Community initiatives

Where Individual Journeys looks at named people, this page looks at what happens when the same conviction becomes a collective project: an organisation, a recurring event, a mosque policy, a declaration signed by religious leaders. Some of what follows is explicitly vegan advocacy. Some of it is about food waste or sustainability and says nothing at all about giving up meat. We try to be exact about which is which, because blurring the two does no one any favours.

The Vegan Islam Initiative

The Vegan Islam Initiative, run under the umbrella of the Middle East Vegan Society and led by Fawzia Jaffan, describes itself as drawing on hadith "from different sects and religious opinions, respecting all points of view", and organises its material around the specific questions Muslims actually ask: halal, Eid al-Adha, meat, dairy, eggs, and leather, wool and fur (veganislam.org). Rather than treating Islam as an obstacle to work around, the Initiative presents its case entirely from within Islamic sources — a deliberate contrast to purely secular vegan advocacy, which the Middle East Vegan Society has said is the point: to "showcase the harmony between veganism and the principles of Islam" (Middle East Vegan Society).

The Vegan Muslim Initiative

The Vegan Muslim Initiative, co-founded by Sammer Hakim and Elysia Ward and based between Canada and Australia, is a global organisation aimed at educating Muslim communities specifically, rather than at the broader vegan movement (Plant Based News / All-Creatures.org). Its most visible and most contested campaign has been a public call to end animal slaughter at Eid al-Adha in favour of plant-based alternatives — a position covered in detail in Individual Journeys and one that drew significant criticism from Muslims who see qurbani as a fixed rite rather than a negotiable custom (LiveKindly). We report this as a real, documented campaign and its real, documented backlash — not as a position this site endorses. Our own view, set out at Qurbani and Eid al-Adha, is that the textual case for ending the rite entirely is much weaker than the case against ordinary factory-farmed meat consumption.

Green and eco iftar movements

A distinct and much less controversial strand of organising has grown up around the environmental footprint of Ramadan itself, particularly food waste at communal iftars. In London, the Green Deen Tribe has organised ethical iftars for six years, aiming, as Hyphen reported, to encourage healthier eating and reduce the food waste generated by family, community and commercial iftars during a month meant for restraint (Hyphen, "A green iftar for an ethical Ramadan"). London's Muslims were already being covered on this theme as far back as 2018, when the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported on iftars serving ethically sourced, seasonal food to reduce environmental impact (Thomson Reuters Foundation, "London's Muslims take a green bite out of Ramadan").

Green Iftar, a global initiative founded by the Toronto-based Studio89, has since spread internationally. Its Kuala Lumpur edition, reported by Says.com in April 2024, brought together over a hundred people, including more than fifty refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, framed explicitly as a celebration of "our shared responsibility as stewards of the earth" (Says, "Over 100 Gather In KL For Green Iftar"). The article covering that event was written by Faisal Mansor — the same Faisal Mansor profiled with his wife Aina Fazlin Ibrahim Bajunid in Individual Journeys, a small but telling sign of how interconnected this space is in Malaysia.

In the United States, "Green Ramadan" initiatives have taken root in cities including Milwaukee, where the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on efforts at the Milwaukee Islamic Dawah Center to encourage worshippers to break their fast more sustainably (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "'Green Ramadan' encourages Wisconsin Muslims to break fast sustainably"). In the UK, Green Lane Masjid in Birmingham has taken direct, practical action on the same problem: hosting hundreds of worshippers for iftar, the mosque introduced smaller-portion iftar packs specifically to cut down on food thrown away each night, a response to UK-wide data suggesting a large share of Muslim households discard iftar leftovers (Hyphen, "How one mosque reduced food waste during Ramadan").

Muslim environmental organisations

The Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES), also known by its EcoIslam branding, co-organised the Islamic Climate Change Symposium held in Istanbul in August 2015, at which the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change was formally adopted (IFEES, on the Symposium). The Declaration itself, addressed to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims and to governments ahead of the Paris climate talks, is framed around humanity's role as khalifa, or steward, over creation, and calls for a rethinking of consumption and lifestyle more broadly (full text, IFEES). It is worth being precise here: the Declaration is a landmark statement on climate responsibility, co-organised with Islamic Relief Worldwide, but it is not a vegan or vegetarian manifesto, and it does not itself call for Muslims to give up meat. Separate academic work, such as Daud Abdul-Fattah Batchelor's paper "Islamic Perspectives on Reducing Meat Consumption to Promote Earth's Sustainability" in the ICR Journal, has argued for reduced meat consumption on Islamic environmental grounds, but that argument is separate from, and more specific than, the Declaration itself.

Green Islam and Hamza Yusuf

Veganism, welfare, waste and sustainability are not the same thing

This matters because it would be easy — and dishonest — to cite a green iftar or a climate declaration as evidence that "mainstream Muslim organisations are going vegan". They are not. What they show, honestly read, is that Muslim communities are increasingly willing to treat food waste, sustainability and the environmental cost of industrial agriculture as matters of religious concern, even where they stop well short of veganism. That is itself significant, and it opens doors that a purely vegan framing would not.

Starting something at your own masjid

None of the initiatives above began as a national campaign. Green Deen Tribe, Green Lane Masjid's iftar packs, and the Milwaukee Green Ramadan effort all started as a small, practical idea inside one community. If you want to try something similar:

• Start with waste, not doctrine. Proposing smaller iftar portions, compost bins, or reusable serving ware is far easier to get agreed by a mosque committee than proposing a meat-free menu, and it opens the door to the same conversation about consumption.
• Bring data, not just conviction. Green Lane Masjid's programme and the UK-wide figures cited alongside it (food waste rising from an average of 2.7kg to 4.5kg per person during Ramadan) gave organisers a concrete case that committees could act on.
• Frame it in Islamic terms your community already accepts — israf (wasteful excess) and amanah (trusteeship) are uncontroversial concepts, unlike veganism itself, and both the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change and Hamza Yusuf's remarks show that this framing has genuine scholarly backing.
• If you do want to go further and make a plant-based case specifically, look at how the Vegan Islam Initiative and Vegan Muslim Initiative built their material from hadith and fiqh outward, rather than starting from a secular vegan pitch and trying to retrofit Islamic justification.
• Expect disagreement, especially around Eid and qurbani, and read Qurbani and Eid al-Adha before that conversation comes up, so you can distinguish the strong case against everyday factory-farmed meat from the much weaker case against the rite of sacrifice itself.

For the people behind several of these organisations, see Individual Journeys. For the practical mechanics of shifting your own kitchen and shopping, Getting Started is the place to go next.