There are a whole cluster of questions here. Clearly, as we leave the second
 millennium, the planet is in abjectly poor physical shape as compared to the
 year 1000. Materialism, enabled by Reformation notions of the world as
 fallen, and by protestant capitalistic ethics, has presided over the gang
 rape of Mother Earth. Everywhere the face of the planet is scarred. Megatons
 of tons of toxic waste are now circulating in the oceans, or hovering in the
 stratosphere. Hormone and plastics pollution has resulted in a 50% drop in
 male fertility in the UK. Every day, another 12 important species become
 extinct. Every form of life apart from our own, and perhaps domestic
 animals, has been decimated by the holocaust of modernity. The BSE disaster
 is a hint of what may be in store: Government analysts have confirmed that
 as many as 30,000 British people may contract Creuzfeld-Jakob disease as a
 result of eating contaminated beef. As technology advances, similar
 scientific blunders may well wipe out large sections of the human race.

 But the most urgent and undeniable environmental issue which we carry with
 us into the new millennium is that of global warming. For a hundred years we
 have been pumping greenhouse gases into the skies, and are now beginning to
 realise that a price has to be paid. We need to focus close attention on
 this issue, not least because it will affect the Islamic countries far more
 radically than the West. Worryingly few people in the Muslim world seem
 interested in the question; and it is hence urgently necessary that we
 remind ourselves of the seriousness of the situation.

 For years government scientists mocked the idea of global warming. But the
 Rio Earth Summit in 1992 revealed to an anxious world that the scientific
 facts were now so clear as to brook no argument. The world is heating up.
 The industrial gases in the atmosphere are turning our planet into a
 greenhouse, reflecting heat back in rather than allowing it to be dissipated
 into space.

 Here in England, global warming is noticed even by the ordinary citizen.
 Temperature records go back over three hundred years, but the 10 hottest
 years have all occurred since 1945, and three of the five hottest (1989,
 1990 and 1995), have been in the past decade. Water supply is equally
 erratic. January of 1997 was the driest for 200 years. Storms at sea have
 become so bad that the North Sea oil industry is now laying pipelines
 because the seas are too rough for tankers.

 What are the exact figures? Surprisingly, they seem tiny. The rise in
 average temperature between 1990 and 2050 will be 1.5 degrees Centigrade,
 which appears negligible. But the temperature rise which 4000 years ago
 ended the last ice age was only 2 degrees Centigrade. Research has proved
 that the polar ice caps are already beginning to melt, which is why the sea
 level is now creeping up by five millimetres a year. In places like the
 North Norfolk coast the EU is spending millions of pounds on new concrete
 defences to keep the sea out. How long even the most elaborate defences can
 be maintained is not clear.

 However, for the West, the bad news is mixed with good. Rising temperatures
 would probably be welcomed by most people. It will, in thirty years, be
 possible to grow oranges in some parts of southern England. Already, the
 types of seeds bought by farmers reflect the awareness that summers are
 warmer, and winters are dryer. But no great catastrophe seems to threaten.

 What is the situation, however, in the Muslim world? At the Rio summit, many
 Islamic countries showed themselves indifferent in the issue. In fact, the
 countries which campaigned most strongly against environmental controls were
 often Muslim: the Gulf states, Brunei, Kazakhstan and others. The reason was
 that their economies depend on oil. Cut back emissions on Western roads, or
 switch electricity generating to sustainable sources like tidal or wind
 power, and those countries lose out.

 There is still inadequate awareness in Muslim circles of the great climatic
 calamity that is looming in the next millennium. But just consider some
 precursors of the catastrophe that have already come about. In the Sahel
 countries of Africa - Chad, Mali and Niger, which have over 90% Muslim
 populations, rainfall is declining by ten percent every decade. The huge
 Sahara Desert is becoming ever huger, as it overwhelms marginal pasture and
 arable land on its southern fringes. The disastrous drought which recently
 afflicted the Sudan ended with catastrophic floods.

 Any climatic map will show that agriculture in many Muslim countries is a
 marginal business. In Algeria, a further 15% decline in rainfall will
 eliminate most of the remaining farmland, sending further waves of migrants
 into the cities. A similar situation prevails in Morocco, where the worst
 drought in living memory ended only in 1995. The Yemen has suffered from the
 change in monsoon patterns in the Indian Ocean - another consequence of
 global warming. In Bangladesh the problem is not a shortage of water - it is
 too much of it. Floods are now normal every three or four years, largely
 because of deforestation in the Himalayas which limits soil retention of
 water.

 Dr Norman Myers of Oxford University predicts that by 2050 'the rise in sea
 level and changes in agriculture will create 150m refugees. This includes
 15m from Bangladesh, and 14m from Egypt.'

 However, this figure does not include migrants generated by secondary
 consequences of climatic change. These huge waves of humanity will
 destabilise governments and produce wars. The modern nation-state does not
 facilitate migration: Bangladeshis before 1948 could move to other parts of
 India, but with Partition, they are stuck within their own borders.
 Epidemics, also, are likely to be widespread. Some island nations, such as
 the Maldives or the Comoros, will disappear completely beneath the waves,
 and their populations will have to be accommodated elsewhere.

 Again, I repeat that these forecasts are not doomsday scenarios. Those are
 much worse. I merely cite the predictions of mainstream science, as set
 forth in European Union and UK Department of the Environment reports. It is
 true that measures are beginning to be taken to limit greenhouse gas
 emission. But even if no more gases were to be released into the skies at
 all, temperatures would continue to rise for at least a hundred years,
 because of the gases already circulating in the atmosphere.

 Let me close with some reflections on the above three themes.

 Are these developments on balance cause for optimism, or for disquiet? Well,
 we know that the Blessed Prophet (s) liked optimism. He also taught tawakkul
 - reliance upon Allah's good providence. However, he also taught that tying
 up our camels is a form of relying on Allah. So how should Muslims consider
 their options over the next few decades?

 There are a number of issues here. Perhaps the most important is the
 cultivation of an informed leadership. I mentioned earlier that most Muslim
 leaders cannot provide the intellectual guidance needed to help intelligent
 young people deal with the challenges of today. Ask the average Muslim
 activist how to prove a post-modernist wrong, and he will not be able to
 help you very much. Our heads are buried in the ground. However, it is not
 only intellectual trends which we ignore. The environment, too, is an
 impending catastrophe which has not grabbed our attention at all. Perhaps
 our activists will still be choking out their rival rhetoric on the correct
 way to hold the hands during the Prayer, while they breath in the last
 mouthful of oxygen available in their countries. They seem wholly oblivious
 to the problem.

 All this has to change. In my travels in the Islamic world, I found
 tremendous enthusiasm for Islam among young people, and a no less tremendous
 disappointment with the leadership. The traditional ulema have the courtesy
 and moderation which we need, but lack a certain dynamism; the radical
 faction leaders have fallen into the egotistic trap of exclusivism and
 takfir; while the mainstream revivalist leaders, frankly, are often
 irrelevant. Both ponderous and slightly insecure, trapped by an
 'ideological' vision of Islam, they do not understand the complexity of
 today's world - and our brighter young people see this soon enough.

 Institutions, therefore, urgently need to be established, to train young men
 and women both in traditional Shari'a disciplines, and in the cultural and
 intellectual language of today's world. Something like this has been done in
 the past: one thinks of the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad where Ghazali
 taught, which encouraged knowledge not only of fiqh, but of philosophical
 theology in the Greek tradition. We need a new Ghazali today: a moderate,
 spiritually minded genius who can understand secular thought and refute it,
 not merely rant and rave about it.

 The creation of a relevant leadership is thus the first priority. The second
 has to be the evolution of styles of da'wa that can operate despite the
 frankly improbable task of toppling the bunker regimes. The FIS declared war
 on the Algerian state, and has achieved nothing apart from turning much of
 the country into a battleground. Unless the military can be suborned, there
 is no chance of victory in such situations. Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and the
 rest are similar cases.

 An alternative da'wa strategy already exists in a sense. In many of these
 countries, particularly in Egypt, the mainstream Ikhwan Muslimin operate a
 largescale welfare system, which serves to remind the masses of the superior
 ethical status of indigenous Islamic values. That model deserves to be
 expanded. But there is another option, which does not compete with it, but
 augments it. That is the model of da'wa activity to the West.

 New Muslims like myself are grateful to Allah for the ni'ma of Islam - but
 we cannot say that we are grateful to the Umma. Islam is in its theology and
 its historical practice a missionary faith - one of the great missionary
 faiths, along with Christianity and Buddhism. And yet while Christianity and
 Buddhism are today brilliantly organised for conversion, Islam has no such
 operation, at least to my knowledge. Ballighu anni wa-law aya ('Convey my
 message, even though a single verse') is a Prophetic commandment that binds
 us all. It is a fard ayn, and a fard kifaya - and we are disobeying it on
 both counts.

 Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les
 conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists,
 carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America.
 Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in
 through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi
 tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority
 areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is
 maintained today.

 Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer.
 Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a
 political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three
 commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one
 thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average
 educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is
 likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or
 her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be
 immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling
 religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite
 the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every
 Christian religious poet.

 Those who puzzle over the da'wa issue in the West generally refuse to take
 this on board. All too often they follow limited, ideological versions of
 Islam that are relevant only to their own cultural situation, and have no
 relevance to the problems of educated modern Westerners. We need to overcome
 this. We need to capitalise on the modern Western love of Islamic
 spirituality - and also of Islamic art and crafts. By doing so, we can reap
 a rich harvest, in sha' Allah. If the West is like a fortress, then we can
 approach it from its strongest place, by provoking it politically and
 militarily, as the absurd Saddam Hussein did; in which case we will bring
 yet more humiliation and destruction upon our people. Or we can find those
 areas of its defences which have become tumbledown and weak. Those are,
 essentially, areas of spirituality and aesthetics. Millions of young
 Westerners are dissatisfied both with the materialism of their world, and
 with the doctrines of Christianity, and are seeking refuge in New Age groups
 and cults. Those people should be natural recruits for Islam - and yet we
 ignore them.

 Similarly, and for the same constituency, we need to emphasise Islam's
 vibrant theological response to the problem of conservation. The Qur'an is
 the richest of all the world's scriptures in its emphasis on the beauty of
 nature as a theophany - a mazhar - of the Divine names.

 As a Western Muslim, who understands what moves and influences Westerners, I
 feel that by stressing these two issues, Islam is well-placed not merely to
 flourish, but to dominate the religious scene of the next century. Only
 Allah truly knows the future. But it seems to me that we are at a
 crossroads, of which the millennium is a useful, if accidental symbol. It
 will either be the watershed which marks the final collapse of Islam as an
 intellectually and spiritually rich tradition at ease with itself, as
 increasingly it presides over an overpopulated and undernourished zone of
 chaos. Or it will take stock, abandon the dead end of meaningless extremism,
 and begin to play its natural world role as a moral and spiritual exemplar.

 As we look around ourselves today at the chaos and disintegration of the
 Umma, we may ask whether such a possibility is credible. But we are living
 through times when the future is genuinely negotiable in an almost
 unprecedented way. Ideologies which formerly obstructed or persecuted Islam,
 like extreme Christianity, nationalism and Communism, are withering. Ernest
 Gellner, the Cambridge anthropologist has described Islam as 'the last
 religion' - the last in the sense of truly believing its scriptural
 narratives to be normative.

 If we have the confidence to believe that what we have inherited or chosen
 is indeed absolute truth, then optimism would seem quite reasonable. And I
 am optimistic. If Islam and the Muslims can keep their nerve, and not follow
 the secularising course mapped out for them by their rivals, or travel the
 blind alley of extremism, then they will indeed dominate the world, as once
 they did. And, we may I think quite reasonably hope, they will once again
 affirm without the ambiguity of worldly failure, the timeless and
 challenging words, wa kalimatuLlahi hiya al-ulya - 'and the word of God is
 supreme'.

 This essay is based on a lecture given at the Belfast Central Mosque in
 March 1997

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