Ibrahim Özdemir, PhD, American Islamic College, Chicago
We exist in a time of striking contradiction. Although enlightenment pioneers could not foresee how technologically, economically, and communicatively connected humanity would become, we still seem increasingly fractured by fear, bias, and political divide. At a time when global cooperation is more important than ever—whether we’re facing climate change, biodiversity loss, war, forced migration, or growing inequality—the places where people of different faiths and worldviews can meet with respect and humility are becoming even more precious.
For this reason, the Parliament of the World’s Religions remains one of the most significant moral institutions of our time. Since its historic beginning in Chicago in 1893, the Parliament has offered far more than a conference of religious leaders. It has cultivated a global culture of encounter, demonstrating that dialogue is not a luxury reserved for peaceful times but an ethical imperative during periods of crisis, as Pope Leo’s recent messages underline. The Parliament has consistently reminded us that while our religious traditions differ in language, rituals, and theology, they converge in affirming the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of justice, compassion for the vulnerable, and responsibility toward the Earth that sustains us all.
This mission has acquired renewed urgency in our own century. We inhabit a fragile world where ecological degradation, political fragmentation, and social mistrust increasingly reinforce one another and are disseminated by social media. Climate change does not distinguish between religions or nations. Pollution respects no borders. The extinction of species, the depletion of natural resources, and the suffering caused by environmental injustice affect all members of the human family. These realities call for a new moral imagination—one that transcends narrow identities and recognizes our shared destiny as inhabitants of a common home. Unfortunately, while AI could help address major issues, its unethical uses are actually making them worse.
It is therefore both timely and deeply meaningful that the Parliament continues to bring together the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to reflect on our shared ethical responsibility toward creation. In an era where religion is frequently seen as a cause of division, marginalization, violence, and radicalization, these encounters serve as a reminder that genuine religious traditions hold significant resources for healing, reconciliation, and caring for the environment.
Today, many religious leaders, including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheik Ahmed El-Tayyeb, and Pope Leo XIV, call and advocate for transcending inherited stereotypes, political divisions, and mutual distrust to build renewed trust and collaboration in addressing our existential and economic challenges related to equity and injustice. My late friend Dr. Thomas Michel emphasized that understanding Christian-Muslim dialogue in the 20th century requires careful examination of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s writings and sermons. As an early religious thinker promoting Muslim-Christian dialogue, Said Nursi (d. 1960) first advocated such discussions in 1911. This was notably fifty years before the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council encouraged Christians and Muslims to overcome past conflicts and foster respectful, cooperative relations.
As an avid and discerning reader of Nursi, I have been engaged with the Parliament for nearly thirty years. I was privileged to attend the 1997 preparatory meeting in Chicago for the Cape Town Parliament, then the 1999 Parliament in Cape Town, and the 2004 Parliament in Barcelona. Each event profoundly influenced my intellectual, spiritual, and professional development.
As someone committed to advancing interfaith dialogue for the common good and for the flourishing of our planet, I have always regarded the Parliament as a unique forum where genuine listening becomes possible. It is a place where differences are not erased but understood, where diverse wisdom traditions illuminate one another, and where friendships emerge that transcend cultural, national, and religious boundaries. Above all, it is a place where ignorance, prejudice, and politically manufactured stereotypes can be challenged through direct human encounter.
Today, I believe more strongly than ever that dialogue is not just beneficial, but essential and a moral obligation. Both our social realities and our biological survival demand that we have to learn to speak with one another rather than about one another. When a house is on fire, our first responsibility is to extinguish the flames before debating who owns the house or how it should be decorated. Humanity and the planet Earth today face such a fire. Climate disruption, ecological collapse, and deepening social fragmentation and environmental injustices require urgent collective action grounded in our shared moral convictions.
The future of our children and grandchildren will not be determined solely by technological innovation or political negotiations. It will also depend upon whether we can recover the wisdom, humility, and solidarity necessary to act together. Every meaningful transformation begins with small but courageous steps, and every lasting partnership begins with sincere conversation.
The memories and insights I gained through my participation in the Parliament have stayed with me across the years, continually shaping my understanding of faith, ethics, and our shared responsibility toward creation. They have deepened my conviction that the world’s religious traditions, when animated by their most profound spiritual values rather than their institutional anxieties, are not obstacles to global cooperation but indispensable partners in building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable future.
It was this very hope that Tolstoy placed at the center of his last great novel, Resurrection. In tracing Nekhlyudov’s slow awakening from complacency to conscience, Tolstoy insisted that the renewal of society begins not with new institutions or ideologies but with the moral and spiritual rebirth of the individual — and that such rebirth, multiplied across a community, is what genuinely transforms the world. His conviction at the end of the novel was radical in its simplicity: were humanity truly to live by the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount — to forgive without limit, to refuse to judge, to love even the adversary — most of our gravest problems would never arise in the first place. The courts, the prisons, the exploitations that fill the novel’s pages stand exposed as machinery we ourselves keep running, machinery that would fall idle the moment we took those few commandments to heart.
That is the summons I carry from Tolstoy and from the Parliament alike: that the deepest resources for healing our divided and endangered world are already present within our spiritual traditions, waiting only to be lived.
Therefore, as we gather once again to reflect on the shared moral imperative of caring for our common home, we are invited not simply to exchange ideas but to renew a tradition of hope. In a fragile world longing for moral leadership, the Parliament of the World’s Religions continues to remind us that dialogue itself is an act of faith—faith in our shared humanity, faith in the possibility of reconciliation, and faith that together we can become more faithful stewards of the Earth entrusted to our care.
Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth—An Islamic Vision for Our Common Home
I want to summarize Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth, which presents an Islamic outlook on the environment to strengthen local, regional, and international actions that combat climate change and other threats to the planet. Nine years after Pope Francis issued Laudato Si’ (2015), his encyclical calling all people to care for “our common home,” the Muslim world offered its own comprehensive answer. Al-Mizan was launched in February 2024 at the sixth UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-6) in Nairobi, facilitated by UNEP’s Faith for Earth Coalition and drafted by a team of Islamic eco-theologians and jurists—drawing on ICESCO, IFEES, Üsküdar University, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qur’anic Botanic Garden, and reviewed by more than three hundred organizations across the Sunni, Shi’a, Ibadi, and Sufi traditions. If Laudato Si’ gave Catholic social teaching an ecological voice, Al-Mizan does the same for the Islamic tradition, and the two documents now stand as companion covenants speaking from within their respective faiths to a single planetary crisis.
The document takes its name and its governing idea from the Qur’an’s Sūrah ar-Raḥmān, where God “raised the heaven and set up the balance (al-mīzān), so do not transgress the balance.” From this single image, it builds an entire ecological vision. Rather than issue a list of policy demands, it offers a moral and theological framework and, in the tradition of Islamic reasoning, raises searching questions. It moves through five movements: an unsparing appraisal of the state of the Earth, in which environmental ruin is named as fasād, the corruption of a God-given order; a reading of creation as a book of divine signs (āyāt), in which every creature has inherent worth and the human being is khalīfah, a trustee rather than an owner; an account of the ecological ethos and ethics of Islam, grounded in taqwā (God-consciousness), iḥsān (doing what is beautiful and good), raḥmah (mercy), and amānah (the sacred trust); a chapter on equity and justice in sharing the sources of life, which addresses resource distribution, the exploitation named as ribā, the purifying obligation of zakāh, and the classical institution of the ḥimā, or protected commons; and finally a set of principles and practices for tending the Earth, followed by a way forward and a closing prayer.
At its heart Al-Mizan reframes the environmental question as a spiritual and ethical one. The Earth is amānah—a trust for which humanity will be held accountable—and the vocation of the human being is not dominion but stewardship, the keeping of a balance we did not create and are forbidden to break. In this it echoes the very conviction I carried away from the Parliament: that the world’s religious traditions, when animated by their deepest values, are not obstacles to global cooperation on the ecological crisis but among its most indispensable resources. To have been a core member of the team behind this covenant is, for me, the practical fulfillment of that hope—the moment at which a life of interfaith dialogue became a shared act of care for creation itself.
The central message of Al-Mizan is that the environmental crisis is not merely a scientific, technological, or political problem. At its heart, it is a moral and spiritual crisis arising from humanity’s loss of harmony with the divine order embedded within creation. The Qur’an repeatedly reminds believers that the universe has been created and sustained with purpose, measure, and balance (mizan). Every creature, ecosystem, and natural process forms part of an interconnected web that reflects God’s wisdom, beauty, mercy, and justice. To violate this balance through exploitation, excess, and injustice is not only an ecological failure but also a moral transgression.
The Covenant is grounded in the fundamental Islamic principle of Tawhid, which affirms God’s oneness. Since there is only one Creator, all creation creates a unified, interconnected community that is supported by the same divine source. Humans are not rulers over nature but are trustees responsible for its stewardship. The Qur’an’s depiction of God as Rabb al-‘Alamin—the Lord and Sustainer of all worlds—expands Islam’s ethical scope beyond humanity to include all living beings and the entire natural world.
One of the Covenant’s most significant contributions is its insistence that Islamic environmental ethics are not new innovations but a rediscovery of deeply rooted Qur’anic teachings and Prophetic practice. In other words, it uses three interpretive methods developed by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim to revitalize Islamic religious teachings for contemporary application: retrieval, reinterpretation, and reconstruction. While retrieval brings forgotten and neglected ethical insights to light, reinterpretation reexamines texts and rituals in light of modern knowledge, and reconstruction reshapes theology to foster planetary ethics. Applying these tools to the Qurʾān reveals its enduring capacity to respond to our theoretical understanding and practical problems.
Furthermore, we find that in Islamic civilization, the values of moderation, conservation, compassion for all living beings, and responsible resource use influenced legal systems, institutions, and daily life. Consequently, Al-Mizan aims to reframe these lasting principles in language that engages with current global issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, environmental injustice, and unsustainable consumption habits.
Importantly, Al-Mizan does not view religious discourse as an alternative to science or public policy. Rather, it agrees with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s central argument for a new understanding of religion’s role and argues that scientific knowledge, technological innovation, and sound environmental policies require an accompanying moral framework capable of inspiring behavioral and cultural transformation. Religious traditions possess precisely this capacity because they shape values, worldviews, and everyday ethical choices. The Covenant therefore calls on Islamic scholars, institutions, educators, policymakers, businesses, and local communities to work collaboratively to advance sustainability as a shared moral responsibility.
The making of Al-Mizan itself reflects this spirit of collaboration. Emerging from cooperation among UNEP’s Faith for Earth Initiative, ICESCO, IFEES, leading universities, environmental scholars, and hundreds of Islamic institutions worldwide, the Covenant represents a genuinely global Islamic response to the planetary crisis. It demonstrates that environmental stewardship is not a peripheral concern but an integral dimension of contemporary Islamic thought and action.
Ultimately, Al-Mizan advocates for an ecological interpretation of the Qur’an, recognizing humanity, nature, and the Creator as elements of a unified sacred story. It urges Muslims to develop societies and economies founded upon justice, moderation, sustainability, and respect for all forms of life. The Earth is not merely a resource to be consumed but a divine sign (ayah), a sacred trust to be protected, and a home to be passed on in balance to future generations. Restoring the balance, we have disturbed is therefore both an ecological necessity and a profound act of spiritual renewal.
Today, the spirit of the Parliament carries a hopeful promise. In a fragile world often pulled by fear and division, it reminds us that we’re not destined for fragmentation—that people of all faiths can come together as caretakers of our shared, endangered home. As recent IPCC reports show, our planet Earth is on fire, and no tradition can extinguish the flames alone. Yet if we recover the wisdom, humility, and solidarity our faiths hold in trust, dialogue becomes more than conversation: it becomes an act of faith in our shared humanity and a covenant with the generations who will inherit the Earth we leave behind.
This piece was originally published on the Parliament of the World’s Religions on September August 27th 2026.
