The late Donald Routledge Hill (d. 1994), 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 Spain, they also played a crucial role in intercepting the flood from the rainstorms which fell from time to time.
In ancient dams, for example in Valencia and Mestella, silt was bound to collect, and if not removed periodically, it would choke and obstruct the canals, allowing dangerous overflow. For that reason, the Muslims equipped the dams with desilting sluices, which the Europeans would later incorporate 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. 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 (d. 1111) 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: 1) sciences and organisation of disciplines, 2) self-evidences which discern possibilities and impossibilities, and 3) study of empirical evidences and the condition whence they originated.
According to the famous 15th century historian and philosopher who studied the ebb and flow of North African and Andalusian civilisations, Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon), sina‘ah or technology is resultant from man’s intellectual ability to comprehend, organise, and master the sciences.
Ibn Khaldun also states that technology is an important aspect of a civilisation, its advancement 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 Marib (today’s Yemen), which the Holy Qur’an happens to mention (Surah Saba’, (34): 16), was “because there were no financial and technical means to maintain it.” Furthermore, Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) explains in his al-Tafsir al-Kabir (The Major Exegesis) that the Sabaeans in Ma’rib had become wayward prior to the ensuing major flood which brought devastation to their wealth and lands. These evidences describe their state of moral and civilisational decline as the catastrophe befell them.
In a recent webinar 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 recently in many states in Malaysia can be attributed to the unprecedented 10 per cent increase in rainfall due to climate change.
Today, scientists say 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 massive and unsustainable lumbering activities and unbridled urban development which destroy the soil’s ability to absorb and hold precipitations to accumulating street litters which choke up and obstruct drainages responsible for diverting rain waters into a storm drain.
God states in the Holy Qur’an 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 Qur’an also confirms that the loss of environmental equilibrium was due to anthropogenically destructive activities: “Corruption has spread on land and sea as a result of what people’s hands have done, so that God may cause them to taste [the consequences of] some of their deeds and perhaps they might return [to the Right Path]” (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 restore what has been lost in the environmental 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: 1) root cause analysis which pinpoints environmentally destructive activities, 2) harmonisation between environmental and ecological sciences, urban development, and environmental governance, and 3) preparation and execution of mitigation plans based on forecast and data provided by the meteorological sciences.
