THE late Donald Routledge Hill, a mechanical engineer turned historian of science and technology in the Muslim world, wrote in his book Islamic Science and Engineering (1993) that the expansion of Islam in the first two centuries made Muslims the inheritors of 3,000 year-long traditions of dam building.
Not only did the dams they constructed meet the irrigational needs of great cities, such as Baghdad and Samarqand in Khurasan and Córdoba in Muslim-ruled Spain, they also played a crucial role in intercepting the floods from the rainstorms which fell from time to time.
Learning from the ancient dams of Valencia and Mestella that siltation could choke and obstruct the canals and therefore lead to flooding, the Muslims equipped their dams with desilting sluices, which the Europeans later incorporated in theirs on a grand scale.
In present times, dams still play the important role of preventing floods, collecting and retaining waters up until certain levels before discharging them to nearby rivers. But, the fact that scouring sluices first appeared in the Islamic world demonstrated that Muslims did not preserve traditions without exercising ingenuity – improving, innovating and coming up with beneficial inventions.
According to Muslim scholar and metaphysician, Imam al-Ghazali in his Ihya' Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences), human intelligence — the spiritual faculty of the human being wherein ingenuity resides — comprises three things: sciences and organisation of disciplines; self-evidences which discern possibilities and impossibilities, and study of empirical evidences and the condition whence they originated.
In his book Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon), the famous 15th century historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun states that technological ingenuity (sina'ah) is an important aspect of a civilisation; its advancement is the advancement of urbanisation.
Conversely, the loss of interest in knowledge, the sciences, and technology is an indication that the civilisation is taking a turn for the worse.
For example, Hill states that the disrepair and destruction of the famous ancient Great Dam of Ma'rib (today's Yemen) in the last quarter of the 6th century mentioned in the Holy Quran (Surah Saba', (34): 16) was because the Sabaeans had "no financial and technical means to maintain it."
However, the underlying cause of moral and civilisational decline is what Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's (deceased 1210) identifies in his al-Tafsir al-Kabir (The Major Exegesis); that the Sabaeans had become wayward prior to the ensuing major flood which brought devastation to their wealth and lands.
In the webinar Islam dan Alam Sekitar (Islam and the Environment) jointly-organised by the Environment and Water Ministry (KASA) and Raja Zarith Sofiah Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation (RZS-CASIS), KASA's secretary-general Datuk Seri Dr Zaini Ujang explained that the major floods which occurred in many states in Malaysia may be attributed to the unprecedented 10 per cent increase in rainfall due to climate change.
According to scientists, the world is experiencing what they call the Anthropocene, a period where human activities are having significant impacts on Earth's geology and ecosystem, ranging from large-scale lumbering activities to unbridled urban development and accumulating of litter on the streets.
Besides destroying the soil's ability to absorb precipitation, they also cause siltation, choking up and obstructing the drainage outlets and the dams responsible for safely diverting the rain water.
God states in the Holy Quran that the planet is created with an environmental balance: "As for the Earth, We spread it out and placed upon it firm mountains, and caused everything to grow there in perfect balance" (Surah al-Hijr, (15): 19).
The Holy Quran also confirms that the loss of balance was due to anthropogenically destructive activities: "Corruption has appeared throughout the land and sea by [reason of] what the hands of people have earned so He [i.e., Allah] may let them taste part of [the consequence of] what they have done that perhaps they will return [to righteousness]" (Surah al-Rum, (30): 41).
How do we save ourselves against the violent forces of nature that are threatening to turn our cities into watery graveyards? For the sake of survival, the intelligent and morally-sound thing to do is to return to righteousness and restore what has been lost in the balance.
Therefore, shared intelligences and agencies working on an action plan to tackle the problem must consider the following elements which are based on the Islamic conceptual scheme laid above:
First, conduct a root cause analysis which pinpoints environmentally destructive activities; secondly, espouse harmonisation between environmental and ecological sciences, urban development, and environmental governance, and thirdly, ensure preparation and execution of mitigation plans based on forecast and data provided by the meteorological sciences.
* The writer is Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Science and Environment Studies, Institute of Islamic Understanding Malaysia (IKIM)
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times