The Muslims Who Want to Save Octopuses
Lisa De Bode, The Atlantic, Mar 3, 2018
In
Zanzibar, cephalopods are getting a leg up from the Quran.
Hamissi
Usi swims with an octopus on Pemba Island, Tanzania, in 2010. Per-Anders
Pettersson / Reuters
ZANZIBAR—Ivory
pirates, slave traders, and naturalists alike have long sought out the Zanzibar
archipelago, a biodiverse group of islands lying off the coast of Tanzania in
East Africa. One of these islands, Misali, is surrounded by a six-mile coral
reef. It teems with rare life: hawksbill turtles, flying foxes, coconuts
crabs—and lots of octopuses.This
island is special to Muslims, who form the vast majority of Zanzibar’s
population. According to a local Islamic myth, Misali was once visited by a
saintly man known as Prophet Hadhara. When he asked fishermen for a prayer mat,
they had none to offer, but he said it didn’t matter: The teardrop-shaped
island, whose northern beach faces Mecca, was like a prayer mat itself. In
fact, “Misali,” in the local Kiswahili language, means “prayer mat.”
Misali
sustained generations of Muslims; the octopus catch, in particular, kept them
fed for centuries. But overfishing, climate change, and oil exploration began
in recent years to threaten the ecosystem. The octopus population dropped
dramatically. Government regulations did little to curb the problem. And so,
some residents decided to try a different strategy: appealing to the
community’s Islamic consciousness and using verses from the Quran to promote
conservation.
“Whether
you catch small-size fish, damage coral reefs, or use drag nets in seagrass
areas … [it] is forbidden in the Islamic point of view,” said Ali Said Hamad, a
field officer at local nonprofit Mwambao Coastal Community Network who began
using the religious strategy in a few villages in 2016. “We should use our
resources in a wise manner. That’s why there is mizan—an Arabic word which
means balance, but balance in the sense of sustainability.”
Since
2016, Mwambao has been assisting villages’ shehia, or fishery committee, with closing 436 hectares of fishing
grounds in intervals of three months per year, to allow the octopus
population to regenerate. Some closures coincide with Ramadan, when fishermen will
feel discouraged from entering the water, “because when water gets into your
ears and nose it means that you’re breaking your fast,” said Ali Thani, the
country coordinator at Mwambao. When the area re-opens toward the end of
Ramadan, when celebrations require villagers to splurge, “they can sell the
[bigger] octopus, get money for Eid, and buy clothes for their kids,” he added.
While
foreign nonprofits and words like “sustainability” can evoke distrust in the
population, the Quran does not: “We say, ‘It’s not from Europe—it is in your
faith; it is in your religion; it has been there for a long time,’” Thani said.
“[T]his is making the people to start trusting things.”
Although
quantitative data is hard to come by, Thani said anecdotal evidence suggests these
octopus regeneration efforts “got very good results.” The octopuses are heavier
now, commonly growing to twice the size they used to attain before the
religious strategy went into effect. “We left octopuses of 1kg and now they
find ones of 2-2.5kg,” he said.
The
Mwambao staff’s experience using Islamic environmental ethics to reinforce
conservationist messages goes back several years. In the 1990s, when illegal
fishing methods like poison and dynamite threatened Misali’s fish stocks, Hamad
and Thani were employees of a nongovernmental organization called CARE
International. They worked with
clerics and fishermen to promote the Islamic concept of khalifa, or
environmental stewardship, making Misali the site of the first documented
example of a partnership between a secular NGO and Muslim clerics.
In the
past, mixing politics and religion has facilitated the mass exploitation of
natural resources in former colonies like Zanzibar, following Pope Nicholas V’s
15th-century edict to “capture, vanquish, and subdue.” But in recent years, the
use of scripture to excite and involve communities in green activism has taken
off. Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato si’, stressed sustainable
development, while Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, and Buddhist environmental treatises
launched similar commitments. When, in April 2016, 195 countries signed the
Paris Agreement, the accord’s success was credited in no small part to
faith-based organizations lobbying behind the scenes.
In
Zanzibar, balancing sustainability and economic survival can feel like “an
uphill battle,” said Aboud Jumbe, the policy director at Zanzibar’s Ministry of
Lands, Water, Energy, and the Environment. “People are aware of things changing
around them—the fishermen are aware of the drying stocks in the coral reefs;
the farmers are aware of the change in rains,” he said. In spite of these
problems, the government contracted
RAK Gas, a UAE-based company, to explore for oil and gas last year.
In the face of a population boom, and poverty levels of more than 50 percent,
Jumbe questioned the reach of imams. “Even though we do have local community
religious elders in the country who are pretty much at the forefront of
conservation and [climate change] adaptation, what can they do in the face of
that very aggressive development agenda?”
Gulf
countries such as the UAE—Muslim states financed by oil and gas profits—have
not generously supported nonprofits promoting Islamic environmental ethics,
said Fazlun Khalid, the founder of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and
Environmental Sciences, who added that “99.99 percent of what funding that we
received over the years has been mainly from secular organizations.”
Meanwhile,
Wahhabism, a fundamentalist type of Islam that Saudi Arabia is often accused of
funding and exporting, is gaining
territory in Zanzibar, with possibly dire consequences for the
environment.
In
Jambiani and Paje, villages in eastern Zanzibar, some villagers worship
so-called sacred groves—stretches of
rare coral rag forest that serve as medicinal treasure chests, where people
make food offerings to conceive a baby, pray for rain, or heal from sickness,
and where, legend has it, villagers were cured from a plague. The groves shelter
caves, where traces of human occupation dating back 20,000 years have been
excavated. The trees are also said to harbor ancestral spirits and are part of
the villages’ origin stories. (Belief in such spirits stem from Swahili
traditions that predate Islam on Zanzibar; Islam was introduced here in the
eighth century.) But worshipping trees, or anyone other than God, is deemed
blasphemous—and for extremists, such blasphemy demands action. In Syria, for
example, an ISIS
affiliate reportedly chopped down a tree last year over fears that
“polytheistic” locals were worshipping it as a god.
“I think
it’s a serious issue for [Zanzibari] sacred groves because that could be used
as an argument to neglect or not protect them,” said Robert Wild of the
International Union for Conservation of Nature.
But
efforts at conservation might yet prevail—thanks in part to monetary
incentives. “There are lots of controversies and debates about the use of the
environment,” said Kessi Ali Pandu, a Muslim who works as a guide of the sacred
groves. “[But] it doesn’t have to do with religion, or culture, or
whatever—trees are a source of life. So let’s keep the trees and the caves.
They pay for my living.”
