About

Dr. Anna M. Gade is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Environmental Studies in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She teaches courses in Environmental Humanities, Islamic Studies, Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the academic study of religion and ethics in the Religious Studies Program. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Chicago, with her doctorate in the History of Religions, specializing in Islam, and a B.A. in Mathematics from Swarthmore College. Her academic career includes positions at Cornell University, Princeton University, Oberlin College, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and institutions in Indonesia such as Universitas Gadjah Mada and the International Indonesian Islamic University. Her research since 2007 focuses on explaining global cultural, historical, and religious responses to environmental change, with a specialization in Southeast Asia's history, knowledge, and practices. Her extensive fieldwork has been conducted in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Malaysia. She has published on topics including tropical forest burning, cross-cultural environmental sentiment, Islamic environmental justice, law and ethics, Rights of Nature in the Asia-Pacific, and religious environmental art, architecture, and material culture. Her most recent book, 'Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations,' was published by Columbia University Press in August 2019, and she has a forthcoming book on environmental ethics. Her previous work emphasizes theory and method in the academic study of religion and Islam. At UW-Madison, she is affiliated with multiple centers and departments, including the Center for Culture, History and Environment, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and Religious Studies. She has served as Co-Chair of the Qur'an Group of the American Academy of Religion and has authored two books on understanding the Arabic Qur'an from diverse Muslim perspectives. From 2017 to 2026, she served as Chair of Undergraduate Programs in Environmental Studies and Sustainability and has also been Associate Dean for Research and Education at the Nelson Institute.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Theology
• History
• Religious studies
• Mathematics
• Environmental ethics
• Geology
• Law

Selected publications

• Environment, Sustainability, and the Work of Constructive Muslim Theology

  The Muslim World · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In sessions on Islam at the AAR conference this year, a recurring theme in our discussions has been that of making new spaces that did not exist previously. The plenary panel from which this essay emerged is just one of those opportunities. Amir Hussein's presidential address on “the work of our hands” reflected on fifty years of Islamic studies at the AAR, a space that had not existed for the study of Islam in the North American academic study of religion prior to that time. I have been around for thirty years or so of these developments in the AAR, such as by presenting my first work, serving on the steering committee for the Study of Islam unit, JAAR editorial boards, co-chairing the Qur'an unit, and co-founding the Southeast Asia unit (which also opened a new space for Islamic studies at the AAR). The story that I have to relate personally about constructive Muslim theology traces this same path that cuts straight through the heart of the AAR, and the academic study of religion as a colonial heritage. It now feels just as inevitable it all would lead right here as it was once would have seemed unimaginable. I was pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless, when I was invited to participate in the ongoing multi-year project on constructive Muslim thought at the AAR last year. This seminar was the inspiration for this presidential plenary panel. I have had time to reflect on why this was at first so striking. Back at the University of Chicago, back in Jonathan Z. Smith's day, nervousness about Christian pastors still pastoring meant that in the history of religions you could do any kind of construction – Marxian, feminist, you name it – but not theological. (That is, unless you called it “religious ethics,” which is just what I did last year presenting on Islamic ethics as constructive Muslim theology.) This wasn't just another Chicago thing, however. At the start of the AAR's Section for the Study of Islam,1 distrust over the commitments of the faithful combined with old-time Orientalism to energize a postcolonial insider-outsider dynamic that has since persisted long into the era of American progressive Islam. Like everybody else, naturally I have my own kind of split self with this. Ironically, however, trained chops for spotting Christian crypto-theology in a post-Eliadian field, once central to the mission of the history of religions, is also what has carried me here today now as an insider to Muslim theology. I do not believe it is our field's purported sloppiness, as critics allege, but rather its deep discipline that has brought us to this point, in symbol and reality, at the AAR. This is not to say that there are not unresolved questions about how to set the parameters of ambiguity in constructive inquiry. This is just how it ought to be, especially for a Muslim theology in the American present. For example, at this AAR, we have been asking essential questions like, what even is the theology? For instance, is this “faith seeking understanding,” like Christians say? Or is kalam, broadly “God-talk” after the work by Martin Nguyen, an open engagement with tradition and imagination? Are constructions of “constructive theology” to be constituted by a rule-bound process, cognate to systematic theology, as found throughout the AAR? Or do we re-invent it, borrowing from past authority, like al-Ghazālī or some other model, all the while dialectically deconstructing the anachronism from the viewpoint of Muslim postmodernisms? Speaking for myself, I could just say that my presence in constructive Muslim theology today is made possible because I talk about the normative ethics of Muslims (and I'm a Muslim). Or, I work with environmental activists who are Muslim (and I'm a Muslim), Q.E.D. That will work fine. However, this would also mean to expect a confessional faith identity to perform an awful lot of quiet work. And, I am not sure that faith identity is not fairly incidental at least to my story here -- because I would do it all the same even without shahāda (“the confession of faith”). I'm fairly certain that whatever is the theology in my own research instead derives from an historical, intellectual arc of religious studies. The greater surprise to me has thus not been any fact of a private religious conversion but rather how critiques in the field have initiated its constructive turn, such as with the subject matter of my own scholarship, environmental crisis and sustainability. I ran into an old graduate school friend, a Christian theologian, in the conference hall just yesterday. He remarked with a tone of surprise that my name was on the program for this panel. I laughed and said, “Paul, I'm a theologian now!” He said something lightheartedly pedagogical like, “Theology is understanding grounded in community.” Then he continued more seriously, “It is to use the terms that make sense to community also to provide wider understanding.” With that setup, I waited for the punchline. It was, “That was your project all along.” My doctoral field, the history of religions, historically voided Islam just as it did Indigenous lifeways, religious “nones,” and many others. Some even speculate that Eliade's own alleged dismissal of Islam had some part in this. When the history of religions finally did reckon with a colonial erasure of Islam just around the time I was entering the field, the Geertzian methodology of “understanding grounded in community” (praised in print by Edward Said himself) meant automatic steps toward post-Orientalist practice, such as by seeking an Indonesian cultural context for my own subject area, textual Qur'anic study. Critique of Christian assumptions that were said to be at the core of the field of religious studies, including “world religions” itself, already under criticism, had now modulated into postcolonial critique for Islamic studies well before any invention of the “anthropology of Islam.” To apply Muslim concepts to explain Islam activates a theological language, as with Sufism, but at the AAR this rarely happened to the extent that one would really wish to use a label like constructive theology. One day, however, it did start to happen to me. The degree to which Anglophone environmental humanities is still informed by latent religious claims, such as in Emersonian nature-thinking or prevailing crisis existentialism, became apparent when I set out to write a book on Islam and the environment using methodologies from the academic study of Islam. As I attempted to translate Muslim terms back into those of the Anglo-humanities, things got theological, and this was as surprising to me as to anybody else. Setting forth to find “the environment” and “the sustainability” in Islamic discourse and practice of the past and present, using methods of the history of religions now in the service of environmental humanities, I found abundant material in Muslim texts and ethnographic contexts. In fact, Muslim-majority systems developed most of the named disciplines that make up environmental sciences today from chemistry to zoology. There is plenty of key theory from the Qur'an, writings of intellectuals like Ibn Sīna, and examples of contemporary global practitioners and activists. However, I faced an intellectual challenge nevertheless when transposing these terms back into the received languages of environmental humanities, steeped as they are in historically post-Christian concepts. As scholars like David Worster have shown, “nature” and “ecology” have a post-Christian theological history as much as a scientific one; in fact, this is an essentially intermingled genealogy. These commitments echo throughout environmental studies’ claims to interdisciplinarity today, with or without neoromantic appeals to wonder at the wild and the empirically sublime. It was environmental humanities, and not so much Islamic studies, for which I needed to make a critical overhaul in order to allow Qur'anic concepts to intervene beyond a superficial keyword identification (e.g. “stewardship”). Further, this would require construction in an intersectionally theological register in order to make legible the post-Christian load of meaning (e.g. crisis-concepts) that carried over from Anglophone humanities. The unprecedented stakes of 21st-century environmental discourse meant that the construction that followed this critical engagement of Islam and environmental humanities would be of a different theological register than the romantic sublime, a point made elsewhere by Bruno Latour and others. No-analog anthropogenic environmental conditions (one may insert Anthropocene language here to the extent that one prefers) imply an existential scale that implicates matters of a theological order, for one and all, human and the more-than-human, all cast within the planetary predicament of Earth (al-arḍ, to use the Qur'an's prolific term). This constructive space is relevant both to non-Muslim and to secular discourse insofar as it represents present conditions like climate, extinction, and other unthinkables. The recognition of the necessity of such an ontological register for the sentient and materially non-sentient alike, such as with an existential scope of potential obliteration, requires no confessional commitment, Islamic or otherwise, to endorse. Furthermore, diverse Islamic perspectives provide a conceptual coherence to these entanglements, such as with respect to urgent themes of responsibility and horizons of futurity. These remain lacking in the balance of secular scales of hope-and-horror, while Muslims’ perspectives can nevertheless be recognized by all. For instance, Islamic environmentalisms offer approaches to the most pressing concerns of environment and sustainability in the form of legal-ethical and multispecies perspectives that are communal, consequential, and in practice that match the phenomenal terms of current environmental circumstances. To conclude now with the theology, here are three specific ideational engagements of Muslim constructive theology that have come out of this project, all initially unanticipated but now necessarily unavoidable. These are intersections and interventions in a theological register that represent logical outcomes of academic construction and critique in the academic field. They take the following forms: ontological propositions, existential calibrations, and finally, consequential relations of justice. Surprisingly perhaps, and although both faith commitment and environmental activism are factors in my own personal case, none of the propositions above derives directly from praxis. The constructive ontological proposition is: ecology is a grounds of being. A related point is often made in contemporary Muslim public legal reasoning, including by some who are using fatāwa to operationalize environmental outcomes. This reasoning does not require faith commitment to validate, and it is also irrefutable. Like many environmental norms that function doubly as a theology, it is intersectional with the secular. The standard Islamic jurisprudential argument is as follows: all five maqāṣid al-sharīʿa or fundamental “aims” or “principles” that the law upholds (religion, life, reason, lineage and property) are dependent on environmental wellbeing. Thus, as one strives to preserve any one or all of these, as is the norm from a jurisprudential perspective, one is obligated to protect the environment as a necessary precondition (as an essential grounds of being). In other words, every conversation, all kalām in Islam, is predicated on an environmental situation, just as all life depends on a healthy biosphere. Furthermore, environmental ontological primacy as a constructive Muslim theology represents an intervention in secular environmental humanism as a non-anthropocentric reasoning. This is a non-trivial conceptual point given the historical primacy of the problem of anthropocentrism within Anglophone environmental ethics. These typically take the form of extensionist arguments that expand the human sphere to the more-than-human, such as with Aldo Leopold's “Land Ethic,” deep ecology, and so forth. In contrast, and on Qur'anic and prophetic authority, many Muslim eco-thinkers today intentionally disrupt the post-Christian preoccupation with anthropocentrism since the essential Islamic theological dichotomy is not Man-to-nature but rather all creation to its Creator, for which clear Qur'anic criteria are set. One need not accept an unverifiable truth claim to appreciate such an intervention taking the form of multispecies ontological presuppositions (as similarly also made globally by Indigenous thinkers and many others). This is also a significant starting point for a critique of the Anthropocene's totalizing ethical aspirations, since the Qur'an does more than imply, but in fact delineates consequential relations of justice for this world and the next. The second cluster of theological intersections that derives from the interactions of Islam and environmental humanities represents existential calibrations. Ongoing oblique theological engagement in post-Christian environmental thinking persists in the tendency to represent “worldviews” – post-Christian and others' – as holistic ecological paradigms. The phenomenon of scaling cosmology to ethical order has been well-studied in the history of religions. It has a robust history in environmental ethics, such as by positing virtue-ethical implications of a “Biblical” worldview (typified by a reading of “dominion” in Genesis), a “Copernican” worldview, and so on. The second proposition here, that of existential calibrations, promises not just an ethics of scale, however, but in fact a re-scaling of ethics. This is significant especially as environmental humanities continues to deploy measures of scale as functioning ethical principles. A ubiquitous example is the term, “Anthropocene,” which is a scalar concept in a temporal sense, an era of Earth's history in “deep time” when humans indelibly determine planetary conditions; additionally, the Anthropocene scales spatially by expanding to the ecological register to the planetary. There are many possible critiques of the Anthropocene's applications, but the trouble here is that, while it was no doubt originally proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer to convey social meaning, nevertheless as a stratigrapher's label it is not a robust ethical term in any tradition. When environment is cast as a crisis-concept then, as it has been since its invention in the mid-20th century, “Anthropocene” does not address any of the anxieties at the edge of a modern moral abyss. The second constructive intervention Islam provides, then, is to offer the understanding of environmental realities a theoretical and practical engagement calibrated on a theoretical order commensurate with ultimate horizons of the planetary and beyond. Finally, a third and moral constructive intersection follows from this. Whether its own vivid truth claims about imminent environmental transformation are seen to be manifest in the empirical world, Qur'anic perspectives do point further to an additional ethical register by positing relations of consequence. The ever-present and inherent futurity of the concepts of environment and sustainability extend to the gardens and fires of a world to come in a real and metaphorical sense. While intersectional to secular perspectives in environmental philosophy, unlike general articulations of “relations” following Donna Haraway and others, this theology conveys a meaningful system of accountability (ḥiṣāb). The reckoning reaches even to future generations, who are heard speaking and even shouting in their own voices in the Qur'an's kalām Allāh. The imminent transformation of the phenomenal world, demonstrated vividly by the text's rhetoric, always indicates ethical necessity in the present, anticipating future Judgment at all times. Apocalyptic and eschatological messages of the Qur'an about the last things (al-ākhira, comprising about a fifth of the text), as I found in my own community-embedded fieldwork, actually energized subjects' reported commitment to care for Allah's creation in order perhaps to receive divine mercy (raḥma) at the inescapable moment of environmental destruction. On this point, the Qur'an provides its own prescription as intervention, what could be considered here to be an engagement with environmental justice (EJ). Islamic tradition emphatically prescribes an environmental praxis in the obligation to stand up for justice (e.g. Q. 4:135). This echoes the constructive theological stance of Nguyen's writing on righteousness, and certainly, Islamic theology is not the only intersectional appeal to EJ with reckonings both in and beyond this world. And, just as EJ has not previously been a known expression in Euro-American moral philosophy of the environment, it nevertheless has now emerged as the pivotal locus of pluralistic environmental ethics in thought and practice. Islam as a praxis of EJ in my view is the most dynamic space opening for Muslim constructive theology from the standpoint of my own research and reflection. The Qur'an is replete with calls to its listeners to look, consider, think, and see the signs (ayāt) in the created world all around in a stunning theoria physike. At the same time, the text also instructs its readers what to think, feel and do, such as to consider, be thankful, pray and make zakāt (alms), and to stand up for justice. It should go without saying that any degree of reflective praxis, whether environmental or Islamic, will make practical theologians if not ethicists of us all. However, if the constructive Muslim theology were limited to an identification with the environmental activism undertaken on the part of Muslims, then there would have been no surprises here. There would actually be little need for kalām either, in the sense of a classically dialectical or discursive engagement. In fact, we would all stop talking and just get to work. There is plenty of environmental work to do, and no scarcity of injustice to address. The surprise came for me when the academic work, too, became inexorably theological, and ironically so, by applying the very same methods of anti-theology I was trained to use as criticism. The intellectual interventions here of ontological propositions, existential calibrations, and consequential relations of justice were all set in motion by an academic contextualization of colonial and its To me this represents one in the North American academic study of Islam as it has developed over the last first in the field of the academic study of religion such as here at the AAR, and further as it out as a recognized field into other like environmental studies. The unanticipated constructions that now to me to have been inevitable in still remain up to this point in of some work like that of some fifty years however, as North American Islam follows the of the world in to the of the of the environment, it also with a to the of Muslim constructive theology, at least as it was initially for this panel at the that is, to historical and

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate, Sustainability, and Future Generations: An Ecotheology for Indonesia’s Ummah of ‘Nonidentity’

  STUDIA ISLAMIKA · 2024-12-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The idea of “future generations” is fundamental to discussions of sustainability, climate and “ecotheology.” However, it also poses a philosophical problem of “nonidentity”: i.e., future people do not really exist. Applied issues regarding intergenerational responsibility, risk and justice in climate policy and practice complicate the nonidentity problem beyond the abstract to the realm of the material. Trends in Anglophone philosophy as well as emerging national ecotheology within the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs increasingly view such empirical problems to be grounded in moral and ethical systems. The Qur’anic idea of ummah (community) renders legible what are otherwise intractable problems in climate and sustainability ethics in regard to justice for future “nonidentities,” that is, generations who are yet to face climate danger. With this come wider implications for morality regarding communities that are invisible and erased in human and more-than-human worlds in Southeast Asia and beyond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present</i>

  Journal of Near Eastern Studies · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Religious studies
  • Philosophy
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• “Muslim Environmentalisms and Environmental Ethics: Theory and Practice for Rights and Justice”

  The Muslim World · 2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Environmental ethics

  This presentation was the Biennial Willem A. Bijlefeld Lecture at Hartford International University in 2023. Muslim religious responses to environmental change highlight the importance of multispecies perspectives, rights of nature and environmental justice. These areas are also the most central to the development of current environmental engagement and advocacy. Muslim moral teachings and praxis of the past and present in just these areas are communal in focus, blend law and ethics around rights‐based notions, and they also scale horizons meaningfully in the area of justice. Additionally, relative autonomy from post‐Christian philosophical tradition allows such Muslim perspectives to re‐ground to ethics away from investments in neoliberal and colonial heritage. Islamic theory and practice addressing concerns at the forefront of environmental studies thereby shape the future of environmental ethics beyond the Anthropocene.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Zamzam Water

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geology
  PublisherDOI

• Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations

  2019-08-20 · 23 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  1. History of religions, Islam, and environmental humanities -- 2. Islam and the environment: pluralism and development -- 3. A Qur'anic environment: relating creatures and resources -- 4. Roots and branches of Islamic environmental justice, law and ethics -- 5. Islamic humanities: apprehending symbol, expression and natural science -- 6. Muslim environmentalism as religious practice: accounts of the unseen -- 7. From this world to the next -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

  PublisherDOI

• Six. Muslim Environmentalism as Religious Practice: Accounts of the Unseen

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-10-23 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Three. A Qur’anic Environment: Relating Creatures and Resources

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-10-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Two. Islam and the Environment: Pluralism and Development

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-10-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Muslim Environmentalisms

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-09-30 · 58 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Anna M. Gade explores the religious and cultural foundations of Islamic environmentalisms. She blends textual and ethnographic study to offer a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of the legal, ethical, social, and political principles underlying Muslim commitments to the earth.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Ravina

  4 shared

• D.S.R. Sarma

  Case Western Reserve University

  2 shared

• Angilee Shah

  Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center

  2 shared

• Haiyan China

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Daniel Transnational

  Michigan State University

  2 shared

• Marc Kanda

  University of California, Irvine

  2 shared

• Deborah Davis

  University of Nevada, Reno

  2 shared

• Jeffrey Ν. Wasserstrom

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Environmental Studies

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2000

• M.A., Middle Eastern Studies

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1995

• B.A., Near Eastern Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  1993

Awards & honors

• Co-Chair of the Qur'an Group of the American Academy of Reli…