Online Public Lecture: Climate Crises and the Reshaping of the Islamic World

Professor Philip Jenkins
Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he serves in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published thirty books, including The Next Christendom: The Coming Of Global Christianity (2002) and Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (2021). The Economist has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.” His books have been translated into sixteen languages.

An event in the series Muslims, Christians and the Environment
Public Lecture to start at 2:30pm UK time

Abstract
Throughout history, episodes of extreme and catastrophic climatic conditions have often had religious consequences, and that is true of all faiths. In the Islamic context, that includes the rise of the faith in the 620s CE, and the various phases of Ottoman history in Europe in Early Modern times. Extreme conditions such as prolonged droughts have resulted in politic turbulence. Arguably, we find such a context for the Syrian civil war over the past decade. On a broader canvas, while the fact of global climate change is well recognized, its religious consequences are less explored. In fact, some of the regions likely to be hardest hit by projected changes are precisely the areas most vulnerable to religious conflict, and it is likely that future climate developments would be reflected in new kinds of religious movement, and perhaps of greater violence.