The school bell, a gong, is struck at 3 p.m. as a thunderstorm rumbles and the call to Asr, the late afternoon Muslim prayer, wafts through the air.
High schoolers at Daarul ‘Uluum Lido, an Islamic boarding school outside the capital, Jakarta, filter out of their classrooms, grab their mats, and head to the small, bright-green mosque at the edge of campus.
Daily prayer is part of the rhythms for the 300 or so Muslim students here, both boys and girls. They study Arabic grammar, math, and science, as well as the Quran and Islamic law. But one of this school’s signature subjects includes lessons on how Muslims should be good stewards of the Earth.
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Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, is vulnerable to climate change. A national movement called Green Islam is urging all citizens to care for the Earth.
After the afternoon prayers, the thunderstorm fading into the distance, a group of girls takes a winding cobblestone path through a thin area of woods and approaches a greenhouse. The girls pass under a banner displaying a verse from the Quran, an instruction to harvest the fruit of a garden in season, but without waste.
At the nursery, ninth grader Zilda Nafiza takes in the scent of wet soil and fresh herbs. She reaches up to check the leaves of a bok choy plant growing from a plastic hydroponic tube. It can take up to 40 days for bok choy to grow, she explains under the icy glow of chlorophyll-stimulating LED lights. Plants that aren’t used in the kitchen will be fed to the school’s flock of chatty brown ducks.
Zilda has been part of the girls’ greenhouse club for two years. It reminds her of her parents’ garden back home, she says. She likes tending to these plants that provide the community with food – as well as with oxygen. “Being aware of the environment is important for a Muslim,” she says.
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That connection is something that her teacher Faizin Zuhri, a Muslim scholar, is intentionally fostering in his course on environmentalism in the Quran. He says the ancient tome contains many teachings that instruct people to care for the Earth. But Muslims didn’t necessarily perceive these parts of scripture as environmental messages, he says, before the climate crisis.
Now Jakarta is sinking. Floods and wildfires happen with devastating frequency in this climate-vulnerable nation spanning some 17,000 islands. Today, those teachings are becoming clear, Mr. Zuhri says. “The lessons are everywhere.”
Daarul ‘Uluum Lido is what is now called an eco-boarding school, part of a program established four years ago as part of a “Green Islam” movement that teaches Muslims around the world to lead the way on caring for the Earth’s climate.
Here in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and one of the most ethnically diverse places on the planet, Green Islam has the potential to be a mobilizing force, inspiring calls for climate solutions in schools, mosques, and other grassroots groups.
The movement does not rely on the authority of climate science, however. It is a moral message rooted in the Quran, conveyed through faith leaders, and reinforced by the nation’s founding philosophy that calls for tolerance and social justice for all Indonesians, regardless of faith tradition.
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“Green Islam is a huge opportunity for Indonesia. It can work to solve many of our problems,” says Hening Parlan, who runs an ecological peace-building program at Persyarikatan Muhammadiyah, a wide-ranging reformist Muslim organization in Indonesia. “Green Islam is driven by the Muslim community, but the benefit is not only for the Islamic community, but the benefit of all.”
A nation at the forefront of climate change
Indonesia’s mounting climate crises have been profound. Parts of the capital are sinking into the ocean by 6 to 10 inches a year, according to reports from the World Bank. This pace is driven mainly by unsustainable groundwater extraction, experts say, though it’s also exacerbated by rising sea levels.
In response, the government has decided to relocate the capital from Jakarta in northern Java to Nusantara, a future city currently under construction in the forests of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.
But in Borneo, as well as in the western island of Sumatra, a global demand for palm oil, which is used in everything from cereal to deodorant, continues to transform the landscape. Over the past two decades, Indonesia has lost 30.8 million hectares (about 76 million acres) of tree cover, an area roughly the size of Italy.
Slash-and-burn methods of land clearing have sparked wildfires that can rage for weeks. They put at risk not only rural communities, but also orangutans and other endangered species – all while the destruction of peatlands and old-growth forests pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
State-backed nickel mining is exacerbating these problems. Indonesia is by far the world’s largest producer of nickel, a critical element for electric vehicle batteries and other renewable energy technology. Ironically, as demand for these green technologies grows, nickel extraction is wreaking havoc on forests and oceans, climate groups say.
Yet in a 2020 YouGov poll across 25 countries, Indonesia came in first in climate skepticism, with 1 out of 5 respondents saying climate change doesn’t exist or isn’t caused by humans. (The United States was the second-most skeptical.)
Indonesia’s Green Islam movement, from eco-boarding schools and eco-mosques to training for clerics and grassroots groups, is one response to that skepticism.
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“People may not be aware that what is happening is climate change,” says Fachruddin Mangunjaya, a dean in the faculty of biology and chairman at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the National University in Jakarta. “There is no single cure for the environmental crisis, but religion is one variable. … We are delivering a strong moral message.”
Indeed, in Indonesia, people trust religious leaders more than any other leaders, according to a 2024 survey by the global advocacy group Purpose.
“People listen to religion. They understand religious words and the notion of duty,” says Hayu Prabowo, chairman of the Environment & Natural Resources Body of the Ulema Council, the country’s highest Islamic authority. “Islam says to do a good job for the Earth, and the Earth will do good for you.”
The Ulema Council has issued seven fatwas, or religious rulings, on climate change in the past decade. These include instructions on wildlife protection and efficient waste management. In 2023, the council also issued a fatwa urging Muslims to carry a “mandate and responsibility for maintaining and prospering the earth and everything in it as a reflection of Islam.”
Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia, has also embraced this mission, becoming in 2022 the first place of worship to be green-certified by the World Bank.
Inaugurated in 1978, the enormous mosque, its name meaning “Mosque of the Independence,” was designed to rely on natural light and cross ventilation. The air-conditioning system only kicks in on Fridays, when up to 40,000 people gather for jummah prayers. Yet it, too, is powered in part by new solar panels that cover 40% of the building’s rooftop. The mosque aims to add more.
Slow-flow faucets reduce water usage, and stickers with Quranic verses are placed near light switches to remind people to turn them off. “Al Isr 17:27: ‘Those who waste are kin of Satan,’” reads one in the basement.
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“Our mission is to be a pioneer and inspire other mosques in Indonesia,” says Her Pramtama, an architect responsible for the Istiqlal Mosque property.
As mothers fan their children and men sit in groups scrolling on phones one quiet Sunday afternoon, Mr. Pramtama is standing among the mosque’s solar panels. He acknowledges that most of the worshippers inside don’t understand the importance of what they are doing. “This is our homework, to teach people about energy efficiency.”
Dr. Mangunjaya at the Centre for Islamic Studies says he believes educating youth is the fastest way to change “hearts and minds.” That is why he helped design the eco-boarding school model – or ekopesantren, which includes schools like Daarul ‘Uluum Lido and almost 50 others – in conjunction with the government in 2021. He wants to see this effort expanded throughout Indonesia – as well as in the global Muslim community.
He and other Muslim leaders also believe Green Islam can do more than help people care for an environment in danger. Some hope it can help foster unity in one of the most diverse countries in the world.
Indonesia comprises thousands of islands, hundreds of ethnic groups, and over 700 spoken languages – more than any other nation except Papua New Guinea.
But these communities haven’t always lived in harmony.
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Indonesia’s founding philosophy: pancasila
Octavia Shinta Aryani was a teenager visiting her older brother in Bengkayang Regency, an area in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, when she heard a mob gathering outside.
Despite herself, she peeked out the ground-floor window and saw an image that would steer the course of her life: A man, his face jubilant and vengeful, was parading a human head through town before dropping it in front of the police station.
The man leading the mob was a member of the Dayak, an Indigenous people on Borneo who are now majority Christian. The head the man was carrying belonged to a Muslim from the nearby island of Madura.
The beheading was the latest in a series of attacks between Dayaks and Madurese that began in the late 1990s. The conflict, at its core, had little to do with religion. But the clashes quickly divided the community along ethnic and religious lines, and left hundreds dead over the past two decades.
That experience was years ago, but Ms. Shinta tugs at her fingers as she recalls being frozen at that window, feeling devastated by what had become of West Kalimantan.
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Kalimantan is relatively “empty,” wrote Elizabeth Pisani in her book “Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation.” But it “manages to be racially complex.”
Its thick forests have always been home to Dayak tribes, who traditionally lived in longhouses along rivers that cut through the island of Borneo. Malay Muslims, originally from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, settled along its coasts. In the 18th century, a Chinese community also settled as an independent state in the west.
Then, Indonesians from more populated islands were relocated to larger, less populated islands as part of the Indonesian government’s transmigrant programs in the 1960s. Thousands more people came to the region from Java and Madura.
Today, West Kalimantan’s riverside capital of Pontianak speaks to that old multicultural mix. It has a vibrant Chinatown, numerous mosques, and a grand Catholic cathedral that blends European and Dayak architectural motifs.
It’s still a fragile coexistence. Ms. Shinta always fears that hostilities remain just below the surface. Even today, if there’s a car crash, the first question is, What group is the driver from?
This fragility has driven a lifelong search for tolerance – a tolerance described in Indonesia’s founding philosophy called pancasila.
Roughly translated as “five principles” in Sanskrit, pancasila has roots tracing back thousands of years. The words Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, or “Unity in Diversity” in Old Javanese, were first found in a 14th-century poem, and today they serve as Indonesia’s national motto.
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They form the core of the official policy of pancasila, instated in 1945 by the nation’s first president, the revolutionary and Indonesian nationalist Sukarno. He led the fight against Dutch colonialists and served as president from 1945 to 1967. Blending Islamic and secular visions for the new nation, the five pillars are a belief in God, civilized humanity, national unity, democracy, and social justice for all.
The artist Indra Suroinggeno tells stories of such ideals. The Java-based puppeteer travels the country with a traditional handmade banner on which he has painted the entire history of pancasila.
On a recent day, he unfurls this banner of narrative art. A local gamelan troupe – a percussive musical tradition of Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples featuring drums, gongs, and bamboo flutes – plays behind him as he begins to tell the story.
“Pancasila is not something easy,” says Mr. Suroinggeno. “It is a challenge.”
In practice, the language of pancasila has been exploited by authoritarian leaders throughout the country’s history, and the government’s interpretation only allows for certain kinds of religious diversity.
Indonesians must list one of six officially recognized religions on their official IDs. There are no options for atheism or traditional folk religions, even though millions of Indonesians incorporate such beliefs into their religious life.
Still, when it comes to Indonesia’s environmental crisis, pancasila could be the solution, says Mr. Suroinggeno. But politics often get in the way.
On paper, the government supports the Green Islam narrative. Nasaruddin Umar, the grand imam of the Istiqlal Mosque and the current minister of religious affairs, announced in March that one of his ministry’s top priorities is “ecotheology,” a religious underpinning for environmental conservation that could put Indonesia at the cutting edge of such efforts.
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Last year, however, the government granted mining concessions to religious organizations that have mining interests – including the country’s largest and most influential Muslim groups, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah. Both are both deeply enmeshed in state affairs, and the concessions have driven a wedge in the Islamic environmental movement.
Ms. Parlan, the environmental activist from Muhammadiyah, sees this move as a “contradiction” of the Green Islam movement. But she feels she must accept it, because she’s a member of the organization.
“I want to use this as an opportunity for the community to learn about the impacts of mining and to strengthen their advocacy [against it],” says Ms. Parlan, who’s also the head of Indonesia’s chapter of GreenFaith, a global, multifaith effort to promote a sacred duty to protect the Earth.
One way she’s doing this is through what Muhammadiyah calls Eco Bhinneka, a program that takes its name from Indonesia’s national motto. This program brings together women and young people from various religious backgrounds to promote conservation. It’s active in four regions of Indonesia, including West Kalimantan, which faces some of the fastest forest loss amid illegal logging and ever-expanding oil palm extraction. This part of Borneo has lost a third of forest coverage in a generation.
This environmental destruction threatens to reignite societal tensions, says Ms. Shinta, who heads the Pontianak chapter of Eco Bhinneka. So she’s seizing an opportunity with Green Islam.
“My first goal is for my city to be a peaceful one – one that is not easily provoked by a minor incident,” says Ms. Shinta. Bringing youth together in the name of peace-building alone would be a nonstarter. But environmental issues are top of mind for young people, and affect everyone regardless of faith or ethnicity.
“If it’s just an interfaith group, they are suspicious,” she explains at the elementary school where she sets the curriculum. “Fighting climate change has become a unifying force. It’s a safe issue.”
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“Green Islam” dialogues with other Indonesian faiths
Later that evening, Ms. Shinta presides over a dinner with members of Eco Bhinneka in Pontianak. About 20 university students and recent graduates sit cross-legged on rattan mats spread out over a long, low table.
She waits until the evening call to prayer ends, a call aired from mosques in cities and small towns across Indonesia. She then explains that because Ramadan is about to begin, the subject of their monthly gathering of “EcoSpeak” will be food waste.
She asks the group members to share the messages they find in their faith books related to this theme. They pull out Qurans and Christian Bibles. They read from the Buddhist Tipitaka canon and The Sishu and the Four Books of Confucianism. An occasional bolt of lightning lilacs the sky as torrential rain pounds the thatched roof. The group members give one another full attention.
Rupina Jeski Anjeli, a Protestant from the Dayak Badineh tribe, who works as a cashier, talks about the love of Earth she finds in Genesis. Reading from the Bible may not be strictly on topic. But what matters is that she is here. She says she used to think women who wore hijabs, like Ms. Shinta across the table from her, were “fanatics.” She once heard an employer call her own people “cannibals,” but she needed the money, so she swallowed her anger.
These kinds of discussions about ethnic and religious hostilities would be too delicate if addressed face on, Ms. Shinta explains. But members of society can get beyond stereotypes and past hurts and fears by getting to know one another in a shared quest to preserve the environment of Kalimantan, including its dense forests and animals threatened by palm oil production and rising seas.
Throughout the evening, several themes keep emerging: balance, moderation, and fairness. I Kadek Harda Widi, a Balinese Hindu, reads from his laptop three philosophies from the Bhagavad Gita. He tries to get the group to understand the ideas of harmony to God, to nature, and to fellow human beings by citing pancasila.
In fact, pancasila, sometimes invoked as a nationalist tool, runs as a current through the philosophies at Indonesia’s eco-mosques, eco-schools, and eco-groups.
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Elok Faiqotul Mutia started a nonprofit organization called Enter Nusantara, which promotes a transition to clean energy. To rally the public toward that goal, she says, it relies on Indonesians’ deep connection to the community. It’s called gotong royong, or “the joint bearing of burdens,” which is also one of the five pillars of pancasila.
That value, Ms. Mutia says, is behind Indonesia’s ranking as the most generous country in the world for seven straight years by the Charities Aid Foundation. She also believes it makes Islam more community-oriented in Indonesia than elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Sitting in an eco-mosque in the city of Yogyakarta, which is known as the cultural heart of Indonesia, she explains how the entire community, including non-Muslims, helped finance the building’s solar panels. It wasn’t environmental zeal that inspired them to donate. It was simply that when the electricity goes out in town, everyone can find light at the mosque.
“Eco-boarding schools or eco-mosques are supported not because of the environment, but because Indonesians want to help the community around the building itself,” says Ms. Mutia.
As a climate activist, she finds that that sense of community, embodied by Green Islam, is key to her work. She doesn’t believe climate change can be addressed from the top down, or by government decree or global directive. The solution “must come from the community itself,” she says.
Ismira Lutfia Tisnadibrata contributed reporting for this story.
