Gonah and Global Warming: The sins fueling Kashmir’s climate crisis

There are signs of a cataclysmic change in the weather, and even though most of us would like to believe that this will go away if we push our heads into the sand, or if we shift blame like hot potato on social media, the weather has only been getting worse in every way. Human greed is showing no signs of restraining itself, and to believe otherwise would be folly and downfall.

In the midst of this mayhem, some users of the Kashmiri social media have been roughly divided over either side of a polarising opinion.

Embroiled in this furore, one social media citizen said, “these are our sins, yim che saen gonah”, “it is our sins that are making these rivers dry up”. He was trying to make sense of the catastrophe at hand the same way we had tried to make sense of the floods of 2014 which caused heavy losses to the people of Kashmir.

“Please do not say these are our gonah; ” a user replied to this, referring to how the moral police of Kashmir had once attributed the cause of those floods to the jeans-wearing girls of Rajbagh, the dog owning families of Kashmir (also mostly from Rajbagh which is considered to be an affluent and hence godless area of Kashmir), and of course, to the beauty parlours that women go to, for makeup.

“Please do not say these are our gonah,” he continued, “This is simply global warming”. This comment was a breath of fresh air from its orthodox 2014 adversary and got a sizeable accolade from the well read, the educated, the liberals and the affluent of social media, who agreed that superstition aside/sins aside, global warming was an entirely different matter and has/had nothing to do with our sins.

He was right, wasn’t he? Sins aside, global warming was an entirely different matter. The flooding of Kashmir may as well be attributed to jeans wearing women, but drying up of rivers is an entirely different matter. And yet, while this comment had all the makings of  the 21st century rationality we have come to embrace, something didn’t make sense to me. And so, I sat down and wrote this essay.

If global warming is not caused by sins, I wondered, what is it caused by? If sins bear no correlation to global warming, I thought, what does?

To understand this, we have to understand two things:

What causes global warming?
What do (our) sins look like?

To illustrate/establish a correlation here, let us try to understand what our sins have historically looked like and how they measure up in the face of catastrophe.

If, say, according to the sin-effect theory we subscribe to, 23 divorces in a society led to a 0.1 degree rise in temperature, how many divorces would it take to increase the global average by, say, 1 degree celsius? Does this account for the divorces outside of Kashmir, or, is it just the divorces in/of Kashmir that have an effect on the weather of the world? Does our atmosphere have an invisible barrier in the sky where temperatures rise geo-specifically with the rate of divorces in the area? What if right next to us were a neighbouring region living perfectly religious lives with minimum divorces? Would they be affected by our divorce ridden society?

With that, perhaps, we can also establish/ as we have already suggested (in 2014 and in the years that followed), a clear causation between, say, 1mm rise in river Jhelum, with one jeans pants put on by a girl in Rajbagh.

Though we must be careful not to include in our studies mention of those cities of the world which suffer from a rampant jeans pants epidemic and yet no flooding problems. Or those cities where wearing jeans does not fall under the ambit of female indecency. City planners of our cities must pay heed to this very important factor of city planning.

For this end, I am devoting a new branch of study to understand how best to put a stop to environmental degradation by putting a stop to our sins – namely, specifically –  indecency of women. Perhaps as soon as we see a rise in the water levels, we could declare a state of emergency and announce atop mosque pulpits and WhatsApp groups that all of us immediately switch to shalwars, and watch in glee as the water levels recede back to normal. Wouldn’t it be some joy to play with Nature like that?

Alternatively, pardon my manners, I have another theory – a question through suggestion.

What is the causation/correlation between felling one large swathe of forest for building luxurious homes and a one degree rise in temperature? What is the causation between owning 4 cars per household puffing out fumes, and a one degree rise in temperature?

What is the causation between dumping fresh rice and mutton in hundreds of kilos into the waste disposals – all those resources converted to food, and then trashed into nothingness?  What is the cost of eating mutton 2 times a day, 6 days a week? What is the cost of sustaining a military apparatus 1 million big in a fragile ecosystem?

So, if, perchance, a relationship is established between felling of trees, wasting of food and the worsening of the climate, can we then also establish that felling of the trees without reckon is a sin? Because if we agree this is a sin, if not for what it does to God’s beautiful earth, but to us and our faith, can we then establish that doing things that lead to global warming do indeed amount to sins, and that we are all sinners when we litter? Pollute? Indulge in excess?

Or, can we then also agree that treating God’s earth in this manner is obscene, and hence a sin?

So, were we to choose between jeans pants epidemic and rampant deforestation – which ‘sin’ would lead to global warming?

However, to come back to our previous correlation, if there indeed is a correlation between female jeans and floods, or in other words, geo-specific indecency and natural disaster, what do we say of a child abuser named Aijaz Sheikh who was looming amongst us for the last 20 years?

Just two weeks ago, he was convicted of raping thousands of young boys, as young and younger than our youngest siblings. He did not do this in darkness. People have known about him for a while. “Used to make them do it to each other”, this is what was said about him, wherein not only did he commit these heinous crimes/sins, he also made his victims perform sexual acts on each other.. Did any of his actions make the rivers run dry or is the causation only restricted to what women do?

Someone once said that men wage wars on the bodies of women. Did his behaviour at no point cause the floods that we so confidently attribute to women?

So, if we are putting more weight on what women wear (jeans) and less on how we actually sin – pollution, overconsumption, paedophilia etc, forgetting entirely the premise of sin, and remembering only our clerical symbolisms, I cannot help but notice in this behaviour a cognitive dissonance of the modern Muslim, who is so far removed from his self and his religious doctrine that he thinks he does not sin when he indulges in the destruction of the planet in his everyday life.

This is the cognitive dissonance of a people who have forsaken and forgotten religion so much that they do not include trashing, burning, and toxifying the environment in sins they commit in their everyday lives.

Back on social media, the man could not stand to tolerate the superstition of blaming our sins/actions for global warming. So, he has instead resorted to blaming global warming for… global warming. A thing that caused itself – like the big bang. It is almost like blaming death for dying.

But the climate itself can’t change this bad for no reason can it?

Surely there must be a reason the climate is getting worse? If in a city in the middle of a hot summer day, you enter a patch of forest that has somehow managed to stay alive amongst the concrete that engulfs it, you will notice a sudden drop in temperature, an ease in breathing, a lowering of the stress levels (unclenched muscles and the likes) and an inexplicable increase in the quotient of joy of the person.

The eyes will relax, the ears will settle down, the jaw will loosen up, and good thoughts will come to your mind. You will let out a deep sigh, and wonder why you choose to live in the city in the first place. Once inside this tiny microcosm, you will see a world teeming with life; sharing life amongst each other. The water, the air, the birds, the animals, the insects exist in a harmony – a harmony of exchanging life amongst each other while also returning it to the earth from where it returns yet again redoubled and energised.

These are the makings of a self sustained ecosystem, capable of immortality. Here, in the middle of life, not hindered and sabotaged by dead concrete, some simple things will start making sense to you. It will make sense to you, for instance, how deforestation and pollution has had a direct impact on our lives, and the environment of our times.

This correlation is simple and obvious to the indigenous, and to those who walk barefoot and drink from streams, but is a cognitive skill which is dulled down, worn out, and lost in a city man. He no longer sees why he needs the trees he fells, and he no longer sees why the stream of water by his side must be protected.

To him, a harvester, harnesser, and tamer of energies, the tamer of the world, it must all bend to his will. The birds and the animals and the streams must reroute themselves to him, because if they do not, he will make sure they do – with his dynamite sticks, his drilling machines, and his industrial blades.

In this lust for comfort, and in this greed-fuelled ego, we often forget what it is that constitutes and survives us.

We forget in our self delusion that nature is contained in us, and that it contains us. We forget that nature has the power to expel us, and that it will… unless we change our ways. Because just as nature is ruthless, it is also forgiving. Because just as God is wrathful, he is also infinitely compassionate – albeit in exchange of repentance and redemption.

What we often forget is that, in an ideal state of living, in this larger continuous lifeform we call earth, we are surrounded by life.

In fact, to have life we must be surrounded by life. In air, there must be life, in water there must be life, and in soil there must be life. We have, through our exploitation and concretisation, laid siege to life on all fronts. But what we have also killed is our understanding of our self-destruction. We have snatched away from ourselves our very own source of life. And of that, we are proud.

So, there is a correlation after all which can be observed in such microcosms of nature. Our greed and our carelessness has caused the planet to heat up, and cool down in ways that can kill us.

Could this be the end?

Allama Iqbal once said,

“amal se zindagī bantī hai jannat bhī jahannam bhī
ye ḳhākī apnī fitrat meñ na nuurī hai na naarī hai”

If global warming has been directly brought about by man and his greed, and his exploitation of nature, and not sins per se, as said by one social media user, then that begs the question – what does the modern Muslim consider to be a sin? If we see indecency and immodesty of women as sins, how do we not see the exploitation of nature as sin? Do we ever apologise to god for refurbishing our houses and spending crores in making houses, hoarding things and getting mad at the poor?

There seems to be a convenient consumerist appropriation of religion by the modern Muslim and the clergy who have come to mutually benefit each other in this world which cannot help but consume everything in its way. Sins are no longer our actions but symbolisms. The ritual has been hollowed out and no longer finds itself traced back to its origins of action/amal and intent/niyyat. In this, not only do we shrug responsibility, we also shrug intent to fix it by changing the meaning of sin altogether.

If there is a cognitive dissonance in our very own understanding of religion itself, how then can we understand sin?