The brunt of this will continue to be borne by the poor, as the Earth experiences a drastic increase in levels of carbon in the atmosphere brought on in the period since the onset of the industrial revolution.”
Muaz Nasir says that Muslims cannot tune out from the environmental damage.
“Tuning out would mean that we are disregarding our moral responsibility to God’s creation,” he said.
“This earth, this one home, is all we have. And as stewards of this earth, we encourage everyone to think about the individual actions we can take on a daily basis that can make a large collective difference,” Nasir added.
Islamic organizations and well-known leaders here in Toronto and around the world are throwing their support behind the campaign intending to dedicate their Friday Khutbah on April 19, 2019 to this year’s Green Khutbah theme.
The Khaleafa.com team has also created an extensive online resource kit to aid faith leaders participating in the Green Khutbah Campaign.
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For more information, photos or to arrange an interview please contact:
Afeefa Karim-Nasir
Media Relations, Green Khutbah Campaign
e: http://khaleafa.com/contact
