Amanah and umma: Eco-Islam and epistemological diversity in environmental communication

This paper is a call to research, teach, and collaborate from epistemically diverse, spiritually grounded, and cosmically connected practices. It is an offering from two scholar-friends who demonstrate that amanah (divine trust) and umma (cosmological community) offer another way of knowing and being with the Earth than neoliberal paradigms. Amanah and umma , practices grounded in Eco-Islam, represent a cosmological vision of the world that resonates across indigenous and kinship-in-place epistemologies. Utilizing a reflexive inter-eco-cultural dialogue, interspersed with evidence from Omani ecocultural ecospiritual practices, we articulate amanah and umma , as not only a moral imperative, but an epistemology—an obligation to know, relate, and act in ways that preserve the sacred integrity of Earth.