The Buriganga River once gave Dhaka its life. For centuries, the city grew on its banks โ trading boats, fishermen, pilgrims, and travellers arriving and departing on its brown waters. By the 1990s, decades of industrial effluent, plastic waste, and raw sewage had turned it into an open sewer: biologically dead along much of its length, black with pollution, and ranked among the most contaminated urban waterways on earth.
The river
Growing up alongside the Buriganga, many of Dhaka's young Muslims absorbed two things simultaneously: the Islamic teaching that the earth is a trust (amanah) placed in human hands by Allah, and the visible evidence that their generation had inherited a catastrophic failure of that trust. For Karim, a 24-year-old student at the Islamic University of Technology in Gazipur, these two facts produced a simple conclusion: 'If we believe Allah gave us this river and we let it die, we have to answer for that. So we have to fix it.'
The cleanup
In 2019, Karim and a group of friends from his university mosque began organising monthly Buriganga cleanup days. They arrived at the riverbank before Fajr, prayed together, and then spent the morning collecting plastic waste from the river's edges and the open drains that fed it. In the first session there were eleven of them. By the end of the first year, their average monthly turnout was over 200 volunteers, drawn from mosques and Islamic student associations across Dhaka.
The movement โ which named itself Panitir Sathi, Bengali for 'Friends of the Water' โ expanded its activities beyond cleanup. Working with environmental engineers from Dhaka University and Islamic scholars who provided religious guidance on the concept of khalifah (stewardship of the earth), they campaigned for factory discharge regulations, lobbied the Dhaka City Corporation to install new waste processing capacity, and began a school education programme that has now reached 40,000 students with the Islamic case for environmental protection.
Connecting ecology to faith
The religious dimension of the movement is central to its appeal. Friday khutbahs at participating mosques regularly address environmental responsibility. Panitir Sathi has compiled a booklet of Quranic verses and hadith on environmental stewardship โ including the famous hadith about planting a tree even if you know the Day of Judgement is tomorrow โ that is distributed at cleanup events and used in mosque education programmes. For many participants, the riverbank cleanup is as much a spiritual act as a civic one.
If the Day of Resurrection were to come upon one of you while he has in his hand a sapling, let him plant it.
What the data shows
Environmental monitoring by Dhaka University's Department of Environmental Science shows measurable improvements in the sections of the Buriganga adjacent to the movement's most intensive cleanup areas โ reduced floating plastic load, improved dissolved oxygen levels at the margins, and the return of some small fish species to areas where they had been absent for over a decade. The Buriganga is not yet clean. The industrial pollution upstream remains a massive challenge. But Karim and his fellow river guardians have demonstrated that faith-motivated youth mobilisation can move the needle โ and that the Islamic tradition has all the theological resources a generation of environmentalists could need.