KUALA LUMPUR: Worshippers in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, are set to go green with a new initiative that aims to establish 1,000 eco-mosques by 2020.
Launched this week by Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla, the initiative will help the mosques to source renewable energy, manage their water and food needs sustainably, reduce and recycle waste and provide environmental education.
The project will see the top Muslim clerical body work with the private sector, the government’s health and planning ministries, universities, and other religious groups in a bid to boost environmental awareness in communities across the country.
“Most Muslims in Indonesia listen more to religious leaders than the government,” Hayu Prabowo, head of environment and natural resources at the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“If an Islamic leader says something they will follow but if the government says something, they may not.”
Indonesia, with 250 million people, has a mixed environmental record.
The archipelago is the world’s top thermal coal exporter and palm oil producer, which has led to the clearing and development of swathes of forest land and intense international pressure to limit deforestation.
Many of Indonesia’s rural and poorest provinces suffer regular droughts due to climate change, while children’s education is often hampered by the lack of regular power supply.
Hening Parlan, coordinator for environment and disaster management at Aisyiyah, the women’s wing of Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic organization Muhammadiyah, said the idea of eco-mosques stemmed from asking how to make mosques the center for environment and education within a community.
“For many Indonesians, their understanding of the environment only happens when they see the impact of climate change (rather than through education)... if they suffer from floods or landslides for example,” Parlan said.
She said the initiative would help mosques establish better water supplies and storage facilities, offer fundraising advice and provide funding to mosques to help them become environmentally friendly.
Solar power and biogas will also be promoted over fossil fuels and imams will teach better environmental awareness.
The eco-mosque initiative is not the first time MUI has taken the lead on the environment — it has also issued edicts, or fatwas, on forest fires and sustainable mining.
There are more than 800,000 mosques in Indonesia but officials hope to create more eco-mosques after the initial 1,000 are established and also include other places of worship.
An eco-mosque roll-out of this scale is rare. In Dubai a mosque built in 2014 was the first to meet the US Green Building Council’s guidelines, while Britain, the US, Morocco and Malaysia all have mosques aiming to be more green.
“We need concrete action to help mosques and their communities overcome the oncoming water and energy crisis by building resilience,” said Prabowo.
Jakarta unveils plan to roll out 1,000 eco-mosques by 2020
Jakarta unveils plan to roll out 1,000 eco-mosques by 2020
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
