Enhancing environmental practices in Khoja faith communities – a collaborative inquiry

My research project was a fascinating exploration and research journey into an intensive collaborative inquiry with six Khoja Shia Muslim faith communities based in England to improve and enhance environmental practices in the faith communities.

The knowledge landscape within which this project is located is a wide and complex one and brings together several different domains of knowledge that arise and come into play in this research. These domains are the environmental issues, global and local initiatives to deal with these issues and the religious considerations underlying these issues.

The different epistemic roots (the ways of and the process of knowing) which are used in analysing and understanding the issues in this project include science and its emergent findings, the impact of global politics on climate change and its impact on global society and its mitigation, the emergence of moral and ethical dimensions on the environment, the faith teachings on the preservation of the environment, institutional structure and practices and the process of organisational change in the faith communities covered in this project.

The purpose of my research project was to contribute to the overall social process of change in the environmental practices in these faith communities. The aim of this research was to assist in bringing about change in the current practices of the communities.

The research approach in this project was a participatory, collaborative inquiry with discussion groups in the faith communities. I opted for the collaborative inquiry framework as one providing a direct pathway for taking a research approach to practice and change-making and enabling investigation, action and reflection and reporting the learning from it in a way best suited to the project and the participants and the faith communities. The collaborative inquiry was undertaken with community discussion groups drawn from the six UK-based faith communities. I gathered the research data through initial face-to-face meetings followed by separate ongoing online WhatsApp sessions of each discussion group. These six faith communities were the Birmingham, Essex, Leicester, London (Stanmore), Peterborough and Portsmouth Khoja Shia Muslim communities.

The collaborative inquiry format provided the discussion groups with a much-needed forum to jointly develop these groups' initiatives and strategies to bring about change in the communities' problematic practices and to trial them within the communities and learn from their outcomes. The discussion groups helped to motivate the communities to think about taking steps to improve their green practices and address environmental issues within their contexts and help in making the change in the problematic activities.

The research gives an engaging insight into the structure and workings of the Khoja Shia communities, the positionality of the key stakeholders and influencers in the community, and the decision-making processes involved in changing their practices.

The research considered the aspects that played a part in influencing the change process and examined the motivating factors and the elements that posed hurdles and impediments in effecting change in these faith communities. It considered how these factors affected the practice and approach of decision-makers and members of the communities.

The study showed that improving the long-standing, entrenched practices was a complex and difficult process in the communities. The communities faced Internal institutional and organisational constraints and external constraints in changing problematic practices.

A key finding of the research was that change in the faith communities could be facilitated by adopting a change strategy involving local change agents, including women and working with community leaders and volunteers in the change-making process, securing buy-in from the donors of the community, undertaking awareness building and education and scientific studies linking the problematic practices to environmental harm locally and globally and seeking motivation from both science findings and faith teachings combining bottom-up consensus building approach and top-down policy forming approach.

The project enabled the communities to develop a deeper understanding of both the Islamic faith's position on nurturing the environment and the impact of the current scientific findings on issues of global warming and climate change, carbon emissions and pollution.

The study highlighted the importance of eco faith and eco science in changing community practices. Both are needed together, working in tandem as borne out by Holy Quran, which states that good deeds should accompany beliefs. Faith remains in the heart and soul, but science or knowledge of scientific technologies acting through the mind opens the doors to operationalizing the practice of faith teachings in modern living.

This process of change-making in the communities needs long lead times and is a continuing process. For the process to be deep, transformational, and sustainable, it requires sustained efforts of awareness raising at grassroots levels and reiterative cycles of formulating and trialling green pilot initiatives in the communities to discover and arrive at acceptable and workable solutions.

The study makes suggestions and recommendations for further study, research work and efforts in this area to be undertaken and shared in the Khoja faith communities at the communities as well as regional organisational levels to enhance ways of addressing the environmental concerns within the Khoja Shia global communal network and also with other communities worldwide.