 in this talk I will offer a different perspective on the sustainable development course. I suggest that the fundamental cause of the environmental crisis is a way of knowing the world reality which is radically different from the traditional methods and the Islamic method and this is known as the enlightenment of Europe which was a radical change in epistemology. Colin Turbin in myth of metaphor has said that prior to the enlightenment the metaphor of mother earth or mother nature captured the nearly universal symbiotic view of the earth as a plant from which we derive enormous benefits and repay this by protecting and respecting the environment. But after the Newtonian revolution this was replaced by the idea of a universe as a machine a dead thing to be used and exploited and controlled. Since the change of meaning of knowledge has led to the climate crisis the only way to fix the problem is to again change the concept of knowledge. We must change our ways of knowing the world we live in as well as our relationships to all of the creation of God and this involves reversing the great transformation of European thought. A brief summary of the history corresponding to this outline is given in the next slide. The enlightened project was launched when Christian factions warred each other with extreme violence for centuries in Europe. European intellectuals saw that it was necessary to rebuild knowledge about society on secular grounds so on which would be equally acceptable to all religions to avoid religious persecution by one faction or the other. This meant building knowledge on objective grounds and using logic which would be equally acceptable to all parties. So intuitions, emotions, subjective personal experiences were rejected as a basis for knowledge they could not be used to create consensus. This meant that traditional inherited wisdom and the collective lessons of historical experience were discarded as being faulty and unreliable and all human knowledge was to be built on new foundations. The concept of knowledge is not only different from traditional Christianity but also from all religious traditions as well as the knowledge, the concept of knowledge in Islam. Islam takes knowledge very seriously and indeed it's central to the message of Islam. Mankind stood on the verge of a catastrophe when Allah revealed his final message 14 and a half centuries ago. God gave us knowledge which we did not have and this knowledge changed the course of history. The foundation of all knowledge in Islam is to be built on the knowledge revealed by God to mankind. Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wasallam made a clear distinction between useful and useless knowledge and he made dua seeking useful knowledge and he made dua seeking protection from useless knowledge. So how can we tell the difference? Even this knowledge has been lost under the influence of western epistemology which makes no such distinction or rather makes the distinction along rather different lines. The fundamental error of western epistemology is that knowledge cannot be built from scratch starting from zero. If you start from zero you always get zero. Building knowledge must be done on pre-existing foundations. Allah ta'ala taught Adam alayhi salam the names of things and this is the foundation for all human knowledge. This knowledge of the names is built into our hearts and this creates categories upon which we build knowledge. Without these pre-existing categories of thought it is impossible to make sense of our life experiences. So when the European intellectuals sought to build knowledge from zero they actually made a lot of assumptions borrowed from Christianity as well as other ideas from their intellectual tradition but without explicitly recognizing these. So these hidden foundations of western knowledge are the source of our current problem. The secular concept of knowledge led to many serious defects. Knowledge was assumed to be true and justifiable. So if I claim something to be knowledge then I must be able to offer objective proof which is equally acceptable to all and of provide certainty. So in the terms of question of does God exist we cannot have knowledge of this because we cannot provide 100% proof which convinces all and so implicitly this leads to a rejection of God and this rejection has serious epistemological consequences as we know. Consequences are this universe was created by an accident. There is no purpose integration of the universe. Life itself emerged by a sequence of accidents. Human beings emerged by evolution from other animals because there is no creator so there's no special creation of humans. So we are just another type of animal. Our society is just a jungle of cutthroat competition and there is only one moral law which is the survival of the fittest. Purpose of our life is because it ends at death is to pursue pleasure, power, anything that we desire in this world and life itself has no meaning like the life of the animals. Toxic foundations lead to a number of conclusions about how we should build society. So society should build on hedonism where every person is pursuing pleasure, power, and wealth. Individualism everyone is alone dies alone and so we distinguish our self from society. In fact one can say that society does not exist. There's only individuals. The war of all against all is one of the philosophers put it. It means that we should be selfish. There is no point in putting anybody's taking care of others. We must put ourselves in front of all others and the society is a jungle of competition driven by the survival of the fittest. So the environmental crisis and natural consequences of these principles because we only concerned about ourselves. We're not concerned about the future when we will be dead. And these principles continue to be taught as basis for western social sciences and especially economics. But they are disguised and cloaked in mathematics so it's not easily comprehensible as to what we are assuming. There is no doubt about climate change. There's a massive number of unprecedented weather events and unprecedented maximum heat in maximum melting of the ice caps, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, acid rain. Only the blind would refuse to see the evidence for climate change. There are systematic efforts being made to deny climate change and to block attempts to solve the problem. Why is that? Why can't people see that it is our collective need to prevent the climate crisis? For this problem is universal adoption of western epistemology because western educational system are in place all over the world and they teach us all this toxic epistemology. Western society developed after they adopted these principles and so they sought pleasure, power and profits all over the world without any concern for others leading to the genocide of millions of tribes in Africa and in South and North America. Even the names of the nations that have been destroyed have not been survived. And this is currently on display by Israel in terms of the cruelty and barbarity with which they are killing Palestinians. So the rejection of intuition, subjective experience, emotion, tradition, spirituality as basis for knowledge leads to this computer-like calculation of efficiency without any moral or emotional concerns. The global conquest and colonization by the West has led to the spread of these ideas in all of the overall of the globe. So if life is all about pursuit of pleasure, power and profits without any concern for others without any concern of what happens after I die then what does it matter if the planet gets destroyed if I'm not there? So climate change actually the way of thinking of these people who are in brainwashed by western epistemology is that if people are concerned about climate change then they will block us from doing things which are causing giving us profits but causing more climate change. So the strategy is to use greenwashing to improve the image to make the people think that we are climate conscious and doing things while without changing any goals, without changing our goals which remain hidden. And so basically the question is that you can't do minor modifications you have to change the purpose of our lives in order to create methods which will actually lead to genuine change and that is difficult to do. In light of this analysis we understand the SDGs as a form of greenwashing that is we make mega projects and business appear to be environment friendly but not to address the root causes of the climate change. A lot of sincere people who believe the false promises and premises of greenwashing and SDGs and they were supported and therefore they are doing a lot of genuine good projects but ultimately you can't fix the problem without fixing the cause. Solutions cannot be found at the level where the problems appear. The problem is the enlightenment project rejection of tradition, intuition, spirit and the heart and to counter it we have to create the Ghazali project which involves rejecting the enlightened project and the whole structures of knowledge created by it. Instead we have to rebuild all of this new knowledge on the Islamic epistemological foundations. This is parallel to the enlightenment which rejected all past knowledge and rebuilt knowledge from scratch but for us we don't aim to start from zero simply to rebuild starting on the Islamic intellectual tradition which has been discarded for the moment in the mainstream at least. It arises especially in context of climate change that we would like to have universal appeal not appeal just to the Muslims. So why use Islamic why not use some universal foundations? So there are multiple answers for this one is that Islam is the Dean of Fitrah or nature and so Islamic foundations for knowledge have universal appeal because these principles have been built into the hearts but this requires careful crafting of the principles. The second point is that you can't build knowledge in zero so you have to build on some foundations so where are we going to get these foundations from? The set of principles which currently people are trying to do are all built on enlightenment ideals and therefore fundamentally flawed. So basically we need to start from universal principles aligned with Islam for example generosity cooperation social responsibility these three are commonly accepted. Finally the idea that our actions are reward in and of themselves they will be rewarded in the Akhira or according to Islam but also good pro-social behavior brings its own reward because our hearts are built to be pleased when we do something which is good. So perfectly we have to use multiplex knowledge a concept that has been revived by Rajab Shantur and is based on the Islamic tradition and there are multiple layers of knowledge so we can layer our foundations on a universal principles on Abrahamic principles to appeal to all three revealed religions as well as Islamic which would be narrower and all three would be in correspondence with each other. We have common grounds in logic for sustainable development that the earth sustains our lives and we must protect and preserve it and this is captured in the old metaphor of mother earth and the new metaphor of Gaia the living planet and we based on simple logic that this planet is a trust which was given to us you don't own it and we have we have temporary possession we should pass it on to the future generations in a condition better than how we found it. So how we can rebuild knowledge on Islamic foundations we can call this the Ghazali project which has three which has multiple components first is to understand that the universe was created so someone must have created it and if it was created then that gives purpose and meaning to our short lives and then we can define useful knowledge as that kind of knowledge which helps us to achieve our purpose or our goals and useless knowledge distracts and blocks us from recognizing and achieving our goals. So the critical question the place where education must start is the question of identity who are we why are we here and these questions are not addressed in western epistemology because they cannot be answered by science. Another component is to see through the apparently brilliant structures of western knowledge and realize that they are built on toxic foundations and once we have this realization then we have to revive the whole structure of knowledge by rebuilding on Islamic foundations. So these are the components of the Ghazali. How is the Ghazali project to be implemented the critical instrument of change is education and we must start by making character building the core of our educational curriculum and see this post for a history of how a character building which used to be central to the western curriculum as well was removed from it over the 20th century. Then obviously the first question which any knowledge must answer must start with the purpose of life and while evading the question directly western education provides an indirect false answer that life is about pursuit of pleasure power profits and being admired status etc but none of these are correct ideas. Basically western social science teaches us certain principles on which to build society but these principles are very toxic they built instead of building a society they build a jungle and so rebuilding the social sciences will teach us how to build society according to Islamic ideals and this is the urgent need of part times. legitimate objection is won't this take too long well that's quite true that we don't know how long it will take but the other avenues that we are being currently explored have no chance of success so this probability has a chance of success it is not clear that we can prevent climate crisis but making preparations for a catastrophe will be useful even if it doesn't happen and all is in the hands of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala one of critical to making preparations for a catastrophe is to build local self-sufficient communities which can provide for all their needs in terms of energy and food and this is also aligned with the teachings of Islam which put a lot of emphasis on taking care of our neighbors and taking care of our own selves and being self-sufficient and these preparations also involve living simple lifestyles which are central to Islam and rejecting the israf and tabseer which is at the heart of capitalism basically overproduction and overconsumption are critical to capitalism and they are the central cause of the climate crisis that we are seeing so we have to revert to simple lifestyles reject the idea of economic growth and instead focus on degrowth and how can we do all that how can we create social change that's a long topic for on which I have a separate lecture which is linked here so we are only responsible for doing the fighting the good fights to making the struggle outcomes are not in our hands and the outcomes will be seen in the Akhira Allah ta'ala has promised in the la alama al mahsinin so if we try to do good and we work to please Allah then Allah ta'ala will guide us to his pathways so let us end with the prayer Allah enlighten our hearts with the noor of knowledge from yourself and fill our hearts with your love allow us to see the what needs to be done and especially those actions which will be most pleasing to you and show us what is the best of the deeds and give us the courage and capabilities to perform these deeds