The book The Moral Status of the Environment from the Perspective of Islam and Christianity, authored by Mehdi Ahmadi, was published in 2025 by the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute. This 200‑page Persian volume offers a comparative study of environmental ethics in two Abrahamic religions.
The author acknowledges foundational commonalities—such as divine creation and human responsibility—yet argues that Christian theology encounters difficulties in articulating the details of nature’s rights and in providing practical solutions, sometimes leading to misinterpretations of the notion of “human dominion over the earth.” In contrast, the book contends that Islam, through a precise framework of jurisprudential rulings and theological principles, presents a more comprehensive and balanced model in which the use of nature is bound by sharʿī (religious) limits and respect for the rights of future generations.
This work constitutes a scholarly response to the well‑known thesis of historian Lynn White, who traced the roots of the environmental crisis to Judeo‑Christian theology. Ahmadi demonstrates that the current crisis stems not from religion itself but from deviation from authentic moral foundations and the ascendancy of a modern instrumentalist outlook.
