Peaceful Coexistence Fethullah Gulens's Initiatives

Metropolitan L e e d s M e t r o p o Leeds l University ita n Press Un i v e r s i t y P r e s s
Peaceful Coexistence
Fethullah Glen's initiatives in the contemporary world
www.GulenConference.nl
Leeds Metropolitan University Press London,2007
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First published in Great Britain 2007 Leeds Metropolitan University Press Distributor Dialoog Academie Rochussenstraat 221-223 3021 NT Rotterdam, The Netherlands info@dialoogacademie.nl www.dialoogacademie.nl
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ISBN 978-0-9555017-7-7
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PREFACE
It is my pleasure, on behalf of the sponsors and organizers, and of the Editorial Board and Organizing Committee, to present the proceedings of the International Conference on Peaceful Coexistence: Fethullah Glens initiatives for peace in the contemporary world, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 22-23 November 2007. The need for peaceful coexistence among the people of various cultures has long been recognized. The much publicized failures in relations in recent years, which are both a cause and effect of the situation in many parts of the world should spur all right-minded people to re-double their efforts to sustain the hope for peaceful coexistence. By focussing on Glens ideas and practice, this Conference aims to explore the appeal and impact of the Glen movements worldwide initiatives to help people respond creatively to the profound social changes that are taking root everywhere. These changes make the world an increasingly integrated place, while its people juggle different, often divided identities. A particular focus will be the movement's long-established and ongoing projects dedicated to improving NorthSouth and EastWest relations, and to building trust and cooperativeness among the people of different faith traditions. Fethullah Glen is an Islamic scholar and peace activist whose ideas have inspired many people to undertake charitable works, especially in education and dialogue. After thirty years of activism in the field they now constitute one of the most effective and influential worldwide civic movements of the 21st century. They work to construct a culture of harmony and lasting peace by founding nondenominational educational institutions and so encourage intercultural dialogue and understanding. Their work makes a practical contribution to constructive, positive relations between the West and the East, the North and the South, with special focus on issues such as democracy, multiculturalism, globalization, citizenship, and intercultural dialogue in the context of secular modernity. The Conference Call for Papers attracted 170 abstract submissions. The Editorial Board read each of them and selected those most pertinent to different aspects of the Conference theme. Authors of the selected abstracts were then invited to submit full text of their work in good time for further review by the Editorial Board. Each paper was then read and discussed by at least three members of the Board. The authors of the 32 finally selected papers were duly notified of acceptance or, in some cases, for the need to re-submit with minor revisions. With the introduction we have 33 papers in this volume. 32 papers will be presented in eight panels over two days. In the first part entitled Reason and Faith in Glen's Philosophy, Professor Richard K. Khuris paper makes a fourfold movement back and forth between emphasis on Oneness as Mystery and Oneness as revealed, for which Glen uses the words Ehadiyet and Vahidiyet. It begins with the Daoist approach to Mystery, moves into the Sufi elaboration of this in conjunction with the Islamic emphasis on revelation, continues with the Kantian retreat back into Mystery in view of the modern aversion to religious authority and explicit religious discourse, and ends with Glens synthesizing thought in the light of lessons learned both from the distant past and from the increasingly apparent shortcomings of modernity. Professor Howard Wettsteins paper explores the synthesis between the extremes that the middle way represents and proposes that we use these diverse images in a practical way, to nurture religious development, to stimulate growth in our relationship to God. Mr Jerome D. Maryon puts
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that Glens potential contribution to co-existence will be assured only when it is recognized, philosophically and theologically, as an intrinsic truth of human development. Envisaging Dialogue from Theological Perspective is our second part where Dr Sevket Yavuz and Professor Davut Ayduz underline that for Muslims, who share the aim of defeating the doom-laden fear-rousing predictions of a long class of traditions, Glens insights and parameters can be reconstructed. They argue that especially commitment to dialogue and tolerance should build up our spiritual capital so that we can adhere to the perennial values and understand the wisdom codes of out respective traditions. Ms Efrat E. Avivs paper deals with similarities between the ideas of two religious leaders, Fethullah Glen and Rabbi Abraham HaKohen Kook, with emphasis on their ideas of the state and tolerance. Dr Ian Fry puts that the Glen Movement can become the launch pad for a continuing dialogue in parallel with a global programme of collaborative reassessment because of initiatives it has already taken: notably its education and conference programmes and proposals to establish joint MuslimChristian universities. Dr Terry Mathis shows that Jewish and Christian Scriptures, somewhat in keeping with the Quran, allow for interfaith relationships that are respectful and peaceful. His paper concludes with some consideration of why the adherents of Christian and Jewish traditions seldom take their Scriptures to advocate interfaith dialogue and how the work of Mr.Glen suggests a way forward to create more such understanding and dialogue. In the third part entitled Glen Between East and West, Ms Kate Kirk and Mr Gurkan Celik, by amalgamating two perspectives on dialogue and tolerance issues one rooted in Islam, the other in secular early-Enlightenment show that although different they can together point to the same goal. They suggest that both Glen and Spinozas philosophies can inform public debates, policy development and community-building strategies in western European countries, like the Netherlands, with their growing Muslim populations as the amalgamation of Glens Islamic and Spinozas secular perspectives on tolerance and dialogue have the potential to contribute to the peaceful coexistence of secular and Islamic residents. Professor Thomas Michels paper shows that Glen is one of the modern Muslims who have appropriated Rumis attitudes and integrated them into their own understanding of Islamic faith and practice. Michel writes that the correspondence of Mevlana to Glen is that of kindred spirits who, across the centuries, share an interpretation of the Quranic message as well as a commitment to communicate that message effectively to people of their respective ages. Professor Richard Penaskovic argues that Glen may be a bridge toward better understanding between Islam and the West because of his views on peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue and because of his optimistic view of the future relations between the two aforementioned blocs. Dr Klas Grinells paper argues for the need for not only interfaith dialogue, but dialogue between different strands of critiques of the border building modernity. In the following part Framing Paths to Citizenship: Glen in Redefining Integration, Mrs Nazila Isgandarov investigates the identity crisis among Muslims in the West as a part of the identity crisis in Western society generally, and asks how the views of Glen help Muslims to deal with this crisis. Mr Fatih Tedik discusses the potential of the Glen Movement to contribute to the integration process of Turkish community in the UK in the medium-term and the Muslim community as a whole in the longterm. Dr Araxs Pashayan writes that it is not Christian and Islamic civilizations that clash in Europe but post-Christian secular/liberal values and Muslim traditional values, arguing that the only alternative for sectarianism, isolation and radical relativism is interfaith and intercultural dialogue. In the fourth paper of this part, Professor Paul Weller emphasizes that although the debates have often, and unfortunately, been constructed in terms of a conflict between ideologically Islamist and ideologically secularist positions, there are other more constructive ways forward that promote
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equity for religious minorities, inclusivity on the part of the state, and participation in civic society. In exploring such alternatives, Weller brings perspectives from the teaching of Glen, into critical interaction with seven recently published theses on religion and public life in the UK and Europe that have been developed by Weller over the past quarter of a century of practical and academic engagement with issues of religious diversity and public life. Motivating Peaceful Coexistence: Understanding Glen's Pluralism is the conferences fifth part. In this part Professor Karina V. Korostelina considers dialogue about the formation of common secular identity (national or regional) as a tool for the development of peaceful co-existence between Muslim and non-Muslim groups in a secular context. Mr Erkan Toguslu analyses the circulation of both Glen and Tariq Ramadans ideas among the younger generation, their education and dialogue initiatives, and the cassettes of lectures that have opened up a space where ideas about human civic responsibility, democracy, citizenship, pluralism, dialogue and tolerance can take root. In a similar vein, Mr Heydar Shadi discusses the approaches, sources and arguments of Glen and Abdul Karim Soroush as contemporary Muslim scholars on religious pluralism and tolerance. Mr Gurkan Celik, Ms Kate Kirk and Mr Yusuf Alans paper is an exposition of Glens model of peaceful coexistence. Based on qualitative analysis of his writings, conversations, sermons and public speeches, the authors distinguish four dimensions of peace eternal peace, inner peace, interpersonal or inter-communal peace, and global peace not from a theoretical perspective, but as a practical guideline for those who seek to pursue peace. The authors argue that these four dimensions of peace are possible only when accompanied by moral values, mutual knowledge and acceptance of cultural and religious identity and they present Glens idea of education as a practical means to achieve peace, and his dialogue approach as an alternative for dispute resolution and as a tool for building a culture of peace between and within societies. In Anatolian Muslimness in Practice (1): Glen's Initiatives for Dialogue and Education which is our sixth part, we have first Jonathan Lacey who focuses on a Glen-inspired society based in Ireland, namely the Turkish Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS). Mr Lacey draws on ethnographic work and qualitative interviews that he conducted with members of TIECS. He argues that TIECS and the Glen community practice Turkish Islam which has Sufi principles at its core, promoting tolerance and reason as the keys to peaceful coexistence. Professor Victoria Levinskayas paper reflects on Turkish influence and specifically the ideas of Glen and his community on formation of identity and values in Central Asia. She argues that Glens ideas and writings will be used by Central Asian nations for further development in the region in order to create a better society based on religious tolerance and modern values, and alert to the importance of education and the pursuit of knowledge, and to the positive role of religion and spiritual life in forming a peaceful and harmonious social order. In the same part, Mr Mark Scheel suggests that the vision embodied in communitarian philosophic approach has close parallels with much of the peaceful, educational, spiritual and moral philosophy found in the work of the Glen Movement and in much of modern Turkish culture and society as a whole. Mr Emre Demirs paper examines the individual and collective de-stigmatization strategies of the Glen Movement in France and Germany. Demir concludes that the total absence of religious discourse in the movements educational establishments constitutes the most interesting and paradoxical feature of the movements strategy: by softening the visibility of their religious identification, the movement look for recognition in the public sphere in Germany and France in order to build an educational network in these countries. In the next part entitled Anatolian Muslimness in Practice (2): Glen's Ideas in Western Context, Mr Farhod Alimuhamedovs paper is about the conditions of inter-ethnic, inter-religious and inter5
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class relations in Glen schools and their operation in non-Turkish and non-Muslim settings. Alimuhamedov argues that the example of Glen schools in Russia could be useful for ethnically changing societies like the French one. Professor Gabriel Pirick underlines in his paper that Glen is one of charismatic Muslims of our time who try to open windows of true dialogue and to overcome the image of furor Islamicus commmunicated by the European media. His paper investigates the possibilities of peaceful coexistence of all humankind as seen from Central European perspective by focusing on the ideas and attitudes of the Czech Catholic priest Tom Halk and Slovak Catholic missionaries in Azerbaijan. In the next paper of the part, Professor Tom Gage compares the seminal ideas of Glen and the late James Moffett in their efforts to engage students with the domain of knowledge inclusive and beyond the cognitive. The hypothesis underlying Gages paper is that Moffetts work in improving reading and writing is congruent with and complementary to Glens mission to foster, enhance, and develop students tolerance, attitudes of inclusivity and mutual good will. Professor Ian G. Williams paper in the same part examines the contribution of Fethullah Glen in his writings and their outworking in schools, their curricula and universities associated with his name towards global peace and understanding, based upon field work in the UK, Turkey, the USA, the Caucasus, and Africa. In the last part of the conference, we look at the Muslim World which includes Muslims of the West. The parts title is Transforming the Muslim World: Glen in Re-Conceptualisation "the Muslim Citizen". Mrs Tineke Peppincks research paper elaborates the question of what the vision of Fethullah Glen is with regard to renewal and modernization, what the historical context is for this vision and what relevance this has for the Dutch context. She emphasizes the development and participation of the Turkish community as a pioneer group in Dutch society and in the development of Dutch youth into world citizens, tolerant towards other beliefs and cultures, a programme fully in line with the vision of Glen and the Glen Movements role models. Professor T. Steve Wright suggests that there is much to learn from the Glen emphasis on interfaith sharing based on spiritual awareness rather than social, political or economic gain, reminding that this very role may be seen as a threat by others who do not share that humanitarian agenda. Wrights paper argues that in the midst of their spiritual and practical teaching, the Glen community should take inspiration from Western groups who apply peaceful non-violent action for social change in the face of repression. Mr Ozcan Keles underlines in his paper entitled Promoting Human Rights Values in the Muslim World: Towards An Inclusive Civilization in Glens Thought and Practice that human rights values are a persistent theme of Fethullah Glens thought and tajdid and expressed by the Glen movement through example. As Glens views on democracy, pluralism, human rights and freedom of belief directly promote human rights values and norms, Keles argues that Glens ideas will enable and empower the periphery in Muslim societies to influence the centre ground and open the way for wider enjoyment of freedom and human rights. It is obvious that the Glens tajdid will also help Western Muslims to come to terms with the western values vis--vis , pluralism, human rights and freedom of belief. In the final paper of the conference, Professor Leonid R. Sykiainen argues that Glen opens the way for the Muslim world to benefit from modern democratic models of governance. The quality and relevance of the papers read at Conference owes much to the conscientious and patient scrutiny of the Editorial Board, and their collective effort to maintain high standards of information and argument. I would like to express thanks and appreciation to all the Editors on behalf of the Conference sponsors and organizers, especially the Organizing Committee. I would like to extend thanks to all those, not named here, who have helped to make this Conference happen. My personal thanks and appreciation go to each member of the Organizing Committee
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Tercan Basturk, Gurkan Celik, Yusuf Alan, Kate Kirk, Sedat Metinulu, Onder Cetin, Serafettin Pektas, Serdal Tunc, Iris Creemers, Battal Karakaya, Isa zler, Murat Celik, Saniye Dilara and Erkan Toguslu the principal driving force behind this Conference. I am very grateful also to our sponsors for helping and enabling us to put together what will surely prove to be a most worthwhile and stimulating academic enterprise. Please note that papers have not been copy-edited but are provided in advance circulation of the conference as draft copies to facilitate meaningful discussion during the conference. Dr Ihsan Yilmaz Conference Convenor
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EDITORS
DR IHSAN YILMAZ BA in politics and international relations from Bogazici University, Istanbul. PhD in law in 1999 from SOAS, University of London. 19992001: Research Fellow at the University of Oxford where he undertook two separate research projects: the Turkish diaspora in London, and the faith-based movement of Fethullah Glen, its neo-ijtihad and renewal of Islam. Since 2001 he has been teaching comparative law, legal sociology, Islamic law and Turkish politics at the University of London. Research interests: Turkish diaspora, Turkish politics, Islamic movements, Muslim minorities, Muslim legal pluralism, neo-ijtihad and the Glen movement. He has published his work in scholarly journals such as British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Middle East Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Muslim World, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal for Islamic Studies and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. He recently convened another conference on the Glen Movement: Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Glen Movement, 25-27 October 2007, House of Lords, SOAS and LSE, London, UK.
MR JEAN MICHEL CROS Researcher and lecturer at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and an advisor to the Strasbourg Urban Community. Main interests: Islam in France, Muslim minorities and the role of Islam in Western culture. His publications include contributions in the collective works: J. Picano (ed.), LIslam (Marseille: Ellipses, Coll. Culture et Histoire, 1996) and F. Fregosi (ed.) Les Conditions dexercice du culte musulman en France: analyse compar partir dimplantations locales de lieux de culte et de carrs musulmans (Agathe Petit, 2004). He is a regular contributor at www.oumma.com, an electronic publication very popular amongst the French Muslim community.
PROFESSOR KHALED ABOU EL FADL Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches Islamic Law, Immigration, Human Rights, International and National Security Law. Dr Abou El Fadl, author of ten books and over fifty articles on Islamic law and Islam, is an accomplished Islamic jurist and scholar. He previously taught Islamic law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Yale Law School and Princeton University. He holds degrees from Yale University (BA), University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D.) and Princeton University (MA, PhD).
PROFESSOR ERIC GEOFFROY Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University Marc Bloch in Strasbourg and an eminent French expert on Islam and Sufism. He is the author of several books and many articles, and has participated in numerous academic and interfaith conferences in Europe and the Middle East. Among his best known publications are: Jihad et contemplation: vie et enseignement dun soufi au temps des croisades (Paris, 1997), and Initiation au soufisme (Paris, 2003).
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PROFESSOR ANDREAS KINNEGING Professor in Philosophy of Law at the University of Leiden, and President of the Board of the Edmund Burke Stichting, the well-known Dutch conservative group. Raised as a Catholic, he graduated in political science from the Catholic University of Nijmegen, and then worked for a time at the Dutch Ministry of Finance. He is the editor of the new Nicolai Hartmanns Ethics (3 vols., 20012004), the author of a collection of essays Geography of Good and Evil (published in Dutch, 2005), and of the book (also in Dutch, 2006) Education in Crisis.
REVD. DR JOHNSTON MCMASTER Lecturer and Programme Coordinator of Education in the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, and Chair of the Northern Ireland Youth Service Curriculum and Policy Development at the Joined in Equity, Diversity and Interdependence (JEDI). (Doctorate of Ministry at GarrettEvangelical Seminary in North Western University, Illinois.) Among his areas of expertise and research are: broadcasting; public theology; socio-political Biblical hermeneutics; Celtic spirituality and contemporary social ethics; communities of reconciliation; overcoming violence: a faith perspective; the shape of faith in a post-Christendom era.
PROFESSOR THOMAS MICHEL, SJ Currently Secretary for Inter-religious Dialogue for the Society of Jesus and Ecumenical Secretary for the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences. Professor Michel was director of the Islamic Office of the Vaticans Council for Inter-religious Dialogue for 13 years. He belongs to the Indonesian Province of the Jesuits. He regularly conducts seminars on ChristianMuslim relations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. He has written much on the thought of Said Nursi and M. Fethullah Glen.
PROFESSOR PAOLO NASO Professor in Political Science at La Sapienza University (Rome); there, and at the Gregorian Pontifical University Cultures and Religions Institute, he teaches a graduate course in Religious Historical Science. He is director of the TV show Protestantesimo (RAI-2) and of the magazine Confronti.
PROFESSOR TON NOTTEN Professor (from 2002) at Rotterdam University in urban education and youth policy issues and also part-time professor (from 1998) in andragology (specially adult education and intercultural issues and urban studies) at Vrije University Brussels. He studied theology and philosophy, and later social sciences, in particular andragology, at the University of Amsterdam (PhD 1988, on Rationality and the Beautiful Ambition). He has always combined scientific work and professional education. At the University of Amsterdam, he was an assistant and associate professor in the theory and history of adult education, and taught social education at the University of Professional Education in Amsterdam. He is the author (writing in Dutch, English and other languages) of over 250 learned articles in journals and books.
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PROFESSOR KLAUS OTTE A world authority on religion and culture, Professor Otte has published extensively in his field. Hewas awarded a special medal of honour by the President of Germany in Berlin in 1999 for his distinguished services to the church and society. Throughout his career he has combined the duties of Professor in Systematic Theology with pastoral work as a minister in local churches. As well as other places, he served as minister in Mehren, Germany. He was Professor in Systematic Theology in Beirut; in Kyoto and Osaka, where he taught Culture and Theology; and then distinguished professor at universities in Basel, Mainz and Frankfurt, specializing in the Ontology of Universal Religion. He has always striven to bring his cultural and theological knowledge and expertise to bear on the work of the church.
PROFESSOR EMILIO PLATTI Professor in Islamic Studies at the Catholic University Leuven (KUL) and the Catholic University Louvain (UCL). As a Dominican father, he is also a member of Institut Dominicain dtudes Orientales du Caire (IDEO), and Institut Catholique de Paris. His research interests include: Islam and politics, Islamic theology and inter-religious dialogue. He is the author of Islam: tranger?, LIslam parmi nous, LIslam: ennemi naturel?, Yahya Ibn Adi: Theologien chrtien et philosophe arabe, Wat Gelooft Enn Goede Moslim. He has also contributed many articles to learned journals and books in French, Dutch and English.
PROFESSOR REV. SIMON ROBINSON Professor of Applied and Professional Ethics, Leeds Metropolitan University, Associate Director, Ethics Centre of Excellence, and Visiting Fellow in Theology, University of Leeds. Educated at Oxford and Edinburgh universities, Professor Robinson entered psychiatric social work before ordination in the Church of England in 1978. He served in university chaplaincy at Heriot-Watt and Leeds universities, developing research in areas of applied ethics and practical theology. Ongoing research interests: religious ethics and care; interfaith pastoral care; professional ethics; ethics in higher education; spirituality and professional practice; corporate social responsibility; and ethics in global perspective. Among his publications: Moral Meaning and Pastoral Counselling; (ed. with Chris Megone) Case Histories in Business Ethics; Living Wills; (with Kevin Kendrick and Alan Brown) Spirituality and Healthcare; Ministry Amongst Students; (ed. with Clement Katulushi) Values in Higher Education; (with Ross Dixon, Chris Preece and Kris Moodley) Engineering, Business and Professional Ethics.
PROFESOR EMERITUS KAREL STEENBRINK Studied Christian and Islamic theology at the Radboud University of Nijmegen and the Darussalam College of Gontor, Indonesia; his doctoral dissertation (1974) was on Islamic education in Indonesia. 19811988: Lecturer at the State Academy of Islamic Studies in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. He taught orientalism in the Western tradition in Islamic studies, at the special request of Professor Mukti Ali, Minister of Religion in Indonesia and a scholar well-known for inter-religious engagement. 1992 1993: Visiting Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University (Montreal). 19892007:
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at Utrecht University as Professor of Intercultural Theology and as a researcher for the Centre for Inter-religious and Intercultural Studies (IIMO). He has published widely on Islam and Christianity in Indonesia and more recently also on Quran interpretation. Among his works are: Catholics in Indonesia 18081942 (Leiden: KITLV, 2 vols, 20037); a series on Jewish and Christian prophets in the Islamic tradition: Adam Redivivus: Muslim elaborations of the Adam saga with special reference to the Indonesian literary traditions (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 1998); and Jezusverzen in de Koran (2006).
PROFESSOR DAVID THOMAS Professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham. His main interests: Islamic theology and philosophy; the history and theology of ChristianMuslim relations; Islam and culture; and textual studies in Arabic. Among recent publications: Dialogue with other Faiths as an Aspect of Islamic Theology in T. L. Hettema and A. van der Kooij (eds.), Religious Polemics in Context (Assen, The Netherlands, 2004); Muslim-Christian Polemic during the Crusades: The Letter from the People of Cyprus and Ibn Abi Talibs Response; (ed. with R. Ebied) The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, 2 (Leiden, 2005); Receiving and Acquiring Wisdom in Islam, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33 (2006). He is currently working on Christian Doctrine in Islamic Theology. He is the editor for entries on Islam in The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and its Reception; general editor of ChristianMuslim Relations: a Bibliographical History, 1; and editor of the journal, Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations.
DR PIM VALKENBERG Christian theologian working in the department of Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen; also teaching as affiliate professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD. Dr Valkenburgs research focuses on ChristianMuslim dialogue in the context of Abrahamic partnership, both in the present and in the past. His publications include: Words of the Living God (Leuven 2000), a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas; The Three Rings (Leuven, 2005) on Abrahamic dialogue in the Middle Ages; Sharing Lights on the Way to God (Amsterdam/New York, 2006) on MuslimChristian dialogue and theology, including a reading of texts by al-Ghazali, Said Nursi and Fethullah Glen from the perspective of a comparative theology.
PROFESSOR PAUL WELLER Professor of Inter-religious Relations at the University of Derby and Head of Research and Commercial Development in its Faculty of Education, Health and Sciences; Visiting Fellow in the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regents Park College, University of Oxford; and Vice Chair of the Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby. Current interests: issues in the relationships between religion, state and society. Recent publications: Time for Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005) and Fethullah Glen, Religions, Globalization and Dialogue, in R. Hunt and Y. Aslandoan (eds.), Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World: Contributions of the Glen Movement (Somerset, NJ: The Light Inc. and IID
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Press, 2006). He is editor of Religions in the UK: Directory, 20072010 (Derby: University of Derby and Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby, 2007).
PROFESSOR EMERITUS ANTON WESSELS Professor Emeritus in History of Religion, in particular Islam, at the Free University Amsterdam. He studied theology and comparative Religion at the Free University Amsterdam, University of Utrecht and Leiden, and Cairo University. His doctoral thesis was on The Image of the Prophet Muhammad in Modern Arabic Literature. He was associate professor of Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. He is the author of many articles and books in Dutch, English, Italian and Indonesian. Among his English publications: A Modern Arabic Biography of Muhammad (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972); Images of Jesus. How Jesus is Perceived and Portrayed in non-European Culture (London: SCM Press/ Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 1990); Understanding the Quran (London: SCM Press, 2000; Europe. Had it Ever been Really Christian?; Arab and Christian? Christians in the Middle East (Kampen: Pharos Press, 1995); Islam in Stories (Leuven: Peeters, 2002); Muslims and the West. Can They Be Integrated? (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE EDITORS Dr Ihsan Yilmaz Mr Jean Michel Cros Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl Professor Eric Geoffroy Professor Andreas Kinneging Revd. Dr Johnston McMaster Professor Thomas Michel, SJ Professor Paolo Naso Professor Ton Notten Professor Klaus Otte Professor Emilio Platti Professor Rev. Simon Robinson Profesor Emeritus Karel Steenbrink Professor David Thomas Dr Pim Valkenberg Professor Paul Weller Professor Emeritus Anton Wessels 3 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9 9 9 10 10 10 10 11 11 11 12
Introduction
SOCIAL INNOVATION FOR PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: INTERCULTURAL ACTIVISM FROM RUMI TO GLEN IHSAN YILMAZ 1. Introduction 2. Rumi and Glens Main Message and Acceptance of the Other 3. Socio-Cultural and Political Activism for Peaceful Coexistence 4. Social Innovation for Peaceful Coexistence and Its Discontents 5. Concluding Remarks: Renewed Peaceful Coexistence Message of Rumi Today and Glens Initiatives
25 25 26 30 35 40
Part 1: Reason and Faith in Glen's Philosophy

INTERSECTIONS OF WAYS TOWARDS TOLERANCE AND COEXISTENCE: FROM DAOISM AND SUFISM TO KANT AND GLEN RICHARD K. KHURI 45 RATIONAL RELIGION: GLENS MIDDLE WAY HOWARD WETTSTEIN
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BALANCING THE CANDLE ON THE RIGHT PATH JEROME D. MARYON Abstract 1. Introduction 2. My chcemy Boga! 3. Deus suam gloriam non quaerit propter se, sed propter nos. 4. Only a concept embracing the whole in its wholeness can be called truly scientific. 5. Tout ce qui monte, converge.
67 67 67 68 71 81 86
Part 2: Envisaging Dialogue from Theological Perspective

TURNING FROM DOOM-LADEN SOOTHSAYINGS TO MUTUAL COMMUNICATION AND WISDOM (TAÀRUF) SEVKET YAVUZ AND DAVUT AYDUZ Abstract 1. Prologue & Methodological Postulates 2. Epistemic and Historical Prolegomena: From Clash and Chaos To Peace and Cosmos 2.1. From Veni, Vidi, Vici to Mutuality and Wisdomization 2.2. From Theoria To Praxes or Textual Precepts and Historical Manifestations 2.3. From Chaos and Doomsday Soothsayings to Wisdomization and Cooperation (Ta ruf) in the Global Village 3. Conclusions and suggestions THE LIGHT OF TOLERANCE BETWEEN RABBI ABRAHAM KOOK AND HOJA EFENDI FETHULLAH GLEN EFRAT E. AVIV Abstract 1. Introducation 2. A brief summary of their lives 2.1. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (1865-1935) 2.2. Fethullah Glen (b.1938) 3. Analogies between Rabbi Kook and Fethullah Hoca 3.1. Their Personalities 3.2. Nationalism 3.3. Education and Educational Synthesis 3.4. Concern for Their Students 3.5. Religion and Science - Religion and Philosophy 3.6. Tolerance and the Attitude towards Atheists 3.7. The Element of "Light" as Expressed in Poetry 4. Conclusion
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107 107 108 108 108 110 113 113 114 114 116 117 118 119 120
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A WIDER ROLE FOR THE GLEN MOVEMENT CONSISTENT WITH THE PLACE OF THE QURAN AND ISLAM IN THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: A FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGICAL REASSESSMENT IAN FRY 121 Abstract 1. Introduction: An overview 2. History and Systematic Religion 3. The Concept of Divine Covenant: Stage 1 Evolution of an Idea 4. The Concept of Divine Covenant: Stage 1 Evolution of an Idea 5. The reality of Shared Covenant: a requirement for dialogue and reassessment 6. The Way Ahead, and a Wider Role for the Glen Movement? 121 122 127 129 135 140 143
SACRED SCRIPTURES AND INTERFAITH DIALOGUE TERRY MATHIS
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Part 3: Glen between East and West
OPENING THE ROAD TO DIALOGUE: AN AMALGAMATION OF GLENS AND SPINOZAS IDEAS ON TOLERANCE AND DIALOGUE APPLIED TO THE SITUATION OF MUSLIMS IN THE NETHERLANDS KATE KIRK AND GURKAN CELIK 167 Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Becoming Dutch: Muslim Citizens and Dutch Integration Policies 3. Anti-Muslimism in the Netherlands 4. Dialogue and Tolerance: Spinoza and Glen 5. Conclusions and Discussion FETHULLAH GLEN: FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF RUMI 169 170 171 174 178 181
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Abstract
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1. The need for a modern spirituality 2. 1. Rumi as the model of tolerance and dialogue 2.2. Rumi as one of the great saints produced by Islam. 2.3. Rumi as the saint who longed to be united to God. 2.4. Rumi as teacher of virtue. M. F. GLEN: A BRIDGE BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE WEST RICHARD PENASKOVIC Abstract 1. Introduction 2.1. Thesis 1: We Live In a Global World 15
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2.2. Thesis 2: Islam and the West Have Become Estranged From One Another 2.3. Thesis 3: Dialogue is the Key 2.4. Thesis 4: Love Conquers All 2.5. Thesis 5: The Future Looks Hopeful 3. Concluding Observations BEYOND EAST AND WEST: FETHULLAH GLEN AND BORDER THINKING KLAS GRINELL Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Modernity as Border Building 3. Glen as a Border Transgressor 4. Turkey as a Borderland 5. Glen on the Western Side of the Border 6. Glens Theory of Science 7. Border Gnoseology 8. Border Dialogue 9. Civilisations? 10. Something Bordering to a Conclusion
195 197 198 199 200
203 203 203 204 205 205 206 207 208 210 212 213
Part 4: Framing Paths to Citizenship: Glen in Redefining Integration
IDENTITY AS A MAJOR FACTOR IN INTEGRATION TO THE WESTERN SOCIETY NAZILA ISGANDAROV Abstract 1. Introduction: Importance of the Problem 2. Literature Review 3. Research Questions and Hypotheses 4. Identity Crisis in the West 5. Identity Crisis among Muslims in the West 6. Glens Approach to Eliminate the Identity Crisis among Muslims 7. Conclusion MOTIVATING MINORITY INTEGRATION IN WESTERN CONTEXT: THE GLEN MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM FATIH TEDIK Abstract 1. Introduction: Theoretical Incentives of the Glen Movement for Integration 2. Turks in the United Kingdom 3. Glen Movements Initiatives in Britain 4. Concluding Remarks: Glen Movement in Practice 16
215 217 217 219 221 221 223 225 227
229 229 229 231 234 236
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INTEGRATION OF MUSLIMS IN EUROPE AND GLEN MOVEMENT ARAXS PASHAYAN Abstract 1. Introduction 2. The Glen Movement: Theory and Practice 3. Turkish Community in Germany and Islamic Identity 4. Turkish integration in Germany and Glen Movement 5. Conclusion DIALOGICAL AND TRANSFORMATIVE RESOURCES: PERSPECTIVES FROM FETHULLAH GLEN ON RELIGION AND PUBLIC LIFE PAUL WELLER Abstract 1. The European and Netherlands Context 2. European Context for Religion(s), State and Society 3. Old Models and Their Alternatives 4. Theses on Religion(s), State and Society: A Conversation with Glen 5. The Importance of Not Marginalizing Religions from Public Life 6. The Need to Recognize the Specificity of Religions 7. The Imperative for Religious Engagement with the Wider Community 8. The Need for A Reality Check 9. The Need to Recognize the Transnational Dimensions of Religions 10. The Importance of Religious Inclusivity 11. The Imperative of Inter-Religious Dialogue 12. Conclusion
239 239 239 240 243 244 246
247 247 248 249 251 252 252 254 255 257 258 260 261 262
Part 5: Motivating Peaceful Coexistence: Understanding Glen's Pluralism
DIALOGUE AS A SOURCE FOR PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE BETWEEN MUSLIM AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS IN A SECULAR STATE KARINA V. KOROSTELINA Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Glens Approach to Dialogue 3. Negotiating Identities 4. Identity Dialogue 5. Conclusion
267 269 269 270 271 275 277
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REFLECTIONS ON EUROPEAN MULTICULTURALISM, ISLAM AND PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: TARIQ RAMADAN AND FETHULLAH GLEN ERKAN TOGUSLU Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Making of Muslim Youth and the New Islamic Intellectuals: Speaking for Western Muslims 3. Ijtihad and Islamic Renaissance 4. European Islam and Citizenship 5. Civility That Matters 6. A Possible Peaceful Coexistence INTERFAITH DIALOGUE AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC THOUGHT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FETHULLAH GLEN AND ABDUL KARIM SOROUSH HEYDAR SHADI Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Fethullah Glens Views on Religious Pluralism and Tolerance 2.1. Definition and Background 2.2. Arguments 3. Dr Soroushs Views on Religious Pluralism and Tolerance 3.1. Definition and Background 3.2. Arguments 4. Comparison and Conclusion GLENS PARADIGM ON PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: THEORETICAL INSIGHTS AND SOME PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVES GURKAN CELIK, KATE KIRK AND YUSUF ALAN Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Moderate Islam and Peaceful West 3. The Middle Way and the Nature of Human Being 4. Four Dimensions of Peace from Glen Perspective 4.1. Eternal Peace 4.2. Inner Peace 4.3. Interpersonal and Intercommunal Peace 4.4. Universal Peace 5. Peaceful Coexistence through Universal Education 6. Dispute Resolution through Dialogical Approach 7. Concluding Remarks
279 279 279 280 282 285 286 287
289 289 289 290 290 291 292 292 293 294
297 297 297 300 302 303 303 304 305 307 308 309 311
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Part 6: Anatolian Muslimness in Practice: Glen's Initiatives for Dialogue and Education
INVESTIGATING THE CONTRIBUTION OF FETHULLAH GLEN THROUGH THE ACTIVITIES OF A GLEN-INSPIRED RELIGIO-CULTURAL SOCIETY BASED IN IRELAND JONATHAN LACEY Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Islam in Ireland 3. Turkish Islam 4. Fethullah Glen and Turkish Islam 5. The Glen Movement and Turkish Islam in Germany: Prospects for Integration? 6. TIECS Attitudes to Integration 7. TIECS, Dialogue and Turkish Islam 8. Conclusion RESEMBLANCE OF FETHULLAH GLEN'S IDEAS AND CURRENT POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN UZBEKISTAN VICTORIA LEVINSKAYA Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Islam in Central Asia 3. Islam after the Independence. (1990s). Turkish-Islam 4. Educational Vision of Fethullah Glen and Establishment of the Network of his Schools in Central Asia 5. Worsening of the Relationships between Turkey and Uzbekistan and Its Negative Effect on Dissemination of Glens Ideas 6. Fethullah Glens Community and Development of Civil Society in Central Asia 7. Concluding Remarks A COMMUNITARIAN IMPERATIVE: FETHULLAH GLENS MODERN TURKEY AS A MODEL MARK SCHEEL Abstract 1. Introductory Overview 2. A Century of Turmoil 3. The Third Way 4. The Turkish Connection 5. A Communitarian Cousin 6. A Communitarian Fertile Ground 7. The Challenge of Community in America 8. A Blueprint for Action 9. Concluding Summary 19
313 315 315 317 319 320 321 323 326 328
331 331 331 332 334 336 338 340 342
345 345 345 346 347 347 348 349 350 352 353
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NEW RELIGIOUS SOCIABILITIES IN EURO-ISLAM: THE ORGANIZATIONAL LOGICS AND RECOGNITION POLITICS OF GLEN MOVEMENT IN FRANCE AND GERMANY EMRE DEMIR Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Islamic Movements as Socialization Agents in Europe 3. The Glen Movement in Germany and France 3.1. The Settlement Process of Glen Movement in Europe 3.2. Organisational Structure of the Glen Movement in Europe 3.3. Stigma Correction Strategies of the Glen Movement 4. Concluding Remarks
355 355 355 356 358 358 359 361 369
Part 7: Anatolian Muslimness in Practice: Glen's Ideas in Western Context
PEACEFUL MUSLIMNON-MUSLIM CO-EXISTENCE IN A SECULAR CONTEXT FARHOD ALIMUHAMEDOV Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Glen and His Schools 3. The Missions of Missionary Schools 4. Case study: Schools in contemporary Russia 5. Academic results 6. Human Relationship 7. Conclusion: The Movement in Europe SEARCHING FOR A NEW UNITY OF THOUGHT (FIKIR BIRLII) AMONG PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS: VOICES FROM CENTRAL EUROPE GABRIEL PIRICK Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Delusive History? 3. Tom Halk and the Idea of a Link between the Secular West and Islam 4. Abrahamic Religions: Coexistence, Tolerance and Dialogue 5. The Empowerment of School Manuals 6. The Salesians of Don Bosco in Azerbaijan 7. Towards Unity of Basic Principles
371 373 373 374 375 377 378 379 380
383 383 384 384 386 388 391 392 394
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HARMONIC LEARNING: THE CONGRUENT EDUCATION MODELS OF FETHULLAH GLEN AND JAMES MOFFETT TOM GAGE
397
THE VISION OF EDUCATION WITHIN PLURALISTIC SOCIETIES IN THE THOUGHT OF FETHULLAH GLEN: THE CONTRIBUTION OF NON-DENOMINATIONAL EDUCATION TOWARDS INTER-RELIGIOUS AND COMMUNAL UNDERSTANDING, PEACE AND IDENTITY. A STUDY OF CONTRASTS IN THE UK, TURKEY AND THE USA IAN G. WILLIAMS 407 Abstract 1. Introduction 2. The Context: Europe 3. A Counter Movement 4. And the wind is blowing 5. Conclusion 407 407 408 411 412 414
Part 8: Transforming the Muslim World: Glen in Re-Conceptualisation "the Muslim Citizen
FROM NEW MAN TO WORLD CITIZEN: THE REPLICATION OF FETHULLAH GLENS RENEWAL VISION IN THE DUTCH CONTEXT TINEKE PEPPINCK Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Turkey as Indivisible Unity 3. Risale-i Nur 4. Glen-Inspired-Schools 5. A Threat to Democracy? 6. Imitation of Western modernity 7. The New Man 8. Glens Vision in the Dutch Context 9. Tolerance and Dialogue 10. Being a Good Example 11. Concluding Remarks
417 419 420 420 421 422 422 424 425 426 427 428 429
NOW MORE THAN EVER: MAKING NON-VIOLENT CHANGE IN A GLOBALISED WORLD T. STEVE WRIGHT Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Peace by Peace? 3. Cultures of Peace 21
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4. Evolution of Tire Peace ConceptEspecially in Western Peace Research: Six Stages 5. Sharps Tactics & Politics of Non-violence 6. Brian Martin & The Dynamics of Backfire 7. Glens Non-Violent Spiritual Paths & Practices 8. Conclusions PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS VALUES IN THE MUSLIM WORLD: TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE CIVILIZATION IN GLENS THOUGHT AND PRACTICE OZCAN KELES Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Glens Influence and Tajdid 2.1. The Glen Trio-Formula: Devout-Intellectual-Alim 2.2. Glen movement: Collective Tajdid 2.3. Glen Movements Influence in Turkey 3. Human Rights Values in Glens Thought 3.1. Human Rights 3.2. Incremental (tedriji) Ijtihad in the Making: Apostasy in Islam 4. Glens Influence in the Muslim World 4.1. Glen on the Muslim World 4.2. Glens Influence in Muslim World 4.3. Movements Relief Charity: Phase of Adoloscence 5. Conclusion THE RELEVANCE OF FETHULLAH GLENS THOUGHTS FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD LEONID R. SYKIAINEN Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Today Islam is not understood properly 3. Regarding Islam as A Political Force and An Instrument for Terrorism 4. Democracy and Islam: Are They Opponents or Allies? 5. Consultation and Human Rights as Key Directions of Political Reforms 6. Diversity and Dialogue as Indispensable Prerequisites for Political Reforms and Domination of Democracy 7. Conclusion NECESSITY AND IMPORTANCE OF INTERCULTURAL-INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND INITIATIVES OF FETHULLAH GLEN NYAZ KTEM 1. Introduction 2. Intellectually, Who is Fetullah Glen? 3. Journalists and Writers Foundation 22
439 441 442 443 445
447 447 447 448 449 451 453 456 456 459 461 462 465 468 469
471 471 471 472 473 475 477 479 480
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3. 1. Abant Platform 3. 2. Intercultural Dialogue Platform 4. Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY
485 486 488 489
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Introduction
SOCIAL INNOVATION FOR PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: INTERCULTURAL ACTIVISM FROM RUMI TO GLEN
IHSAN YILMAZ 1
1. Introduction Even though some Muslims all over the world have been radicalised as a result of being challenged and influenced by the juggernauts of modernity, nationalism, imperialism and neo-colonialism in addition to being harshly subject to ignorance, poverty and dissension, overwhelming majority of Muslims still believe that respect for diversity as exemplified in the discourses and practices of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi and many others is a religious obligation. When we came to the modern times, such an understanding and tradition are being represented in the Turkish context by Sufis and scholars like Mevlana Khalid-i Badadi, Bedizzaman Said Nursi, Muhammed Lutfi and recently Fethullah Glen. Glen who has achieved his message to be heard not only nationally but also globally has frequently been compared with Rumi, the most resonant voice of Islamic mysticism in the West. It will not be wrong to argue that Glen is todays most prominent representative of apolitical Turkish Islam or Anatolian Muslimness based on socially activist but tolerant Sufism (tasawwuf) once represented by activist scholars like Rumi. These Muslim scholars are social innovators to use the modern terminology- who endeavour to address the pressing spiritual, social and cultural needs of the masses in the tune with their respective Zeitgeists without radically departing from the tradition and authentic religious sources thereby by continuing to credibly influence the masses. In this introduction, I opted to compare Glens social-cultural activism and his understanding of peaceful coexistence to that of Rumi because of exemplary role of both in establishing dialogue and building peace between Muslims and non-Muslims. As known, the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) marks 2007 as 'Mawlana Year'. This celebration is to honour the 800th anniversary of the birth of the great spiritual leader of Islam, Mawlana. Although Rumi lived about 800 years before Glen, they both lived in cosmopolitan environments and thus both made intercultural dialogue their main tool of social innovation and conflict resolution for social inclusion, coherence and peaceful coexistence. They inspired the lives and practices of their students, sympathisers, followers, scholars, and the larger community to contribute to solutions that better the world. Put differently, they both served to re-read and renew (tajdid) religion, faith and society. They
1 BA in politics and international relations from Bogazici University, Istanbul. PhD in law in 1999 from SOAS, University of London. 19992001: Research Fellow at the University of Oxford where he undertook two separate research projects: the Turkish diaspora in London, and the faith-based movement of Fethullah Glen, its neo-ijtihad and renewal of Islam. Since 2001 he has been teaching comparative law, legal sociology, Islamic law and Turkish politics at the University of London. Research interests: Turkish diaspora, Turkish politics, Islamic movements, Muslim minorities, Muslim legal pluralism, neoijtihad and the Glen movement. He has published his work in scholarly journals such as British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Middle East Journal, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Muslim World, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal for Islamic Studies and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. He recently convened another conference on the Glen Movement: Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Glen Movement, 25-27 October 2007, House of Lords, SOAS and LSE, London, UK.
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also endeavoured to strike the delicate balance between serving the community, solving pressing real problems, challenging threats to coherence of society and staying away from politics & instrumentalist use of religion in daily politics. I will briefly endeavour to show in this introduction that both Rumi and Glen have the same main message vis--vis acceptance of the other and peaceful coexistence and that they both employed similar instruments such as socio-cultural activism, education and intercultural dialogue. As noted by several academics, both Rumi and Glen, if unintentionally, maximised their social impact with their altruism, devotion, piety, dedication and knowledge helping them to inspire similar initiatives in their surrounding communities. It goes without saying that both are of the same tradition despite the differences in contexts, shapes, formats, appearances and minute tempo-spatial details. For instance, as I will try to show, Glen is socially very active -in contrast to the stereotypical Sufi or mutasawwif images- to have his discourse implemented and practiced within the wider society, just like Rumi. Likewise, both men have been accused of seeking political power although when analysed in detail it will be seen that their discourses and practices have little to do with daily politics. I will compare and contrast concisely main messages of the two men first, then will proceed to analyse their socio-cultural and political activism for peaceful coexistence. Then, before concluding by giving an account of todays renewed peaceful coexistence message of Rumi and focusing on Glens initiatives in line with this renewed message, I will briefly look at the two mens almost similar social innovations for peaceful coexistence and their discontents.
2. Rumi and Glens Main Message and Acceptance of the Other Social and political conjuncture was very turbulent when Rumi emerged. It was a period in which so many conflicts and disorders were being experienced one after the other. There was first a great deal of dissidence and anarchy as a result of the marginal Babai movement. People were also fed up with the continuous assaults, pillage and invasions of the Mongols and Crusaders. As to the administration, the Seljuks state was significantly weakened and getting deteriorated, fastened by the inability to cope with internal conflicts, divisions and mismanagements. The other powerful state, the Kharzamshahs, which once fought against the Genghis Khans armies and stopped them and defended the Muslims, then turned against and were fighting the Anatolian Seljuks and organizing territorial incursions and invasions. Benefiting from the chaotic atmosphere and lack of authority in the region neighbouring communities were exploiting the circumstances for their own material and political interests. During this period Rumi emerged as a powerful activist character and scholar. Not only he talked about but also actively produced an atmosphere of dialogue and tolerance through his lyrics, poetry and of course, followers. Through tolerance and compassion, he was conveying his message, which clarifies the relation of man to his/her Creator, and ones relation to the others and fellow beings. Humanity, love, compassion, tolerance, respect for, openness to and acceptance of the other in their otherness and dialogue are fundamentals of Rumis thought and practice. The world was a global village even in Rumis time and he was fully aware of this reality:
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Still, this whole world is but a house, no more. Whether we go from this room to that room or from this corner to that corner, are we still not in the same house? 2 Empathy which is essential for peaceful coexistence in the global village is another essential cornerstone of his practice as beautifully emphasized in one of his discourses: A westerner lives in the West. An oriental comes to visit. The westerner is a stranger to the oriental, but who is the real stranger? Is not the oriental a stranger to the entire western world?3 He also drew his listeners attention to the mother of all evils ignorance- and underlined that education and dialogue are only remedies. He communicated something through his writing that has attracted spiritual seekers from almost every religion in the world, for hundreds of years. Rumis discourse is composed of tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness, charity and awareness through love, looking with the same eye on Muslims, Jews, Christians and others alike: Come, come, whoever you are... Come and come yet again... Come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire... Ours is not a caravan of despair, This is the date of hope, Come, come yet again, come. Even in his day, Rumi was sought out by many, from famous scholars to ordinary villagers. When he passed away in 1273, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Turks and Romans honoured him at his funeral, and men of five faiths followed his bier. The flood of people in the funeral was the sign of that he was understood well even in his lifetime and that he was a sound foundation for the communities. Rumis discourse and practice teach us how to reach inner peace and happiness so we can finally stop the continual stream of hostility and hatred and achieve true global peace and harmony.4 Below quote shows how Rumis main message is continued by Fethullah Glen: if we exclude certain periods and individuals, the Turks interpretation of what Islam allows to be interpreted is correct and positive. If we can spread globally the Islamic understanding of such heroes of love as Niyazi-i Misri, Yunus Emre, and Rumi, if we can extend their messages of love, dialogue, and tolerance to those thirsty for this message, everyone will run toward the embrace of love, peace, and tolerance that we represent.5 Those who perceive religion as being contradictory to science and reason are the afflicted; they are unaware of the spirit of both religion and reason. Moreover, it is absolutely fraudulent to hold religion responsible for clashes between different sections of society. Conflicts between peoples and groups of people arise from ignorance, from ambition for personal advantage and profit, or from the vested interests of particular groups, parties, or classes. Religion neither approves nor condones such
2 3 4 5
Rumi, Discourses of Rumi, Fihi Ma Fihi ,Tr. By A. J. Arberry, Discourse 12, p. 99. Ibid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalal_ad-Din_Muhammad_Rumi Glen, Love and Essence of Human Being, p. 29.
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qualities and ambitions.6 In a world becoming more and more globalized, we are trying to get to know those who will be our future neighbors. One of the most important factors here is to eliminate factors that separate peoplesuch as discrimination based on color, race, belief, and ethnicity. Education can uproot these evils. We are trying our best to do this.7 As Thomas Michel conludes in his paper entitled Fethullah Glen: Following in the Footseps of Rumi in this book, (i)t is not an exaggeration to say that Glen is a modern Muslim thinker and activist whose life work of promoting an Islamic appreciation of love, tolerance, and universal peace is in fact a renewed interpretation for our times of the central insights of Mevlana. Sufism (tasawwuf) has played a major role in Glens life and spiritual intellectual scholarly upbringing. A new chronological and intellectual biography of Glen gives details about Glens spiritual, scholarly, and intellectual background: Glen was a student of Alvarli Efe Muhammed Lutfi, a great Sufi-master of his time. Under Alvarlis instruction, Glen studied Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence, and exegesis. Muhammed Lutfi was also Glens first teacher in Sufism. On his own account, Glen was much affected by his teacher Muhammed Lutfi, especially from his piety, devotion, and ascetic lifestyle. It is from Muhammed Lutfi that he first learnt the importance of devotion to others, selflessness and altruism. Again, his respect for the great Sufi masters, including Rumi, is attributable to Alvarli.8 Glen sees humans as Gods special and very important creatures: Humans, the greatest mirror of the names, attributes and deeds of God, are a shining mirror, a marvellous fruit of life, a source for the whole universe, a sea that appears to be a tiny drop, a sun formed as a humble seed, a great melody in spite of their insignificant physical positions, and the source for existence all contained within a small body. Humans carry a holy secret that makes them equal to the entire universe with all their wealth of character; a wealth that can be developed to excellence.9 He underlines that:
6 7 8
http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1958/12/ nal and Williams 2000: 329331. See in detail Dialogue Society (forthcoming) A Short Chronological & Intellectual Biography of Fethullah Glen. London,
UK: Dialogue Society. It should be underlined that Glens Sufi understanding refers the pre-institutionalized period, mostly to the first and second century of Islam. Gulen does not have tariqah (Sufi order ) and he is not a Sufi as the term understood especially in the west. As Dogan Koc (2005) explains in Glens understanding, Sufism was characterized by spiritual people seeking to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet, and his companions by imitating their lives. Sufis eventually established orders under different scholars, and institutionalized it by establishing regulations and rules in each tariqah.. That is why Saritoprak (2001) calls Glen a Sufi in his own way: (e)arly Sufis had neither orders nor even Sufi organizations. Rabia, Junayd, Muhasibi, Bishr, Ghazali, Farid al-din Attar, and even Rumi did not belong to a tariqah. However, they were Sufis (Saritoprak 2001: 6). As Gkek (2005) puts Glen does not establish a tariqah, but he lays down basic principles for a Sufi life in the modern world. According to Glen, Sufisms practical dimension is more important than its historical or terminological definitions or institutional structures (Koc 2005). In his own words, (s)ufism is the path followed by an individual who, having been able to free himself or herself from human vices and weakness in order to acquire angelic qualities and conduct pleasing to God, lives in accordance with the requirements of Gods knowledge and love, and in the resulting spiritual delight that ensues (Glen, 1999: p.xiv).
9
Fethullah Glen, Human Beings and Their Nature Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Ed. M. Enes
Ergene (New Jersey: The Light Publishing, 2004), 112.
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Compassion is the beginning of being; without it everything is chaos. Everything has come into existence through compassion and by compassion it continues to exist in harmony. . . . Everything speaks of compassion and promises compassion. Because of this, the universe can be considered a symphony of compassion. All kinds of voices proclaim compassion so that it is impossible not to be aware of it, and impossible not to feel the wide mercy encircling everything. How unfortunate are the souls who dont perceive this . . . Man has a responsibility to show compassion to all living beings, as a requirement of being human. The more he displays compassion, the more exalted he becomes, while the more he resorts to wrongdoing, oppression and cruelty, the more he is disgraced and humiliated, becoming a shame to humanity.10 A man of compassion does not hesitate to be open to all and to enter into dialogue with all. As Celik and Valkenberg (2007) explain, Glen proposes dialogue as a method to be used in building and establishing a culture of peace among co-religionists, people of different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. He sees dialogue as a framework of mutual acceptance and respect of each others identity. They describe this as the first stage of Glens dialogue concept: accepting the others in their own position. The second stage involves respecting the position of the other(s),and the third stage is the concept of sharing values in the context of the other(s). Glens conviction is that humanity ultimately will be led to peace and unity by recognizing and accepting social, cultural, and religious diversity, an exchange of mutual values and union in collaboration. Glen sees diversity and pluralism as a natural fact. He wants those differences to be admitted and to be explicitly professed. Accepting everyone in their otherness, which is broader and deeper than tolerance, is his normal practice.11 The Prophet says that all people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. Islam does not discriminate based on race, color, age, nationality, or physical traits. The Prophet declared You are all from Adam, and Adam is from earth. O servants of God, be brothers (and sisters).12 Those who close the road of tolerance are beasts who have lost their humanity... forgiveness and tolerance will heal most of our wounds, but only if this divine instrument is in the hands of those who understand its language. Otherwise, the incorrect treatment we have used until now will create many complications and continue to confuse us.13 Islam recognizes all religions previous to it. It accepts all the prophets and books sent to different epochs of history. Not only does it accept them, but also regards belief in them as an essential principle of being Muslim. By doing so, it acknowledges the basic unity of all religions. A Muslim is at the same time a true follower of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and of all other Hebrew prophets. This belief explains why both Christians and Jews enjoyed their religious rights under the rule of Islamic governments throughout history (Gulen 2001a: 137). He believes that dialogue is a must today, and that the first step in establishing it is recognising but transcending the past, disregarding polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points,
10 11 12 13
M. Fethullah Glen, Towards the Lost Paradise, (London: Truestar, 1996), 402. See in detail, Unal and Williams, the Advocate of Dialogue, op. cit ., pp. 256-258. Glen 2001a: 134. M. Fethullah Glen, Forgiveness, The Fountain 3 (AprilJune 2000), 45.
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which far outnumber polemical ones.14 In his opinion, a believer does not hesitate to communicate with any kind of thought and system; while one foot should remain at the centre the other could be with other seventy-two nations (Rumis famous metaphor); Islam does not reject interaction with diverse cultures and change as long as what is to be appropriated does not contradict with the main pillars of Islam. different beliefs, races, customs and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village. Each individual is like a unique realm unto themselves; therefore the desire for all humanity to be similar to one another is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. For this reason, the peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Otherwise, it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end.15 If one were to seek the true face of Islam in its own sources, history, and true representatives, then one would discover that it contains no harshness, cruelty, or fanaticism. It is a religion of forgiveness, pardon, and tolerance as such saints and princes of love and tolerance as Rumi, Yunus Emre, Ahmed Yesevi, Bedizzaman and many others have so beautifully expressed.16 Glen firmly believes that the road to justice for all is dependent on the provision of an adequate education. He envisions a twenty-first century in which we shall witness the birth of a spiritual dynamic that will revitalise long-dormant moral values; an age of tolerance, understanding, and intercommunal & international cooperation that will ultimately lead, through inter-cultural dialog and a sharing of values, to greater understanding and peaceful coexistence. He believes that the Islamic social system seeks to form a virtuous society and thereby gain Gods approval. It recognizes right, not force, as the foundation of social life. Hostility is unacceptable. Relationships must be based on belief, love, mutual respect, assistance, and understanding instead of conflict and realization of personal interest (Glen 2001a, 137).
3. Socio-Cultural and Political Activism for Peaceful Coexistence Rumi strongly underlines that humans even if they are dervishes- should not ignore the laws of this universe and doctrine of causes, not to sit around heedlessly waiting for Allahs favour, but rather to exert themselves endlessly in order to transform this broken world into the world of peace and justice: I am looking all over the world for students of action so that I can teach action. I am looking all over the world for anyone who knows action, but I find no student of actiononly of words 17 His activism is different from stereotypical Sufi remoteness to socially active units and personalities: Those who always feel themselves in the presence of God do not need to seclude themselves from people. Such people, in the words of Rumi, are like those who keep one foot in the sphere of Divine commandments and turn the other, like a compass needle, throughout the world.
14 15 16 17
Ibid. Glen 2004a: 249-250. M. Fethullah Glen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Light: Somerset, N.J., 2004, pp. 58-59. A. J. Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, Fihi Ma Fihi, Discourse 16, p. 133-134.
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They experience ascension and descent at every moment. This is the seclusion recognized and preferred by the Prophets and saints.18 It is obvious that living in the world but not of the world was his main action plan and road map: The Amir (the ruler), surprised by an unexpected visit from Rumi, said: Master, how gracious of you to honor me in this way. I never expected this. It never even entered my mind that I could be worthy of such an honor. By rights I should be standing night and day in the ranks and company of your servants and attendants. Im not even worthy of that. How gracious this is! Rumi said: It is all because of your lofty spiritual aspirations. The higher and greater your rank and the more you become occupied with important, exalted worldly affairs, the more you consider yourself to have fallen short of your spiritual purpose. You are not satisfied with what you have achieved, thinking that you have too many obligations. Since none of these attainments can blind you from that divine attainment, my heart is moved to serving you. And yet for all that, still, I wanted to pay you formal honor as well.19 Rumis activism included his spiritual guidance to the rulers, including the invading Mongols. Rumi gained much love and respect from the sultans, viziers, and kings. These men of high positions were very eager to see him. However, Rumi seldom accepted their invitations. He spent most of his time with the poor and needy. He had disciples who were sultans and viziers but also a lot of disciples from amongst the poor and common folk.20 In Rumis time, invading Mongols basic policy was decentralization, and this included support for local Sufi groups that were less doctrinaire and more open to the non-Muslim population than the madrasah-based Seljuk orthodoxy had been. In effect, Sufi lodges became populist civic spaces. In response to this, Rumi tried to reduce the gap between ulama Islam and folk Islam. Rumi communicates many things, multiple meanings, at many levels, simultaneously; he provides explanations and keys to unlock the meaning of reality; all the words, all the stories and explanations he conveyed say nothing more than reality, which has been expressed so far by all the great masters of the tasawwuf tradition in Islam. He communicated through the power of literature what he learned from the madrasah to the hearts of the people around him, as well as the religious and political elite.21 Rumis Mesnevi is for both well-educated people and people with little education.22 He was part of the urban elite in the cosmopolitan capital city of Konya. He was also involved in the political struggles of his time in one way or another. He was in contact with the rulers. On this, he states that: Mohammed, the great Prophet, once said, The worst of scholars are those who visit princes, and the best of princes are those who visit scholars. Wise is the prince who stands at the door of the poor, and wretched are the poor who stand at the door of the prince. Now, taking the outward sense of these words, people think that scholars should never visit princes or they will
18 19 20 21 22
M. Fethullah Glen, Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, Fairfax, Va.: The Fountain, 1999, p. 19. A. J. Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, Fihi Ma Fihi, Discourse 5, p. 34. Can, p. 92. Ugur 2004, p. 332. Can, p. 26.
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become the worst of scholars. That is not the true meaning. Rather, the worst of scholars are those who depend upon princes, and who revolve their life and purpose around the attention and favor of princes. Such scholars take up learning in hopes that princes will give them presents, hold them in esteem, and promote them to office. Therefore, such scholars improve themselves and pursue knowledge on account of princes. They become scholars from their fear of princes. They subject themselves to the princes control. They conform themselves to the plans that princes or a prince visits them, still in every case theyre the visitors, and it is the prince who is visited. However, when scholars do not study to please princes, but instead pursue learning from first to last for the sake of truthwhen their actions and words spring from the truth they have learned and put to use because this is their nature and they cannot live otherwisejust as fish can only thrive in watersuch scholars subject themselves to the control and direction of God. They become blessed with the guidance of the prophets. Everyone living in their time is touched by them and derives inspiration from their example, whether they are aware of the fact or not. Should such scholars visit a prince, they are still the ones visited and the prince is the visitor, because in every case it is the prince who takes from these scholars and receives help from them. Such scholars are independent of the prince. They are like the lightgiving sun, whose whole function is giving to all, universally, converting stones into rubies and carnelians, changing mountains into mines of copper, gold, silver and iron, making the earth fresh and green, bringing fruit to the trees, and warmth to the breeze. Their trade is giving, they do not receive.23 His book Letters composed of 147 letters written to the political authorities shows Rumis personal relationships with various authorities of his violent era, using extant letters to suggest his skill at combining diplomacy with pastoral counseling. Like all of his other books, Rumi did not write these letters himself. He dictated them.24 Some of the discourses are addressed to the Seljuk vizier Muin alDin Pervane (d. 1277). His Fihi Ma Fihi is full of examples of his contact with and guidance to the rulers: My purpose in speaking this way to the Amir (the ruler) was so that he could see the matter correctly, and accept the will of God humbly. He has fallen out of an exceedingly high state into a low state, yet in this way he may grow. Life can show the most wonderful things, but behind all of them lies a trap should we forget the source of this wonder. God has devised this plan so
23 24
Discourses (Fihi Ma Fihi), Discourse 1, p. 3-5. Can, p. 36.
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that we will learn not to claim, out of arrogance and vanity, these ideas and plans as our own.25 In short, Rumi was not a politician but a spiritual guide who was perfectly aware of the realities of the mundane world, essential to be an influential spiritual guide. Even though he did not deal with daily politics, he faced and is still facing political accusations, such as seeking political power or being a spy. A significant renewal of Glen vis--vis tasawwuf is his emphasis on socio-cultural and even political action which is as vital as belief can only be sustainable if it is supported with these actions. For Glen, just like Rumi, living in the world but not of the world, allowing no inner attachment to it is the basic blueprint of the individuals whole social action.26 Glen also reiterates Rumis compass metaphor: Our right foot is fixed upon the center of the truth while our left foot is rotating in and around the seventy-two nations.27 In Glens view -as strongly emphasized by Rumi more than 7 centuries ago- action is an inseparable aspect of tasawwuf, and Muslims should be actively involved in the community, share their experience with others, strive to help others and bring peace to the global village.28 Toguslu (2007) explains that although Glen is against hedonism and he regards altruism as the criteria of life according to the ideal man which require the effort of follower as developing the detachment from the pleasure and seductive needs, a socially active intellectual and aesthetic dimension is accepted and -even more- encouraged by Glen. Even though in Glens view the pleasure in this world is considered ephemeral and he and his sympathizers do not pursue the hedonism because they believe that they are sent to this world to enhance devotion and to seek Gods contentment, Glens sympathizers do not abstain from the social life, the pleasure and entertainment like going to the cinema or theatre, listening to the music29 But they like to live meaningfully an aesthetic Muslim life. Paradoxically, these ascetic body and soul which participate actively in daily life
25
Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, p. 11. See for more: Discourse 3: The Amir said: Night and day my heart and Soul are intent
upon serving God, but because of my responsibilities with Mongol affairs I have no time for such service. Rumi answered: Those works too are work done for God, since they are the means of providing peace and security for your country. You sacrifice yourself, your possessions, your time, so the hearts of a few will be lifted to peacefully obeying Gods will. So this too is a good work. God has inclined you towards such good work, and your great love for what you do is proof of Gods blessing. However, if your love of work were to weaken, this would be a sign of grace denied, for God leads only those who are worthy into those right attitudes that will earn spiritual rewards. Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, p. 19; After the Amir left, someone said: When the Amir comes, the Master utters mighty words. The words never stop, because he is a master of words. Words flow from him without interruption. Rumi said: If in winter time the trees do not put forth leaves and fruit, people should not think they are not working. They are continually at work. Winter is the season of gathering; summer is the season of spending, Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, p. 95; After the Amir arrived, Rumi said: Ive been longing to call on you. But, knowing you were busy with the interests of the people, I spared you the trouble, Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, Discourse 12, p. 98; The Amir of Rum said: The unbelievers used to worship and bow down to idols. Now we are doing the selfsame thing. We go and bow down and wait upon the Mongols, and yet we consider ourselves Muslims. We have many other idols in our heart too, such as greed, passion, temper, envy, and we are obedient to all of them. So we act in the very same way as the unbelievers, both outwardly and inwardly, and we consider ourselves Muslims! Rumi answered: But here is something different; it enters your thoughts that this conduct is evil and utterly detestable. The eye of your heart has seen something incomparably greater that shows up this behavior as vile and hideous. Brackish water shows its brackishness to one who has tasted sweet water, and things are made clear by their opposites, , Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, Discourse 17, p. 138
26 27 28 29
Komecoglu, p. 39. Zaman, 3 July 1996. Camci and Unal, pp. 140-141. Gokcek, 2006, p. 173-174. Toguslu 2007.
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are considered better than the ascetic who is absent from worldly life.30 In other words, Glen endeavours to redefine the Muslim personality at the most subjective level that is analogous to Sufi subjectivity, but also different from stereotypical Sufi remoteness to socially active units and personalities.31 Glen echoes Rumi also in telling us not to ignore the laws of the universe, not to sit around aimlessly, but rather to exert all our energies to change this world into a world of peaceful coexistence and justice.32 Glen ideal man, man of action, does their best until this world is turned into paradise; and also struggle for a better world, to be stopped by nothing except death itself.33 Glen continues a long tradition of seeking to address the spiritual needs of people and to provide some stability in times of turmoil. Like many previous figures, including Rumi, he is wrongly suspected of seeking political power.34 Like Rumi, rather than advancing political ambitions, creating an Islamic ethic as a manner or conduct of individuals life is the main objective of Glen. Glens objective is also to foster an ethic that is similar to Max Webers worldly asceticism, an activist pietism -composed of sincerity, worship, moderation, modesty, following the prophets example and encouraging the good and discouraging the bad- with a tendency toward the rationalization of social relationships.35 For Glen, religion is primarily a private or a communal matter, not a political or state matter. He reiterates that Islam as a religion should not be reduced to being a political party identity. He is very critical of political Islamism and the instrumentalization of religion in politics: When those who have adopted Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion in its true sense and function, review their activities and attitudes they claim to be based on Islam, especially political ones, will discover that they are usually moved by personal or national anger, hostility, and other similar motives A Muslims beginning point must have an Islamic basis. In the present situation, Muslims cannot act out of ideological or political partisanship and then dress this partisanship in Islamic garb, or represent mere desires in the form of ideas. If we can overcome this tendency, Islams true image will become known.36 As concisely analysed by Ozdalga, the perspective taught by Glen is based on activism, stirred up, as well as controlled, by pietism. This activist pietism describes a new feature in Turkish religious life. In conformity with Webers concept, Glens pietistic activism is based on a critical rejection of the world but not the flight from this world that is characteristic for escapist mysticism. It is based on activism. It is an ethic that finds the certification of salvation by deeds performed in this world and is based on a paradox as it includes a critical rejection of the world while simultaneously calling for
30 31
Toguslu 2007.
Ugur Komecoglu, A sociologally interpretative approach to the Fethullah Glen community movement, Istanbul: Bogazici University, 1997 (Unpublished MA thesis), p. 17; see also see also Ugur Komecoglu, Kutsal ile kamusal: Fethullah Glen cemaat hareketi. Nilufer Gole (ed) Islamin yeni kamusal yuzleri (New public faces of Islam), Istanbul: Metis, 2000. Cetin, Peaceful Heroes, Dallas. Agai, Glens Islamic Ethics of Education, 2002, pp.39-40. Aras and Caha, Turkish Islams, op. cit; see in detail Altinoglu, Fethullah Glen, op. cit. Elisabeth Ozdalga, Worldly Asceticism in Islamic Casting: Fethullah Glens Inspired Piety and Activism, http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1336/13/
32 33 34 35
Critique, 17 (2000): 84104.

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involvement in the world in rationally structured social activities. These activities include the building of schools instead of mosques, investing in secular education instead of religious instruction, encouraging economic enterprises and requesting sympathisers to invest in education, encouraging educational and economic enterprises to support each other, promoting individual and collective selfcriticism, and supporting critically minded planning for future projects. Glens activist pietism, therefore, builds on a delicate balance between rejection of this world on the one hand, and a desire to rebuild a new social order by peaceful, constructive means, on the other. Without the religious sense of duty on which it builds, there most likely would have been less constructive accomplishments.37 The distinction between political ambition and religious activism is crucial for a correct understanding of Glens mission.38 For instance Glen does not see the world in political terms and does not draw imaginary boundaries. As skilfully expressed by Klas Grinell in this book, Glen is a border transgressor. By employing ijtihad, he bases this border transgressing understanding on and also extends to- the Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). He does not divide the world by employing mutually exclusive concepts of dar al-harb (abode of war) and dar-al Islam (abode of Islam, peace) but sees it as an almost coherent place, as it were, that needs to be served continually by utilising the concept dar al-hizmet (abode of service to humans, thereby God): If ones intention is to serve Islam by presenting a good example, then one can stay wherever one desires, says Abdullah Aymaz, former editor in chief of the daily Zaman and Glens close friend and colleague for more than thirty years. Glen stresses that wherever a Muslim is, even outside a Muslim polity, he or she has to obey the lex loci, to respect others rights and to be just, and has to disregard discussions of dar al-harb and dar al-Islam. In Glens understanding, umma is more of a transnational sociocultural entity, not a politicolegal one. He hopes that this sociocultural entity will be instrumental in bringing general universal peace.39
4. Social Innovation for Peaceful Coexistence and Its Discontents Rumis respect for all religious traditions was not always popular in his day, and often provoked criticism from the more dogmatic.40 While some criticized his openness to the other, some other claimed that he was a traitor, a spy and not even a Muslim. Siraj al-Din of Konya was a man of grudge and to hurt Rumi and to discredit him in the eyes of the public, he sent one of his disciples to pressurize Rumi in public whether or not he actually said that he was with seventy-two sects and creeds. Siraj al-Din advised his disciple to insult, curse, and swear at Rumi if he admitted to saying those words. That man came and asked Rumi: It has been claimed that you said: I am with seventy-two sects and creeds. Is that true? Rumi did not deny what he had said.
37
Elisabeth Ozdalga, Worldly Asceticism in Islamic Casting: Fethullah Glens Inspired Piety and Activism, Elisabeth Ozdalga, Worldly Asceticism in Islamic Casting: Fethullah Glens Inspired Piety and Activism, Authors interview with Abdullah Aymaz, 3 Sept. 2000, Istanbul. A. J. Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, Fihi Ma Fihi, vii.
Critique, 17 (2000): 84104.

38
Critique, 17 (2000): 84104.

39 40
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He replied: Yes, that is what I said. That man immediately started to swear and curse at Rumi. Rumi only smiled at him and said: In spite of all that you are saying, I am also with you.41 Even today some westerners see him unorthodox or even outside the banner of Islam.42 The idea that Rumi cared little for orthodox Islam has been put forward by translations of poems attributed to Rumi which were actually not composed by him and which express ideas that are not characteristic of him.43 Some writers have even claimed or suggested that Rumi really was not a Muslim, because they believed that the line, "na tars na yahd-am man na gabr-am na musalmn-am" ("I am not a Christian, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, or a Muslim") expressed Rumi's true attitude toward Islam. But this poem is not in the earliest manuscripts and so probably is not a genuine Rumi poem.44 Rumi's actual approach to Islam is clarified by the following quatrain composed by him: I am the servant of the Qur'an as long as I have life. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one. If anyone quotes anything except this from my sayings, I am quit of him and outraged by these words. In an article written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr entitled "Rumi and the Sufi Tradition," he states that "(o)ne of the greatest living authorities on Rm in Persia today, Hd H'ir, has shown in an unpublished work that some 6,000 verses of the Dwn and the Mathnaw are practically direct translations of Qur'nic verses into Persian poetry.45 At a recent event in Strasbourg on Rumi, Professor Eric Geoffrey asserted that due to today's judgmental stance towards Muslims, Rumi's Islamic roots were being ignored by many.46 Geoffrey explained that although the work and thinking of Rumi had gained prominence in the West over recent years, most Western sources took Rumi out of the context of his Islamic roots. He also noted that in both the US and the EU, Sufism was being stripped of its links with Islam and being presented as a sort of "new age religion." Geoffrey referred to these efforts as a form of "religious racism" and noted that it was the Prophet Mohammed and the Qur'n which had provided the sources for Rumi's humanist understanding, one which is so universal as to still be fitting in today's world.47 Rumi was also accused of being too soft against the Mongols. Some a recent example being Professor Mikail Bayram- claim that he was a spy of Mongols,48 showing that in times of turmoil it is very difficult to maintain a moderate stance.49 Avni Ozgurel, as many others, refutes these claims:
41 42
Can, p. 89. See also El-Zein A. (2000) Spiritual Consumption in the United States: the Rumi phenomenon, Islam and Christian-
Muslim Relations, Volume 11, Number 1, 1 March 2000 , pp. 71-85. This study shows how Rums work is taken nowadays out of the Muslim Sufi tradition into an elusive spiritual movement which the author terms the 'New Sufism'.
43 44 45 46 47 48
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalal_ad-Din_Muhammad_Rumi Ibid. Ibid. http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/2321/22/ Ibid. http://www.kuranislami.com/save/mikail_bayram_mevlana_mogollarla_iliski.rtf
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We know that Prof. Mikail Bayram is against Rumis philosophy and his Islamic understanding. He previously claimed at a TV programme that Rumi was raising individuals who were inclined to be submissive to imperialism and was a representative of Iranian Sufism; that is why the West gives importance to him but at the final analysis Rumis ideas would only help colonisation of Anatolia, thus were harmful... In Rumis time, the Sultan was Giyaseddin Keyhusrev who to be a Sultan himself poisoned his father Alaaddin Keykubat who unified Anatolia under Seljuk rule. And, in Keyhusrevs time, the state was deteriorated and Anatolia was in bloodshed. I mean the infamous Babai rebellion.... While Rumi was warning Keyhusrev in Konya to rule properly so that the state would not be destabilised, some other religious leaders were staging the biggest rebellion in Anatolian history... After all these turmoil and Mongolian occupation, it is true that Rumi inclined towards to Mongols. If Prof Bayram said that Rumi sided with the Mongols and criticised who opposed this, he would be deemed right. The main reason of Rumis this attitude was that if Mongols were opposed, Anatolias unification would deteriorate further, impossible to be revived again but (if left alone) the cruel Mongolian power would be dissolved in Anatolias spiritual environment. He was right. Although Mongols came to Anatolia with an uproar; they disappeared and history never recorded a Mongol retreat. 50 Mikail Bayram also claimed at an ultra-nationalist TV programme that Rumis friend Shams was also a spy of Mongols. When asked of the proof of this allegation, Bayram replied that Shams, in his book Makalat, fiercly criticisize the ones who oppose Mongols. The presenter asks him again Is this the proof? and Bayrams reply is Yes.51 Bayram also alleges that Rumi had Nasreddin Hodja, his own son and Ahi Evran killed.52 Like Rumi, Glen also is a social innovator for peaceful coexistence and like Rumi, his social innovation is not without its discontents. As noted above, Rumis tradition of intercultural dialogue as the most important method of social innovation to tackle enmity stemming from prejudice and ignorance is also Glens tradition. Thus, intercultural dialogue all over the world is the main agenda of the Glen movement as the papers in this book by Richard Khuri, Sevket Yavuz, Davut Ayduz, Terry Mathis, Efrat Aviv, Ian Fry, Kate Kirk, Gurkan Celik, Thomas Michel, Richard Penaskovic, Klas Grinell, Paul Weller, Karina Korostelina and Jonathan Lacey elaborate on in detail. In the countries where Glens followers and sympathisers reside they establish intercultural dialogue organizations, associations and societies, utilizing the concept of dar al-hizmet (country of service to humanity). They all believe that interfaith and intercultural dialogue is a must to reach a lasting universal peace (sulh-u umumi).53 Glen pioneered in the establishment of the Journalists and Writers Foundation in 1994, well before mushrooming of dialogue activities in the post-9/11 world, the activities of which to promote dialogue
49
Rumi was not a fan of Mongols: Someone said: The Mongols also believe in the resurrection and say that there will be a
judgment. Rumi said: They lie, desiring to be accepted by Muslims. If they really believe in the resurrection, where is the evidence to prove it?, Rumi, Discourses, Fihi Ma Fihi, p. 121.
50 51 52
Avni Ozgurel, Was Mevlana an Agent of Mongols?, Radikal, 4 December 2005. See for a transcript of the programme, http://www.biroybil.com/showthread.php?t=3525 visited on 4 November 2007. http://www.haber7.com/haber.php?haber_id=123747, http://www.biroybil.com/showthread.php?t=3525 visited on 4 See in detail Yilmaz 2003.
November 2007, visited on 4 November 2007.

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and tolerance among all strata of the society receive warm welcome from almost all walks of life. The Foundation also works as a think-tank in related issues. The movement tries to bring all scholars and intellectuals regardless of their ethnic, ideological, religious and cultural backgrounds (The Abant Platform). This platform is the first of its kind in Turkish history where intellectuals could agree to disagree on sensitive issues such as laicism, secularism, peaceful co-existence, and faith & reason relations. For instance, in 2007, the Abant Conventions theme was Alevis in Turkey.54 Glens dialogue and peaceful coexistence discourse has also led to the establishment of new institutions like the Dialogue Society established in 1999 in London or the Rumi Forum, the Rumiinspired foundation established in 2000 in Washington DC. Such enterprises underscore the ambition to consolidate and make manifest the trend toward a general but a renewed Rumi form of humanism.55 There are now hundreds of dialogue associations and charities all over the world founded by the movements Muslim and non-Muslim volunteers motivated by Glens teachings. Through these charities, these volunteers initiate and engage in interfaith and intercultural dialog with people of different faiths, backgrounds, and cultures. They have been organising events to commemorate Rumi and hosting whirling-dervish events. Only in the United Kingdom, as Fatih Tedik explains in his paper in this book, the Dialogue Society organizes several whirling dervishes programmes each year in several cities of the country, including but not limited to the famous Wembley Arena, Oxford Universitys Ashmolian Theatre and Hackney Empire.56 Similar to Rumi, Glens message of openness and dialogue is not without its discontents. Staunch enemies of the Glen movement come from three segments: a. Marxist/Maoist left, b. anti-religious artificial-nationalists57 and c. religio-nationalists. These are distinguished from the critiques in that their allegations and accusations are not supported by evidence, refuted by legal verdicts and are otherwise inconsistent.58 These antagonists reiterate that the Papacy has bought some community (movement) in Turkey to produce an adulterated and reformed Islam without sharia, fiqh, sunnah and laws.59 They negatively react to the Glens visit to the Vatican City to meet with the Pope as they consider it a humiliation.60 They allege that some groups are the secret agents of the Papacy in Turkey. They also repeatedly claim that some secret agreements between a group and the Papacy and also the Orthodox Church has been reached that Halki Seminary will be re-opened and when the conditions are right, some Greeks (Rum) will immigrate to Turkey.61 They also strongly state that the Muslims who advocate dialogue with Christians and Europeans are either nave, or ignorant or, for worse, traitors. They even imply that Glen is not a Muslim at all but a secret cardinal of the Catholic church.62 An extreme leftist daily
54 55 56 57 58 59
See, www.gyv.org.tr Ozdalga, 2003, pp. 70-71. See in detail, www.dialoguesociety.org Aslandogan, Defamation as Smokescreen, Oklahoma, 2006. Ibid. Mehmet Sevket Eygi Turkic world, Milli Gazete, 5 May 2000. Daily Milli Gazete belongs to political Islamist Necmettin Saritoprak and Griffiths, People of the Book, Muslim World, 2005, p. 336. Eygi, Secret agreement with papacy, Milli Gazete, 26 May 2000. See, several issues of religio-nationalist Haydar Bas Groups daily Yeni Mesaj, www.yenimesaj.com.tr. It is probable to
Erbakans National Outlook (Milli Gorus) movement.

60 61 62
read such a comment in any issue of the daily.
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regularly claims that Glen is a man of the Korean originated Moon Church.63 An ultra-nationalist argues that the CIA agents such as Graham Fuller and Paul Henze are pupils (murid) of Glen.64 These groups together with artificial nationalists (ulusalcilar) claim that Anatolia will be Christianized and some people in Turkey are helping the Christians in this mission.65 The support of the Turkish old elite or buraucratic oligarchy to these groups is a publicly known reality and the allegations against the Glen movement are regularly extended to the ruling AK Party in the old elites fight against the emergence of the new elite, democratisation, transparency and accountability of Turkey and its official institutions. In the words of Ozdalga (2003: 61), no other religious personality gives rise to such intense contempt and rejection among strongly committed laicists, bureaucratic oligarchy and old elite as he does. This view is the more difficult to understand given that Glens adherents, without exception, are characterized by unobtrusiveness and humbleness. However, it is exactly this withdrawal that is raised to support arguments about the dangers of the movement. His antagonists look upon Glen as being almost omnipotent, possessing, according to them, secret powers to challenge any political authority. A single word from himso it is thoughtwould be enough to rally a sufficient number of political parties to attempt to topple the government. To be sure, this phantasmagoria is nourished by dread, bordering on panic, of religious reactionaries (irtica), combined with ignorance about what the Glen community really does.66 Glen is not suggesting any radically different or heterodox interpretation of Islam, but re-reads a conventional Hanafi/Sunni understanding.67 When looked closely there are -naturally- many similarities between the discourses of Glen and Rumi and many other Muslim scholars of the past. Thus, Ozdalga concludes that: So it does not seem to be the content of the religious interpretation as such, but the very existence of a new relatively strong group, filled with religious fervour and claiming a place in the public arena that annoys the establishment. This new element is perceived as being an anomic force, a force that challenges the norms and values, the order of the established hegemonic elite community. Thus, it is not religion per se that is at the root of the conflict. On the contrary, religion has been used as a false ideology to displace the real threat. From the Established-
63 64 65
Cumhuriyet, 3 December 2000. Necip Hablemitoglu, Yeni Hayat, N. 52. For an analysis of pro-globalization and anti-globalisation Islamic movements in Turkey, see, Ahmet Kuru (2005)
Globalisation and diversification of Islamic movements: Three Turkish cases, in Political Science Quarterly, V. 120, N. 2, pp. 253-274. Kuru analyses Gulen, Haydar Bas and Erbakans National Outlook (Milli Gorus) movements and concludes that (t)he Gulen movement and the younger generation of the late Milli Gorus movement developed positive attitudes toward globalization because they benefited from international opportunities and they had tolerant normative frameworks The Haydar Bas movement, the early Milli Gorus movement, and the elders of the late Milli Gorus movement developed antiglobalization views because they did not benefit from international opportunities and had intolerant normative frameworks (religio-nationalism in the first case and political Islamism in the second and third cases), Kuru 2005, p. 273.
66 67
Ozdalga (2003: 61). Ozdalga (2003: 61).
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Outsider perspective, the key to the problem seems to lie in the threat posed to the existing power balance and established status hierarchy.68
5. Concluding Remarks: Renewed Peaceful Coexistence Message of Rumi Today and Glens Initiatives Rumis discourse and practice vis--vis peaceful coexistence and his tradition of intercultural activism as the most important method of social innovation to tackle ignorance and to improve cooperation for a more cohesive society live in the thought and practice of Glen. It is, thus, not a coincidence that their antagonists accusations are also of similar nature and content. Millions inspired by Glen put his discourse into practice all over the world. The greatest advantage in the prospect of achieving this is that Glen has an alim background. It is true that he is an influential leader but he is first of all an expert of Islamic theology (kalam), Qurnic exegesis (tafsir), science of hadith (usul-u hadith) and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) similar to Rumi as we have seen above. Through his sermons, teachings, books and activities, Glen has inspired a whole generation in Turkey and abroad and has reduced the gap between ulama (high) Islam and folk Islam. For the lasting peaceful coexistence, Glen has encouraged his followers and sympathisers to establish educational and intercultural dialogue institutions in and outside of Turkey. These people following in the footsteps of Rumi- are also active participants in society and perform public service by establishing schools, charities and hospitals. The communitys enthusiasm for establishing secular schools in both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, specifically schools serving people of all faiths and nationalities, is unprecedented not only among Sufis but all faith-based groups and movements, thus, socially innovative. Instead of being isolated from the society, they try to reconcile their spiritual life with their worldly one, following Glens discourse.69 These schools aim to instil -through the good example of teachers, educators, and staff- universal values such as honesty, cooperation, freedom, happiness, humility, love, respect, responsibility, and acceptance of the other. The movements schools in areas where ethnic and religious conflicts are escalating, such as Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, the Philippines, Banda Aceh, Northern Iraq, Darfur and South-eastern Turkey have played remarkable peacemaking roles in decreasing levels of conflict in these areas.70 Through its schools and outlets the Glen movement is spreading an Anatolian Muslimness; a renewed Rumi practice of Islam that emphasises love, empathy, mutual respect and enrichment, intercultural activism, education and social innovation for a cohesive society. With the help of the schools in about 100 countries all over the world, many people, not only Muslims, are getting a good and quality education in a multicultural, multi-faith environment so that in future they will continue to be open to dialogue and they will hopefully attain good socio-economic status within their societies.
68 69
Ozdalga, Redeemer or Outsider, Muslim World, 2005, pp. 441-442. Mandaville states that in the case of Turkeys Glen movement we find elements of Sufi spirituality fused with socio-
economic liberalism in a highly successful transnational educational project. Dozens of Glen-sponsored schools, emphasizing a modernist curriculum against a backdrop of non-invasive Islamic morality, now operate throughout much of the Balkans and Central Asia, Peter Mandaville (2003) What does progressive Islam look like?. ISIM Newsletter. Leiden: ISIM. 33-34. p.34.
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Saritoprak, Nonviolence, Muslim World, 2005, p. 423. See also Kalyoncu 2007.
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As Thomas Michel puts, in line with Glens firm belief that the road to justice for all is dependent on the provision of an adequate education, in addition to the formal education carried out in schools, the movement has also pursued non-formal education through television and radio channels, newspapers and magazines, cultural and professional foundations. 71 It will not be wrong to suggest that Glen is renewing the message of Rumi in accordance with contemporary tempo-spatial needs of the masses for a lasting peaceful coexistence through education and dialogue. Given that Rumis discourse and practice are deeply rooted in Islam, Glen could be said to be renewing Islam (tajdid), which is another dimension of his social innovation. Arabic proverb puts that el-merru aduvvu ma jahila, one is enemy of whom s/he does not know. Thus, if each side knows each other, it is probable that tensions will ease or tensions will not even emerge. With its innovative projects, schools, activities and aid programmes72 almost all over the world, from Cambodia, Bangladesh to Mali, Philippines, Lebanon and Argentina, the movement itself becoming a bridge between cultures, countries, nations and faiths. It has also been observed that students from Glen schools do not feel that they are lost between cultures. On the contrary, they been, to borrow Roger Ballards concept, skilfully navigating between cultures or surfing on the inter-cultural-net, may be just as Rumi did many centuries ago like a compass with one foot on one faith & culture, the other travelling worlds. What is more, as Harun Tokak -Chairman of the Journalists and Writers Foundation and a companion of Gulen for more than 35 years- beautifully expressed in his column in Daily Yeni Safak on 4 November 2007, Glens sympathisers do not only say Come, come, whoever you are but they also actually go to people whoever/wherever they are. As a result of the movements innovative projects, a new generation with quality education, wellversed in a few languages and with prospects of good jobs and high socio-economic status has been raised. Three main enemies of humanity and mothers of all incoherence, terror, anarchy and conflict (ignorance, poverty and disunity) will be overcome in the long run if Glen projects succeed. In my humble opinion, Glen movement is a good start to counter radicalism and radicalisation in the long run. Without such an educational and dialogue project, societys increasing problems of radicalism and radicalisation cannot be solved. One expects that these self-confident new generations who study in pluralist non-denominational multicultural and multifaith environments where Rumi and Glens peaceful coexistence ethos prevails will be not be inclined to radicalism. If education and dialogue do not work to build and maintain a cohesive society, nothing will work.
71 72
Thomas Michel (2006) Said Nursis Views on Muslim-Christian Understanding. Istanbul: Soz. 70. Kimse Yok mu Association is the major aid organization of the movement and has been active in the last few years.. It has
helped earthquake victims in Bandah Aceh Indonesia, Pakistan and so on; sent aid in goods and cash to Lebanon after the recent Israeli onslaught, www.kimseyokmu.org.tr. One can expect that this aid association will increase its activities throughout the world.
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Reason and Faith in Glen's Philosophy
PART
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INTERSECTIONS OF WAYS TOWARDS TOLERANCE AND COEXISTENCE: FROM DAOISM AND SUFISM TO KANT AND GLEN
RICHARD K. KHURI 73
Abstract Fethullah Glens crucial insistence on the need to distinguish between the Hidden and revealed aspects of Oneness has favourable repercussions for the deepening of coexistence at many levels, especially between religion and secularism, and between the various world religions. The paper therefore makes a fourfold movement back and forth between emphasis on Oneness as Mystery and Oneness as revealed, for which Glen uses the words Ehadiyet and Vahidiyet. It begins with the Daoist approach to Mystery, moves into the Sufi elaboration of this in conjunction with the Islamic emphasis on revelation, continues with the Kantian retreat back into Mystery in view of the modern aversion to religious authority and explicit religious discourse, and ends with Glens synthesizing thought in the light of lessons learned both from the distant past and from the increasingly apparent shortcomings of modernity. Both Kant and Glen, each in his own way, demonstrate a renewed ability to express Transcendence, the first with almost complete emphasis on the Hidden (or noumenal), the second with a careful balance between the Hidden and the revealed. With both thinkers, we end up with an idiom that stresses the total openness of the Infinite/Eternal while sustaining the sense that one is guided through a life potentially full of meaning. With regard to coexistence, what results is that different religious paths, traditional and non-traditional, can each retain their character while sharing a deep recognition of their common pursuit.
-IAmong the many ways that humanity finds itself at seminal crossroads, the alternative between dialogue and clash of civilizations looms large. A crucial and subsidiary divide within that alternative lies between religious coexistence and conflict. While almost all eyes are fixed upon the political developments that have bearing on future relations among different religions, there is an altogether different determination. One way that human beings have fought and fought hard over their divergent views of religion passes through their conception of transcendence, of what has also been called ultimate reality, truth, and the Logos. In particular, the question is (1) whether these may be viewed in absolutist terms and (2) whether it is possible to be explicit about the Absolute. Whenever religion is essential to religious conflict (rather than incidental when the dispute is social,
73
Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Cultural Studies at the Lebanese American University. PhD in philosophy from the
University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Freedom, Modernity, and Islam: Toward a Creative Synthesis (Syracuse University Press, 1998), and several academic papers dealing with philosophy and contemporary science, some published by the American Institute of Physics and the New York Academy of Science. His papers on freedom have been published by Brill, on phenomenology by Kluwer, on the philosophy of art by the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and on the philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr by the Open Court Press. He has also written a series of literary and critical essays for the international newspaper al-Hayat.
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economic, or political), the reason seems to be that the adherents of two or more religions are absolutists who also believe they have definite, explicit accounts of the Absolute that unfortunately happen to be at serious odds or that one or more groups of absolutists decide to rectify the wrongs of those who are religious, but for whom absolutism is nevertheless an alien concept (something hardly uncommon since Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and many Hindu interpretations, besides aboriginal religions across the world, are not absolutist, certainly not in the Abrahamic sense). The same is true of the conflict between religion and science in modern times. It has either arisen because religious absolutism has been transposed into areas of inquiry better left to scientists, or because some kind of scientific absolutism has (comically) taken on a quasi-religious aspect. Only thus can we explain religious officials indignant over the proof that Earth is not flat, or scientists who imagine themselves certain that God or any other manifestation or naming of transcendence are fictions that grown up human beings ought to leave behind. How humans conceive transcendence and how explicit they think they can be about it is hence central to the future of coexistence between the various religions of the world (above all the world religions) as well as that between religion and science, and religion and secularism. An overly explicit absolutist conception of transcendence, in view of the excesses to which it obviously leads and has led, will often cause and has caused -genuinely concerned enlightened human beings to overreact to the point of attempting to abolish religion altogether (or at any rate create a system so thoroughly secularized as to sustain the hope that religion will whither away someday). Such has been the case of modern Turkey. What is particularly interesting about Turkey is that it has reached the stage where both sides in a conflict that had threatened to tear the country apart are finding more nuanced and considered approaches to secularism and Islam. This is the context for the significance of the thought of Fethullah Glen. Here, of course, we shall limit ourselves to what is relevant to the foregoing. Before we turn to a leading contemporary Islamic reformist, however, a setting needs to be provided for the always difficult discussion of transcendence (which will henceforth be used as shorthand for the nexus of terms already mentioned, such as ultimate reality, truth, and the Logos). The whole history of philosophy and religious thought (including mysticism) may be surveyed most fruitfully in that regard. But for our purposes, it will suffice to begin with one of the most ancient recorded beginnings, namely in ancient China, and pause with Rumi and Kant before we reach our final destination.
- II My Master Teacher! My Master Teacher! He judges all life but does not feel he is being judgemental; he is generous to multitudes of generations but does not think this benevolent; he is older than the oldest but he does not think himself old; he overarches Heaven and sustains Earth, shaping and creating endless bodies
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but he does not think himself skilful. This is what is known as Heavenly happiness. The words belong to Chuang Tzu, twice over (Chuang Tzu, 107). They occur in his book, and they are also a direct quote of his own words within his book. He was the first major Daoist after Lao Tzu and is believed to have lived during the fourth century BCE. The verse is typical of the Daoist insistence on the impossibility of expressing what is truly beyond in our terms. It is also shows typical Daoist ambiguity. The words may equally refer to a great (human) sage, or the Ultimate Sage (The I Ching is also ambiguous in the same way). But there is nothing ambiguous about the intent, which is to remind us that the Ultimate Judge is no judge at all viewed from the other side, the Ultimate Work (of Creation) is no work at all, the Immortal is forever young, and so on. Logically, we are faced with paradox upon paradox. Yet in our words, if we are really referring to transcendence, we must be paradoxical. Elsewhere, Chuang Tzu argues that words have value but only in terms of their meaning. Meaning is constantly seeking to express what cannot be said in words . . . (Chuang Tzu, 115) Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and many Sufi thinkers will find their own Islamic rendition of such timeless awareness. Transcendence cannot be limited in any way by our words. It is fundamentally open. It is openness itself. One of the many recurring paradoxes at this level involves the convergence of complete emptiness with perfect fullness. Buddhism refuses to speak in any theistic terms and acknowledges only the Great Emptiness. Precisely so, it acknowledges the greatest imaginable plenitude, or we should say unimaginable plenitude. Note the apparent precariousness: We normally associate emptiness with nothingness. Literally, by talking about emptiness at the highest ontological-spiritual level, we seem to be implying the abyss that frightens masses of humanity into the rush to transform it into something closer, something they are more comfortable with, something seemingly fuller and so they promptly lose the depth of what it was they had fearfully, through misunderstanding, been staring into. On the contrary the abyss, just so, has the openness to allow the most gigantic creature to fly, as is narrated in the opening passage of Chuang Tzus book (Chuang Tzu, 1-3). Similarly, for us, an apparent emptiness is the right state, not only to begin a proper awareness of transcendence, but also to live rightly and happily: Empty, still, calm, plain, quiet, silent, non-active, this is the centredness of Heaven and Earth and of the Tao and of Virtue. The Emperor, king, and sages rest there. Resting, they are empty; empty, they can be full; fullness is fulfilment. From the empty comes stillness; in stillness they can travel; in travelling they achieve. In stillness they take actionless action. Through actionless action they expect results from those with responsibilities. Through actionless action they are happy, very happy . . . Empty, still, calm, plain, quiet, silent, actionless action is the foundation of all life. (Chuang Tzu, 106-7) Being (of the world and everything in it), wisdom, just rule, right action, and human action all these have their root in stillness (a view also found in Parmenides, Plotinus, and the Upanishads). Again, we are far from the common misunderstanding of stillness as lifelessness. On the contrary, what is intended by Chuang Tzu and other ancient sages is a stillness that underpins the very possibility of life, that is more alive than life itself, as Plotinus might put it. How far such stillness and clarity are from the noise and frequent anger that accompany the insistence on presenting and representing Transcendence in terms generally accessible to human beings!
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Anyone who has undertaken a demanding task such as writing a literary essay, playing a piece of music, or performing a dance, understands that such tasks are only accomplished successfully when they feel effortless. There is a sense in which work that demands a maximum intensity does not feel like work at all as it flows. And it only flows when one is free from other distractions, when one becomes still in ones relaxed concentration on the task at hand. The more profound the work, the more capacious one must be to get it done. From the everyday point of view, one becomes empty to make room for the work. The more empty one is, the better the work that gets done. This contemplative or meditative state in action can then be extended into the areas of human and divine governance, where good human governance refers both to self-mastery as well as wise and just rule over society at large. More pertinent for our immediate purposes, it is this same meditativecontemplative state that occasions an adequate human awareness of Transcendence and makes it virtually impossible either to descend into the inferno of religious conflict or tread on turf well covered by broadminded science. There is a kind of scepticism that is a blessing for humanity: In saying that whatever words we try to assign literally to Transcendence will come across as nonsense, one does not thereby dismiss Transcendence. Rather, one heeds it. For how can it be otherwise? How can Transcendence fail to turn contradictory and worse when reduced to what our words can convey literally? In this as well, Transcendence shows Its love for humanity. For to be beyond human expression is to be open to many kinds of expression, each offering a new perspective, each helping us on our way so long as we do not mistake the perspective for the whole.
- III As far as we are able to ascertain, Rumi never read the work of ancient Chinese sages. He knew neither Lao Tzu nor Chuang Tzu. He did not have to, for what is timeless is available equally to whoever finds a path to it. And so it was that Rumi wrote, in the Mathnavi: Whatever you can think is perishable. That which enters no thought, thats God! (M II 3107) The unthinkability of Transcendence is another way to state that for thought of the ordinary kind, which readily expresses itself in our language, God is nothing and nowhere. Indeed, the Arabic word adam often comes up in Rumis and other Sufi writings, a word normally translated as nothingness or non-being (In spoken Arabic, something that is adam is of the lowest quality). Rumi sees adam as the Buddhists saw the Great Void: To us in our everyday stance, It is nothing, yet everything emerges from It. In his Diwan-i kabir, he writes: To be nothing is the precondition of Being. (D 2642) Waves of being come out of it constantly, so that from their movement a hundred mills are set in motion. (D 155) Being and non-being are brothers, as contrasts are hidden in each other: Did not the Quran say (Sura 31:18): He brings forth the living from the dead? (M V 1018-9)
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We are dealing here with the ultimate paradox. Existence, all of existence, presupposes what from its standpoint can only be metaphorically termed non-existence for it to be possible. Parmenides had already noted the mysterious link between Being and Non-being, so much so that all his affirmations of Being had to be made against the backdrop of a contrast with Non-being. And the misinterpretation began almost immediately! Is Non-being literally nothing, so that, as Parmenides seemed to state it and Plato would do so again in the Sophist, the question arises: How can Non-being be? Or is it Non-being in the sense of beyond Being, so that only when we are confined to Being, as we usually are, we have no choice but to use that strange term Non-being? The ancient Chinese already understood this difficulty, and so they had two words, Wu for Non-being (or Beyond-being, a key concept in the mystical-philosophical theology of IbnArabi), and Yu for Being. A Chinese can easily understand that Wu is more encompassing than Yu. In philosophy, it is dialectics that enables the thinker, faced with a hopeless tangle within a certain domain of thought, to see that domain as a domain, in other words as bounded and relatively limited, beyond which there has to be another realm, less limited, intimated by the very recognition of boundaries. The less limited realm is invisible within those boundaries. It vanishes. The dialectical thinker, from Heraklitus and Parmenides to Hegel and Nietzsche, risks reliance on (and places trust in) what ordinarily vanishes and thereby finds he is able to think more deeply. The Sufi risks himself. Before God, he vanishes. In vanishing, he becomes a universal or cosmic Self in an Islamic rendition of the Hindu motif, namely the unity of Atman and Brahman. When the Sufi returns to himself and tries to find words for Transcendence, he has recourse only to paradox, symbolism, and metaphor. Rumi revelled in paradox. From the interplay between Being and Non-being, other paradoxes followed abundantly. Faithful to his Muslim heritage, Rumi associated those paradoxes with the Names (and attributes) of God that for Ibn Arabi (with whose work Rumi was familiar) were the origin of everything in the world (Chittick, 47-58). Thus in our terms, God is at once merciful and wrathful, at once beautiful and powerful, at once the giver of life and death - but only in our terms. The Sufi whose mysticism culminates in direct awareness of Non-being is thereby aware of the dissolution of those paradoxes from the other side. However, from the side of ordinary mortals like ourselves, they must ever remain paradoxical. The problem with Transcendence, from the general human standpoint, is that it eludes common expression and only resolves itself in contradiction and paradox. To the common eye, It vanishes. Yet humans have an innate longing for Transcendence and many among them find Its elusiveness intolerable. So it is that Christianity and Islam have gained a wide following. In claiming Revelation, they have brought Transcendence into the human domain with greater clarity, or so the faithful believe. Even if we suppose for the sake of argument that there is indeed greater clarity about Transcendence as a result of Revelation, this has come at a price, the extent of which will perhaps be better evaluated by future generations. That explicitness about Transcendence has been exploited by those more interested in power than religion ought not detract from the legitimacy of the longing for Transcendence to come out of hiding, at least to some degree. After all, emergence from deep ambiguity into the light of clarity is how the ancient Greeks understood truth, as their word aletheia suggests. As the disclosure of what is normally hidden, the sense of aletheia is lost to our modern word truth. In Arabic, the relation between al-haqiqa (truth in our sense) and al-haqq (truth in the sense of ultimate reality, also a metaphor for God) is closer to the spirit of aletheia than modern English. However, in Greek mythology and the worldview forever preserved by it, the Hidden has to be persuaded, cajoled,
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sometimes even tricked into disclosure. The notion of the Hidden wanting to disclose Itself was novel. It was introduced by the Abrahamic religions in conjunction with pagan mystical thinkers like Plotinus. The foregoing can be refined further. For the ancient Greeks, what first came out of the primordial Chaos (Non-being in our sense) was Love. All other differentiation on the way to order (Cosmos) came afterwards. Since Love is what most primordially brings forth the Cosmos, there is already an implicit sense that a kind of desire is crucially at work in emergence from the Chaos. If we wish to be more precise, it is not the notion of the Hidden wanting to disclose Itself that was introduced by the Abrahamic religions, but a more explicit affirmation of Love. Thus we have the setting for the famous divine pronouncement that, while believed to be part of Revelation, is actually not in the Quran, but is rather a hadith qudsi: I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created the world! All Sufis gave pride of place to this pronouncement. So far, so good. To see the world itself and much that is in it as full of signs signifying Transcendence in no way leads to the idea that humanity is now in possession of the truth about the Hidden and should therefore make sure that everyone is set along the right path. For those of us who are concerned with tolerance and coexistence, the question now becomes: To what extent can the Hidden be explicit without endangering communal harmony and peace, without subjecting individual human beings to repeated abuse in Its name? We can see where the problems begin. For example, so far as individuals are concerned, Abrahamic theodicy repeatedly assures those whose lot in life is cruelly unfortunate that they are part of Gods plan and ought to see their allotment through a broader perspective. Even a man like Rumi, so obviously filled with Love, succumbs to the temptation to urge those upon whom the worst evils are visited to praise God for His hand in their fate. Is this acceptable? Is it humane? Meanwhile, whole communities have been crushed by Christians and Muslims alike as a consequence of the Abrahamic belief that the truth about Transcendence is known, which becomes the basis for passing judgment on every other form of human life. Recipients of a negative verdict are rarely in an enviable position. Is this an act of love? Such questions stirred the passions of those who sought to change the direction of human life in Europe more than five hundred years ago. And for all their success, we still find ourselves gathered at many meetings in order to discuss issues pertaining to tolerance and coexistence. No doubt, it is unsatisfactory for a more tolerant environment to arise at the expense of religion. It would not be so tolerant in any case if it must be intolerant to religion. However, what seems to be necessary is a more mindful approach to Transcendence, an acceptance that the Hidden must largely remain so, at least so far as the possibility of explicit and detailed statements is concerned. And if one must feel oneself in possession of the Truth, then let this not lead to the temptation to impose such truth on others. The Hidden, even when revealed, is never revealed completely, nor can It, given human limitations. Thus Christians and Muslims both acknowledge Mystery. The concept of Mystery is the key to the depth and breadth of Abrahamic tolerance at the religious level.
- IV With Kant, we have perhaps the most sophisticated modern outlook that at once acknowledges the importance of both science and religion. Kant was at the same time a contributor to science (in his younger years) and an outstanding metaphysician. Transcendence is consistently acknowledged
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throughout his philosophy, in its epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic phases. It sometimes makes a humble appearance in the course of a complex and rigorous argument, sometimes a grand entrance as more general statements are made about human beings, the world, and lies beyond. Above all, since we have just concluded the section about Rumi with an affirmation of the importance of Mystery for the consolidation of coexistence and tolerance, Kant offers us a modern, philosophical rendition of Mystery in the manner that he approaches Transcendence. The transcendent (or noumenal) is unknowable, ineffable to our everyday empirical mindset and methods. Yet It shapes and motivates our scientific undertakings, our moral lives, and art. We have presentiments of Transcendence in our affirmation of freedom, the immortality of the soul, the moral good, the beautiful, and the Supreme Being. Kants philosophy offers us an excellent example of dialectics as discussed earlier. Again and again, in great detail, his philosophy lays out various domains of inquiry and living that seem to have strict boundaries, yet are only laid out successfully owing to our ability to transcend them. This is why Kant has no problem at all accommodating himself to the most comprehensive and unfettered scientific undertakings. Wherever science arrives, this will only add to the means by which Transcendence radiates Its Presence silently. In Kant, the silence with which we address Transcendence is therefore not the silence of dismissive sceptics, but that of genuine respect. For us, then, Kant offers a model of coexistence between religions (because of the centrality of Mystery in his view of Transcendence and the dogged of an explicitness that he believes would be futile for human beings to attempt), as well as between religion and science (because of the complete openness to science just mentioned). Therefore, any serious evaluation of Fethullah Glens philosophy in that regard ought to pass through the Kantian legacy. However, as we have noted in a series of questions raised towards the end of Section III, the early modern period that began (philosophically and scientifically) with Bacon and Descartes and was ended by Kant as he propelled modernity into its latter stage (which continues to shape contemporary life) was marked decisively by repugnance over the excesses of religious institutions and organizations that had gained widespread power over the lives of most Europeans. We need only bear in mind three interrelated motivations for secular attitudes: Religious wars, especially the 1618-1648 conflict; nation building, driven by strong rationalist yearnings after the Thirty Years War (Toulmin, 69-80, 89-129); and the successes of scientists in improving public health and increasing rigour and precision in the human understanding of nature, particularly the physical world, after religious authorities had opposed the undertaking of free inquiry into, say, the anatomy and physiology of the human body with a view to a better grasp of the nature of illness and wellbeing. Against the backdrop of developments that would define modernity in both its early and latter stages, Kant could hence only be vigorously opposed to any explicit statement of religious doctrine, to any claim about Transcendence that is epistemologically grounded. For Kant, when it comes to Transcendence, nobody can claim to have the truth or any clarity about It whatsoever. Even if Transcendence matter most to us, even if knowledge be bathed with transcendent intimations at its limit that drive it onward and forward, even if morality be ultimately impossible without It, even if art and nature reveal purpose and harmony that suggest It, Transcendence cannot be known. What can be known about nature ought to be left to the natural sciences. Philosophy qua theory of knowledge simply shows how the scientific pursuit of knowledge within the empirical world is metaphysically well grounded. We are back to our ancient beginnings, with the movement appropriately modified. Again, we are left wondering how the human longing for explicitness and clarity regarding Transcendence can be fulfilled constructively, with due regard for the unprecedented need for coexistence and tolerance in
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our globalized world. Let us then recapitulate the movement with regard to the deepest foundation for tolerance and coexistence through Kant: In ancient times, as evidenced in pre-Socratic, neo-Platonic, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Aboriginal awakenings, there was an accommodation with the ambiguity and opacity of Transcendence and comfort with the idea that the Chaos or the Empty are indeed respectively a Chaos beyond all order (and so sustaining every conceivable order) and an Emptiness fuller than all plenitude (and so sustaining plenitude). There was no question of conflict between religion and the study of nature, for all was encompassed within the broadest and most open outlook imaginable. With the emergence of revealed (Abrahamic) religion, the idea took hold that human beings now have the truth about Transcendence (Note as well the crucial idea that truth is something that can be had in the first place, and how this differs radically from the ancient Greek notion of truth as disclosures of the Hidden, with emphasis always on the Hidden rather than the disclosed). It is well known that as soon as Christianity became a state religion, no other possibilities for religious expression were allowed except for Jews for obvious Biblical reasons. Scientific and free philosophical inquiry were also suppressed or integrated into the overall views of the Church. Islam was initially far more tolerant than Christianity on all counts. The Quran stipulated that followers of other Abrahamic faiths be treated with respect, and this was extended to Hindus, Buddhists, and others as Islam spread across Asia. Meanwhile, the Qurans explicit urgings to study Nature combined with Muslim exposure to ancient holistic and intellectual traditions to create a vast cultural flowering that reached its zenith during the 9th and 10th centuries CE, and would be repeated during the early Ottoman centuries and sporadically in places like Cordoba and Samarqand. However, for reasons that are now fairly well understood, many of which are internal (meaning not related to imperialism/colonialism), this flowering came to an end and eventually, many of the motivations for the modern rebellion in Europe took hold of Muslim aspirations (Khuri, 213-276). The modern rebellion, for its part, was often unable to distinguish between religious organizations and institutions, and religion itself, perhaps because the Catholic Church had habituated Europeans so much to the idea that the two cannot and ought not be separated. Thus, whatever might be fairly blamed on institutions was attributed to religion as such, with the result that modern methodology and practice all too frequently suppressed or ignored a human concern so central that it is possibly at the heart of what it is to be human. Even Kant can be said to have kept Transcendence safely locked within a Mystery that would not allow any conceivable practical abuse. However, several historical developments combined to cast doubt on once allpowerful institutions that had reinforced indifference or hostility to religion. It should be noted, however, that the reality was always far more complicated. The USA in effect knowingly encouraged religious life by keeping the state away from it. Religious symbolism was maintained at the top of the British monarchy, since the monarch is also head of the Church of England. The Federal Republic in Germany has taxation policies that indirectly support the various churches. So the main examples in Europe of states opposed to religion were France and the Soviet Union as well as Kemalist Turkey at least until 1950. So what has re-emerged is not so much religious life as a more serious attitude towards it. The post-modern phase, then, has two relevant aspects, the one more sceptical than ever, the other more mindful of religion. Now, however, the requirement is for religious life to encapsulate
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the lessons that must be learned from a long authoritarian past as well as the extremism of the present. Specifically, the question here is whether a contemporary way has been found for Transcendence to regain its resonance and place without the kind of explicitness that gives rise to misinterpretation and abuse, in short to intolerance. This is the historical-existential setting for the consideration of the thought of Fethullah Glen.
-VIn the thought of Fethullah Glen, one finds several ways that Transcendence as Mystery is indeed heeded so that It regains Its resonance in a contemporary spirit, in particular with regard to the great care shown for the promotion of tolerance and coexistence. We may single out three moments in such renewal: In the first place, Glen highlights a faculty by which one finds continuity with the Hidden; second, and crucially, Glen highlights a mediating level between the Hidden and the disclosed (or the Unseen and the seen in the Islamic conception); and third, Glen directly emphasizes the Hidden within the many faces and modalities of the Divine. Let us see how. In a book that collects many of his writings on fundamental questions and topics, namely Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Glen almost from the beginning turns to what many modern philosophers have avoided. He talks about the inner depths hidden within each one of us and relates those depths directly to the Hidden. In the spirit of what has been argued throughout this paper, what is truly profound within human beings remains invisible to a positivistic ideology. In our words, it vanishes. Yet from its ancient beginnings and clearly so in the Socratic stance, the importance of what seems to vanish had been acknowledged. For one thing, there was the Delphic oracle Know thyself, for which Socrates had the utmost reverence. The Socratic dialogues preserved by Plato are exemplary on showing how what is superficially elusive is also decisive, not only at a deeper level, but because it is depth itself. Socrates relentlessly wanted the inner spirit of his interlocutors to come forth, and because this does not happen through argument alone, the arguments always seemed to fail to reach their conclusion. But it is an instructive failure. Among all levels of irony known attributed to Socrates, the greatest might well be this: In their failure, his arguments reveal what is most important about human beings, which is whatever it is that allows them to know themselves. Thus, Glen writes Our interest in our environment and our love for humankind that is, our ability to embrace creation depends on knowing and understanding our own essence, our ability to discover ourselves, and to feel a connection with our Creator. In parallel with the ability to discover and feel our inner depths and hidden potential within our essence, we will be able to appreciate that others also possess the same potential. Moreover, because these inner values are directly related to the Creator, and because a respect for the riches that are hidden in every creature is nurtured, we will start to see every living thing from a different perspective and in a different manner. (Glen, 6). With a few words, Glen is able to encapsulate so many crucial interconnected insights. He does not waste time on arguing for the depth that he affirms because of the long history that shows the futility of such argument and the readily available example of Socrates, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marcel, and others whose work instigates awareness of depth in the sincere and open-minded reader who has not yet forsaken that perennial human potential. Thus, Glen feels free to go ahead and further affirm the intimate link between human and divine inwardness. At its most profound, all inwardness is one in the mystical philosophy. However, Glen is not content to leave things at that. He wishes to extend
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such human potential to all human beings and to make this the basis for the solidarity that cuts across religious, sectarian, cultural, ethnic, and other lines. Even more, he extends inwardness to all life, hence anchoring sensitivity to the environment far more substantially than in ordinary environmentalism. Our inner aspect, the presence of the Hidden within every one of us, becomes the strongest possible basis for tolerance, coexistence, and care for the environment. Emphasis on the Hidden, on Mystery, within the overall approach to Transcendence is unproblematic for Glen because there is an inherent continuity with the hidden within all human beings, actually within all being. In a manner characteristic of the Sufi mindset, upon attainment of the overall vision and union that underpin mystical thought, the duality hidden/disclosed pervades all being and connects them to what is beyond Being. The hidden and the disclosed are themselves two aspects of the divine (as we shall see). And setting Abrahamic mysticism apart from other mystical traditions the Hidden, crucially, wills disclosure. As for what it is that allows human beings to become aware of themselves as harbouring such hidden treasures, Glen did not have to reinvent the wheel for it has already been said many times. However we may mean it, there is soul; and just as a compass is always oriented towards the magnetic north, so does the soul turn towards God (Glen, 11).
- VI Quite often, however, thought genuinely turned towards Mystery in intense mindfulness of the integrity of Transcendence leaves us without a bridge between the Hidden and the disclosed. However, this is not the case with Glen. The strength of mystical thought is, having a view of Reality from the inside, however fleeting, it is then able to proceed through a graded dynamic that expresses the turning of Reality from inside to outside. Instead of the Platonic duality of Forms (or Ideas or Archetypes) and beings in the world that are instantiations of those Archetypes, Glen follows in the footsteps of a trinitarian tradition stretching from Plotinus to Ibn Arabi. For in addition to Archetypes, called yn-i Sabite in Turkish, and the physical entities (for which no technical name is usually given, not even in Plato), there is the mediating level, the world of images, or Alem-i Misal (Eris, 134). Archetypes become physical entities through images. It is not accidental that image is related to imagination. Our creative imagination is what helps us make the turn successfully beyond the physical. This is universally true. How much art is there that is far from explicitly religious, yet it invites us to behold the material in a dematerialized state? Art, dreams, other imaginings these are the pole with which we vault over the empirical world. Kant acknowledged this in his third critique, when he turned to art and explained as clearly and rigorously as he could how it transformed the rules through which judgements of beauty are made. This could only be done through what he termed genius, which among other things involves an exceptional imagination (Kant, 1987, 9-67 and 174-188). Many philosophers have strangely failed to pay sufficient attention to the imagination, which reinforced the modern predicament with regard to the apparently insurmountable barrier between the individual subjective consciousness and the external world. However, Sufi thinkers, like postKantian Idealist and Romantic philosophers and poets, were able since Ibn Arabi to posit an imaginal world that lies between the Hidden and the disclosed. Ibn Arabi colourfully called that world the barzakh or Isthmus, which was readily adopted by Glen (Eris, 136). An isthmus readily suggests a world between two others, and we might try to imagine the emergence of a cosmic shore of
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possibility from the Mystery of Beyond-being behind which the contours of the physical universe begin to form. This imaginary cosmic shore is a world in transition, where the images have formed but have yet to become materialized. This pre-existing tendency to physical form is surprisingly finding recognition among some contemporary astronomers and physicists. Glen adds another dimension to Ibn Arabis notion of the barzakh. For him, not only is the imaginal world ontologically between the mysterious Source and physical entification (or taayyn), but it is spiritually between earthly life and the afterlife (Eris, 136). The mediating spiritual domain in Glens mystical ontology strikes one as being rather more compassionate and appealing than the traditional notion of limbo. This reminds us that the role of mercy should not be overlooked in Glen, although it is not immediately related to our chosen subject. Nevertheless, mercy is a central concept in his thought and, of course, it informs his commitment to tolerance and coexistence.
- VII We now turn to the third moment in Glens renewal of the human connection with Transcendence: his emphasis on Mystery or the Hidden even as he also acknowledges what Transcendence reveals to Muslims. As he evokes the sophistication of Ibn Arabis mystically grounded ontology, Glen makes some fundamental conceptual distinctions of his own. Of special interest is that between Ehadiyet and Vahidiyet (Eris, 125-8). The two terms take full advantage of the subtleties that can be expressed through the derivation of different words from the same Arabic root (In fact all of the technical terms in Glen that we have mentioned are Arabic in origin, Turkified only phonetically). They both pertain to the word for One or Oneness. The reason why Glen needs two terms is his need to distinguish between the aspect of Oneness by which it envelops multiplicity, and that by which Oneness shows Itself in multiplicity. To the extent that Oneness envelops multiplicity (which is our world), It cannot be known. It is incomprehensible. Nothing can be said about It. In the Kantian sense, It is the purely noumenal. To the extent that Oneness reveals Itself, It is not only known but desires to be known. The phenomena are signs of the One turning outward in a primordial act of Love. In this way, Glen is able to heed both the demands of Mystery and the demands of the faithful. Mystery forever and inherently abides with and within Itself in a manner beyond the reach of all but those whose mystical commitments have led them to the One. Even then, they are unable to say anything definite about It. Ek-stasis in ancient Greek automatically evokes a state outside of oneself. One is at a loss for words and only symbols accessible to initiates and then only indirectly begin to convey the depths that have been attained. The purely noumenal aspect of the One, always encompassing the phenomena and all words and qualities conceivable to humanity, is hence always open, always available for another path or another interpretation. In and of Itself, it guarantees coexistence and tolerance. For who dares claim to be in possession of the final word about It? On the other hand, Glen remains faithful to his Islamic calling and so heeds the significance of Revelation. The same Oneness that embraces all Being and so is Beyond-being at the same time has left traces with all beings for which soul has been used in reference to humans thus enabling them to rise to an awareness of connectedness with It; and to add emphasis to Its outward turn, It has spoken to the faithful, thus letting Itself be known in a manner accessible to human beings. Intolerance begins only when the Word of Oneness is taken literally and interpreted in partisan language (Us believers against them unbelievers). It begins when humans, their being confined and
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their existence impoverished for a great variety of reasons, individual and collective, psychological and political, act as though they were not the fortunate repositories of traces of the outward Turn taken by Oneness in short, as though their souls were asleep. For nobody with a living soul needs to assert his spirituality in opposition to those he deems in error. This is what is often forgotten by those who wish to emphasize that the Hidden has willed Its disclosure to some extent: They only remember the words of disclosure (and often fail to remember them particularly well and more often still are oblivious to their true meaning) and forget about the hidden treasure within not only each one of us, as Glen so aptly reminds us, but there as a sign of its Origin in all beings, so that we have abundantly what it takes for us to coexist with all forms of life and with our environment.
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RATIONAL RELIGION: GLENS MIDDLE WAY

HOWARD WETTSTEIN 74
Abstract This paper explores the middle way. Talk of a middle way harkens back to Aristotles Golden Mean, and in my own Jewish tradition to Maimonides. I explore the synthesis, if that is the right word, between the extremes that the middle way represents. I delineate two models of integration, the first, theoretical compromise. The second way, which I prefer, leaves the extremes and the truths they emphasize in place. Consider the alleged conflict between science, in the broadest sense, and religion. The problem with religious fundamentalism and also what we may call scientism is the claim to the exclusive possession of the truth. My approach is to leave in place what seems plain, that both sides possess truth, and to see the middle-way as a practical-reason project, one that emphasizes context. A parallel example is the apparent conflict between ethical universalism and particularism. Rather than decide between these, or produce a theoretical third position, we should give great weight to universalism seeing all people as of equal value and ethical significance and particularism with its attention to our families and ethnic and religious communities. The idea is to give appropriate weight to each of these depending upon context, and allowing each to call a halt to the dominance of the other. Finally, I apply my approach to the middle way to basic theology, to the discordant scriptural anthropomorphic characterizations of God. I propose that we use these diverse images in a practical way, to nurture religious development, to stimulate growth in our relationship to God. What the religious traditions give us, or so I argue, is not so much a theory of God, as a route to holiness.
just as God wove the universe like a lace on the loom of love, the most magical and charming music in the bosom of existence is always love.75 Fethullah Glen has made a major contribution to Islamic Modernism. My project here is to generalize to a view one might call religious modernism, or even better, rational religion. I have been stimulated by Glens thought to reflect in some of the ways indicated in this paper. Needless to say, Glen is not responsible for the directions my own reflections take me. But I am grateful for the stimulation, and for all the good that the Glen movement has stimulated during these dark times. My own orientation is traditional or even Orthodox Judaism. But orthodoxy is the wrong expression for the sort of wonderful constellation of backward and forward looking thinking that Glen
74
Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of California, Riverside.
Graduated in philosophy from Yeshiva College; MA and PhD, the City University of New York. Dr Wettstein has published a number of papers on the philosophy of language, and two books; Has Semantics Rested On a Mistake? and Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 1991) and The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford University Press, 2004). He is a senior co-editor (with Peter French) of Midwest Studies in Philosophy; and has edited a number of other books including Themes From Kaplan (Oxford University Press, 1989, co-edited) and Diasporas and Exiles (University of California Press, 2002). Over the last decade he has worked on philosophy of religion, on which he is currently preparing on a book, and published papers on topics like awe, doctrine, the problem of evil, and the viability of philosophical theology.
75
Fethullah Glen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, p. 8.
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advocates and with which I feel great sympathy. The idea of a middle way of course brings to mind Aristotles talk of the golden mean, and in the context of Jewish thought brings to mind the great medieval Aristotelean, Maimonides, who would feel much sympathy I think for Glens middle way. It is striking that both religious fundamentalists and anti-religious scientistic thinkers agree on so much: for example, that science and religion are fundamentally opposed, that enlightened reason is dramatically at odds with traditional revelation (no matter which religious tradition is in question). Each of these schools discerns the truth found in his favored domain; but each ignores the important truth in his opponents domain. The middle way refuses to sacrifice either truth. The middle way as Professor Kuru helpfully points out is not a marriage of convenience, a sort of compromise. It is a principled outlook, one that acknowledges multiple truths. I would suggest that complete truth is an ideal, one beyond the human ken. There is no way to escape our human limitations which is not to sneeze at the substantial progress we can make. It is sometimes suggested that with Divine help, for example, revelation, we can sidestep our limitations. There is surely an element of truth in this. At the same time, who but us, with our limitations, is to decide between the various versions of Divine help that are proffered? A fundamental question about any such middle-way position is the nature of the synthesis we wish to achieve. How exactly are scientific truth and religious values to be integrated if integrated is the right word? I want to suggest two different models and to advocate one of them. But first, I want to generalize the problem of radical oppositions. Lets add a few such oppositions to our list, as there is something general I want to say about such apparently polar contrasts. Closely related to the oppositions already mentioned are materialism/spiritualism, and rationalism/mysticism. To move to a dimension closer to ethical, we can mention worldliness/asceticism. Even more centrally ethical is the opposition universalism/particularism, the question of our ethical attitudes towards human beings as such as opposed to our more immediate brethren, say in the Islamic community, or in the Jewish or Christian communities. I would even add going out a bit on a limb perhaps reverence/irreverence, although there matters get more complicated. The first model not my favored one is one of integration. The idea is that there is some sort of blending, a finding of harmony, a unification of the extremes. Im reminded here of a Rabbinic Midrash, a discussion of another opposition: that between Gods lovingkindness and his demand for justice. The Midrash suggests that the unification of these, their harmony, is not to be found on earth, but in the world to come. Interestingly, there is a related discussion in the Talmud in which it is said that God prays. The Talmudic interlocutor inquires incredulously we may imagine: What does God pray? The answer is this: God prays that his demand for justice is overwhelmed by his loving kindness. This, I take it, is a distinctively Jewish sort of reflection; Im not sure that there is anything parallel in Islam (or Christianity) Im eager to discuss this. But it puts in bold relief the hopelessness of the quest for a perfect worldly resolution of these oppositions. Heres another suggestive example. There is a Hasidic adage that a person should carry in his pocket two pieces of paper: I am but dust and ashes, and The world was created for me. I used to think that the really difficult trick is to get both of these highly dissonant messages on the same piece of paper; to live a life that is not so compartmentalized, that integrates the superficially incompatible messages.
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Maurice Friedman suggested to me that it would be better to leave them on separate sheets, maybe even in different pockets. The imagery of a single piece of paper suggested to Friedman what he took to be a bad idea: that the philosophic job is to render these insights coherent, to articulate an inclusive principle. What one needs is rather a kind of practical skill, the ability to negotiate experience respecting both truths that is, both images, each of which illuminates human experience. Universalism/particularism: When one considers the very different demands of an ethical universalism as opposed the stance of various particularistic views that give ethical weight to ones own people or religious community, it may be tempting to seek a principled way to decide various questions that arise, that is a theoretical way to work ones way between the competing demands. This would be a form of what I called integration, a theoretical integration of the two poles. My alternative is that we focus instead on the truth to be found at the extremes. We need not average them out or find a theoretical treatment that states the one comprehensive truth. Rather, once noting the multiple truths, we can focus our attention on the practical ability to carry on in light of those truths. To begin with the power of power of universalism, all people and not only my group are created in and reflections of Gods image, and a violation of another person is a violation of Gods image and thus (at the very least symbolically) of God. To violate a person is to profane Gods name. Such a view has something important in common with modern liberal individualism, namely, the irreducible value of the individual. But for the modern individualist, such value is the sole locus of ethical significance. Accordingly, the ethical significance of being a member of a people, or of a religious community is problematic; one needs to work hard, too hard, within such a liberal framework to give significance to ones people, even perhaps to members of ones family. My child, after all, is no more a person than anyone else. While there is much in contemporary liberal individualism that I respect, it is for me ethically significant in the first instance that I am a member of a family/people/religious community. I care, and Im right to care, about the latter in a way thats more immediate than my care for humanity. At the same time, while there may be a time and a place for focus, even exclusive focus, on ones own family and ethnic or religious community, one can never forget that such particularism constitutes only as aspect of ones ethical being. What we have seen in recent times among fundamentalists across the religions is a runaway particularism, an insensitivity to the other that should strike us an ethically unacceptable, sometimes quite horrible. What seems to me important, in reflecting on the multiple truths, universalist and particularist, is the thought that this is no real polar opposition; there is the potential here for a coherent approach. However, the sort of coherence we are after is not necessarily theoretical coherence in the form of an inclusive principle. More important is the ability to negotiate experience, appealing to one idea or the other when fitting, allowing each to call a halt when we are nearing excessive attention to the other.76 Of course, I have not shown nor could I, nor would I wish to the impossibility of producing a kind of super-principle, one that delineates the experiences in which one or the other of the opposing ideas is applicable. However, we dont even know the shape, so to speak, of such a principle. Do we, or ought we, have any confidence that the cases fall under some illuminating formula? Think about the cases in which ones universalistic scruples might usefully be brought into play. Ought we to be
76
The matter seems related to the Aristotelian outlook on ethics that gives pride of place to practical skill over articulated
principle.
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confident that all share some common feature or features, other than, of course, being cases in which particularism should not be getting undue weight? Even if one identified a plausible candidate principle, isnt it likely that it would have to be gerrymandered repeatedly to meet the needs of novel cases? While there remains the possibility of an inclusive principle, there is reason to be skeptical.77 I turn to the application of this sort of thinking my own take on the middle wayto our original opposition: science and religion. Science in the broadest sense and as Glen emphasizes, this includes the social sciences as well are the key to unlocking the nature of nature, including human nature. Of course we do find in Scripture some claims about matters of fact, historical events and the like. But such claims, as I see it, are, as we say in philosophy, defeasible. This attitude expresses itself dramatically in Maimonides radical too radical for many attitude to creation ex nihilo. Maimonides roundly criticizes the Aristotelian proofs for the eternity of matter and espouses a belief in the religious traditions conception of creation ex nihilo. But he adds the thought this is the radical part that if the Aristotelian proofs had really been good, he Maimonides would have immediately accepted them and would have proceeded to reinterpret scripture. The scriptural characterization of creation would have remained crucially important for Maimonides there would be much to learn from it about the universe and our place in it but we would no longer read it as an account of the actual process of creation. So what we know by human reason is what we know, and religion does not come to tell us otherwise. Again this is not because religion loses some battle with science but rather because the world and not only Scripture is Gods book, and we have been given the (of course fallible) gift of reading the book of nature. But values are another matter. Of course there are some values immediately implicated in sciences reading of Gods book of nature, values like intellectual honesty and integrity, openness to new ideas, and the like. But broader ethical, moral, and personal values are another matter. The modern world I gratefully live in a liberal democracy emphasizes values like (as in the American constitution) life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not for a moment to belittle these, what about the values that are focal in the religious tradition, like awe, love, and gratitude? Those of us who have tasted Gods love and who live with a sense of awe as a background condition of our lives, who attain with Gods help a sense of centeredness, who feel Gods providence we know what religion provides. This is no replacement for something science provides, not at all. It is perhaps a replacement or, better, a supplement to what modern culture provides. But we need not feel any sense of bifurcation between the religious sides of our lives and our interest in science and more broadly our interest in the gifts of modern culture. These too including music and the arts are Gods gifts. If there is any sense of priority here between science (and we might include the other products of modern culture) and religion, I would distribute it. With respect to facts on the ground, including the nature of the natural world, priority goes of course to science in the broadest sense. Not because it ever achieves the final word, but because it is our God-given guide to nature. With respect to values in the broadest sense, with respect to providing a framework for life, priority goes to religion. What Im advocating and without being a Glen scholar, I hope that what I say is at least broadly in his spirit is unfortunately far removed from what is perhaps the dominant trend, certainly in
77
This brings to mind Ludwig Wittgensteins discussion of family resemblance in Philosophical Investigations. As with
Wittgensteins examples, there may well be some more or less trivial common features that constitute necessary conditions. All games are human activities, but that is beside the point.
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Orthodox Judaism, and other forms of emphatically traditional religion. What I find is a gap: those who share the sort of attitude towards western culture Ive been espousing tend to either reject religious tradition outright or else exhibit weakness in their religious practice and knowledge of traditional religious texts. Those who are steeped in the traditional texts and in Judaism that means (at the highest level) Talmud tend to a fundamentalist outlook, a lack of appreciation of the value, even the religious value, of western culture; it also often means a parochial attitude with respect to the other. I conclude this aspect of my discussion with a related reflection on the middle way, one suggested by Professor Kurus discussion of taqwa, what in Hebrew we call hashgacha, divine providence, what Kuru refers to as being in Gods safe-keeping. To quote Kuru: Derived from wiqaya, meaning protection, taqwa means to be in safe-keeping or protection of God. This has two aspects. The first is that a man fears God and obeys Him by performing His commands and refraining from his prohibitions. The second aspect of taqwa is that, by studying nature and life and discovering Gods laws controlling them, people find scientific knowledge and order their lives. The establishment of sciences depends upon the discovery of these laws. In order to be under the safe-keeping of God, the true religion and sciences should be combined, for they are two faces or two expressions of a single truth. Kurus last point is one I have already expressed some skepticism about: Whether or not science and religion are expressions of a single truth seems to me complicated, for reasons discussed above. We certainly do not have language to express any such single truth. We have multiple languages, scientific and religious. But his central point seems to me both deep and important. Let me begin with a remark about Maimonides, on the topic of divine providence, divine protection. Maimonides writes that divine protection at the individual level depends upon ones knowledge of philosophy, including for Maimonides ones knowledge of natural philosophy, that is, scientific knowledge. I always thought that Maimonides here, indeed as elsewhere, overemphasizes intellect. He argues, for another example, that the intellect constitutes the bridge between man and God; this always seems to me an overemphasis on the purely cognitive. But Kurus quote helped me to see the truth in Maimonides position on providence. Consider the contrast between one who has advanced knowledge of the laws of nature and one whose knowledge is quite primitive. Or think of the difference between our culturewith respect for example to medicineand that of the medievals. Our knowledge quite simply provides quite a measure of protection for our well-being. And if one is thinking about science as our reading of Gods book of nature, then our being diligent readers of this book means that we are extended considerable protection. My daughter recently gave birth (excitingly to her first child and my first grandchild). But she became ill with an infection that used to be (and still is in many parts of the world) a leading killer of women, post-delivery. Medical science made her recovery almost trivial, an example of Gods lovingkindness and protection. But the scientific side is only one side of the matter, as Kuru emphasizes. From the point of view of traditional religion, the sort of divine protection just discussed is only a part of the story of providence. A deep engagement with Gods ways provides a centering of ones life, protection from, or at least divine fellowship with respect to, the inevitable dark aspects of life, as well as a powerful and heightened sense of life as meaningful, rich, significant. Without such a religious sensibility, one can
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attain some protection from scientific knowledge, as discussed above. But one is not yet brought under Gods wings, as it were. As I say, one does not need to see these aspects as expressions of a single truth. God can be One without reducing the multiplicity of his teachings and commandments to anything so unitary. So far I have been discussing the middle way, and two models for the nature of the synthesis. My idea has been that instead of seeking a theoretical resolution, a single conceptual truth that resolves the apparent conflict, we remain at the conceptual level with different sorts of truths. There is no incoherence, but the coherence is not to be found in a conceptual resolution, but rather in practical know-how, the ability to work with two different perspectives, relying on the appropriate one in a given context. I now want to extend my analysis to a basic area of theology. Here I am out on a limb, perhaps alone. I do not suppose that I am elaborating Glens thought or indeed Islamic thought, although I will be quite interested in the reactions of scholars of Islam. What I say derives somewhat from my Jewish perspective, although my view is by no means the usual outlook even in that context.78 It is I will explore another and very different sort of opposition, actually a series of them, the variety of discordant images of God found in traditional sources, like the Bible, Quran, etc. I am no expert in the Quran, and so Ill restrict my discussion to the Bible. But I am most interested in reactions from Islamic practitioners and scholars. Lets consider some of the great variety of anthropomorphic images of God in biblical literature, as well as in the elaboration of that literature in Rabbinic sources like the Talmud: God is a loving and nurturing, even if demanding, parent; a benevolent judge/ruler who does not forget acts of loving kindness and generously and lovingly passes on the rewards to ones progeny; a righteous judge who has access to our deepest secrets and who rewards and punishes accordingly; king of the universe, to be treated with lordly deference; bridegroom; husband; woman in labor; angry, regretful, even vengeful, remembering the sins of the parents and visiting them upon even distant generations. It is tempting subsequent to the philosophical/theological discussions beginning in the medieval period to dismiss such characterizations as simply figurative; the Bible, we are told by the medievals, speaks figuratively; it speaks in the language of men. However, its quite striking to a student of the Talmud that such anthropomorphic characterization does not decline even in Talmudic times (0-600 C.E.), a period characterized by the most rigorous and analytical development of Jewish law. The same figures who think almost hyper-analytically about law talk about God in these picturesque ways, ways that proved almost an embarrassment to the later philosopher/theologians of medieval times. My idea somewhat contrary to the philosophical tradition is not to dismiss, but rather to give great significance to, such anthropomorphic characterizations. Indeed, they play a crucial role in living a religious life. The great power of religion to affect life seems crucially related to seeing God as loving, caring, sometimes disappointed in us, sometimes even angry. Peoples religious lives revolve around these traits of God; the focus of the religious practitioner is hardly the austere God of the
78
I have been much helped in my revolt against the usual mode of Jewish theology by the seminal work of Abraham Joshua
Heschel. iSee his Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York, 1996).
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philosophers beyond all such anthropomorphic characterization no matter how much the latter may appeal to certain philosophical instincts. The philosopher/theologians I mentioned Maimonides is probably the most highly regarded among Jewish thinkers were of course exercised by a fundamental problem: Even given the practical, pastoral importance of the anthropomorphic imagery, still what is God really like? Can He be truly characterized in such human terms? Biblical poetry (and poetic prose) is one thing, but the theoretical characterization of God is quite another thing. My work in the philosophy of religion including a book Im currently writing has much to do with this contrast between styles of theology: Biblical/Rabbinic anthropomorphic characterization vs. the purification project of the medievals. I mention the topic here because its another context for the sort of issue Ive been discussing in this paper. The Biblical rendition of God issues in many, divergent, characterizations of God, in addition to the somewhat discordant hint that He is somehow beyond all of this. But neither the Bible nor Rabbinic literature is much exercised with how to put these different pictures together; how to theorize away the apparent diversity. Thats worth more than a moments notice. So again we have a domain in which there are conflicting ideas, each of which possesses a kind of truth or validity. And I will argue here as I have earlier in this paper that these tensions are to resolved not by discovering a higher order principle, but by the acquisition of a practical ability or skill, a kind of knowing how. The agent develops a sense of balance, the ability to call upon the idea appropriate to the situation at hand. Let me explain. Think of the diverse, sometimes conflicting, images of God as profiles, each a view from a perspective. Each profile, each perspective, is crucial for the religious life. Each has validity. Each illuminates in its own way. There are situations in which the image of God as nurturing parent is salient. In other situations other imagery may be salient, perhaps God as an impartial judge, or as a friend, or as creator of heaven and earth, or as one you have wronged, or as the parent of one you have wronged. There are still other situations in which two or more profiles of God are all somehow salient. Some of these may be very pleasant; as if one were taking in several varieties of beauty at once, or through several sensory modalities. Some of these situations, though, may be troubling, confusing. Such situations are analogous to one who works for his father-in-law, who also happens to be his teacher, landlord, and plays unnamed other roles in his life.79 One can readily imagine situations that become quite complicated and confusing. One doesnt quite know where one stands. It is striking to me that until the medieval period and with it the influence of philosophy on the religious tradition the resolution of the tension between the conflicting images and ideas gets little to no theoretical attention, at least within the Jewish context. For theoretical resolution at least a leading candidate for such a resolution would involve an account of the entity that lies behind the profiles, an account of how these could possibly be perspectives on the same being. Rabbinic tradition seems focused not on what we might call the theory of God, but rather on the plane of action. The images of God are indeed images of One God; their discordance is superficial. Their coherence, however, reflects itself in a life informed by all of these images.
79
I have been helped in thinking about the diversity of images of God in the Bible, and the implications thereof by the work
of M. Halbertal and A. Margalit in their book, Idolotry (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996).
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The religious life involves a combination of practical abilities or skills that are grounded in understanding, intuitive if not articulate. The religious life also involves habits, behavioral and affective. All of this requires education, training, and practice. As is our way with such things, some are more given to it, more gifted at it, some will take to it more easily than others, others may come along more slowly, but may attain greater heights in the end. One stage in religious development is understanding the many different human relationships in terms of which these very different profiles of God are formulated: developing a sense of what it is to relate to another as child to parent, as subject to monarch, as defendant to judge, as creature to creator, as lover, as friend, and so on. Developing a sense of these with their directions reversed is also of great utility: parent to child, monarch to subject, and so on. The more vivid ones grasp, the more deeply one sees into these relationships, the farther along one is in this stage of the training. Some of this understanding requires the accumulation sometimes years of experience. This education is a lifelong affair. The next step not that these need to be separated in time is the application of this growing understanding to the relationships between people and God. One needs to think about and practice seeing oneself in relation to God as child to parent, with the variety of complications that entails; and to think about it from both sides of the relationship. And as lover to lover, friend to friend, judged to judge, and all the rest. The payoff of ones work the propriety and caring for others, the comfort and solace, the elevation and dignity that are the concomitants of developed religious character depend upon ones ability to negotiate the world feeling and acting in ways appropriate to just such relationships. One needs to feel and act as if one has a Godly parent, a Godly lover or friend, a Godly judge who sees all, a creator of inexorable laws of nature that proceed as if we didnt exist, even I suspect an angry, even vengeful Godly ruler this last being more complicated and controversial. Of course, one doesnt feel and act in these ways all the time, or all at the same time. Part of the skill what takes training, practice, and experience is to call upon, or be called upon by, the appropriate image at the appropriate time, sometimes a single image, sometimes multiple ones. The latter can be confusing, disconcerting, and it can be wonderful, sometimes both. At the death of a parent, for example, many of these images may strike: God as creator of inexorable laws of nature; God as friend and comforter; (and since belonging and community becomes so important at such times) God as focal point glue, as it were of the religious community, a community that extends horizontally the present community and vertically the community over time; and perhaps others. Ritualized prayersomething that also takes training and practice if it is to be more than mechanical (and even if it is merely mechanical)provides another example of the sometimes confusing but wonderful multiplicity. In prayer, when it works, many of the magnificent images are summoned. One is provided with the opportunity of experiencing these relationships and of reflecting upon them, seeing more deeply into them, seeing new aspects all the time. That there are multiple images, that they seem discordant properties that make theory seem very far away are thus rationalized. We dont do so by finding a theoretical account of God that puts the images in their right place. Rather the miscellany, the mixed multitude of robustly anthropomorphic ideas and images, facilitate the religious life.
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I will close with some personal experiences, ones that illustrate for me something of the middle way. These do not reflect all of the issues discussed above; the middle way touches so many domains. But they do reflect especially my discussion of universalism and particularism. I will mention two experiences, both related to my life as a university professor. I read this year an astounding account of the Palestinian experience, Once Upon a Country, by Sari Nusseibeh. It was a transforming experience, but one even exceeding by a related experience I will mention below. I went to Jerusalem this past June, to study Talmud, my practice for the past decade, and to engage in philosophical/theological/political discussions with Jerusalemites, again as I have for a decade every summer. Upon arriving I sent Dr. Nusseibeh an e-mail asking to see him, and we were able to set up a meeting at his office. He is President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. My talk with Nusseibeh was astounding. As a Jew and an American, I am not privy to first-hand versions of Palestinian experience. I hear of that experience only through various filters. Dr. Nusseibeh and I talked philosophy for a while, and then we discussed the political situation. I very much appreciated his great insight, and his ability rare in the Jewish community and the Palestinian community to cut through the mythologies and show a genuine concern primarily for his own people but also for the other side. At one point I asked, What can I do to help? His answer was astounding: Palestinians need more philosophy. Come and give a lecture to our students. I spent July back in the United States but my daughter who lives in Israel gave birth, as I mentioned before, in August and so my wife and I returned to Jerusalem. And my lecture at Al Quds materialized. It was a day I and my wife will never forget, the incredible beauty of East Jerusalem, a sense, even if only preliminary, for the people, the responsessome friendly, some wary, some a bit hostile, but all respectfulto my lecture. My wife and I made friends with several students who invited us to their homes, and a Professor of Islamic Studies invited me back to speak with his department. I dont know what anyone can do about the deep divisions, social, political, religious, in the region. But human contact seems like a crucial step. A second sort of experience concerns my teaching at the University of California, Riverside, my home campus. I teach, usually every year, a Introduction to Philosophy course that focuses on philosophy of religion. The population by university serves is very mixed, socially and religiously. My students are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, etc. And I work hard in a very large class of some 300 students (as well as in the discussion sections) to get them to speak up, and to talk to one another. There was an ugly incident on campus a few years ago that concerned the verbal attack of one religious group on another, and there was great alienation across campus. At that very time, students in my classroom were speaking with great respect across these very lines. I commented to them about how our class is very much not like the real world, and how precious was what we were creating together. I am the Director of the University Honors Program at UCR, and I and other faculty members occasionally give small seminars on special topics. My dream, and Ive made some, but only some, progress in implementing it, is to conduct a seminar on peace in the middle east, and to take a number of students to Israel/Palestine to meet the respective communities and to experience the respective universities. I very much look forward to the educational and social experience of engaging with people who are steeped in the thought of Fethullah Glen.
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BALANCING THE CANDLE ON THE RIGHT PATH

JEROME D. MARYON 80
Abstract M. Fethullah Glen is a globally important historical figure for three reasons: (1) his postmodernist re-appropriation of the ancient theoretical roots of Turkish Islm [Trk Mslmanl]; (2) his practical call that this re-appropriation become the property of Turks at every level of understanding; and (3) his vision that such re-appropriation would not only revitalize Turkish communities, but also enhance the dialogue of the worlds great faiths, and, as all civilizations are founded on faith, enhance the prospects for peace in the world: pace Huntington, not a clash, but an alliance of civilizations. Glens importance flows from a threefold development. (1) He builds on foundations from Maturidi to Said-i Nursi, affording ample exegesis of Quranic prescriptions for moral duty: following the straight path: al-sirt almustaqm. (2) He insists (a) theoretically, Islm is the umma wasat [ummeten vasatan], the middle way of absolute balance, e.g., between rationalism and mysticism, and (b) practically, that individuals make choices according to situations, requiring free use of intelligence (v. Abant Platform, July 1998), and its keen development, esp. in natural and social sciences. (3) Given the polymorphism of consciousness and the fragmentation of culture, he recognizes that we proceed like the blind men in Rumis elephant parable: we need a candle; but it wont be ideological; Glen refuses to have religions role be decided by the political; instead, he insists on the absolute Transcendence of the middle way, of the need for us to keep our balance on the way, and for us to understand that balance in terms of our own intrinsic development, our candle, be it, e.g., in common sense, medicine, or physics. That balanced candle is crucial. Glens potential contribution to co-existence will be assured only when it is recognized, philosophically and theologically, as an intrinsic truth of human development. This is the gravamen of our inquiry.
1. Introduction M. Fethullah Glen is a globally important historical figure for three reasons: (1) his postmodernist re-appropriation of the ancient theoretical roots of Turkish Islm [Trk Mslmanl]; (2) his practical call that this re-appropriation become the property of Turks at every level of understanding; and (3) his vision that such re-appropriation would not only re-vitalize Turkish communities, but also enhance the dialogue of the worlds great faiths, and, as all civilizations are founded on faith, enhance the prospects for peace in the world: pace Huntington, not a clash, but an alliance of civilizations.
80
Jerome D. Maryon, Esq. leads the legal-political part of the team serving Boston College, Harvard, MIT, etc., in
developing Americas first interdisciplinary course on the multidimensional costs of the War on Drugs; in spring 08, hell teach the law, policy, and strategy portions: Federal legislation and law enforcement, high incarceration and recidivism rates, and the complex role of the American intelligence community abroad. Hell draw on his record as Federal Commissioner: to date, none of his judicial draft opinions has been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hell also draw on an extensive academic development: a perfect Poli Sci 4.0, a First Honours Diploma in Pontifical Studies, French and American law school, and a first-place tie in his class at the U.S. Naval War College. Finally, Jerome will draw on his community leadership, esp. in Muslim-Jewish-Christian dialogue, emphasizing Americas need to restore common reason to public policy debate.
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Glens importance flows from a threefold development. (1) He builds on foundations from Maturidi to Said-i Nursi, affording ample exegesis of Quranic prescriptions for moral duty: following the straight path: al-sirt al-mustaqm. (2) He insists (a) theoretically, Islm is the umma wasat [ummeten vasatan], the middle way of absolute balance, e.g., between rationalism and mysticism, and (b) practically, that individuals make choices according to situations, requiring free use of intelligence (v. Abant Platform, July 1998), and its keen development, esp. in natural and social sciences. (3) Given the polymorphism of consciousness and the fragmentation of culture, he recognizes that we proceed like the blind men in Rumis elephant parable: we need a candle; but it wont be ideological; Glen refuses to have religions role be decided by the political; instead, he insists on the absolute Transcendence of the middle way, of the need for us to keep our balance on the way, and for us to understand that balance in terms of our own intrinsic development, our candle, be it, e.g., in common sense, medicine, or physics. That balanced candle is crucial. Glens potential contribution to co-existence will be assured only when it is recognized, philosophically and theologically, as an intrinsic truth of human development. This is the gravamen of our inquiry. Unlike the substantive reviews of the work and life of M. Fethullah Glen, this essay is merely a propaedeutic. We seek, not to introduce Glen to a Western audience, but to alert sagacious Western readers to the need to meet him. Our sketch unfolds in two parts. In part one (Sections I and II), we aim to remind the secularist and materialist Western readers that, contrary to Chairman Maos obiter dictum, Power flows from the barrel of a gun (a dictum followed by a number of adventurers in the Middle East), power can have an entirely invisible and indeed, unimaginable, source, a source as near at hand as our own horizons of inquiry, and yet as far beyond us as the ways of God. In part two (Sections III and IV), we very briefly recall the severe context and several of the accomplishments of M. Fethullah Glen, the prophetic voice from eastern Anatolia, who has done more than any one else within the House of Islm to remind both East and West that this power is ours only upon submission to the will of God, a submission that is by no means arbitrary, but rather that demands the full exercise of our reason as well as our faith. It is the measure of Glens accomplishment that he has not only created the greatest civil movement in the history of the Ottoman lands, Arabic and Turkish alike, but that he has also reminded the West, ever so quietly, of the primacy of charity. The House of Service or Dar al-Hizmet may become, not only the glory of Turkey, but an inspiration to the world.
2. My chcemy Boga!81 Skeptics of conferences on peaceful co-existence and the practical impact of inter-faith dialogue ignore not only the power of belief (reasoned and loving reliance on the Unseen), but a major lesson of Late Modernity. A. Doubting Thomases82 arch a skeptical eyebrow when they hear of international conferences on peaceful co-existence that are predicated on inter-faith dialogue. Their rebuttal is brief: Assisi.83
81
This is the opening of a very popular Polish hymn, sung in utter defiance of the Communist regime, to this effect: We
want God in our families, in our churches, in our schools. More succinctly: Potrzebujemy Boga! We want God!
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82
The term, once re-appropriated, points us toward a Muslim cognate and thus to a neglected concurrence of heart-and-
mind values among the Ahl al-Kitab, the People of the Book, with the House of Islm. Doubting Thomas derives form the Gospels last earthly encounter with the Risen Jesus, John 20:19-29, at 27-29. Jesus had previously appeared to the disciples when Thomas was not present; they had recounted His visit in wonder, but Thomas had refused to believe them unless he could physically examine the wounds from the Crucifixion. A week later, the disciples re-assembled, with Thomas, and Jesus returned, first wishing them Shalom/Salm. 27 Then He told Thomas, Reach out your finger and examine My hands; reach out your hand and put it into My side. And do not persist in your disbelief, but become a believer. 28 Thomas answered with the words, My Lord and my God! 29 Jesus told him, You have believed because you have seen Me. Happy [are] those who have not seen and yet have believed. (Raymond Brown, tr., Anchor Bible) Fundamentalists would construe the text as one demanding blind faith. Yet, nowhere in the Gospels (cf. the verbal Injl) does Jesus speak capriciously. Here, too, His rebuke of Thomas is not based on a failure of Thomas to believe everything he hears, but rather, very precisely, on his failure to consider closely, i.e., to judge himself, the judgment of his most esteemed contemporaries: his fellow disciples. Thomas elevates the evidence of his senses above his judgment though we all of us know how often our unaided senses can mislead us .It is only when Thomass senses are confronted with the physical truth that he utters the great profession of faith, My Lord and my God! Sharpening the point, Thomas is depicted in St. Johns Gospel as one of the most discerning and courageous of the disciples. His failure at this instant reflects how we can all of us, when confronted in heart-and-mind with a divine challenge, seek refuge in the senses: in denial of the Transcendent. Perhaps Caravaggio caught this internal division of ours best. In a Baroque masterpiece, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, c.1601-02 (original in the Neues Palais, Sanssouci, Potsdam; close copy by Caravaggio, authenticated 2006, from lglise Saint-Antoine, Loches, Touraine), we are struck first by Thomass own division: even as Christ guides Thomass hand into His chest wound, Thomas himself looks away, as though he has just come to realize his failure. He has tested the Lord, rather than himself. This is the most copied work of Caravaggios. Thomas stands in for all of us; and lest the point be missed, he is accompanied by two decidedly ordinary-looking disciples, equally entranced by the evidence of the senses. So ordinary are the three disciples, that their clothes are old; Thomass shirt is splitting at the shoulder. These are no privileged professionals; these are the salt of the earth. Twenty centuries of commentary on St. Johns story are best summed up in Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Un. Pr., 2005, 2007). Once we re-appropriate to ourselves the call to test, not the Lord, but ourselves, in every walk of life, then we can rise to the convergence of heart and mind values with Islm. In the Qurn, as in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the infinite nature of Gods Transcendence demands extraordinary concentration and judgment; for most often, God will be described in terms that are immanent, familiar, even familial. As in the Old and New Testaments, so too there are verses in the Qurn that have recourse to anthropomorphic metaphors in describing our direct contact with Allh, e.g., 20:5 (the Most Gracious rose over the Throne), 38:75 (whom I have created with both My hands), 81:19-25 (the Prophet [pbuh] saw Allh in the clear horizon). More often, though, the contact is intermediate, conducted though the Archangel Gabriel (Jibrl); but even in direct contact, the emphasis remains, always and everywhere, on the infinite Transcendence of Allh, and the grace of His transmission of truth to Muhammad and thus to us, e.g., in 81:19-25, supra: Neither does He withhold grudgingly a knowledge of the Unseen. Those who demand special physical proof are too proud and thus, even at the Last Trump, the ultimate physical vindication, they will find no joy (25:21-22). Like all Jews and Christians, all Muslims are called upon to acknowledge the works of God visible and invisible, and to act accordingly. The point is well put by Imm Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi (A.H. 631-676/A.D. 1234-1278), in the second of his famous Forty Hadths. The Archangel Gabriel interrogates the Prophet, so as to instruct the faithful [Gabriel] said: Then tell me about al-Ihsn. [Muhammad] said: It is to worship Allh as though you are seeing Him and while you see him not, yet truly He sees you. Al-Ihsn: the perfection of virtue, or benevolence: accepting less from others than is ones due, giving more to others than is their due, and, as the very highest level of al-Islm, of submissive good deeds, it means comporting ones life in complete conviction of the benevolence of the unseen God. This leads to the discipline of heart-and-mind together, and thus to tasawwuf, consciousness of God (spiritual development), to Sufism, and, ultimately, to Glen.
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Twenty years after the famous Prayer for Peace, what evidence is there of its effectiveness? Then, hearing that part of our conference turns on reconciling and balancing reason and faith, the skeptics response becomes one of outright dismissal: What has reason-with-revelation, a private construct, a belief of individuals, to do with the great affairs of state? What has faith to do with reality? B. The question has been asked and answered. In May, 1935, the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, a consummate practitioner of Realpolitik,84 visited Stalin; he attempted to advise the Communist dictator to restore some freedom of worship to Catholics in his domain, so as to gain favor with the Pope. Stalin famously retorted, The Pope? How many divisions has he got?85 History returned the answer in Victory Square, Warsaw, on 2 June 1979. The Polish Communist government, originally established by Stalins divisions, tried to control the crowd movement and press coverage of the Pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II.86 But 2,000,000 Poles lined the route from the airport to Victory Square; 1,000,000 crowded into the Square itself for the Papal Mass. Having failed to dissuade the crowds, the regime ordered all cameras to ignore them and focus exclusively on the Pope. Consequently, viewers throughout Eastern Europe, while perfectly focused on John Paul during his homily, could still hear the extraordinary and unbroken chant of the laity, suddenly intoxicated with liberty: My chcemy Boga! We want God! And then, at the moment that the Pope elevated the
Rather than blind faith, this discipline requires the highest level of judgment, superseding at once the defects of the senses and the weaknesses of the flesh. This is our life opened powerfully to the grace of God. Jewish scholars speak of lovingkindness (hesed) and judgment (gevurah) brought into balance or harmony (tiferet). As Pope John Paul II put it, in words that could have been recited by Glen, it is a judgment that is vindicated in right action The true and proper meaning of mercy does not consist only in looking, however penetratingly and compassionately, at moral, physical, or material evil: mercy is manifested in its true and proper aspect when it restores to value, promotes and draws good from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in man. John Paul II, P. (1980) Dives in Misericordia, 6 (Rome: Vatican).
83
The First World Day of Prayer for Peace was convened by Pope John Paul II in Assisi on 27 October 1986. As he
concluded, This day at Assisi has helped us become more aware of our religious commitments. But it has also made the world, looking at us through the media, more aware of the responsibility of each religion regarding problems of war and peace. Address of John Paul II to the Representatives of the Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities and of the World Religions, Basilica of St. Francis, 27 Oct 1986, 6 (Rome: Vatican).
84
Laval, four times Prime Minister, sought in May, 1935, to balance the resurgence of Germany by forging a purely
Realpolitik alliance of France with Great Britain, Mussolinis Italy, and Stalins Russia; this entailed, inter alia, giving the Italian fascist army a free hand in Abyssinia, and trying to reduce Stalins persecution of believers so as to mitigate the Churchs fierce anti-Communism. The Abyssinian appeasement was leaked and Laval was forced to resign; he only returned to ministerial politics once the Wehrmacht had overrun France; as Vice Premier and then Prime Minister of Vichy France, he repeatedly offered more concessions to Hitler than he demanded; Laval was captured, tried, and executed in 1945.
85 86
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. I: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1948), 135. Elected the first Polish Pope in October, 1978, Karol Wojtya asked permission to plan to return to his native land on 8
May 1979, so as to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Stanisaw Szczepanowski, a victim of the Polish King, Bolesaw II (rather as Archbishop Thomas Becket would later be martyred by King Henry II of England). Stanisaw represented the highest convergence of theological and political morality; most Polish kings had been crowned while kneeling before his sarcophagus. Fearful of that symbolism, the Communist authorities, under Party Secretary Edward Gierek, banned the Pope from Poland for the month of May, and strictly prescribed his routes and his media coverage in June. Then, thinking to control the crowds, they ordered all Warsaw cabs in for inspection, froze the public bus service, and declared there were no extra trains available. Having unwittingly advertised their fear, they made Poles all the more determined to attend the papal pilgrimage; John Paul drew the largest crowds in the nations thousand-year history.
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consecrated Host, a million Poles fell silent and fell on their knees and with them, the Soviet empire began to fall.
3. Deus suam gloriam non quaerit propter se, sed propter nos.87 The power of belief is the common heritage of the People of the Book. The first Revelation in Islm affirms not only the majesty and generosity of Allh, but His concomitant concern that we pursue knowledge unreservedly (cf. even to China). Islmic theologians late Medieval deprecation of science was as much a Qurnic as a strategic and political failure. Re-appropriation of Qurnic scientific and cognitional value will come, not from preoccupied power elites, but from those who withdraw and return, historically inspired by Glen, for he is the first theologian in Post-Modern Islm to focus on our deepest yearning: for the unrestricted love and knowledge of God. Though universal, our yearning is rarely addressed by Western politicians and academicians; instead, it may be our own thought experiment that leads us to affirm it anew. As Ancient and Modern Chinese history demonstrates, this is an affirmation that can only be invited, never commanded. But the invitation, like the power of belief, should never be underestimated. A. The central issue of the intersection of power and faith was put starkly in a World Affairs Council exchange in Washington, DC. The guest was a Saudi fighter pilot and Prince; the interlocutor was an American Navy lawyer. The lawyer led off by observing that on Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Measures,88 when the Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam),89 received the very first revelation from the Archangel Gabriel, the premium was placed not only on the majesty and
87
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (S.T.), II-II, q. 132, a.1 ad 1. Here, in the Second Part of the Second Part
(Secunda Secundae Partis), Thomas discusses in sequence the three theological virtues Faith, Hope, and Charity and then the four cardinal virtues Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. Drawing heavily on his Muslim, Jewish, and Classical forebears in philosophy, as he does throughout the Summa, Thomas seeks to strike a balance in our conduct within each of the virtues, a balance between excesses and deficiencies of the given major virtue (a positive habit that has become second nature); thus, in his examination of Fortitude, QQ 123-140, his analysis turns in Q. 132 to vain glory (inani gloria); he begins with the inquiry, whether the desire of glory is a sin (Utrum appetitus gloriae sit peccatum)? Though he specifically invokes SS Augustine and Matthew, the gravamen of his response (italicized here, and the subtitle in the text, supra), the centrality of Gods glory, could have been penned by Glen. Reply to Obj. 1. As Augustine says on John 13:13, You call Me Master and Lord; and you say well. (Tract. lviii in Joan.): Self-complacency is fraught with danger of one who has to beware of pride. But He Who is above all, however much He may praise Himself, does not uplift Himself. For knowledge of God is our need, not His: nor does any man know Him unless he be taught of Him who knows. It is therefore evident that God seeks glory, not for His own sake, but for ours. In like manner a man may rightly seek his own glory for the good of others, according to Matt. 5:16, That they may see Your good works, and glorify Your Father Who is in Heaven. The works of Glen are replete with warnings to those in service (hizmet) not to seek personal acclaim, much less socioeconomic preference: service of Allh is all. Here again the consistency of Gods Revelation to humanity, a cardinal precept of Islm, leads to the high convergence we would expect: v., e.g., the central injunction for all Jesuits to act for the greater glory of God: Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
88
Laylat al-Qadr is more popularly rendered in the Anglo-American world as the Night of Power, a very honorific
translation (understandably, given the context of transmission that night), by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Some have objected to the non-literal translation, but the sense of majesty and awe comes through quite clearly.
89
May God bless him and grant him peace, usually abbreviated saw directly from the Arabic or pbuh in English (for
Peace be upon him); the beautiful reverence that Muslims demonstrate in repeating the phrase after every use of his name is a central feature of Islmic culture, but one that requires different expression in the Western cultures, which avoid verbal repetition; e.g., English writers traditionally show reverence by capitalization: Prophet.
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generosity of God, but also on His concomitant concern that we learn: Recite90 in the name of your Lord, Who is the Creator; who created man from a clot. Recite! And your Lord is most bountiful. (He Who taught) the use of the pen taught man what he did not know. (Qurn 96:1-5) The Qurn consistently affirms that God is all-knowing,91 that He requires us to exercise our minds as much as our hearts,92 and that this requirement is universal: God is the light of the Heavens and the earth. neither of the East nor of the West God doth guide whom He will to His Light; (24:35) Most succinctly, 20:114: My Lord, advance me in knowledge: Rabbi, zidni ilma!
90
Cf. Imm al-Bukhri, The Beginning of the Revelation.
The famous first command to the Prophet, Iqra!, is traditionally translated as Recite!, in part because there was no text provided by Gabriel and in part due to Muhammads illiteracy; but the verb, which gives rise to the verbal noun, Qurn, is bivalent: it also means, Read! (The Qurn is now both a holy recital and a holy reading.) The recitations of the Prophet, echoed by his closest successors, were eventually committed to writing, at which point the premier command gained a new depth of meaning, for literate generations of Muslims were led not only to read but to turn over the sacred text, to study it in comparative ways not easily accessible via a memorized text; v. Walter J. Ong, S.J., for the epistemic differences between oral cultures and chirographic cultures: the cultures, precisely, of the pen. The Enlightenment had assumed a linear progression form oral to written civilization a gradual yet irreversible ascent but that blithe reading of history could not envisage the recent and accelerating reversion to a more oral form of expression in Western culture, i.e., a concomitant pattern of progress and decline, a pattern driven technologically in America by the telephone, then the television, and now the Internet, especially e-mail. Since the Second World War, the level of public discourse in the United States has undergone a steady but popularly unremarked decline in both sentence structure and vocabulary; e.g., what was once the unique preserve of the campaign button and the bumper sticker has now become the standard fare of political discourse; and this decline in public sophistication of debate occurs not by some imposition form above, but by popular acquiescence. Political handlers warn their candidates that Americans no longer vote so much for those whom they admire (the aspirational vote) as for those with whom they feel most comfortable: Who is most like us? Contrast, e.g., the level of regular public expression conscientiously adopted by President John F. Kennedy, the twelfthgrade level, so as to preserve a natural sense of complexity in the issues under public consideration, with the level of vocabulary and sentence length preferred by the incumbent president in his unscripted Q.-&-A.: the fifth-grade level. On a separate, global point, the Night of Power also reminds us that earthly power-mongers in any age and culture notoriously disdain personal study and public complexity; the simplistic black-and-white contrasts that they hammer home in public discourse best serve their (sometimes unwitting) drive to accrue more power, usually by vilification of others, both foreign and domestic, and then by a concomitant demand for more support. It is instructive in this global civilizational context to consider that the first revelation to Muhammad should put a premium on the rise to literacy, the necessity for a complex understanding, and the power of discovery and communication; all symbolized by the pen.
91
Many of the 99 Names of Allh emphasize one aspect or another of His omniscience, e.g., Al-lim, the All-Knowing,; Just in the opening srahs (chapters) of the Qurn, some of the best-known verses (yt) on the centrality of the quest
Al-Khabr, the All-aware; Al-Hakm, the All-Wise.

92
for understanding and how it pleases Allh include 2:269, 3:190-191, 29:20, 39:9, 41:53, and 58:11. The Ahdth or Sayings of the Prophet, especially the ranking of the hadth quds (pure hadith, i.e., the rare saying that not only enjoys the bestauthenticated chain of transmission isnd but also is considered by the first witnesses to have been a reiteration by Muhammad of a direct revelation), reinforce the twofold message that religious knowledge must bear fruit (number 6 of the famous 40 Sayings) and that for those whose reflective and fruitful lives have recommended them to the Mercy of Allh, the pleasures of Paradise are beyond their knowledge, even beyond their imagination (37). Most succinctly: Whoever follows a path seeking knowledge, Allh will make his path to Paradise easy because of it. (Ibn Abbas, in three collections of Sayings)
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How was this epistemological imperative so narrowed as to be nearly discounted in many fields of inquiry in the course of the last seven centuries?93 And what but that long lack of a universal scope of inquiry, especially in science, could account for the eclipse of the Golden Age of Islm? This is not the expected level of discourse in the corridors of Washington. But the first Arab astronaut is a man of many talents, as open-minded as he is decisive, as reflective as he is straightforward. His Royal Highness, Prince Sultan Salman Abdulaziz Saud, graciously acknowledged that the ulam the scholastic and judicial scholar-leaders of Sunni and Shite Islm alike had virtually restricted the scope of public research to the book of the Qurn, to the detriment of studying the book of nature. This failure was not only scientific, and thus eventually strategic and political, but it was also Qurnic: the failure to investigate Gods creation was in clear derogation of the divine command. Since he, as a Saudi, had been the first Muslim to orbit the earth, the Prince naturally hoped that his Kingdom would lead the worldwide Islmic community the ummah in developing a new, personalized understanding, a neo-ijtihad, of modern scientific values implicit in the Qurn.94 This would revolutionize the deep popular ambivalence, particularly on the Arab street, about Western science. Moreover, being one of the most sporting members of the Royal Family, as well as one of the most computer-adept, Prince Sultan was well placed to inspire Saudis just as he inspired his interlocutors in NASA and DC. But revolutions in theoretical and practical political philosophy rarely proceed from the power center of society (recall the French, Soviet, and Chinese Revolutions, all led by elite outsiders, or the popular revolutions of 1989).95 Instead, the elder members of the Royal Family decided to have Sultan chair the Benevolent Association for Handicapped Children, and then to become, in one of the most closed lands on earth, the Minister of Tourism. B. Unlike the unfortunate Prince a prophet without honor in his own land - it would be M. Fethullah Glen, this humble man from a village near Erzurum, who would be given the opportunity to issue the historic invitation that could make all the difference in Islmic faith and society. And the very first indication of his genius was precisely his understanding that he could only offer an invitation. Lets recall a neutral, non-Islmic example of the difference between invitation and command, even at the royal level. During the Warring States Era in Ancient China (c.475-221 B.C.),96 there unfolded under rare royal auspices the single greatest set of exchanges among all the schools of philosophy during the long Contention of a Hundred Schools of Thought;97 this occurred at a special academy,
93
The reduction of inquiry was twofold: on the one hand, a long theologico-philosophical debate resulted, after al-Ghazzali,
in the effective closing of most philosophical and empirical inquiry, in favor of a uniquely Islamic theologico-jurisprudential discourse; on the other hand, the terms of that discourse were restricted to the methods and scope of inquiry of schools of thought that had already matured centuries before, i.e., during the early part of the Golden Age; the combination of those two reductions will be the sense in which we use the controversial term, the closing of the gates of ijtihad.
94
Cf. Islam, Postmodernism, and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar Reader, Schail Inayatullah & Gail Boxwell, eds. Two of the few revolutions to be led by large numbers of the ruling elite, Britains Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
(Sterling, VA: Pluto Pr., 2003); I am indebted to Erturul Cubuku for introducing me to his thought.
95
Americas War for Independence, 1775-1783, were, in the realm of political theory, essentially conservative movements, as both sought, albeit in different ways and with different structures resulting, to vindicate the ancient liberties of Englishmen.
96 97
Pinyin transliteration: Zhan4-guo2 Shi2-dai4. Bai3-jia1 zheng1-ming2.
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the Jixia Palace of Learning.98 King Wei of Qi99 founded the Academy, and his son, Pi Qiang, King Xuan of Qi,100 raised the level of discourse on philosophical, legal, moral, and strategic concerns to their highest level by making it clear that there would be no royal favorite positions, but rather a clear preference for vigorous debate. King Xuan understood that if his academy became famous throughout China, then the prestige of his kingdom, the caliber of scholars it would attract, and the ideas they could give him for increasing the strength of the kingdom would all be considerably enhanced. Indeed, the Kingdom of Qi prospered for another century.101 It was this very model that came to mind when, in the winter of 1956-57, the Modern communist Red emperor, Mao Zedong, proclaimed, Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.102 Chinese intellectuals, aware of the Ancient precedent but also aware of the ideological intolerance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), were reluctant to take Mao at his word. He publicly remonstrated with them: bureaucrats needed feedback. They began to criticize, first gingerly in the spring, then vigorously in June and July, 1957, decisions by CCP officials that were demonstrably harmful to the nation. But this was far more than what Mao had anticipated; he not only cut off the Hundred Flowers Campaign, but launched an Anti-Rightest Campaign those whom he had pressured in the spring to speak their mind now paid for it with prison sentences. Until he died in 1976, no public criticism of Mao would be tolerated, not even during the extraordinary famine brought on by his Great Leap Forward or the unprecedented ravages of the Red Guard during his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Wei and Xuan had brought peace and plenty to their kingdom by their cultivation of unrivalled free horizons of public discourse; but Mao, after the failure of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, brought such suffering upon the Chinese people as they had not known in any era, and so Deng Xiaoping found it possible to replace most of Maos draconian economic and cultural regimen in just a few years, permitting in non-political and non-legal domains freedoms beyond the dreams of 57. In 1976, China stood among the poorest nations in the world; today, her wealth, productivity, and U.S. Treasury bill holdings are such that no White House or Treasury decisions can be taken without careful consideration of the response of Zhongnanhai. Xuan stands twice vindicated. C. The wishes and demands of human beings are boundless and their expectations are infinite. Even if the whole world were to be given to humanity, its appetite would not be satisfied nor would its ambitions cease.103 The assertion is bold; given its scope, Glen implicitly challenges a line of development in Western philosophy extending all the way from Aristotle104 All humans by nature desire to know - to Gadamer.105 For while Gadamer explores in great depth the gap between human horizons (personal or cultural sets of attitudes, beliefs, desires), which are often in flux but which can nonetheless be entered (his famous fusion of horizons) if we are willing to embrace an alien
98 99
Ji4-xia4 Xue2-gong1. Qi2 Wei1 Wang2. Qi2 Xuan1 Wang2. Qi was the last state to fall to Qin, in 221 B.C.; the King of Qin, having united all China, then declared himself Qin2
100 101
Shi3Huang2 Di4 Qin, the First Emperor. He would serve as an implicit role model for Mao. In both cases, many of their signature policies, as well as their complete centralization of power, died with them.
102 103 104 105
Bai3 hua1 qi2-fang4; bai3 jia1 zheng1-ming2. M. Fethullah Glen, The Inner Profundity of Humankind, in The Fountain, issue 52, Oct-Dec 2005, 4-7, at 6, ii. Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei. Metaphysics 980a. [N.B. Anthropoi, not andres: not just men] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr,
1960; 6. Auflage, 1990). Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 1; Truth and Method, tr. J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall (NY: Crossroad, 2d. rev. ed., 1989).
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vision, Glen asserts that we are always and everywhere called to transcend our horizon qua horizon, to transcend it utterly, toward the unconditionally infinite horizon, that of Allh. Likewise, against Aristotle, Glen affirms that we are called to essay this transcendent act not only intellectually, but also socially and spiritually. Glen implicitly concurs with Pascal: Le Dieu dAbraham, dIsaac et de Jacob, non des philosophes et des savants. 106 Self-transcendence cannot be restricted to the rational plane of existence; the call to transcendence permeates every aspect of our life; and so we may discover that this omni-dimensional call comes, not from the god of the philosophers, the god of Reason, but from the God Who makes Himself known in history, the God of Revelation. For Revelation not only affirms Reason, but transcends it: My ways are not your Ways.107 Revelation bids us attain our highest accomplishments and confirms our unspoken suspicion that even they will not prove sufficient in our life. Glen thus continues, Explicitly or not, human souls expect another eternal abode, not to mention the fact that they hanker for the continuation of this transient world.108 In other words, while we cling to this world and its glittering prizes, at the very same time, our deepest yearning is not for any reward, but for redemption: for the unrestricted love and knowledge of God. To Glen, our threefold openness intellectual, social, and spiritual may be merely implicit in a Modern culture, but it is nonetheless universal. Like the book of Nature, it serves as a perpetual invitation to turn to Allh (in specifically Sunni Turkish terms, ihtida). The openness of our desire is the key to our conversion (in more general terms of personal transformation, dnm). We all of us want to know and to be known; we all of us want to love and to be loved; and we want to do this, not only in the visible company of our neighbors, but also in cooperation with any invisible ground for our existence. For as we all of us discover, regardless of culture, or of upbringing, we are none of us necessary beings, and we most certainly none of us created ourselves: we are merely contingent beings. The primal question of our existence is whether this contingency is purely material a blind product of cosmic reactions or if this contingency is as reasonably and lovingly designed as it is intelligible and awe-inspiring. If there is a ground to our existence, then it utterly transcends us, now and forever. And its expectations would be equally transcendent to anything our ego could imagine. Thus far sheer openness brings us: merely following our primal question brings us to the possibility of conversion, a threefold conversion, at once reasonable, moral, and spiritual. To discover the contingency of our existence is to inquire, eo ipso, as to the possibility of a necessary ground to our existence; and to ask that question just as ineluctably entails the concomitant question, What would such a ground require? In sum, openness entails its own process. We begin by asking the universal question, Are we merely a cosmic fluke, or is there a transcendent origin for life in the universe? We rapidly discover that answers have varied, particularly in Modernity; and yet, if we persist, we also discover that, by virtue of that very inquiry, we transcend all spatio-temporal concerns: we affirm horizons of desire beyond our work-a-day world and beyond all possible rewards in our world. To grow beyond our earliest egotistic eruptions our temper tantrums as a 2-year-old and beyond our easy-going inquisitiveness as a 10-year-old, beyond even our intense self-preoccupation as a 16year-old, is to turn to face death and then, and only then, the meaning of life. It is to transcend the
106
Blaise Pascal, Mmorial, Penses: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the philosophers and the intellectuals. Isaiah 55:8-9: For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are My ways your ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens Glen, op. cit.
Pascal draws on Exodus 3:6 and Matthew 22:32.

107
are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts.
108
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sensationalism of our entertainment media and the cynicism of our mass culture. It is to discover that our horizons trump virtually anything on offer on the silver screen or in the corridors of power. And then we discover, if we persist, that our openness not only entails its own process, a process that has carried us far beyond the restricted horizons of a materialistic culture, but that that process itself is normative. Regardless of culture or upbringing, our questions carry us toward conversion. This initially most open horizon, this unrestricted yearning in our formative years, serves as Glens most fundamental postulate, just as it could serve for any individuals who reflect upon their existential situation, anywhere, anytime. For regardless of whether an adult ultimately affirms, blurs, or denies the goal of this initial yearning regardless of whether the adult chooses to follow the path of atheism, agnosticism, polytheism, or theism the fact of our primal openness and inquiry, our initial state of desire, is attested by all cultures, historic or prehistoric, from the glorious cave paintings of Lascaux to the defeat of Leninism. Yet, currently in the West, this primal horizon is rarely acknowledged in our private but predominant mode of work-a-day existence; even more discouragingly, in the public, civic dimension, it is almost never developed by our political and strategic elites, much less even mentioned in our lacist lecture halls; it is as though that which is deepest, because it is also the most potentially divisive, must never be addressed. Moreover, if these professional and public silences were not daunting enough, the maintenance of this open horizon in early adulthood requires not only an initial counter-cultural decision by individual Westerners a decision against all the subtle pressures to conform to the silences of professional and public discourse but, because we are intrinsically dynamic creatures, moving instinctively either to confirm or deny our own potential bases for responsible living, the maintenance of our horizon also requires an arduous self-examination by each of us, individually, if it is ultimately to be confirmed. By our nature, we cannot stand pat. We must find the means to confirm or deny our decision for what constitutes our own responsible way through life. And if we do find the means to confirm a responsible way through life, we may well find that, far from standing still or even shrinking, our horizon actually expands. Even as we affirm our hard-won decision, we begin to value and affirm the hard-won decisions of others. Commitment is inherently expansive as depth calls to depth. For Westerners now seeking to come to grips with the gifts of Glen, we need, before all else, to understand why it is that his gifts are universal. When Glen speaks to Erzurum and Izmir, why should Paris and New York pay heed? What is it that he has encouraged Turks to appropriate to themselves that we, too, should make our own? The single best Post-Modern method of such selfappropriation of how it is that we initially think and feel in terms of an unrestricted horizon of how, despite the pervasive cynicism and sensationalism, we grope forward in our quest for a hint of the knowledge of God, of the love of our Redeemer is perhaps that of Bernard Lonergan, Insight.109 While we cannot hope to do justice here to one of the most demanding works of philosophy in our era, we may try to show how it re-orients us in our practical lives. A simple thought experiment, tracing four steps in the every-day life of a tourist in Turkey, may be the quickest way to confirm this, to confirm that following our questions is a normative and universal method, a method that Glen is redeveloping for Turkey and all the ummah.
109
Collected Works of Lonergan, vol. 3, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, F.E. Crowe & R.M. Doran, eds.
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr., [1957], 5th rev. ed., 1992, 2000); hereafter, Insight.
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Step 1: Recalling our most basic mental state. Lets imagine that we are at Kuadas, lying on one of the beaches or in an old hammam (hamam). Between taking plunges in the Aegean or following the sequence of the warm, hot, and cooling rooms, respectively, we are pretty much immersed in brute physical experience (deneyim or tecrbe), with very little in the way of thought: this is about as close as we come to the realm of sheer animal extroversion. This is also the realm, when we later reflect back on it, of nave realism, of the mistaken notion that seeing is knowing. For even though we discovered as children that our senses repeatedly deceive us (e.g., when we see an oar bend in the water), nonetheless, in our every day, commonsense preoccupations, our work-a-day world, we do not take those experiences and raise them to the level of systematic, theoretical reflection it hardly seems practical to reflect upon those subtly formative discoveries, indeed, only philosophers do that! Far easier to alternate between the practical necessities of work and, for the rest of the time, to immerse ourselves in sensory pleasure!
Step 2: Examining how we transcend that most basic state. Moving up the coast, we come to the ruins of Troy (Truva); we hear the tour guide explain how Heinrich Schliemann, excavating the site in the late 19th century, mistook levels I and II for the actual level that dates from the time of the Trojan War, now held to be level VIIa. We not only see the ruins and hear the guide we not only experience the incoming data of sense we begin to add to our experience on a wholly new level: for as those data come in, something else happens in our consciousness. As we hear how Schliemann, an amateur archaeologist who was more of a businessman on the make, not only dug indiscriminately, thus destroying much of the layering, but probably planted finds (e.g., Priams treasure), it hits us, all of a sudden, that archaeology is nothing like what we imagined. It is not a simple digging down through neat cross-sections of old towns, it is not an uncovering of what was just waiting to be seen; it is much more of an active reconstruction of those ancient and truly ruined sections. This is an Aha! moment, this is a moment of insight. It shocks us: we feel the shock. We want to test the feeling: it needs spelling out, it needs understanding. In other words, after the first level of experience, there follows a second and rapidly sequenced twopart level of insight (sezgi) and understanding (anlama or anlay). We ask, What is it? (traditionally, Quid sit?). We study the brief printed explanations around the site. But we want to be sure of our understanding: Is it so? (An sit?). We may buy a couple of books or, better yet, talk to a professional archaeologist. We want to answer all the questions that reasonably come to mind: we want a virtually unconditioned answer to our question, Is it really so? In other words, we move up to a third level, to judgment, to a virtually unconditioned affirmation or rejection of our initial insight. This judgment is analogous to a judges verdict (hkm), for it requires us to sift all the relevant, material, and probative evidence, pro and con, before we can render an objective decision to affirm or reject our initial insight; it is a final determination, very much like a judges only it is more demanding, since our own personal prejudices are very much likely to affect the decision without us having any professional training to detect and isolate them. (How often do we care to be professional about ourselves?) And if we are often blind to our own prejudices, how much more often are we blind to our own processes of thought; how often do we fail to reflect, not just on the data of sense, but on the data of consciousness! Seeing the archaeological site is not knowing; processing all the relevant questions about archaeology is knowing: our judgment is our affirmation of reality. We do not know the world by what we see, or even by what we think we understand; we know it only by what we affirm beyond a reasonable doubt. Our world is ultimately not a realm of animal extroversion (a realm that is
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already real and out there now, as it were). Nor is it a world of ideal forms. It is a world of judgment, a world of substantiated meaning. Once we proceed through the natural but arduous method of following our questions, once we rise from experience through insight-and-understanding, so as to achieve judgment, then we know something of reality, something about the world suggested by the data of sense; and by the very same measure, once we turn that process on itself, once we examine our own mode of knowing, then we know something of the data of consciousness, something of the invariant pattern of human judgment (a judgment that cannot be refuted without self-refutation: I judge that I do not judge). This accomplishment is as rare as it is beautiful, as good as it is true; we might even call it the archaeology of the mind! For what we have dug up and appropriated to ourselves is no less than our own mind, the mind that is unrestricted, the mind that seeks the eternally true, the eternally good, the eternally beautiful. Having appropriated it through a process that transcends the mere data of sense, a process that turns on the data of consciousness, a consciousness that has been verified as a virtually unconditioned truth, we have appropriated our judgment of reality in a manner that is, in Modern and Post-Modern parlance, thoroughly critical. Though we may never have heard the phrase before, we find that we are, not nave realists, nor idealists, but critical realists.
Step 3. Affirming that our deepest horizons are also the most potentially divisive Continuing north, we come at last to Istanbul and the world-famous museum of Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya). Inside, over the southwest vestibule, we find the restored mosaic of the Virgin and Child, flanked by the great Emperors Constantine I and Justinian I. We also find two women standing before it: an Eastern Orthodox nun visiting from the Balkans, and a Shite tourist from Qom, in full chador. They are looking at the same mosaic, but they are not seeing the same thing. Is this the Mother of the last great Prophet before Muhammad, or, as the mosaic asserts, Mater Theou: the Mother of God?
Step 4. Affirming that these deep divisions are not the end of our inquiry. At the third level, the level of judgment, the tourist and the nun will silently disagree with each other. There is, however, a fourth level, the level of permanent decision, where they begin once again to converge. For at the level of decision (karar), at the point of a lifetimes commitment, they may each resolve to live in love with God unrestricted love and thus, concomitantly, to live in love with their neighbors. Everything is offered up, as Justinian offers a model of Hagia Sofia and Constantine, of Constantinople itself. And in the beauty of this mosaic, our very resolve is refreshed. Thus our four steps and our four levels. Through experience, insight-and-understanding, judgment, and decision, we can come to a love - a peace - that surpasses understanding. This is an exceedingly hard-won peace. Lonergan was fond of remarking that knowledge makes a bloody entrance; how much more painful is the decision to follow where that knowledge points: to unrestricted love! The four steps are as easy to read as a tourist map. But the four levels are as difficult to ascend as, say, Mount Ararat. For they require us to strip away everything but the barest necessities for reflection, and then, as we mount through the levels of reflection, to let nothing loosen our grip on those necessities, the necessities of appropriating to ourselves, at every step of the way, our own mode of thought, a mode that is invariant through all cultures and faiths, a method that thus serves as a bridge between all the sons and daughters of Abraham, and beyond that unites all the children of God.
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To recap: What did I hear and see at Troy? What insight did that experience trigger? How well did I spell out that insight in my own understanding? More difficult still: Did that understanding answer all the pertinent questions? Can I now affirm that understanding, judge it to be as complete as I can make it under the circumstances, that is, virtually unconditioned? Most difficult of all: what does this relatively simple process of a tourists judgment reveal about judgment per se? What does it tell me about my mind? And my heart? Or the heart of the lady from Qom? It may be that Western philosophers and theologians will find that the method of Lonergan gets us beyond the fashionable rhetoric of choice: Stanislaus chooses to be Catholic; Stanley, to be Jewish; and Selim, to be Muslim. For our politically correct rhetoric of choice in the West requires nothing more than a facile tolerance of other choices; choice entails no method, and thus no rigorous method of life decision and thus, too, no possibility of profound respect for the permanent-commitment decisions of others. Choice is little more than the dinner-menu decision writ large. Against the egotistic demands of individuals, the appetites of nations, and the momentous risk of the clash of civilizations, choice is no choice at all. It may be, too, that Western analysts will test this critically realist method and then find, in their own judgment, that it begins to open our horizon to the gifts of Glen. This finding is not a fusion of horizons, but a transcendence of our own parochial views; for Glen points, never to himself or to his own worldview (much less to a choice of lifestyle), but to the infinite: to the God who is All-Mighty, All-Merciful and utterly Mysterious. If we have experienced and reflected upon that Mystery, an experience and reflection that is at once joyous, sorrowful, glorious, and even luminous, then we have made a profound life-decision, one that enables us to follow the alien words and the identical processes of Glen. Only through judgment do we know judgment. Only through our own lifes resolve can we esteem anothers. Only when depth calls to depth do we find convergence. We have suggested how difficult the process of intellectual self-appropriation is, that is, the process of intellectual conversion. We shall see that the processes of moral and spiritual conversion are no less demanding but, fortunately for the peace of humanity, much more often undertaken! In approaching Glen, we may say, with Lonergan, that the only authentic objectivity is authentic subjectivity. And only through authentic subjectivity do we find convergence; it takes a Gandhi to wisely, delicately, keenly appreciate the Gospel; a Merton, the Dalai Lama. This quality of convergence ayn noktada birleme is one of the most attractive qualities of Rumi. For when one of the greatest poets of a civilization and one of its most enduring spiritual leaders is also one of its most open individuals not in the fashionable sense of sampling other choices, but in the enduring expression of an existential apprehension of value then we all of us potentially may find ourselves attracted to him in turn. The openness of genius is itself an inspiration. Sensing it in our depths, we may well resolve to go and do likewise. Like the nun from Skopje and the tourist from Qom, we may resolve to go forth to love and serve the Lord and one another. And no desire could be more democratic. For this effective appreciation, this resolve, just like its antecedent life-decision, can only be sown and cultivated between an individuals soul and her Maker. No principality, no philosophy, can pre-determine it. For neither that decision nor that convergence can be commanded. Here, we begin to discover the intensely practical value and difficulty of conversion. It is not a matter of power but of individual
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cultivation and, if we are exceedingly lucky, of a culture that rightly adjudges and therefore encourages such unbounded cultivation.110 But mass culture, in any of its manifestations, e.g., American or Arabian, shows no such luck, be it intellectually, morally, or spiritually: only the technological genius that immediately accrues more wealth and prestige to the culture is popularly adored. (Ivory tower genius is just as readily dismissed in Riyadh as in Washington; what is wanted is useful, applicable genius: applicable to power.) There is an irony here, for technological progress is dependent upon a key portion of the very intellectual conversion that it blithely dismisses: it depends upon the individual stepping out of the dominant industrial perspectives and envisioning a problem in an unprecedented way: it requires an imagination it cannot create, much less control. Prince Sultan knew that there was nothing uniquely Western about science; subatomic particles function no differently in a Japanese reactor than in a French reactor; or, as Aristotle put it, fire burns the same in Persia as in Greece.111 But Greece discovered science, Persia did not; the difference was not in the laws of science, but in the laws of society, the customs that define that horizons of inquiry. The extraordinarily broad and deep horizons of Athenian society led not only to the development of democracy, but to the expectation of full citizen participation, both in the informal public philosophical and prudential debates in the Agora, the marketplace, and in the formal legal and political deliberations of the Ekklesia, the Assembly, and the Dikasteria, the jury courts. Indeed, Pericles instituted public jury payments so as to ensure the participation of (relatively poor) daily wage-earners any Athenian citizen who imagined that he could take a free ride on communal responsibility and look only to his own affairs was called by his neighbors an idiotes- a word that serves not only as the obvious root of our Modern idiot, but also as the unadvertised basis of our Hobbesian-Lockean social contract: Whats in it for me? And yet, as in Ancient Athens, so too in PostModern America: that culture flourishes most in which each individual discovers and contributes his or her best; and it is only the highest horizons that invite the apex of discovery and contribution. The outline of the great gifts of Glen may now be identified: his life-long drive to empower the average Turk, first in the understanding and perfection of individual faith, then in the understanding and perfection of science in society, and finally, the renewal of society itself. Like Prince Sultan, Glen understands that there is nothing exclusively Western about science, that there are very good historical and theological reasons rather than exclusively scientific reasons why the High Middle Ages in Western Europe took the first hints of empiricism from the ummah and pursued them, at the very moment that the ulam began to discourage such inquiries. Unlike the unfortunate Prince, Glen has been afforded the opportunity to issue the historic invitation that makes all the difference in faith and society: to re-open our full horizons of desire, our horizons of knowledge, of love, and of service. The gifts of Glen set in sharp relief the crassness of the technological imperative and, even more starkly, the failure of the technocrats own self-understanding. What Glen boldly proposes is no less than a
110
Such cultures, though rare, span the globe in their emergence: the Warring States period in Ancient China, Athens from
Pericles to Aristotle, 5th to 7th-century Ireland, 8th to 11th-century Damascus-Baghdad, 13th-century Bologna, Paris, Cologne, Oxford, and Cambridge, 15 to 16th-century Istanbul under the Ottomans, 17th to 18-century France, England, & Scotland; 19th-century Germany and America, are just a few of the societies that encouraged an extraordinary profusion of individual quests on the intellectual, moral, and/or spiritual planes.
111
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.7.1134b24-1135a5: the famous passage challenging the facile notion of the Sophists
that all justice is merely a matter of convention. As Aristotle rightly judged, it is not only the laws of nature, but our own deepest intellectual aspirations, that are universal. Along with the Jewish Prophets, the Confucian scholar-gentlemen, the Hindu Brahmins, the Buddhist saints, it has been the work of subsequent philosophers, theologians, lawyers, and statesmen, East and West, to extend his judgment to the moral and spiritual spheres.
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new Turkish leadership of the ummah, but a leadership based, this time, not on military and administrative genius, but on the earlier and enduring genius of a Yunus Emre, a Rumi, a native depth, a genius that is as theoretical as it is practical, as powerful as it is spiritual. If it works for some seventy million Turks, be they Sunni or Alevi, Jewish or Christian, then that will be because the moving genius the spirit of the enterprise is founded on universal aspirations. But if they are universal, how can we Westerners continue to ignore them?
4. Only a concept embracing the whole in its wholeness can be called truly scientific. In 1963, Niyazi Berkes, albeit in exile, wrote one of the best encomiums to the Kemalist regime; he urged that the regime had never intended to force secularism upon the masses, and thereby eradicate Muslim belief, but rather, by means of an incremental secularization, to deliver them to a more enlightened Islm.112 Ordinary Turks would not be deprived of the resources of faith, but would instead update their faith: just as the sultanate and the caliphate had been swept away, so too superstition and folklore would yield to the methods of science; society would be thoroughly secularized, but the government would insure, though its Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), that individuals would be led to a Modern set of beliefs and rituals. Berkes noted that the attempt to enforce revised rituals, from introducing Turkish music to banning Arabic, failed; he did not recognize, however, that the philosophy of governmentally-inspired faith was a contradiction in terms: once again, deep faith can only be invited, not commanded. Nor did he fully recognize that the Western predicates for the effort, predicates dating from 19th-century positivism and materialism, were not only exhausted in Europe and America, and thus anachronistic, but they were also reductionistic: their attempt to make all aspects of public life, and even private religious ritual, conform to dictates of science, had nothing to do with the work of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., but represented instead a form of scientism, a false reading and over-extension of scientific method to fields in which it had no natural application. Einstein famously held that God does not play dice with the laws of the universe; he did not tell us what God might play in a mosque. At the same time, the Kemalist Revolution did thoroughly understand that the Ottoman-style importation of Western machines would be insufficient, that the technology would have to be adopted as well, and that this would require, in addition, an internalization of Western philosophy.113 Technologically, and thus philosophically, and thus, too, politically, Turkey would have to modernize and this would require some degree of Westernization, though all of this would be determined by the guardians of the new Republic, the Army. As a former New York Times reporter from Istanbul has observed, Today [the Turkish Army] is a victim of its own achievements. So successfully has it encouraged Turkeys integration in the world that ever more Turks want to escape from its political power, which has become intrusive and suffocating. They have learned the lessons of democracy and now want to live by them.114 Unfortunately, the brass does not altogether realize how far the society has evolved, or how much Turkey, by virtue of its success, now serves as a role model and, thus, how
112
Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, with a new Introduction by Feroz Ahmad (NY: Routledge, Sina Akin, The Nature of the Kemalist Revolution, in David Shankland, ed., The Turkish Republic at Seventy-Five Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 165.
[1963], 1998).
113
Years: Progress Development Change (Huntington, Cambridgeshire: The Eothen Press, 1999), 14-28.
114
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much it could help reshape its geopolitical environment. Rather they see a nation surrounded by enemies and populated by simpletons who are easily manipulated.115 Worse yet, the Kemalists outside the Army, the previously protected ruling elite in Ankara, who regard themselves as the aydnlar, the enlightened ones, have long treated all manifestations of faith among the vast rural and now urban majorities as signs of hopeless backwardness; while the Army worries about regional trends, the secular elite condemns most domestic political developments.116 Not seeing democracy in action, but rather irtica, an upsurge in reactionary religion and obscurantism, the Kemalists feel caught in a Kulturkampf117 and just like Bismarcks original culture war, they have shown no willingness to understand, much less dialogue with, the vast opposition. Looking back upon the 1920s and 30s, when Atatrk swept away much of the opposition to modernization, the Kemalists today feel an uncanny nostalgia for the Modern a nostalgia that, ironically, is itself reactionary.118 Then again, in regional terms, the secularists certainly have reason to worry. In the great arc of Islm, from Morocco to Indonesia, the two great trends of democratization and identity assertion studied by Esposito and Voll are a particularly volatile combination.119 Not only are they concurrent and vital, but they are also fairly immune to secular Western influences; witness the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian election of January, 2006, and the increased popularity of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon after the summer war of 2006. Part of this upsurge is due, in yet another historical irony, to the decline of the ulam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for it was the failure to come to grips with Modernity of that relatively quietistic scholasticism that cleared the way for the rise of the Muslim activist intellectuals in the late twentieth century.120 Moreover, this activism, when not reducing faith to political imperatives, tends to reduce politics and an aggressive military strategy to a thoroughly fundamentalistic form of faith, one first articulated in virulent rejection of all aspects of Modern social life (except technology), in the early eighteenth century.121 In sum, Islamic reformism tended to become a legacy that was not developed and applied systematically, but instead employed or manipulated on occasion, in a diffuse and ad hoc fashion, when convenient by individuals, nationalist movements, and Islamic organizations.122 Among Western scholars of the Middle East and of Islam, there is thus a general tendency to accept two of the major observations of Khaled Abou El Fadl. On the one hand, he notes the similarities between the ostensibly literalist puritans of the era of al-Ghazali, whom that great theologian described as hadith hurlers they use the inherited tradition and law to silence their opponents and
115 116
Id., 168. Nicole and Hugh Pope, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998), 316, Heinz Kramer, A Changing Turkey: the Challenge to Europe and the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Esra zyrek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, NC: Duke John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15. J. L. Esposito and J. O. Voll, Makers of Contemporary Islam (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16. John Obert Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982, 2nd John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (NY: Oxford University Press, rev. 3rd ed., 2005), 145.
340.
117
Institution Press, 2000), 66, 68-69.

118
University Press, 2006).

119 120 121
ed. 1994), 374.

122
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to stunt critical or creative thinking.123 Those so-called puritans124 did not prevail in the first millennium of Islm. On the other hand, today, the traditional institutions of Islam that historically acted to marginalize extremist creeds [e.g., the Khawarij, Qaramites, and Assassins] no longer exist.125 The upshot is that Western scholars are deeply divided about the prospects and prescriptions for democracy within much of the house of Islm.126 What agreement there is concerns the current perilous state of authoritarian stability through much of the region127 and the lack of tools among Western powers to move those regimes toward a democratic opening that would not deliver a newly retrograde form of puritanical rule: that would not thrust the Mideast out of the frying pan and into the fire. What is missing in this literature is, first, the sociological phenomenon of the rise of the House of Service: of the great neighbor-oriented Islm inspired and led by Glen. Second, because this is missing, Western political science and strategic literature too often describe an unacceptable alternative: either continue to support the authoritarian regimes or take a huge gamble on Islamist neo-puritan regimes. Third, political science and strategic projections for the mid-term future of the Mideast lack both philosophical and, surprisingly, theological depth. Edward Sad, in Orientalism,128 famously decried the Western colonial and postcolonial penchant for viewing the Near East and especially Islm as the Other; in yet another bitter irony, the one thing that Western social scientists have not been able to do, at least not in American political discourse, is to portray just how much the context for development in the Mideast is other than the starting suppositions in Anglo-American history. Whether it was discussions of options in Iraq in 2002, or Egypt in 2004, or Palestine in 2005, discussions emanating out of Washington revealed scant acquaintance or concern with conditions on the ground. Sheer American will power cannot overcome such ignorance.129 Contrast that very sorry picture with this slim but fairly representative excerpt from Glen himself:
123
Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, There is a growing literature to suggest that the service organization founded by Glen leads a new Puritanism in
2005), 97.
124
Anatolia; v., e.g., Selcuk Uygur, Islamic Puritanism as a Case of Economic Development: the Case of the Glen Movement, in the Proceedings of the London conference, Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Glen Movement (Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University Press, Oct 2007), 176-186 while there are marked comparisons with the capitalist emphasis of the Northern European Protestants in general and the Swiss-Dutch-Scottish-New England Presbyterians in particular, nonetheless, there are community values among the Anatolians, particularly the very strong emphases on community growth and neighborly responsibility, to say nothing of dialogue with other faiths, that are quite distinct from the patterns of Calvins Geneva or Winthrops Boston.
125 126
El Fadl, op. cit., 102. See, e.g., Khaled Abou el Fadl, et al., Islam and the Challenge of Democracy: A Boston Review Book, ed. Joshua Cohen One author who has suggested that those authoritarian regimes have been more successfully entrenched than the
and Deborah Chasman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

127
political science and strategic literature generally realize is Steven A. Cook, Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
128 129
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (NY: Vintage/Random House, 1979). (The Council on Foreign Relations has described the lack of a well developed, indigenous liberal leadership alternative in
most Arab polities; Washington failed to grasp that point when it touted its great democracy initiative for the Middle East from 2002 to 2005; already, by 2006, the initiative was in retreat and potential liberal allies among the Arab intelligentsia were back where they started: silenced, imprisoned, even tortured. Washingtons emphasis on American will power and high-tech allure proved to be very thin reeds when pushed against the desperate politics of a culturally and theologically angered region.)
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If Muslims want to end their long humiliation and help establish a new, happy world at least on a par with the West, they must replace old-fashioned positivistic and materialistic theories with their own thoughts and inspirations. Aware of their past pains and troubles, they must exert great efforts to define these problems and cure them. A true concept of science will join spirituality and metaphysics with a comprehensive, inclusive view that affirms the intrinsic and unbreakable relation between any scientific discipline and existence as a whole. Only a concept embracing the whole in its wholeness can be called truly scientific.130 This is, indeed, far removed from 19th-century positivism; Glens sense of science per se accords well with the discoveries of Heisenberg and even late 20th-century chaos theory and complexity theory. And his sense of the whole is not only well grounded by analogy to the most advanced physics, but it also ties in, and very directly, with the genuine democratic aspirations of people of faith, Muslim or otherwise. In Western terms, we might distinguish his sense of theological democracy as one whereby a Catholic may appropriate to herself one after another of the great teachings of the Church, rather as John Henry Newman did: slowly, prayerfully, reasonably, resolving the difficulties without ever making them into doubts. In the Islamic literature, perhaps the most invigorating example of this is offered by Ihsan Yilmaz, Inter-madhhab Surfing.131 As Paul Weller has just observed, Glen employs a hermeneutic which is more in line with the classical traditions of the interpretation of Islam, and quite different from the flat approach of modern Islamists.132 At the same time, Glen manages to keep a balance between his emphasis on the need for Muslims to become fully at home with contemporary science and the need for Muslim community leaders to develop those classical theological traditions anew. It is not merely a matter of Muslims becoming comfortable with a much more realistic sense of science than scientism ever afforded; nor is an awareness of current scientific methods and findings among well educated Turks sufficient to balance their expression of faith. The balance does not operate at all in that way. No individual maintains a bifurcated pair of horizons, one that would need to be constantly juggled. Instead, the balance that Glen advocates is one that goes to the heart of each discipline: the chemistry professor should be every bit as immersed in his lab work as in his prayer life, and should not seek to construct an artificial divide between them, or, for that matter, an equally artificial set of premature parallels
130
M. Fethullah Glen, The Horizons of the Soul: Metaphysical Thought, in Glen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love Ihsan Yilmaz, Inter-madhhab Surfing, Neo-Ijtihad, and Faith-Based Movement Leaders, in The Islamic School of Law:
and Tolerance, Foreword by Thomas Michel (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2004), 148-151, at 150.
131
Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, ed. Peri Bearman, Rudolph Peters, and Frank E. Vogel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 191 ff. Cf. Glen, Why Prophets Are Sent, in Glen, The Messenger of God: Muhammad (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2005), 21 ff. Cf. Glen, Divine Decree and Destiny, and Human Free Will, in The Essentials of the Islamic Faith (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2005), 89 ff. Cf. Thomas Michel, Turkish Islam in Dialogue with Modern Society: the Neo-Sufi Spirituality of the Glen Movement, in Islam and Enlightenment: New Issues, ed. Erik Borgman and Pim Valkenberg (London: SCM Press, 2005), 71-80.
132
Paul Weller, Robustness and Civility: Themes from Fethullah Glen as Resource and Challenge for Government,
Muslims and Civil Society in the United Kingdom, in the Proceedings of the London conference, Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of The Glen Movement (Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University Press, Oct 2007), 268-284, at 280.
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between them. The experience in each discipline, be it in pursuit of a new scientific result or in the most profound prayer (not Here are my desires prayer), yields its own intrinsic methods and results: the book of nature will point, in its own time and its own way, toward the book of Scripture. Although Islm rarely invokes a logic explicitly equivalent to that of natural law theory in the West, the sense of profound unity underpinning Creation and Revelation is nonetheless there: Prince Sultan and Glen would agree that the abandonment of empirical research was first and foremost a failure to understand the unity of Gods complex Creation, a failure to honor each part of that Creation in its own terms. It was the theological misunderstanding that, ever so subtly, entailed the decline and fall of the Islmic world and, eventually, of its last and greatest power, the Ottoman empire. For the God Who calls upon all Muslims to Recite! immediately reminds them that He has given them the pen: He has given them the means to record all knowledge. Allahs first Revelation is, in short, a powerful call to mind the whole of Creation. For the gift of the pen was unrestricted: the Prophet was not instructed by the Archangel to jot down the words of Revelation; indeed, Muhammad could not read or write. In that moment of fear and trembling that experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto) that Muhammad underwent, time and again, for years on end, fearing that he could not endure it, that he would be crushed by the Archangel, or by the burden of the revelations, or by the Meccans rejection of his message (Armstrong is very good on this) - the Prophet was at no point concerned to stop and scribble. That is not why the Archangel led off with the pen. Muhammad was scarcely likely to forget what he heard if he did not jot it down Revelation is not a shopping list - jotting cannot, under any interpretation, be the meaning of the pen. Sometimes, the import of the symbolism is buried in plain sight. Recall the Aha! moment of St. Augustine who, after years of frustration in reading and re-reading the twin accounts of Creation, set forth at the beginning of Genesis, suddenly realized that the poetic description there, even within the admittedly broad interpretive span of mythopoetry, is not a declaration of a once-for-all sequence of six 24-hour days of divine labor (as it were: the divine Fiat! is not labor, but Sophia, divine wisdom, certainly permits us to use the image of Her at work). Rivers do not suddenly teem with fish; reeds along the riverbanks take time to grow; animals even take years to mature and reproduce; Genesis is not an image of a static Creation, where everything bursts out in full growth, as Athena bursts from the head of Zeus: no, Creation is the setting in motion of all things; Creation is, in a measure, continuous; so much was now clear to Augustine, and it was again tested and accepted as virtually unconditioned by Aquinas; now if the West had pursued Augustines insight and understanding and had judged its potential aright in the natural sciences in the High Middle Ages, as it took up empiricism from its Muslim and Jewish forebears, then the agonies of the Victorian era and the idiocies of the creationist fundamentalists could all have been averted: if, and only if, Medieval scientists had matched their inquiries into the natural world to the sophistication of their theology. The West had the implication of ongoing Creation and missed it for ages. The Eat had the implication of the pen and missed it for ages. Neither East nor West took its theology seriously enough to apply it to the whole. Neither of us minded Creation as God suggested we should. But the divine suggestion was just that: a small voice the night, an invitation.
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It becomes clear that there was a dim but persistent popular grasp of the import of the pen: witness the popular but informal hadth that we should pursue knowledge even to China. The whole world, human and natural, bears witness to the glory and the complex care of God. Such a world is very, very complex and multifaceted. But even so, it has no room for the preaching of hatred against ones neighbors or of despair for oneself. To mind the whole is to be not only true to ones theology and to ones science, it is to be true to ones heart and mind. For to mind the world is to refuse to condemn any part of it, be it the neighbors power or ones own powerlessness. To mind the whole is to discover that, for all our differences of belief and speech, our minds and hearts function in precisely the same way. Each and every one of us undergoes, each and every day, the immemorial process of experience, insight, understanding, judgment, and decision. Undergoing that process, we have the opportunity to turn, at every moment, and see that our horizon of inquiry is unlimited: it is made for infinity, it is made in the image of God. Our hearts and minds will not rest until they rest in God. And with that realization, with Augustine and Glen, we discover that there is no place in this world for a clash of civilizations that the lifespan of a reed, or the power of the pen that is made from it, attests at once to the foresight and the continuity of Gods Creation: the reed that becomes the pen that inscribes the subatomic particles making up the reed this is deep knowledge, and if we are graced, this is even deeper awe, and wonder, and, finally, love. It is said that there is no real knowledge of the part without antecedent knowledge of the whole. As Socrates points out at the end of the Theaetetus, there is no knowledge of the circle by its parts: for is it just two semi-circles? But then what are they, if not four quarter circles? And what are they reductio ad absurdum! It is even more properly said that there is no knowledge of the whole without love. For such knowledge comes only through great labor. We struggle to grasp an iota of the complexity of Creation: a jot and a tittle. And in our jotting, there is joy; but the greatest joy of all, as in a cave outside Mecca, requires no jotting whatsoever: the joy of the presence of God. Glen has renewed that call to joy like no one else in Muslim Modernity. He stands alongside the spiritual giants in the House of Islm, great souls like Rumi and Yunus Emre. Like them, he speaks directly to the needs of our age; like them, he speaks for all time.
5. Tout ce qui monte, converge. It was a French paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J, who observed, Everything that rises, converges. If we attend to our own processes of heart and mind, if we follow our own unrestricted desires to know and be known, to love and be loved, if we accept once again that our horizons (unlike our attainments) are infinite, then we can understand, and affirm that understanding with judgment and
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lifetime decision, with Teilhard and Glen, that Allh, in His infinite wisdom, has created our diversity the better that we may compete with one another compete in goodness. Not all will agree with us. Some, whether power-mongers or victims of fear, will persecute the likes of Glen. Even when he most practices what he preaches as sublime as that practice can be.133 And that is when we can affirm our own understanding of Glen, affirm it to be virtually unconditioned, for no more questions obtain, affirm it for this ultimate reason Despite the hardships that Glen faced during the process of accusations, spiritual persecution and exile, he never sought revenge.134 Beyond the three reasons for his being an important historical figure, reasons that are already well articulated in the literature, Glen stands forth ultimately as a man of infinite peace a man of God. And that is why the West should come to know him. There is no greater accolade, no greater power, for there is no greater invitation.
133
Ihsan Yilmaz, Ijtihad and Tajdid by Conduct: the Glen Movement, in M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito, eds., Zeki Saritoprak, Glen and His Global Contribution to Peace-Building, in the Proceedings of the London conference,
Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Glen Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 208-237.
134
Muslim World, op. cit., 632-642, at 639.
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Envisaging Dialogue from Theological Perspective
PART
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TURNING FROM DOOM-LADEN SOOTHSAYINGS TO MUTUAL COMMUNICATION AND WISDOM (TAÀRUF)

SEVKET YAVUZ 135 AND DAVUT AYDUZ 136
Abstract Doom-laden forecasts like Huntingtons projected clash of civilizations use imaginary fears as a mechanism to condition individuals and societies to accept the division of the world, especially its future energy supplies, in favour of those who currently wield power and supremacy. Previously the NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs were used to maintain blocs; now the clash of civilizations is being used to make blocs along religious/cultural lines. Division and conflicts are generally based on unreal fears of the other, by means of which the emotions of the masses are channelled into whatever direction suits the wielders of power. All the revealed religions, from the first prophet, Adam, to the last, the Prophet of Islam, in their true nature reject the conflictbuilding tendencies that lead humans to war and bloodshed. Briefly, religion means cosmos or universal order and bringing order to the chaotic experiences in human history in the world. Islam, by its very name, affirms peace, safety, and happiness for all humankind. In Islam, as in any other religious traditions, war is incidental; peace is the norm. On the other hand, to prevent chaos from undermining cosmos, wars become necessary at times. In Islam war is regarded as a natural but incidental feature of human collective life; the incidental necessity of it is balanced by its being subject to certain principles and constraints. Islam proposes justice and peace for all the worlds peoples, and through certain precepts sets up a firewall designed to protect religion, life, property, mind, and generation. The world needs to encourage an ethos of peace and dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims so as to maintain the an orderly, harmonious co-existence in the global village. It needs to discourage and battle against all clash-centred discourses and practices. With the resuscitating breath of love and peace inherent in all religions, preserved and well-maintained in Islam as in the Abrahamic traditions generally, humanity may be able, for all our sakes, to strengthen order and enfeeble chaos. For Muslims, who share the aim of defeating the doom-laden fear-rousing predictions of a long class of traditions, Glens insights and parameters can be reconstructed again. In particular, commitment to dialogue and tolerance should build up our spiritual capital so that we can adhere to the perennial values and understand the wisdom codes of out respective traditions.
135
Sevket Yavuz: His MA. (1996) and PhD (2002) were from Temple University, PA, USA and he made his post-doctoral
studies (2003-4) at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, in Berlin, Germany. He is now working as Assistant Professor of the History of Religions, Comparative Religious Thought and Anthropology of Religion at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Canakkale Turkey. His main interests: Methodological foundations and practical manifestations of religions, Post/modern philosophy, religion and sacred, interreligious dialogue. Recent publications: Existence in a Post/Modern World and Resistance of the Tradition: Amishes (2007), Neo-Conservatives: Religion and the "Other" in Neo-Cons (2007); Contemporary Buddhist Sects and Movements (ed. by S. Gndz, 2007), The Pentecostalists (ed. by S. Gndz, 2007).
136
Davut Ayduz: Since 2002 Professor in Theology at the Sakarya University. (Graduate in Islamic sciences, Ataturk
University; PhD in theology, University of Marmara, Istanbul in 1992.) 1993: lecturer in the Theology faculty, University of Harran; Assistant Professor Theology at the Sakarya University (1993) and Associate Professor (1996). 1994/5: a period of research in Egypt; then lecturing in Baku from 19972000.
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1. Prologue & Methodological Postulates The future is always predestined from now and here. One of the future predictions was that the future will be the age of knowledge. The futurists or other future-readers are pretending to be an augur; thus, rather than objective estimations and predictions, the whims and wishes of the reader are over imposed on the future. Therefore, these kinds of future-reading praxes are only contingencies without any real content and context. Yet based on these kinds of future-readings, humans are led to a psyche of supplication and thus await something in accord with what was read before. This psyche in the end forms a mode of practical preparation and strife. Once a target is determined; then all means and projects to get this target are utilized vastly and professionally. At this juncture, Huntington's theory can be deconstructed in the aim to negate all doomsday fantasies and soothsayings.137 The doomsday fantasies and fears conditioning societies and individuals seem to be just an apparatus to parcel out the future existence and energies of the world at the hands of those upholding power and supremacy. Through these kinds of projects, or more correctly, predictions, humans are conditioned to get aligned along the line of the holders of economic powers. Just as the blocs of the Cold War aligned around the NATO and Warsaw were just ephemeral entities to get humanity divided, by now the thesis of the clash of civilizations is being discoursed and practiced by referring to certain religio-cultural sensivities. Hence, these types of clash scenarios help the holders of imperial power control the less-privileged parts of the world. As a matter of fact, the ethos of tension and conflict is always beneficial for the unjust upholders of power in history. Conflicts are generally based on phantasmic fears, an imaginary other, by which the masses are goaded whatever these power wants to canalize. All religions from the message of Adam to that of the Prophet of Islam in their pristine nature can and may never wish enmity and conflict, rejecting all conflictual tendencies that lead humans to wars and bloodsheds. Briefly, religion means cosmos and cosmicizing all the chaotic experiences in the world in human history. As such, Islam, with its very label, means and declares peace, safety, and happiness for all humankind. In Islam, like any other religious traditions, war is accidental; where peace in the cosmos is essential. On the other hand, lest chaos besieges cosmos in the cosmos wars at times becomes necessary. Be it defensive, or protective for chaos, wars are conditioned with some fundamental principles. In Islam war is regarded as natural-but-accidental feature of human nature and in order to balance it Islam put principles and restrictions. Islam proposing justice and world peace establishes a firewall in the aim to protect one's religion, life, commodity, mind, and generation through certain precepts. Lastly, humanity with Muslims and non-Muslims needs an ethos of peace and dialogue in order to maintain the cosmic situation of our existence in the global village, degrading all clash-centric discourses and praxes. With the resuscitative breath of love and peace inherent in all religions, refurbished well in Islam in particular, and in Abrahamic traditions in general, humanity may able to cosmicize chaos for the sake of itself and make the bleak futurists unwarranted in the case of the
137
Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993). Later his article was published as a
book with the same title. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997). In the nearly same vein with its epistemic and apocalyptical tones, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article, entitled "The End of History? in the National Interest (Summer 1989), later published as a book with the same title, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free P, 1992).
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chaotic prediction of our world. For Muslims, in the aim to reach such a telos of cosmicizing cosmos, the following insights and parameters can be reconstructed again for the war-torn, hoary world: Islam lays the ground for a relation with all peoples, not only with Jews and Christians whose prophets are confirmed in the Qur'an. Having once been the recipients of revelation, and of a revelation that is identical to that of Islam, the whole of mankind may be recognized by Muslims as equally honored, as they are, by virtue of revelation and also as equally responsible, as they are, to acknowledge God as the only God and to offer Him worship, service, and obedience to His eternal laws.138 Or more recently, as Glen indicates in his masterpiece, nancn Glgesinde II (Under the Shadow of the Faith-II): Our age is an age of positive sciences together with the epistme molded with inspiration wrought with thought and culture. Our people can only catch up, communicate with and respond to the contemporary age through wielding these aspects of life as if four or five-dimensioned angels. What we need for is thought as much as inspiration, inspiration as much as experience, experience as much as love and ardor.139 At this juncture, the following thesis can be encapsulated: On the threshold of the quagmire leading universal existence to global perdition and doom, to universal inequities and oppressions, and the like, mutuality, communality, cooperative and proactive praxis enhanced by dialogues and alliances is a both cosmic and cosmicizing solution to our fragmented and debased existence at the expense of doomsday soothsayings. Theoretically, grace and love cannot be counted and thus are not squeezed into certain formula or categories, whereas hate and enmity can be categorized and squeezed into certain formulae through practical and existential manifestation in the daily lives of human being. Furthermore, it is also important to accentuate that all power and hegemony-tainted discourses and praxes are essentially and pragmatically diabolized and manifested through spiritually attuned umbrellas and supra-structures. Hence, what is in conflict, clash, or doomed is, to a great extent, the wish and will to power and otherize human beings for the sake of predominance. For the sake of brevity, dialogue and tolerance should be our eternal spiritual capital through which the world may able to get cosmicized in a continuous manner. By resuscitating the perennial values and mutual wisdimization codes, the whole world may be able to get resuscitated. This resuscitation can be made possible by communicative and dialogue-centric strives of the members of the Abrahamic religions. By doing so, a new mode of existence and peace may one day prevail in our wartorn world. In other words, dialogue that sets the path for mutual communication and wisdomization (taruf) has been a necessary mode of existence for several centuries; but it is a quintessential asset since the beginning of this century. In this study, the following questionnaire will be sought to answer: Why does humanity need an ethos harboring mutual communication and wisdimization through dialogue in our precarious existence? To what extent and to what degree can one anticipate a more just, equitable, and fraternizing epistme by way of dialogue and mutual understanding? What is the
138
Isma'il Raji al Faruqi, Islam and Other Religions in The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences vol. 2, no. 1 M. Fethullah Glen, nancn Glgesinde-II (stanbul: Nil Yaynlar, 1994), CD-ROM.
(1985).
139
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rationale for cosmisizing the chaos at the expense of cosmos and order? And most importantly to what extent do the notions of Glen support this goal of cosmicizing chaos through mutuality and communication?
2. Epistemic and Historical Prolegomena: From Clash and Chaos To Peace and Cosmos 2.1. From Veni, Vidi, Vici to Mutuality and Wisdomization Are the religions of the world for the disparity of human being? At the outset, religious traditions have, as if, been the cause of all conflictual tendencies and inclinations. Nevertheless, a judgment something like this is not correct and cannot be evinced. What is witnessed on the scene is in fact the paraphernalization of religion/sacred in favor of power struggles, politico-economic hegemonies, and so forth. The existential ramification of this situation can be seen also in religious contact instances. For instance: When different religions or ideologies met in the past, the main purpose was to overcome an opponent, because each was completely convinced that it alone knew the secret of human life.140 Living no longer in isolated islands, humanity have to come to contact with each other. The contact zones are now expected to be prepared through dialogue and communication. Hence, (d)ialogue, as the term is used today to characterize encounters between persons and groups with different religions or ideologies, is something quite new under the sun.141 If the genealogy of dialogue in the 20th century is reconsidered, the following statement seems appropriate in showing its general rationale and program: The impetus for dialogue in the contemporary world has generally come from Christians, and secondly from Jews. Thus it is natural that when Islam enters into dialogue, it is most likely to be first with Christians and then Jews. To be sure, the need for dialogue between Islam and Hinduism and even Buddhism is underlined almost daily in the newspaper reports of mutual hostility and killings. But it is overwhelmingly the encounter with the
140
Leonard Swidler, Islam and the Trialogue Of Abrahamic Religions in Cross Currents, vol. 42 Issue 4 (Winter 92/93), Swidler, ibid., 444.
444-6.
141
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other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, that has been the motor driving Islam toward dialogue.142 The reason why some of those who resist dialogue can be given, it would seem, to the lack of knowledge in the extent and content of the dialogue. In the aim to clarify this activity, it is important to know what dialogue is not as well as what it is. This process or act is not a new mode of syncreticism, nor an attempt to form a new religion; rather it is an attempt to search for mutual initiatives for peace and congruity in a tolerance and understanding ethos without constraint while preserving differences. By virtue of its emphasis on mutuality and alterity, the practice of dialogue does not aim to proselytize or to make concession. Thus, this practice may not be a missionary activity; whereas s/he is able to share each others religious experience in this practice. Hence, dialogue and missionary activities are drastically different activities; because the latter activity regards the collocutor as a prey and acts accordingly and calls any means for changing collocutors belief and way of life. Thus, what dialogue aims at is just presentation of ones experience and conviction in a mutually constructive setting. This presentation, as indicated before, comprises mutual recognition and understanding without any pressure and insistence. On the other hand, dialogue enables one, to some extent, to communicate the ones religious beliefs and thoughts. It can even enhance the scope and depth of ones religious experience. Only at this juncture can dialogue and missionary activity overlap. It is obvious that every religion, by and large, wants to expand its followers as many as possible; nevertheless this want should not and may not be put in the activities of dialogue. This is because dialogue does not mean to reject or proselytize other; but to wish the collocutors adherence to a right way and a right conduct (hidayah in Islam). What is more, it is essential that the issues causing conflicts and intense discussions be avoided; rather the common grounds that religions share be emphasized and brought forth. 143
142
Leonard Swidler, Islam and the Trialogue of Abrahamic Religions in Cross Currents, vol. 42 Issue 4 (Winter 92/93),
444-53. Here also Swidler gave a brief history of Trialogue: (T)he longest-lived (1978-84), most organized trialogue, see the report by Eugene Fisher, "Kennedy Institute Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 197-200. In April, 1989, another ongoing trialogue, this time international, sponsored by the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, held its first, very successful three-day meeting; the fifth was held in January, 1993 in Graz, Austria. A dialogue between Muslims and Hindus has been launched, but only on a relatively small scale to date. One such between Riffat Hassan and Kana Mitra was sponsored by the Journal of Ecumenical Studies in 1985 and was published in Leonard Swidler, ea., Religious Liberty and Human Rights in Nations and Religions (New York and Philadelphia: Hippocrene Books and Ecumenical Press, 1986), 109-42. A miniature dialogue between Islam and Buddhism also took place at the same conference between Mohammed Talbi and Masao Abe and was published in ibid.; both are reprinted in Leonard Swidler, ea., Muslims in Dialogue (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). Swidler, ibid., 444-5.
143
Niyazi ktem, Kulturlerarasi Diyalog Sempozyumu, stanbul Byk ehir Belediyesi, 7-8 Mart 1998, (stanbul)163-164.
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2.2. From Theoria To Praxes or Textual Precepts and Historical Manifestations A. Wisdomization Precepts in the Islamic Sources a. Mutuality and Cooperation among Humankind according to the Qur'n and the Sunnah of the Prophet of Islam aa. Wisdomization and Mutuality in the Qurn There are myriad verses and ahdith (traditions of the Prophet) in the Qur'n and in the Hadith collections pertaining to dialogue and tolerance. In these authentic sources, save some occasional situations, as a rule peace and tolerance are main traits of Islamic ethics and thought. One can easily grasp in these sources an ethos of tolerance; forgiveness, dialogue, and embracing ones heart all the cosmos in many verses and hadiths. This ethos expresses the pluralist character of the Islamic sources. To illustrate this, the Qur'n repeatedly emphasizes goodness (khayr); hence it make this concept paradigmatic framework as peace is principal goodness (al-sulh khayrun) (al-Nis /4: 128). This also proves both the epistemological and ontological structure of Islam, which means peace, surrender, and safety. That is to say, without forming these virtues and features one cannot be a real Muslim. Additionally, the very concept of Islam denotes to embrace and approach the cosmos, human being, and eco-system with love and respect. In addition, in the Qur'n all religions are the same in their essence; hence, the hadith of the Prophet makes it clear in the following manner: The religions of us as prophets are single 144. In this respect, a Muslim should believe in God, His angels, and the books He sent as well as the Prophets teaching these books without discrimination (al-Baqarah/2: 285; l Imrn /3: 84). In the same way, the Prophet is ordered in the Qur'n to follow up the path of the past prophets (Al-An m/6: 90; al-Nahl/ 16: 123). The path reinstated in the Qur'n very clearly (al-Midah/5: 48), recovering of what is adumbrated in the previous scriptures. The Qur'n commands in many verses the Prophet, sent as a paradigm of universal grace, to act in a tolerant way and communicative way while spreading the message. Its parameter in the vein of dialogue and communication is summarized well in the following verse: Say: "O People of the Book! Come to common terms as between us and you: that we worship none but Allah; that we associate no partners with Him; that we erect not, from among ourselves, Lords and patrons other than Allah." If then they turn back, say ye: "Bear witness that we (at least) are Muslims (bowing to Allah's Will)." (l Imrn /3: 64) What is more, it is also important to emphasize here that in the Islamic sources the method and means of wisdomization are well explicated. Hence: And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury); but say, "We believe in the Revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; our Allah and your Allah is One; and it is to Him we bow (in Islam)." (Al-Ankebt/29: 46).
144
Ebu Abdillah Muhammed b. smail, Sahih-i Buhar, Anbiy, 48, stanbul.
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Therefore, it is not an Islamic conduct and ethics to cut off our relations with the People of the Book, or behave harshly, or look down on them. This mode of conduct and praxis apparently contradicts the main character of Islam in general, and of the Qur'n in particular. In other way, the Qur'n reinstates this rule in this way: Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them: for Allah loveth those who are just. (Al-Mumtahinah/60: 8) This verse was revealed in time of very tense relations with the pagans of Mecca. Despite this tense occasion, it is noteworthy to point out its insistence on goodness, fairness, and justice. Moreover, with the logic of the verse the religion before Allah is islam (submission to the Divine Will) (l mrn /3: 19), all prophets in human history are preacher of the Divine Message. By virtue of this fact, it may be easier and possible to establish dialogue with those who follow the path of the prophets before the Last Prophet. On the other hand, it is not a compulsory thing to establish dialogue among the fellows of religions; rather in the Qur'n, there are advices to behave the best possible just and moral way with those who do not fight with Muslims. Neither in the Qur'n, nor in the Sunnah of the Prophet does any order ban the mutual and communicative relations with anyone. This kind of regulations firstly contradicts the very nature of the Qur'nic message. To exemplify how the Qur'n wants from Muslims to act the other, the following verses can be given: But if ye forgive and overlook, and cover up (their faults), verily Allah is OftForgiving, Most Merciful. (Al-Taghabn/ 64: 14). And: Tell those who believe, to forgive those who do not look forward to the Days of Allah: it is for Him to recompense (for good or ill) each People according to what they have earned. (Al-Jthiyah/45: 14). For the sake of brevity, the Qur'n clearly declares forgiveness, tolerance and mutuality in its whole ontological and moral framework. ab. Practical Manifestation: Wisdomization in the Life and Discourses of the Prophet of Islam The Prophet of Islam is a paradigmatic model for Muslims in their daily life as well as in their relations with the members of other religions. He used to behave non-Muslims in a very positive and embracing manner on the grounds of being human. Of course the source of this tolerance and indulgence is the Qur'n, forming the consciousness of its first Receptor and its followers. Hence, this kind of communicative interaction is expected to be an inherent habit in Muslim character. Upon the migration to Madinah, the Prophet established a universal peace constitution, forming the equality of non-Muslims with Muslims in terms of law and administration.145 In its egalitarian and inclusive spirit, this first constitution has not been surpassed yet by any other universal constitution. Multi-
145
Muhammed Hamidullah, Islam Peygamberi, (trans. By .Salih Tug), Ankara 2003, I, 190.
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cultural and multi-religious attitudes were the main trait of the early Muslim community, enabling to live side by side peacefully with the People of the Book in Madinah. To illustrate the praxes of dialogue and cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims, the following cases can be remembered: During his first prophetic experience in Mecca, the Prophet came across to some Christians. One of them was Waraqa b. Nawfal, who console him and his wife, Khatijah, by mentioning the challenge of the prophets by their community based on the Gospel manuscripts he owned.146 Furthermore, during his Meccan phase, on the issues not regulated with revelation he used to act in accordance with praxes of the People of the Book opposing the associators of Mecca. 147 As a rule, the relations of the Prophet with Christians in Mecca were peaceful and communicative; hence, they console and support each other physically and psychologically. For instance, in the third year of his prophetic mission the Christian (East) Roman Empire was defeated by the pagan Sasanid Empire. This defeat news saddened Muslims due to the fact that the former was the People of the Book. Upon this episode, a verse was revealed heralding the feat of the Book-Owned Rms/Romans in a near future and thus consoling Muslims (Al-Rm/30: 1-5). In addition, the Prophet was inclined to migrate first to Abyssinia, whose ruler was a Christian. On the occasion of strict oppressive regulations practiced by the pagans of Mecca, he wanted the Muslims to migrate to a near Christian country. He expresses his emotions by saying: If you want and able to do, do seek refuge in Abyssinia; for in the land of the ruler of Abyssinia no one is oppressed. That place is a secure and suitable place and stay there till God give easiness.148 Compared to the Meccan period, in Madinah Muslim-Christian relations become intense and hectic. The reason for this intensity was the process of founding a state in Madinah and the practices of the Prophet to spread the Islamic message throughout the region, be it states, tribes, groups, or individuals. These diplomatic interactions also explain these dense interactions with the Christians of the era. As for the relations with the Jews, another group from the People of the Book, it came to its crescent when the Prophet migrated to Yathrib (622). In the would-be capital of the first Islamic state, then alMadinah al-Munawwarah, Jews alongside the Arabs used to live for centuries. In the first phase, the Prophet needs to regulate the relations and rights and responsibilities of emigrant Meccans, native Arabs and the Jews of Madinah. In terms of education, justice, economy, military, and the like, the new community needed to get organized and regulated. Thus, by bringing together the head of groups and tribes the Prophet formed a regulation of city-state, the first written constitution, which has been handed down to nowadays. This regulation consists of nearly fifty articles, in many of which the Jews were mentioned. In the 2. and 25. articles of the constitution, the Jews along with the Muslims of Mecca and Madinah were regarded as ummah (community). In the 25. clause, the Jews and their allies have religious freedom. Briefly, the state and its constitution prove the way to live various races and creeds together under an administration.
146 147 148
Buhr, Bedul- Vahy, 3. Buhr, Libs 70; Ebu Huseyin Muslim Ibn-i Haccac, Sahih-i Mslim, stanbul 1955, Fedil 90. M. Hamidullah, slam Peygamberi, I, 109.
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In Islamic sources, there are many occasions in which the relations between Muslims and Christians are treated intensely. The Prophet himself appointed many non-Muslims as state functionary, technician, contractor, soldier, etc. What the Prophet used to search while giving duties to individuals was trustworthiness and competence only. He made many commercial contracts with non-Muslims having these attributes. He used to purchase foodstuffs and debt from Jewish merchants. In one of the verses, this situation explains like this: Among the People of the Book are some who, if entrusted with a hoard of gold, will (readily) pay it back; others, who, if entrusted with a single silver coin, will not repay it unless thou constantly stoodest demanding, because, they say, There is no call on us (to keep faith) with these ignorant (Pagans)." But they tell a lie against Allah, and (well) they know it. (l Imrn/ 3: 76) The Qur'n gives privileges to the People of the Book compared to those people without any religious books. For instance, in the matters of marriage and diet the People of the Book were treated defiantly. Muslims may able to marry with Jewish or Christian women and these ladies were able to keep their religious beliefs as it was before. Unlike those of associators, foods served and meats of lawful animals slaughtered by the People of the Book are welcome to consume by Muslims. The paradigm set by the Qur'n and the Sunnah has been followed by Muslims throughout centuries and this paradigm of tolerance was in turn responded by non-Muslims as well, mutually saddening and collaterally rejoicing.
b. A General Wisdomization Panorama in Islamic History till the 9-11 Phenomenon Muslims in history treated other religions and members of other religions on the basis of religion; namely, following the precepts instituted by the Qur'n and the Sunnah of the Prophet and thus the treatment of the People of the Book was highly tolerant and constructive imitating these precepts. When the historical experiences of the three Abrahamic religions were closely scrutinized, one can easily grasp the foundations of mutuality and wisdomization within these religious traditions. In particular, Islamic civilization with its pristine core (tawhd and its existential manifestation justice), molding pot (socio-cultural and spatial variables), and forms (the Qur'n and its practical expression, the Sunnah of the Prophet of Islam) set a perennial paradigm for later socio-political and cultural entities in forming and interacting with the other. For instance, the Islamic Turkish states in history, in general, used to treat others in a very tolerant and positive manner, respecting their respective religions. Guided both by humanitarian reflexes and religious tenets, they made multi-culturality and multi-religiosity a kind of mode of life as strongly expressed in Muslim history and discoursed in the Islamic religious texts. Hence, non-Muslims were free to act and think according to their religious affiliations. These kinds of historical praxes were not just conjectural decisions of the rulers, sultans, or viziers; rather in these states the rights and freedoms of non-Muslims alongside Muslims were protected by Islam as divine endowment, not as a grant permitted by rulers or sultans as in the law of the Western world, which were dependent upon the whims of kings or administrators. Because of this historical context, laicism in the West emerged long after from the Muslim world as a philosophical system in order to protect the freedom of religions and of conscience. What is more, the scholars of Islamic jurisprudence used to classify the world into Dr al-Harb (Abode of War) and Dr al-Islm (Adobe of Peace); whereas in the Ottoman State the world was
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regarded as Dar al-Sulh (Adobe of Reconciliation) aiming at preserving the rights of those who live in the state and making all the citizens of the Ottoman land. That is to say, the concept of Dr al-Sulh made a very strong effect in the administrative and cultural structure of the state and hence many cultures and religions were able to live side by side throughout centuries. Briefly then tolerance and indulgence in Muslim history were kind of handed down to upcoming generations in the scene of history, refurbished by the Qur'n and the Sunnah throughout centuries. The Ottoman State, shaping nearly 600 years political life of the world, gets more and more attention of especially multi-national state as a source of inspiration and admiration. Its ability to rule and to come together many nations and myriad religions peacefully on a vast geography inherited from both the East Roman Empire and Muslim polities has been studied by todays multi-national politicoeconomic complexes. Todays multi-national polities are interested in the multi-national and religious character of the Ottoman State and its ability and competence to rule them for centuries. One of the reasons why the Ottoman State has been able to stay in these lands was the role of the non-Muslim population especially in the Balkans. Administrating justly and fairly, the Ottomans were able to hold sway on these lands. Just as the Jews of Spain oppressed by the Spanish kingdom were rescued from the tyranny of the kingdom, they were settled down in the Ottoman lands. This episode and fair administrative conducts made them loyal to the state.149 Like the Muslim Turkish states before, the Ottomans treated, to a great extent, non-Muslims as recognized and respected entities, not tolerated minorities; respecting religious values and tenets of every group. The Ottoman State protected the rights of non-Muslims as proved by records of the court (er'iyye Sicilleri), of non-Muslim communities, and especially special archival documents of the Christian minority. As an ethnic mosaic, the Ottomans State was composed of 22 different nations and religions and able to live side by side for centuries. As such it represents the most noteworthy Muslim multi-cultural and multi-religious experience in history. With respect to todays chaotic ethos that even two ethnic entities may hardly live together, this paramount example can be fathomed in a tolerant ethos emanated from the Ottoman society in these centuries. The reason for this success was that the Ottomans, as a rule, did not interfere with the matters of different communities, leaving them free in terms of religion, language and ethnicity. 150
2.3. From Chaos and Doomsday Soothsayings to Wisdomization and Cooperation (Ta ruf) in the Global Village A. Wisdomization vs. Otherization: Some Evaluations and Suggestions In order to achieve a new cosmos-yet-haunted with doomsday sayings the ethos of mutual communication and cooperation, or briefly wisdomization (ta ruf), it seems necessary to disassociate the politico-economic and martial encroachments from the socio-cultural and civic wholes. Besides this disassociation, one can also find the sources of chaos in tribal environment, authoritarian attitude and behaviors, literalist reading, colonial domination, the processes and
149
Yusuf Halacolu, Osmanl Devleti'nde Gayrimslim Vakf ve Din Teekkllerin Stats, Osmanlda Hogr, Birlikte Ziya Kazc, Osmanl Devletinde Dini Hogr, Kltrleraras Diyalog Sempozyumu, stanbul 1998, 106-109.
Yasama Sanat , stanbul: Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakf Yay., 2000,. 127-129.

150
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impacts of westernization, and so on. In the aim to decipher the generic sources of dividing/excluding and integrating/including elements in religious communities necessitates mutuality an cooperation among societies and religious communities by reconstructing relations and interactions on an equal footing and level. In order to reread correctly cultural heritages of humanity and live peacefully in inter and intracivilizational context of the new global village, it would seem salient to understand the genealogy and content of exclusionary and otherization challenges. At this point, the problem is this: Why and how are these challenges the extant cases especially during the Neo-colonial era (1945-2000) and New-hegemonic aeon with imperial slants (2001-). For instance, what are the historical and social causes that resuscitate, for instance, some important Islamic terms, such as jihd (holy struggle), takfr (religious repudiation), irtidd (apostasy), sabb (blasphemy) especially after the postSeptember 11 catastrophic event? At this juncture, the following question can be asked: do the upholders of power really consent with the revocation of the processes that force Gods Hand to the Doomsday? Are the policies of new hegemonic-yet-imperial agendas embedded into this economy of war based on an either-or mentality? To which end are the pupil and vicegerent of the Divine led? To give an example: in such a context that relates the Muslim world, though there are several modern Islamic attitudes are being voiced in multi-cultural mode, there are also exclusivist trends reinserting themselves in the face of theorizing and actualizing terror. Especially in the post -September 11 era, intellectual efforts in the Muslim world are, by and large, headed towards to find concrete solutions in order to prevent possible conflicts and otherings. On the other hand, the invasions and encroachments of the following the 9-11 phenomenon became intensified and globalized; thus, the solution for this globally oriented case may be also a globally extended one. All answers to these questions are always to be collateral in nature. Thence, humanity needs firstly to get back the moral, egalitarian, and fraternal quintessence and manifestation; secondly, or more aptly, concomitantly, it needs to form a new cosmos through and with the mutually communicativecommunicative objectification of religious determinant. Hence, instead of applying historically bound and existentially reappropriated phantasmic concepts of Post/modern mini-narratives ontologically and categorically, these concepts can be postulated as attributive modes applicable to situations, persons, etc. regardless of nominal creedal affiliations. Briefly, in the aim to reach a global peace, it is necessary to have peace among cultures and religions of the world. The way leading to this objective passes through both a new hermeneutics realigning these erstwhile epistmic concepts, drastically connected to the yesterdays conflictual war ethos, and a new existence and behavior that obstructs the processes of otherizations working with the ritual return of the diabolos to the temporal existence of humanity. The epistemological and methodological path for this telos can be as follows: Firstly, consecrated archetypal interpretation of the other that forms overall epistme in each culture is to be deconstructed. These interpretations bear, to a great extent, the imprints of the era in which they were formed. Thence, (a) these interpretations can be directly related to the theological, denominational, and politico-economic affinities of the exegete/ interpreting subject; hence, they can be disassociated from the pure religious/sacred domain in order to make them less durable; (b) new epistmic prototypes may not be collective and whole-sale labeling in nature applied in educational and politicodiplomatic policies; (c) in the aim to avoid the phenomenon of theorizing terror, a new epistme that creates a new existential cosmos can be harbored. Namely, rather than trumpeting the so-called the war on terror and dividing human existence into two polar sides (the good vs. the evil), it would be more humanly and civilized manner to discourse the herald of love, passion, mutual respect, and
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most importantly globally mutual sharing. Since reaction breeds drastic reactions, the praxes of terrorizing terror are to be avoided, lest the othering archetypal repetitions revisited by the terrorized other. Secondly, this deconstruction process is to be made with the guise of reconstruction poised to actualize a new cosmos and epistme. To do this, it would be necessary to relegate the geneses of othering interpretations to various variables in history, such as political, economic, personal, etc.; and the reconstruction of new epistemic modalities can be objectificied in line with the creational fraternity (ukhuwwah khalq) of human beings, a perennial epistme, which is the main tenet of all classical religious traditions.
B. From Diabolic Encoding to Dialogue and Wisdomization In other words, in our globalized village, everyone is aware of the fact that human being can no longer live in an isolated island; thus, all should learn how to live, communicate, and interact with each other in this new global village. Nowadays, compared to the past, humans are more in commercial, political, martial, religious and cultural relations and interactions. In the aim to expedite these relations, mutual tolerance and indulgence are direly needed. In the 21. century Muslims live under the nonMuslim government or administration, and vice versa. This historical necessity leads humans in constructive relations. 151 This context explains why dialogue and cooperation are salient for the respect of human rights in the same degree and manner for all humanity. Based on sincerity and good intention of each side, dialogue is to be initiated in the aim to preserve others rights, honor, and dignity. In the search for a trialogue among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it seem salient not to bring forth repeatedly the unfortunate happenings of the past; rather the future perspective may be overemphasized. This kind of ethos is firstly dependent upon us; namely it is closely bound up with our sincerity in human rights, ethical precepts, world peace. It is obvious that the world peace cannot be attained just by one or two nations or groups, rather its is a world-wide initiative through the process of dialogue realizing mutual understanding, fundamental human rights, and universal moral values. Only through these means, the most-wanted world peace would, to a great extent, be reached.152 With the constructive help of dialogue, the following malaises can be cured: things threatening life; terrors, wars, imperialism, poverty, unjust allocation of world resources, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, tortures, oppressions, enslaving, exile, adultery, prostitution, human trade, hard work conditions, etc. For the sake of brevity, the need for dialogue among members of religions and/or civilizations cannot be underestimated and overlooked. Through an ethos created by these kinds of dialogical activities, s/he can understand those who are different from her/him. In another word, as Kng clearly articulates, in the following manner:
151
Abdurrahman Kk, Mslman-Hristiyan Diyaloguna Genel Bir Bak, Asrmzda Mslman-Hristiyan Xavier Jakob, Ahlak, nsan Haklar ve Diyalog, Kulturlerarasi Diyalog Sempozyumu, stanbul Byk ehir Belediyesi,
Mnasebetleri, Tartmal lmi Toplantlar Dizisi, SAV, stanbul 1993, 45-59.

152
7-8 Mart 1998, stanbul, 185-191.
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1. Only if we seek to understand othersour neighborsbeliefs and values, rites and symbols, can we truly understand people. 2. Only if we seek to understand others faith can we really understand our own: its strengths and weaknesses, its constants and variables. 3. Only if we seek to understand others faith can we discover that common ground which, despite all differences, can become the basis for a peaceful life in this world together.153
C. A Case Approach: Why Wisdomization and Dialogue are Necessary in the Post-9/11 Phenomenon In this part of the study, a case approach will be accentuated and evaluated. In the book, entitled M. Fethullah Glen: Bir Portre Denemisi (A Biographical Assay), Glens dialogue and latitudinarian view is evaluated within two categories: (a) latitudinarian ethos both to the Turkish society and to the whole world; (b) dialogue and wisdimization among members of religions both in Turkiye and the whole world. 154 By redefining the will to dialogue and latitudinarianism with the aim to reconstruct broken crystal, i.e. disjointed national and cultural bounds in the Turkish society, in particular; the whole humanity in general, he accentuates this task in the following manner: The enlightened and happy worlds of the future will be constructed by the gallants of love flying into passion with affection(These gallants) spread love and affection to everybody and everything; from the rising and setting suns, from glaring and fading stars receive always the message of affection.155 And the extent and caliber of dialogue and wisdomization are determined by him as follows: Open up your heart as possible as you can; be it like oceans! Stretch up with faith and love humans; lest nobody ousted from your care and passion. Applaud the righteous with their good works, be affectionate to the believing hearts; accost the rejecters with such an easiness and softness, let their rancor and hate go; and be the Messiah in their breath.156 For him, the cosmos is a cradle of fraternity (mahd-i ukhuwwah); hence: As a believer, one should look at the cosmos as a cradler of fraternity; thus, s/he should search for a relation bond with beings and s/he must be always lenient and open to diffusion with the people of faith.157
153
Excerpt from Kurt Rudolph, The Foundations of the History of Religions and Its Future Task, in M. Kitagawa (editor), Ali nal, M. Fethullah Glen: Bir Portre Denemesi (stanbul: Nil Yaynlar, 2002), 344. nal, 350. Excerpt from M. Fethullah Glen, l veya Yoldaki Iklar 2 (zmir: Nil Yaynlar, 2001; yeni bask: 208, nal, 351. nal, 367.
The History of Religions, 115. See on this W. G. Oxtoby, The Meaning of Other Faiths (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983).
154 155
192).
156 157
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The uptrend of religious values in the last quarter of the previous century set the stage for a new kind of reconstructions and reconciliations. In another word, religion takes its revenge by returning to history from the front door: In accord with the Modernization claims religion was to be ousted from the processes of Modernization, public sphere and nation state; yet public sphere is now at the crossroad of religious, political, and social life and as such it forms civil society in the Muslim world.
158
Thence, at the destiny-equilibrated (kaderdenk) point, dialogue and wisdomization process came to the fore due to two traits: (a) the uptrend of religious values, or the return of religion to history, and thence these values can be called for reconstructing a better and just world order; (b) the soothsayings of war and terror through the discourses and praxes of a new secular theory, namely terrorology; by extension diabolizing Islam and severely debunking its ability to adapt itself to the values and codes of the Modern world.159 Due to constant retreat and losses both politically and topographically, such as colonial encroachments by the West (it was read for centuries as Christians), Herodian and Zeolatian modes of Modernization processes, and the like, the Muslim world has created defensive collective ethos; thus everything coming from the West (read also from the Church / Christianity) is dubious, or more aptly dangerous; hence one should avoid from such incursions. Protective and defensive modes impede the ability to take risks and to take part of changes and evolutions. 160 According to Glen, dialogue, mutuality, and wisdomization are necessary in our global village, or more aptly, our class without walls, because: 1. Politically, economically, martially, and practically, Islamic civilization has for more than two centuries in the inertial phase; thus by now Islam cannot manifest itself without a problem in such a conjuncture. Diabolized and otherized Islamic image cannot be eradicated without a wisdomization ethos; war and conflictual modes of our world cannot give a space for listening to the otherized person, religion, or civilization. Ever-becoming global village through mass-communication and interactions via technological breakthroughs can no longer tolerate isolations and living at bays; rather it enforces human beings more and more come into contact with each other; Wisdomization and living together are tenets of Islamic civilization wrought throughout centuries; yet the West recently came to the point of tolerating Islam with other religious affiliations. Humanity came to the point that no religion, or civilization can annihilated others religion or civilization; thus, there is a necessity to live together and side by side.
2.
3.
4.
5.
158 159 160
Dale Eickelman, Islam and the Languages of Modernity, Daedalus, Winter: 2000. nal, 376-7. nal, 377.
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6.
Most importantly, dialogue and wisdomization processes of today is a reencapsulation of the Qurnic precepts fourteen centuries before.161 Hence, in the Islamic epistme, wisdomization (ta ruf) is not a nascent enterprise; but a perennial functions of all peace-loving persons and groups.
3. Conclusions and suggestions Today humanity is at the crossroad of doom and freedom; doom and doomsday fantasies became extant discourse with their practical manifestations in the oppressed and repressed lands of the Third World on the on hand; freedom from hate, rancor, enmity and inequity, though not as extent as the former, is also echoed through discourses and praxes on the other. To reach a contended state of being happy and felicitous, or eudaimonia/ khayr, in the actual realm (and in the Hereafter of the Abrahamic traditions), is made possible by acting, reacting, and reenacting rightness (amal salih) through wisdomization ethos. In the aim to make human civilization perennial, mutuality and cooperation through wisdomization and dialogue humanity can form a free and peaceful world, by instilling universal human values builtin all religions in various degrees in nascent generations (nasl). It seems that wisdomization among humankind of various religious and civic traditions are the backbone of our existence in the war-torn world. Without wisdomization, civilization and humanity is destined to perdition and doom. Interactions and relations among humans shaped and wrought with love, respect, equity, and probity form accordingly loving, respecting, equity and probity-probing individual and societies (nasl), material and spiritual outputs (culture/ harth). Any cultural traits whose nature is hegemonic, othering, degrading, and exclusionary brings about authoritarian and oppressive personalities and societies. Wisdomization, as in its reciprocal form, is a collateral responsibility. Wisdom of one civilization whose scope is not expanded by other set of the values and wisdoms of another civilization does not value and respect other wisdoms, but only imperializes and encroaches, then becomes devaluing and degrading tool kits at the hands of the oppressing and subjugating subject. Wisdom of one society or civilization works always with others; thus, in this article it is called reciprocally, namely wisdomization (taruf). The processes and actualities of wisdomization are to be wrought with love, respect, and fraternity. Wisdom-sharing and interaction practices blockade all hedonistic, utilitarian, pragmatic, and other types of egocentric expressions; thus, it reproduces always goodness, khayr, or ultimate bliss. Briefly, wisdomization and cooperation through dialogue is to give the proper place to the pupil of the universe. For the sake of conclusion, on the threshold of the universal Armageddon planned by those who devaluing the value of wisdomization and cooperation for the sake of profit and war economy based on terrorology, human being needs a theology of peace seeking to establish a communicativecooperative (taruf), and competitive in the path of goodness or khayr without demonizing, othering, demeaning, and destroying the pupil of the universes. When is humanity going to resuscitate the valuing epistme again as expressed in the following: One day Francis crying said to Jesus:
161
nal, 374-92.
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I love the sun, I love the stars, I love Clara and the Sisters I love human hearts, I love all beautiful things. Oh my Lord, I must excuse myself, For I should love you alone.162 Loving human hearts and just all beautiful things are good but in fact not enough. Hence, imbibing the discourse of the Word Civilization encompassing all creation within the sphere of value as expressed by Yunus Emre: If you want to efface the rust of the swol /inner soul Discourse that word that is the gist of all words. Discourse the Truth, alab (God) ordered every soul The liar of this world in the Next will embarrass Anyone who does not look at every creation with equity Even if saint in appearance, wayward (towards God) in essence. 163 Briefly, in the nascent globalized village, especially after the apocalyptical event of 9-11 and its subsequent developments, human being needs more and more a theology of peace modulated on the perennial values that are product of universal human heritage and on the mutual love, respect and probity. Values as the soul of human civilizations are to be reproduced within the core (culture / the Quranic harth) of each civilization and transmitted and thus made perennial by and through the anthropological and social subjects (nasl) for the absolute eudaimonia or mutlaq khayr in this world (and the next world of the Abrahamic quintessence [Urquelle]). Tersely then, as expressed in a French proverb: to understand all, is to forgive all.
162
Song by Bernardino Greco, OFM, at the Institut fr kumenische Forschung, Tbingen, June 22, 1985 in Leonard Yunus Emre, Rislat al-Nushiyya ve Dvn, edited by Abdlbki Glpnarl (stanbul: Sulhi Garan Matbaasi Koll. ti,
Swidler, After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection (Minneapolis: Fortress Pres, 1990), 19..
163
1965), 49, 107.
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THE LIGHT OF TOLERANCE BETWEEN RABBI ABRAHAM KOOK AND HOJA EFENDI FETHULLAH GLEN
EFRAT E. AVIV 164
Abstract This paper deals with similarities between the ideas of two religious leaders, Hoja Efendi Fethullah Glen and Rabbi Abraham HaKohen Kook, with emphasis on their ideas of the state and tolerance. Abraham Isaac Kook was born in Griva, Latvia in 1865. In 1904, Kook moved to Ottoman Palestine to assume the rabbinical post in Jaffa. In 1919 he was appointed Rabbi of Jerusalem, and soon after, as first Chief Rabbi in 1921. His books and personality continue to influence many even after his death in Jerusalem in 1935. Attempting to synthesize traditional Judaism with a modern and largely secular ideology Kook should be properly understood as a pragmatic consensus-builder and present-day Jewish National-religious stream draws on his ideology. Fethullah Glen always addressed by his followers as Hoja Efendi (respected teacher) was born in Erzurum in eastern Turkey in 1941. In 1953 he began his career as a government preacher and has travelled the length and breadth of Turkey since. His movement seeks integration with the modern world by reconciling modern and traditional values and hopes to reestablish the link between religion and society. Both leaders express a unique synthesis of state/nationalism and religion, military service and religious life. They both seek the integration of religious people into the modern life and prefer to do it by using tolerance as a way of living. Interesting to note, that both leaders make the same use of the term light, for instance; Rabbi Kook titled his most famous book : Orot HaTorah (lights of Torah, Tevrat klar). Both leaders represent the same ideology within their respective societies: Jewish-Israeli and Muslim-Turkish, as tolerant religious orthodoxies.
"I love all. I am unable not to love all creatures, All the nations. From the depth of my heart i long for the glory of all, for the uplifting of all." (Rabbi Kook, Arfiley Tohar [The Mists of Purity])
164
Now preparing a doctoral dissertation on Fethullah Glen in the Department of Middle Eastern History at Bar Ilan
University, Israel. She specializes in and is currently teaching a course on Turkish history. Her MA dissertation (in Jewish history, Bar Ilan University, 2002) was on Community, Culture and Feminism the Jewish Community of Izmir on the Eve of Young Turk Revolution 18991908. She graduated in Hebrew literature and Jewish history, Bar Ilan University in 1998, and is the holder of several prestigious prizes and scholarships. She has published several articles dealing with Turkish affairs in the Israeli press, writes poetry and translated Turkish poetry into Hebrew for literary journals in Israel; she has also published learned articles in her field and the article Izmir for the new Judaica encyclopedia.
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"Sevgi yaatan bir ksirdir; nsan sevgiyle yaarSevgiyle mutlu olur ve sevgiyle evresini mutlu eder" [Love is the elixir of life. Human beings live by virtue of love...thanks to love you are joyful, and be means of ove you bring joy to your neighbours... (Fethullah Glen, Insann zndeki Sevgi [the love inside the people])
1. Introducation Both Rabbi Avraham Hacohen Kook and Fethullah Glen Hoca, each an influential and enlightened leader in his own community, expressed tolerant attitudes unusual for their age. By examining their lives and writings, we may better understand how inter-religious dialogue may be achieved.
2. A brief summary of their lives 2.1. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (1865-1935) Early life Rabbi Kook, sometimes called: "The seer of Light", was a rabbi, religious arbiter, Kabbalist and philosopher. Having immigrated to the Holy Land during "Second Aliyah" (the wave of immigration before 1914), he developed a philosophical, Kabbalistic position favorable to Zionism and the new settlement movement. This system of thought, expressed in works compiled from his writings in the realm of religious law, philosophy, exegesis, ethics, Kabbalah and homiletics ("Aggadah") forms a significant component in the world outlook of the various elements of the National-Religious Movement of today. Born in the village of Griva, Latvia, his first teacher was his learned father. At the end of 13 ("Bar Mitzva"), he was sent off to study in nearby towns. Married in 1884 to the daughter of Rabbi Elyahu Te'omim, he spent a year studying at the prestigious Volozhin Yeshiva,165 where he acquired most of his religious education. Appointed in 1888 as rabbi of the Lithuanian town of Zeimel, he began to devote himself to Kabbalah. After the early death of his first wife, he married her cousin, and in 1895 was elected rabbi of Boysak, where he began to publish his precepts in the journal "HaPelles".166
The Jaffa Period When the Jewish community of Jaffa, prompted by Rabbi Joel Moshe Solomon, requested him to serve as their rabbi, he hastened to fulfill his dream of immigrated to the Land of Israel. Landing at Jaffa harbor in 1904, he quickly took up his post as rabbi of Jaffa and the new settlements. The period at Jaffa, the most fruitful for his writings, produced the material for many of his most influential
165
Yeshiva or Yeshivah (plural: yeshivot) is an institution for Torah study and the study of the Talmud by males primarily Sources for descriptions of the Rabbi's life: Kook, A.Y. HaCohen. (1961) Letters of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen
within Orthodox Judaism. Could also be translated as Divinity School.

166
Kook (Jerusalem, HaRav Kook Institute). (Heb.)
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works : Orot HaTorah [Lights of Torah],167 Orot HaTfilah [The Lights of Prayers]168, Orot HaTshuva [The Lights of Repentance],169 and more. At that time he also promoted the establishment of the Takhkemoni School which combined religious and secular studies: "to educate man to be honest and good" "and to prepare him "for the struggle of life". This expression of his view that it is imperative to progress with the spirit of the age, aroused strong opposition among extreme sectors of the Jerusalem Rabbinate. Further dissent was created by his relations with the secular leaders of the Labor Movement, by his support of the growing agricultural settlements, and by his willingness to find religious, canonical sanction for their continued existence. He also founded a small yeshivah in Jaffa, where the students spent half a day poring over the holy Writings, but worked at everyday jobs during the second half.170
The World War 1 Period In 1914, Rabbi Kook participated in the founding meeting of the World Congress of "Agudat Israel" in Europe, due to his hope of bringing the leaders of that movement closer to Zionism.171 Stranded there after only a month by the outbreak of W.W.1, he was forced to remain in Switzerland till 1916 when he was called to serve as a rabbi in London. There he became deeply involved in public activity in an effort to aid the settlement of The Land of Israel. Following the publication of Rabbi Kook's manifesto in the British synagogues, many memoranda were sent from the Jewish congregations to English parliamentary groups, affirming that the Faith of Israel is linked to Israel's Nationalism and to the Land of Israel. These were highly influential in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. After the end of the war, and having spent almost three years in London, Rabbi Kook returned to the Land of Israel in 1919, when he was appointed Rabbi of Jerusalem. In an attempt to provide solutions to religious problems arising from the transition from Diaspora life to the conditions of life in the Holy Land, he helped to establish the institution of Chief Rabbinate.172 In 1921, after his appointment as Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of the Land of Israel, he continued his public activities and his writing till the end of his life. He died of cancer at age 70 in 1935, and was buried with great honor in the Holy City.173 His son and spiritual heir, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, continued his work, while Rabbi Yehudah Maimon founded an academy for Jewish studies and a publication society in Jerusalem that bear Kook's name. Though Rabbi Kook is considered a conservative from the standpoint of "Halacha" (legal tradition), his philosophical outlook is seen as profoundly original as well as being bold and dialectical. It draws upon his response not only to Jewish writings of all periods, but also to universal thought, in a unique blend of Bible, Talmud, Hebrew philosophy, and Kabbalah, with more modern concepts absorbed from the scientific and philosophical world of his day. All these he succeeded in molding into a unified
167 168 169 170 171
Kook, A.Y. HaCohen. (1900) Lights of Torah (Jerusalem, Jerusalem Publishing).(Heb.) Kook, A.Y. HaCohen. (1979) Lights of Prayer, M.T. Neria (ed.) (Jerusalem, Lavi Publishing). (Heb.) Kook, A.Y. HaCohen. (1935) Light of Repentance (Jerusalem, Jerusalem Publishing). (Heb.) Yaron, Z. (1979) The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook (Jerusalem, The World Zionist Organization). 14. (Heb.) A political Social Ultra Orthodox movement, which was founded in 1912 as a universal religious organization. Back then Gerber, R. (2005) The Enlightenment Revolution- the Spiritual Way of Rabbi Avraham Isaac Haohen Kook (Jerusalem, Neria M. T. (1986) In the field of Rabbi Kook (Kfar HaRoeh Publishing) 43-44. (Heb.)
staunchly opposed to the new settlements.

172
Biyalik Institute) 192. (Heb.)

173
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system and mode of teaching, thus becoming revered as one of the most outstanding figures among Jewish thinkers of recent generations. Apart from members of the extreme Orthodox Community who bitterly opposed his modernistic, nationalist views, all those who came into contact with Rabbi Kook admired him deeply. While the zealously sectarian rabbis respected him for his profound Torah knowledge, they declared an irreconcilable religious war against him, claiming his progressive Zionist beliefs to be totally false, so that he suffered deeply from the schism till his last days. As he walked through the streets of the orthodox quarter of Me'a Shearim [100 Gates] in Jerusalem, he heard the epithet "Heretic!" hurled at him from behind closed shutters. Of the many books he wrote, he succeeded in publishing a few himself, but most of them appeared, often in edited versions, only after his death.
2.2. Fethullah Glen (b.1938) Childhood Fethullah Glen Hoca was born in 1938,174 in the small village of Koruuk (with fewer than 80 homes), in the Hasankale sector of the Province of Erzurum, eastern Turkey. His father, a religious teacher in the local mosque and his mother, a housewife, had six children, of whom Fethullah Hoca was the second son.175 The early death of one of his brothers during his childhood affected his life deeply.176 His father's influence was extremely significant. Fethullah Hoca relates that his father's eyes were always filled with tears, but that he never wasted his time. He wrote that although he grew up in a small village in material poverty, to the point of actual privation, he was apparently blessed with 'regal breeding'.177 And it was indeed his father who exposed him to the world of Islam's classical philosophers.178 During childhood, Fethullah Hoca ran the family errands, helped his mother with household chores, and even cared or the herds of goats. In his leisure time, he loved to read books or to memorize verses from the Koran (Hafzlk).179
174
According to the records of the Turkish Population Office, Fethullah Glen was born April 27, 1941. See nal, A. (2004)
M. Fethullah Glen Bir Portre Denemesi (stanbul: Nil Yaynlar), 508.(Tur.) Nonetheless, most books about Glen as well as his speeches, note the year of his birth as 1938. see for example: Glen, F.M. (2000) Prophet Muhammad : Aspects of his life (Virginia :The Fountain), i.(Tur.) The reason for the discrepancy may be that his father reported his birth to the authorities only 3 years later.
175 176
Glen, F.M. (1996) Fasldan Fasla 3 (zmr: Nil A. Yaynlar). Cover. (Tur.) One version claims that it was a sister who died: :www.pearls.org/authors/biography.html, while another version
attests to the death of his brother: :http://en.fGlen.com/a.page/life/biography/c160.html The first version notes that for years Glen visited his sister's gravesite and wept.
177 178
Nursi, . (1996) Kk Dnyam (Hatrlar)- 3. Zaman, 27 Kasm. (Tur.) Sartoprak Z. and Sidney G. (2005) Fethulah Glen and the People of the Book: A Voice from Turkey for Interfaith Nursi, . (1996) Kk Dnyam (Hatrlar)- 5. Zaman, 26 Kasm. (Tur.)
Dialogue.The Muslim World, 95, 3, 331.

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His Education Beginning to pray at the age of four, Fethullah Hoca affirms that since then he never missed a prayerservice. Since teaching of the Koran was forbidden at that time, his mother, his first Koranic teacher, used to rise in the middle of the night to teach him and later all the women and girls of the village.180his first instructor in Arabic was his father, but later he studied in Erzurum under the grandson of Lutfi, Sadi Efendi.181 In 1949, Fethullah Hoca's family moved to the town of Alvar after a brief stay in Artuzu,182 at which time the boy was forced to leave primary school after only two and a half years of study. Though his teacher had recommended entering him into the fourth grade, the move curtailed his education and Fethullah Hoca completed his studies later, by his own efforts. By his own admission, he finds it hard to grasp how he succeeded in learning everything by himself, noting that he was even able to read Ottoman Turkish fluently. In 1953, Fethullah Hoca began his career as "Government Preacher", the only legal preaching post available in Turkey at that time. His great rhetorical skills made him a highly gifted orator, raising him to the first rank of Islamic preachers of Eastern Anatolia in the 1970's.183 in 1959 he moved to Edirne, the gateway of Turkey to the West.184 On the way, he spent several days in Ankara, during which time he took the Preaching (Vazlk) Examination of the Administration of Religions, and was later informed by his relative Hseyin that he had passed successfully.185 In Edirne, Fethullah Hoca spent large sums of money in purchasing books which he considered to be of value, and would give books and journals as presents to his friends. His generosity is often alluded to by his friends, for it was known that he was frequently in financial straits. He ate and slept very little, by his own admission, so that his abstemious life-style once forced him to be hospitalized for a fortnight.186at Edirne, Fethullah Hoca first received the position of Second Imam in the Mosque of the " erefeli Camii" [Three Illustrious Ones]. Now, for the first time in his life, he received a regular salary of 170 pounds.187
His Military Service On November 10, 1961, Fethullah Hoca began his military service at Mamak.188 At the same time, he continued to lecture on religious subjects.189 Having been sent to serve at Iskenderun, he fell ill due to
180 181 182
Erdoan, L.(1995) Fethullah Glen Hocaefendi- Kk Dnyam (stanbul: AD Yaynclk), 25. (Tur.) http://en.fGlen.com/a.page/life/biography/c160.html His move to Artuzu took place after the move to Alvar and before the move to Erzurum.
nal A. and Williams, A. (2000) Fethullah Glen- Advocate of Dialogue (Virginia: The Fountain),14, www.thefountainmagazine.com
183 184 185 186 187 188
www.islamonline.com/cgi-bin/news_service/spot_full_story.asp?service_id=750. nal, M. Fethullah Glen Bir Portre Denemesi. 508. Erdoan, Fethullah Glen Hocaefendi- Kk Dnyam. 47-48. Ibid. 51 Ibid. I49 according to another opinon, he started his sevice on the 11th of November: nal A. and Williams, A. Fethullah Glenhttp://en.fGlen.com/a.page/life/life.chronology/p1055.html
Advocate of Dialogue, 18. www.thefountainmagazine.com

189
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the change of climate, and was granted three months' leave back at Erzurum, which he had left four years earlier.190 At Iskenderun he had undergone disciplinary punishment which included ten days' imprisonment in an army jail, due to a sermon which he had preached there.191 Three months later, Fethullah Hoca returned to his unit, at last completed his army service, and was released in 1963. Returning to Erzurum, he stayed with his family for a year, and then went back to Edirne.192 During his military service, one of Fethullah Hoca's superior officers who had a thorough knowledge of Sufism, urged Fethullah Hoca to read Western classics. As a result, he became familiar not only with classics of the West, but also with Eastern Islamic writings, both religious and non-religious.193 Consequently, Fethullah Hoca read widely in Rousseau, Balzak, Dostoyevski, Pushkin, Tolstoy and many others,194 as well as in the great works of the East.
His Civilian Life and the Founding of the Movement At Erzurum, Glen continued to give lectures, and for the first time began to visit the "Halk Evi" [People's Hall], where he presented lectures and seminars to the local people. In the framework of Glen's work as a young teacher, we may find elements which testify to his pro-nationalist approach. In August of 1964, he returned preach at Edirne, where he gave his services voluntarily as teacher of the Koran and as Imam of the Dar'l Hadis Mosque. Moving to Izmir in March of 1965, he assumed his position as official preacher of the Administration of Religions, and also served as teacher in the Islamic study hall Kestanepazar Kur'an Derne. In addition, he presented volunteer lectures and seminars.195 n Izmir, he became very well-known due to his enthralling sermons. Preaching in two or three additional places beside his regular Friday sermon at the Kestahanepazar Mosque, he was extremely active, often working on Saturdays as well.196 During the 1970's, Glen gave lectures all over Western Anatolia where they earned him many followers due to his original idea of blending service to the nation with service to humanity, of combining spirituality with intellectual training, and most crucial, his belief that true happiness is reached by helping others.197 Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, Glen continued his activities in Turkey, while the 90's witnessed his emergence into the public sphere, where the movement which he founded gained increasing recognition. His entrance into the public sphere was closely connected to the issue of dialogue which he constantly emphasized, and with activities linked to advancing this topic.
190
the heat in Iskenederun as opposed to the cold in Erzurum. Fethullah Hoca mentioned he had arrived to Iskenderun
with a coat: Nursi, . (1996) Kk Dnyam (Hatrlar)- 12. Zaman, 6 Aralk.

191 192 193 194 195 196 197
www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/yazdir.php?id=2659. nal, A. M. Fethullah Glen Bir Portre Denemesi, 508. nal A. and Williams, A. Fethullah Glen- Advocate of Dialogue, 19. http://en.fGlen.com/a.page/life/biography/p760.html Erdoan, L. Fethullah Glen Hocaefendi- Kk Dnyam, 98. Ibid., 102. nal, A. M. Fethullah Glen Bir Portre, 509.
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3. Analogies between Rabbi Kook and Fethullah Hoca 3.1. Their Personalities Beyond the many similarities in the biographies of these two outstanding figures, they both became charismatic leaders who serve as role- models for thousands of admirers, despite their extreme modesty. It was related of Rabbi Kook: "his humility, self-effacement and unwillingness to be showered with honors were well known." When a celebration was held in Haifa in the summer of 1914 to honor him, he requested that the speakers not heap praises upon him, for in Hebrew, the word "honor" connotes "heaviness", and the greater the honor, the greater the heaviness that accompanies it. His luminous personality and nobility of character are repeatedly testified to by various people who came into contact with him. One of his pupils describes their first meeting as follows: In 1904, not long before the Feast of Pentecost [Shavuoth], I journeyed to Jaffa on my doctor's orders, to bathe in the sea. On Shavuoth, which fell on a Friday, I prayed at the "Gates of Torah" [Sha'arey Torah] synagogue. Only 21 years old at that time, I was privileged to hear how the Rabbi was reciting the Preliminary [Akdamot] prayers, before the congregation with trembling and weeping, so that I was moved to the depth of my soul. From that moment, I felt deeply bound to the rabbi with ardent love, and became his pupil and devoted adherent forever.198 Kook was a profound thinker who delved deeply into spiritual questions in the privacy of his study, but was also a public figure and active leader of superior rhetorical skill, who labored untiringly for the betterment of society. His gentleness of spirit, forgiving nature, generosity, and desire to compromise so as to further peace among people were manifest in all he did, as was his constant emphasis on mankind's spark of Godliness. Glen, too, in his personal life, faithfully expresses the values which he teaches. Thus, for example, he lives a truly ascetic life. Living in the United States, he owns no personal property or possessions, either there or in Turkey. His dress too is extremely modest and simple, so that he refuses even to wear a tie.199 Blankets, sheets and books are his only possessions.200 He relates that he never takes trips to the nearby regions, and that ordinary pleasures, amusements and entertainment are unnatural to him. He was determined to devote his life to spirituality and religious pursuits only, spending his days in humble living and even austerity, while never expecting to create a spiritual or social movement at all. Glen's outstanding charisma marks him as probably the most charismatic figure in the annals of modern Turkey. He is surely the most wise and learned among Turkey's religious leaders, especially because of his comprehensive acquaintance with a uniquely broad range of erudite sources.201
198 199 200 201
http:// he.vikipedia.org. Bonner, A. (2004) An Islamic Reformation in Turkey. Middle East Policy, 11, 1. 85 Akman, N. (1995) Sabah, 23-30 Ocak. http://en.fGlen.com/a.page/life/biography/p760.html. Bilici, M. (2006) The Fethullah Glen Movement and Its Politics of Representation in Turkey. The Muslim World, 96,
10.
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3.2. Nationalism The nationalistic leanings of these two prominent thinkers were very similar. Glen himself served in the army, and called upon everyone else to undertake this duty as well. Rabbi Kook was a passionate Zionist and fought valiantly for immigration to the Land of Israel. The Rabbi's spiritual path was a blend of religion and nation, so that his followers, including his son, argued in favor of army service within a religious framework, for their vision of nationalism was as a fundamental religious component of the redemption of the Jewish people.202 And indeed in Israel today, there are institutions for the study of Torah (The Law, Tevrat) that inculcate the combination of religious teaching with military service, not willing to dispense with either of them. According to Rabbi Kook, the concept of the State is not the embodiment of the Divine Ideal as claimed by Hegel, but the Justification for the State is achieved only when its inhabitants live according to the Divine Ideal, with the will to exercise the Divine Ideal creating he foundation of the Nation's existence. The laws of the state must lead the national entity into becoming a national-humanistic base for emitting Divine Light.203 In a similar manner, Glen too helps to make Islam more "nationalistic". In his view, the state or "devlet" and the nation, or "millet", do not contradict each other. There is no conflict between Turkish nationalism and religious identity.204 Glen's movement strives to build a new social contract in which Ottoman-Turkish tradition will play a formative role. He brought together diverse groups to discuss Turkey's problems and to offer solutions to the conflicts between religion and science. These activities were carried out, for example, under the auspices of the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation [Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakf].205 Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the two thinkers, Glen and Kook, in their ability to express their ideas: while Rabbi Kook's activity took place just before the founding of the State of Israel, a state characterized as being "Jewish", permitting and even encouraging the establishment of "National-Religious" schools, Glen's activity in Turkey, a state with a markedly secular Constitution, faces the fact that a synthesis between nation and religion cannot find full expression in the schools or in any educational system as may exist today. Thus, Rabbi Kook's ideas, despite struggles with the anti-nationalistic ultra orthodox community's views, fell on attentive ears, since there is a large, highly respected national-religious sector of the population, in Israel today. Yet the synthesis promoted by the Glenic Movement is perceived by Turkish secularists as a threat to the regime, although it in no way presents religion as being contradictory to the civil authority.
3.3. Education and Educational Synthesis Both Glen and Kook were active in education and in establishing schools (or Yeshivot) for enhancing their religious beliefs and their respective faiths. But this was not their only purpose. As Kook averred, the ultimate foundation is education. Rabbi Kook's method in advancing the sanctification of all realms of being and all professions and wisdom is the basis of his concept of the educational value of secular and scientific studies. In the early 20th century, attempts were made by various groups in
202
On Jewish Nationalism see Katz, J. (1979) Jewish Nationalism :Essays and Studies (Jerusalem: The World Zionist Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, 320. Gndem, M.(2005) Milliyet, 27 Ocak. Yavuz, M.H. (1999) Search for a New Contract in Turkey: Fethullah Glen, the Virtue Party and the Kurds. Sais Review,
Organization) 320. (Heb.)

203 204 205
19, 1,125.
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Eastern Europe to introduce changes into the religious-Jewish educational curriculum by adding secular to religious studies. In the contrast to other leading rabbis, Rabbi Kook did not completely oppose this trend, for he believed in the value of educational synthesis, combining the religious with the secular, while yet always ensuring that religious subjects are of primary importance, and that the more worldly studies are secondary.206 Kook hoped to create a society in which history, philosophy, criticism and poetry would not be the exclusive province of those who wish to undermine or destroy religion. In the yeshivot that he established, he envisioned the spiritual academy of the Israeli people, while actively founding new Torah institutes in every possible place. In 1924, he headed a delegation of rabbis to the United States for the purpose of raising funds for Torah seminaries. Received in America with great esteem, he was even awarded honorary citizenship of New York City. On his return to the Land of Israel, he also witnessed his founding of the Yeshiva in Jerusalem called "The Central World Yeshiva" or more briefly "Merkaz HaRav" [the Rabbi's Center]. Its main innovations were the use of Hebrew as the language of instruction, and the addition of he studies of philosophical thought and meditation. Its goal was to draw "the best young men from all over the world, those who excel in talent and mental brillianceto restore the ancient glory of Israel, to enable them to improve their knowledge of the Torah of Israel, and to participate in the rebirth of the Land of Israel."207 The rabbi encouraged the Center's graduates to take an active part in public life and to become rabbis, teachers and leaders in the public sector in all fields, and indeed his pupils did disperse themselves all over the country to fulfill these goals.208 Among them were also rabbis who emigrated to the United States to serve as spiritual leaders of congregations there. The central purpose of education according to Rabbi Kook is to make man honest and good so as to prepare him for Spiritual Amendment and Perfection. Ever since Abraham the Patriarch began to fill the world with God's presence, it is believed that the more Man calls upon the Name of God, the greater will be his goodness and integrity.209 Education is also a crucial element characterizing Glen and his followers. As an integral part of the educational system founded by Glen, student dormitories, secondary schools, seven universities, cultural and instructional centers as well as summer caps were set up in many places. This comprehensive educational system comprises over one hundred school in Turkey itself, and above two hundred beyond Turkey's border.210 Schools inspired by Glen initiative already began to be built in the 1970's but the great majority were built starting in 1983.211 the Glenic educational system emphasizes such traditional values as respect for elders, politeness, and good behavior, as well as stressing older pedagogical methods such as memorizing by rote rather than analytical thinking. These schools support a philosophy based on Turkish nationalism rather than on Islam.212the prevailing belief in Glen's movement is that "the world is undergoing a process which causes man's deterioration, one in which humanity is forfeiting itself to technology, so that only education can counteract this rapid decline". According to the basic credo of the movement, one school can prevent
206 207 208 209
Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, 189. http:// he.vikipedia.org. Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, 16. Filber, Y. (1993) The Star of Light: Studies in the Teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (Jerusalem, The According to Yavuz, the number of schools is above 500. see: Yavuz, M.H. (1999) Search for a New Contract in Turkey, zdalga, E. (2000) Worldly Asceticism in Islamic Casting: Fethullah Glen's Inspired Piety and Activism. Critique, 17, Kristianasen W.(1997) Newe Faces of Islam. Le Monde Diplomatique (English Edition), (July ), 11-12.
Institute for the Study of Rabbi Kook's Teachings) 177. (Heb.)

210
124.
211
84-85.
212
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hundreds of pupils from descending into a life of crime, and since those who usually end up in prison are young people, it is doubly important to help them. Education is the prime means for softening their hearts and for awakening the love of these youthful personalities for nation and country, to enable them to preserve their individuality and independence.213 In the case of both these great thinkers, the education they promulgate is not an independent system cutting itself off from state education, but on the contrary, these are systems which both of them believe blend harmoniously with the governmental course of study. Thus, in Israel's "nationalreligious" schools, a religious program of studies is taught in addition to the general one, while in Glen's schools, religion is not taught at all. The course of study in those schools is the one dictated by the state, and the schools themselves are under close supervision by the government. At the same time, despite their differences, both leaders consider education to be a beneficial force, ameliorating the individual human being and his personal qualities according to Rabi Kook, and improving man as part of society according to Glen.
3.4. Concern for Their Students Both these outstanding men expressed their love for the younger generation (which is called "Golden Generation" [Altn Nesil] at the Glenic Ideology) in practical ways. Rabbi Kook cared for his pupils as if they were his children, since the yeshiva in Jerusalem became a sort of extended family for them. he conducted life in the school in a fatherly manner, without formality or distance, often helping the boys materially, with his wife's aid, so that even the holes in their socks were darned. Fethulah Hoca relates that while he was in Izmir, working with his pupils at Kestanepazar, he always checked the boys' bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets in the evenings, both to see to the condition of his pupils and to remedy matters that required correction, always trying to protect the pupils. As a result he slept very little during that period, just two or three hours a night, until he began to suffer seriously from exhaustion and weakness.214
213 214
Glen M. F. (2002) Yitirilmi Cennete Doru (a ve Nesil 3) (Izmir: Nil Yaynlar), 37-39.(Tur.) Erdoan, (1995) Fethullah Glen Hocaefendi- Kk Dnyam, 99-100
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3.5. Religion and Science - Religion and Philosophy Both Glen and Rabbi Kook studied philosophy, were well versed in the works of the major writers, and forcefully confronted the religious issues they encountered in their studies. In Rabbi Kook's thinking, the influence of modern philosophy is evident, including many concepts found in the works of Spinoza. Hegelian influence is especially noticeable.215 In addition, one finds traces of the thought of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Schelling, Buddhism and also to scientific discoveries bearing on philosophical issues (Evolution, the age of the universe etc.).216 in some instances, these concepts seem influential, in others they are treated critically. Thus, for example, Rabbi Kook found no problem in accepting the theory of Evolution, in marked contrast to many others, even asserting that it conforms with ancient ideas that appear in the Kabbalah. Rabbi Kook viewed the amalgamation between the sacred and the profane as what is termed: "the Method of allInclusive Unity", that is, a blend of the two in all spheres and in every important value: in man, in society and in the world as a whole. From this approach, too, springs his positive attitude towards the secular segment of the population.217 Glen was also well acquainted with modern positivistic knowledge, such as literature, history and philosophy. As an auto-didact, he had even succeeded in attaining an understanding of the natural sciences- biology, physics and astronomy, as well as being able to read the works of Sartre, Camus and Marcuse in the original.218 Glen was also deeply influenced by Kant.219 Glen saw science and philosophy as a step promoting man's religious awareness, for in his opinion science is essential for man's personal development, and without it, he remains hollow, with nothing to transmit to others. If one is not acquainted at least with philosophy and with the principles of certain sciences such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine and botany, and if the individual is not involved in theological studies to the same degree, he will find it impossible to explain anything to others, or to persuade them of the truth of his beliefs. Thus, every believer bears the real responsibility of reading widely and learning the ways of God in ordering the world.220 Thus secular studies are essential for each individual who calls himself a "believer".
215
This fact is especially evident in his article, contained in his work Lights [Orot], "concerning the Course of Ideas in
Israel", which uses the concept of "ideas" in the Hegelian sense to explain Jewish History : Kook, A.Y. (1963) Lights (Jerusalem: HaRav Kook Insitute). (Heb.)
216
Goldman, E. (1985) Rabbi Kook's relation to European thought, in: B. Ish-Shalom and S. Rosenberg (Eds) A Jubilee of
Lights (Jerusalem: Alinar Library and the Department of Religious Culture and Education in the Diaspors). 118-119.(Heb.) see also: Gelman, Y. The Aesthetics in the Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, in: B. Ish-Shalom and S. Rosenberg (Eds) A Jubilee of Lights (Jerusalem: Alinar Library and the Department of Religious Culture and Education in the Diaspors). 159-168.
217
Lifshitz, H. (1966) The Sacred and the Profane in the Teaching of Rabbi Avrahan Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (Jerusalem, www.pearls.org/authors/biography.html See his book: Glen, M.F.(1998) Varln Metafizik Boyutu (stanbul: Feza Yayinevi). (Tur.) also here: Can, E. (1998) Glen, M. F. (1996) nancn Glgesinde (Izmir: Nil Yaynlar). 203-204.(Tur.)
The Zionist Organization). 7.(Heb.)

218 219
Fethullah Glen Hocaefendi le Ufuk Turu (stanbul: AD Yaynclk A.). 109-111.(Tur.)

220
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3.6. Tolerance and the Attitude towards Atheists Religious tolerance in the modern age sprang from the weakening of religion. When the idea of tolerance spread in Europe during the second half of the 17th century, traditional religious faith had been enfeebled and undermined. Tolerance was motivated by a desire to be liberated from the social and organizational restrictions of religion. This was a non-religious form of tolerance, which gained its chief support from opposition to religious piety, or from indifference to it.221 We are thus forced to ask the following question: can a person who believes that "there is no salvation outside the church" as St. Augustine asserted, remain indifferent to heretics? This question was intensified within Jewish society since the establishment of the state of Israel as a "Jewish State" aggravated the tension between secular and religious elements of the citizenry. Neither Rabbi Kook nor Glen derides or scorns the irreligious, but both rather wish to integrate them and to bring them closer. Though Rabbi Kook felt great anxiety on seeing the increasing secularization of youth, and their abandonment of religion, he yet loved them and supported them in many ways, even willingly accepting the opprobrium of "vain love" towards them. even a sinner, in the rabbi's view, is still a son of God.222All-embracing love is essential for true worship of the Lord, and whoever harms another even in love, not only spreads dissent among the people, but also injures religious life. Thus the truly religious man is unable not to love. As one of Rabbi Kook great ethical works teaches: Love for all creatures must dwell in the heart and soul, especially love for each individual; and love of all the people is the desire of the most honorable, and the source of their material and spiritual upliftingit is this characteristic which harmonizes the exalted Messianic Spirit with the more earthly elements of IsraelWe must know that the life-point of light and sanctity never departs from the Godly image instilled into all mankind, and with which every nation and tongue is graced, each according to its intrinsic worth.223 In similar vein, Glen maintains that tolerance towards others draws all its origins from religion. What is expected of us today is the realization that tolerance is a force that grows primarily within ourselves and later in our surroundings. In order to bring about the rebirth of our nation, we must cut off the roots of hateful thoughts, and afterwards instill the concept of tolerance. In Turkey, this viewpoint has already begun to be perceived, but the rate of its growth must be accelerated, so that the trend may continue and even spread throughout the world. The world of the future must be founded on tolerance, love and mutual acceptance, instead of hatred grievances, violence and war.224 Furthermore, we will seek in vain to find tolerance, with all its depth and many dimensions, in other places, for indeed it is to be sought in Islam. Tolerance is also a particularly "Turkish trait", as already noted by Yunus Emre and Mevlana.225 Glen believes that the world has already crossed the threshold
221 222 223 224 225
Toynbee, A. J. (1965). A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press). 348. Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, 333. Kook. A.Y (1971) Thy Father's Instruction (Jerusalem, HaRav Kook Institute). 76.(Heb.) Glen, M.F. Fasldan Fasla 3, 102-104. Celaleddin Rumi (1207-1273) philosopher and mystic of Islam, poet of Persian origin, who is known in his didactic epics
and poets : Mansnavi-ye Ma'nav. Rumi had affected tremendously the mystic Islamic thought as well as the ideology of Glen. He is the father of Mevlevi sect which is known for its Whirling Dervishes. On Rumi see, for example: Schimmel, A. (1993)The Triumphal Sun: a Study of the Works of Jalaladdin Rumi (Albany: State University of New York Press).
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of understanding the truth that there is no way to avoid the dialogue.226 For Glen, liberalism and tolerance towards others and inter-religious debate are not merely pleasant ideas to be put into practice in some future Paradise, but are at the heart of the significance of being a Muslim here and now. He is convinced that the world is a symphony composed of different faiths, and just as an orchestra cannot perform if all its members play the same instrument, so too the world is a harmonious blend of all the varied beliefs. The most potent pillar of tolerance is rooted in love, which is the strongest force in the life of each human being; the follows compassion whereby the world may be thought of as a "symphony" of compassion and mercy", leading at last to tolerance. This is the final pillar for constructing a new mode of existence, one in which we must shut our eyes to the blame of others but forgive them, so that all together we heal the great majority of our wounds.227 The fact that Glen's precepts are not just an abstract model, but have been open to real life experiments and implementation, encourages the supporters of the movement to discover the many points of similarity between themselves and others, instead of stressing their differences and peculiarities. This pertains not only to the divisions between religions, but equally to those within the various secular groups. Glen attempts to find common ground even with Marxists, saying that those who consider religion to be "opium of the masses" should not have their opinions dismissed lightly.228 Glen also has a group of supporters who hold atheistic views, who endorse some of his tenets at a distance, but do not play an active part in the movement's regular business.229
3.7. The Element of "Light" as Expressed in Poetry We may note with more than passing interest that both these great thinkers frequently discussed and used the concept of "light". Rabbi Kook's works nearly always include the element of light. The titles of his books affirm this fact repeatedly. In the thought of Glen light is also a central element, to prove which we need only mention the "Houses of Light" [Ik Evleri]. In both cases, light is conceived of as the Supreme Lofty Light which descends from above to the lower realms of worldliness, enabling man to carry out the Divine Will,230 each according to his own faith or religion. Both men were also engaged in writing poetry, especially poems dealing with the relations between man and God.231 Both of them conceive of Light as representing Sublime Truth, infusing every aspect of daily being, serving as an alternate way to describe the life of perfected righteous behavior. This is exemplified in Rabbi Kook's poem: Bring us light, Bring us Holiness,
Yunus Emre- a poet and mystic of the 13h century.

226 227 228 229
nal, A. M. Fethullah Glen Bir Portre Denemesi, 362. Kurtz, L. R. (2005) Glen's Paradox : Combining Commitment and Tolerance. The Muslim World, 95, 3 , 378 Glen, Fasldan Fasla 3, 201. Aras B. and Caha . (2003) Fethullah Glen and his Liberal 'Turkish Islam', in: Barry Rubin (ed), Revolutionaries and Kook, Lights of Torah, 6-7. On Rabbi Kook's poetry, see Lifshitz, H. (1975) The Seer of Light (Jerusalem, The Rabbi Kook Institute). The rabbi's
Reformers (Albany: State University of New York Press). 150

230 231
family name, kook, is thought by some to derive from the Yiddish "kooken" maning "to peer deeply", thus reflcting his unique ability to see beyond surface so as to discern the inner essence of people and events.
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Bering us honor, Bring us justice Grant us life Worthy of its name. In Glen's poem, we read: O Army of light, the light of radiant faces Diffusing deep and warm joy, Bearing armfuls of tranquility to every place With endless tears beclouding their eyes" The Turkish original verse rhymes musically: Ik ordusu, aydn nsiyelerinde nr Snelerinde derin ve smscak mutluluk. Gtrrler her tarafa kucak kucak huzr; Gzlerinin iinde buulanr sonsuzluk..
4. Conclusion Just as Rabbi Kook inspired a large group of National-Religious followers who adhere to his teachings, so Glen too drew many loyal acolytes. The unique quality linking the two leaders is that both regarded nationalism as a complementary force enhancing the religious element, viewing the nationalist component as an integral part of religious duty, indeed as an actual obligation of the Faith. Both of them regard tolerance as a religious commandment, believing religion to be the very source of tolerance rather than the motivation for its absence. Both refuse to leave the material world and its culture in the hands of the non- religious or, to be dealt with by atheists. Thus they strive, each with the means available to him and in his own surroundings, to create a synthesis that will enable religious people to become the very best from all aspects, both spiritual and material, including science and all realms of culture. Furthermore, both serve as models proving that it is possible to be a truly devout religious leader, uncompromising in matters of the faith, while at the same time being highly educated, tolerant, and concerned for the welfare of all those who do not conform to this model themselves. While others may find this combination paradoxical, Fethullah Glen Hoca and Rabbi Avraham Kook prove in their own lives that these seemingly divergent attitudes can be blended in perfect harmony.
Online sources http://he.vikipedia.org www.islamonline.com http://en.fGlen.com www.pearls.org www.kimkimdir.gen.tr www.thefountainmagazine.com
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A WIDER ROLE FOR THE GLEN MOVEMENT CONSISTENT WITH THE PLACE OF THE QURAN AND ISLAM IN THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: A FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGICAL REASSESSMENT
IAN FRY 232
Abstract This paper contends that the ideal of dialogue between people of the Abrahamic faiths is consistent with Quranic teaching and the essential role of Islam in religious evolution. The Quran provides the incentive, and a template, for faith traditions to collaborate to alleviate the current crisis of conflict. It is also the imperative for a process to reassess foundational theological concepts that inform the self-understanding of each tradition. The circumstances in which Fethullah Glen pursued dialogue with other faith communities rather than political initiatives to protect and selectively benefit Muslim communities are considered in the context of the relationship between Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Universal history, population growth and science establish that current religious beliefs and practices are not absolute or final. Each world faith exists to provide guidelines for humanity to live in harmony and stability. The Abrahamic faith communities have an additional responsibility: to enable humanity to understand its relationship with the Divine. Regrettably, conflict between them undermines both roles. Being bound to their obligations under covenant they might precipitate changes consistent with Divine intention in spite of pursuing self-interest in exercising total free will, through negative conduct. If so, circumstances suggest it will be concurrent with Divine Judgment invoked upon themselves. It is surely better to achieve such changes through reassessment. Islam came into existence as a challenge to its pre-existing partners and to encourage reassessment of their self-understanding and practices. Its reforming role has not changed and its leaders should not be distracted by current disputation. Continuing dialogue is vital but in parallel with a global programme of collaborative reassessment. The Glen Movement can become the launch pad for that programme because of initiatives it has already taken: notably its education and conference programmes and proposals to establish joint MuslimChristian universities.
232
Preparing a doctoral dissertation at the Melbourne College of Divinity, having been admitted in recognition of prior
research publications. With a Diploma in Agriculture (Roseworthy), his career was in advisory work and chemical marketing until he joined the Presbyterian Board of Local Mission, Victoria, as communications officer. On the outbreak of the Ramadan or Yom Kippur War he proposed a reassessment of theological concepts with Christians, Jews and Muslims working in collaboration. Denied support, he undertook personal research and turned to journalism. His past international conference papers have concerned MuslimChristian relations; intertextuality of the Holy Books; globalization; and interfaith collaboration in reassessment of theological concepts. His Trouble in the Triangle (Compton Arch: Fitzroy, 2000), is a critical review of relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Formerly founding secretary of the Jewish ChristianMuslim Association of Australia, he is a member of the Interfaith Commission of Council of Churches in Victoria.
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1. Introduction: An overview Units of the Glen Movement have earned a worthy reputation for openness, ready hospitality, and readiness to engage in dialogue with people of other faiths on the home grounds of other communities as well as within their own comfort zone at a time of raging international crisis. Their policy has encouraged reciprocal readiness to dialogue, and has achieved success in educational and cultural programs which was rare only a few years ago. This is consistent with the principles enunciated and pursued by Fethullah Glen in his relations with people of other faiths throughout his career, and with his clear awareness that Islam was called in to existence with the purpose of reform through dialogue. In his paper Islams Ecumenical Call for Dialogue (June 11, 2003) he noted that Islam made the greatest ecumenical call the world has ever seen in seeking to bring Christian and Jews together as People of the Book some fourteen centuries ago. He then confirmed that the urgency of the ecumenical task is as great now as ever. Interfaith dialogue is a must today, and the first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones, he said. (Dialogue is a Must, also June 11, 2003) However, the subject of this conference, peaceful coexistence, is not an adequate aim. Our aim must be to overcome current circumstances of crisis, to establish and then maintain circumstances of harmony and stability for whatever may be the term of humanitys divinely ordained existence. This requires an understanding of the historical basis of current circumstances of crisis. Therefore, although it is important that past wounds should be set aside in pursuing dialogue at community level, history, with all the blemishes of human nature and dastardly conduct that it exposes, must be considered openly, fully and frankly in moving to another stage: reassessment undertaken by scholars and religious leaders in order to facilitate the long term aim. An examination of its historical circumstances shows that the root cause of the current state of crisis is the development of different community self-understandings based on particular interpretations of religious belief and teaching. These self-understandings may lead to antagonistic attitudes towards people of other religious belief, and different patterns of personal and corporate conduct. It is the patterns of conduct which, in turn, result in predictable patterns of conflict. It would not matter that people held different religious beliefs if their consequent self-understanding and patterns of conduct did not lead to conflict. Two later passages in the same statement on dialogue suggest that Glen clearly recognizes this situation: When those who have adopted Islam as a political ideology, rather than a religion in its true sense and function, review their self-proclaimed Islamic activities and attitudes, especially their political ones, they will discover that the driving force is usually personal or national anger, hostility, and similar motives. If this is the case, we must accept Islam and adopt an Islamic attitude as the fundamental starting point for action, rather than the existing oppressive situation Our beginning point must have an Islamic basis. Muslims cannot act out of ideological or political partisanship and then dress it in Islamic garb. Nor can they represent mere desires as ideas. If we can overcome this tendency, Islam's true image will become
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known. The present, distorted image of Islam that has resulted from its misuse by both Muslims and non-Muslims for their own goals scares both Muslims and non-Muslims. That statement applies equally to Christians and Jews as to Muslims. Conflict as a consequence of conduct, self-understanding and belief are intimately linked. Therefore conflict cannot be eliminated unless and until relevant aspects of religious belief have been subjected to reassessment and changes in self-understanding and patterns of conduct have been initiated. This has been apparent since the early to mid-twentieth century, but it has been widely denied, and discussion of reassessment that might lead to a new self-understanding has been actively discouraged. 233 [Fry, 2000 (1) P. 579] 234 [Stourton 1998 pp. 37-40] 235 [Ariarajah 1992] This reflects a fear that to admit that there may be a reason, or a need, to reassess the faith that one teaches or practices will imply an admission that ones own faith-based self-understanding may be (or might have been) a factor in generating crisis. Even to consider such an admission is a challenge to the self-understanding of dominant religious faith groups and a threat to the authority of their institutions. The perceived need to maintain institutional integrity and personal authority is given precedence over enhancing prospects for world peace and stability. Contradictory responses to the conflict which is a consequence of such inflexibility may then precipitate a more pressing need to participate in dialogue. One response often from people who have no direct involvement in religious affairs and possibly no faith base in that sense is based on recognition that a community is tearing itself apart, that this must stop, and that antagonism between faith-based communities must be overcome through people talking together and getting to know each other. A second response may be prompted by a sense of insecurity and fear for the stability of a system of faith that is supposed to provide the framework for a social and communal culture. This insecurity evokes a hope that through dialogue a compromise may be reached to deter a process of reassessment or make it unnecessary. A third response may be prompted b the opposite: a sense of confidence in ones system of faith and the expectation that if reassessment does result from dialogue and leads to change, the change will be consistent with divine intention.
233
In 1928, the International Missionary Council was widely criticized when, following its meeting in Jerusalem, it said that
Christ is the revelation of what God is and what man, through Him, may become, and, referring to other religions in which Christ is not recognized as Son of God, added that the Father had nowhere left Himself without witness.
234
In 1964 the Second Vatican Council had to consider the draft of the Catholic Churchs Declaration on Religious Liberty,
Dignitatis Humanae. This marked a seismic shift in the Churchs thinking. It challenged the concept of a theocratic state and accepted limits to the Churchs constitutional authority. It recognized that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of reasonable freedom, not driven by coercion but a sense of duty; it placed religious freedom first among all human rights, noting that This demand for freedom in human society chiefly regards the quest for the values proper to the human spirit the free exercise of religion in society. The challenge to the Churchs self-understanding was such that a group of senior Council Members planned a coup to prevent it being adopted. However an equally determined group of progressive members wrote to Pope John Paul XI that the opposition was a source of extreme anxiety and very disquieting, and seeking his direct intervention. He appointed a special commission with balanced membership, and the declaration was adopted.
235
Suspicion of interfaith dialogue among some Christians surfaced in the open controversy at the WCCs fifth assembly
(Nairobi 1975). For the first time, five persons of other faiths were invited to a WCC assembly as special guests and took part in the discussions of the section on Seeking Community, where the dialogue issue was debated. Plenary discussion of the report of this section highlighted the deep disagreement within the church on the issue of dialogue. Fears were expressed that dialogue would lead to the kind of syncretism or that it would compromise faith in the uniqueness and finality of the revelation in Christ, or that it would threaten mission seen as fundamental to the being of the church itself.
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This mix of responses and motives means that almost without exception, guidelines for dialogue programs that have been published steer participants towards getting to know each other personally, then their cultural and religious practices, and finally an overall framework for their belief. They steer people away from theological considerations which actually provide the basis for their selfunderstanding and, ultimately, the attitudes and conduct that results in conflict. This is illustrated by notes 1. and 4. of Guidelines issued by the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. 236 The purpose of interfaith dialogue is to increase our understanding of and respect for other religious systems and institutions, thereby increasing our appreciation of their values. Dialogue should enhance our sensitivity to the feelings of all professing religious people in their relationship with God. Good dialogue should, in addition, result in the deepening of the faith of every participant. There is valid purpose in dialogue regarding an issue which could become desirable or even mandatory for interfaith action as the result of the dialogue. There is, however, valid purpose as well in dialogue which takes place for its own sake for the elucidation of subjects and for the forthcoming of the persons and feelings of the participants. Participants in dialogue should represent their faith group views, but may also share their views as individuals. Thus the rich spectrum of conviction within any faith group can become manifest [Emphasis added.] However, the stage of crisis that has been reached requires us to meet for conferences such as this and makes it quite apparent that our essential aim cannot be achieved through programs of dialogue alone. Fundamental theological reassessment is required to enable humanity to develop an understanding that humanity is one, and an enlightened understanding of the relationship under covenant between it and the Divine Creator. This paper examines the concept of covenant, how it has come to be recognized, and the convergence of covenant-related prophesy, to establish that the Glen Movement is an appropriate instrument through which the process of theological reassessment can be stimulated, promoted and supported. Its starting point is the place of humanity in creation. But if the Glen Movement has a significant role to play, a brief review of the circumstances in which it has taken root is appropriate. When Fethullah Glen was born the world was in crisis. 237 Governments and their people were preoccupied with a conflict between a dictator, Adolf Hitler, leading Germany, and a small group of other European leaders who were said to be protecting the world from the threat of Hitlers excesses. This was in sharp contrast with the adulation with which industrial leaders had greeted Hitler a few years earlier because of the economic miracle he was credited with overseeing in Germany. Few people realized that the crisis hinged around the abuse of covenantal obligations that the Christian
236
The InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. Guidelines for Interfaith Dialogue. At least three dates are given for Fethullah Glens birth (a), but such uncertainty is of no consequence. The immediate
http://www.religioncommunicators.org/interfaith_IFCguidelines.html Accessed 3/10/2007

237
impact on pre-school children of the crisis of war is greater on those born in war-torn areas and seeing family and friends killed around them than on those not born in such areas. My earliest understanding of the macro-crisis environment of the mid-twentieth century dates from my primary school years towards the end of the war. (a) [The Glen Movement website notes April 27, 1941; the associated Rumi Forum for Interfaith Dialogue website, November 1938; and Gulay 2007, citing Roy, April 27, 1938.]
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powers claimed to live under. Even fewer were prepared to talk about it. The key circumstances are summarised thus. The European powers had capitalized on the particular interpretation of Divine Covenant adopted by the Christian Church, its doctrinal theology and its self-understanding, in subjugating and exploiting peoples throughout the non-European world over a period of four hundred years. During that period, due to both the dominance of the European powers and the religious selfunderstanding of Muslim leaders, the circumstances of the Ottoman Empire declined. The European powers had systematically abused the same doctrinal theology over a much longer period to subjugate and oppress the Jewish communities of Europe. That oppression reached such a level that a group of Jewish leaders established a Zionist movement to seek a homeland in which to escape oppression in Europe. They applied their particular interpretation of the Divine Covenant under which their people believed they lived, and sought to occupy the region from which their forebears had been expelled almost two thousand years earlier. When competition between the European powers led to the First World War, the dominant colonial power, Britain, faced the real prospect of defeat. Its government and the Zionist leaders saw great mutual benefits from entering into an arrangement that had no formal agreement or documentation, initially, other than the Balfour Declaration. What it did involve was further abuse of religious understanding by both parties. Among the outcomes from that arrangement were the entry of the United States into the war as an ally of Britain; the occupation of key oil fields in Iraq by Britain before Germany could do so; the invasion of Russia by the Allies when Russian Jews who were favoured by the Balfour Declaration failed to keep the Bolshevik Government in the war as an ally on an eastern front and thus prejudiced Britains position; a long-drawn-out war with traumatic consequences; the provision of massive additional funds for Britain and its survival; the degradation of both Germany and the Ottoman Empire whose leaders had aligned it with Germany out of fear of a Russian adventure in support of Britain; and the expectation that the establishment of a Jewish State would result from the allocation to Britain of a mandate over the territory of Palestine. The Nazi Party in Germany came to power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler who experienced messianic visions after being gassed during the closing days of the war; was haunted by the tragedy of Germanys loss as a consequence of Jewish intervention through the Balfour Declaration. He made good use of nine months in prison to begin dictating his policy document, Mein Kampf, in which he made his intentions perfectly clear.
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I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. [Watt, 1969]
238
While Mustafa Kemal set about restoring the pride, prestige, security and economy of a reconstructed Republic of Turkey through military success and the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate, the Great Powers of Continental Europe, preoccupied with reconstruction and economic recovery, tried to persuade themselves that Hitler and his religious ideas were of little consequence, and Britain struggled to maintain control of Palestine torn apart by conflict between Jewish immigrant settlers and Arabs of both Muslim and Christian heritage who saw their homeland being progressively alienated because without it the loss of its eastern empire was almost certain. Turkeys reconstruction was accompanied by the severing of the role and influence of Islam from state structures, a range of Kemalist social, educational and administration reforms, the Europeanization of culture and language, the substitution of civil for religious codes, and the elimination of ethnic differentiation. That reconstruction was complete on November 10th, 1938, when Turkey mourned its founders last breath; Europe woke to a new phase of Hitlers Jewish Question, and Fethullah Glen may have been taking his first breath. A few months earlier, at a conference at Evian, the Western powers had refused to agree to a program of Jewish resettlement to relieve Hitler of his Jewish problem. The Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica immediately aggravated the situation by publishing a long study saying that the supremacy of Jews had become particularly disastrous for the religious, moral, and social life of the Hungarian people and it was therefore not a question of proposing a theory of segregation, but of approving its concrete application in a country represented as being the most solid and indestructible fortress of Christianity. [Fry 2000 (1) p. 791] Hitler responded, telling the British Government that if there is no satisfactory solution in the near future, I will simply have to solve (the Sudeten question) by force. [Toland 1977 pp. 637-638 ; Churchill 1948 pp.242-243] Britain obliged by forcing Czechoslovakia to accept the Munich Agreement and surrender Sudetenland to Hitler, [Bullock 1993, p. 633], and on November 9, 1938, Hitler confirmed his message to the Jews and the world with the devastation of Crystal Night and the accelerated repatriation of Jews to Czechoslovakia and Poland. Britain rapidly lost control of the crisis in Palestine and its grip on its empire was threatened; Hitler increased the pressure for Jewish resettlement but no country would oblige; he threatened to invade Poland and, under intense pressure from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish
238
These selected quotations from Hitlers Mein Kampf are successively from pages 103, 109, 278, 512 and 60. Having
come under anti-Semitic influence from many quarters, and being steeped in the anti-Semitism that was part of the Churchs history and culture, Hitler maintained that the Protestant Churches failed to rescue Germany from its most mortal enemy, since its attitude towards Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established; that the Christian Social Party failed because its anti-Semitism was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge; that Christ took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity [and] in return was nailed to the cross; that both Christian denominations [he meant Catholic and Protestant] looked on indifferently at systematic bastardization of the nation by the Jewish black parasites, making it every mans sacred duty, each in his own denomination, [to make] people stop just talking superficially of Gods will, and actually fulfil Gods will, and not let Gods word be desecrated; and hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. [Watt, 1969]
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Agency for Palestine, Britain gave Poland a guarantee of intervention.239 [Fry 2000 (2) pp. 960970] When Hitlers bombs began to fall on Poland, Britain and Germany were at war. Hitler had the upper hand and pressed for negotiations to solve his Jewish resettlement problem. No one budged. Hitler overwhelmed Holland, Belgium and France, and expected Britain to negotiate. It didnt. Churchill, determined to regroup and continue the war, mounted the Dunkirk evacuation. Seeing his hopes trashed, Hitler issued instructions for The Final Solution. Four years and a Holocaust later, the war ended. Reconstruction began again. The Jewish community took full advantage of the intense Western Christian guilt complexes brought on by the fate of the Jews, and resettlement was agreed to with Palestine as the Jewish homeland. Another three years later, the British Government knew it faced imperial and economic collapse if it enforced the plan against the interests of the Arab people. But the United States had glimpsed the same vision of enormous benefits from assuming the role of sponsor and protector of the proposed Jewish State that had inspired the Balfour declaration thirty years earlier. It anticipated an enormous boost to its political and capital strength, and ready made access to exploit the geography and the resources of the Middle East by using Palestine as a foothold with the support of its Jewish constituency. The administration believed that such a partnership would complement the establishment of the Bretton Woods Organizations and the Marshall Plan which were planned to enable it to secure control of the international economic system, future resources and markets, and domination of world affairs with a minimal need for armed forces. [Wala 1993; Pollard 1985] Fethullah Glen was in the last phase of his elementary schooling when the Partition of Palestine took effect on May 15, 1948 with the Declaration of the State of Israel, and, in the wake of unprecedented political corruption and manipulation of voting in the United Nations, 32,500 troops from five neighbouring Arab nations crossed the border to confront 30,000 troops of the Jewish Hagana in the Arab-Israeli War. [Fry 2000 (2) pp. 1474-1483] The first of seven major wars directly related to the establishment of the State of Israel in less than sixty years had erupted. But that was the lesser of two concurrent events. It was only the outward indication of the other. The principal event was the conjunction of prophetic outpourings from its two partner faiths which the Church had long maintained could never happen: the Quranic Night Journey and Maimonides prediction of circumstances in which people of Israel would return to their ancestral home. This takes us to our real starting point.
2. History and Systematic Religion The solar system has existed for about 4.5 billion years, and universe for about 14 billion years. The current state of knowledge indicates that human habitation may be possible for about 5 billion years. (Wright, 2005) Although evolution of the progenitors of humanity occurred over a period of four to six million years, humanity, as we understand ourselves, has been on earth for somewhat less than 200,000 years.
239
See letter, Weizmann to Chamberlain, The Times, London, Wednesday, September 6, 1939, p. 8.
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Significant genetic variation dated ca. 35,000 BCE indicates continuing evolution. (Lahn 2005) The first evidence of systematic religion 240 is dated about ten thousand years ago: a couple of thousand years after the close of the most recent cyclical ice age, The population of the world at that time was about four million. (McEvedy 1978) It took ten thousand years to increase to about 375 million at the time of the European Christian push for colonies. That push was triggered by the occupation of Constantinople by Muslim forces and coincided with the beginning of the exponential growth phase. The tripling of the population to one billion, about 1825, then took just 15 generations. But, baring catastrophes, the nine-fold increase from 1825 to the projected peak of nine billion about 2070 will have taken a mere ten generations: 250 years. From our vantage point two thirds of the way up the cliff face of the world population curve, chart 1, it is apparent that the development of systematic religion through an evolutionary process has been a prelude to life on the imminent human population plateau. That development preceded the fantastic search for knowledge of how existing matter, both biological and inert, came in to existence, functions and interacts, and the consequent technological development that has provided the capacity to enable humanity to secure its future as it progresses along the plateau at least in a physical sense. We are at a critical stage of humanitys existence. The need for a framework of beliefs and guidelines that will sustain humanity in terms of human relationships, moral conduct and responsibility in matters affecting the human environment for whatever might be the Divine Authoritys intent, is absolute. Humanity, potentially, has a lot of living to do. It is our grandchildren who, only sixty years from now, must guide and manage or at least respond to humanitys circumstances and conduct at the peak. three traditions which claim divine revelation, rather than rational reasoning, as the basis of their faith each take Adam as a starting point, make mention of Noah, then take up their story with Abraham. The implication is that Abraham took a leap out of a religious vacuum and that Judaism then developed under divine guidance, more or less in isolatiorents of religious activity. Sharman and totems had given way to priestly polytheistic systems with semi-divine kings to the north, east and south (some claiming full divinity), with an overlay of Indo-Aryan Vedic sacramental philosophy of
240
The term systematic religion as used in this paper is not restricted to religion subsequent to the introduction of written
texts or the development, imposition and systematic study of authoritative doctrinal and dogmatic statements. Neither is it restricted to systems that involve ritual or priestly figures, although available evidence indicates that from the earliest era of identified systematic religions, c. 8,000-7,000 BCE, persons claiming or recognized as having healing or divining capacities (sharmans) generally assumed communal religious leadership to some extent. The term is used to refer to any system of enquiry or belief organized on a communal basis and seeking to understand the meaning of human existence and to establish or regulate laws and ethics for communal living, or to identify and honour a power or authority that initiates or sustains life and is greater than the group or its members and which exercises influence in their lives and their affairs.
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life in the eastern region, (Ling 1968 p. 3; Flood 1996), but there were also a series of codes of conduct. 241
3. The Concept of Divine Covenant: Stage 1 Evolution of an Idea At an early stage in that process of exposure, Abraham perceived and responded to a divine command to leave his ancestral home, to migrate to a land that he would be shown, settle, and found a new nation. Somewhat later, at Moreh, he experienced a vision. Neither was a covenant involving three essential attributes: a divine promise, an obligation linked to it, and a penal clause, either explicit or implied, in the event that the obligation was not honoured. There was a command associated with a promise, but no penal clause and only the implication that the promise might not be fulfilled if the command was not acted upon. The covenant followed only after Abraham obeyed the first command and survived a range of testing experiences. When it was imposed in a vision after he had finally settled at Hebron he was traumatized, but he did not spontaneously understand that his lifes work was to be the basis of a process that should enable humanity to live in harmony and stability for an indefinite period after it reaches its plateau. An understanding of covenant began to evolve when the basic covenant, having been revealed, was invoked and reinforced in many stages involving interaction between people of a number of faiths. Each of those faiths has received insights and inspirations relating to one or another aspect of covenant at some time. The concept of covenant and in particular the notion that all humanity is interdependent and has responsibilities to share and obligations to honour is not the sole province of the Abrahamic faiths. The key phases that have influenced the understanding of the concept to date are summarized in a series of clusters arranged according to the era in which relevant ideas were first expressed. Each phase is placed in historical context by an ID number in a panel below the dateline on chart 1, and the interaction between the faiths can be traced along diverging and intersecting time lines in chart 2. Abraham was traumatized when Yahweh told him his descendants would be exiled, enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years; that they would return with many possessions and that judgment would also be passed on the nation that enslaved them because its wickedness had not ended. Yahweh then made the specific commitment that: To your descendants I give this land, from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates.
241
Over several thousand years Ur was swept by waves of Semitic Accadians and Amorites; Aryan Hurrians from Iran
invaded the region during the 18th century BCE; and for about seven hundred years an Asian Sumerian people had provided the basis of the population. Abrahams ancestry is therefore speculation, (Armstrong 1993 p. 11) , but the religious environment was very complex, and at Ebla, a centre of scholarship, religion and commerce between Haran and Canaan, at least twelve gods were worshipped, and creation was seen as the act of a deity. (Matthiae 1981, Gordon 1987, Pettinato 1981) Contact with a wide range of belief systems was clearly a vital aspect of Abrahams formative experience as he migrated from place to place successively. Exposure to belief in divine intervention and punishment, certainly: but a sense of covenant, no. [Armstrong 1993 p. 11, suggests that the migration occurred between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries rather than the eighteenth, and that Abraham may have been a wandering chieftain.]
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Peak
Chart 1
The Human Population Explosion ?

Projection for the Situation at 2050i
based on data in circulation at the time sof the invasion of Iraq, March 2003
Today Invasion of Iraq September 11, 2001 Second Intifada
i 2050 9.2 : 2070, 9.4 : 2100, 8.9
Systematic Religion: Evolution, Covenant & Crisis Domination: Use & Abuse of Resource
Divine Covenant
North
Situation today * South
Ratio of foodstuffs, fibres, nonrenewable resources consumed
4
*
6.7 billion Ratio of foodstuffs, fibres, fuels & non-renewable resources consumed
North
South
Successive stages in the evolving understanding of the nature and consequences of Divine Covenant are discussed as clusters of ideas in section 3 of this paper. The clusters are placed in the era in which the ideas were first expressed or committed to writing for the Holy Books. This sequence is not the same as the era in which the events referred to occurred or are said to have occurred. The clusters and the era in which the ideas were expressed are identified by numbers in the panel beneath the date line.
Ratio of populations
1
Balfour Declaration Dreyfus, Herzl, WZO Zionism, Darwin, Marx Reformation European Colonial Era Fall of Constantinople 300-year Crusades Maimonides Pentecost Jerusalem Christology Destroyed again. Jewish church dispersion structure Jesus of Nazareth The Prophet Muhammad Islam Nicaea
Yom Kippur War Vatican II WCC, State of Israel Barth, Hitler
1) Adoption of totems 2) Shamanism. 3) Adoption of deities, sacrificial practices under priestly direction 4) organized settlement, kingdoms. 5).Vedas
Parallel developments: Kingdoms of Israel & Judah Hebrew prophecy
Ratio of populations
Asian & Greek philosophy Messianic expectations Buddha , Confucius Zoroaster
Moses Abrahamic tradition: Exodus, Law Covenant Yahwism
Jerusalem Destroyed: Jews exiled
1,2,3,4, 5, 6,7, 8
9,10
11
12
13
World Population in Billions
Time Scale: 2000 BCE 3000 CE
The North: Countries with European Christian or Jewish heritage which constitute the Western World. The South: All other countries, essentially Asia, Africa & Latin America; previously called the economic Third World. Population data: (1) McEvedy, Colin & Richard Jones 1978. Atlas of World Population History Harmondswoth. Penguin (2) UN DESA. 2007 World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision. Data, projections, trend lines. Resource usage and projections have been compiled from published trade data and industry projections for production and demand for basic foodstuffs, fibres and non-renewable resources. Ian Fry MCD/NL Oct 2007
Evolution of Systematic Religion and the Concept of Covenant 40000 . . . . . . . . 3000 . . . . . . . . 2000 . . . . . . .
.
1000
. . . . . . . .
Chart 2
Abrahams Mesopotamian Heritage
Ishmaels sons establish 12 Arab nations; settle from the River Paran east towards Babylonia in association with descendants of all of Abrahams children ARISTOTLE PLATO SOCRATES PYTHAGORAS SUNNI The Covenants interpreted
Upper time scale: years Lower time scale: hundreds of years . . . 1000 . . . . . . . . 2000. Pittsburgh Platform Mendelssohn European influence Copernicus Darwin Rominus Pontifex Marx Pantheon dedicated to Mary Huss & Wycliffe Voltaire Sancta Maria ad Martyres Aquinas Inquisitions Columbus P Bultmann Crusades Schism Calvin Balthasar Charlemagne Luther Tillich Kung Roman conquest Abraha at Mecca Rahner Barth Alexanders conquest Genseric & Odoacer Cluny Herzl Balfour Dec Pelagius Mott Evian Conf. MAIMONIDES Napoleon Hitler Constantine Shoa
Sumerian, Accadian, Amorite, Aryan & Hurrian. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cereal harvesting, dry stone wall construction from 9000 BCE; symbolic script, toolmaking, painted pottery from 7000 BCE; irrigated farming, copper & iron smelting, clay tablets, ideographs & pictographs from 4000 BCE; Cruciform writing c. 2250 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Traditions: Shamanism; Hierarchies of deities & priests; Great Floods & associated myths; Ziggurats to approach the gods. Codes: Aryan Vedic; Sumerian Ur-Nammu & Lipit-Ishtar; Akkadian Bilalama; Amorite Hammurabi ISLAM
Sumarian
Amorite
Accadian
ABRAHAM
[c. 2000-1800]
Sth. W. Europe Egypt England Egypt Greece Nth.Africa MUHAMMAD Arabia Turkey Italy Arabia The Covenants = Significant Jewish resettlement and exile recognized Assyria Babylon ISHMAEL
SHIA Nostra Aetate CATHOLIC Fragmentation Vatican II Colonial expansion REFORM
Settlement
ISAAC
Hindu Rg Veda Persian conquest Babylonian conquest Judaism grows by annexation Assyrian conquest Samaria Akhenaton Galilee Early Aramaean influence Idumea Negev 1st Temple 2nd Temple JUDAISM Monarchy
from c. 9000 BCE
Floods
CONFUCIUS BUDDHA ZOROASTERS influence
An era of communal evolution, rapid changes in patterns of domination; imperial turmoil throughout Asia Minor . Growth by proselytising & syncretism Nicaea
ADAM*
NOAH*
Aryan Hurrian
Sharman Totems Priests
Expansion by Coercion and
Conquest ORTHODOX
WCC
Vedic Tradition
Ziggurats Eblaite creation hymns Sumerian Ur-Nammu Code Accadian Bilalama Code Naram-Sin: divine kingship Amorite Hammurabi Code
CHRISTIANITY REFORM New Covenant proclaimed Khazar Khanate, by adoption CONSERV Pentecost Central Europe, Russia, by expulsion. Zionism WZO Dispersion RABBINIC JUDAISM ORTHOX Mass Jewish expulsions JACOB MOSES Judges Samuel Two kings Cyrus Proc. JESUS Hijra Ibn Sina Rumi Aggresive oppression (Israel) Saul DAVID Universal Covenant Arius Shiat Ali Ataturk Abrahamic Cov. Partial exile composed Athanasius Muslim Conquests Glen documented SOLOMON Hasmonean Revolt Augustine Genghis Khans conquests Shah Wali Allah Nursi The Amos Jubilees Paul Nestorius Sufism al-Ghazalli Ibn Abd al-Wahhab Isaacs Exodus. Isaiah Maccabees Dhual-Nun Sikhism Bahai 12 grandsons The Israelites, Jeremiah Philo Muhasibi Hujwiri Gilani Guru Nanak The Bab by Jacob (Israel) held in bondage, Habakkuk Josephus Kabbalah Bahaullah settle in Canaan and are led out of Egypt Haggai ben Zakkai Abulafia Gandhi the Negeb but many by Moses to Sinai where Jonah Ezra bar Kochkbar Zohar move southwest to Goshen they receive the Law and Zecharia Babylonian Talmud Asian & African influence and eventual bondage in Egypt Covenant *By Biblical tradition Malachi 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 .Ian Fry-MCD/NL Oct 2007.
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Abrahams problem was that ten tribes occupied the territory straddling the Jordan, including the Syrian Desert the stronghold of the Amorites whose wickedness, according to the statement attributed to Yahweh, had not ended. Trouble was to be expected if Abraham tried to settle those areas. Furthermore, he had not been given specific rules, guidelines or codes of conduct on which he and his descendants would be judged, nor a schedule of punishments, nor any pattern of worship practices or liturgies. The Abrahamic Covenant was based on human conscience, intelligence and capacity to determine right from wrong. That was to be adequate to ensure that the party under covenant acted appropriately. It was clearly implied that judgment would be exercised and punishments imposed on the same basis to Abrahams household and successors and on those occupying the Promised Land at that time. The word also in the expression: I will pass judgment also on the nation that enslaves them, would have been superfluous if equality of judgment and punishment was not intended. Exile and enslavement were to be imposed as punishment for breaches of the Covenant which, again by implication, included abuse and oppression of the neighbours of Abrahams descendants. The Hebrews were not being treated in isolation. Judgment of their actions would be based on their adherence or non-adherence to the Covenant, while Yahweh would continue to exercise the same authority and judge other communities on the same basis: their wickedness meaning abuse or oppression of their neighbours but not on the basis of their worship. 242 The exclusive application of the worship provisions of Gods relationship with humanity applied at that stage specifically to Abrahams successors. Nothing suggested that other forms of worship or the recognition of other gods should be suppressed. Abrahams household and descendants were simply obliged to honour Yahweh and no god other than Yahweh. Similarly, the covenant did not qualify or contradict in any way the direct relationship between Yahweh and all humanity. Yahwehs love, mercy and justice was universal. But Yahwehs commitment to Abraham was the trigger for a chain of traumatic events of far-reaching consequences. It prompted Abrahams wife to propose that he should father a child through her slave girl so that Yahwehs promise could be fulfilled; coercion of the slave girl to become a surrogate mother; a consequent family feud and expulsion of the slave-girl; Yahwehs intervention, the return of the slave-girl, and the birth of Abrahams first son, Ishmael. The subsequent birth of a second son, to Sarah, exacerbated the jealousy and precipitated Abrahams decision, taken reluctantly, to banish Ishmael and his mother after receiving Gods assurance that although the family was divided and the responsibility to pursue the Covenant would pass to one son, both sons would lead great nations. From that point the Hebrew text follows only Isaac and his descendants. Ishmael is written out of Biblical history. He is referred to only when other family members cross his path. However there is sufficient information available 243 to establish that the branch of Abrahams family that Sarah and Isaac rejected, settled to the south and the east, from the eastern edge of Egypt through Central Arabia towards Babylon, and became a significant influence in the development of the Arab nation.
242 243
A selection of relevant references: Genesis 12:17-20; 15:14; 18:20-21; 19:13-14, 24-25. Genesis 25:5-6,18 (J), and the Book of Jubilees which forms part of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha.
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All of Abrahams descendants were subject to the foundational Covenant with its components of divine promise, obligations and penalty clause. 244 Key points are summarised, thus: Responsibility for honouring the covenant passed through two generations of Abrahams descendants with little to distinguish them and lengthy periods of apostasy before family affairs again triggered dramatic developments. A group of Abrahams great-grandsons on Isaacs side sold one, a sibling, Joseph, into slavery through a group of great-grandsons on Ishmaels side; Joseph saved his criminal brothers from famine by arranging their settlement in Egypt. A later descendant on Isaacs line, Moses, married into the apostate line of another of Abrahams children, Midian (one of six born to a third woman), then, later, received help from his father-in-law, (a Midianite priest), to organize the people of Israel after their escape from oppression in Egypt. Israel received a comprehensive code of laws and practices from Yahweh through Moses but immediately fell into apostasy also.
244
The region which Abraham apparently allocated to Ishmael and Keturas sons included the district of Paran, where
Ishmaels half-brother Midian settled, and also extended into central Arabia. Isaacs descendents passed through Paran on their way to and from Egypt. Moses married a daughter of a Midianite priest, Jethro, and received help from him in establishing a legal system for the Israelites after the Exodus. Within the region were areas that were already settled by the families of Lots sons/grandsons who had been conceived in drunken incest against Lots will, the Ammonites and the Moabites. Lots household had ceased to be a part of Abrahams wider household after he and Abraham parted company following their return from Egypt. They were not included in the covenantal circumcision event, they were subsequently barred from the assembly of Yahweh for misconduct and reverting to pagan practices, and their core community was slaughtered by the Israelites under Moses.
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Yahweh sternly rebuked Israel, but ratified and then renewed the Covenant through the leadership of Moses, but not by succession through his line. The core of the Midianites, having rejected the most basic tenet of the Abrahamic Covenant and adopted idolatry, led the Israelites to again do likewise and to fall into immorality. Moses was immediately instructed to extract full vengeance for the sons of Israel and the ensuing slaughter was carried out in Yahwehs name. The events foreshadowed by Yahweh at Hebron had come to pass. The penal clause of the Abrahamic Covenant had been invoked successively, through Israels bondage as a consequence of Jacobs failure to adhere to it, and when the Midianites felt the full force of Yahwehs judgment under covenant. Equality of divine judgement had been demonstrated through the fate of the Egyptians, and the Israelites had been enabled to return to the Promised Land. The Israelites then fought battle after vicious battle to occupy portions of the Promised Land but, in due course, out of frustration for having to do so, they decided that a loose community structure with dependence on periodic divine guidance through judges and without direct leadership controls did not provide security. They wanted a king. They got one, and then began documenting their history. The immediate stimulus was the establishment of the monarchy: a crucial event in the evolution of its nationhood and self-understanding. It was expected to ease conflict with the peoples whose territories they were yet to occupy with a guarantee of protection under a divine covenant, and to usher in an era of privilege under Yahwehs protection. The events from Horeb through the Exodus to Sinai and to the establishment of the monarchy were therefore documented first. Once the process was underway, the amount of detail recorded increased. Then the need to record the nations pre-history became more apparent but, with only oral history to rely on they had to leave huge gaps and reliability was uncertain. They had largely lost touch with their pre-Egypt heritage and information for the period of several hundred years prior to Sinai was very sparse. On this basis the sequence of clusters begins with the call to Moses, the Exodus, the delivery of the Mosaic Covenant at Sinai, and Yahwehs prompt threat to destroy the apostates and to narrow the base of the covenant community to a remnant led by Moses. 245
245
Some authorities maintain that the J and E strands were all written more or less concurrently, in the tenth century
rather than in the tenth and eighth respectively, and that they should be classified by place of composition, either Judah as an undivided kingdom or Israel. For this reason, and the logical sequence of their content, some passages from the E strand are included with passages from the J strand in the first cluster.
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4. The Concept of Divine Covenant: Stage 1 Evolution of an Idea Cluster 1: 10th - 8th 1 cent. BCE 246 The first cluster, written in the tenth century, relates to the period immediately after the Kingdom of Israel had been established. It records that Israels leaders recognized that, as a community, they had been rescued from oppression by divine intervention under a special relationship imposed by Yahweh, that they accepted specific obligations under the Mosaic Covenant of Sinai; undertook to bow to no other god than Yahweh, and acknowledged that serious consequences might result from apostasy and failure to honour obligations under covenant. Cluster 2: 10th cent. 247 The writers acknowledged Yahwehs absolute authority in commands imposed on Abraham in a divine covenant during an earlier period; that his successors were to bow to no other God and to accept ongoing responsibility to maintain the specific Abrahamic Covenant; and that Abrahams successors divided into two streams, through Isaac and Ishmael. Cluster 3: 10th cent. and later 248Straining to recall the origins and pre-history of their community, they acknowledged the divisions within Abrahams family, the succession through Isaac and then Jacob, Jacobs failure, and the communitys bondage and rescue. They tried to glimpse their prehistory, and recognized creation as an act of God. Cluster 4: 8th cent. 249 By the eighth century the competing kingdoms of Judah and Israel faced increased external influence from pagan and polytheistic kingdoms including the Assyrian Empire. Israels King Ahab introduced the worship of Baal; Judah became a vassal kingdom, a hotbed of idolatry, and apostasy was widespread. The primary stage of Israels prophetic era began at this point with the inspired work of Hosea, Amos, Isaiah and others who recognized that Yahwehs authority is universal; judgment and corrective punishment is imposed on both individuals and communities or nations; and the agency through which punishment is administered may be no less corrupt or unworthy than the party being punished. Cluster 5: 7th,early 6th cent 250 The dramatic prophetic period continued. Elijah and Jeremiah each understood that Yahwehs relationships are both personal and communal; that Israel would be subjugated for its apostasy, but that a remnant would survive so that it would rise again to pursue its continuing role in Yahwehs plan. Jeremiah also anticipated that a messianic figure, a righteous branch springing from David, would secure Jerusalem in peace provided the Covenant was honoured.
246 247 248 249
Exodus 3:6 E, 7-8 J, 16-20 J; 32:9-11, 14 J; Numbers 14:19-25 J Genesis 12:1-7 J; 13:14-16 J; 15:1-4 J & E?; 15:13-16 E?, 18 J; 16:9-10 source ?, 16:11-12 J Genesis 26:3-6 J; 26:24-25 J; 28:13-17 J; 32:27-29 J; 2:5-4:26 J;, J portions of chapters 6,7,8 & 9; 8:21 J Genesis 21:12-13 E; 22:2 E; 22:16-18 Source ?; 28:20-22 E; 46:3-5 E; Hosea 2:7,9-10,13-23; 14:1-8; Amos 3:1-2; 8:41 Kings 18:17-18 D; Jeremiah 23:4-6; 30:4-11; 31:31; 33:14-26; 2 Samuel 7:11b,16 source ?; 2 7:12-15 D
7,14; Isaiah 6:1-3; 1:2-4, 9, 24-28; 6:13; 11:1-6, 9-11

250
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Editors backdated this understanding to relate it to the oracle of Nathan, Davids reign and Solomons succession. Cluster 5: 6th cent. 251 Rampant idolatry in Assyria triggered the ministry of the prophet Zoroaster, but the circulation of the RgVeda, completed ca.900, was also a factor. It was basically socially constructive but Zoroaster denounced its polytheism and some aspects of its teachings. [Zaehner 1977] Zoroasters stringent monotheism influenced both Cyrus of Persia and Second Isaiah in exile. They both concluded that Israels God and Persias God were one. But Second Isaiah also realized that God has a covenant with all humanity and that Israel is to exemplify the nature of that relationship. Editors backdated that realization also, inserting it in Genesis and Exodus as if it had been a fundamental belief from the earliest days of Abraham and his predecessors. Cluster 7: Post exile 6th/5th cent. 252 Jonah, also inspired by the experience of the Exile, realized that Gods love and compassion is for all who repent, not only those who were obligated under the Abrahamic or Mosaic Covenants. Editors acted again, inserting an array of critical passages into Genesis and Exodus which had been compiled from three to four centuries earlier. The insertions included the expanded creation story; the Universal Covenant through Noah; a greatly expanded statement of the Abrahamic Covenant, including that circumcision was to be a sign of the Covenant; a redefinition of the land promised in perpetuity to Israel, reducing it to the land of Canaan and, in so doing, tacitly acknowledging that Ishmaels descendants had been blessed and were occupying the balance of the territory under covenant, while Israels covenant was to relate to Isaac. But they also inserted passages relating to circumstances after Abrahams death. They noted that: after Jacob/Israel had destroyed the idols, Yahweh confirmed that benefits to flow to his descendants were because of Abrahams obedience; Yahwehs name was not disclosed until Moses received additional commands in Egypt; future protection had been made conditional on absolute obedience to Yahweh prior to Sinai; Israels role as a kingdom of priests with stronger conditionality of covenant was imposed at Sinai, and that there would be continuity of punishment for breaches of the Covenant, They also inserted the 18th century Amorite Hammurabi Code into Book of Covenant without acknowledging in any way that it was only known to the Israelites because of the Exile. Those additions represent the major flowering of Israels understanding of Divine Covenant and it happened because of its interaction with diverse peoples who were also struggling to understand their relationship with God. However the editors should not be criticised for doing so. They were concerned to lift the self-understanding and commitment of Israel. They were not to anticipate the confusion that their action would later cause. Cluster 8: Post Exile to 2nd cent. BCE 253
251 252
Second Isaiah 42:5-8; 43:8-12; 44:24, 28; 45:13 Jonah 3:4-10; 4:1;10-11; Genesis 1:1-2:4 P; 8:15-17 P; 9:1-17 P; 17:4-8 P; 17:19-21 P; 28:3-4 P; 35:11-13 P; Exodus 6:4-9 Malachi 1:11-14; 2:17-3: 5; Jubilees 6:1-38
P; 15:26 D; 19:3-6 D; 19:5-6 D; 20:5-6 source ?; 20:23 to 23:33 D ?; chapters 25-31; 35-40 P
253
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Then there was a dramatic change of direction. Malachi asserted that the failure of Israels priestly system had brought the era of prophecy to an end, pending the arrival of a Messenger to restore the relationship between Israel and God. And in a stunning work that was relegated to the Jewish Pseudepigrapha, the writer of Jubilees asserted that the Universal Covenant with all humanity, only recently inserted with the story of Noah, was the basic covenant. The Mosaic covenant, he insisted, was a continuation or renewal of the Universal Covenant. [Van Ruiten 2003 p.190; Barnstone 2005. p.223]. Cluster 9: 1st cent.BCE 254 Those new understandings were extended by other writers whose works are also excluded from the canon. The Qumran Community believed that Israel was condemned by misconduct during the Hasmonean expansion [Barnstone 2005. p.223]; that it would be the faithful remnant that provided a vehicle for the renewal of the Covenant of Sinai; and that the rigid discipline in conduct and acceptance of communal and personal covenants that it imposed on those who wished to join it was a requirement for renewal. [Evans 2003 p.59] Philo regarded covenant as a matter of Gods gift of grace, law and justice being reflected without restriction in those who might have responsibility for human affairs. It was not a matter of a contract imposed or negotiated between God and a person or community, and it was not essential to express or conceptualize religious belief or personal obligations. [Grabbe 2003 p. 257,266]. Cluster 10: 1st - 4th cent. CE
255
According to the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus taught that the Mosaic Covenant obliged Israel to contribute to the life of humanity, but that the substance of law good relations with neighbours determined every persons relationship with God, and that he believed himself to be the fulfilment of Malachis expectations. However Jesus disciples and later adherents gradually departed from that teaching. Paul, writing ca.55-59 CE before any of the Gospels were in circulation, implied that Israelites who rejected Jesus forfeited a covenantal relationship with God to those of the promise and that descendants of Abraham who were not through Isaac had never been part of the covenant. The writer of Hebrews, ca.60-96, taught that the Christian presence is superior; the Mosaic Covenant was abrogated and Christ had obtained a more excellent one; that the old covenant was at fault, not the people subject to it; Jesus promises are better, and Christ is a mediator between humanity and God. Ephesians, ca. 90-95, rejected the later prophets teaching about Gods personal covenantal relationship with all humanity, and stated that gentiles were without God until Jesus provided access in one Spirit to the Father. The writer of Johns Gospel, ca.90-110, insisted on a one-track salvation: Jesus was the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by him.
254
Qumran Manual of Discipline, Section 1; Damascus Document; Philo, Mut. 51, 52; Somm. 2 Matthew 5:13-16; 5:17-20; 6:7-15; 11:2-6; 25:31-34; 26:63-64; Luke 13:34-35 ; 9:34-36; 22:14-20; Mark 16:14-16; Acts
255
3:25-26; Romans 9:3-8; Hebrews 8:5-9, 13; 9:11-14, 13:20; Ephesians 2:11-22; John, various chapters.
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Then, as the church took a grip on the future of imperial affairs, it adopted the Athanasian Creed, ca.381-428, and rejected all other notions of covenant. Whosoever will be saved must hold the Catholick Faith whole and undefiled or, without doubt, he shall perish everlastingly. That was not a matter of enhancing faith by clarifying teaching; it was a case of rejecting a basis for faith and abrogating the teaching of Jesus. Cluster 11: 6th cent. 256 The consequences of that creedal statement, and the conduct that followed, triggered the ministry of the Prophet Muhammad and the dictation of the Quran. The framework of the Quran is that the scriptures of all three communities comprise The Book, and, concerning covenant, its essential elements correspond with the teaching of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. They can be encapsulated thus: the Abrahamic, Mosaic, Christian and Universal Covenants are all valid, but no covenant relates to David. The paramount Quranic consideration in covenant is submission to the will of God in ones conduct and in honouring all moral obligations; recognition that divine judgment is the prerogative of God alone; anticipation of judgment for transgressions on that basis and the need to monitor ones own conduct and not to assume automatic salvation after acknowledging ones sins. Repentance is a matter of the heart, not the mouth, and one must not look for benefits through personal or material intervention or intercession. Paradise is for all who live according to Gods will, not only People of the Book, and Sinai did not abrogate the Abrahamic Covenant which continues to bind all descendants through Ishmael to Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets. Sinai was an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant that binds only those descended through Isaac. Both Jews and Christians have breeched covenants that they acknowledge and are subject to judgment accordingly. Believers who accept as valid any of the divine covenants are bound by the same covenantal concepts of obedience to the Law, and there is no need for separate confirming covenants. The universal covenant embraces all humanity with obligations that relate to all living creatures: not only humanity. Quite specifically, the Quran maintains that Jews are still part of the Divine Plans and rigidly subject to covenant as the people chosen for a particular role. The prophecy of The Night Journey anticipated that if they again transgressed against their neighbours they would again suffer Divine retribution. It was not a prophecy that they would transgress, because they, like everyone else, have the facility of absolute free will. But it was a very definite statement that in the event of a further communal transgression they would be subject to exemplary consequences.
256
The Quran: Sura 2:62, 83-96; 3:64-80, 98-109, 113-120, 144-148, 183-188, 199; 4:46-48, 152-159; 5:1-5, 7-43; 7:188;
17:1-10; 18:110; 20:116-128; 21:78-81; 27:91-93; 29:14-22; 33:7-20, 38-40; 37:100-138; 48:28-29; 52:1-28.
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Cluster 12: 12th cent. 257 The preeminent 12th century Spanish Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, accepted the validity of Muhammads ministry but rejected Quranic belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. In spite of scathing criticism of the great stumbling block of Christian theology he saw a role for each of Judaism, Islam and Christianity in bringing humanity to understand its relationship with God. Disagreeing with the Quran, and thus playing into the hand of the Church, Maimonides wrote that Davids succession was under covenant and that a Messianic King would arise from his line. He foreshadowed the return of the dispersed of Israel to the Promised Land under the Covenant of Sinai and predicted that their return would be associated with a war between powers of great evil: Gog and Magog. His ultimate prediction, corresponding with Malachis belief that prophetic capacity would, in due course, return to Israel, was that the return would be a prelude to an era free of famine and war; that Israel would dwell securely with its prophetic capacity restored; that the occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God, and that the world will be filled with the knowledge of God as the sea fills the ocean bed. But the Church disagreed. The Messianic Era was here and now, it said, under its delegated management. Cluster 13: an opportunity lost, and the 19th-20th cent. Two hundred and fifty years later, Muslim forces occupied Constantinople and the Churchs situation changed significantly. It did not wish people who held power under its patronage to trade with, or reach political accommodation with, the powers of Islam. It used various mechanisms, including its versions of covenants to coerce the principalities and powers into a massive crusade to regain ground and suppress Islam. It did not succeed. It further undermined relations between the communities of faith, inhibited any moves towards reconciliation, triggered a competitive push for territories and initiated the European Colonial Era. This was to be managed on the basis of the Athanasian Creed and contrary to every other understanding of covenant. The pivotal document was the bull Romanus Pontifex, issued in favour of Portugal by Pope Nicholas V in January, 1455, little more than a year after the Ottoman occupation of Constantinople in May, 1453. Portugal was to enjoy absolute power over people and lands that might be discovered in the New World. 258 But the first of a series of critical documents, the bull Dum Diversas had already authorized, promoted and legitimized slavery in any areas where Islam was present. It was issued a year prior to the occupation of Constantinople, in May 1452. We [grant to King Alfonso the faculty] to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms,
257
The Mishneh Torah, volume 14, The Laws of Kings and Their Wars, chapters 11, 12. Romanus Pontifex reflects a particular interpretation of the New Covenant: that the temporal head of the Church
258
exercised authority delegated by God; and that the teachings of the Prophets and Jesus which were guidelines for relationships between people and personal conduct towards ones neighbours could be ignored without regard for Divine Judgment. It grossly exceeded the parameters of the Athanasian Creed. While the creed demanded absolute acceptance of the Catholick Faith it did not presume to hand the responsibility for judgment and punishment to the Church. It anticipated the return of Jesus, that he would judge the living and the dead upon his return, and that in the meantime either judgment would be left in abeyance or saving grace would be exercised by God.
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dukedoms, principalities, dominions held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to convert them to his [and his successors] use and profit 259 The church hierarchy had totally rejected the concept of Universal Covenant and the guidelines for conduct towards ones neighbours. The understanding of covenantal responsibility which had been developed through interaction between people of a wide range of experiences, and which had been edited progressively into the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, should have prompted them to reflect on what the future might hold. They ignored the teaching that judgment may be imposed and extend through future generations as a consequence of communal wrongdoing: they sought to choose which aspects of covenant they would respond to. In 1869, against the backdrop of the European Colonial Era and turmoil in Europe, the Philadelphia Conference of Reform Rabbis adopted a platform that said the purpose of the ending of the second Jewish commonwealth had been to realize the priestly mission entrusted to Israel to lead the nations to know and to worship God, and the Messianic aim is the union of all men as children of God confessing unity of God and a call to moral sanctification: not a restored Jewish state under Davids descendants. [Meyer 1988 p. 256] But later, responding directly to the impact of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, Theodore Herzl wrote in The Jewish State that the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one; that Jews shall not be left in peace and that the only solution was to make it a political world-question to be settled by civilized nations. [Herzl 1896 p. 2] Again, the Church did not agree. Civilita Cattolica published a statement that to reconstitute Israel is against the prediction of Christ Himself and Jews must remain dispersed to render witness to Christ by their existence. [Minerbi 1990 p. 96] But in line with Britains aspirations not to be defeated in The Great War, Arthur James Balfour wrote in 1917 that: His Majestys Government (favours) the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object. [Isaacs 1995 p. 202] Then two Christian leaders who had both been affected by that war responded in quite different ways. Karl Barth wrote first, (Romans, 1922) that Israel and the Jews have not been cast off. They have been veritably entrusted with the oracles of God the Risen Lord is no founder of a new religion (and God) overcometh the unrighteousness of the existing order [Barth 1968 p. 396] Then, as already noted, Adolf Hitler followed with his infamous statement in Mein Kampf: I am acting in accord with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord [Watt 1969 p.60]
5. The reality of Shared Covenant: a requirement for dialogue and reassessment During the past five generations the conjunction of prophecy generated within two of the three primary Abrahamic faiths has involved the conduct of all three, and, with the declaration of the State
259
Various translations and histories of the document are available. Some indicate that it was issued to both Spain and
Portugal. This extract: www.romancatholicism.org accessed August 20, 2007.
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of Israel and its consequences, every aspect of Divine Covenant that has been illustrated progressively though four thousand years of Biblical and Quranic history and human interaction is being illustrated again. This interaction confirms the reality of divine covenant. In doing so it also confirms that each of the Abrahamic faiths owe their origin to inspiration and revelation, and that they are each legitimate instruments of Gods will with a continuing role tightly obligated within covenant. Several circumstances have therefore been demonstrated. The Divine Covenants under which each of the Abrahamic Faiths came into being are firmly in place, but in circumstances that none of them welcome or, generally, appreciate. The people Israel are the primary instrument through which humanity will be enabled to understand and respond to its relationship with God; the prophetic understanding that a remnant would remain to re-establish its communal function after any or each successive breech of covenant and punishment has been confirmed; and in current circumstances the role of the reinvigorated remnant is to be a catalyst to precipitate change to the benefit of humanity at large and consistent with Divine Will. Israel is a very reluctant catalyst. Its people find it very difficult to acknowledge that they are the focal point in conflict from which the dominant and privileged Christian Western World which they see as their protector and with which they are intimately enmeshed will emerge with its position of relative privilege and authority reversed. The Christian Churchs role is to be a vehicle to proclaim the Good News of the love of God for all humanity on the basis of the teaching of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, through whom the Gospel was delivered as an extension of the Hebrew experience and as a pattern for relationships and conduct to enable humanity to live in harmony and stability. Through the misinterpretation of its role, the misconduct of its hierarchy and gross exploitation by commercial and political powers acting on its self-understanding, it has basically failed in its mission, and in the eyes of the world-at-large it faces an uphill struggle to establish its credibility and fulfil its role. The role of the Prophet Muhammad and the establishment of Islam as the third Abrahamic faith, generated through the line of Abrahams first born son, Ishmael, was to confirm those who had gone before, to correct errors of understanding, and to lead and stimulate reform in both religious belief and personal and communal or corporate conduct. The pursuance of reform in obedience to Divine command remains the basis of its Divine Covenant which it must pursue while restraining those elements within its ranks who responding to the need to offset the exploitation and degradation of a significant proportion of the worlds people have taken precipitate action to accelerate the pace of change. The conduct that brought about confirmation of these roles relates directly to the prophecy revealed in the critical Quranic passage, The Night Journey, and to Maimonides prediction of the circumstances of the return of the people Israel to The Promised Land. For most of its history from the seventh century CE the Jewish community was in no position to transgress as a community against its neighbours. It was scattered, fragmented and constantly oppressed by the Church and its associated powers the amorphous Christian gel. That situation changed, quite quickly, with the preparation of Herzls plan for a homeland for Jews in Palestine and the establishment of the World Zionist Organization to implement it. Measures taken to implement the plan constituted the transgression. [Aarons & Loftus 1994; Lilienthal 1953, 1978; Tessler 1994; Fry
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2000(2)] Adolf Hitler then fulfilled the role of the Scourge foreshadowed by the Quranic passage. A remnant remained to return to the Promised Land, to restore Israel as a cohesive community and to provide a focal point for the efforts and aspirations of those remaining scattered in the Diaspora, and to pursue Israels prophetic role under Covenant. But, while the transgression was entirely a matter of absolute freewill, it was prompted by, and was a consequence of, the abuse of authority and breech of Covenant by the Christian community, its leaders and powers associated with it during the long and painful experience of its institutional growth and the European Colonial Era. Hitler and his Alliance constituted one of the persons of Maimonides Gog and Magog. The remaining powers of the Christian Western World the Allies constituted the other. In fact current world crises need not have erupted around the establishment of the State of Israel if a different approach had been taken to resettlement. It was predicated on the assuagement of the guilt complexes of the Western Christian powers and the churches for their role in bringing about the Shoah, and the assumed desirability of repatriating all people who considered themselves as Jewish to the region in which the religion of their forebears originated. It was then precipitated and brought into effect by the corruption and blackmail exercised by those pushing for a decision by the United Nations to partition the Mandated Territory of Palestine. [Aarons & Loftus 1994 pp. 168-171; Fry 2000 (2) pp. 1481-83, 1955-56] These situations and actions compounded breeches of covenant by both the Jewish and Christian communities. If a reassessment of the theology of covenant which determines communal self-understanding and conduct had been undertaken prior to, or immediately after World War Two, and if the economic and political powers had responded appropriately, events could have unfolded in a radically different way. A paradigm shift is now necessary to avoid further rapid deterioration and consequences which may go far beyond inhibiting the development of harmony and stability in humanitys affairs on the plateau. The Muslim community of Dr al-islm need not have become involved in a crisis which was essentially a matter of Christian-Jewish relations. Its relations with the Jewish community had been quite sound. However it did become involved because its people shared the territory being partitioned to establish the State of Israel; they were among those most deeply affected by the European Colonial Era; and they see their moral, social and cultural norms being undermined by Western (thus Christian) influence. Furthermore, as a result of a key phase of the conflicts centred on Palestine and the City of Jerusalem, the Muslim World Community now enjoys financial, political and cultural influence as great as at any time in its history, even allowing for the peak of power enjoyed by the Ottoman Empire. [Fry 2000(2) 1785-1820] The key phase was the partial oil embargo that was imposed against the USA and Holland in retaliation for the resupply of arms to Israel by the United States which enabled Israel to continue the Ramadan or Yom Kippur War and end direct hostilities without having to negotiate a settlement of the concerns of the Palestinian people. The embargo enabled the source countries to dramatically
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raise the price for their crude oil.260 With a massive new flow of petro-dollars the source countries, many of which were Muslim, were able to fund aid and development programs in underprivileged countries for which those countries had been begging, as well as their own development. Hospitals, schools, mosques, universities and joint investments flowed freely. The prestige and influence of the benefactors rose accordingly. So did interest in Islam.
6. The Way Ahead, and a Wider Role for the Glen Movement? Each community under covenant has a potentially critical role in securing humanitys future. If they act in concert, the course towards harmony and stability can be relatively smooth. If they do not: ruggedness and trauma can be anticipated, but the outcome in either case must be the same. A dramatic shift in influence and privilege from the Western world to the balance of the world; realignment of priorities in resource allocation; a dramatic lift in the circumstances of countries that are currently in a state of degradation and depression, and an equally dramatic shift in patterns of personal, communal and corporate conduct in the Western world will inevitably take effect under the Universal Covenant. A particular obligation of each of the Abrahamic faiths is to enable humanity to better understand its relationship with the Divine. If the resolution of the current world crisis is seen to be to the benefit of humanity-at-large, then it follows that if that resolution is seen to be at the initiative of the Abrahamic faiths, or as a consequence of interaction between them, it may lead to global recognition of a relationship between humanity and the Divine. However, there is little doubt that if current leadership fails to act on this opportunity it may, in the immediate future, be responsible for leaving people of other faiths, or none at all, with the belief that this God business is all a figment of Abrahamic imagination. The outcome depends on the people involved. None are bound like robots or puppets. They all enjoy authority and the opportunity to act totally on free will. The only thing that binds them is their obligation under divine covenant. There appear to be four alternative pathways to stability and harmony or five if the leadership groups of all three faiths act in concert. Israel and its supporters, for whom the security of Israel is paramount, take two concurrent steps: 1) to negotiate an end to the Palestinian crisis directly with the Palestinian people, and 2) to initiate the redirection of global governance and resources by using their influence directly on the political economies of the West and by collaborating with the Non-Western powers. This would remove the Palestinian Question from the international conflict equation, dramatically change Israels relations with those people who see it as a tool perpetuating Western domination and oppression, and make the US military umbrella totally redundant. There could be no clearer demonstration of Israels existence under covenant.
260
The countries from which the Western world was, at that time, sourcing the bulk of its petroleum requirements had been
struggling to obtain anything like a realistic return for their commodities. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had been established but its members efforts to achieve a fare share of revenue or effective participation in production were constantly thwarted by oppressive collusion by the cartel of oil majors and their governments. That situation changed dramatically when a group of Arab countries allies of Palestine but not all members of OPEC or directly involved in the war imposed the partial embargo and raised prices. The West screamed cartel, but it was crying wolf.
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The Christian Churches initiate a reassessment of fundamental theology in collaboration with leaders and authorities of its partner Abrahamic faiths who then, together, use their influence on the political and economic powers of the West to ensure the redirection of global governance, authority and resources. Muslim scholars and leaders take the same path: initiate a reassessment of fundamental theology in collaboration with leaders and authorities of its partner Abrahamic faiths who then, together, use their influence on the political and economic powers of the West to ensure the same redirection of global governance, authority and resources. A breakdown in international relations results from the crises in the Middle East; the redistribution of resources and authority follows, accompanied by the redrawing of international systems of governance, authority, financial management and capital investment. But the process is different. It involves collaboration between all interested parties in the Non-Western world, excludes the Western world, and results from the non-Western powers coalescing (as they are tending to already) around complications flowing from the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. The first option requires a dramatic change in dominant attitudes in both the United States and Israel, and there is no evidence that change is imminent. People of influence in Israels affairs do not believe that the Christian Churches will ever change their fundamental theology and selfunderstanding, or influence the conduct of their adherents sufficiently to ensure security for Israel and safety for Jews in the Diaspora. The second is hardly achievable because of the Vaticans absolute resistance to a process of theological reassessment or renewal; the inability of the World Council of Churches (in spite of strong activity in interfaith dialogue) to act as a vehicle for rapid change because of the arrangements under which it is constituted and operates, and the determination among the Western Powers to maintain their position of privilege with near-complete disregard for any guidance from the churches. Given the strained relations between Western governments and the Muslim world at large; the fact that the Islamic Conference is concerned only with relations between states; and because Islam does not have a centralized body of authority that can readily take initiatives in matters of religion except, perhaps, the Saudi Arabia-based World Muslim League (Rabita), this leaves the fourth option a total breakdown in international relations as the most likely. However it is clearly preferable that such dynamic change, with consequences that can not readily be identified and quantified in advance of the event, should take place with the steadying influence of one, if not all, of the communities of faith which are bound under divine covenant. In this regard the Glen Movement is in a potentially critical position. 261 Although there are Muslim organizations in
261
People of religions that do not have a perception of a divine being, or divine intervention, may well understand a simple
schematic scenario with the Abrahamic faiths identified by their initials, J, C and M, and with their responses to divine covenant, and the consequences of failure to honour their respective obligations, summarized thus
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many countries that have been established to secure or negotiate in support of their communities, and to offset Islamophoebia through dialogue with other faiths, there are none with the philosophical approach, experience, competence and influence of the umbrella Glen Movement. The initiatives that Fethullah Glen and his colleagues have already taken suggest that they may be able to initiate an appropriate process for reassessment, bringing together scholars and leaders of each faith to work together on a continuing program. The scheme of cooperation ought not be limited to like-minded organizations within, or involving, only Islam, Christianity and Judaism, whether with, or without, the formal involvement of the institutions of those partner faiths. It ought welcome participation from scholars other than those of the revealed religions. There are certainly many potential partners for the process. To list them in this paper is not appropriate, but an outline of the rise of organizations set up to facilitate interfaith dialogue or to serve minority faith communities is appropriate. Chart 3 indicates when and in what relative numbers such organizations have been established. The earliest ones were single faith support groups or, as in the case of the Muslim-Christian Association in 1918, reactions against the Balfour Declaration and the activities of the Zionist communities. No organizations that were established prior to World War Two for the purposes of dialogue, cooperation or the protection of minorities involved direct membership of institutions of the Abrahamic faiths. They were founded by concerned individuals who, in most cases, had strong institutional links, but membership was individual. In the years following World War Two the emphasis was heavily on Christian-Jewish reconciliation, except in the United States where there was a proliferation of single interest and multiple interest religious and civil rights groups. Since the establishment of the State of Israel and the rise of interfaith tension and conflict there has been a corresponding rise in initiatives following each related war. The Iranian crisis, the decision of the United States to provide Israel with direct military aid, and Israels confrontation with Syria in 1963 prompted a sharp rise in the organization of Muslim groups in the US, then a dramatic overall increase in activity followed the Six Day, Ramadan and first Gulf Wars. (The phenomenon of the establishment of a rash of single interest and multiple interest religious and civil rights groups in the United States occurred again following the Ramadan War, but with a disproportionate emphasis on the defence of particular Christian-group interests.) During the 1960s and 1970s some Christian churches and institutions took a direct interest in interfaith organizations and activities, and Christian theological training institutions began to add the study of non-Christian religions to their curriculum, but they also closed ranks and placed greater emphasis on teaching the concepts which their partner faiths disagreed about. Of special significance
The inadequate response to its task by J led to C being brought into being. The misconduct of C led to M beingcalled. Cs continuing misconduct induced the transgression of J which triggered the application of prophecy from M (the Night Journey). C then provided all three parties involved in the prophecies: two powers of evil for the prophecy from J (Gog and Magog), and the Scourge, Hitler, for M (the Night Journey). Through conflict with M, J is now the catalyst in precipitating conflict between C and M in circumstances that bring covenantal retribution upon C and benefit for the whole of humanity long term. However the scenario is not yet played out. The geographic and physical circumstances of both J and M are such that it is virtually certain that if they do not act to help resolve the situation, the consequences of a continuation of current policies will be catastrophe for both of them as well as bringing degradation upon C. The features which are central to their beliefs and self-understanding the State of Israel and Jerusalem, and the heartland of Dr al-islm, Mecca lie at critical points in the Middle East zone of conflict.
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| 1870/79
| 1880/89
| 1890/99
| 1900/09
| 1910/19
| 1920/29
| 1930/39
| 1940/49
| 1950/59
| 1960/69
| 1970/79
| 198089
| 1990/99
| 2000/07| 08
Chart 3
8
THE MIDDLE EAST
7 6
the temperature of crisis and instability in world affairs
The trend line indicates military and political activity/intervention New Interfaith initiatives correspond closely with the trend line
5 4
Events are grouped in decadal periods Critical events are shown in bold and identified by arrows:
3 1 # + * 2
Small arrows indicate circumstances that have aggravated or reduced the level of Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia Attacks against Christians Other anti-religious activity
Contradictory influences apply from region to region and culture to culture
^ /
Papal infallibility German Ccordat Dreyfus casePont.Bib. Com 1st World War Kulturkampf Russia May Law Der Judenstaat Protocols/Zion *Balfour Dec French 3rd Rep. Lovers of Zion !st Zionist Cong Muslim League Hitlers vision Russo-Turkish War Oath/Modernism
Apartheid SA Org of AF. Unity Cuban Missiles Vatican II PLO 3.Six Day War Suez blocked OAPEC OIC
US ME oil plan 5.Peace/Galilee 6.1st Gulf War 4.Ramadan War Lebanon C/w Kosovo Oil embargo Intifada Dissolution of Iranian Rev Birth of Hamas Soviet Union Afghasnistan/Sov Iran/Iraq War
E d Z t >
_ Versailles Dunkirk H bomb race +Palestine Mdate Hitler in office Barbarossa Coup in Egypt Mein Kampf #Reich Cncdat Sov/Pol Acc Crisis in Iran Lateran Treaty Boycott Final Solution 2.Suez Crisis Transfer agreed Asia/Pacific plan Colonial BiraBidzhan Pearl Harbour/ watershed Mit Brnder Sorge Chelmo Evian Conf. German defeat Munich Arab League Crystal Night Hiroshima Eastern Pact Japanese defeat Polish guarantee Palestine Partition 2nd World War 1.Arab/Israeli War Renascent Judaism World C. of Churches NATO
7.2nd Intifada 9/11 War on Terror Afghanistan 8.2nd Gulf War London Lebanon again Division of Palestine Israel>Syria Iran ?
| 2000/07|08_____
Ian Fry, MCD/NL Oct 2007
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were the establishment of the Vaticans Secretariat for Non-Christians, and the World Council of Churches Unit for Dialogue with Living Faiths and Ideologies. The consequences of the Ramadan War, the oil embargo, the Gulf War and the associated implosion of the Soviet Union then encouraged universities to become more directly involved, organizing conferences and research programs. The biggest increase in Muslim organizational activity in the USA, and the broadening of educational curricula followed the Kosovo Crisis. That pattern continued through the 1990s, and several universities established centres for interfaith studies and dialogue, or inter-civilization studies: the University of Malaya possibly being the first. However, since September 11, 2001, the dark mood of foreboding and the realization that the world does indeed face a crisis linked to both religious self-understanding and its abuse, has boosted the level of interfaith activity in all fields. The resource-use blocks in chart 1 indicate the critical nature of the point we are at in human history. The dominant assumptions in the Western world concerning its relationship with the Non-Western world are illustrated by the projections for future resource consumption which are based on data current at the time of the shock and awe invasion of Iraq. They indicate that the assumed relationship is totally unsustainable on two grounds. First: the impact on the environment if the projected consumption levels in the West were to be achieved, regardless of any efforts by the Non-Western world to achieve comparable consumption levels. Second: the inevitability of retaliatory conflict when human relationships are abused by such disproportionate resource consumption. No amount of interfaith dialogue could possibly placate the mass of people if that pattern were to become the reality. Also, since September 11, 2001, additional universities have established centres for dialogue studies (including LaTrobe and the Australian Catholic University). Privately constituted and funded centres (such as the Weeramantry International Centre for Peace Education and Research, Colombo) and the World Futures Council have also been established, and the flow of new initiatives is being maintained at a frenetic pace. [For a selected chronology of the establishment of significant organizations and institutions illustrating the pattern of developments see endnote262.]
262
The institutions and organizations named here have been selected and listed to illustrate the changing emphasis in
international concern and initiatives relating to the interfaith relations and the crisis in the Middle East.
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The significance of the contribution that Fethullah Glen and his colleagues in the Movement have already made is best appreciated by relating it to the circumstances in which he became involved. By the time Glen abandoned elementary education and began reading religion with his father and Haci Sitki Effendi, efforts had been stirred in Turkey to reverse some of the Kemalist Reforms and to bring its domestic codes into line with the liberties and rights subscribed to by adopting the Charter of the United Nations in which the country was entitled to a seat having broken its neutrality in the closing stages of the war against Germany to benefit from post war association with the victorious Western powers. 263 As a result, some degree of religious freedom had already been restored, religious instruction was allowed upon request at state schools, a faculty of divinity had been established at the Ankara University, and the Sufi Brotherhoods were being revived. It was then that Glen became interested in the works of Said Nursi who was said to be the inventor of Interfaith dialogue because of his correspondence with the Pope and the Orthodox Patriarch in an effort to bring Muslims and Christians together in opposition to Communism. By the time his mentor died in 1960 and Glen began giving lectures himself, the Middle East had reached another ArabIsraeli war involving the Great Powers the Suez Crisis. He travelled twice for the Haj, in 1968 and again in January 1973. His experience of Saudi Arabia and the Eastern Mediterranean on the second pilgrimage would have still been prominent in his memory when the Ramadan War broke out nine months later, but at that time his principal concern appears to have been religious recovery and domestic reform at home, and his preaching focus remained firm: love, right behaviour before God, the requirements of the Quran, tolerance, human rights, justice, community cohesion, democratic participation, and the need for the religion of Islam to be given its rightful place as an influence in the life and education of the community. However, after the Ramadan War his foreign contacts and interest in foreign affairs appear to have increased steadily, and when he returned from Mecca and Medina to Turkey by the land route following his third Haj in August 1986 he was clearly immersed in the international crisis. The
1843, Bnai Brith; 1893, Parliament of the Worlds Religions; 1897, World Zionist Organization; 1900, International Association for Religious Freedom; 1901, Jewish National Fund; 1906, American Jewish Committee; All India Muslim League; 1913, Anti-Defamation League; 1918, Muslim-Christian Association; 1928, Muslim Brotherhood; 1936, World Congress of Faiths; 1944, National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (USA); Jewish Council for Public Affairs (USA); 1945, Arab League; 1947, International Council of Christians and Jews; 1950, American Israel Public Affairs Committee; 1956, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; 1961, Christian Legal Society (USA); 1963, Muslim World League (Rabita); Muslim Students Association (USA & Canada); Islamic Society of North
America; 1964, Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians; 1968, Jewish Defence League; 1969, Organization of the Islamic Conference; 1970, World Conference of Religions for Peace; 1971, Dialogue Unit of the WCC; 1973, North American Islamic Trust; 1974, Conference of Jews Christians and Muslims; 1976, Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs; 1984, Islamic Relief (UK); 1985, Muslim Youth of North America; 1989, Holy Land Foundation; 1990, American Muslim Council; 1992, Muslim American Society; International Movement for a Just World; 1993, International Interfaith Centre; Association of Muslim Lawyer5s; 1994, Journalists and Writers Foundation; Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); 1995, Minorities of Europe; 1996, Children of Abraham Institute; Society for Scriptural Reasoning; Three faiths Forum; 1997, Muslim Council of Britain; Islamic Human Rights Commission; 1998, Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief; Forum 18; World Faiths Development Dialogue; 1999, Rumi Forum; 2000, United Religions Initiative; 2002, Interreligious Engagement Project ; World Council of Religious Leaders; 2003, Jewish-Christian-Muslim Association of Australia; Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews; 2004, World Futures Council; 2006, Mosque and Imams National Advisory Board (UK); 2007, Family Action Organization (USA).
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Turkeys neutrality had been assured by concurrent treaties of mutual assistance with both Britain and France, a
nonaggression treaty with Germany, and its capacity to maintain passage through the Black Sea to the Soviet Union.
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Iranian Revolution was history; Israels destruction of the PLO and Beirut were fresh memories; Jordan was about to assume responsibility for the West Bank; and Osama bin Laden, with aid from the USA, was helping the Afghans humiliate the Soviet Union which was preparing to withdraw. Glens preaching was taking on a new emphasis. He was aware that the Catholic Churchs attitude had changed, that it was looking further afield and encouraging Christians to have dialogue with people of other faiths. He noted that the church is turning towards other religions that preserve the concept and meaning of God as One, Transcendental, Creator, Ruler of Fate and Wise. He was soon prepared to say that Interfaith dialogue seeks to realise religions basic oneness and unity, and the universality of belief. Religion embraces all beliefs and races in brotherhood, and exalts love, respect, tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, human rights, peace, brotherhood, and freedom via its Prophets. [02.05.2002] He was well aware of opposition from certain quarters, notably the Kharijites, Karmatis and Anarchists, but he put his commitment into practice in seeking meetings with the Greek Patriarch Bartholomeos in April 1996, Pope John Paul II in February 1998, and Chief Rabbi David Aseo as recently as July 2006. Glens writings on the relationship between civilization and modernization establish that has an acute awareness of the processes of evolution in all human development, material progress, the flow of history and philosophical and religious thought, and, in particular, the relationship between the three Abrahamic traditions.264 That awareness was the basis on which he could say, after the traumatic events of September 11 and the subsequent shock and awe invasion of Iraq: The goal of dialogue among world religions is not simply to destroy scientific materialism and the destructive materialistic worldview; rather, the very nature of religion demands this dialogue. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even Hinduism and other world religions accept the same source for themselves, and, including Buddhism, pursue the same goal. As a Muslim, I accept all Prophets and Books sent to different peoples throughout history, and regard belief in them as an essential principle of being Muslim. A Muslim is a true follower of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and all other Prophets. Not believing in one Prophet or Book means that one is not a Muslim. Thus we acknowledge the oneness and basic unity of religion, which is a symphony of God's blessings and mercy, and the universality of belief in religion. So, religion is a system of belief embracing all races and all beliefs, a road bringing everyone together in brotherhood. [11.06.2003] Tragically, the reaction of the United States Government and certain of its allies was damning of Islam and its people in a bid to politically and socially isolate them and reduce their influence in
264
We have a Prophetic Tradition almost unanimously recorded in the Hadith literature that Jesus will return when the
end of the world is near. We do not know whether he will actually reappear physically, but what we understand is that near the end of time, values like love, peace, brotherhood, forgiveness, altruism, mercy, and spiritual purification will have precedence, as they did during Jesus' ministry. In addition, because Jesus was sent to the Jews and because all Hebrew Prophets exalted these values, it will be necessary to establish a dialogue with the Jews as well as a closer relationship and co-operation among Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. [Fethullah Glen. 11.06.2003]
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international forums. However that policy has backfired. The reverse has happened. Muslim minority communities after a period of reluctance and trauma returned to organizing and, with the cooperation and support of many communities of non-Muslims and institutions of other faiths, have become better coordinated and organized in their worship, education and welfare programs. Extensive dialogue and community consultation programs have been organized with churches, synagogues, universities and local government. With better exposure and ease of recognition they have achieved greater acceptance and enjoy more open participation and influence in their wider communities than had previously been possible. Certain governments and political parties have found it necessary to modify their wedging practices to avoid a community backlash. It is unfortunate that Glens proposal for the establishment of a three-faiths university, symbolically to be placed in the region from which Abraham migrated, was not adopted. However the collaborative establishment of Chairs in Islamic Studies at universities, such as that at the Australian Catholic University, indicates that some authorities may be prepared to go to the next step. However the need for the leaders of faiths to go further and to begin a process of systematic reassessment of how we came to our point of crisis, the influence that their theological teaching has had, and how to move forward is so critical that efforts to achieve collaborative educational and research programs cannot be allowed to lapse. The Glen Movement, under its leaders inspiration, has shown that it is able to manage such an effort if it has the will. It should be encouraged by the Four Levels of Interreligious Dialogue identified by M. Thomas Thangaraj. [Thangarai 1999] 1. The dialogue of life.
2. The dialogue of action. 3. The dialogue of theological exchange, where specialists seek to deepen their understanding of their respective religious heritages, and to appreciate each other's spiritual values. 4. The dialogue of religious experience Given that the major faiths each now acknowledge the validity of their partner faiths, logic requires that they also acknowledge the validity of their holy scriptures. It follows that at the level of scholarly theological exchange it is time to shift from dialogue to reassessment. Therefore conditions requiring that the faithful should try to learn by sincere and patient dialogue what treasures a bountiful God has distributed among the nations of the earth while at the same time letting them try to illuminate these treasures with the light of the Gospel, to set them free, and bring them under the dominion of God their Savior should be discarded. 265 However some communities are still being told to regard dialogue in that light. 266
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Vatican Secretariat fro Non-Christians (May 10, 1984) The attitude of the Church toward Followers of other Religions: According to the guidelines, interfaith dialogue does not entail Christians watering down their faith. Nor should it be
Reflections and Orientations on Dialogue and Mission.

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blind to the light of truth in other religions. it does great harm to interfaith dialogue for a Catholic to slip into a belief that all religions are basically the same.
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The two positions are contradictory. Therefore to establish a program of collaborative reassessment of fundamental theological concepts is no mean task, but the Glen Movement should be encouraged by the assessment that the earliest form of dialogue between Islam and Christianity can be said to have taken place in the Quran, where the Christian doctrine is referred to in explicit terms. (Alatas 2006 p.125) Many debates occurred face to face and in correspondence during the three centuries following the establishment of Islam.267 But more significant than the debates and polemics were later developments including cultural borrowing of Christians from Muslims, largely revolving around the Muslim universities of the past, that influenced matters in the Medieval West. The records indicate that three themes of interreligious dialogue began to emerge in the 13th century during the period of the rise of the western university: (1) the multicultural origins of modern civilization; (2) intercivilizational encounters of mutual learning; and (3) the point of view of the other. (Alatas 2006 p126) Logic suggests that the process of reassessment should be steered by an International Standing Body of eminent persons involved in the life of each major faith, including scholars at the highest level of universities from each faith. It will need to be well resourced, with funds available to administer a network of research programs that would involve universities and related institutions of research in a number of countries, and that would not necessarily be campus-dependent. It is envisaged that the research programs would involve groups of doctoral or post-doctoral candidates working in teams of three (probably one Muslim, one Christian and one Jew) under the supervision of teams constituted the same way. There would be no need for them to be domiciled at the same institution.The world is driven by instant communications. The results of their work would be published and made readily available for consideration by the teaching institutions and peak leadership bodies of each faith, and for general publication. The program would probably require two parallel bodies: one to administer the program and ensure a flow of funds, and another to determine all academic matters. These would include priorities for research; oversight of the selection and appointment of panels of research scholars, supervisors and examiners; and policies for the awarding of degrees and publication policies to be adopted in the event that the scholars in a research team were not unanimous in their conclusions (requiring the admission of a minority submission on certain matters). It can be anticipated that the resulting publications, books, papers or occasional pieces would be used extensively in dialogue programs and by educational institutions. However, if any changes were envisaged to the teaching, doctrines, creeds, liturgy, systems of discipline, structure and authority
Catholics should not fudge the basic Catholic belief that the Church (the Body of Christ) is necessary for salvation Jesus is for all times the way, the truth and the life. (Jn 14:6) Jesus alive in His Church is necessary for the salvation of every human being. At the same time [The] universal salvific will of God propels us to seek out the evidence of Gods presence in all men and women of good will and offer every encouragement and mutual search for fullness of all Truth. three challenges [can be identified] in further development in the graced journey of interfaith dialogue. Many Catholics fail to see why we should engage in interfaith dialogue. The ongoing development of interfaith relations is an important way to peace in families, neighbourhoods and communities local, national and international. [Kairos Catholic Journal Vol. 18, Issue 17. www.southern-cross.org.au accessed 3/10/2007]
267
Alatas shows that within the first three centuries of Islam several works refuting Christian doctrine had appeared, and
an index of books written in Arabic lists the works of several authors who dealt with Christian theological doctrines. Alatas notes that the discussion on Christianity was not always one-sided. There were often exchanges between Muslim and Christian scholars; among the first Christians to enter into polemics with Muslims was St. John of Damascus, and there was debate between Nestorian Patriarch Timothy I and Caliph al-Mahd.
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systems or organizational relationships of any institution of faith, these would be matters for consideration and decision solely by that institution. The initiative of reassessment of matters around which the Abrahamic faiths have divided is long overdue. It is a matter of great urgency if the opportunity for a Messianic Era of peace stability and harmony as envisaged by each of the Abrahamic faiths is not to be missed and if, as Maimonides anticipated the world will be filled with the knowledge of God as the sea fills the ocean bed following the return of people Israel to their ancestral homeland. But it can only be achieved if scholars and institutional leaders from each faith are involved in intimate collaboration. A logical starting point may be the convening of a meeting of thirty or forty eminent persons for an indepth working session of a few days to consider alternative approaches to establishing an international standing body, what resources will be required, how to obtain them, and what administrative and coordinating procedures and facilities must be put in place. This is a challenge, an opportunity and an obligation under covenant that I trust the Glen Movement is prepared to accept.
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SACRED SCRIPTURES AND INTERFAITH DIALOGUE

TERRY MATHIS 268
Abstract M. Fethullah Glen encourages Muslims to be tolerant and accepting of people in other religions and to enter in to interfaith dialogue with them. He succeeds in doing this because the Quran sets the ground for this interfaith stance. Christians and Jews are often not aware that their Scriptures also promote interfaith dialogue. The paper shows that Jewish and Christian Scriptures, somewhat in keeping with the Quran, allow for interfaith relationships that are respectful and peaceful. To this end, the paper briefly examines some of the Old Testament and New Testament passages that promote interfaith dialogue. In the OT, the story of the Prophet Jonah is first examined to set the stage for an interfaith understanding of the story of Abraham and Melchizedek, the life of Ruth, her great grandson, King David, and finally, the Jewish restoration after the dispersion in Babylon and Persia. In addition to these OT themes, which Christians take as their own, the paper gathers similar interfaith themes in the NT. Christ is seen to encourage interfaith dialogue, as does James, the early Church leader. The paper finds that the Apostle Paul (the author of most of the NT) develops the implications of an interfaith theology in his letter to the Romans. The paper will conclude with some consideration of why the adherents of Christian and Jewish traditions seldom take their Scriptures to advocate interfaith dialogue and how the work of Mr. Glen suggests a way forward to create more such understanding and dialogue.
The Sacred Scriptures of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity each allow for interfaith dialogue. We will consider some of the ways in which the Scriptures of these religions provide for such dialogue, and the work of M. Fethullah Glen will illuminate the issues. He has for many years promoted interfaith dialogue between Muslims and adherents of other religions. We will find that he has provided keen practical insight that may encourage others outside of Islam to engage in interfaith dialogue. Mr. Glens use of various passages of the Quran will inform the Muslim position. Jewish and Christian positions will be informed by my own use of the respective texts, and in any of these cases, I am aware that my use of the various texts may be offensive to some readers. Although I hope not to
268
He is the Campus Minister at the University of California in Riverside, where he directs the University Religious
Conference, which promotes interfaith activity on campus. He received his PhD in philosophy from Claremont Graduate University. Faculty positions have included Associate Professor at Rosemead School of Psychology in California and at Northern Arizona University at Lake Havasu. Current interests: the metaphysical and psychological conditions that allow for interfaith dialogue, and the history and rise of secularism. Relevant publications: Against John Hick: An Examination of His Philosophy of Religion (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985) and Review of Christians and Religious Pluralism by Alan Race (TSF Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 5, June 1984). He has been to Antarctica three times with the United Stated Antarctic Research Program and accordingly has a keen interest in the relationship between science and religion. Ordained with the Church of the Brethren, his pastoral expertise includes counseling and university outreach.
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be offensive, various approaches or uses of Sacred Scripture are often personal, and different from mine. While it is my intention to revere the way in which other people use Scripture, there are at least two groups who may nevertheless find my approach inappropriate and even disrespectful to their own standard use of the texts. Conservative Christians will tend to reject my assumption that revelation occurs outside of the Bible. The other group is secular. This group will find my use of texts naive in light of their materialist worldview. Mr. Glen addresses both of these groups. One of the hallmarks of the thought of Fethullah Glen is his vision for a relationship of tolerance and dialogue between Muslims and people of other faiths, but he also sees the influence of materialism as a threat to the possibility of interfaith dialogue.269 In a pivotal essay entitled The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue, Mr. Glen laments that the influence of religion in contemporary social life is often shunted by the western materialist world view. Materialism keeps people from reconciling the material and spiritual realms, which reconciliation is crucial. We must first be at peace with God if we are to have personal integrity and thus experience peace and justice in the world. From a viable relationship with God come reconciliation between the material and the spiritual, and thus the realization of the desired contemporary social life in which society can flourish.270 In contrast, to the detriment of society, when experience of God is called into question by the assumptions of secular scientific materialism, the social conditions that flow from living in the presence of the divine are interrupted. People become less able to engage in dialogue of any kind, including interfaith or intercultural dialogue. In response to the influence of the secular scientific world view of the West, an optimist, Mr. Glen all the more calls for Muslim dialogue with others. Intrinsic to the nature of true religion is positive influence. The faith of the Muslim in dialogue with Christians and Jews and others will provide a corrective influence to a destructive materialistic world view.
269
Modern secular materialism includes metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that impact the use of language to
talk about God, and these various linguistic restrictions may tend to cause the different world religions to become competitive. The way the materialist notion of truth and certainty are construed, it is difficult if not impossible to talk meaningfully about God, and more important for interfaith dialogue, given this notion of truth, the secular model often requires that only one religion be representative of the truth. The materialist account of language often does not allow the possibility of the truth of conflicting statements from different religions. Accordingly, a conceptual framework for dealing with religion has grown up in the universities of the West to cope with the metaphysical assumptions of materialism and its account of the use of language. At one extreme there is thought to be exclusivism, while at the other extreme is pluralism, inclusivism perhaps in the middle. Most religions are thought to include a core of exclusivist stance, most fundamentalists maintaining that their religion is the only true religion, and thus they are generally completely under the influence of modern epistemological assumptions of Western culture, although they are typically without awareness of this influence. Inclusivists, perhaps the least affected by modern secular assumptions, often suppose that God can somehow accommodate the various different religions. Although inclusivists may suppose that God can accommodate most religions, ones own religion is usually thought to be the best. Pluralism is generally the dominant position in most religion departments in Western universities. Pluralism tends to mesh with the assumptions of materialism thus elevating the factual capacity of scientific language while still allowing religion to have significant meaning but of a different value than that of science. In pluralism, typically, the various different religions are all equally interesting and valuable (we should promote world peace) but religious language is often thought not to be factually reflective of material reality. Some recent thinkers are attempting to create different models for understanding religion in the West. See, for example, Knitter, P (2002) Theologies of Theologies (New York, Orbis Books). Knitters attempt to create new labels for the issues seems to weight in favor of pluralist assumptions, and he seems to conflate a number of the issues. For a critique of secular assumptions with respect to theology see Diamond, M The Challenge of Contemporary Empiricism in Diamond, M (1975) The Logic of God / Theology and Verification (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Company). We shall not be concerned with these issues except to note that Mr. Glen is attempting to cut through the detrimental effects of materialism.
270
Glen, F (2006) Essays Perspectives Opinions (New Jersey, The Light, Inc.), 34.
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The role of the sacred text is central to Muslim faith. Mr. Glens views thus naturally have there origin in the Quran, which refers to the various persons of faith in the different world religions as People of the Book. Jews and Christians, when persons of faith, are People of the Book. Muslims have some advantage over other People of the Book with respect to interfaith dialogue because Islam is open to dialogue. As an example of this openness, along with the Prophet Mohammed, Mr. Glen, as a Muslim, says of himself and other Muslims, I accept all Prophets and Books sent to different peoples throughout history, and regard belief in them as an essential principle of being Muslim. A Muslim is a true follower of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and all other Prophets.271 The advantage the Muslim has for engaging in interfaith dialogue, Mr. Glen continues, is thus that they acknowledge the oneness and basic unity of religion, which is a symphony of Gods blessing and mercy, embracing all races and beliefs, a road bringing everyone together in brotherhood.272 Like Christians, moreover, Muslims believe that Jesus will return when the end of the world is near, though perhaps not physically, but as the underlying conditions of a Godly society. Near the end of world history, from society will emerge values such as peace, love, forgiveness, and mercy. As these values are also central in the Hebrew Prophets, there will be cause for cooperation between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.273 Muslims have already engaged in this activity with Jews, who were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire when expelled from Spain. Despite these various factors that predispose Islam to interfaith dialogue, Islam is not well understood and this misunderstanding contributes to difficulties. Christendoms historical portrayal of Islam has weakened Muslims courage with respect to interfaith dialog. For centuries, Christians were told that Islam was a crude and distorted version of Judaism and Christianity, and so the Prophet was considered an imposter, a common or ingenious trickster, the Antichrist, or even an idol worshipped by Muslims. Even recent books have presented him as someone with strange ideas who believed he had to succeed at any cost, and who resorted to any means to achieve success.274 In the extreme, misunderstanding of Islam has often erupted into violence. When wrongly understood as a political system, rather than a religion, Islam is sometimes seen as an ideology promoting social instability and conflict that must be eliminated. So misunderstood, Islam has been under siege, more Muslims killed in the last century than throughout history. Accordingly, when non-Muslims call for dialogue, Muslims may meet this call with suspicion. Again the optimist, Mr. Glen insists that Muslims engage in dialogue for the reasons that religious leaders such as Massignon, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II have recognized. Muslim faith in God is not a political ideology aimed at self interest, but a life changing spiritual experience that results in compassionate and cooperative representatives of universal peace.275 The fountainhead of this virtuous disposition of true Muslims is the teaching of the Prophet Mohammad, who through the revelation of the Quran lays essential ground work for interfaith dialogue.
271 272 273 274 275
Ibid. Ibid., 34-35 Ibid. Ibid., 37-38 Ibid.
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In referring to people of faith outside of Islam as the People of the Book, the Quran issues one of the greatest calls to interfaith dialogue that can be found. O People of the Book! Come to common terms as between us and you: that we worship none but God; that we associate no partners with Him; that we take not, from among ourselves lords and patrons other than God. If then they turn back, say you: Bear witness that we are Muslims (surrendered to Gods Will). (3:64) If this call to dialogue is rejected, Muslims are to continue on their path and allow the other person to continue on their path as well. But those who respond to the call find their path opens to salvation that is available for all who respond to this call. A person experiences salvation, roughly, in the event God graciously allows this person to enjoy both this life and the next.276 The dialogue following this openness that leads to salvation should avoid argumentative unproductive debate and rather revolve around caring relationships. The Quran states; God forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them: for God loves those who are just. (60:8) Further describing the degree to which God may provide a measure of salvation through revelatory interaction with non-Muslims, the Quran states of itself: This is the Book; wherein there is no doubt; a guidance to the pious ones. (2:2) The pious ones later described as those Who believe in the Unseen, are steadfast in prayer, and spend out of what We have provided for them; and who believe in what is sent to you and what was sent before you, and (in their hearts) have the reassurance of the Hereafter. (2:3-4) The Quran here proclaims the beneficial providence of God at work in the lives of some non-Muslims. We thus find that Mr. Glens vision for interfaith dialogue has influenced many people, in part, because of the way in which his views naturally have there origin in the Quran. The admonition toward dialogue that Mr. Glen promotes flows naturally from the Quran, and the authority of the Holy Book provides him with authority. He directs Muslims to engage with others because the Prophet Mohammad first conveyed this message in what was revealed to him. We will find that this divine message of encouragement toward universal tolerance and acceptance of others (the call to interfaith dialogue), is less explicit in other religions, but we will limit our discussion to a Christian and Jewish understanding of interfaith dialogue as found in the Bible. We begin with the Old Testament, which is not only a fundamental source of Jewish outlook on interfaith dialogue, but also foundational for many Christians. As will also be the case later on when we look at the New Testament, it is beyond the scope of this paper to utilize contemporary critical studies of the OT, which studies are extremely valuable when on occasion they can be used in such a way that they do not rule out the implications of the Sacred texts this paper attempts to gather.
276
For the purpose of this paper, I shall assume that this brief understanding of salvation will suffice for each of the
religions represented here. Buddhism and other religions are obviously of a different elk.
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A most interesting interfaith OT story is that of the Prophet Jonah. Some time in the eighth century BCE, God told Jonah that he must carry a message of Gods forgiveness to the people of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, an enemy of Israel. Nineveh seems to have been representative of Assyria. Jonahs task was to instruct the Assyrians to repent from their destructive ways or God would destroy them. Gods forgiveness was thus conditional, and there was surely a chance they might not meet these conditions. Jonah was understandably reluctant to obey God. Assyrian warfare was vicious. After victory in battles with Israel, Assyrians sometimes deported Jewish prisoners to languish and die in exile in Assyrian territories. To these hated adversaries Jonah was asked to bring a message of salvation. His initial response was to flee from the task. He boarded a ship headed for Tarshish (probably southwest Spain) traveling in the opposite direction of Nineveh. But God caused a storm that threatened the ship. At Jonahs own request, the mariners threw him overboard. The sea immediately calmed and God then appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah. (1:17) After three days and nights in the stomach of the fish, the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land, and God asked Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh. This time Jonah obeyed. After hearing Gods message the Assyrians repented. They asked God to help them turn from their wicked ways (3:8), and then God relented from the calamity that would have been brought upon Assyria. Gods mercy toward Assyrians made Jonah so angry he wanted to die, and he prayed to the Lord and said, Please Lord, was this not what I said [would happen] when I was still in my own country? Therefore, in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I know that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving-kindness (4:2). God then tries to show Jonah that saving the Assyrians was the right thing to do. God causes a plant to grow up to shade Jonah, and then the plant dies, illustrating that as the plant is worthwhile to Jonah, God finds the Assyrians worth saving. The interfaith contrast is such that despite Jonahs Judaism, including his special knowledge of God as a Prophet of God, he also needs to repent. He needs to be saved from his destructive ways as much as the Assyrians do. The story of Jonah suggest that non-Jewish religion is not the immediate issue for God, or at least that the Assyrian view of God was not the issue, but rather the problem was the destructive violent way in which the Assyrians were living. The Assyrians were not asked to become Jews to experience Gods favor. They were asked to look to God to change there way of living life. They did so and were saved. Something like interfaith dialogue occurs on a practical scale, orchestrated by God. The Assyrians are confronted by a weak (perhaps despised) person about Gods concerns. Jonah and the readers of his text are in turn confronted by God about their attitude toward the Assyrians, their powerful enemy. The Assyrians are not required to become Jews, and the Jews are asked to accept and even care for the enemy, the Assyrian non-Jew or anti-Jew. There is a kind of dialogue between two different religious groups, and the result is a more peaceful co-existence, or at least the potential for a more comfortable co-existence between Jews and Assyrians. These interfaith implications of the Book of Jonah were not new to the Jews. Abraham, the great patriarch of various religions, including Islam, Judaism and Christianity, is the main character of most of the book of Genesis and a central figure in the Quran and the New Testament. Abraham, through his wives Hagar and Sarah, was called to make great nations. He is an iconic example of Gods covenant purpose for humankind. But well after Gods covenant relationship with Abraham had been established (Gen 13:14-18), he meets with a mysterious character, Melchizedek king of Salem
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priest of God Most High (Gen 14:18). Melchizedek blessed Abraham who paid tithes to Melchizedek. Abraham on his covenant pilgrimage is helped and strengthened on his way by someone outside of Gods newly formed covenant with Abraham. Both figures benefit from each other and respect the divine connection each has, even though different kinds of relationships with God are evident. Abraham believed God and was accordingly called to be the father of many nations; Melchizedek was the king of Salem and a priest. Both individuals were Gods people and though different, one could bless the other, and the other paid worshipful respect with a tithe in response. Another non-Jewish minister to Jews is Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. While Jethro was not a Hebrew, as a Midianite and perhaps a descendent of Ishmael (Gen 37:28), Jethro helped design an effective structure for Moses governance of the Hebrew people, and though not a Hebrew, led Aaron (often thought to be the father of the Jewish priesthood) and the other elders in worship before God (Ex 18:12-24). Another interfaith life changing interaction comes from the life of Ruth in the Book of Ruth. This brief OT history tells of Elimelech and his wife Naomi who sojourned in the land of Moab while there was a famine in their home town of Bethlehem in Judah. Ruth was one of two Moabite women who met and married Naomis two sons while they were in Moab. Elimelech and Naomis two sons died, and Ruth followed Naomi back to Judah when the famine had passed. This Moabite woman aggressively secures food for herself and Ruth and succeeds in acquiring Naomis relative, Boaz, as her husband and the womens redeemer. Ruth has a son, Obed, the father of Jesse, the Father of David. Naomi, as a surrogate mother, has the joy of helping raise Obed. While Naomi adheres to Jewish tradition, she does not appear to require Ruth to do the same. Also, when Naomis other daughter-in-law, Orpah, had started on the journey back to Judah with Naomi, Orpah decides to return to Moab. Naomi says to Ruth at this juncture, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and her gods, return after your sister-in-law. (1:15) Ruth, as we have noted, decides to stay with Naomi, but Naomi is not possessive of Orpah and Ruth, concerned to keep them with her so that they might become Jews. Naomi is comfortable with the non-Jewish Moabite religion of her daughter-in-laws. While Ruth eventually embraces Naomis religion there is no requirement that she do so. Some years later, this comfort level seems to also exist in her great grand child, David. Before he was king, when hiding from King Saul who wanted to kill him, David often goes to Moab. After David and his band of follows leave their hiding place in the cave of Adullam, David went from there to Mizpah of Moab; and he said to the king of Moab, Please let my Father and Mother come and stay with you until I know what God will do with me. (1 Sam 22:3) David, the author of many of the Psalms, a person of unique spiritual insight, does not presume to inform the Moabite king about the nature of God, but assumes that the king can track with his frustrating experience of exile brought on by the attempts of king Saul to murder David. Even as the king of Moab helped David and his family and seemed open to Davids sense of providence, some time later, one of the kings of Persia, Cyrus, seems to have had a similar outlook of acceptance for people in other religions, though this was not true of his predecessors. To secure the lands they conquered, the Persian kings deported populations in mass resettlements to places where control of these people would be easier. When Persia conquered Babylon, some of the Jews already in captivity in Babylon were moved to Persia. When Cyrus eventually became king of
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Persia, many Jews were not only allowed to return to their homeland, Cyrus sometimes financed their trip and gave them back their religious artifacts and places of worship. Cyrus, unlike many of his predecessors, seems to have believed that God wanted the restoration of the religions of conquered people. Cyrus thus helped with the restoration of the Hebrew religion. In recognition, the Prophet Isaiah says of this restoration that it was the work of God. It is I who say of Cyrus, he is My shepherd. And he will perform all My desire. And he declares of Jerusalem, she will be built, and of the temple, your foundation will be laid. (Is 44:28) The Hebrew Prophet Isaiah thus extols the pleasure of God for Cyrus interfaith activity. As one of many of Cyrus restoration projects, many Jews did return to Jerusalem from captivity in Persia and the Temple was rebuilt, and Isaiah says that God enabled Cyrus to carry on this restoration, which clearly reflects some kind of ancient interfaith initiative on a massive scale. These OT examples supporting interfaith activity should be as significant for Christians as for Jews. For many Christians, the meaning of the relationship of the Old Testament and New Testament is literally a relationship between Old Covenant and New Covenant. Christians often think that the books of the New Testament depict a New Covenant or agreement with God that is at least a more complete account of Gods grace and mercy than the Old Covenant found in the OT. If so, the previous OT examples of interfaith activity in the OT should provide a bias toward an understanding of interfaith material in the NT, or even more than mere bias. Some people find the grace and goodness of God in the OT just as profound and wonderful as that which is found in the Quran and the NT. A further complication is that, unlike the Quran, not everyone agrees about what should be included in the NT and the OT. Many Christians, such as Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox, include deuterocanonical and apocrypha books into the cannon of Scripture. In any event, the scope of this paper must be limited by the assumption that the OT is usually taken to be foundational for the NT, and with this assumption in hand, we turn now to focus on NT Scripture. Were we to ask Christians the question, What should be the relationship between Christianity and other religions? the answer appears differently at different times in the history of Christianity. Something similar also occurs in Islam and Judaism, although we shall only consider Christianity in this regard. The Christian movement in the first century was often taken by Jews to be heretical perversion of Judaism. The man eventually known as the Apostle Paul, for example, first known as a conservative Jew named Saul, tried to destroy the early Christian movement. In his zeal to preserve Judaism, Saul sometimes authorized the killing of innocent people, as we learn from the story of Stephen in Acts chapter eight. The people of the early Christian movement, on the other hand, often took themselves to be open to other religions, God being the Father of all viable religion. The early movement often worshiped in Synagogues with Jews, though they were first called Christians through their involvement with gentiles outside the Jewish tradition in Antioch (Acts 11:26). Centuries later, after Christianity had become institutionalized, the tables were turned. As an institution, Christianity has often taken a hostile stance toward any other religion that might question or even merely differ from the standards of orthodoxy that happen to be in place at a given time, these standards generally reflecting the history of philosophy. The early church, due to the able influence of Augustine, incorporated Plato. Latter Thomistic tradition created a larger paradigm in which Neo-Platonism was integrated with Aristotle, in no small part because the crusades brought Moslem theology with its link to Aristotle back to Europe. The likes
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of Galileo, Descartes, Locke and Hume later set the stage for a secular materialist world view. Kant and the philosophical theology of thinkers Kant influenced, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and John Hick, lead us into the modern era and the current post modern developments. Given these philosophical theological trends that shape the outlook of any given historical Christian institution or movement, Christians have generally exhibited a brittle defensive reaction to religions that have not held a corresponding acceptance of these trends. Utilizing a focus similar to that of Mr. Glen, who looks to the Quran, we will for the moment leave aside the history of Christianity, and in what follows we will briefly consider the position of the early Christian movement as found in the New Testament. We will again do this in a non-critical way, that is, we will not utilize extra-biblical textual criticism, which is nearly always a part of the study of the gospels. We begin with the gospels. The story of the Christ Child in the Gospel of Matthew (2:1-12) often leaves people puzzled about the identity of the wise men from the East who came to Jerusalem looking for the king of the Jews. Were they priests, philosophers, or perhaps astrologers? They followed a star to the baby Jesus, and when they found him they fell down and worshipped him and presented him with precious gifts. Though they are not Jews, they are sensitive to God and seem to have had revelation from God that was so significant that they left their homes in the East, traveled a considerable distance, engaged in an act of worship, and gave costly gifts. Since these wise men were not identified as Jews, their activities would not have been possible unless Gods favor and revelation extends outside the religious context of the Jews of the first century. Another NT account will help shape our thinking. There was an incident in the life of Christ that we find in both Mark and Luke. One of the disciples saw someone casting out demons in Christs name, though this person was not a part of the band of disciples, so the disciples tried to stop him and came to Christ for help. Christ responds, Do not hinder him, For he who is not against us is for us. (Mk 9:39-40, Lk 9:49) Is Christ simply telling them to be tolerant? Or is Christ assuming that God is at work in the lives of people who are not involved in Christs ministry? It seems that there are people who are appropriately religious though outside the group of disciples, and Christ is at least asking his followers to have an attitude toward others that could easily lead to interfaith dialogue. Much more to the point in a different passage, consider the words of Christ as the Good Shepherd in the Gospel of John, chapter ten. We find a metaphor. There are sheep and there is a shepherd. The disciples are obviously the sheep, and Jesus represents himself as the good Shepherd, who will protect and care for the sheep even to the point of laying down his life for them. He says, I am the good shepherd; and I know my own, and my own know me, even as the Father knows me and I know my Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock with one shepherd. (Jn 10:14-16) Who are the other sheep who are not apparently among the immediate band of Christs disciples? These other sheep shall hear his voice, shall become one flock, and shall have one shepherd. The assumptions that often prevent Christians from seeing Muslims and Jews, respectively, as such flocks with their own shepherds have largely been the cultural and philosophical trends mentioned above. But aside from these trends, why not understand that the various world religions are the flocks in question, Islam being one in particular, with the shepherd of Islam being Mohammad and the faithful imams following the Prophet
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In keeping with Christs indication that the other sheep would hear his voice and would have one shepherd, might we suppose that the Prophet Mohammad somehow mysteriously, from Christs perspective, stands in the place of Christ? Many Christians would be troubled by the suggestion that we might see Christ in Mohammad, but that this may be possible is suggested by the way in which the Apostle Paul sometimes viewed Christ. In writing his first letter to the Corinthians, many of them gentiles, he interestingly refers to the Jews wandering in the wilderness, immigrating from Egypt to Canaan, as the fathers of the Corinthians, saying, more importantly for the point here, that when they drank from the rock at Horeb, that rock was Christ. (I Cor. 10:4) The OT story tells us that the Israelites were thirsty and complained bitterly to Moses, who then struck a rock with his staff, and water came out of the rock. (Ex 17:6) The source of this satisfying refreshment, says Paul, was Christ. The rock was Christ. But if that rock was Christ, similarly, Mohammad might be seen by some as a form of Christ. Christians might recoil that Christ and Mohammad are entirely different. The problem for many Christians is that they elevate the status of Christ to deity and hold everyone else to the status of mere humans, who are accordingly not thought to have the capacity for divine activity of Christ except through the use of spiritual gifts, a kind of supernatural ability to do Gods work (Rom. 12; Eph. 4; 1 Cor. 12-14) and through prayer. To the contrary, a statement suggesting the possibility of greater human capacity is found in Pauls letter to the Colossians. Paul says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of his body (which is the church) in filling up that which is lacking in Christs afflictions. (Col. 1:24) Paul seems to be saying that Christs suffering is not sufficient for the needs of the church, so that Paul must also contribute his sufferings. If so, why not assume that Mohammads contributions also have measure in Gods economy as did Pauls and Christs contributions. Another NT example that suggests a commonality between Christianity and other religions comes from James, often thought to be the brother of Christ. As a good Jew and a leader of the early Christian movement, in his NT epistle James encourages relationship with God in a way that is typical of many other religions. He says that if we cleanse ourselves and draw near to God, God will draw near to us (4:8-10). In writing this, James does not create a religion superior to other religions, but rather, after identifying himself as a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, (1:1) he does not then tie true religion to Christ, but says that pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father [is] to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.(1:27) In this early Christian account of religion, James appears to intend to define religion across the boundaries of the various world religions. As the leader of the early Christian movement, he is known for reconciling different groups within the early church (Acts 15:13). Similarly, in keeping with his calling as the shepherd of the early church, his account of religion, selects the core elements that many religions have in common that have to do with a quality of life that seeks the well-being of others. Keeping oneself from the destructive processes of the world, the truly religious person has the resources to care for those who are in need, some who are even weak and helpless, such as widows and orphans. James enduring account of religion seems to be altogether compatible with Islam and Judaism, and given the likelihood that James has given us the religion of Christ, it is significant that the religions of Mohammad and Moses are compatible with James account. Might we even say that, to some degree in light of the Epistle of James, the religion of Mohammad is the religion of Christ, and thus, that from an interfaith perspective, Mohammad reflects the spirit of
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Christ, even as Muslims may feel that Christ reflects the spirit of Mohammad. James has allowed for this kind of reciprocal exchange. Many Christians can easily see Abraham and Moses and David as Gods people. So can some Muslims, who also revere Christ. But Christians and Jews do not readily reciprocate with Muslims. Christians and Jews can often not see Mohammad as a prophet. But this short sightedness is out of keeping with the Apostle Pauls account of a prophet. A prophet, says Paul, is one who speaks to people for edification and exhortation and consolation. (1 Cor.14:3, 25) In Pauls view, the prophet engenders qualities of life that help people overcome grief and anger with success. The prophet is supposed to give insight that leads to Godliness. Although Paul is addressing a Christian audience, there is reason to think he saw a larger context that would, on his own account of the prophetic, include Mohammad as a prophet. Consider Pauls Epistle to the Romans for its interfaith implications. This letter is a bit more general and comprehensive than most of his correspondence and it develops an inter-religious understanding of Gods dealings with humankind. Although known as a Jew, Paul identifies himself as the apostle to the gentiles in the first chapter, thus qualifying himself to deal with non-Jewish religion through his appointment by God to do so (Rm 1:5). In chapters two through four there is a basic contrast between Jews and people of non-Jewish religion (gentiles), and it is here that Paul implies that Gods hope for all people is that they be in a personal relationship with God, despite whether they are Jews or gentiles. Gods relationship with a person preferably develops in response to a persons faith. Though Paul did not have Muslims specifically in mind, had he lived later in history, he no doubt would have seen practicing Muslims as people of faith, people who may transcend the category of Jew or gentile (Rm 3:28-30). Then turning to the transforming effect of faith, more or less, in chapters five through eight Paul explores why transformation may or may not occur. An outgrowth of the earlier discussion, chapters nine through eleven wrestle with questions about the relationship between an all-powerful God and responsible free agents. The remainder of the letter, chapters twelve through sixteen, deal mainly with the way in which faith affects a community of people of faith. Paul considers the relationship between the well-being of an individual and the well-being of the group in which this person may live, a group that includes vast differences (Rm 15:7-13), and he concludes with personal notes and greetings to individuals mainly in Rome. While the terminology of the letter addresses and presupposes a Hellenistic world, a mix of Jewish, Greek, and Roman culture and philosophy, its monotheistic overtone is nevertheless compatible with that of the Quran. This letter to people living in Rome was meant to convey what Paul had hoped to say in person (Rm 1:9-15). Given that he was unable to visit Rome (as least prior to the writing of this letter), Paul felt compelled to write to these people to give them his account of Gods way of dealing with people. Presumable this letter contains Pauls basic message to all the groups he encountered and attempted to influence, and if so, its significance is heightened. Touching on some of the points that are obviously related to interfaith dialogue, we find in Romans chapter two that gentiles, who do not have the benefit of the Jewish law, can nevertheless find favor with God, even if they are not circumcised Rm (2:14-16). The practice of circumcision is used to illustrate that faith in God runs deeper than the act of circumcision (Rm 2:28-29). A gentile, who has faith in God, though not circumcised, may thus experience Gods favor. Paul argues, for example, that Abraham experienced Gods favor prior to circumcision, and then when later circumcised, this circumcision is merely a sign of the faith that he had while uncircumcised. So it is faith in the grace
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and mercy of God that ultimately makes the person acceptable to God, and as Abraham exemplifies this life of faith, Abraham is an archetype or spiritual father of all who have faith. The kind of religion in which the faith is expressed is not at issue for Paul (Rm 4:9-16). If faith in such instances is like Islamic submission, we again find parallels between Islam and the early Christian movement. But perhaps most significant for the discussion of interfaith implications in Pauls letter to Rome is found in what has become chapter four (the original manuscript had no chapters or verse numbers). Here Paul uses two individuals to illustrate salvation by faith. Paul obviously has the work of God in Christ in view. He has just explained the role of Christs death, burial and resurrection in Gods plan for salvation in chapter three. Who should he use as examples of people who found favor with God through Christ? Did Paul develop an illustration through the life of Peter, the well known disciple and early church leader, or James, who was possibly the brother of Christ, or John, the disciple Christ seemed to love more than the others (Jn 13:23)? We find that the two people Paul used to illustrate a relationship with God were Abraham and David. Despite the various examples available, Paul hails these two non-Christian individuals as examples of Christian faith (Rm 3:21-4:25). For our purpose we should emphasize that neither of these persons knew Christ personally, nor did they know the culture and theology that are usually required for orthodox Christianity. More succinctly, while Paul had developed the role of Christ in Gods salvation in chapter three, to illustrate this, that is, to exemplify the person of faith who has been saved through Christ, Paul did not use Christians, but rather two well known Jews, David and Abraham. Abraham is importantly seen as having faith before he was circumcised, because this precondition of faith further shows that it is by faith (or submission to God), and not merely by following a religious tradition, that Gods eternal favor is received. Knowledge of Christ is not necessary. The obvious intent of Pauls argument is to show that God deals with people from all religions (gentiles as well as Jews) under the same conditions.277 Accordingly, we must surmise that all people who are in fact Gods children are faithful and submissive to God as were Abraham and David. By implication, as Paul intended, we should suppose that such people can be found in a Mosque, a Synagogue, a Temple, a Monastery, or in ordinary everyday circumstances located in Asia, Berlin, South Africa, Antarctica, or Detroit. Christians may come to see that Mohammad is like Christ, and some Christians may see that Mohammad was a Prophet through whom Gods word was revealed as the Quran. One controversial NT passage should be mentioned because it is used to argue that Christianity is exclusively Gods only one true religion. In the Gospel of John Jesus says, I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one come to the Father, but through me. (Jn 14:6) This passage is used to argue that only explicit knowledge of Christ can result in salvation. For example, contemporary conservative Christians usually maintain that for a person to experience salvation, this person must realize (must somehow explicitly know) that Jesus provides substitutionary atonement for their sins, although the language describing atonement may vary. It is often held that the person must pray a prayer to bring Christ into this persons life. But consider a different interpretation of this text. Another standard alternative interpretation of this verse (though seldom known or accepted by conservative Christians) is that through Christ means to live in a way that is the same as the way
277
For a scholarly commentary that supports my reading of Romans see Ziegler, J (1989) Pauls Letter to Rome (London,
JLM Press).
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Christ lived.278 A closer examination of the larger context of the Gospel of John does suggest (perhaps in addition to mysterious metaphysical conditions somehow only realized through Christ) that the meaning of this text in John has to do with living the kind of life that Christ lived. The background of the verse includes the disciples realization that Christ will soon die. They are disappointed, fearful and concerned. They had believed that he would overthrow Roman rule and restore world control to the Jews. As they understand his insistence that he must die, and his reassurance that despite his death, they will one day be with him again in heaven, Thomas (doubting Thomas) confesses, in essence, that he does not know how to get to heaven. Christ responds, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one come to the Father, but through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know Him and have seen Him. (Jn 14:6-7) The issue for Thomas is whether or not he knows the Father, who is God. Implied in Christs response to Thomas, if Thomas really knew Jesus, he also knew God. So while salvation, as some Christians understand salvation, is only through Christ, this passage in John does not actually require a person to endorse a certain kind of twentieth century theology. We have found this to be the case in the examples of salvation used by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. David and Abraham did not know Jesus, even though Paul indicates that they were saved through Christ. What is entailed in knowing another person is beyond the scope of this paper, but the simple message may be that to know a person like Jesus is to know God. Perhaps David came to know God through his grandmother Ruth, if she was still alive when David was a boy. Ruth may have provided mothering for David even as Naomi was a surrogate mother for Obed. In knowing his Moabite grandmother, David would have come to know God. Likewise, people who knew David knew God, people who knew Abraham knew God, and people who knew Moses knew God. So why should Christians and Jews and others not take the matter a step further and say that people who knew Mohammad knew God, and that people continue to get to know Mohammad through the Quran. And thus through the Quran, people continue to grow in their knowledge and relationship with God. In conclusion, the broad strokes used to pull together the various religious traditions represented herein indicate that the Sacred Scriptures of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity each encourage intercultural tolerance and acceptance. While the Quran gives implicit instruction for Muslims to interact with the followers of other religions peacefully under most conditions (Mr Glen embodying this instruction), the Scriptures of other religions are not so explicitly instructive, though we have found that Jewish and Christian Scriptures can be read to support and advocate interfaith dialogue. The stories of the lives of Jonah, Ruth, Abraham, and David are telling. Similarly, Christian Scripture on the whole includes an understanding of deity that embraces all of humankind, and as Christianity depends upon the OT, we see this embrace of humanity occurring through the religion indigenous to the region in which a person lives. Whether a person is an Assyrian, Moabite, Roman, or Jew, in each case the implications if not the directives (somewhat tacitly) toward interfaith dialogue are for the larger purpose of promoting peace and well-being among all peoples of the world. This interfaith outlook in Scripture is often not apparent when, as the insight of Mr Glen would have it, religion is used for self proclaimed personal ends apart from God, especially political ends.279 When religion is used to inflict torment and suffering and to gain political control, the Scriptures in
278
For an exhaustive account of the various views of atonement, especially the one I have sketched here see Moberly, R. C. Glen, Essays, 37.
(1904) Atonement and Personality (London, John Murray).

279
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this case are not being used in accord with their purpose as divine revelation. The influence of materialism may provide impetus for such abuse of Scripture in that unbelief and skepticism in the lives of religious leaders may distort their use of Scripture, so that they perhaps foster indifference or scorn for people outside their own cultural norms. Cutting through the effects of materialism in the life of faith, Mr Glen finds that the powerful effect of a loving relationship with a person of faith provides a cure. He therefore encourages Muslims to reach out in friendship to non-Muslims so as to counter the effects of the secular world. The cure for the ill is love. He finds that religion commands love, compassion, tolerance, and forgiving. Love is the most essential element in every being, a most radiant light, a great power that can resist and overcome every force. It elevates every soul that absorbs it, and prepares it for the journey to eternity. Those who make contact with eternity through love work to implant in all other souls what they receive from eternity. They dedicate their lives to this sacred duty, and endure any hardship for its sake. Just as they say love with their last breaths, they also breath love while being raised on the day of Judgment.280 According to the Gospel of John, Jesus, like Mr Glen, similarly encouraged people to love one another despite their differences and problems. An instance of this is found in Johns account of the Last Supper.281 Prior to the meal, Jesus got up from the table and took a towel and a basin of water and washed his disciples feet (13:1-30). According to John, this feet washing was an act of love (13:1), which was in part to show the disciples (and all disciples to follow) how they should lovingly treat one another (13:14). Jesus enacted a metaphor to depict a deep caring relationship that would sooth and overcome the affects of brokenness and pathology in the lives of people of faith (it seems that even saints have dirty feet from time to time).282 A bit later, when the meal begins, Jesus again reaches out in love to Judas, by seating Judas at the place of honor at the head of the table where they could talk to each other. When they were finally seated, Jesus confronted Judas (13:26), but rather than entering into dialogue with Jesus about his dissatisfaction with Jesus views, such as, we can imagine, the theology of the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:30-37), or their various excursions into non-Jewish Samaritan territory to help non-
280 281
Ibid., 48-49 Many scholars do not think this passage is an account of the Last Supper because the first verse (13:1) specifies it was
before the Passover Feast, and moreover, Johns account is different than the other gospel accounts. However, these scholars seem to fail to see the entire context. The text says before the Passover Feast, Jesus knew that his time had come referring back to Jesus awareness, when the Greeks wanted to talk to him sometime earlier (12:20), that the time of his death had come (12:23). The passage seems simply to be saying that this occasion in Johns gospel is the Passover Feast, but before the feast began, Jesus already knew he was about to die.
282
The meaning of Jesus metaphor is somewhat obvious when he says of Judas, after having washed Judas feet, not all
of you are clean..., (Jn 13:10) for Judas must have been clean. Judas was the disciple who was perhaps the most respectful of Jewish tradition. He would have bathed before the Passover meal, yet wearing sandals, his feet would have become soiled by walking through the city streets to the place of the Passover meal. When under normal circumstances the servant at the door would have washed his feet, he would have become clean all over again (in accord with ritual requirements). Only in this instance, Jesus took the place of the servant and in an act of love, washed Judas feet, but then strangely said that Judas was not clean. (Jn 13:10-11) John reiterates that this condition of Judas (not being clean) is an indication of the betrayal that is about to take place (Jn 13:10).
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Jewish people (Mt 15:21-28), or caring for tax collectors (Lk 19:1-10) and women of the night (Lk 7:36-39), Judas mounted a passive aggressive attack and managed in short order to kill Jesus. It appears that Jesus was committed to something like intercultural dialogue which Judas rejected. Judas may have been some sort of Jewish exclusivist who could not tolerate the openness to people that Jesus expected. Jesus was apparently aware of Judas rejection and hence gave Judas the place of honor at the table (an act of love no less than feet washing) no doubt so that Judas and Jesus could iron things out. While few Christians emulate Jesus by loving their enemies, it appears that Mr Glen is willing to place himself in this risky position. He has taken the place of Christ, not as a Christian, but as a Muslim, offering peaceful dialogue to Christians and Jews and people of all religions. Mr Glens insistence that love is the essential element that will solve the problems related to interfaith dialogue places him squarely in the non-violent peaceful tradition of the Jew named Jesus that Christians claim to follow. Christians and Jews and people of the various world religions would do well to emulate Mr. Glen.
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Glen between East and West
PART
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OPENING THE ROAD TO DIALOGUE: AN AMALGAMATION OF GLENS AND SPINOZAS IDEAS ON TOLERANCE AND DIALOGUE APPLIED TO THE SITUATION OF MUSLIMS IN THE NETHERLANDS
KATE KIRK 283 AND GURKAN CELIK 284
Abstract This paper is a demonstration of how perspectives from different times, locations, and worldviews can still find deep resonance and yield points supporting the necessity for dialogue and tolerance. By amalgamating two perspectives on these issues one rooted in Islam, the other in secular early-Enlightenment the authors show that although different they can together point to the same goal. The need for and the relationship between tolerance and dialogue are expressed in the writings of both Fethullah Glen (1941), an internationallyrenowned scholar of Islam and a prominent teacher of peace and practitioner of dialogue, and Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza (16321677), the son of Portuguese Jew who sought refuge in Amsterdam during the seventeenth century and became the leader of a radical philosophic current which divorced philosophy from theology. The merging of these two mens ideas demonstrates in itself that a dialogue between civilizations is possible and thus defies those who believe that Islam and the Judeo-Christian/secular West are destined to clash. Furthermore, their philosophies can inform public debates, policy development and community-building strategies in western European countries, like the Netherlands, with their growing Muslim populations. Islamophobic and anti-Muslim discourses have had a profound impact on recent developments in integration and naturalization policies in the Netherlands. All across western Europe the doctrine of multiculturalism and the welfare state shaped post-War immigrant related policies, but these policies have since been re-examined due to social problems among first and second generation immigrants and the emergence of what is considered to be theologically inspired terrorism. In the Netherlands politicians, policy-makers and citizens struggle to deal with these discourses and especially the perceived tensions between the Dutch secular state and society and the increasing number of Muslim citizens. Thus the amalgamation of Glens Islamic and Spinozas secular perspectives on tolerance and dialogue have the potential to contribute to the peaceful coexistence of secular and Islamic residents.
283
Kate Kirk: Currently writing a doctoral dissertation, at Queens University, Belfast, on Dutch integration policies and
their implications on citizenship practices. (A graduate in social science, University College Utrecht; MA in political science, Leiden University.) Ms Kirk is also doing research on social problems in a deprived neighbourhood in Amsterdam for the Wiardi Beckman Foundation (WBS), the Dutch Labour Party think tank. She has recently published Enlightened Embodiment: the Submissive Islamic Female Body in the Contemporary Dutch Enlightenment Project in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations.
284
Gurkan Celik: Currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on Glen's views on peace and the human condition from the
perspectives of education, dialogue and theological anthropology at Radboud University, Nijmegen. (MA in policy and organization studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.) He has written articles for learned journals, and is (co)author of several publications, including Glens Approach to Dialogue and Peace in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations (2007); Fethullah Glen as a Servant Leader in International Journal of Servant-Leadership (2007); Voorlopers in de Vrede [Forerunners for Peace] (2005); Hizmetkar Liderlik [Servant Leadership] (2003).
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The ways to explain things to people without making them hostile and frightened should be sought. For this reason, at whatever cost, the road to dialogue with people must be kept open. (Glen 2004a:140).
1. Introduction Throughout its history the Netherlands has been known as one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. Repressed groups, such a Portuguese Jews and French Huguenots, came to the Netherlands during the 16th Century because there they were able to practice their religion without persecution. Similarly philosophers like Descartes came to the Netherlands because he could enjoy greater freedom of speech than in his native France. Dutch tolerance took on it most indurate institutional form during the era of pillarization when Catholics, Protestants, socialists, and liberals lived harmoniously apart-together (Vermeij, 2006:19). Currently, homosexuals come the Netherlands to enjoy the freedom to express their sexuality openly and even marry if they wish to.285 Similarly, postcolonial and labour immigrants who arrived in the Netherlands during the 1960s and 70s and the subsequent generation of alloctonen (those born in a foreign country or with parents born in a foreign country) where also treated with tolerance under multicultural policies. However, during the last several years the Dutch tradition of tolerance seems to many to have encountered Poppers paradox of tolerance. Popper argued that tolerance of the intolerant is ultimately self-defeating because it eventually leads to the abolition of tolerance by the intolerant (Popper 1966 as cited in Rosenfeld 2003:11). The interethnic and inter-religious climate in the Netherlands has undergone dramatic changes over the passed several years. During the 1990s criticism of multiculturalism and its tolerance of Muslim immigrant, primarily of Moroccan and Turkish origin, began to surface: exclusionist opinions and social distance towards ethnic minorities have increased (Dagevos, Gijsberts & van Praag, 2003). Both the structural and political-cultural integration of these groups was said to have failed. We will argue that this failure is due not to excessive tolerance but to indifference masked by a tolerant faade. Furthermore, current claims to the Dutch tradition of tolerance have become part of a nationalistic identity building project that has shaped current integration policies. As both a form of indifference and nationalism tolerance losses its power to build a plural liberal democratic society because it closes the road to dialogue (Glen 2004a:140). Thus, we will contend that it is not the paradox of tolerance that has strained relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Netherlands but the misuse and misunderstanding of the principle. Dutch politics and society is renowned for its political culture of dialogue: in the polder model all parties have to be heard before a decision can be made. However, Dutch dialogues between nonMuslim and Muslim citizens on the role of religion in society and on integration will be empty and counterproductive without a re-conceptualisation of what it means to be tolerant in a plural society and how a meaningful dialogue should be conducted. By using the ideas of Fethullah Glen [1941]286 an internationally-renowned scholar of Islam and a prominent teacher of peace and practitioner of
285
Dutch tolerance has also lead to the integration of liberal attitudes and polities towards prostitutions, and the use of soft
drugs suggest that the Dutch still take an open and accepting stand towards behaviours that may be condemned as deviant by others.
286
Glen was born in Erzurum, eastern Turkey and has lived in Pennsylvania USA since 1998.
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dialoguein comparison with those of Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza [1632-1677]the son of Portuguese Jew who sought refuge in Amsterdam during the 17th century and became the leader of a radical philosophical current which divorced philosophy from theologywe will attempt to make such a re-conceptualisation. The purpose of this amalgamation of philosophic perspectives on tolerance and dialogue is two fold. First, Glen and Spinoza, respectively, argue that dialogue and tolerance complement each other and together make liberal democratic peaceful coexistence possible. Second, the merging of these two mens ideas, emerging from very different perspectivesthe former religious and the later secular, demonstrates in itself that a dialogue between civilizations is possible and thus defies those who believe that Islam and the judo-Christian/secular west are predestined to clash. The paper will begin with an outline of the historical developments of Dutch integration policies in order to provide the background information needed to understand the position and participation of Muslims in the Netherlands. Thereafter we will discuss the Dutch discourse on Islam and Muslims. We will then outline Spinozas and Glens thoughts on discourse and tolerance and conclude by discussing how they can be applied to the Dutch situation.
2. Becoming Dutch: Muslim Citizens and Dutch Integration Policies The Netherlands has had a long history of contact with the Muslim world thanks to its trading activities. In fact the Ottoman Turks gave the Dutch their first tulips, the famous national flower, in the 1500s (Ireland 2004). However, little of this commercial or cultural contact occurred on Dutch soil until after the Second World War. The Netherlands was, and remains, a very hesitant immigrant land. Nevertheless, at present approximately 11 percent of the Dutch population is foreign born, and, if the second generation is included, that percentage increases to 20 (Entzinger 2007:2). Approximately one million of the 16 million people living in the Netherlands are considered to be Muslims (van der Laan 2007 ) the majority of whom are of Turkish or Moroccan origin. 287 The most visible minorities are Turks, Surinamese and Moroccans.288 The Surinamese immigrants arrived during the 1970s, as a result of increasing apprehension over the countrys independence from the Netherlands. Their Dutch passports and knowledge of the Dutch language greatly facilitated their integration. Conversely, the Turkish and Moroccan communitiesthe legacy of guest worker policies of the late 1960s and 1970s that were followed by generous programs of settlement and family reunificationhave come to be seen as problematic due to a lack of integration (Entzinger 2007:2). Before the 1980s the national government had not devised any clearly articulated policies towards immigrants. Prior to that period it was believed that most of the post-war immigrants would eventually leave the country (van Houtum et al. 2005:626). There was a powerful conviction that the Netherlands should not be an immigration country: immigrant residence was to be temporary because the Netherlands regarded itself to be overpopulated (Entzinger 1975). However after acts of
287
Other Islamic groups in the Netherlands include Hindustani Surinamese, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Tunisians and Visible minorities is a Canadian term used to indicate ethnic communities that stand out as a result of their size
Moluccans (Shadid and van Koningsveld 1996) as well as newer immigrants/asylum seekers such as Iranians and Iraqis.
288
(Entzinger 2006:2).
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violence committed by young Molukan immigrants the Netherlands began to recognize and accept the presence of immigrant communities.289 After the parliament published the Minderhedennota (the Minority Memorandum) in 1983 the guest workers and post-colonial migrants became known as ethnic minorities (van Houtum et al. 2005:626). The policy that followed reflected the belief that if the newly discovered ethnic minorities were allowed to retain their own culture and manage their own affairs they would be better placed to emancipate in Dutch society (van Houtum et al. 2005:626). The institutional and political structure for these new policies had already been constructed. Dutch Multiculturalism was the descendent of earlier forms of political accommodation that had served the country well in the past. The Netherlands was remarkably politically stable during the 20th century, despite the constant threat posed by the division of society into four separate pillars: Catholic, Protestant, liberal, and socialist (Andeweg & Irwin 2005:19). Arend Lijphart explained this extraordinary stability with his concept of consociational democracy. This theory seeks to demonstrate how stable and effective democracy is possible despite social heterogeneity when there is elite cooperation (Lijphart 1975). In the pillarised Netherlands there was a decentralization of policy making to the corporate minorities, whose institutions were subsidised by the central government. Although the pillars collapsed under the pressure of social mobility and secularisation during the 1960s, subsidised autonomy was granted to new immigrant groups and formed the backbone of Dutch multiculturalism. The Ethnic Minorities Policy focused on ethnic minorities as collectives: it promoted socio-economic participation, combated discrimination, and supported group emancipation of minority groups through coordination with ethnic elites. These policies had an especially profound impact on the experience of Turkish and Moroccan guest-workers and their families (Entzinger 2007:3). These Islamic immigrants were allowed to establish separate facilities based on their community and religious identity. For example subsidies were allocated for mother language teaching programs for immigrant children, and welfare benefits were granted to their nonDutch speaking parents (Entzinger 2007:3).290 During the 1990s high unemployment and under-development among first and second generation allochtonen opened the flood gates to progressive claims that multiculturalism promoted racial stereotypes and ethnic marginalisation (Steenbergen 2006: 267). Furthermore, criminality and Islamic fundamentalism provoked more conservative critiquesechoing Samuel Huntington (2004, 1998)against the tribalisation of the Netherlands and the assaults on Western democratic ideals by foreigners, particularly Muslims (Philipse 2005; Bolkestein 1997). The political debate over the compatibility between Islam and democratic liberalism, which would mark much of the later political
289
After Indonesian independence was granted in 1949 approximately 300,000 colonizers and colonized fled to the
Netherlands, of whom approximately 13,000 were former soldiers from the island of Ambon (Molukans) (Kbben 1979: 147). Both the Molukans and the government considered their residence to be temporary because they had been promised independence by the Dutch. After being housed in a former Nazi concentration camp, and having been considered temporary for more than 25 years, unrest led to several terrorist attacks by young Molukans. Finally a kidnapping and two train hijackings sparked the political and social debates that eventually led to the WWR report on the status of Minorities. (Kbben 1979).
290
It is interesting to note that although well meaning these policies often led to mistaken understandings of ethnic group
composition. For instance all Moroccans were supposed to have Arabic as their mother language and thus the children of Berber speaking immigrants were also provided with Arabic classes.
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debate over integration, was started in 1991 by former liberal party (VVD) leader Frits Bolkestein (Maas 1997). Bolkestein claimed that Islam was a threat to liberal freedom and democracy After the 1994 elections, the newly elected purple coalition, composed of the three main nonreligious parties, replaced minority policies with integration policies; shifting the focus from respecting cultural difference to promoting the immigrants social and economic participation (Entzinger 2007:5; Ministerie van BiZa 1994).The approach taken by the integration policy was a more citizenship-oriented (or republican) approach than the group-oriented policies of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the 1997 parliamentary report on the multicultural society still stressed the importance of strong group-identity as a means to facilitate self-confident societal participation (Gemeente Utrecht 2004:17).291 Thus, the integration of individuals was also combined with the idea of distinct group identity. The Inburgering of new immigrants became the spearhead of Dutch integration policies (Fermin 1999:96). In colloquial Dutch the word integratie (integration) is used interchangeably with the word inburgeringnormally translated as naturalising. However, the root of the term, burger (citizen) suggests it can literally be translated as to become a citizen. This concept arose in 1989 when the WRR advised that basic civic and language education be made a requirement for immigrants. In 1994 the government began to express interest in developing an inburgering policy, the purpose of which would be to facilitate the independent functioning of immigrants in Dutch society. Finally, in 1996, non-European Union immigrants, with a right to welfare benefits, were obliged to participate in a 12month integration course, consisting of 600 hours of Dutch language instruction, civic education and preparation for the labour market (Joppke 2007:13). Then, in 1998, through the enactment of the Wet inburgering nieuwkomers (WIN) (Newcomer Integration Law), non-EU immigrants without a temporary reason for residence (such as students), were required to inburgeren regardless of welfare rights (Fermin 1999: 96). Furthermore, the relics of multiculturalism, such as mother tongue teaching, were removed from the school curriculum (Entzinger 2007:5). During the 2002 parliamentary elections campaign, Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant homosexual sociology professor, challenged the political elite with his populist claims that there was no more room in the Netherlands for foreigners. Furthermore, in his book, Against the Islamicisation of Our Culture, he warned that Dutch society was under attack by authoritarian Muslims who, if given the opportunity, would destroy the Dutch tradition of tolerance, and rob homosexuals and women of their rights (Fortuyn 2001). Although assassinated shortly before the elections by a Dutch animal rights activist, his party (LPF, List Pim Fortuyn) was included in the ruling coalition. However, the partys inability to function as part of the government led to the collapse of the coalition, and after new elections were called the LPF lost most of its votes (Andeweg & Irwin 2005: 16). In the end it was Fortuyns critique of the prevalent political correctness towards immigrantsespecially Islamic immigrantsthat had the most impact on Dutch political culture. One of Fortuyns most enthusiastic supporters, who dubbed him the divine baldy in light of his shaved head, was Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, a film maker, columnist and television personality, was known for his outrageous and politically incorrect antics. When he was approached by Ayaan Hirsi Alia liberal party parliamentarian of Somalian decentto direct a film she had written called
291
In this same report the government wrote that the effort of the entire society, both foreign and native-Dutch was needed
for the integration of minorities.
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Submission Part I, he agreed.292 In the film the story of the abuse suffered by Islamic women at the hands of male relatives was told by a woman dressed in a transparent burka: her naked body was tattooed with Quran texts. The film alienated and enraged many Muslims and as revenge a young Dutch Islamic fundamentalist, Mohammed Bouyeri, killed van Gogh. Bouyeri left a note on the body threatening Hirsi Ali. The lives and deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the media spectacle that was Hirsi Ali, along with international events like September 11th and the Madrid bombings, set the stage for the formulation of Integration Policy New Style. Furthermore, a 2004 parliamentary investigation into the state of integration in the Netherlands, known as the Blok Commission, concluded that integration in the Netherlands had failed, especially in regard to education (Tijdelijke Commissie Onderzoek Integratiebelied; Commissie Blok, 2004). Steered by the former heavy-handed Minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk, the Netherlands enacted increasingly restrictive migration and more rigorous integration policies, including the requirement of civic integration or inburgering classes for religious leaders like Imams.293
3. Anti-Muslimism in the Netherlands Dutch Islamophobia is marked by what Halliday (1995) calls anti-Muslimism because it encompassed racist, xenophobic and, stereotypical element : it is part of a larger anti-immigrant sentiment (as cited in Koningsveld 2002:175). Muslim is an ethnic political identity, that along with socio-economic deprivation and spatial segregation, is used to draw clear lines between Dutch and Islamic culture, the native Dutch and Muslims. This kind of differentiation does not allow for engagement and cooperation but instead fear and feeling of moral superiority born of ignorance. Initially the aforementioned legacy of pillarization, provide for a conception of ethnic minorities that was based on social, economic, cultural and religious characteristics: the end goal was a cohesive yet pluralistic society made up of ethnically distinct yet settled groups (Ireland 2004:122). Muslim movements were just part of the mix: the problematic history of Catholic emancipation and the eventual acquiesce of humanist beliefs and Jewish practices helped to clear the way for Islam (Ireland 2004:122). Although the so called silver cord between the Dutch state and churches was cut in 1983 local governments still had the authority to disperse subsidies for social and cultural work, including those performed by mosque associations (Ireland 2004:122). Thus, although most of the Dutch where leaving their pillars the state helped to construct a new Muslim one: they introduced subsidies for prayers rooms and eventually mosques, sanctioned and regulated the ritual slaughtering of animals, initiated the Islamic Broadcasting Foundation, and made imams legally equal to other spiritual leaders (Shadid & Van Koningveld 1996). It was believed that Muslim organizations could help to
292
Hirsi Ali made it her political mission to emancipate women from Islam. She herself came to the Netherlands as a
refugee after escaping an arranged marriage. In 2006 a controversy over her citizenship arose after the Minister of Integration -a fellow liberal party member- made an issue of lies Hirsi Ali had told on her original asylum request. In the end she was allowed to keep her citizenship but she voluntarily resigned from the parliament and moved to the United States.
293
In Dec 2006 integration was removed from Verdonks portfolio after a struggle between the cabinet and the parliament
over the pardoning of 2600 asylum seekers who asked for asylum longer than five years before and who had asylum applications turned down under the previous cabinet and in the justice system. In Feb. 2007 she stood down as minister when the new cabinet was installed and is now a member of parliament (Valk 2006:3).
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implement the minority policies and emancipate their members. However, efforts to create a unified Dutch Islam failed and the organizations remained nationality-based and most Mosques had an ethnic affiliation (Ireland 2004:123). Thus references to the Islam or Muslims are miss-leading generalizations, for there are many different interpretations of the Quran and differences in religious cultural practices. This focus on political-cultural integration based on ethnic identities and the lack of structuralintegration in the labour market, housing, schools and vocational training polices eventually blew up in the faces of Dutch policy makers. As Christopher Cadwel writes: The Dutch talked themselves into believing that valuelessness was a perennial feature of their society. So they could build a Muslim pillar and then let it collapse into post-modern individualism, following the same historic route that Protestantism and Catholicism had taken, as if that route were the product of an iron historical law (Cadwell 2004 as cited in Carle 2006). The economic stagnation and restructuring of the late 1980s hit immigrant groups very hardin 1987 unemployment rates had soared to 42 percent among Moroccans, 44 percent among Turks and 27 percept among Surinamese, compared to just 13 percent among the native population (Pennix & Groenendijk as cited in Ireland 2004:123). Drop out rates among alloctonous students were very high and many of the first generation immigrants who had lived in the Netherlands for decades did not speak any Dutch (Engbersen, Hemerijck & Bakker 1994 as cited in Ireland 2004: 123 ). In January of 2000 Paul Scheffer, a historian and prominent Dutch Labour Party (PVdA) member, wrote an article that appeared in the NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch daily newspaper, entitled The Multicultural Drama. Herein Scheffer argued that an ethnic underclass consisted of people who do not feel attached to Dutch culture and society and who are unwilling and unable to integrate, had been formed as the result of cultural relativism. From his view point the illiberal idea of Muslims could undermine the social cohesion and the functioning of liberal democracy (Scheffer 2000). The solution he suggested was a civilization offensive which would force immigrants to adhere to the principles on which the Dutch state had been created and that they should have a comprehensive knowledge of Dutch history and culture. Tolerance, he claimed, can only survive within clear limits: without shared norms and values about the rule of law, we cannot productively have differences of opinion (Scheffer 2000). The success of Scheffers critique of the indifference of Dutch multicultural tolerance was that it sparked the expression of classical nationalist sentiments such as the defences of Dutch language and culture and the need for a shared understanding of history. Thus criticism from the left that the very idea of a multicultural society was too conservative because it denies the fact that migration changes people (Scheffer 2000) started to ricochet across the political spectrum. These anti-multiculturalism sentiments were most clearly articulated by the rightist populists like Pim Fortuyn and later Geert Wilders and Liberal Party (VVD) members like form leader Frit Bolkestein, parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the former minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk. What all these politicians have in common is the idea that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and that Western values are superior. The status of homosexuality and the position of women in society have become markers of the difference between Dutch values and Islam. Fortuyn in particular expressed the importance of protecting the rights of homosexuals from Muslim, although he openly bragged about sleeping with many Moroccan men (Burma 2006). During a recent political controversy sparked after Prime minister Balkenende told a group of students at the Islamic Indonesian State University that he had voted again gay marriage as a parliamentarian Boris van der Ham (D66) stated as prime minister representing all the Dutch he must explain that gay marriage is
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based on deeply rooted norms and values (Krietiek op uitspraken Balkenende over homohuwelijk 2007). However, what van der Ham and Fortuyn before him have failed to explicate is that the right to gay marriage is not a fundamental Dutch value but the result of a democratic decision that many, including native Dutch Christians like Balkenende opposed. The supposed suppression and abuse of Islamic women has been repeatedly used as an example of the threat of Muslims to Dutch society and the backwardness of Islam. Islamic women and their own definitions of themselves are often excluded from this discourse, based on presumption and not on dialogue. Ayaan Hirsi Aliwho has mistakenly been called the heiress of Spinoza294made it her mission to free women from the edicts of Islam that had decreed her own circumcision, and an arranged marriage from which she had fled.295 Through the language of the European Enlightenment, and with the justification of her own Islamic African past, she has declared war on Islam from inside liberal Dutch political circles. However it is not skin colour or background that matter here but the nature of the arguments. Hirsi Alis position clearly comes from an elite, secular, western perspective. Feminist scholar Halleh Ghorashi captures the anomaly of Hirsi Alis politics in her assessment that: Hirsi Ali is sincere but also dogmatic, she is brave but also one-sided, she is black but thinks white (Ghorashi 2005:2). Although her intentions are good, by allying herself with an ideology that objectifies the Islamic woman as part of a postcolonial nationalistic discourse instead of engaging in dialogue , she has failed in her emancipatory mission. Just as in France and the UK, woman clad in hijab in the Netherlands have become walking symbols of an Islamic threat. In December of 2005 Geert Wilders, the leader of the populist anti-immigrant Party for Freedom, proposed a motion to ban the Burka, a garment worn by orthodox Muslim woman with only a screened opening around the eyes. In regard to the motion Wilders stated: The Burka is unfriendly to women and actually medieval. It is an insult to everyone who believes in equal rights to have completely unrecognizable women on the streets. Thus, in the Netherlands there is no place for a burka. The motion also gives support to moderate Muslims in the Netherlands. The burka ban contributes to integration in the Netherlands. Furthermore, in light of security issues it is unacceptable that people are unrecognizable. It is for this reason that the burka was earlier forbidden in certain Belgian cities.296,297 Although such a ban was found to be unconstitutional on the grounds of religious freedom, the motion may still be passed in light of security issues surrounding unidentifiable people. Wilders was given wide support by the Christian Democrats (CDA), the Liberal Party (VVD) and the party founded by the late Pim Fortuyn (LPF). The parliamentary fuss over the issue puzzled many because only about 100 women, out of a population 16 million, actually wear the burka. However, within the context of Dutch anti-Muslimism it is entirely understandable because the burka is a glaring example of the Islamic other violating perceived pillars of the Dutch state.
294 295
Buurma 2006; 24. This was a statement made by Jonathan Israel quoted by Yoram Stein in Trouw, May 6, 2005. Hirsi Ali has resigned from her parliamentary position and moved to America due to a controversy surrounding her Groep Wilders. 20 Dec. 2005. Burka verboden in Nederland Kamer stemt voor motie van Wilders. This is the authors own translation from Dutch to English.
citizenship and security issues.

296
http://www.geertwilders.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=364&Itemid=71 (8 Oct 2006).

297
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During an interview in July 2007 the minister of Housing, Neighbourhoods and Integration, Ella Vogelaar, made the prediction that in several decades the Dutch would have a Jewish-ChristianIslamic tradition. Furthermore she stated that she would like to help Muslims to feel at home. Islam and Muslim must be able to root themselves here, specifically because Muslims are also citizens of this country (Laan 2007). These statements were immediately meet with disapproval by the leaders of the PVV, VVD and members of one of the government coalition parties the Christen Union (CU). Wilders was quotes as saying: I fell off my chair when I read it [the interview with Vogelaar] .the Islam is opposed to very important norms and values in our culture. We must not just throw these away(Nederland krijgt joods-christeljke-islamitische traditie 19 juli 2007). VVD leader Mark Rutte echoed Wilders saying: the Netherlands doesnt have an Islamic tradition. Of course not, we have to be clear over that. People who come to our country have to except our core values like the equality between men and women and the democratic state (ibid 19 July 2007). CU parliamentarian Ed Anker stated that the ministers remarks misrepresented fundamental differences between two religions and expressed worries that the ministers opinions on the compatibility between different religious cultures would find its way into the cabinets integration policy (ibid 19 July 2007). Vogelaar stressed that in her role as minister she would like to put an end to the negative image and fear of Islam precisely because they are Dutch citizens and in the country stay (van der Laan 2007). Not only does she have fight against the fear that Muslims will override so called deeply rooted Dutch norms and values but also the fear of terrorism and anarchism. Around the world the difference between Islam in general and jijhadism is often confused and Muslim has become a synonym with terror. Jihad is an element of Islam which is primarily defined as the inner struggle of a believer against all that stands between the believer and God.298 For the last decade or so terms like Muslim terrorists, Islamic violence, jihadists, Muslim suicide bombers rank among the most frequently used jargon in the press and TV broadcasts. Regardless of how one defines global Islamic revival, theological and political debate makes its presence felt on a global scale. Contrarily, Fethullah Glen (2004:261; Caban 2005) argues: there is no such thing as a Muslim terrorist; a terrorist cannot be Muslim; a Muslim cannot be a terrorist. He declares that from the point of view of Islamic criteria nobody can justify or permit suicide attacks. According to Robert Carle approximately 80 percent of the Dutch population believes that the state has been too tolerant towards Muslims who do not respect the right of homosexuals and women and are willing to use violence to further their assault against the democratic state (Carle 2006:68). Until recently, students of Dutch interethnic attitudes have agreed that a strong norm against blatant racism prevailed among native Dutch, but that more subtle forms of racism were equally prevalent in the Netherlands as in other countries (Essed 1991; Pettigrew & Meertens 1996). However, it is important to note that this tolerance first lead to indifferent to the economic and social problems in an Islamic pillar tucked away in crumbling inner-city and then to a tit-for-tat tolerance: we are only tolerant if you are then tolerant based on nationalistic cries for the protection of Dutch core norms and values. True tolerance and the dialogue it can promote are needed because there are a million
298
Jihad occurs on two fronts. the internal and the external. The internal struggle (the greater jihad) is the effort to attain
ones essence; the external struggle (the lesser jihad) is the process of enabling someone else to attain his or her essence. The first is conducted on the spiritual frond, and is based on overcoming obstacles between oneself and ones essence, and the souls reaching knowledge, eventually divine knowledge, divine love, and spiritual bliss. The second is, however, material and based on removing obstacles between people and faith so that people can choose freely between belief and disbelief. (see Glen, 1998a,b).
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Muslims in the Netherlands, there are mosques and even halal meat in the supermarkets: Muslims are nested in the Netherlands and are there to stay.
4. Dialogue and Tolerance: Spinoza and Glen Islamaphobia and anti-Muslimism in the Netherlands are often buttressed on the national claims to a tradition that is not Judaeo-Christian but Enlightened. What Jonathan Israel calls the radical or early enlightenment, which began in the Netherlands during its golden 17th century (Isreal 2001), is often referenced by the likes of Hirsi Ali and Bolkestein. This nostalgia is reminiscence is what Vamik Volkan calls a chosen glory: a historical story of greatness woven into nationalist narratives and used to rally people around an imagined collective identity (Volkan 1994). What made the radical enlightenment so radical, a movement in which Spinoza played a key role, is that it was the first time that philosophy was divorced from theology (Isreal 2001). Isreal claims that Spinoza was the first to see all the key elements that made up the modern, progressive values that mark the secular Dutch society today (Hartmans 2007:24). Spinozas philosophy, instead of being the brawn behind nationalist anti-Muslimism, can be used to advocate religious tolerance from a secular position. In his writings and speeches, Glen highlights the tension between Islamophobia and the reality of Muslims in the West that needs to be addressed in order to make sustainable peaceful coexistence possible. Glens alliance of civilizationsas apposed to the clash of civilizationsoffers a perspective from which this peaceful coexistence is possible. Glens perspective shows that through dialogue groups can come to see that they share common virtues and ideas not simply incompatible differences (nal & Williams 2000; Carroll 2007). Glen, a contemporary theologian, clearly comes from an Islamic perspective: the Quran, the Sunnah, ijtihad (independent reasoning, see Yilmaz 2003), and Islamic piety are his reference points, just as reason was the basis of Spinozas philosophy. He like Spinoza tries to conceptualize modern peaceful coexistence by conjoining tolerance and dialogue. Spinoza, a vehement critic of religious superstition called for religious tolerance in the name of reason and Glen, a devote Muslim, calls for tolerance in the name of God. This is not to say that either Spinoza or Glen is a relativist, however both do believe that differences are inevitable in society and we must thus learn ways of living together in harmony. Glen states, tolerance does not mean being influenced by others and joining them; it means accepting others as they are and knowing how to get along with them (Glen 2004a:157). Spinoza insisted that a philosophy of reason was necessary to unmask the evils produced by theology, but if it was believed that a philosophy could do way with faith and religion, it would ultimately become yet another dangerous dogma (Rosenfeld 2003:34). Thus, adherents to both a philosophy of reason and to Islam do not have to let their own belief falter by tolerating others and accepting that there are other conceptions of the good. For Spinoza virtue can be created by acting in accordance with reason and for Glen virtue comes from acting in accordance with a love of God however both men come to the conclusion that it is both a public and a private virtue to be tolerance: tolerance is necessary for dialogue, which in turn leads to a understand that can facilitate peaceful coexistence. It is noteworthy to mention that both Spinoza and Glen reject the Cartesian divide between faith and reason, both find that faith and true religion can be part of the realm of reason.
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These men, coming for very different time periods, assert that a plurality of ideas of the good exist and thus must be dealt with. Glen states: at a time when the world has become like a big village and at a point when our society is on the verge of great change and transformation, if we are talking about dialogue with other nations[then] tolerance is a matter that needs to be rewarded and for this reason it must permeate the whole society(Glen 2004a:57). Spinoza lived in a diverse and thus fragile Dutch republic when democracy was trying to establish a firm footing amidst vehement religious and political conflict (Rosenfeld 2003:3). Both thinkers oppose government efforts to stamp out what is considered false belief. Spinoza insisted that the state is tyrannical if it attempts to force a person to abandon his or her beliefs (Rosenfeld 2003:42). Similarly, Glen (2004b:34) observes that in countries programmed for corruption, intolerance and mercilessness, such things as freedom of thought, polite criticism and exchange of ideas according to norms of equity and fair-minded debate, it would be meaningless to speak of products of logic and inspiration. Spinoza held that democracy was the best form of government because he believed that the rule of the majority would lead to political decisions based on reason (Rosenfeld 2003:65).299 Correspondingly, Glen considers democracy to be a necessary requirement for the continuation of Islamic thought and belief. According to Glen, human rights, freedom of thought and the rule of law provide the ideal circumstance in which Islam is best understood and can flourished. That is why, Glen states, that Islam is better practiced and appreciated in Europe and United States than it is in some Muslim countries. Likewise, Glen argues that Islam necessitates support for human rights and freedom (Saritoprak & nal 2005:447-456). In terms of democracy vis--vis Islam, Glen claims that Islam does not propose a specific form of governance but that it sets some certain underlying fundamental principles that should be adhered to, such as justice, tolerance, equality, freedom from oppression and persecution; freedom from despotism, freedom of worship (Yilmaz 2003:208-237). Thus, according to him, there is no such thing as an Islamic state or Islamic regime. Every form of governance can be Islamic if the aforementioned principles are followed. Hence, according to Glen Western states that protect and promote human rights, democracy, equality and justice are more Islamic than some so-called Islamic states that do not uphold such principles and values. Therefore, Islam leaves the choice of governance to the people which will inevitably be dictated and affected by the prevailing circumstances of the time. Glen calls the determination of this choice a social contract between the people and the governors. He does not see a contradiction between Islamic administration and democracy (Yilmaz 2005:396) and strongly states that a democratic state ruled by law depends on the idea of a social contract. As Islam holds individuals and societies responsible for their own fate, people must be responsible for governing themselves. The Quran addresses society with such phrases as: O people! and O believers! The duties entrusted to modern democratic systems are those that Islam refers to society and classifies, in order of importance, as absolutely necessary, relatively necessary, and commendable to carry out. People cooperate with one another in sharing these duties and establishing the essential foundations necessary to perform them. The government is composed of all of these foundations. Thus, Islam recommends a government based on a social contract. People elect the administrators, and
299
Spinoza envisaged elite democracy instead of mass democracy, which as the democratic election of Aldolf Hitler shows
can lead an end to reason and tolerance.
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establish a council to debate common issues. Also, the society as a whole participates in auditing the administration. (Glen 2001:135-136). Tolerance as both a public and private virtue opens the door to dialogue. Spinozas thoughts on tolerance can best be understood from a dialectical approach (Rosenfeld 2003:14). Thus, his ideas on tolerance are based a dialogue of sorts for he used a method of reasoning and to reach a conclusion by considering theories and ideas together with ones that contradict them: thus in his quest for reason he considered religious doctrines that he considered superstitious. Dialogue is part and parcel of democracy, which Spinoza found to be the best form of government because it promoted reason. Glen is very explicit over the inter-relationship between dialogue and tolerance (de Bolt 2005:3852). Spinoza conceptualized tolerance as a combination of self-constraint with greater openness towards others, under these conditions dialogue is then possible. Glen defines dialogue as two or more people coming together to talk and meet on certain subjects and by means of this, to draw closer together to one another (Glen 2004a:171). For both men consent is not the ultimate goal of dialogue but instead a means to deal with the contradictory view-points in pluralistic society. Both believe that the discourse is a logical process that can lead to a reasonable outcome because there is a commonly shared core of identity that permeates through difference, and that is reason. Glen believesas aforementionedthat tolerance does not mean being influenced by others or joining them; it means accepting others as they are and knowing how to get along with them (Glen 2004b:52). Celik and Valkenberg (2007) explain that Glen proposes dialogue as a method used in building and establishing a culture of peace among co-religionists, people of different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. He sees dialogue as a framework of mutual acceptance and respect of each others identity. They describe this as the first stage of Glens dialogue concept: accepting the others in their own position. The second stage involves respecting the position of the other(s), and the third stage is the concept of sharing values in the context of the other(s). Glen convictions is that humanity ultimately will be led to peace and unity by recognizing and accepting social, cultural, and religious diversity, an exchange of mutual values and union in collaboration. Glen sees diversity and pluralism as a natural fact. He wants those differences to be admitted and to be explicitly professed. Accepting everyone as they are, which is broader and deeper than tolerance, is his normal practice (nal & Williams 2000:256-8). The Prophet (Mohammed) says that all people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. Islam does not discriminate based on race, colour, age, nationality, or physical traits. The Prophet declared You are all from Adam, and Adam is from earth. O servants of God, be brothers (and sisters). Glen, 2001a:134). Those who close the road of tolerance are beasts who have lost their humanity. . . forgiveness and tolerance will heal most of our wounds, but only if this divine instrument is in the hands of those who understand its language. Otherwise, the incorrect treatment we have used until now will create many complications and continue to confuse us (Glen 2000:4-5). Glen (2000:4-5) believes that interfaith dialogue is a must today, and that the first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones. In his opinion, a believer does not hesitate to communicate with any kind of thought and system. Islam does not reject interaction with diverse cultures and change as long as what is to be appropriated does not contradict with the main pillars of Islam.
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different beliefs, races, customs and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village. Each individual is like a unique realm unto themselves; therefore the desire for all humanity to be similar to one another is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. For this reason, the peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Otherwise, it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end (Glen 2004:249-250). If one were to seek the true face of Islam in its own sources, history, and true representatives, then one would discover that it contains no harshness, cruelty, or fanaticism. It is a religion of forgiveness, pardon, and tolerance as such saints and princes of love and tolerance as Rumi, Yunus Emre, Ahmed Yesevi, Bedizzaman and many others have so beautifully expressed. (Glen 2004b:58-59). Glen envisions a twenty-first century in which human beings shall witness the birth of a spiritual dynamic that will revitalise long-dormant moral values; an age of tolerance, understanding, and international cooperation that will ultimately lead, through inter-cultural dialog and a sharing of values, to greater understanding and peace. Glen believes the road to justice for all is dependent on the provision of an adequate and appropriate universal education. Only then, will there be sufficient understanding and tolerance to secure respect for the rights of others.
5. Conclusions and Discussion Initial Dutch tolerance of Muslims was not true tolerance because instead of leading the way to dialogue is lead to the division of society through pillarization and current claims to tolerance by rightist politicians close off the way to dialogue pinning one extreme inflexible core of beliefs against another. The fear of losing Dutch traditions to Muslims is based on a fear and a lack of insight into historical and democratic processes: homosexual and womens rights were created as a result of a socio-economic changes and dialogue. Glens interpretation of the Quran shows that Islam does not require its followers destroy beliefs they dont agree with but instead to tolerate and engage in dialogue with those who have seemingly contradictory values. Similarly, Spinoza insists that the state should not try to force people to desert their beliefs. Thus Scheffers civilization defensive is not conducive to true democracy and lasting peace. A re-evaluation of the Dutch tolerance is necessary! Before he was killed Theo van Gogh said to Mohammed Bouyeri, can we discuss this (Spruyt 2007) but no discussion was possible because Bouyeri was not tolerance of van Goghs ideas and van Gogh himself had also not been tolerant of Muslims. The situation is a microcosm for what has been happening in Dutch society as a whole. Those afraid of losing their ideals fail to tolerate positions they see as threatening and thus do not engage in dialogue. The problem with this fear is that it breeds intolerance in a society that is and will inevitably remain diverse: Glen writes people with different ideals and thoughts are either going to seek ways of getting along by means of reconciliation or they will constantly fight with one another. There have always people who thought differently to one another and there always will be (Glen 2004b:52). In the post-9/11 world of real and perceived clashes, the millions participating in the
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Glen movement continue to provide people with both spiritual and practical guidance towards peace and tolerance of others. This paper is a demonstration of how perspectives from different times, locations, and worldviews can still find deep resonance and yield points on which to engage in dialogue and tolerance. By amalgamating the perspectives on tolerance and dialogue, one Islamic, the other enlightenment secular, it shows that although different they can together arrive at one truth. This is only possible when political and social positions are developed in dialectic, and not a fundamentalist, context. Respecting others, listening to others in dialogue, and considering their perspectives when drawing conclusions can lead to peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslim in the Netherlands.
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FETHULLAH GLEN: FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF RUMI

THOMAS MICHEL 300
Abstract The writings of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century mystical poet and founder of the Mevlevi Sufi confraternity, have influenced the thinking and behaviour of many Muslims down to our own times. One of the modern Muslims who have appropriated Rumis attitudes and integrated them into their own understanding of Islamic faith and practice is the Turkish scholar and religious leader, Muhammad Fethullah Glen. The correspondence of Mevlana to Glen is that of kindred spirits who, across the centuries, share an interpretation of the Quranic message as well as a commitment to communicate that message effectively to people of their respective ages. In his sermons and written works, Glen frequently cites Rumis behavior and attitudes to illustrate his message; in the book Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Glen cites Rumi over 15 times to exemplify his themes of civilizational dialogue. In his work on the Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, Glen cites Mevlana more often than any other saint or spiritual writer as he seeks to initiate the seeker into the mysteries of Gods love. What does Mevlana mean for Fethullah Glen? Where does he see the affinity between his own understanding of Islam and that expounded and exemplified by Rumi? What are the lessons that can be learned from Rumi? Why does Glen consider Rumi a worthy exemplar for the modern Muslim? The answers to these questions can be found in four areas. Firstly, for Glen, Rumi is one of the great figures of tolerance and dialogue in Islamic history; modern Muslims can learn from Rumis compass openness. Secondly, Rumi is a model of holiness, one of the great saints produced by Islam. Thirdly, Mevlanas longing for God makes him an instructive example for all those who thirst for a relationship of greater intimacy with God. Finally, Rumi is the teacher of the many virtues need by conscientious Muslims at all times.
1. The need for a modern spirituality Among the medieval mystical poets, the one who speaks most clearly and directly to the modern world is Jalaluddin Rumi, known simply in the Muslim world as Mevlana, Our Master. The depth of his spiritual experience, his original and arresting poetic images, his obvious sincerity and openheartedness, and his ability to transcend cultures, time periods, and religions, all go together to make Mevlana one of the most accessible and influential of Muslim thinkers who speak to us from the past. The number of internet webpages devoted to translations of Rumis poetry into European languages is evidence of the extent to which Mevlana is known and loved in the West, but in the Muslim world, the
300
Currently Secretary for Inter-religious Dialogue for the Society of Jesus and Ecumenical Secretary for the Federation of
Asian Bishops Conferences. Professor Michel was director of the Islamic Office of the Vaticans Council for Inter-religious Dialogue for 13 years. He belongs to the Indonesian Province of the Jesuits. He regularly conducts seminars on Christian Muslim relations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. He has written much on the thought of Said Nursi and M. Fethullah Glen.
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influence of Mevlana on modern thinkers and scholars, as upon the ordinary Muslim worshiper, must not be underestimated. While those who can read and appreciate his poetry in the original Persian may be relatively few, Mevlanas works are known through poetry recitations, classical performances of their musical settings, and through the many translations of his poetry into Turkish, Arabic, Urdu and other Muslim languages. I have seen verses of Rumi decorating dishes, wood panels, horse carts and their modern equivalent, minibuses. The dervishes of the Mevlevi tariqa communicate, through their solemn whirling prayer, a non-verbal way message of Rumis experience of tolerance, peace, and deep absorption in the Divine. One of the modern Muslims who have appropriated Rumis attitudes and integrated them into their own understanding of Islamic faith and practice is the Turkish scholar and religious leader, Muhammad Fethullah Glen. The correspondence of Mevlana to Glen is that of kindred spirits who, across the centuries, share an interpretation of the Quranic message as well as a commitment to communicate that message effectively to people of their respective ages. In his sermons and written works, Glen frequently cites Rumis behavior and attitudes to illustrate his message; in the book Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Glen cites Rumi over 15 times to exemplify his themes of civilizational dialogue. In his work on the Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, Glen cites Mevlana more often than any other saint or spiritual writer as he seeks to initiate the seeker into the mysteries of Gods love. What does Mevlana mean for Fethullah Glen? Where does he see the affinity between his own understanding of Islam and that expounded and exemplified by Rumi? What are the lessons that can be learned from Rumi? Why does Glen consider Rumi a worthy exemplar for the modern Muslim? I believe that the answers to these questions can be found in four areas.
2. 1. Rumi as the model of tolerance and dialogue In discussing Said Nursis proposal to undertake dialogue and cooperation with true Christians, Glen states that in this Nursi is acting in a similar manner to Rumi who described himself as a compass, with one foot fixed firmly in the center while the other turns in a broad arc to complete a full circle. The foot planted resolutely in the center which never changes position is the faith conviction by which one is united to God as the unmoving heart and center of ones existence, while the other foot moves in a broad circle that embraces all believers.301 Glen endorses Nursis view that the days of the use of force are over; todays methods of persuasion are those of dialogue, scientific argumentation and rational debate. The jihad of the word focuses on rationally convincing others of the truth of ones position, not on imposing ones views by force. For Glen, this mode of discussion is the only manner of confrontation which fits properly the nature of Islam: The truth is that there is no harshness or bigotry in Islam. It is a religion made up entirely of forgiveness and tolerance. Such pillars of love and tolerance like Rumi, Yunus Emre302,
301
.M. Fethullah Glen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Light: Somerset, N.J., 2004, p. 199.
302.The poet Yunus Emre, 1238-1320, was one of the first mystical poets to compose his works in the spoken Turkish of the time.
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Ahmed Yesevi303, Bedizzaman [Said Nursi]304 and similar figures have expressed this aspect of Islam most beautifully and they have gone down in history as examples of this affection and tolerance.305
2.2. Rumi as one of the great saints produced by Islam. If Glen understands Islam to be a religion consisting entirely of forgiveness and tolerance, he looks back in Islamic history at those figures who best embodied these values. Foremost among them is Mevlana, whom Glen calls one of the people of love.306 About such, he has this to say: Being the embodiments of sincerity, Divine love, and purity of intention, the Sufi masters have become the motivating factor and the source of power behind the Islamic conquests and the Islamization of conquered lands and peoples.307 For Glen, Rumi represents the true face of Islam, what the Islamic revelation and tradition is actually about.Glen elaborates his point as follows:If one were to seek the true face of Islam in its own sources, history, and true representatives, then one would discover that it contains no harshness, cruelty, or fanaticism. It is a religion of forgiveness, pardon, and tolerance as such saints and princes of love and tolerance as Rumi, Yunus Emre, Ahmed Yesevi, Bedizzaman and many others have so beautifully expressed.308 Glen notes that not every aspect of religion is of equal weight; there are some aspects which are essential and fundamental, while other aspects are occasional and peripheral. For Glen, the essence of Islam, what the religion is really about, are values like peace, love, forgiveness and tolerance. Rumis preeminence in the Islamic tradition derives from his eloquent espousal of the primacy of love, Gods love for the believer, and the believers love for God. A similar emphasis is found in Glens thought: I can and do say that peace, love, forgiveness and tolerance are fundamental to Islam; other things are accidental. Yet, it is necessary to give priority to basic Muslim issues according to their degree of importance. For example, if God gives importance to love, if He has informed us that He loves those who love Him, and if He has given to the person He loves most the name Habibullah, i.e., one who loves God and is loved by Him, then we have to take this as a fundamental principle. Rules like jihad against hypocrites and unbelievers are secondary matters that are necessitated by circumstances.309
303.Ahmad Yesevi (Yasawi), from modern-day Kazakhstan, was the first Sufi poet to write his mystical works in Turkish. He founded a Sufi confraternity, the Yasawiyya, which has been widely diffused throughout the Turkic world. 304.Said Nursi, 1878-1960, a prominent scholar and author of the Risale-i Nur, a 6600-page commentary on the Quran which has influenced millions of modern Muslims. Fethullah Glen came to know Nursis writings at the age of twenty. He describes Nursi as follows: An Islamic scholar of the highest standing with deep spirituality, a wide knowledge of modern science and the contemporary world. He believed that humanity could be saved from its crises and could achieve true progress and happiness only by knowing its true nature and by recognizing and submitting to God.
305 306 307 308 309
.Glen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, p. 179. .Ibid. p. 93. .M. Fethullah Glen, Prophet Muhammad: The Infinite Light, Izmir: Kaynak, 1998, 2: 154. .Toward a Global Civilization, pp. 58-59. .Toward a Global Civilization, pp. 71-72.
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According to Glen, men like Rumi and Yunus Emre have made an important cultural contribution to the Turkish people and have left their mark on Islam as understood and practiced in Turkey. The great honor and affection shown to mystical poets and saints by Turkish Muslims is evidence of the esteem in which such holy men are held and an indication of the attitudes and values according to which Islam is meant to be lived. As Glen puts it, the message of Islam for which modern people are thirsting is its teaching of peace, tolerance and love; the mission of Muslims today is thus to invite people to discover this message by the way that Muslims themselves live their beliefs. Even though there are naturally exceptions, the interpretations of Islam held by Turkish scholars are tolerant. If we can spread the understanding of Islam held by the pillars of affection like Rumi and Yunus Emre throughout the world, and if we can get their message of love, dialogue and tolerance to those people who are thirsting for this message, then people from all over the world will come running into the arms of this love, peace, and tolerance that we represent.310 In Glens thinking, Rumi, Yunus Emre, and those like them represent the mainstream of Islamic thought and practice down through the centuries. There is no denying that some Muslims have at times espoused violence and coercion, but Glen invites his followers to look to the lovers the people of love, as Rumi calls them, to discover and follow the example of those who have come to a understand Islam as a message of love. He cites Rumis famous invitation: Come, come and join us, as we are the people of love devoted to God! Come, come through the door of love and join us and sit with us. Come, let us speak one to another through our hearts. Let us speak secretly, without ears and eyes. Let us laugh together without lips or sound, let us laugh like the roses. Since we are all the same, let us call each other from our hearts, We wont use our lips or tongue.311 In quoting these lines of Rumi, notes that according to the logical principles of Greek thought or Western philosophy, such words are nonsense. How can people converse without ears and eyes? How can they share laughter without expression or sound? How can they call to one another without lips or tongue? However, Rumi insists that the people of love can do just that, and Glen is suggesting that this ancient skill of lovers is one that needs to be rediscovered by modern people. As we are all limbs of the same body, he affirms, we should cease this duality that violates our very union. We should clear the way to unite people; this is one of the greatest ways in which God grants people success in this world, and how He transforms this world into a Paradise.312
310 311 312
.Ibid., p. 181. .M. Fethullah Glen, Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, Fairfax, Va.: The Fountain, 1999, p. 6. .Ibid. p. 7.
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2.3. Rumi as the saint who longed to be united to God. For Glen, Mevlana is someone who was able to express the fundamental pain and sorrow of human life in this world. For Rumi, that pain is rooted in the separation of the soul from its deepest desire, that is, for unity with the Divine Beloved. This yearning of the soul for its true home forms the opening verses of Rumi=s masterwork, the Mathnawi: Listen to the reed and the tale it tells, how it sings of separation To Rumi, the notes of the flute are like the sound of human groans, and readers of the Mathnawi are invited to imagine the reed flute being cut and plucked from its roots in the reed bed. Its sad sounds represent the longing of the reed flute to return to its origins where it feels it belongs. The application of this image to the human condition is not hard to conceive for, like the flute, the human soul has been snatched from its true home in the presence of God; it is presently wandering lost and far from home and is forever longing to return to the source from which it had sprung. Glen likens the melancholy human yearning for God to the mournful sounds of the flute, as in the opening verses of the Mathnawi, or to the distant squeaking of a water wheel, as in the imagery of Yunus Emre. Zeal and yearning can be divided into two categories. The first is the yearning produced by separation from the Beloved after meeting with and gazing upon Him in the past eternity. The sighs that Rumis flute uttered and the creaking, painful sounds heard by Yunus Emre from the revolving water-wheel express such a separation. These sighs will continue until the final union or meeting with Him.313 Such sorrow and feelings of separation are felt only by those who know God directly. Someone who has been blessed by being allowed to experience oneness with the Divine Lover will be like a spiritual drunkard, living from then on with a longing to be fully united to the Beloved. Glen notes that only one who has reached this rank of sanctity can properly describe the profundity of his thoughts and feelings. He cites Rumis verses in the Mathnawi to illustrate his point: Those illusions are traps for saints, whereas in reality they are the reflections of those with radiant faces in the garden of God.314 Glens point, beautifully expressed by Rumi, is that the longing to be united with God produces a sorrow and world-weariness which to those who did not know better would appear as unhappiness and despair. Those who have not been initiated into the mysteries of Divine love must necessarily judge by appearances rather than the deeper reality. However, for those who have arrived at the truth, like Mevlana, they see that such superficial sadness masks the radiant faces of those who have come into the garden of God, that is, Gods loving presence. Glen makes the point elsewhere that the longing and sorrow expressed by Rumi truly embody the human condition, the state of distance and lack of fulfilment in which we all live. Absence, it is true, makes the heart grow fonder, but the deepest desire of our hearts cannot be achieved here on earth. Whether or not we are aware of it, we are all longing to be in that loving union with God which is true peace and our hearts true home. Until that is achieved, no one can be satisfied with transient and ephemeral substitutes. As Glen states: Our tongues speak sometimes of love and sometimes of weariness; though love and weariness cause pain to others, in them we always hear, like Rumi, the poem
313 314
.M. Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, p. 157. .Key Concepts, p. 15.
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of longing for the realm that we have left to come here. Love and weariness to us are like a plea from the tongue of the soul, stemming from a sorrowful desire for eternity.315 The other side of the coin consists of those fleeting moments of joy by which God blesses the one who is seeking to be united with Him. Glen notes: Since our beliefs and feelings take us to the magical worlds of beyond, we almost always feel sadness and joy intertwined; we hear the sounds of crying and laughing as different notes of the same melody. Rumi refers to these experiential states of soul (hal/ihwal) as the wedding night, depicting the state of grace when those on the spiritual path find themselves rushing headlong to embrace the Beloved. They try to find satisfaction for the desire of reunion in their soul. They keep running toward Him, sometimes flying, sometimes limping on the ground, unified with everyone and everything.316 Glen points out that the same image of the wedding night, the fulfillment of love, is used by Mevlana to indicate death, when the seeker, freed from the shackles of mortality and earthly bonds, transcends all obstacles separating the soul from a loving union with the Divine Beloved. Sorrow which arises from separation from the Beloved and which gives give rise to a longing to return to God is the source of greater love and happiness in ones life. The pain of separation from God must not be rejected or denied, but rather accepted as expressive of the human state and a strong motivation for a fuller absorption in the Divine. Rumi puts it as follows: Ive broken through to longing now, filled with a grief I have felt before, but never like this. The center leads to love . . . Hold on to your particular pain. That too can take you to God. One must not think that Rumi, in his day, and Glen, in modern times, are proposing a lifedenying spirituality in which a person turns one=s back on the exigencies of reality and practical living in this world. Glen quotes Mevlana to say: One wise and sensible prefers the bottom of the well, For the soul finds delight in privacy (to be with God). The darkness of the well is preferable to the darkness people cause... One must seclude oneself from others, not from the Beloved.317 In his commentary on these verses, Glen explains that the purpose of seclusion is to purify the heart of all love which is not for God so that one might live united with the Beloved in the midst of daily activities. This is a restatement of what is affirmed in the compass image, portraying the true lover as one whose union with God frees him to embrace humanity wholeheartedly. As Glen explains:
315 316 317
.Toward a Global Civilization, p. 155. .Ibid., p. 97. .Key Concepts, p. 18-19.
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Those who always feel themselves in the presence of God do not need to seclude themselves from people. Such people, in the words of Rumi, are like those who keep one foot in the sphere of Divine commandments and turn the other, like a compass needle, throughout the world. They experience ascension and descent at every moment. This is the seclusion recognized and preferred by the Prophets and saints.318
2.4. Rumi as teacher of virtue. Glen also sees Mevlana as one who teaches and exemplifies the virtues needed to progress on the path toward a union of love and will with God. He enlists Rumis advice at the very beginning of the spiritual path and cites Mevlanas words on the need for repentance. If one does not feel remorse and disgust for errors committed and if one is not apprehensive of falling back into ones old ways of living, in short, if one has not made a serious act of repentance, ones persistence in following the spiritual path will be shallow and unstable. Glen sites Rumi as follows on the need for a deep commitment to repent : I have repented and turned to God so sincerely that I will not break [the vow of repentance] until my soul leaves my body. In fact, who other than an ass steps toward perdition after having suffered so much trouble [on account of his sins]?319 A second virtue essential for progress in spiritual life is that of sincerity. It is so easy to fool oneself and even easier to deceive others that if one is not sincere, one may find oneself performing religious duties to be seen by others. As Rumi puts it: You should be sincere in all your deeds, So that the Majestic Lord may accept them. Sincerity is the wing of the bird of the acts of obedience. Without a wing, how can you fly to the abode of prosperity?320 Glen elaborates on this by adding two hadiths from the Prophet in which he states: Be sincere in your religion; a little work (with sincerity) is enough for you, and Be sincere in your deeds, for God only accepts what is done with sincerity. A third virtue stressed by Rumi is humility. Rumi does not present himself as a great saint or someone who has achieved a deep spiritual level, but sees himself rather as a simple servant of God. He reiterates his servant status to emphasize his standing before God: I have become a servant, become a servant, become a servant;
318 319 320
.Ibid., p. 19. .Ibid. p. 3. .Ibid. pp. 61-62.
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I have bowed and doubled myself up with serving You. Servants or slaves rejoice when they become emancipated; Whereas I rejoice when I become a servant of You.321 Glen is aware, as was Rumi before him, that spiritual pride, or boasting about ones religious experiences, is an all-too-common failing among those involved in religious practices, a fault which leads to an arrogant service of oneself rather than of God. Glen quotes Rumi regarding this danger to the effect: If the kings courtier behaves in an affected manner to attract the kings attention, you must not attempt to do so, for you do not have the document (to justify your doing so). O one who cannot be freed from the restrictions of this transient life, how can you know what (the stations of) annihilation, drunkenness, and expansion mean? 322 In commenting on these words of Rumi, Glen affirms that It is impossible for those imprisoned in the body to be aware of spirituality. We should ask those souls who have burned and been roasted many times in the fire of the love of God about the pains of a heart that has been cleft open, and their expansion and contraction. Expansion (bast) and contraction (qabd) of the soul are states taught by Sufi masters and experienced by practitioners on the path to holiness. It is not only Muslim mystics like Rumi who have spoken and written about these states of soul. There is much in common, for example, between the Sufis explanation of qabd and John of the Cross description of the Dark Night of the Soul. One could go on at length to multiply instances of how Fethullah Glen employs the teaching of Jalal al-Din Rumi to teach the practical virtues needed for a rich spirituality. In his work, Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism, Glen refers to Rumi more often than to any other spiritual author. He cites the advice of Mevlana to illustrate his teaching on poverty (Poverty is the essence and all else is form; poverty is a remedy and all else the disease, p. 171); on the need for austerity and periods of retreat (In the early days of his initiation, Rumi underwent many forty-day periods of austerity in seclusion; however, when he found a true, perfect master, he left seclusion for the company of people, p. 17); and the value of temporary seclusion (One must seclude oneself from others, not from the Beloved; fur is worn in winter, not in spring, p. 18). Similarly, Glen enlists the authority of Rumi to underline the importance of self-supervision (Rumi regards self-supervision as a protecting screen from evil emotions, thoughts, passions, and acts, and considers it the safest way to be attentive to Divine rights, p. 58); truthfulness (The truthfulness of a lover affects even the lifeless; why then should it be found strange that it affects mans heart? p. 86), and reliance on God (p. 70). Rumi offers the criteria for judging the value of work (p. 126) and for appreciating a proper attitude toward worldly possessions (p. 43). What is the world? It is heedlessness of God Not clothes, nor silver coin, nor children, nor women. If you have worldly possessions in the name of God, Then the Messenger said: How fine is the property a righteous man has!
321 322
.Ibid., p. 55. .Ibid., p. 116.
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The water in a ship causes it to sink, But the water under it causes it to float.323 Glen uses Rumis parable of the grain of wheat to illustrate the nature of patience. In order to be sustenance for mana grain of wheat must be buried in the bosom of the earth, germinate under it, and grow to emerge into the air. It must come into the air after a fierce struggle with the earth, and then be sown and threshed and ground in a mill. After that, it must be kneaded, baked in an oven, and, finally, chewed by teeth, sent into the stomach and digested (p. 103). To a Christian, this parable calls to mind the words of Jesus in Johns Gospel, Truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24). In Rumis poetry the image of the grain buried in the earth is a symbol of the patient unfolding of natural processes, while in Jesus words, the grain of wheat symbolizes dying to oneself in order to rise to service of others. It is clear from Glens writings that he has spent much time perusing the poetry of Rumi and has reflected deeply on his spiritual insights. It is not an exaggeration to say that Glen is a modern Muslim thinker and activist whose life work of promoting an Islamic appreciation of love, tolerance, and universal peace is in fact a renewed interpretation for our times of the central insights of Mevlana. Glen sees himself, not as an innovator, but as a Muslim scholar firmly within the Islamic tradition represented by the lovers like Jalal al-Din Rumi, Yunus Emre, Ahmad Yasawi, and Said Nursi. In many of his writings, Glen composes paeans to love as the central motivating force of his life. For example, he states: We have been brought up in an atmosphere in which the victories of love are in our eyes and the sound of the drums of love resounds in our hearts. Our hearts beat with excitement when we see the flag of love waving. We have become so intertwined with love that our lives become purely dependent on love, and we dedicate our souls to it. When we live, we live with love, and when we die, we die with love. In every breath, we feel it with our whole existence; it is our warmth in the cold, and our oasis in the heat.324 One can give the last word to Our Master Rumi himself to show the attraction of Rumis thought for modern Muslim thinkers like Fethullah Glen. Rumis words unknowingly reveal why his poetry continues to be perused and reflected upon by Glen and his disciples: Stay in the company of lovers. Those kinds of people, they each have something to show you.
323 324
.Ibid., p. 43. . Toward a Global Civilization, p. 4.
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M. F. GLEN: A BRIDGE BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE WEST

RICHARD PENASKOVIC 325
Abstract Ever since 9/11 the Western world has been griped with anxious fear as to what some Muslims might do next. Hardly any journalist in the Western world speaks about moderate or liberal Islam, although plenty of Muslims globally fall into that category. This paper deals with the thought of M. Fethullah Glen, a moderate Muslim. It argues that Glen may be a bridge toward better understanding between Islam and the West because of his views on peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue and because of his optimistic view of the future relations between the two aforementioned blocs. I base my argument on five theses: Thesis 1: We live in a global world: Glen argues that we live in a global world, one tremendously different from the past. Today what happens in one part of the world is known throughout the world almost instantaneously because of the Internet and the cell phone. Technology has caused our world to shrink. Thesis 2: Islam and the West have become estranged: The estrangement between Islam and the West began with the Crusades followed by the Mongol invasion of the Muslim world, notes Mr. Glen. Western civilization has been based on the physical sciences and has unfortunately succumbed to materialism, its Achilles heel. Thesis 3: Dialogue, particularly interfaith dialogue, is the key: Glen sees dialogue as a give and take between two or more parties involving respect, honesty, and compassionate love. In dialogue one must retain self-integrity while encountering the other as a true other, who is neither falsely similar, nor too alien from me. For interfaith dialogue to succeed one must forget past hurts, ignore polemics, and concentrate on the commonalities between the dialogue partners. Thesis 4: Love conquers all: Glen speaks eloquently of love as the greatest power, the most radiant light, and the chain that binds humans one to another. Thesis 5: The future looks hopeful: Glen does not see a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. By focusing on dialogue, tolerance, peace, and love the future of the relationship between Islam and the West looks rather rosy.
325
Professor of Religious Studies and Immediate Past Chair of the University Senate and University Faculty at Auburn
University in Alabama, USA. (BA in philosophy, the equivalent of an MA in theology from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, and a doctorate in theology from Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He is the author of over 100 publications and has appeared on radio and TV in the US. His latest book, Critical Thinking and the Academic Study of Religion, is distributed by Duke University Press. His many articles and book reviews have appeared in such journals as The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Augustinian Studies, Theological Studies, The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Louvain Studies (Belgium), and The Heythrop Journal (London). His current research interests are Muslim Christian dialogue, spirituality, and ecclesiology.
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1. Introduction Ever since 9/11 the entire Western world has been griped with anxious fear as to what some Muslims might do next. Hardly any journalist in the Western world speaks about moderate or liberal Islam, although plenty of Muslims around the globe fall into that category. My proposed paper deals with the thought of M. Fethullah Glen, a moderate Muslim. I argue that Glen may be a bridge toward better understanding between Islam and the West because of his views on peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue and because of his optimistic view of the future relations between the two aforementioned blocs. I base my argument on five theses, which can be distilled by looking carefully at his copious writings.
2.1. Thesis 1: We Live In a Global World Mr. Glen argues that we live in a global world, one tremendously different from the past. Today what happens in one part of the world is known throughout the world almost instantaneously because of the Internet and the cell phone. Technology has caused our world to shrink (Ameli, 2004, p. 324). Those who think that any radical changes in a particular nation will be determined by that nation alone are in for a rude awakening. We exist in a totally interdependent world, a global village (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 9; Kellner, 2007, p. 54). The events of 9/11 show that the world has become one place. The attacks on the United States shook the world on a global scale. For example, within two hours of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers, almost eighty percent of Sweden knew about it. In fact, both national radio and T.V. in Sweden changed their programming in order to cover the story (Larsson, 2005, p. 34). Glen notes that todays world has a plethora of problems that can only be solved by many nations working together in unison. Some examples of these problems are: global warming, the regulation of outer space, over-fishing of the seas and oceans, water pollution and dealing with international terror, to name but a few (See Glen, 2000a, p. 240).Glen manages to put his finger on a twenty-first century phenomenon that intellectuals and others see as increasingly important, viz., globalization. Like the word, spirituality, globalization is an ill-defined concept, an umbrella term. Globalization means different things in various cultures and geographical regions. The West often views globalization in economic terms, namely, as the free and untrammeled movement of capital, goods, labor, and services across borders. In other words, globalization refers to the integration of technologies, nations, and markets to an unprecedented degree. However, globalization has taken on a different meaning in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. There globalization is perceived in mainly ideological terms and hence attacked as a new brand of imperialism, although some like King Abdullah of Jordan view globalization in positive terms. In the MENA region many people see globalization as a threat to their cultural, economic, or political independence. This is the case despite the fact that the MENA region, in toto, remains one of the least globalized areas in the world (Looney, 2007, p. 342). Glen thinks of globalization in more than economic and ideological terms. For him globalization is a more encompassing term. It refers to connectivity and interdependence in all areas of life, cultural, ecological, economic, political, religious, social, and technological. Glen would be comfortable in saying that globalization is the process by which the experience of everyday living is becoming standardized around the world.
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How precisely has the world become a global village according to Mr. Glen? Glen attributes globalization to advances in communication, science, and technology (Glen, 2004b, p.230). He points out that thanks to advances in technology, more specifically electronic technology, both the acquisition and exchange of information is gradually growing. The Internet would be a good example of globalization. Through the Internet people all over the world can be linked together. At the same time, though, those without computer access are left in the dark and ignored. Sometimes entire regions are cut off, for example, in parts of South America where the Amazon River flows in areas inaccessible to roads. Glen came upon the notion of globalization by reflecting on the nature of the universe. For him the universe is clearly and unmistakably an inseparable whole. Every being on every level is interrelated to every other being. Quantum physics points toward this unity or unbroken wholeness of the universe, including human beings (Glen, 2000b, p. 4). Since there exists an interdependence of all beings in the universe, whatever causes a flower to exist must be responsible for a tree, notes Mr. Glen. And whatever causes a tree to exist must be responsible for the forest. Such interrelatedness and interconnectedness means that all beings in the universe help each other. Glen finds the order, organization, and harmony in the world completely fascinating. He does not believe that this order and harmony derive from matter or come about randomly through chance. Rather, in his view everything that happens in the universe takes place according to certain laws. The most trifling event cannot occur without putting into the equation one who has an absolutely perfect knowledge of the universe and who possesses absolute power. That one is God the Creator. Glen argues that God reveals himself in the book of nature which, addressed to humanity as a whole, makes known its Author (Glen, 2000b, p.13).
2.2. Thesis 2: Islam and the West Have Become Estranged From One Another In speaking about Islam and the West several important distinctions must be made. First, one must distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islamism as a political ideology. This distinction is implicit in Glens writings, for example, in his essay, True Muslims Cannot Be Terrorists. (Glen, 2002b, pp. 95-98). As a religion Islam insists very strongly on peace, love, and tolerance. For Glen love binds existence. Glen notes that Muhammad, a man of affection, was given the title, Habibullah, which comes from the word, habib, meaning he who loves God and is loved by God. Glen narrates several stories (hadith) from the Prophet Muhammad that make the point there is no room for hatred in Islam or in the multicolored world of its ambassador, Muhammad, the Prophet, may his name be blessed. For Glen the entire Quran has tolerance and forgiveness as its foundation (Glen, 2002b, p. 99). Islamism, though draped in religious imagery and presented in apocalyptic language, has more in common with secular ideologies of terror than it does with the Islamic religion. For example, just as the Irish Republican Army cannot in any way be equated with Roman Catholicism, so Islamism as an ideology cannot be thought of in the same breath as the Islamic religion (Desai, 2007, pp. 59-87.). One of Glens favorite aphorisms goes like this: In true Islam, terror does not exist. In the Islamic religion no one can be a suicide bomber, not even in time of war. The Islamic religion forbids such barbarism. To kill another person according to the Islamic religion is tantamount to qufr or atheism. A true Muslim cannot say, I will kill someone and then go to heaven. How can someone receive the
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approval of God by taking a precious human life? In the Islamic religion this is a sheer impossibility (Glen, 2004b, p.185). Second, when Glen speaks of Islam is he thinking of customary Islam characterized by the combination of regional practices and those shared by most Muslims around the globe who desire to surrender themselves to the will of Allah as revealed in the Quran or of revivalist Islam? Note, though, that this customary tradition is not a unitary one, since each region of the Islamic world has made its own version of customary practices. For example, the customary tradition in Morocco includes reverence for saintly figures that some Muslims argue have no basis in the Quran. Does Glen have in mind revivalist Islam, the most common alternative to customary Islam? The revivalist tradition, also known as fundamentalism or Wahhabism, argues against local deviations and practices. Instead, it stands for a renewed stress on Arabic as the language of revelation, the illegitimacy of local political institutions, (since they usurp the sovereignty of Allah), the revival of practices from the early period of Islam, and, lastly, the authority of the revivalists like Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as the sole qualified interpreters of Islam. I would argue that Glen speaks of Islam in the former sense, viz., that of customary Islam (Kurzman, 1998, p. 6.). I would also observe that Glen thinks that Islam has become a way of life or a culture for some Muslims who do not adhere to Islam as a faith. These Muslims have restructured Islam in accordance with their own thoughts. Glen sums up his feelings on this matter by asserting that an Islamic world does not exist. What does this imply? Glen means that some Muslims live Islam as it suits their own purposes so that a Muslim culture is dominant rather than an Islamic one (Glen, 2004b, p. 186). If the term, Islam, can be problematical, so does the term, the West, have its ambiguities. First, the term, the West, can be understood geographically. As such it refers to those countries in which most of the inhabitants are Christian and where pluralistic political systems and free market economies thrive. Historically, this would include Canada and the United States, Europe west of the former East Germany, plus Australia and New Zealand, along with South Africa and possibly Israel since the majority of Israelis are Jewish and not Christian. Today, however, one could argue that past geographical boundaries defining the West no longer hold and are porous. In the post cold-war era the West incorporates Russia, the urbanized, moneyed-elites in Latin America, and an advanced capitalist, democratic Japan as well as Taiwan, and the powerbrokers in the oil-rich Gulf States like Dubai ( Abramsky, 2007, p. B8). Second, the term, the West, can be understood culturally either as part of the world that shares a Judaeo-Christian heritage or as synonymous with secular humanism and the mind-set of the Enlightenment. The question, then, boils down to this, namely, does the West refer to a state of mind or to a particular plot of land? There exists no doubt where Glen comes down on this question. Glen understands the West mainly in cultural and religious terms. For him Western civilization has been based on the hard sciences, such as physics and mathematics. In his estimation a gigantic conflict has arisen in the West between the hard sciences and religion, a conflict that need not exist. Glen sees the West as succumbing to materialism and secularization. On this matter Glen aligns himself with other Muslim thinkers who feel this way, e.g., Sayyid Qutb (Ayoub, 2007, p.49). The East, on the contrary, has emphasized moral, religious, and spiritual values, while at the same time, giving short shrift to the hard sciences and technology. Glen notes that the estrangement between Islam and the West began with the Crusades followed by the Mongol invasion of the Muslim world (Glen, 2002b, p. 27). The Crusades were crucial in setting a pattern for the long history of
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mistrust and conflict between Islam and the West (Lewis, 2004, p. 47). Although Jesus in the gospels taught love of neighbor, the Crusaders apparently never learned the meaning of love of neighbor. The Crusades have made Muslims wary of entering into dialogue with Christians but many other factors also play a role. For example, Glen points out that in the twentieth century far more Muslims have been killed by Christians than all Christians were killed by Muslims throughout the march of history (Glen, 2002b, p. 33). Attacks by Europeans collapsed the Ottoman Empire, while Christendoms portrayal of Islam as a crude, distorted version of Judaism and Christianity upsets many Muslims to this very day. In hopes of building a better future, Glen insists on interfaith dialogue as the key to overcoming the historical conflict between Islam and the West. Glen says, in effect, Let the healing begin. We now turn to this extremely important matter of dialogue.
2.3. Thesis 3: Dialogue is the Key Despite the tension and struggles between Muslims and Christians for almost fourteen centuries, Glen calls interfaith dialogue a necessity. Throughout his writings Glen insists that for interfaith dialogue to succeed, we must forget the past, ignore polemics, and focus on the points both religions have in common (Glen, 2002b, p. 34). He notes that all revealed religions are based on peace, security, and world harmony. Like Jesus call to turn the other cheek, Glen exhorts us to return good for evil and overlook discourteous treatment (Glen, 2000a, p.192). Should Muslims engage in dialogue with Jews and Christians? Based on his reading of the Quran Glen answers with a resounding yes. At the beginning of the Quran in 2:2-4 people are called to accept the former prophets of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament and their books. Glen interprets this passage as sending an important message in terms of establishing dialogue with Jews and Christians. In 29:46 of the Quran we are enjoined not to dispute with People of the Book except with means better than mere disputation. The Quran thus gives us a method of how dialogue should be conducted with Jews and Christians. Based on his reading of the Quran Glen believes that tolerance should be extended not only to Jews and Christians but to all people (Glen, 2000a, p.260). I would also point out that Glen argues that there are as many theoretical reasons for Muslims and Jews to draw together in dialogue as there are for Jews and Christians to engage in dialogue. There has been no discrimination on the part of Muslims toward Jews, no denial of their basic human rights, and no Shoah or Holocaust. Glen observes that Jews were welcomed in times of trouble. For example, the Ottoman State embraced Jews after they were expelled from Spain (Glen, 2002b, p. 33). Glen always speaks of dialogue in connection with toleration, forgiveness, love, and opening ones heart to everyone. He makes an important distinction between matters that are fundamental to Islam and those that are accidental. Dialogue, toleration, love, forgiveness, and opening ones heart to all are basic to Islam (Glen, 2004b, p.71). In the dialogue with others Glen states that the dialogue partners should look at what they have in common, rather than focusing on the differences. He remarks that issues that can separate us should be avoided altogether. Glen calls dialogue and toleration the two roses of the emerald hills. What exactly does Glen mean by dialogue? Glen understands dialogue as the encounter between two or more individuals in order to discuss specific issues. What does dialogue bring about? Dialogue helps form strong bonds between the dialogue partners. Glen calls dialogue an activity that has the human person as its axis. In
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dialogue the discussants share their thoughts and their feelings. Knowledge alone does not suffice. In dialogue we open our minds and hearts to others in a compassionate and loving way. Dialogue is not something we achieve on our own. Only with the help of God can we concentrate on matters of dialogue and toleration, says Glen. (Glen, 2004b, p.55). What is the goal or purpose of dialogue? Is it to drive ones dialogue partner in the ground using tools of superior logic and insight? Not at all, retorts Mr. Glen. Dialogue exists so that the truth emerges from the dialogue more clearly. One enters into dialogue neither to best ones dialogue partner nor to satisfy ones ego. Rather, the goal is to let the truth emerge out of the conversation. In dialogue with others, particularly in interfaith dialogue, one must not neglect such important items as mutual understanding, dedication to justice, and, above all, respect for ones dialogue partner (Glen, 2000a, p.259). How did Glen come to intimately link tolerance with dialogue? Glen took his cues on the importance of toleration and dialogue from the Quran and the sunna of the Prophet. In the Quran 25:63 we read that the servants of God are humble and when the ignorant address them they say, Peace. In other words, the servants of Mercy do not return evil with evil. Instead, they take tolerance and dialogue as their basic principles in dealing with those who are rudely ignorant. Other verses in the Quran such as 25:72 and 28:55 make a similar point, namely, that when the special servants of Allah encounter ugly words or behavior, they overlook such things and pass by in a dignified way (Glen, 2000a, p.257). Glen remarks that the life of Prophet Muhammad was an orbit of forgiveness, toleration, and patience. Take the case of the Prophets dealings with Abu Sufyan who persecuted Muhammad throughout his life. Although Abu Sufyan had doubts about Islam during the conquest of Mecca, Muhammad said that those who take refuge in the home of Abu Safyan are as safe as those who take refuge in the Kaba. What an incredible passage because it mentions the home of Abu Safyan in the same breath as the sacred Kaba, in terms of safety and security. In commenting on this passage Glen notes that such tolerance was more valuable to Abu Safyan than giving him tons of gold (Glen, 2000a, p. 257). In short, Mr. Glen sees dialogue as a give and take between two or more parties involving respect, honesty, and compassionate love. In dialogue one must retain self-integrity while encountering the other as a true other, who is neither falsely similar, nor too alien from me. Not only is interfaith dialogue critical to peace in todays world. There must also be a dialogue of cultures, viz., a dialogue between Islam and the West.
2.4. Thesis 4: Love Conquers All Glen speaks of love in conjunction with compassion, forgiveness, and tolerance. For him these are the pillars of dialogue and basic human values. Love has the ability to overcome every force, elevate every soul that absorbs it, and it also prepares the soul for the journey to eternity. Love is, then, our human way of making contact with eternity. Mr. Glen speaks eloquently of love as the greatest power, the most radiant light, and the chain that binds humans one to another. On the individual level love is the sultan that reigns on the throne of the human heart. On the social level there is nothing more lasting or more real than love in any nation or society. For Glen it is axiomatic that love should be as vast as the oceans. Love calls us to take every soul to our bosom.
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Those who have the greatest share in this love are the greatest heroes on earth. Such heroes live on even after death. These lofty souls light a new torch of love in their hearts on a daily basis. In turn, they are loved by others. What makes these heroes of love so special? They transcend the generality of others by their ability to uproot from their hearts any personal feelings of animosity toward others (Glen, 2000a, p.253). How should we deal with those who put us down? Glen counsels us to take the approach of Yunus the poet: not striking those who hit us, not replying in kind to those who curse us, and not holding any secret grudges against those who abuse us. This goes against the grain on the natural level. That is why Glen sees God, the Truly Beloved One, as the fountainhead of this type of love (Mahabba) (Glen, 2004a, p.149). Genuine love of God means to stand in Gods presence, wholly set on the Beloved, and mindful that complete union with God will only occur in the afterlife. A persons love for God varies in accordance with the degree of ones obedience to the Beloved. To come closer to God in true love, one must fight to overcome ones faults and deficiencies, says Glen. Those individuals on the highest stage of love are illumined with the light of Gods being and are in touch with the spiritual world. These favored souls recognize that they are an inspiration to those with whom they come into contact. Glen would say that ones true identity and personality come from ones inner spirit. The more humans are filled with the love of God, the more that they can say with the prophet Abraham that I love not things that set (Glen, 2000b, p.107). Imagine what the world would look like if more people possessed true, spiritual love. What a difference this would make if leaders of nations possessed such a deep, dynamic, and transforming love. If they did, they could solve an entire mountain of problems and there would be no clash of civilizations. This is Glens message to todays broken, fractured world of egoism, individualism, and greed.
2.5. Thesis 5: The Future Looks Hopeful In light of the preceding section on love, it is not surprising that Glen has an upbeat, hope-filled view of the future. Most assuredly, Glen does not subscribe to the clash of civilizations thesis advanced by Sam Huntington. By focusing on such qualities as dialogue, peace, and love Glen has high hope that Islam and the West can resolve their differences amicably through dialogue. By focusing on dialogue, tolerance, peace, and love, the future of the relationship between Islam and the West looks rather rosy. Glens belief in the resurrection and last judgment helps him look at life in a qualitatively different way than the secular humanist and others who believe that life ends with the grave. For Glen life on earth prepares us for an eternal life with God in heaven. Glen views this present life as a test for the human race. We are to brace ourselves, so to speak, for the future by caring for others and by putting on such qualities as love, gentleness, and inner peace. Those who live their lives on the plane of eternity can forgive others their trespasses and overlook their shortcomings. In short, Glen remains convinced that human life on earth is absurd and meaningless without a strong belief in the resurrection of the dead (Glen, 2000b, p. iii). Glen argues that if we look at life through the windows of God, then it follows that hope is the dynamic of action that does not falter. Hope may be regarded as the life-giving nourishment of those
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souls who live for others, rather than looking out for number one. Glen calls hope a source of energy which never diminishes for souls that are other-centered. Finally, Glens reflections on hope are epitomized in these poetic words, I am keeping my hope alive for the world and humanity, fresh as evergreen leaves and I keep on looking upon tomorrow with a smile. (Glen, 2004b, p. 234).
3. Concluding Observations I conclude my essay with these four observations written in the spirit of Mr. Glen: 1. Unfortunately, many Western observers today see the Islamic world as a threat, similar to the way the Soviet Union was considered a threat to the West during the Cold War. Actually, the Islamic world does not really threaten the West economically, militarily, or politically (Robb, 2007, p. 7). Many Western nations control the most precious asset of the Muslim world, viz., oil, and desire to recover the money they have paid for it, either through the creation of safe markets or by selling military hardware. (Nasr, 2007, p. 374). Far from being a threat to the Western way of life, the Muslim world is only a threat to Western interests in the Muslim world itself. For example, tapes of the Quran are not about to replace rap music in Western culture. On the other hand, Glen might say that the secularization and materialism of the West, the so-called Coca Cola culture, is a threat to the Islamic emphasis on spiritual and moral values. It is abundantly clear from this essay that Glens moderate views on the Islamic faith may be an effective antidote to the Islamophobia now sweeping the world as chronicled in the Western media where Muslims are depicted stereotypically (Pratt, 2005, p. 175). By this I mean that all Muslims are judged to be evil by the very fact that they are Muslims. Hence Islam is perceived in the West as a pernicious and dangerous religion, rather than one of peace, love, and tolerance (Larsson, 2005, p. 37). If Western journalists and intellectuals would read the writings of M. Fethullah Glen carefully, they would understand the true meaning of Islam as a religion of peace, love, and forgiveness. A close reading of Glens writings would teach the Western world a critical lesson, namely, tolerance. Unfortunately, the West sees its own development in history as the only true path for other cultures and civilizations to follow. The Muslim world, on the other hand, questions many assumptions held by the West: humanly devised laws over against the divine law, secular humanism or the denial of any transcendent dimension to human existence, as opposed to the Islamic faith, and the supremacy of human rights over divine rights. From Glen the West can learn to be tolerant vis--vis a Muslim world that wishes to develop according to its own Islamic principles and dynamic (Nasr, 2007, p. 374). The Western world can make an infinitely small start by trying to understand the world from an Islamic perspective (Shahrur, 2007, p. 353). Muslims world-wide are outraged by the loss of Muslim lands, particularly in Palestine, on the basis of exclusive historical claims that deny the claims of Muslims to these lands. Also, many Muslims do not feel the leaders of Western governments care seriously about the greater welfare of the Muslim community or ummah. The Western powers care for the greater welfare of Muslims only if doing so coincides with the economic, political, and military interests of the West. For example, look at the attitude of the West in regard to democracy in the Muslim world. The West countenances free elections only to the extent that the winners align themselves with Western interests. How does this make most Muslims feel?
2.
3.
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4.
Glen has also something to say to the Muslim world. Muslims must not write off the West as completely secular and materialistic. The vast majority of people in the United States, for example, attends church regularly and is deeply religious. Moreover, there are striking similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three are Abrahamic religions which take their origin from the deserts of the Middle East. All three religions believe in monotheism and regard God as transcendent, ineffable, and completely above the world as its creator and sustainer. Not only do we urgently need interfaith dialogue but a dialogue between Islam and the West. Glen would opine that our very existence may well depend on its success.
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BEYOND EAST AND WEST: FETHULLAH GLEN AND BORDER THINKING

KLAS GRINELL 326
Abstract East is East and West is West. We have heard it many times; Kipling said they shall never meet Huntington that they shall clash. Bordering (or barrier-building) is a fundamental practice of modernity, creating dichotomies and trenches between us and them. Glens message of dialogue is shown to depart from this practice. It developed with the help of both Eastern and Western arguments. Through the concept of border thinking I argue for the special bi-polar vision Glen holds thanks to his Turkish experience of modernist Kemalism and deep-rooted Islamic tradition. Glen holds that today we are all living in borderlands, a global border village where no one can live a life sheltered in one tradition only. We therefore need to engage in dialogue. For dialogue to be possible there must be difference as well as belief in our ability to understand each other despite difference. Bordering modernity has seen only difference and dichotomies. The meaning of the concept of civilization is explored to differentiate between the barrier-building Huntingtonian concept and Glens affirmation that we are all fundamentally of the same make, that we sing different harmonies on the same song; describe different parts of the same elephant. The paper argues for the importance of Sufism to Glens position on civilizational understanding. The concepts of borderland and border thinking are taken from Walter Mignolo, a leftist postcolonial critic of modernity. His aim is to be open to thinking other than modernity. I explore the affinities between Mignolo and Glen without trying to make them fit each others projects. I argue for the need for not only interfaith dialogue, but dialogue between these different strands of critiques of the border building modernity.
1. Introduction East is East and West is West. We have heard it many times. Kipling said they shall never meet, Huntington that they will always clash.327 They both say that there is a distinct border between them. They are both mistaken.
326
Assistant Professor in the History of Ideas, Goteborg University; Associate Lecturer at the Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies, Goteborg University, and Country Coordinator for Turkey at Amnesty International Sweden. Klas Grinell has published in Swedish on the following subjects: Images of the other in Swedish tourism abroad; the place of Islam in Hegels philosophy of history; Ziauddin Sardar, social constructivism and the Islamization of science; al-Suhrawardi and the place of Islamic philosophy in the history of Western philosophy; Orientalism, post-colonial theory and world systems analysis; the idea of Europe will be fulfilled by Muslim Turkey; Justice beyond the reach of reason: some agreements in the writings of Said Nursi and Jacques Derrida.
327
Kiplings phrase is the refrain of the poem The ballad of East and West to be found for example in Stedman, Edmund
Clarence, A Victorian anthology 1837-1895: selections illustrating the editor's critical review of British poetry in the reign of Victoria. Houghton & Mifflin, Boston, 1895, p. 1129. Huntington presented his theory in Huntington, Samuel P., The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, nr 3, 1993.
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But Kipling and Huntington are not alone in imagining an uncrossable border between East and West. They are merely two all-too ordinary representatives of Western modernity, and bordering is a fundamental practice of modernity. In this paper I will discuss Fethullah Glen as a critic of modernity that departs from these bordering practices and offers an alternative of civilisational dialogue. These opening paragraphs are scattered with opaque and difficult entities East, West, modernity, civilisation. Everything said in such big generalising terms is bound to be rather superficial, but distinctions will be made along the way.
2. Modernity as Border Building I will begin with a sketch of a kind ideal type of modernity that fits the intention of this paper. As said, the practice of creating borders is a fundamental aspect of modernity. The border can be seen as a political and epistemological invention of European modernity, politically established with the peace of Westphalia in 1648 and spread around the world with imperial colonialism, epistemologically maybe most influentially articulated by Ren Descartes in the same time.328 In different areas dichotomies and trenches were created between us and them this state and that state, mind and body, civilised and barbarian, either-or One aspect of this was developed in Cartesian theory of science where an object could only have one essence, a cause only one effect. The burning of coal, for example, created heat and energy. That was the essential outcome. Other effects could only be interpreted as side effects, pollution was thus not essential. But in the long term we might see that pollution will kill everyone that the coal could warm and produce energy for. From that perspective the energy effect can be seen as only a temporal gain from a deeply destructive process. This very simplified example serves to show that matters are more complicated than the border building, either-or thinking modernists could see. The over-confident belief in science dominant in positivistic modernity is something Glen has often criticised under the name of materialism. Enlightenment movements beginning in the eighteenth century saw human beings as mind only. Following that, positivist and materialist movements saw them as material and corporeal entities only.329 If we take modernity to be what the staunchest modernists wanted it to be, as I have done so far, we run the risk of simplifying life lived in the modern society. Modernisation did not make the world modern in the way the modernist expected. But in my use modernity is the ideology and practice of the modernists, the borderland is a place where its shortcomings and abuses become visible. Another way of stating that modernist modernity never has been hegemonic can be found in the sociological
On the Westphalian order see the International Studies Review: Special issue Continuity and Change in the Westphalian Order, vol 2, no 2, 2000. On Descartes as the father of modern dichotomous epistemology, born in concert with the formation of the nation-states, see Mignolo, Walter D., Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking, Princeton studies in culture/power/history, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999, pp. 60.
329
328
Glen, M. Fethullah, Education from Cradle to Grave, in Essays Perspectives Opinions, the Light, New Jersey,
2004, p. 79.
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concept of multiple modernities, there have always been many different ways of being modern.330 From a sociological perspective I find that concept fruitful, but from a more philosophical perspective modernity is useful as a marker for the ideology and practice of Western expansionism.
3. Glen as a Border Transgressor But Glen is not merely a critic of them on the other side of the civilisational border. His critique is directed to both sides. The Easts and Wests civilizations existed separated from each other. This separation, which should not have occurred, was based on the formers retiring from intellect and science, while the latter retired from spirituality, metaphysics, and eternal and invariable values. As a result, the last centuries of this millennium have witnessed disasters that are hard to believe.331 The border set up between East and West is a false one, he says. To say that science is Western and spirituality Eastern is just a symptom of the bordering mentality. The separation should not have occurred, Glen says. It was an invention. As all inventions it had a purpose connected to its time and place of invention. I would argue that one important purpose with the invention was to prove the Wests superiority. Its time has run out and there is no room for it today. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.332 The above words are taken from Chicana feminist Gloria Anzalda. She is claiming the borderland as a place to have a full identity, not accepting all those that say that purity and belonging to only one side is essential for a qualitative identity. In her writings the borderland becomes a place for a new understanding of traditions, heritage and identity. She is from the indigenous Mexican mestizo population of south Texas that came under US rule after the wars between the United States and Mexico in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her borderland is Anglo-Spanish-Aztecan. Her story is tied to her very special biography. But her example can be inspiring in the analysis of many other places.
4. Turkey as a Borderland Turkey is often called a bridge between East and West, a place where they meet and intermingle. Tourist guides are full of that kind of wordings. We could, to sound more academic, instead call it a borderland. A borderland where East and West are wrapped in layer upon layer that makes it impossible to say what is what: Hittite, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman, Turkish, Central Asian, Kurdish, Muslim, Sunni, Alevi, Balkan, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, European, and many
330
On multiple modernities in relation to Turkey and Islam, see Gle, Nilfer, Snapshots of Islamic modernities i, Glen, M. Fethullah, At the threshold of the new millennium, in Essays Perspectives Opinions, p. 28. Anzalda, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza, 2nd ed., Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1999, p. 25.
Daedalus, vol 129, nr 1, 2000.

331 332
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other layers. If Turkey is a borderland, Fethullah Glen can be called a person who has developed and preached a border gnosis that takes us beyond the confrontational understanding of East and West. (I will return to the concept of border gnosis later.) But Turkey is not the only borderland, maybe just a more obvious one. At least in a metaphorical way today we are all living in borderlands, a global border village where no one can live a life sheltered in one tradition only. If we could only escape from the comfortable self absorption of fixated identities, and instead live in the multilayered present we might see that bordering is a modernistic and even unnatural practice. Many on each side of the imagined East-West divide, be it a Sayyid Qutb or a Hindutva man, or a Donald Rumsfeld or a staunch Kemalist, will of course cling frenzily to the fixed identities guarded by the border and its barbed wire. They want to stay safe and only have to mingle with those who are one of us. Fethullah Glen, on the other hand, has devoted much of his time and made many efforts to mingle with them, and it could be said that he has seen the borderland as a place to meet them and dialogue with them. Since the borderland is an undetermined place it is a place where something new can come to be. The bright future of the new millennium that Glen speaks so often about is for him not a return to something pure and forlorn within the established borders, it is something new and transgressive. Giving up their centuries-old clashes, these two worlds should come together for a happier, more peaceful world.333 For Glen religion will be the foundation for a new and happier world, the revelation sets parameters for it. So even if Glen is an advocate of dialogue and a spokesman for everyones place in a global civilisation of love and tolerance, he still has a firm normative ground for his message. Religion, in a very inclusive understanding, is the answer, and atheism is unacceptable.334 Religion reconciles opposites that seem to be mutually exclusive: religion-science, this world-the next world, nature-Divine Books, the material-the spiritual, and spirit-body. Religion can erect a defence against the destruction caused by scientific materialism, put science in its proper place, and end longstanding conflicts among nations and peoples. [---] The goal of dialogue among world religions is not simply to destroy scientific materialism and the destructive materialistic worldview; rather, the very nature of religion demands this dialogue. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even Hinduism and other world religions accept the same source for themselves, and, including Buddhism, pursue the same goal.335
5. Glen on the Western Side of the Border As said, Glen has special experiences that make him able to be transgressive and inclusive. His Turkish experience of modernistic westernistic Kemalism and a deep rooted and familial Islamic tradition gives him a double vision. As he says himself: We have one side in common with Europe and one side in common with the Muslim world.336 He uses that double belonging to argue for his cause from both sides. He is as firm in his critique of the lack of intellect and science in the Islamic
333 334 335 336
Glen, Fethullah,. Advocate of dialogue, The Fountain, Fairfax, 2000, p. 58. Glen, Fethullah,. Advocate of dialogue, pp. 241. Glen, Fethullah,. Advocate of dialogue, p. 241-242.. Glen, Advocate of dialogue, p. 189.
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tradition as of the materialistic denial of the spiritual in the Western tradition. He shows that there is a Western counterpoint to the materialistic strand and tries to argue for a different and truer Western canon in contact with Platonist and Christian thinking. In this non-materialistic canon he places thinkers like Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bergson and Heisenberg. With this broadened Western tradition he can argue against the materialist imitators of the West, who, he says, are always more radical in their borrowed modernist attitudes.337 The Westerners in the East are thus trying to imitate a fake image of the West. But what role do European thinkers play in Glens message? It is difficult to see that they have any part in shaping his arguments. Here and there in his writings he invokes their names to strengthen his point against those who believe that science must equal materialism and atheism. The worldly allusions derive their specific meaning through their existence within the sacred universe of God and the Ultimate Truth that stands at its centre., one could say.338 The quote is taken from an analysis of Martin Luther Kings rethoric. To me, Glens and Kings use of the Western canon are very similar. As Fredrik Sunnemark argues in his analysis of Kings rhetoric it is hard to find any detailed content in the references made to the authorities of the modern canon. They are no building blocks for the argument. It might seem as if Kings use of literary references simply fills the function of ornamentation. But that is a too simplified understanding, Sunnemark says. The allusions are a method of legitimising the civil rights movements claim to righteousness. But it is not a philosophical method; it is a preachers method. The allusions are significant and important, but they are part of a rhetorical establishing of a theological argument formed without their participation. Therefore a rather superficial understanding of these sources can make do, for both preacher and listener.339 The same can be said of Glen and his style of argumentation.
6. Glens Theory of Science But not all of Glens use of the Western tradition is rhetorical. Science is one of the most important subjects in Glens message. Science is something that during the last couple of hundred years have been developed in the West. To get rid of its compartmentalised and materialistic conceptions of reality, Glen says, it needs to be conducted within the spiritual and moral frame of Islam. There is no reason to fear science. The danger does not lie with science and the founding of the new world it will usher in, but rather with ignorance and irresponsible scientists and others who exploit it for their own selfish interests.340 His discussions of science are very much in tune with contemporary strands in the theory of science field gathered under the name of Science and technology studies (STS).341 But here the relationship is rather opposite to the one with the classical philosophers. Here Glen does not mention any names. It
337 338
Glen, A civilization of love and tolerance, pp. 148. Sunnemark, Fredrik, An inescapable network of mutuality: Discursivity and ideology in the rhetoric of Martin Luther Ibid. pp. 198-261. Glen, The Essentials of the Islamic faith, p. 233. STS works from the understanding that social, political, and cultural values affect science and technology innovation,
King, Jr., Acta universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2001, p. 215.

339 340 341
and that they in turn affect society. It is richly presented in Jasanoff, Sheila, (ed.), Handbook of science and technology studies: published in cooperation with the Society for Social Studies of Science, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1995.
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is thus difficult to know whether his arguments stem from readings of this field, or if he has come to similar conclusions from a different angle. He very strongly emphasises that none of the findings of scientific research are ever absolute.342 To support this claim he refers to the majority of scientists, without giving any references. Also without mentioning names he distance himself from those who try to see simple correspondences between todays scientific results and verses in the Quran. The great volume of articles and books produced in this vein in recent times will be open to ridicule in the future.343 Glens reluctance to name people like Maurice Bucaille or Harun Yahya as those who fit his description of an improper stance is probably due to his wish not to create divisions in Islam.344 The wisdom of the Quran does not need any external support, Glen stresses. His position on the relation between Islam and science is similar to the British Muslim writer Ziauddin Sardars. But a big difference is that Sardar makes many references to the contemporary debate among theorists of science in the STS-tradition such as Thomas Kuhn, Jeremy Ravetz and Donna Haraway.345 What we must, and do, reject is that the truth of Quran and hadith should be made to depend on verification and confirmation by scientific data which are, as explained above, incomplete, disconnected from the meaning and purpose of life as a whole, and vulnerable to change as the borders of human ignorance change.346 Glen criticise Darwinism for being too certain of the truth of its claims. His argument that the theory of evolution is just a theory that leaves many things unexplained is a rather standard one from religious critics.347 But Glen does not approve of the theory of intelligent design, it is a debate in the wrong arena, trying to beat the opponent in his own field with scientific arguments rather than trying to transgress the dichotomy and see the explanations as incommensurable.348 7. Border Gnoseology Glen can be seen as a border thinker, as a producer of border gnosis: but what does that mean? Argentinean philologist Walter Mignolo has theorised about the border and developed the concepts of border thinking and border gnoseology. It might seem as pure post modern jargon, but according to Mignolo it is often necessary to change the terms in order to change the content of a discussion. I will argue that there are certain affinities between Mignolos and Glens critical ambitions. Or maybe
342 343 344
Glen, M. Fethullah, Questions and answers about Islam, vol 2, The Light, New Jersey, 2005, p. 105. Ibid. I have no time or intention to show enmity to others. The Quran teaches us: You must be busy with yourselves; dont See mainly Sardar, Ziauddin, Explorations in Islamic science, Islamic futures and policy studies, Mansell, London, 1989,
allow others following different ways to keep you busy. In Glen, Advocate of dialogue, p. 67.
345
and Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing science, Icon Books, Cambridge, 2002. A good exposition of different Muslim conceptions of science is Stenberg, Leif, The Islamization of science: four Muslim positions developing an Islamic modernity, Lund studies in history of religions, 6, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1996.
346 347 348
Glen, M. Fethullah, Questions and answers about Islam, vol 2, The Light, New Jersey, 2005, p. 107. See for example, taken rather randomly, Denton, Michael, Evolution: a theory in crisis, Burnett, London, 1985. Thomas Kuhn saw theories as incommensurable if there is no common theoretical language that can be used to compare
them, and since there is no place outside the paradigms, different paradigms will from their own perspectives judge the others theory as flawed. There is no absolute way to decide which theory is better. Glens argument is in line with Kuhn, but as I have said, since there is no references, I cannot know if Glen is influenced by Kuhnian perspectives. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970, chapter 10..
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more to the point that Glen is a representative of the break with modern/colonial epistemology that Mignolo is trying to encourage and develop. Mignolo develops the concept of gnosis as an alternative to episteme. They are both Greek words for knowledge. But in the modern international academic language gnosis has been connected with Gnosticism and the search for knowledge about God.349 The rational knowledge revered by modernitys big philosophers such as Descartes, Kant and Husserl is episteme, which is connected with empiricism and rationalism. But Mignolo argues that that division was made not only in the interest of philosophy and science, it also excluded a lot of local, non-Western knowledge that was articulated in different, maybe non-textual, ways and therefore were not recognised as epistemic knowledge by modernity.350 A lot of important local knowledge was thus lost forever, but some it is still possible to reactivate. As stated in the opening quote from Glen, episteme was reserved for the West and gnosis for the East. That was of course a simplification, but a simplification that in time became productive in the sense that the two sides of the dichotomy came to reproduce themselves in line with it. Gnosis was non-Western and therefore not wanted in the West. Episteme was Western and therefore not understandable or useful to the East. And so the prejudice and empty phrase that East is East and West is West was born. It implied that we should stick to our respective fields of expertise and learn to live with the fact that we cannot understand each other. For the hardliners it meant that the others should be conquered and ruled over, or even that they had no right to live. It is very important to note that the reverence for episteme and despise for gnosis grew hand in hand with the colonial expansion. Among the radical propagators of epistemic fundamentalism was those Glen criticise as scientific materialists and Bedizzaman Said Nursi called students of philosophy and positivists.351 Mignolo rather calls them propagators of colonial knowledge, to emphasise that this
349
In explaining the concept of marifa (turk. marifet) the English translators Ali nal uses the term gnosis as a synonym for the Turkish word marifet. A traveler who is completely closed to all else save God, who has resisted all corporeal desires and impulses in order to be carried by the tides of peace, has reached the stage of marifa. One who travels around this point is called a traveler to marifa; one who has reached it is called an arif (a Gnostic, or one who has spiritual knowledge of God). The differences found in commentaries on marifa are based on the temperaments and schools of thought or levels of the Gnostics. In Glen, M. Fethullah, Key Concepts in the practice of Sufism: Emerald hills of the heart, vol 1, revised edition, The Light, New Jersey, 2004, p. 147. Compared to the corresponding section in Turkish: Hak yolcusunun btn btn ayra kapand, tamamyla nefsanlie kar gerilime getii ve kendini huzurun gel-gitlerine sald ite bu nokta, mrifet noktasdr. Bu nokta etrafnda dnp durana irfan yolcusu, ba bu noktaya ulaana da rif denir. Mrifet mevzuunda sylenen szlerin farkll, istidat ve merep ayrlklarndan kaynakland gibi, seviye farkllyla da alkal olabilir. In Glen, M. Fethullah, Kalbin zmrt tepelerin, Nil Yayinlari, 2001, Marifet. This opens the very interesting question of translation, and transmission of knowledge. Here the translator has inserted a rather Christian concept to explain to readers in English what the Arabic marifa is. In Glens exposition of the Turkish marifet there is no such connection, instead we find a reference to ibn Hanbal, al-Ghazzali and al-Daylami that is omitted in the translation. It is not a question for this paper, but if Glen is to be seen as an important scholar, as stated in all introductions to his books, there is a need for more scholarly translations into English. Now it seems as if accessibility is chosen before accuracy. It is often not so easy to find the original version corresponding to texts by Glen published in English, and therefore it is hard to tell if the message might be somewhat altered in the translation process. I would very much welcome a study on this subject by someone equipped with the language skills needed.
Mignolo, pp. 10. The references for this could be numerous, see for example Glen, M. Fethullah, The Essentials of the Islamic faith, The
350 351
Light, New Jersey, 2005, pp. 228, and Said Nursi, Bedizzaman, The Words: On the nature and purposes of Man, Life and all things, From the Risale-i Nur Collection 1, Istanbul, Szler Publications, 2004,, 30th Word, 561-69.
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knowledge was used to gain control over nature and other peoples, by suppressing other ways of knowing. To escape from this version of colonial modernity Mignolo want to resurrect the concept of gnosis with a meaning covering both episteme and doxa and use it so that Western philosophy no longer will be allowed to judge over other forms of knowledge.352 Instead different ways of knowing can suit different times and different places, and there is no need for a totalising system of all knowledges where they are put in boxes and hierarchies. Border thinking, or border gnosis, is thinking and knowledge produced from the borders of colonial modernity, knowledge that recognises the colonising aspects of what has been seen as true knowledge in mainstream modernity, and uses local resources to confront and alter that knowledge in order to know the particularities of life lived in that setting better. The first criterion for a border thinker is that (s)he cannot be an unproblematic part of the centre, nor entangled only in a local tradition. Fethullah Glen fits very well into Mignolos description, even if Glen comes from a very different background and position than the authors Mignolo deals with. Mignolos insistence on different ways of knowing puts universalism into question. If there is no universally valid knowledge, can there be any universal values? If border thinking is opposed to universalism then Glen can hardly be a border thinker. His message is definitely universalistic. Also in this analysis do we have to release ourselves from an over dichotomous understanding a choice between absolute universalism and absolute particularism. There might be universal values, but every attempt to express them will be tied to the time and place where the attempt takes place, it will be coloured by what Mignolo calls its loci of enunciation. German sociologist Ulrish Beck has coined the concept contextualised universalism to describe a similar position.353 The emancipatory power of border thinking lies in the double vision it upholds, the border thinker is more prone to see this situatedness of every expression. Thinking made in the borderland might still spring from universal values, but it will be aware of the impossibility to speak for everyone. Therefore the border thinker, like Glen, will need to dialogue with others to see, and show respect towards, other localised understandings of the universal values.
8. Border Dialogue A dialogue must start with difference (or we will have monologue) and a belief in the possibility that we can understand each other. We must break with the empty phrase that East is East and West is West. First and foremost we are human beings of the same make. In Western epistemology there has been a dominant tradition to separate the understanding of non-Westerners to special fields such as anthropology. In anthropological philosophy, a branch of philosophy discussing the possibilities of understanding other peoples, it has been common to state that it is something different to understand a person or a custom from another tradition. For example: It might be hard for me as a Swedish historian of ideas to try to relive the thoughts of Aristotle, but to try to understand an African sage is
352 353
Mignolo, pp. 10. Beck, Ulrich, Risk society: Towards a new modernity, Sage, London, 1992.
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utterly impossible since we do not share the same we, which Aristotle and I are assumed to do.354 Such a view makes true dialogue impossible and therefore meaningless. That is the stance of those protecting borders. There are of course representatives of a similar position from Eastern countries. But I am not the most fitted to give examples.355 To them Glen says: Islam is the religion of the whole universe. That is, the entire universe obeys the laws laid down by God, so everything in the universe is Muslim and obeys God by submitting to His laws.356 His message goes out to all humanity. We are all of the same make and therefore we can understand each other. The differences are only on the surface; essentially we are all the same. Another requisite for dialogue is that we do not think that a person or a tradition can only speak for themselves. Walter Mignolo might be called a post colonial critic. One of the main aims of post colonial critique is to show that the urge to gain knowledge of the non-Westerners has often been used to conquer, rule and diminish them.357 It is easy to jump to the conclusion that any attempt to seek knowledge about another person or culture is a way of suppressing them. The next logical step is to say that no Western orientalist or islamologist can understand Islam, that only a Muslim has the right to talk about Islam. But the just moral imperative that everyone should have the right to speak for themselves does not imply that everyone can only speak for themselves. This would lead to a position holding that we cannot represent someone elses rights and thus take away the possibility for engagement for others and for humanitarian solidarity. Those who are too oppressed to be heard cannot gain any rights if that view is put into practice. It would leads to an egoistic and cynical world. But Glen is no advocate of that kind of misguided respect for the other. As we have seen he takes the right to argue from both sides of the border, a must in a real dialogue.
354
Clack, Brian R., Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion, Macmillan press, London, 1999, pp. 76. I take my understanding of
this from Motturi, Aleksander, Filosofi vid mrkrets hjrta: Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna, Glnta produktion, Gteborg, 2003, pp. 235. A way to make it possible for me to understand Glen within these axioms would be to argue that Aristotle is as Muslim as he is Western European. For example in Glens discussion of proofs for Gods existence we can see the strong Aristotelian legacy in Islam. We have the same philosophical ancestors and thus we can understand each other. But that would only serve to argue for a more exclusive Abrahamitic dialogue. See Glen, M. Fethullah, Questions and answers about faith, vol 1, The Fountain, Fairfax, 2000, pp 1.
355 356
Glen criticise the lack of universality with the neo-salafiyah, Glen, Advocate of dialogue, p. 54. Glen, M. Fethullah, A comparative approach to Islam and Democracy in Essays Perspectives Opinions, the Light, For an introduction to post colonial thinking see, Gandhi, Leela Postcolonial theory: a critical introduction, Edinburgh,
New Jersey, 2004, p. 18, as well as in Toward a global civilization of love and tolerance, the Light, New Jersey, 2004, p. 223.
357
Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
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9. Civilisations? But what are these sides of the border. What are East and West? What is a civilisation? Both Glen and Samuel Huntington speak of civilisations. If we shall not assume they are comrades in arms it is important to see the differences in their understanding of what the term civilisation denotes. The word civilisation (turk. medeniyet) has more than one meaning. According to the English dictionaries the main meanings are 1. the state of being civilised, 2. culture 3. cultural entity. In Turkish medeniyet covers roughly the same meaning of being civilised and as Redhouse puts it: the sum of those qualities that give a society its particular character. In both languages it is connected with the root civic or medeni, used in concepts like civil law, or medeni hukuk. A major problem with talk about civilisation is that the different meanings often are intermingled and the descriptive use of civilisation for different cultural entities in the world often becomes linked to an understanding of a hierarchy according to those entities different level of civilisation. The scale for that levelling is of course always the Western civilisations most chauvinistic self image of itself as being guided only by liberty, equality, reason and democracy. Only in the West is there Culture. Only in the West is there true civilisation. One of the major proponents for the importance of civilisations in understanding the present state of the world is infamous Samuel Huntington. In the context of my discussion it is not so important whether one accepts his argument for the inevitable clash of civilisations or not. It is more important to scrutinise his definition of civilisations. In my view he would be just as mistaken even if his thesis was the peaceful co-existence of civilisations. That is because he is committed to the East-West dichotomy, to the barbed wired border. Every civilisation has its own unique core values and we can not understand each other, he says. It is the same stance as the one shown in anthropological philosophy. Even if Huntington wasnt militaristic, his definition of civilisation can never lead to understanding or real dialogue. The most positive option within that conception of civilisations is some kind of exoticising interest in those whom we can never understand. As we can see this is far from Glens stance. His concept of civilisation cannot be the same as Huntingtons. But what is the content of his concept? Unfortunately is not easy to find out since he uses civilisation in a rather broad and undistinguished way.358 Glens concept of global civilisation seems to refer to the state of being civilised, but also that the world will come together in one civilisation, one culture and cultural entity. This is possible because we already are essentially one. Can this ideal be called border thinking? If the borderland becomes global then there are no borders anymore. Let us return to the difference between Huntington and Glen. Huntington argues that the West is the only civilised civilisation. I would interpret Glens global civilisation as something that can only be realised in the borderland. It is realised by the golden generation, and their special power comes from the fact that they are brought up in a borderland. Of course this takes the notion of borderland from its localised setting in south USA and transforms it into the broader conceptmetaphor of a global border village hinted at earlier in this paper. Everyone can share the experience of living in borderlands, and in that respect everyone is part of the same global entity. But the
358
Again we encounter the problem of translation. Is it only the Turkish term medeniyet that is translated as civilisation?
Medeniyet is derived from the Arabic medeniyyet and even if the meaning given in the dictionaries are rather similar, the Arabic origin unavoidably has different connotations than the very Enlightenment made concept of civilisation as opposed to barbarism. Again I can only point to an important topic to study.
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understanding of that entity is always coloured by a specific local experience. Even if this is a possible interpretation it would hardly be endorsed by either Mignolo or Anzaldua, they would most probably find it to Utopian. On of the important aspects of Turkish Islam highlighted by Glen is the importance of love and tolerance.359 That is the Sufi strand. Like mystics in all religions the Sufis seeks the experience of oneness and are less akin to border building and sectarianism. Since we are parts of the same whole we belong to the same creation. Civilisations in the meaning of cultural entities are just different ways of expressing life in this creation. Every civilisation has developed some knowledge and understanding, but often failed to see that it was only a partial understanding. But from the mystic perspective they are not dichotomous but complementary. We can sing different harmonies in the same song; describe different parts of the same elephant; I we break all the cups, the water will be one. There are countless images to express this belief that the ultimate truth is Unity. Sufism is the way of being Gods friend, Glen says and makes Sufism a very natural part of Islamic life.360 There is no tension between the exoteric and the esoteric aspects of Islam or religion as such in Glens writings.
10. Something Bordering to a Conclusion Mignolo is a Latin American leftist and he mainly reads and uses other thinkers with a leftist approach. Glen is a preacher more connected to the political right, if anything, and building his message from Islamic sources.361 But they are both deeply committed to furthering dialogue and respect between different traditions of knowledge. The fact that they come from perspectives often seen as opposing each other, as maybe the main opponents, is interesting and might shed light on their respective views on dialogue. Are there hidden borders? Can there be dialogue between these perspectives? I think that the mystical can be a meeting place and a starting point. From a post modern point of view mysticism can be seen as a rational humility towards the complexity of the world. There are things we cannot know, that others might have come closer to by other means than epistemic knowledge. From a religious point of view mysticism opens for a curiosity of how others have experienced and explained the ungraspable mystery. In this paper I have tried to explore the concept of border thinking to better understand Fethullah Glen and reach that meeting place beyond East and West.
359 360 361
Glen, Advocate of dialogue, p. 53 and 196. Glen, Advocate of dialogue, p. 359.
On Glens ties with right wing politics, see zdalga, Elisabeth, Worldly asceticism in Islamic casting: Fethullah Glens inspired piety and activism, Critique, vol. 17, 2003.
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Framing Paths to Citizenship: Glen in Redefining Integration
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IDENTTY AS A MAJOR FACTOR IN INTEGRATION TO THE WESTERN SOCIETY

NAZILA ISGANDAROV 362
Abstract Many different changes have occurred within Muslim communities all over the world over the last decade. Some Muslim communities have managed to become front-runners in the shift towards democratization and in encouraging Muslim regimes and states to make a transition to liberal democracy and a market economy. Liberal Muslims and others who watch these changes have acknowledged the contributions of those communities. In this regard, the Glen movement has a particularly positive image. However, how this movement has been helping Muslims in the West to integrate into their societies has not been analysed. This paper investigates the identity crisis among Muslims in the West as a part of the identity crisis in Western society generally, and asks how the views of Fethullah Glen, a prominent spiritual and religious leader of moderate Muslims, help Muslims to deal with this crisis. Does he think it is necessary to feel Westernized in order to be integrated into Western society? If so, how controversial is being Westernized for Muslims living in Western society? Does becoming Western go against Muslim belief and attitude? If so, how avoid stigmatization and negative labelling from both sides the Westernized Muslims on the one side and those who reject being Westernized on the other? The following two hypotheses guide the discussion: first, that the identity issues among Muslims have increased since 9/11 and have marginalized them in the West; and second, the Glen movement challenges traditional notions of identity and encourages Muslims to accelerate the process of integration into Western society.
1. Introduction: Importance of the Problem The impact of globalization on the movement of people made a tremendous impact on identity of peoples in the West. According to the estimation of the World Bank, at the beginning of the 21st century, about 2.5 percent of worlds population, or roughly 130 million people, lived outside their countries of birth, and that this number is rising at a rate of approximately 2% per year (World Bank. 2000:38). The migrants, especially from the Muslim world who migrated to the West deepened the identity crisis of the West, which has already been challenged in terms of identity. Identity is a target of various disciplines such as sociology, political science, international relations, anthropology, etc. It is involved in human relations and consists of its most important features and
362
Nazila Isgandarov: Graduate in history from Baku State University; MA in European and Russian Studies, Carleton
University and a DMin student in Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a Spiritual and Religious Care Coordinator in Toronto, endorsed by the Ontario Multifaith Council, and a member of the Union of Azerbaijani Journalists. Her recent work includes: Islamic Spiritual Care in a Health Care Setting, a chapter in A. Meier, T. O'Connor and P. VanKatwyk (eds.), Spirituality and Health: Multidisciplinary Explorations, (Waterloo, ON: WLU Press, 2005); The Search for Security in the South Caucasus: NATOs Role in the BakuTbilisiCeyhan Pipeline (Carleton University, Ottawa Institute of European and Russian Studies, Sept., 2006); Silence in Muslim Language Prayer, paper presented at CAPPE Annual Conference, Niagara Falls, 9 February 9, 2007.
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forms the conditional nature of social, political and economic relations (Guerrina, 2003, p.136). It also is a set of feelings that defines belonging both in individual and political sense and could be divided into three categories, which are social identity, cultural identity, and political identity. Social identity refers to an individuals relationship with social structure. Cultural identity relates to history and heritage, and political identity refers to the relationship between citizens of a state and/or nation (Guerrina, 2003, p.137). In this meaning, nation building is peoples active search for their identity through their particular culture, history, language, and identity. For Max Weber, the nation is a cultural community on a solidarity form and the state is a political institution and an organisational form (Weber, [1922] 1978). But there are two types of nation, one is a civic nation and the other is ethnic one. The civic nation is a territorially based community of common descent, based on historical territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality of the members, and common civic culture and ideology whereas the latter is based on descent where the nation is seen as a fictive super-family, and it boasts pedigrees and genealogies to back up its claims (Smith, 1991, p. 12). . National identity, according to Smith, is based on those traits that are common to both of these versions, namely (1) historic territory, or homeland; (2) common myths and historical memories; (3) a common, mass public culture; (4) common legal rights and duties for all members; [and] (5) a common economy with territorial mobility for members (Smith, 1991, p. 14). This type of identification has been challenged with recent developments in the world, especially by globalisation, which increases interconnectedness, weaken institutional mechanisms and organisations that have hitherto sustained national identities. It also is somewhat different from the Islamic view of nation and nationalism. First of all, emergence of nationalism is a result of different historical events in the West and the Muslim World. In Europe, secularization of the Reformation gave birth to nationalism by underestimating the sense of Christian nation and rising the national selfishness and the individual selfishness (Hassan Al-Banna, p. 26), but in the Muslim world it is a result of the destruction of the Islamic ummah, or the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, by the Europeans and the emergence of a new economic structure and relations. Like in the West, nationalism was a new phenomenon of imagined identity in the Muslim world. In history, identity was religious in its content and was perceived in the light of religion. For instance, the West was identified mainly Catholic during the premodern era, but was divided into Catholic, Protestant, and emerging secular identities during the early modern era (the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries). In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, this identity was transformed into a new division between liberal, socialist, and nationalist identities. In the modern era (the twentieth century), the West was challenged with its democratic, communist, and fascist/national socialist identities. In the Muslim world, a lot of changes have also occurred in regard to new definition of identity. The equivalent of nation in the Quran is ummah, which applied to religious communities mainly. However, it also is human societies united not only in religious beliefs and behaviour but also in social, economic, and political framework. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Muslim philosophers used this conception to describe communities based on mere ties of blood or language, and are designated with the term asabiyya (cited in Hourani, pp. 20-25). However, modern ideologies, among them the conceptions of nationality and nationalism challenged this vision of the ummah well in the eighteenth century. For instance, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani tried to re-define the term by incorporating the politically and socially useful aspects of European civilization into the Islamic ummah without sacrificing the essential religious, moral, and cultural identity of the latter.
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He wrote the centre of attention is no longer Islam as a religion, it is rather Islam as a civilization. The norm of human action is no longer the service of God; it is the creation of a human civilization flourishing in all its parts (quoted in Hurani, p. 114). Al-Afganis views on new definition of ummah was spread very quickly because many Muslims in Ottoman Empire had already experienced the new sense of identity. The destruction of Ottoman Empire accelerated this process and Islamic culture and religion, Arab culture and language, local cultures and traditions had been utilized for the purposes of creating new identities. In general, the identity was defined in four trends such as: territorial nationalism, integral nationalism, ethnic (Arab, Turkish, etc.) nationalism and Islamic nationalism. The supporters of the first trend sought to build a new community on the basis of civic notions of nationhood. Second, integral nationalism espoused ethnic criteria of nationality. The ethnic nationalism stressed on ethnic identities. Finally, Islamic nationalism sought to reconcile ethnic identity with the cosmopolitan Islamic teachings on the nature of the trans-national Muslim ummah (Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, pp. 81-93). For Glen, combination of Islamic and Turkish (ethnic) nationalism is more relevant. Based on liberal interpretations of the Quran, the civic nation is more appealing to Glen when he sees the Turkish nation based on not racism but on common culture, history of all Anatolian people and supports democratic and pluralistic society (Gleng, p.140). According to Glen, history, territory and culture play an important role in definition of nation. For instance, Glen interprets the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a negative impact on culturally authentic modernization of Turkish, Arabic and other nationalities (H. Yavuz, 2003b, 274). However, Glen argues that this identity should not take on an identity of confrontation and conflict, but rather one of co-operation and coexistence. Therefore, Glens goal is to raise Muslim consciousness and to get involved in modernity, democracy and a free-market economy, so as to get Muslims to enter into those global processes and to turn Turkey into a regional power: What has been going on in modern Turkey is the reconstruction of the Islamic tradition in terms of modern idioms to create a new Turkey that can become an exemplar of political, economic, and cultural success for Muslims around the world (H. Yavuz, 2003b, p. 238). Thus, the modern interpretations of identity, nation and nationalism in the West and the Muslim world coincide. The identity question is not anymore defined by territory, ethnos, language, culture and history, e.g. territory has been excluded from this definition and ethnos is not based on racism. Now there is a common trend in the West and the Muslim world which stresses on co-existence and cooperation and tries to reconcile ethnic identity with civic notion of nationhood. Under this impact, the Muslims like other communities in the West try how to maintain both national identity and preserve cultural particularity.
2. Literature Review The literature review shows that there are three main approaches on the identity question in the West. The first approach perceives the West as a cultural civilization and supports the Western identity363 formation on the bases of cultural and historical values. The second approach suggests that the Western identity should be political which must be based on political and social values of West. Michael Bruter, Lars-Erik Cederman and Jon Erick Fossum are the best representatives of this stream (L. Cederman, 2001; J.E. Fossum,November 12, 2005). The third approach perceives the Western
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The Western identity refers to the identity in EU particularly in this research..
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identity between cultural and political identities. For them, the Western states are political unities, but their nations use their cultural values to understand and interpret the political values of their states. Furio Ceruttis A Political Identity of the Europeans is one of best representatives of this approach. All these approaches are characterized in two main groups: constructivist and traditional or deconstructivist. The latter is an idea, which is based on Western Christianity and sees the problem of integration and adaptation from the context of the clash between the civilizations. (B. Lewis, S. Huntington, etc.) However, the constructivists support the idea that it is mistake to see culture entirely in terms of conflict and cultural differences should not be exaggerated in terms of integration and adaptation (Delanty, 1995, p.17). The works of Glen can also be included in this stream. Some scholars and politicians argue that the Western identity is based on only Western Christianity (e.g. S. P. Huntington, B. Lewis). For instance, S. P. Huntington sees Islam and Muslim identity as a deconstructive factor in the West when he writes that problem for the West is Islam, a different civilization whose people is convinced of the superiority of their culture, and is obsessed with the inferiority of their power (Huntington 1997, p. 217). This decontructivist approach to the problem was challenged by the constructivists who argue that the Western identity went through different identity formations. The constructivists concentrate purely on politics in identity formation and do not agree with the notion that identity at the European level can only be based on national level. For them, the role of national identity at the EU level is thin and the existence of culturally imposed trade-offs is not important. (M. Bruter, 2005). They argue that the Western identity was transformed into a new division between liberal, socialist, and nationalist identities. Today, in our post-modern era Europe is once again defined by liberalism that is characterized with the hyper-individualism dividing the society into different small groups. Therefore, it is mistake to see culture entirely in terms of conflict and cultural differences should not be exaggerated (Delanty, 1995, p.17). Instead, Western identity should be based on the core European values, which are solidarity and a concern with social justice, and the principal identity of people in the Western civilization, is defined by an ensemble of liberal ideas: (1) liberal democracy; (2) the free market; (3) the open society; and (4) an individualist culture, but the religious identity of Western society should not be underestimated, too. Bo Petersson and Anders Hellstrom suggests that the legitimacy of the present Western order has to be enhanced among its peoples through nurturing of common identities within the EU which can make it most lasting and solid unit (B. Petersson and A. Hellstrom, 2003, p. 236). Glens view on this subject also relates to the constructivist approach to the problem. Since Glen strives for political, economic, and cultural success of Muslims in the world, their identity struggle in the West is not alien to him and he offers some solutions to the identity crisis in the West. According to Glen, modern Western identity was once based on the trinity of Greek thought, Roman law and Christianity and Eastern identity is based on faith and morality (Glen, 2004f, p.148), and the Western identity should be enhanced with Eastern faith and morality (Glen, 2005c. p. 56). Thus, the identity concept is moving from the traditional view to the constructivist approach because the decontructivists rarely acknowledge the mutability of other collective identities and are inclined to see other nationalities and religious groups as obstacles to self-realization. However, migration and then globalization brought a general acceptance of the idea of multicultural identity and intercommunity dialogue.
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3. Research Questions and Hypotheses To grapple with this issue, I took a constructivist approach, which attempted to arrive at what is considered true by eliminating differences and by synthesizing common grounds or potential similarities in the West. I looked at different concepts from a collective perspective, followed by a similar examination at the personal level focusing on what I regard as being the major characteristics of the Muslims as individuals and as a people in the West in the shade of thoughts of Glen. From the follows the hypotheses guiding this research are: first, the identity crisis issues among Muslims have increased since the 9/11 and have marginalized them in the West. Second, Glen movement challenged the traditional notions of identity, which is based on territory, ethnos, culture and history, in the Muslim community and encouraged them to accelerate the process of integration to the Western society. Testing of these hypotheses is based on the comparison of actual cases, the identity problem of Muslims in the West as an independent variable, and Glen movement as a dependent variable.
4. Identity Crisis in the West The Western society needs some kind of identity to exist and the Western national identity is one form of collective identities. This national identity, however, is not just any collective identification, but is broader than all other social and individual identifications, embodies, coordinates, and grades all social and individual identifications. In this meaning, the foundation of a nation in the West is based on and legitimized by the ideology of an absolute, unique national identity which functions as a mechanism for the formation and control of the community of "us" in juxtaposition to the community of "them" (Panagiotopoulou, 1997, p. 349). Identity in the West is not a natural state of being and is a process of inclusion and exclusion. Individuals are not born with an instinctive identification with a particular group, and in this meaning, the identity construction is an artificial process, but this process is based on a shared culture and heritage (Guerrina, 2003, p. 138). Therefore, the Muslims also go through the process of inclusion and exclusion. In this regard, their identity has a fluid nature because of the involvement of social relations, political and economical circumstances. Since the nations are active in the social, political, and economic discourse of the West, the Muslim identity as a part of general identity in the West are moving away from the ethno-cultural identity towards a state-central identity. It became possible especially under the impact of formation of the global identity, which eliminates language, territorial, custom, religious barriers and leads to the globalization of culture. Such identity is cosmopolitan in nature because it is not supported by a common past, common historical origins, historical memory, or a sense of continuity (Panagiotopoulou, 1997, p. 350). The Western identity is a kind of global identity, which desires to build not a West of institutions but a West of individuals guided by the non-identity of the national (Delanty, 1995, p. 5). However, many still support traditional aspect of identity which emphasizes on alienation from others and definition of Us and Others which is at the heart of the identity construction process in some Western countries (Delanty, 1995, p. 5). For instance, Huntington also defines civilization as a "cultural entity ... the highest cultural grouping defined by both common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people A
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civilization may include several nation states or only one" (Huntington 1993, p. 24). But Glens suggestion about the global character of Western civilization and identity is more appealing. Glen suggests that if Western civilization is based only on science and technology, it will be paralyzed. If it claims to be the civilization of future, it should combine science and Eastern faith and morality in order to establish true civilization (Glen, 2005c. p.56). Todays identity formation in the West is about two things: (1) the growth of a new system, which upholds national identities, while at the same time symbolizing and encompassing those common Western ideas and experiences that have developed during the history; and (2) the existence of Western structures which makes it easier for different groups and communities to express their different identities within the dominant culture (B. Petersson and An. Hellstrom, 238). In this regard, the West represents a system in which both the fundamental and more cultural and ideological aspects of Western identity are reflected. It is a framework in which national identity is fundamental, yet where different identities are also important. The main categories of the culture are national and cultural identities. If the Western identity is based on one sole national culture, then it is exclusive and restrictive, because in national cultural point of view, the Western identity is controversial and not clear because the West is consisted of many diverse nationalities and groups, on the one hand, and there is discontinuity of historical culture than continuity and difference than sameness on the other. The West is still culturally thin and there is no common Western language and common Western memory that can bind many diverse peoples, and for many there are only the memories of divisions. Culture is not stable and changes according to the surrounding environment. These are common features of the nation-states in many Western states in the process of becoming a statenation. However, culture still plays an important role and associated with the geographical and political space. Therefore, legitimacy of the present Western identity has to be enhanced among its peoples through nurturing of common identities, which can make it most lasting and solid. In this process symbols, like flags, anthems play great role but with considering the historical experiences (Petersson and Hellstrom, 2003, p.238). In this regard, Glen suggests that the existence of distinct and unique cultures should first be distilled before being absorbed into the indigenous culture because otherwise, cultural and civilizational crises can occur, but communities should also be allowed to produce a distinctive culture in order not to become a barren tree (Glen, 2005c. p.55). Thus, the cultural foundations of the West are not in a pre-political cultural identity and relating Western identity to the Christian heritage does not offer much substance. The cultural dimension of the West is the mixture and recombination of current exiting identities through the interface of the encounter of the global with the local. In this meaning, the top-down creation of a global identity in the West as a process of transformation of national identities for the purpose of strengthening of the West as a cultural reference is important. Therefore, the Western cultural identity is hybrid, mixed and evolving. It also includes the Muslim identity and culture but with a condition of fully integration of others into the national culture of the states in which they are citizens. Many Muslims have accepted the core Western values, which are based on solidarity and a concern with social justice and do not feel a conflict in terms of cultural identity in the West, if it is seen in positive terms and cultural differences are not exaggerated. The Muslim scholars have also been encouraging Muslims in the West in this process. For instance, al-Qaradawi says, [We urge] Muslims to integrate into the societies within which they live without conceding their faith (quoted in Scholar with a streetwise touch defies expectations and stereotypes by Owen Bowcott and Faisal al Yafai, July 9, 2004, The Guardian).
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Like al-Qaradawi, Glen preaches that Muslims should to be able to have a new, flexible Muslim identity, which can be changed under the market economics and neo-liberal economic policies within the current tendencies of modernity. For him, being a Muslim in the modern world, especially in the Western world means to support and consolidate modern institutions of democracy, the rule of law, a free-market economy, and so forth. Muslims should not isolate themselves from the world but interact and to create a shared understanding, a shared experience and a shared code of ethics (Yavuz, July 21, 2004a). Thus, the identity in the West is complex with many layers which means individuals have multiple identities. The Western institutions recognize the multiple bases of identity that are found in any group and individual and take into account variation in levels of commitment to the identities which people are tied into. Therefore, the complexity of Western identity is reflected in the complexity of the society itself. This kind of identity does not depend on one factor. Today the West is multicultural and many communities, including Muslims claim their own location within this boundary of values of solidarity and social justice. There should not be tension between the national, religious, and Western feelings. And indeed, the Muslims attempt to fully integrate into the national culture of the Western society by bringing the Eastern faith and morality to the science and technology based Western civilization.
5. Identity Crisis among Muslims in the West Religion is among many factors, which affect the level of democracy and formation of the Western identity, but the democratic community begins with the acceptance of fundamental values, including the religious values and identity. Therefore, the religious identity should not be underestimated. However, there is no easy answer to the question of what constitutes the religious identity of a person or human group. The demographic diversity of Muslims themselves in the West - theologically, economically, and culturally - also makes it harder to answer to identity question. For instance, what are the characteristics of Muslim? How is Muslim identity shaped into a shared image in the West? Some suggest that there is such a thing as only a Muslim, but some argue that there is no such a person today because Muslims have been assimilated into the local cultures and languages of the majority societies in which they now live in the West. However, the term Muslim indicates an identity-something the person defines who he/she is. This sense of self is expressed by membership in a group, or affiliation in something like culture or religion. The major categories of Muslims in the West are the devout and secular, immigrant and Westernborn Muslims. But for all of them, the sources of their identity are the Quran and the narrations of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) based on the basic tenets of Islam, which are belief in one God and Prophet Muhammad as the final messenger of God, charity, fasting, prayers and the hajj pilgrimage for those who can afford it. The different urf and adats (cultures) are also the sources of their identity. Linguistically, the word Islam means peace, salvation, and submission. This should first be established in our inner worlds, so that we are at peace with God and natural environment, and then throughout the world and then universe (Glen, 2005a. p. 209). In regard to the integration with the world, Islam preaches that Adam represents the creation of all races. The origin of human being is the same regardless their color, peoples do not display different physical characteristics. Islam makes the idea of a common ancestor likely and advocates the idea of one creation, not two (one for Gentiles, the second for the creation of Adam.) According to Glen,
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human beings, unlike other creatures who tread the path nature have free will. We bear the gift of freedom and obligation to harmonize our life with nature. This harmony is also the path of our exaltation and progress, the path upon which God created human nature (Glen, 2005a, pp. 201203). Glen suggests that to harmonize our lives depends on how much we realize our personal integrity and remember that we are social beings (Glen, 2005a, p. 202). A good Muslim is the one who is powerful both physically and spiritually, and also has scientific and technical competence (Glen, 2005a, p. 194). A good Muslim is also the one regards whatever pleases and displeases others as a measure while interacting with others (Glen, 2005c. p.59). In this meaning, Islamic identity theologies promote unity not segregation as a divine command and condemn any kind of racism and discrimination. Although, the immigration is very difficult undertaking (Glen, 2005a, p. 263), the teachings of Islam make the adaptation of Muslims to the Western society easy. However, the laws in the Western states also help Muslims to become legal citizens and residents of these states. For instance, the older generation of Muslims became citizens of the West through naturalization process, which is granted to those individuals who have met some years of residence requirements, then wait a further period of time for the processing of the application and be able to communicate in state language. It demonstrates that many Western states do not limit their citizenship to ethnic population nor discriminate individuals on an ethnic basis. They have established a relatively liberal naturalization procedure, but the only concern lies with the preservation of the state culture and language. The commonality of naturalization process is the same in many Western states which includes: 1. Permanent residence permit for some period of time to the date on which an application for citizenship is submitted; Knowledge of the state language in accordance with the requirements; Knowledge of the states history, geography, and laws. Loyalty to the state; Oath in applying for citizenship, etc (Chinn and Truex, 1996, pp. 134-135).
2. 3. 4. 5.
The younger generation became citizens of the West because traditional idea of citizenship in many Western states which is based on the Jus Sanguinis model that bases citizenship on blood decent, was replaced with the Jus Soli method that allocates citizenship to all those who were born on the territory, regardless of the citizenship of their parents (Chinn and Truex, 1996, pp. 134-135). Although, the older generation became the citizens of the Western states, still have cultural or social ties with their countries of birth. Many of them see their religious identity in ethnic or religious culture alone, and are pessimistic that their culture will be weakened over time. For instance, Dr Muzammil H. Siddiqi suggests that there is a decline in strict adherence to specific Islamic values among the younger generations. However, I suggest that Muslims in West are combining their faith, ethnic background, and the folkways of their adopted land in many different ways. I also witnessed that later generations of Muslims who were born here often embrace their faith with more enthusiasm than their parents, who may have distanced from their religious identity due to many reasons.
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Against the notion that the younger generation is assimilated in the dominant culture, I would suggest that Muslim identity in the West displays itself in three layers: social, cultural and political. The social identity of Muslims refers Muslims individual relationship with social structure. The cultural identity of Muslims relates to Islamic history and heritage. Since Muslim identity in the West is very much politicized, I will here emphasize on political identity of Muslims. The political identity of Muslims refers to the relationship between citizens of a state and/or nation. However, the view of alienation process in the identity process, which sees Us as a homogenous mass and denies the multiple identities in Us and the Other, has received a great deal of attention since the securitization of migration in the EU since 9/11. In conservative politics Muslims were perceived as a threat, which have provoked confusions between Muslim legal immigrants and asylumseekers. In general, the Muslim identity has been associated through the figure of the foreigner within security discourse, Islamic fundamentalism and the threat of terrorism. Moreover, cultural and historical values are strongly embedded in the politicians behavior in the EU (Douglas Alexander, Speech at the Centre for European Policy Studies, October 15, 2005). The laws passed in some European countries make it harder for Muslims and others to practice their religion. A poll by USA Today/Gallup reported that 39 percent of respondents favored requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification. Many politicians support the idea of racial profiling in the US (Speeches of Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee; U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and John Faso, a New York Republican running for governor). This tendency in political life of the West resulted in categorization of Muslims as liberals or moderates and radicals. Radicals as rogue Islamists are defined Muslims who are willing to do anything except to destroy America and its power, but the liberal Muslims concentrate on liberal values such as religious tolerance, freedoms of conscience and speech, civil liberties, social justice, public welfare, and educational development (Muqtedar Khan, 2003, p. 418). Some suggest that fundamentalist movements in the West are a direct response to globalization pressures exerted by Western cultural and economic values and the movement tends to draw people who feel cut off from what they see as a traditionally Islamic lifestyle, including converts to Islam in European countries, such as Britain, France and Germany. At the same time, fundamentalists find themselves unable to fit in to the respective societies in which they are living. The fundamentalists have recast religion outside of cultural contexts (Roy, 2003). The Liberal Muslims or moderate Muslims are mostly among the Muslim intellectuals who have achieved a negotiated peace with modernity as an existential condition of our time and advocate democracy, religious tolerance, interfaith relations, peaceful co-existence and education (Muqtedar Khan, 2003, p. 419). For them, the religion is not a subjective faith or a cultural tradition, but it is what the Quran promotes religion as a distinctive path to the divine (The Quran, 23:53 and 30:32).
6. Glens Approach to Eliminate the Identity Crisis among Muslims Glens views are deeply rooted in favoring Islam as a religion and Anatolian people as a nation, which act in framework of tolerance and pluralism. In this regard, Glen is a moderate Muslim and criticizes the religious bigotry in the form of religious extremism and favors modernism, nationalism, tolerance, and democracy without sacrificing religious precepts. He opposes politicized Islam imposed by the radical Muslims emphasizing the view that no individual or group has a monopoly on interpreting Islam manipulating the emotions of Muslims. However, he also is critical to the current
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foreign and internal policy trends in the world, including the West. He highly criticizes the prejudiced view of Islam particularly among the political elites who have lack of knowledge about Islam and the trends in the Muslim communities. Glen also criticizes a state-controlled secularist fear of religion and sees the secular fanaticism a blind persistence, which is against the tolerance as the acceptance of differences as a result of dialogue to promote cooperation (Glen, 2004f. p.240). However, like the other moderate Muslims, Glen is against the view of radicals to see the backwardness of the Muslim world as a Western production but sees this backwardness as a result of the internal dynamics. For Glen, backwardness of the Muslim world was a result in pressure for centuries from both within and outside and under restrictions put on feelings, thoughts, culture, and education of Muslims, it was impossible for a person to remain with human faculties, let alone realize a renewal and development. The backwardness of the Muslim countries is due to the continuation of feudal and tribal systems and lack of education, and values like democracy, human rights, spread of education across society, economic prosperity, equality in production, the institutionalization of consumption and income in a way that prevents class formation, the supremacy of law and justice have never been fully realized in Islamic societies (Glen, 2004f. p.240). Glen is also very critical of the regimes because of harsh restrictions or fanaticism. He supports the idea of republicanism, which is in accordance with the idea of consultation in Islamic sources. Like the idea of consultation, republicanism promotes peace tolerance and dialogue and does not mean being anti-religious. This view seeks integration with the modern world by reconciling modern and traditional values (Aras and Caha, December 2000, p. 10, Kuru 2003). In this regard, Glen writes that the current religious situation in both Iran and Saudi Arabia is not what the Islamic states promoted in history because religion has never been a tool of manipulation and repression but instead religion was and should always be a private matter, and its requirements should not be imposed on anyone (Glen, 1995b, p. 223). Glen highly criticizes the fundamentalist approach to the problems and preaches: Muslim cannot act out of ideological or political partisanship (Glen, 2000g. p.5). However, the excluding Muslims in the Western society is also harmful, too, because a nation fails to establish relationships as strong as the family members cannot be considered a nation (Glen, 2005c. p.92). Thus, many Muslims see religion as a source of morality and ethics but do not want religion to become a tool of politics, because if something then goes wrong in politics, people will blame religion. In this regard, Glen wants religion to remain above politics when he says: religion is the relationship between people and their Creator. The feeling of religion lives in the hearts depths and on the inner worlds emerald hills. If you turn it into a display of forms, youll kill it. Politicizing religion will harm religion before it harms a governments life (Unal and Williams, 2000, p. 36). Although, young generations and converts have been facing social, economic, cultural and political problems in the process of adaptation and finding their places in the society and the search for identity became fierce in the dominant traditional culture surrounding them, many young Muslims in the West are able to shape their identity and integrate with the modern world by reconciling modern and traditional values. It is possible when people do not neglect their children and abandon them to a foreign culture risk losing their identity, as Glen suggests. If a young Muslim knows from where he came from and the destination of his life, together with his responsibilities will take on the responsibility of bringing justice and happiness to the society and will be able to think freely and respect freedom of thought since freedom is a significant dimension of man's free will and a key to the mysteries of human identity, otherwise, distancing from Islam leads to degeneration and loss of peace (Glen, 2004f. p.245).
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These teachings of Glen helped many members of young Muslim generation to accept Western civilization as a suitable foundation for material life while considering Islamic civilization suitable for spiritual life. (Aras and Caha, December 2000, p. 11) This strong foundation of Muslim identity will bring some relief to the identity crisis in the West among Muslims and integrate them to the society easily, and also brings relief to the Western society which still goes through the process of identity formation. Moreover, Muslims should not feel discouraged because this trend was even stronger during the World War II when thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were interned in camps after Pearl Harbor because their loyalty to the U.S. and Canada was doubted.
7. Conclusion The identity in the West is complex and has many layers, and individuals have multiple identities. The complexity of West is reflected in the complexity of the society itself. The migration to the West brought another complexity to the society and challenged the old notion of identity which was once based on Western Christianity (e.g. S. Huntington, B. Lewis). The diversification of the Western society promoted the idea to see cultures in unity and not exaggerate cultural. However, this problem is not completely solved in the West, especially in the EU which suffers identity lack. Muslims found themselves in amid of this process which contributed to the identity crisis among Muslims. The religious identity of Muslims should not be considered as a problem in the West because today Muslims are the second largest religious group in many Western countries. However, many Muslims, especially the young generations and converts have been facing social, economic, cultural and political problems in the process of adaptation and finding their places in the society. The inner struggle of many of them is to find out where their identities truly lie: on secularized Western identity or faithbased Eastern identity. This search for identity became fierce in the dominant traditional culture surrounding them. Although, Muslims suffer the lack of agreement between themselves when it comes to the interpretation of Islam and considered the less integrated group to the society, and have been facing social, economic, cultural and political problems in the process of adaptation and finding their places in the society, the teachings of progressive Muslim scholars help many young Muslims in the West to shape their identity and integrate with the modern world by reconciling modern and traditional values (Glen, al-Qaradawi, etc.). They encourage Muslims in the West to enjoy these core Western values and hold on their religious identity. For instance, Glen invites them to integrate to the Western society fully by obeying the local laws (Yilmaz 2003, Yilmaz 2005) and by supporting the liberal democracy, market-economy without sacrificing their Islamic belief and morality. He invites Muslims to accept Western civilization as a suitable foundation for material life while considering Islamic civilization suitable for spiritual life. However, he also acknowledges the political obstacles before Muslims, therefore, invites the political elite in the West to support the attempt of Muslims to eliminate differences and synthesize common grounds or potential similarities and allow Muslims to claim their own place in the identity construction of the West as equal citizens. Thus, Glens views are very progressive and can be used as a model to eliminate the identity crisis among Muslims in the West. His ideas of identity mean that identity is not merely given and the personal and collective identity should be recognized within the certain parameters. We are all as human beings shaped by social and historical context, therefore, a dynamic relationship with others, acknowledging responsibilities, and dialogue is the last step to reach to progressive and peaceful society.
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MOTIVATING MINORITY INTEGRATION IN WESTERN CONTEXT: THE GLEN MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
FATIH TEDIK 364
Abstract This paper endeavours to analyse the potential contributions of the Glen Movement to the integration process of Turkish community in the UK in the medium-run and the whole Muslim community in the long-run and the feasibility of this process with references to the existing restrictions in the composition of aforementioned communities. The Glen movement has an interesting potential in the UK since 7/7 and its aftermath have urged the state to co-opt a suitable Muslimhood in the UKs multicultural context. This does not mean that the government and policymakers would invent or evolve a new religion but, indeed, it denotes that the existing system should cooperate with an existing Muslim establishment, movement or approach in order to endorse integration process for a peaceful coexistence. Many Muslim organisations and movements exist as the possible candidates particularly with their improving dialogue activities in the post 7/7 atmosphere. However, I suggest that, in this context, the Glen movement offers a new partnership with the surrounding society with its characteristics, such as built-in dialogue notion, un-denominational schools and new understanding of the West and Western. Yet, this mostly positive outlook contains undeniable shortcomings that constraint the movements capacity at this new home, e.g. severe sectarian and ethnic cleavages, disadvantageous status of Turkish community and the movements financial constraints. To articulate this probable function of the Movement, the paper first gives a succinct summary of the theoretical incentives of the Glen movement for integration. Then it depicts the social conditions in which the Turkish community live followed by the Glen movements history in the United Kingdom. Thirdly, the paper endeavour to analyse the Movements integration philosophy, its impacts on Turkish community in the Western Europe and the problems that the Movement and Turkish community experience. Finally, possible collaboration options for the UK government and the Glen movement to improve the integration of Turkish community in the medium-run and the greater Muslim community in the long-run are discussed.
1. Introduction: Theoretical Incentives of the Glen Movement for Integration Initially and perhaps the most importantly Glens redefinition of West, Western civilisation and Western context in religious terms is an attempt to replace the conventional dichotomy of dar alIslam (abode of Islam) and dar al-harb (abode of war). He does not only attempts to alter the Muslims assessment of West as a natural enemy and their land as the natural places of destruction;
364
Preparing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Birmingham on Stimulating the Potential: the Role of Religious
Movements in the Integration Process of the Turkish Community in Holland and the United Kingdom'. (BA in political science and public administration, Bilkent University; MA in public administration, Ankara University; MSc in politics, SOAS, University of London.) Research interests: Turkish religious movements, integration, the Turkish diaspora in western Europe, the Glen Movement and the Muslim community in the UK.
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he also seeks to substitute the classifications, which give temporal reconciliation, with an unconditional idea of concord. For instance, besides the dar al-Islam and dar al-harb dichotomy, Islamic jurisprudence has utilised different concepts such as ikrah (duress), darura (necessity), and maslaha (public welfare) and produce some concepts such as dar al-ahd (country of treaty, covenant), dar al-aman (country of security), dar as-sulh (country of peace), and dar al-darura (country of necessity) which denotes that Muslims can live according to their religion in non-Muslim lands perhaps with difficulty but peacefully.365 Quite the reverse, Glens term of dar el-hizmet (abode of service) requires Muslims to ad infinitum perform peaceful manners in their societies to demonstrate Islams true faade. The term charges new duty to the believer to portray good example in their everyday lives (temsil) without any reservation. It stresses not only necessity but also the obligation of a Muslim to obey legal settings of the new country, not only receiving benefits of the political setting (e.g. pensions, but also perform civic duties (e.g. tax), recognition of others rights and being fair. Glen stresses that: wherever a Muslim is, even outside a Muslim polity; he or she has to obey the lex loci, to respect others rights and to be just, In Glens understanding, umma is more of a transnational socio-cultural entity, not a politico-legal one. He hopes that this sociocultural entity will be instrumental in bringing general universal peace.366 Thus, by these words, he nullifies the conventional evaluation of the western context, even those giving a conditional status of peace but which are prone-to-change according to conditions. And quite strikingly, he also changes the magnitude of the aforementioned peaceful manner in terms of Islamic theology. Though in the classical dichotomies, the terms do not belong to the essence of the faith; Glen repositioned the peaceful method and obedience to the host country to the centre of a Muslims personal and religious life and requires him/her to re-designate the complete way of life similar to the commands of the religion. Hence, for his integration becomes intrinsic or integral part of the religion. Secondly, and parallel to the first set of logic, values of Western civilisation such as democracy and modernity, and re-evaluation of the Wests development occupy a one of the focal points in his logic. He does not observe the West and its civilisation from our eternal enemy perspective, and thus, denies the rejection of its values just because they are Western. He sees Western dominance as the result of their obedience to the Divine laws valid in the nature by pursuing scientific knowledge and by developing well-structured methodology. Glen emphasizes his concern for the basic, tenets of Islam, but he also professes the backwardness of today's Islamic interpretation and livelihood vis--vis the requirements of the era. To him, thats why West dominates the Muslim World, while latter fails to understand and perform Islam properly, and disregards the scientific investigation as done by the former.367 He promotes this notion with his understanding of takwah which mostly understood as the preservation from sins. He sees takwah as a systematic rapprochement to the creation, fulfillment all the requirements of this world (e.g. from science to economics) which concomitant with having a pious and otherworldly character. It seems that this is not a mere justification of modernity and a pursuit of a middle way between being Muslim and being modern; because he accepts Islam itself as
365
Yilmaz, I, Ijtihad and Tajdid by Conduct: The Glen Movement, in M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito, eds., Turkish Yilmaz, I, Ijtihad and Tajdid by Conduct: The Glen Movement, in M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito, eds., Turkish Glen, MF, Essentials of the Islamic, The Light, New Jersey, 2005, p. 251
Islam and the Secular State: The Glen Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, p. 234
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Islam and the Secular State: The Glen Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, p. 234
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the middle way. In this regard, Glen is searching for an interpretation of Islam that is compatible with and at the same time critical of modernity and tradition. In other words, it is not an effort for grafting Islam with modernity and obtaining a hybrid identity. What he does is reveal a dynamic interpretation of Islam that is both compatible with and critical of modernity and Muslim tradition.368 Thirdly, with his re-reading of dialogue in which dialogue is the natural result of the practice of Islamic ethics falls apart from most of the Islamic scholars. For him, Islam does not reject interaction with diverse cultures and on condition that it does not challenge with the essence of Islam. For all other conditions, dialogue is not a superfluous endeavour, but an imperative which is inherent to the faith. For him love, respect, tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, human rights, peace, brotherhood, and freedom are all values exalted by religion [and are the parts of] the messages brought by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, upon them be peace, as well as in the messages of Buddha and even Zarathustra, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, and the Hindu prophets.369 On the contrary, opposition to the diversity or attempts to take measures against the emergence of diverse ideas are, indeed, against Gods creation and historical fact.
2. Turks in the United Kingdom The terms Turks in the United Kingdom or Turkish Community in Britain, at least in this article, refer to the ethnically, politically and religiously fragmented community that comprises three main groups: Cypriot Turks, mainland Turks and Kurdish refugees. Most of the members of this Turkish speaking community have settled mainly in London, particularly the boroughs of Lewisham, Lambeth, Southwark, Croydon in the south, Haringey, Enfield, Islington and Hackney in the north, and in other major cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester. Today, its quite common to feel Turkish presence in some parts of these places. For instance, in Harringay of London Borough of Haringey or Kingsland Road (which situated between Dalston and Stoke Newington) of London Borough of Hackney, a large amount of Turkish coffee and kebab shops, restaurants, markets, social clubs and other Turkish businesses with their Turkish names, Turkish outlook and Turkish style of merchandising serve their surrounding society. As one of the kebab shop clerks in Harringay states that probably the number of kebab shops on Harringay or Kingland Road is more than anywhere in Turkey. This picture, of course, started emerging after a series of political and social events in mainland Turkey and Cyprus. These events such as wars, coup dtat of 1980, economic conditions and social trends have encouraged, if not obliged, to immigrate for safer and better places to live. As a result, since the first wave of Turkish Cypriots fled their increasingly unstable and divided island to seek refuge in the UK in between the first half of 50s and the end of 60s, the number of Turkish people has steadily increased over time.370 Particularly, with a tide of immigrants in the 80s that seek to build more economically and politically foreseeable future for themselves and their household and with
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Kuru, Ahmet T. Fethullah Glens Search for a Middle Way Between Modernity and Muslim Tradition, in M. Hakan
Yavuz and John L. Esposito, eds., Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Glen Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003, p. 130
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nal, Ali and Alphonse Williams, Fethullah Glen: Advocate of Dialogue, Fairfax: The Fountain, 2000, p.43 http://www.gazetem.net/bellekyazi.asp?yaziid=67
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another great wave in the 90s mainly consists of people with Kurdish origin who left their homelands due to Gulf War, this Turkish population has been calculated as nearly a quarter-million immigrants. Even for some representatives of the respective communities, this number could have soared to 300.000 or even 350.000. Although most of related literature insists that small proportion of mainland Turkish minority and vast majority of Kurds have resided the UK as safe haven where is far from political turbulence of their hometowns, as consequence of my interviews, I believe that almost all of the former group and the vast majority of the latter came to the UK due to economical reasons. By economical reasons, I mean the availability of more prosperous life in the UK than in Turkey. Now, third generation is in education and preparing to enter the life but In terms of integration, although each new generation performs better than previous one the picture is not so bright. After the formal immigration era started the first generation were hardly educated population who had rural background of Eastern and Central Anatolia. When they experienced a shock following residence in the Western countries, with the instinct of protection they began gathering in the Turkish ghettos.371 They had no intention to stay permanently, thus, they didnt feel the necessity to integrate into the society. This pattern of ethnic enclaves has continued and even increased each year. In fact, the Turkish-speaking community is probably one of the most self-sufficient communities in London with half a dozen local community-based newspapers, together with Turkish television channels and countless digital radio channels. Community members can provide any service within the community ranging from mortgages to a quit-smoking helpline and from driving instructions to massage parlours. As BBC correspondent reported it could be christened Little Turkey. At the beginning, religion had not any role in the Turkish community. Especially before the 1980s, parallel to the Turkish politics, the greater part of Turkish associations could be categorised according to their position on the continuum of the extreme poles of Turkish society. Turkish political competition, both official and underground, became reflected among the Turks in Diaspora. But transition from temporary migration to permanent settlement, family reunification and Turkish political developments increased the significance of religion in the Turkish community.372 However, religion of Turkish community is neither strong enough to mobilise people nor monolithic entity. Turkish community divided into many parts due to sectarian and ethnic disparities. In terms of sectarian variations, Turkish population is mostly Sunni with 88% and Alevis with 11%, which have no large exchanges between them. No Alevis live in Sunni-dominated areas and as was shown earlier, the distinctions are repeated in the composition of the unions. The Alevis and the laicists are unlikely candidates for Islamic movements. Turks are mostly cultural Muslims who adjust their religious practices towards folk Islam. This Islamic way if life is a mixture of popular religiosity, national customs, Islamic rules of conduct, mysticism, folk knowledge, folklore and magic with Islamic elements.373 Especially members of the first generation define themselves as Muslims but this is not because of their firm adherence to an Islamic faith but they merge the notion of nationality and the Islam. In other words, they are Muslims because Islam was taken granted with Turkishness and it is far from their central identities. For example, as Joseph Rowntree Foundation research suggests that less than 5 per cent chose religion as
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http://www.gazetem.net/bellekyazi.asp?yaziid=68 http://www.flwi.ugent.be/cie/umanco Thom-Venske, Hans (1988) The Religious Life of Muslims in Berlin, in T. Gerholm and Yngve George Lithman, eds.,
London and New York: Mansell, p. 78
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their only identity. Sixty-eight per cent did not subscribe to a religious identity at all. This low use of a Muslim identity is completely distinct from the findings of the Fourth Survey, in which, for instance, an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis said their religion was an important feature of their self-description and the way they lived their lives (Modood et al, 1997). While for some respondents being Turk implies being Muslim at the same time, this Muslimness is again a cultural identity rather than a religious one.374 On the other hand, the members of Turkish community do not feel British either. As figures in the same research illustrates that only 3 out of 250 Turkish respondents identified themselves as British only. Not having British as a self-identity does not mean that the young people chose only Turkish as an identity. Indeed, nearly 60 per cent of the young people chose multiple identities for themselves. In fact, only 22 per cent of the males and 15 per cent of the females chose only Turkish as a selfdescription.375 While this is partly because of many Kurdish peoples alienation from a Turkish identity, it is still the case that the majority of the young people picked more than one identity. In other words, in ethno-national sense, the chief split occurs mainly among people with Turkish and Kurdish origins.376 Three different historical and social backgrounds of these three migrants groups inevitably have affected relations between the communities and generated a heterogeneous community in Britain. Nowadays, the tension between Turkish State vs. PKK and Turkish State vs. Kurdish Administration in Northern Iraq highlighted the ethnic division between Turks and Kurds in Britain. For instance, during the pro-PKK demonstration on 28th October 2007 the Metropolitan Police did show great effort to prevent a bloody encounter between the two sides.377 For social indices, today, the Turkish community suffers from very serious deficiencies which not only obstruct a healthy integration but also threaten Turkish community itself. Lack of formal and vocational education, critical deficiencies in communication in native language, social isolation, animosity and anxiety towards the societal environment, and involvement to crime378 have reached very critical level already. Again findings from the same research indicate that many of the 1623 year olds who filled in our questionnaire did not have many qualifications. This outcome is also likely to be shaped by their socioeconomic background and, in the case of some, their recent arrival under difficult circumstances in Britain. Nearly half of the males and 37 per cent of the females in our survey did not have a single good GCSE result. In terms of the 2002 GCSE results, only 13 per cent of 99 Kurdish candidates achieved five or more C and above grades (the standard measure of good educational achievement). For Turkish Cypriots, it was 14 per cent of 36 and, for Turkish students, 21 per cent of 94. The average for Haringey is 35 per cent (Haringey Local Education Authority website, http://www.haringey.gov.uk/education/). If we add the whole Turkish community, this figure becomes much more severe: 40% of Turks and 60% of Kurds in Britain have no formal educations379. In terms of unemployment and home ownership the Turkish-speaking families are worse off than the Haringey average. Free School Meal (FSM) entitlement for pupils in English schools is an indicator
374
The complete report entitled Young Turks and Kurds: A Set of 'Invisible' Disadvantaged Groups could be seen and http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/185935274X.pdf Bayurt, Erhan. Gereklemesi Zor Bir Hayal: Euroslam. Aksiyon 09/2004
download from http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/185935274X.pdf

375 376 377 378 379
www.toplumpostasi.net
Only in German prisons are 25000 Turks and more than this number involved to the street mobs. Bradley, Harriet (2005) lgisizlik ve Dlanma, Londra Gazete, February17, 2005
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for measuring poverty. In 2002, four out of ten Haringey GCSE cohort students required a free meal, while nearly eight out of ten Kurdish students, 65 per cent of Turkish students and half of the Turkish Cypriot students did so.380 Moreover, the percentage of unemployment in Haringey is 5.8 per cent, compared to the England and Wales average of 3.4 per cent. In addition, three in every ten households in Haringey live in rented social housing (renting from the council, a housing association or a registered social landlord), while less than half of the households own their homes. The remainder of the households rent privately or live rent free.381 This underprivileged status undoubtedly increases the numbers of illegal organisations within the Turkish community itself. The members of socially un-integrated and economically underdeveloped families choose to join crime organisations in order to complete according to themselves- what is missing in their life. For instance, The National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS)382 states that 70% of the heroin coming into the UK is brought in by ethnic Turkish gangs based in Britain. In fact, the situation is not so desperate since fairly small percentage of the second generation and almost total entity of the third generation of the Turkish community are now struggling to diminish this disadvantaged status. Nowadays, for instance, even it is likely to observe shining examples of the Turkish youth in Western context who have achieved academic or professional excellence in nationwide examinations.383
3. Glen Movements Initiatives in Britain The history of the Glen Movement in the United Kingdom is fairly short compared to other Turkish faith-based communities or movements, such as Suleymanci, Sheikh Nazim and other Naqshibendiyya communities. Indeed, this fact could be deducted when the facilities and other services of respective communities are observed. For instance, each of the aforementioned community has its own an opus magnum in terms of religious architecture, such as Suleymaniye and Aziziye Mosques that both situated in Hackney. To meet religious necessities of the Turkish community during Ramadan, Glen movement, however, hire small community centres for Ramadan activities. The most established institution of the Movement is Axis Educational Trust which was established in 1994 as a charitable trust. Its founders and first trustees were Turkish-speaking businessmen and academics resident in the UK. The objective of Axis is three-fold, advancement of the educational attainment of the Turkish-speaking (Turkish, Kurdish, Turkish-Cypriot) youth in the UK, encouragement of their social integration and inclusion within the wider society and support and
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Haringey Local Education Authority website, http://www.haringey.gov.uk/education Neighbourhood Statistics website, http://www.neighbourhoodstatistics.gov.uk/areaProfile Now, the responsibilities of NCIS are resumed by The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). The Serious Organised
Crime Agency (SOCA) is an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by, but operationally independent from, the Home Office. The Agency has been formed from the amalgamation of the National Crime Squad (NCS), National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), that part of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) dealing with drug trafficking and associated criminal finance and a part of UK Immigration dealing with organised immigration crime (UKIS). (http://www.soca.gov.uk/index.html)
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This sort of news has become very common particularly for Europe edition of Turkish newspapers such as Zaman and
Hurriyet, or local Turkish newspapers such as London based Haber and Olay newspapers. For examples, please visit www.eurozaman.com/euro, www.habernewspaper.com or www.olaygazete.co.uk.
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guidance for the rest of the Turkish-speaking community in social, welfare and educational matters that is of concern to them. Although it has a history of slightly more than a decade, except a brief mainstream school experience, Axis have mainly operated supplementary weekend schools until the opening of Wisdom Primary and Secondary School in Tottenham, Haringey. In the supplementary schools whose number has fluctuated over years, as other weekend schools of Turkish community, main emphasis has been on the teaching of Turkish. Maths, science and English are among other important fields that taught each year. As stated above, two years ago, the Trust managed to open Turkish communitys first private mainstream school. The school, as its counterparts in different countries over the world, is an undenominational school which follow national curriculum. As second year running, it has nearly 70 students all of which from Turkish background. As the additional facilities, last year, it rented an old school building in Bradford for thirty years as a consequence of an agreement with Pakistani community that vacated the building due to inadequacy of students. Axis is planning to open this building as a boarding secondary school by the spring term. Finally, following a mortgage agreement with the building society the Trust started refurbishing an old building near Edmonton, an Enfield town with a high density of Turkish and Kurdish population. This building will be opened next year as primary and secondary school since Wisdom becomes small for future expansions in educational field.384 Another organisation funded by the Movement is the Dialogue Society (DS). The Dialogue Society was established in 1999 by a group of Turkish-Muslim intellectuals, academics and volunteers as a notfor-profit charitable organisation. In its charter, the objective of DS is declared as to promote tolerance, understanding, mutual respect and acceptance of people as they are, between people from all walks of life. To achieve this goal, DS routinely organizes 5 different events throughout each year. These events are Whirling Dervishes event (or the Whispers of Love), commemoration of Prophet Muhammeds birth (Mawlid an-Nabi), celebration of Kurbani festival (eid al-fitr) and commemoration of Jesus birth which generally held on following days of Christmas and finally fastbreaking Ifthar dinners in the holy month of Ramadan. In all programs, the preferred method by the members of the Movement is not to explain or demonstrate solely the Islamic perception and understanding of this event but allow other faiths to express themselves in the events. For instance, in a Whirling Dervishes event which was held two years ago at Hackney Empire Theatre, the believers of almost all faiths explain their perspectives on the general theme, which was love for that year, and prayed for the good of all Londoners and humanity at the end of the event. There are several sister organizations of DS all over Britain which are also established by the members of the movement inhabited in that region. Although the movement has other organizations founded for different aims, i.e. Koza Women Association or Anatolian Muslim Society, either their scope or their activities are limited compared to Axis and Dialogue Society; thus they are omitted in this paper. The Glen movement in the Turkey, and in the United Kingdom as its reflection, is a fairly controversial formation with its philosophies and institutions run by its sympathisers all over the world. They are severely criticized by two groups, hard-line laicists who mainly constitute the
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Lighthouse Educational Foundation is another charity that is as the South London counterpart of the Axis Educational
Trust but neither its activities nor its facilities has developed like Axis. As new institutions are being opened via Axis, it seems that the dual system of weekend school system will fade out and the main focus will only be the Axis.
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dominant state-elite and a minor radical group of Islamists whose support are mostly external and politically oriented. Whilst the former group suspect of organising to takeover the state when the conditions met, the latter group are not keen on their tolerant approach to the non-Muslims. For example, during the latest international academic conference in London in which the Glen movements influence in the Muslim World was analysed, all of the Kemalist organisations and some of the secular organisations launched a campaign to prevent the conference by pressuring the venues, the editors and some of the organisers by insisting that the conference would undermine the secular structure of the Turkish political system. However, as Kmeolu argues, the community is not a response of dissidents Muslims of a social breakdown or group of people with lower class background in order to protest social tension in Turkey or in the world.385 Contrary, the members of the community are mostly university student and large group of small and big businessmen, professionals from all sectors in the country, especially from academics, media, music and the specialized strata that compose the elite as well as middle layers of the society. Altunolu determined seven characteristics of the members of the movement; individually pious, culturally ascetic, politically conservative, idealist in the mission of converting souls, disengaged in active politics, success-oriented Otherization and adversary component is weak.386 Yavuz adds four additional attributes to the followers profile: they are more predisposed to tolerance, electoral politics, moderation, and a market economy than are other Islamic groups in Turkey. Even though the devotees are enthusiastic believers of their faith, they formulise their mission with humanitarian parameters and believe that salvation is not only to be saved from sinful activities, but also to be engaged actively in the improvement of the world. They think that serving the society in the narrow sense and the humanity in the wide sense is the most crucial activity to gain Gods favour and consent. They do not try to challenge the modernity but demonstrate how to be both good Muslims and modern. They are willing to live in a secular democratic atmosphere rather than rejecting it when they are trying to live their faith. Following this concise information about the characteristics of the movement and its members, Ill endeavour to articulate its current and potential contributions to the integration process with references to the Glens ideas, and finally Ill portray major constraints that define the movements efficacy in the British context.
4. Concluding Remarks: Glen Movement in Practice The Glen movement proved itself successful while we particularly take its educational and dialogue activities around the world. But it is noteworthy that the rest of the world is not Europe vis--vis political, social, financial and cultural characteristics. Until recently, with some exceptions, the countries where the Movement opened educational or social institutions have been relatively underdeveloped to Turkey. Beginning with the 1990, the members of the movement opened have erected many facilities such as colleges, universities and dormitories from Turkic Republics in the
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Kmeolu, Uur (1997) A Sociologically Interpretative Approach to the Fethullah Glen Community Movement, Altunolu, Ebru (1999) Fethullah Glens Perception of State and Society, Istanbul: Boazii University, p. 86
Istanbul, Boazii University, p. 46

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former Soviet Union, African countries, to Indo-China. Opening institutions were financially and politically tough, but to be recognised by the host countries were not so testing especially with their successful educational background in Turkey. In my opinion, the real challenge is to prove the merit of the movement in the UK with a success in education and with a representation of their commitment to the Western values. This is crucial because in the UK neither the state nor society are expected to be more reluctant to welcome it. Not only they have history between the sides or they experience Islamophobia, but also they would fear due to past experiences with Turkish minorities in the West (as happened in Germany) or they simply would not feel the necessity to accept assistance from a new actor. So the movement would not be appealing for them. Secondly, the movement heavily relies on donations and other financial assistance of the Turkish community. As Ebaugh indicates movements all activities are performed with these donations of local businessmen. However in UK context this could cause a financial trouble in the future as Turkish minoritys economically underprivileged condition is pretty vulnerable. Also ethno-religious differences within these communities fairly narrow the financial support base of the movements. Apart from hardliner laicists, since most Alevi and some Kurdish minority members have opposed the Glen movements activities and Turkish Cypriot community has mostly remained indifferent, only Sunni mainland Turkish community continues to be the main supporting group. Later group consists of generally small businessmen, self-employed or students whose income is generally fluctuating throughout the year and this makes the movements activities vulnerable. Thirdly, the movement is voluntarily represented by young professionals who just moved in to the UK and some Turkish graduates who either go to language courses or graduate schools. However, along with their psychological conditions as newcomers, their lack of competence in some issues such as native language does inevitably damage their roles as the guides for their surrounding Turkish community. This problem also obstructs their efforts to present Glen and his movement to the mainstream British public. Even some newcomers find hard to communicate with third generation of the Turkish community whose Turkish skills are fairly limited relative to their predecessors or understand new generations lifestyles or thinking as its quite distinct from their counterparts in Turkey. The members of the movement are trying to solve this problem by using young members who were born in Britain as intermediary. In the short run, Turkish minoritys social, economic and intellectually disadvantaged position would cause unwillingness to assist or participate, or their shortcomings (such as incompetence in native language) would prevent the members of the Movement from an efficient participation. However, at this point, it should be noted that, although the history of the movement in Europe is quite short, as a beginning, they have a good start in the Netherlands with almost all sorts of institutions and activities, and in the United States with a striking raise in the number of intercultural dialogue institutions and some schools. Similarly, despite having unpleasant experiences with the Muslim minority presence, Danish society has witnessed a profound change among Turkish population. With the intense exertion of the movement, the politically isolated Turkish minority was convinced participating elections. Now,
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Turks have an MP in the Danish parliament even though they constitute only 0.7% of the population with scattered residential patterns.387 With their moderate message which contains tolerant and friendly messages for the Western world, it can lessen the radical messages of radical ideologies coming from Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the larger context, they can also weaken the impact of Islamism in the Muslim world. This process at one hand, contributes the democratisation of Turkey and Islamic World, respectively via Muslim citizens within European states. And in a possible accession of Turkey to the EU, aforementioned community can significantly facilitate Turkeys adaptation process. The democratisation process of whole Muslim world will undeniably take pretty long time, but even in this situation Turkey can function as a buffer between liberal and democratic Europe and the Middle East. A buffer which absorbs the shock coming from the both sides of the alignment and, hence, would lessen the political and cultural resentment for both sides. The movements educational principle that favours the integration into the modern world, can assist the second and third generations of Muslim minorities who undergo severe educational, vocational and language problems. In the Netherlands, for example, one of the countries where the movement well established, are tens of civil society institutions founded by Turks whose cooperation definitely affects the integration process. The positive outcome of the movements course of action contributes also the Turkish participation to the national politics. In Dutch parliament are five MPs with Turkish origin. Additionally two candidates with Turkish origin succeeded to be elected for the European Parliament. Additionally, with their emphasis of education, it is (hopefully) expected that by 2015, the educational level of Turkish minority will be equalise with the native students level.388 Therefore, at one side, with their specialisation in education, they can improve the educational level of Turkish children by paying special care to their specific problems; at the other side since they do not refer any religious and ideological orientation in the education progress, the young generations would not be constrained in terms of interaction to the mainstream society. In the UK context, it appears that, with the theological incentives, physical and intellectual potential, the Glen movement has the ability to promote integration process of the Turkish people, in the medium-run, and the majority of the Muslim community, in the long-run even this requires a reidentification phase for the minorities. As the religion is the principal identifier for most Muslims, Glens re-aligning of individuals role and the re-positioning of host countries in religious context would gradually benefit them to have civic values compatible with the prerequisites of modern states. Since they can diffuse to all levels of everyday life, from schools to magazines, they can influence the population more effectively and efficient. Especially when the movements success in Turkey, where the operation grounds is so limited due to a fierce rivalry by the Kemalist state elite, is taken into consideration, it can be claimed that the movement is fairly promising in Western context that is characterised by democracy and freedom.
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http://www.turkembassy.dk/mkt2.htm Bayurt, Erhan. Gereklemesi Zor Bir Hayal: Euroslam. Aksiyon 09/2004
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INTEGRATION OF MUSLIMS IN EUROPE AND GLEN MOVEMENT

ARAXS PASHAYAN 389
Abstract In the beginning of the 21st century, mankind faces a few tendencies, first of all, related to the resurgence of radical trends in major religions, the increasing role of religion in the universal civilization, and cultural, ideological and religious diversity on global and local levels. In particular, the troubled integration of Muslims into European societies is evidence of perceptible incompatibility of Christian and Islamic traditions. There are two main tendencies within the Muslim communities of Europe. The first one is related to radicalization processes. Glen mentions four reasons why Muslims often have problems with dialogue; he says that many Muslims even educated believe that West seeks to undermine Islam. The second tendency is related to a newly established identity. There are circles tending to retain their Muslim identity, and as a distinctive feature they choose religious identity, which is more determining and powerful element in the competition with the European/Christian civilization. Finally, this paper is argued, that it is not Christian and Islamic civilizations that clash in Europe but post-Christian secular/liberal values and Muslim traditional values. In this case, the only alternative for sectarianism, isolation and radical relativism is interfaith and intercultural dialogue. To oppose and resent the West, as Islamic scholar and peace activist Fethullah Glen argues, will never benefit Islam or Muslims. He indicates the method of dialogue: forgetting the arguments of the past and concentrating on common points. He stresses the tolerance as an extremely important virtue that should always be promoted. Glen argues that Christianity and Judaism have in common with Islam. He insists that the world is becoming more global and both sides feel the need for a give-and-take relationship. Glen movement aims to promote creative and positive relations between the West and the Muslims.
1. Introduction In the beginning of the 21st century, mankind faces a few complementary tendencies, first of all, related to the resurgence of radical trends in major religions, the increasing role of religion in the universal civilization, and cultural, ideological and religious diversity on global and local levels. In particular, the troubled integration of Muslims into European societies is evidence of perceptible incompatibility of Christian and Islamic traditions. In spite of these tendencies, Islamic scholar and peace activist Fethullah Glen argues that Christianity has in common with Islam, since both religions consider they have missions. Glen insists that the world is becoming more global and both sides feel the need for a give-and-take
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Assistant Professor in Yerevan State University, teaching a course on modern Islamic movements in Arab countries; an
expert on Middle East in Noravank Foundation, Yerevan; senior researcher on Arab countries at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Armenia. Dr Pashayan specializes in political Islam, having done her doctorate on the Organization of the Islamic Conference 19692002. She is the author of several learned articles and the monograph, Organization of the Islamic Conference: The Objectives, Activity, Position Towards the Karabakh Conflict (Yerevan, 2003).
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relationship. Glen movement aims to promote creative and positive relations between the West and the Muslims. Since the events of 9/11 a great deal has been written on the growing religious fundamentalism and violence among Europes Muslim population. Migration has recently been framed as a source of fear and instability for the nation-states in the West, though it was rather a source of content in the 1960s.
2. The Glen Movement: Theory and Practice The Glen movement of is one of interesting examples of liberal Islamic thinking in the Middle East. The movement has Islamic, nationalist, liberal, and modern characteristics. Its ability is to reconcile traditional Islamic values with modernity. Beginning in the 1960s, Glen Movement emerged as a social force. In 1990s political and economic developments in Turkey, global changes after the end of cold war and increased Turkish migration to Europe contributed to the transformation of the Glen movement from a modest community of Nursi followers to an international civil/cosmopolitan Muslim social movement active in nearly 70 countries. (1) The movement is influenced by the moderate concept of Turkish Islam formulated by some nationalist thinkers, and also the Nurcu or Nur (Light) movement that developed around the ideology of Said Nursi (1877-1961), a prominent religious authority who rejects the idea of clash between the "East" and "West".(2) The founder of the movement - Fethullah Glen and his devotees accept Western civilization as a suitable foundation for material life while considering Islamic civilization suitable for spiritual life. Thomas Michel, who recognizes Glen's movement importance, argues that Glen is more famous as an activist in public communication.(3) Part of the Turkish secularist elite views Glen as a progressive development, argue that the solution to Turkey's problems depends on reaching a consensus. Though others see him as a threat as of using different tactics to reach the same goal as the Islamists. The Islamists think that the secular establishment uses Glen's community to obstruct their ideology. Greg Barton argues that Glen movement is often mistaken for either an Islamist movement or a Sufi tarekat, but closer examination reveals that it is in fact something very different, it is well developed and broad influential Islamic social movement. (4) Glen movement illustrates an ability to unify Turkish-Islamic synthesis, a strong identity uniting Turkish-ness (or Kemalism) with Muslim-ness into one position.(5) Fethullah Glen does not favor the state applying Islamic law. He accepts Said Nursi's argument that the idea of republicanism is very much in accord with the idea of "consultation" discussed in Islamic sources. Glens goals are simultaneously to Islamize the Turkish nationalist ideology and to Turkify Islam. He proposes two keys to provide peace in society - tolerance and dialogue. He argues that religion is a private matter, and its requirements should not be imposed on anyone concluding that the democratic form of government is the best choice. Such an approach, he insists, would strengthen the state, and thus protect society by widening the state's base of legitimacy and enhancing its ability to mobilize the population.(6) In fact, in a democratic society the source of law is colorblind and free from ethnic prejudice. It promotes the creation of an environment for the development of human rights, political participation, protection of minority rights, and the participation of individuals and society in decision-making institutions which are supposed to be the characteristics of our modern world. Everybody should be allowed to express themselves with the condition that no pressure should be made on others through
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variety of means. Also, members of minority communities should be allowed to live according to their beliefs. If these sorts of legislations are made within the norms of international law and international agreements, Islam will have no objection to any of these. No one can ignore the universal values that the Qur'an and the Sunnah have presented with regard to the rights mentioned above. Therefore, it is impossible to prove in any way that Islam opposes democracy. (7) About the reconciliation of Islam with democracy Glen has his own approach: Those who follow a more moderate pattern also believe that it would be much better to introduce Islam as a complement to democracy instead of presenting it as an ideology. Such an introduction of Islam may play an important role in the Muslim world through enriching local forms of democracy and extending it in such a way that helps humans develop an understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. I believe that Islam also would enrich democracy in answering the deep needs of humans, such as spiritual satisfaction, which cannot be fulfilled except through the remembrance of the Eternal One. (8) Glen movement has been manifested in many groups and educational institutions. There are nearly 700 schools worldwide inspired by Glen movement advocating for global toleration, dialogue, and peace. To promote their views, Glen's followers have set up a wide range of organizations. One of them is the Turkish Teachers' Foundation publishes a monthly journal, Sizinti (Disclosures) and two academic journals Yeni Umit (New Hope) and the Fountain. It also organizes national and international symposiums, panel discussions, and conferences. Another foundation, the Turkish Writers and Journalists Foundation, brings secularist and Islamist intellectuals together. The foundation has organized national and international conferences on the attributes and benefits of interfaith dialogue. Followers of Glen manage a media network and are active in the construction of clinics, research institutes, and cultural foundation around the world. Much of this kind of institutions success is due to the Glen movement policy of working in accordance with its host countrys national laws regarding education, religion, and social organizing. Fethullah Glen is one of the contemporary Muslim thinkers advocating interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims. Pim Valkenberg, speaking about Glens contribution to MuslimChristian dialogue, argues that the most interesting thing about Glens writings is not his originality, but the way in which he combines the wisdom of mystical and exegetical traditions of Islam with references to Western philosophers and theologians.(9) Glen writings about dialogue have been collected in Advocate of Dialogue. Glen mentions four reasons why Muslims have problems with dialogue. The first three reasons are connected with the historical reminiscence of Muslim world about the western colonialism, so the Muslims suspicious about the dialogue using from the West as a political matter. The fourth reason is theological and connected with the distorted image of Islam. (10) These reasons are well described by Edward Said in his Orientalism as well.(11) Mentioning the difficulties, Glen is coming to the nodal point of his message: "Interfaith dialogue in a must today, and the first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones". (12) Glen considers that the dialogue is not only required by modernity but also by Quran urges Muslims to respect the followers of other religions, former Prophets and their Books: When dealing with People of the Book who are not oppressors, we have no right to behave violently against them or to think about how to destroy them. Such behavior is non-Islamic, contrary to Islamic rules and principles, and it can even be said that it is anti-Islamic. (13)
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The Movement of Fethullah Glen emerged as Turkeys brand of Islamic modernity that seeks to realize peace through education, tolerance and interfaith dialogue. (14) Glen argues that dialogue meetings primarily concerning with religion. Basic Islamic sources advise Muslims to engage in dialogue with other faiths. Glen reaffirm that the dialogue is not his invention or innovation, but a revival of the most neglected aspect of Islam. Tolerance is also central to the Glen movements conception of reality: Among the many things we have lost, perhaps the first and most important is tolerance. From this world we understand embracing people regardless of difference of opinion, worldview, ideology, ethnicity, or belief. It also means putting up with matters we do not like by finding strength in a deep conscience, faith and a generous heart or by strength of our emotions. (15) Contradicting S. Huntingtons assertion that Muslim have problems living at peace with their neighbors, Glen defines the movements project as follows: In a world becoming more and more globalized, we are trying to get to know those who will be our future neighborone of the most important factors here is to eliminate factors that separate peoplesuch as discrimination base on color, race, belief, and ethnicity (16) In our modern day the relationship between Islam and terrorism is greatly debated and Glen approach to this issue is very interesting. Glen emphasizes that terror harms to Islam, Muslims and humanity at large. The scholar tries to show that Muslims responsible for terror attacks may first change the image of Islam in their mind. They have no comprehensive understanding of the sources, they read the texts out of context, they misinterpret their religion and then put this misunderstood religion into practice, they are misguided and misguide others.(17) I regret to say that in the countries Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon on hand than their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam; they use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes. In fact, Islam is a true faith, and it should be lived truly. On the way to attaining faith one can never use untrue methodsNo person should kill another human being. No one can touch an innocent person, even in time of war. No one can give a fatwa (a legal pronouncement) commending this matter. No one should be a suicide bomber. No one can rush into crowds with bombs tied to his or her body. Regardless of the religion of these crowds, this is not religiously permissible. (18) Glen speaks about the problem of overcoming the global calamity of terror. In contrast to many observers, Glen thinks that the world situation is not detraining and there will be no clash of civilization. According to Glen, those who are looking forward to a catastrophic future for the world hope that global antagonism will ensure the continuation of their power in the world. Glen emphasizes that education must play a very important role in helping to resolve the worlds problems.(19) Glen not only is renewing Muslim discourses and practices but also transforming the public sphere without claiming or boasting that he is doing so.(20)
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3. Turkish Community in Germany and Islamic Identity The Turkish immigrant group is one of the largest Muslim communities that has settled in Europe from the beginning of the 20th century. There are more than 4.5 million Euro-Turks dwelling in the European Union countries /Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium/. As of 2006, according to U.S. Department of State, there are 3.2 million Muslims (roughly 4% of the population) in Germany. Most Muslims live in Berlin and the larger cities of former West Germany. However, unlike in most other European countries, sizeable Muslim communities exist in some rural regions of Germany, especially Baden-Wurttemberg, Hessia and parts of Bavaria and North-Rhine Westphalia. Most Muslims in Germany are Sunnis. Many Turkish Muslims are Alevis. The Turks have formed their own special society within the Western societies, a feature, which distinguishes them from the other immigrant communities. The Turks always adhere to their national identity and leave impressions on native residents wherever they settle. The central element of their social life is the mosque also comprises a caf, a barbershop, food shops, a library, and a lodge for wayfarers. Furthermore, many mosques have recently been equipped with modern means of communication like the Internet and telecommunication lines. Especially women tend to stick to their distinctive outer appearance. Turkish woman ties hijab in specific way. The merchants are always keen on displaying Turkish goods. The shops have names like Istanbul, Ankara, Amra, Mulana, Turkeya, and display the same quantity and types of goods supplied in Turkey. No immigrant Turkish home lacks satellite dishes configured to receive homeland Turkish channels. Beside TV channels, Turkish daily papers are delivered to most immigrant Turkish doorsteps whether for free or on subscription. Most of these papers (Zaman, Turkiye, Hurriyet, etc) are distributed all over Europe. Other periodicals include European-language magazines and papers specialized in Turkish affairs and the Turkish immigrant community, which attract only a small number of Turkish readers. Charitable works are always observed by the Turkish residents. There are thousands of mosques that have been built with the donations of the Turkish immigrant community. They are also noted for seizing the opportunity to buy churches on sale and then transforming them into mosques. They try to support Arab Muslim issues as well. The charity makes them feel they belong to the Muslim Ummah. (21) Islam is a visible religion in Germany and is the largest minority religion in the country. The history of Islam in Germany started at the end of the 1960s. The Turkish migrants remained invisible in their religious practices also because they did not regard Germany as a new home. Their intention was to work only for a short period of time in Germany, and they were emotionally much more connected to the political debate and public life in Turkey. They strongly believed that, they would certainly return to Turkey. The first generation of migrants understood their practicing of their religion as a homecoming. They practiced it in their homes or intimate, invisible places shielded from the outside, because the outside was conceived of as foreign, as a foreign land, or - in Turkish - "gurbet." The reality of migrants' live - homesickness and ignorance even are characteristic of the so-called "Gastarbeiter"-Turkish literature until the beginning of the 1980s. When Turks in Germany had turned from migrant workers into immigrants in the second generation, however, it was not only their institutional disposition, which became transformed, but also their individual religious ones. For the first immigrants, the so-called Turkish 'People's Islam' was a
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formative influence for their practice of religion in Germany. The People's Islam was oriented towards and shaped by the practicalities of everyday life and was defined by distinct phases of an individual's life. (22) The People's Islam was embedded into the culture at large, while in the Diaspora, religion later became 'de-culturalized.' The migrants slowly began to study the Quran in Turkish, which was a radical change to their religious lives. Young Muslims in Germany often declare that they "have discovered Islam for themselves." The notion of self-actualization through Islam is particularly highlighted by Sigrid Nkel in her study Die Tchter der Gastarbeiter und der Islam. As Nkel says, personal growth is central to self-descriptions of phases in young Islamic women's lives. The decision to wear a head-scarf and to model their lives individually, and out of their own free will, according to Islamic principles becomes young women's means towards self-actualization and dominates their relation to Islam. (23) When second-generation migrants left from the idea to return to their parents' home country, this not only changed their status as 'guest' to a status as immigrants, but also helped to shift the power balance between immigrants and Germany. Germany has been forced to meet the immigrant on eyelevel, consider him a new citizen, and communicate with him in discussion about integration. In contrast to the first generation, which practiced Islam defensively and invisibly, the second generation uses Islam as an instrument to give meaning to their everyday, individual lives. It has become a highly visible and irreversible part of German society. The second generation do not only study the Islamic sources to find solutions to their everyday problems in Western society, but tries to counter Western discourses about Islam.(24) Applying Islam became a source of overcoming personal destruction, isolation and nihilism. The Islamic identity helped to see the future. The religious factor allowed young people to find their orientations in German society.(25) Until 2001, migrants in Germany had not been perceived in religious terms, but in ethnic ones. Polls in the 1990s, for instance, indicated that about three million people with a Turkish background live in Germany. Within a couple of years, their identity changed - the majority society began to perceive them differently. Now they are no longer perceived in ethic terms, but in religious ones: three million Turks became three million Muslims - although they never had the chance to make a statement about their religion on their own. While German Protestants and Catholics have the chance to tell the public authorities whether they belong to the Catholic or to the Protestant church, Muslims have no chance to tell whether they want to be registered as Muslims. The reason is that Islam has no organization that is comparable to the Christian churches. There are some Muslim organizations, but the majority of migrants from Turkey do not belong to them. (26)
4. Turkish integration in Germany and Glen Movement The discussions about the Euro-Turks have been heated in a time when Turkey has been given a fullmembership perspective to the European Union. These discussions have also become imbedded in the debates on 9/11, the killing of anti-Islamist political leader Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, and the Pope's discussion about the Prophet Mohammad. In the meantime, Euro-Muslims in general, and Euro-Turks in particular, have had a greater visibility in the European public sphere in a way that has fueled Islamophobic sentiments.(27)
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The relationship between Germanys largely Turkish Muslim population and the German national community was until recently conditioned by the political classs refusal to acknowledge that the guestworkers were there to stay. Since 2000, however, German outlook and policy have changed; the reality of immigration and permanent settlement is now recognised and a new willingness, in principle, to extend citizenship has developed. However, the view that integration should precede naturalisation the requirement that Turks and other Muslims should first integrate and demonstrate their German-ness before they may acquire that citizenship remains a formidable brake on the process. It is unrealistic to expect those of Turkish origin to become fully integrated into German society while citizenship and full participation in public life are withheld.(28) The German government has spent the past years working with immigrant groups and independent experts on a national integration plan. An estimated 15 million people in Germany have an immigrant background, and Chancellor Angela Merkel's "grand coalition" of Social Democrats and Christian conservatives sees integration as crucial to the country's future security and economic well-being. Discussions over the past years have shown that Germany has a long way to go before immigrants feel included in society. For decades, politicians have insisted that Germany is not an immigration country, but Merkel's focus on integration points to an important shift in German politics. Whether Germany will remain and become an even more civil multi-ethnic society will depend on a number of factors. First, some of the most severe social problems have to be tackled and educational system has to be improved. Germany needs a lot of effort to enable underprivileged - German and non-German - young people to have a decent future, materially as well as emotionally. Even the outcasts, even right-wing extremists, have the right to get emotional support and help. This has nothing to do with approving their actions. On the contrary: only if a society stands firmly against violence, only if there is an obvious will to protect the weaker and to care for the victims, can a civil society survive in the long run.(29) There are social, economic and political barriers to integration presented by the host societies and there are many efforts among Muslim population to promote their own visions and models for integration. Among these models is the Glen movement, which is has embraced a modern, multicultural notion of political identity and community that is also deeply rooted in Muslim practice and traditions.(30) The debate over Turkish-Muslim integration in Germany has resolved around three main educational policy issues. The first involves the religious instruction in the schools. The second educational policy debate involves the establishment of private Muslim or Turkish schools. The third educational policy issue involves wearing of headscarves in the schools. In contrast of France, German schools permit female students to wear headscarves in the classroom. The issue of headscarves has been in particular area of concern all over Europe, and in Germany as well. While under the German Basic Laws freedom of religious expression clause, German students may wear headscarves in the classroom, the situation concerning teachers has been much more complex. Since teachers are representatives of the state, they have no permission wear a headscarf. Glen movements approach to the issue is interesting. The movement prefers to avoid direct controversy and eschews a highly visible role in the current struggle over permitting teachers to wear the headscarf in the classroom. Jill Irvine argues that such a stance is in keeping with the general goal of the movement in Germany to avoid highly charged political battles that could detract from its educational mission.(31)
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Glen movement participants in Germany have founded a variety of educational institutions that operates through the country.(32) In the past decade though the difficulties, the movement in Germany has been building an educational infrastructure that aims to improve social situation of Turkish residents and promote their integration into German society. They attempted to find middle way between the cultural devastation implied by assimilation and the globalization of a minority group living apart from the majority culture. Any solution to the challenges of integration must involve the give and takes of cultural understanding and mutual enrichment. Turkish residents must become educated according standards and fully capable of operating at the highest levels on German professional society, but the key to integration is to provide the best possible education. (33)
5. Conclusion Muslim communities /Turkish communities particularly/ are not adequately perceived by European societies founded on tolerance which has generated two tendencies within the communities. The first one is related to radicalization processes within the communities. The emigrants who encounter various social problems, especially, unemployment, are subjected to discrimination which leads to their isolation. Suffering from psychological discomfort, they gradually become an alien element for the European society, they feel themselves as strangers. This fact leads to the increased consolidation with ones own ethnic group. The resultant ideological gap is bridged by Islam which functions as a uniting factor. The second tendency is related to a newly established identity. There is new generation which rejects isolation, tries to overcome stereotypes and is ready to integrate into the European societies. These are the circles which obtained European education, speak in the language of the given country and are well aware of the local culture. At the same time, they tend to retain their Muslim (or national) identity, and as a distinctive feature they choose religious identity, which is more determining and powerful element in the competition with the European/Christian civilization. The requirement of the institutional presence of Islam in European countries creates an immediate contradiction with the fundamental values of the European societies. Europe is not willing to reject the liberal cultural and moral values, which constitute the basis for the Western civilization, even realizing that pluralistic multicultural community needs universal values. Europe which face demographic and socio-moral problems in some cases feels threatened by the manifestations of Islamic fanaticism. It is not Christian and Islamic civilizations that clash in Europe but post-Christian secular/liberal values and Muslim traditional values. In this case, the only alternative for sectarianism, isolation and radical relativism is interfaith and intercultural dialogue. To oppose and resent the West, as Glen argues, will never benefit Islam or Muslims. He indicates the method of dialogue: forgetting the arguments of the past and concentrating on common points. He stresses the tolerance as an extremely important virtue that should always be promoted.
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DIALOGICAL AND TRANSFORMATIVE RESOURCES: PERSPECTIVES FROM FETHULLAH GLEN ON RELIGION AND PUBLIC LIFE 390
PAUL WELLER
391
Abstract With the continuing evolution of the European Union by incorporation of new member states and the extension of its competence into ever-wider areas of social policy; the increasing ethnic and religious diversity of its populations; the debate over the accession of Turkey into the EU; and the emergent questioning of the previously held European models of, on the one hand, multi-culturalism, and on the other, of lacit, there is growing debate on the relationship between religion and public life in Europe. Since the Madrid train bombings and the 7/7 London attacks; the murder in the Netherlands of Theo van Gogh; and so-called cartoons affair in Denmark, many of these debates have focused on the position of Islam and Muslims. Because of these events, the debates have often, and unfortunately, been constructed in terms of a conflict between ideologically Islamist and ideologically secularist positions, as if these were the only alternatives. It is, however, the argument of this paper that there are other more constructive ways forward that promote equity for religious minorities, inclusivity on the part of the state, and participation in civic society. In exploring such alternatives, this paper brings perspectives from the teaching of the Turkish Muslim, Fethullah Glen, into critical interaction with seven recently published theses on religion and public life in the UK and Europe that have been developed by the author over the past quarter of a century of practical and academic engagement with issues of religious diversity and public life. Through interaction with these theses, key aspects of Glens thought and teaching are explored. These include, for example, Glens position, that .Islam does not need the state to survive, but rather needs educated and financially rich communities to flourish. In a way, not the state but rather community is needed under a full democratic system. They also include Glens commitment to inter-religious dialogue. Taken together, these key positions are then explored through the notion of what Ihsan Yilmaz articulates in terms of the possibility of a commitment to dar al-hizmet, in which an Islamic contribution is made to public life, as one contribution to civil society set alongside others.
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Not for quotation without the authors permission. The author can be contacted at: p.g.weller@derby.ac.uk Professor of Inter-religious Relations at the University of Derby and Head of Research and Commercial Development in
its Faculty of Education, Health and Sciences; Visiting Fellow in the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regents Park College, University of Oxford; and Vice Chair of the Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby. Current interests: issues in the relationships between religion, state and society. Recent publications: Time for Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005) and Fethullah Glen, Religions, Globalization and Dialogue, in R. Hunt and Y. Aslandoan (eds.), Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World: Contributions of the Glen Movement (Somerset, NJ: The Light Inc. and IID Press, 2006). He is editor of Religions in the UK: Directory, 20072010 (Derby: University of Derby and Multi-Faith Centre at the University of Derby, 2007).
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1. The European and Netherlands Context In the Europe of today there are considerable tensions and challenges to peaceful co-existence in terms of the relationship between Muslims and others in a secular context. These challenges are perhaps particularly sharp and poignant in the Netherlands, the country in which this conference takes place. This is because it is here that the murder of the artist Theo Van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, took place on 2nd November 2004. This was an event that sent shockwaves through a society that, on the basis of its historical roots as a seventeenth century refuge for Christian religious minorities392 as well as on the basis of its more recent history, had generally had held to an image of itself as, on the whole politically liberal, and of its religious minorities as generally well integrated with the wider society. In the Netherlands, an historical approach to the pattern of relationships between different religious groups, and also organised secular movements, had been developed a policy has been followed known as Verzuiling, (Dobbelaere, 1988), often translated into English by means of the none too elegant terminology of "pillarisation". The roots of this approach are to be found in the origins of the country itself that emerged out of a revolt, inspired by Calvinist Christianity, against Spanish and Roman Catholic rule. The product of this was, in the first instance, the establishment of what was basically a Calvinist state, but which also had a number of Roman Catholic enclaves. In the newly independent state the Dutch Reformed Church was the only officially recognised Church. The worshipping life of Protestant dissenters, Jews and Roman Catholic was tolerated, but initially they were excluded from holding public office. In his book on Dutch Society, Goudsblom (1967:18) argued that the commercial interests of the Dutch burghers and merchants modified the initial religious zealotry of the Calvinists with the result that a Dutch society of "varied religious composition" came into being. In connection with this, he (Goudsblom, 1967: 71-73) also went on to note that: "religious diversity has remained a pervasive determinant of social and cultural distinctions, giving rise to the curious phenomenon of `bloc' formation known as verzuiling." Commenting on the potentially wider relevance of this approach to religious plurality for contexts beyond The Netherlands, Ahmed Andrews (1994: 127) described this pillarisation in the following terms: At its most fully developed the structure of verzuiling enabled a person to live their whole life within their confessional or secular bloc. Once born into the system it has been possible to be educated in one particular bloc from school to University: join a confessional or nonconfessional trade union or professional body and be employed within the same bloc. Marriage within the bloc was also the general rule. In addition, one could read a newspaper published within one's bloc and even receive television and radio broadcasts put out by the confessional or secular segment of society to which one belonged. Finally one's social and
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Thus, for example, the Netherlands provided a refuge for the Mennonites and also for
a group of English Separatists who, under the leadership of John Smyth, migrated there in 1606 and founded, together with the support of Thomas Helwys, the English Independent Church in Amsterdam. Helwys and others of the group returned to England in 1611/12 to found the first General Baptist congregation in England and Helwys (in Groves, R., ed., 1998) penned his 1612 A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity addressed to King James I of England, and in which he developed one of the first theologically developed arguments for religious liberty to be published in the English language.
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sporting activities were catered for within the bloc, owing to each having its own sports and social clubs. Historically, conflicts between the blocs were generally managed within the overall framework of a system that has some success in relation to the criteria of social and political stability. In Andrews' (1994: 127) evaluation, this was due to two factors: Firstly, the verzuiling structure arose in a society which was already clear about its national identity to which all groups had an attachment, unlike India or Pakistan, for example, where attachment to one's state or ethnic region often appears to be stronger than attachment to the nation. Secondly, all blocs have equal access to resources." Initially, however, state-funded education was initially an area in which verzuiling did not fully operate. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, after a campaign that saw the orthodox Calvinist and Roman Catholic blocs co-operating in opposition to the secular Liberal Protestants, the principle was established that the state could support denominationally-based schools to the same extent as non-denominational schools. Like Christopher Bagley (n.d.; 1971a, 1971b) before him (who undertook comparative work on race relations in the Netherlands and the UK), writing in the mid-1990s, Andrews argued that he believed that this verzuiling model may have had something wider to offer in relation to the challenges posed by religious diversity. Thus Andrews (1994: 127) noted that, "At first sight this segmentation of Dutch society might appear to lead to social instability." However, although "it is not as strong as it was in the 1960s," Andrews arrived at the overall judgement that pillarisation could still offer a useful model and that, especially when linked with a proportional representation model of democracy, it could remain a "useful illustration of how a segmented society, a plural society, has met the needs of various conflicting groups and achieved a stability based, since the late 1800s, on equal treatment for all". However, in the Netherlands itself, questions increasingly began to be asked about the structure (see Gowricharn and Mungra, 1996), with some arguing that it was becoming a relic of a previous age. In particular, issues emerged about the extent to which this structure could, in reality, stretch to accommodate new Muslim migrants in the Netherlands (Rath, Groenedijk and Penninix, 1991; Shahid and van Koningsveld, 1996; Feirabend and Rath, 1996). It is both because of its inheritance of toleration and of the system of verzuiling, as well as because of the intensified social and political ferment that followed the killing of Theo Van Gogh, that it is all the more appropriate that a conference of this kind and on this theme should take place here in The Netherlands.
2. European Context for Religion(s), State and Society But the issues involved and challenges for peaceful co-existence in Europe are not for the Netherlands alone. With the continuing evolution of the European Union by incorporation of new member states; the increasing ethnic and religious diversity of its populations (Davie, 2000); the debate over the accession of Turkey into the EU (Bilici, ed., 2006); and the questioning of previously developed European models for the relationship between religion(s), state(s) and society (Robbers, ed. 1996), the issues in the relationship between religion(s), state and society are ones with which all states and societies in the EU and in the wider Europe are having, once again, to wrestle with (Madeley and Enyedi, eds., 2003).
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While tensions and even violent conflict involving religions did continue to exist in parts of Europe (for example in the religiously-related dimensions of the national conflict in the North of Ireland), for the majority of Europeans these were seen largely as things of the past. Thus, the overall perspective of the majority was one that perhaps somewhat complacently had come to see religion as primarily something for the private sphere. Although labour migration and refugee movements of peoples changed the composition of European societies in the years following the Second World War, there was initially very little reflection on the implications of this diversity in relation to religion, with ethnicity and culture receiving much more emphasis. Thus, in 1989 in connection with the early years of The Satanic Verses controversy, the veteran British socialist politician, Tony Benn MP (1989), could write: Now, all of a sudden, arguments which had almost disappeared into the mists of time have to come into sharp focus and are hotly contested across the world, involving diplomatic relations, trade arrangements and stretching into the heart of religious communities where people of different religious convictions have to live side by side. In fact, it is arguable that the controversy around Salman Rushdies (1988) book, The Satanic Verses contained in microcosm many of the themes, issues and debates which have since come to form such a large part of public, religious and political debate and consciousness and, in relation to which, with hindsight, one can see that the controversy was an early lightning rod. Although there were firebombings of some bookshops stocking the book; threats against those supporting Salman Rushdie; the killing of an imam in Belgium; and threats to a number of Muslim organisations and place of worship, the form of conflicts that ensued were, in Europe, primarily located in the cultural, social and political domains. More recently, many of the original issues involved in The Satanic Verses controversy have been reprised in the so-called Cartoons Controversy that developed around the images published in the 30th September 2005 edition of the Danish daily newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, and which gave rise to similar widespread media, public and street-level debate. However, while the The Satanic Verses controversy entailed (following the fatwa or legal opinion pronounced by the Iranian religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini) the threat of targeted violence towards Salman Rushdie and those directly associated with the publication of his book, together with some more generalised violence in other parts of the world, the Cartoons Controversy took place in the context of a more general association of Islam and violence in Europe. This association was in itself a contributory factor to the controversy since the Jyllands-Postens cartoons were deemed so offensive by many Muslims because, among other things, they depicted the Prophet Muhammad as having a bomb under his turban and the Shahadah - or basic Muslim declaration of faith - being written on the bomb. What had happened in between was, of course, the seismic and global impact of the events of 9/11 in the USA, followed in Europe by the 3/11 (2003) Madrid train bombings; the 2nd November 2004 van Gogh murder; and the 7/7 (2005) London transport attacks. In other words, in between The Satanic Verses controversy and the Cartoons Controversy the violence associated with the emerging cultural conflicts had become very explicit, and also in the heart of Europe itself (Guelke, 2006; Abbas, ed., 2007). Because of these events, and others like them that would have taken place had they not been foiled by the security services, the debates arising about the possibilities or otherwise for peaceful coexistence of Muslims and non-Muslims in a secular and European context have become sharpened.
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3. Old Models and Their Alternatives As a result of all this, the opening years of the 21st century have the seen a growth in questioning of the previous European models for the management of religious and cultural diversity including those of verzuiling (or pillarisation) in the Netherlands; multi-culturalism in the UK; and lacit in France. Unfortunately it has often been the case that the debates that have emerged around this have often been constructed in terms of a conflict between ideologically secularist and ideologically Islamist positions, as if these were the only alternatives. It is, however, the contention of this paper that there are other ways in which these debates can be approached. On the basis of both academic reflection upon, and practical engagement with, issues arising from religious plurality over the past quarter of a century the author of this paper has elsewhere argued (see Weller, 2005a) that these alternatives are not the only options and that there are other, more constructive ways forward. Furthermore, it is argued that these alternatives are capable at one and the same time of promoting equity for religious minorities, inclusivity on the part of the state, and participation in civic society, all of which are necessary for the healthy functioning of diverse and plural European societies, including the religious traditions, communities and groups within these societies. These perspectives that were developed by the author are distilled into seven theses, propositions or principles on religion and public life in the UK and Europe.393 In exploring these and other approaches it is important that this is done in active dialogue with Muslims and their own thinking on these matters. This is because it is unlikely that any positive way forward can be identified, and much less implemented, unless European Muslims can contribute to its creation as active social participants rather than merely passive recipients. Of relevance to this is something that the historian of religion and theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1981: 101), in his book Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion, spoke about as a process in scholarship of engaging with the otherness of the other that culminates in a we all are talking with each other about us: The traditional form of Western scholarship in the study of other mens religion was that of an impersonal presentation of an it. The first great innovation in recent times has been the personalisation of the faiths observed, so that one finds a discussion of a they. Presently the observer becomes personally involved, so that the situation is one of a we talking about a they. The next step is dialogue, where we talk to you. If there is listening and mutuality, this may become that we talk with you. The culmination of this process is when we all are talking with each other about us. Such ideas about methodology in the study of religion were applied to the practical field of inter-faith relations by Kenneth Cracknell (the former Executive Secretary of the British Council of Churches
393
The origin of these theses can, perhaps significantly, be found in a paper given by the
present author on the topic of Jews and Muslims in Europe: Some Propositions and Questions for European States, Societies and Religions, presented at a conference organised by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Europes initiative, Academic Response to Racism and Anti-Semitism and Racism in Europe on From Xenophobia to Tolerance: Jews and Muslims in Europe, and held at France-Amerique, Paris, 28th-30th October, 1995, as well as in a paper on Religion(s), State and Society: Theses and Propositions for Europe prepared for the Council of Europe Seminar on Religion and the Integration of Migrants, the Palais de lEurope, Strasbourg, 24th-26th. They have subsequently been published in slightly variant forms.
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Committee for Relations with People of Other Faiths) in a thought-provoking lecture published as Cracknell (1986), We Talking About Us: The Implications of the Ending of Religious Isolationism. They also, I would suggest, have contemporary relevance and resonance in reflecting on the relationships between religion(s), state and society in Europe. And in facilitating the kind of approach that enables a we talking about us and which can contribute to the overcoming of religious isolationism, a key Muslim contribution to this dialogue (albeit one that is not yet as well-known as it should in many parts of Europe) comes from the teaching of the Turkish Muslim, Fethullah Glen, and the work of the movement associated with his teaching.
4. Theses on Religion(s), State and Society: A Conversation with Glen Having set something of the current European context, this paper now focuses on key themes in Glens teaching by bringing them into critical interaction with the theses on the relationships between religion(s), state and society that have previously been developed by the present author. The theses have developed over the past decade since they were first formulated, and so have appeared in slightly variant published form (see Weller, 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2005a; and 2005b). As presented below,394 they are, in a way, the equivalent of newspaper headlines, with some brief editorial comment appended. There is much that could be said about them by way of qualification. As propositions they do not claim to be either a detailed survey or the last word. They paint on a broad canvas, standing back a little from the detailed histories and variations that exist within the European context. Thus they are intended to provoke reaction, not as systematic statements, but as succinct formulations that others can react to in affirmation or disagreement, uncovering the presuppositions that underlie particular positions on the relationships between religion(s), state and society. At the same time, they were formulated not only as debating principles in the sense of facilitating abstract discussion alone. Like Glens teaching, the theses outlined below are intended to have at least the potential of being principles for a change that can be translatable into working principle that could inform a direction of social and religious change to which they might themselves also actively contribute.
5. The Importance of Not Marginalizing Religions from Public Life States which assign religions to the private sphere will impoverish themselves by marginalising important social resources and might unwittingly be encouraging of those reactive, backward- and inward-looking expressions of religious life that are popularly characterised as fundamentalisms (Weller, 2005a: 197). Glen rightly does not accept the kind of uncritical use of the term fundamentalism which in the thesis is also deliberately framed by inverted commas to indicate that the term can only be legitimately used in the context of more carefully defined meanings that has become among the media and among the commentators of the chattering classes when referring to a whole range of
394
The form in which they are quoted in this paper is taken from the form in which they are published and discussed in P.
Weller. (2005a) Time for a Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society. (London: T & T Clark), 197-198
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different religious phenomena beyond those of liberal religion. Thus Glen (2004: 35) points out that the term has become another fashionable term with which to smear .those who did nothing more than express their religious feelings have been branded as reactionaries, fanatics, and fundamentalists. In other words, in the context of concerns about the emergence of conflictual and violent religion there can all too easily emerge a simplistic secular misunderstanding in which, as Glen puts it, Unfortunately some people do not distinguish between being truly religious and blind fanaticism, and fail to differentiate between different strands of more conservative religious expression. But given that there do exist religious expressions by those who are called Muslims (and others) that, in the name of religion, tend towards the undermining of civility and co-existence, the irony is that particular approaches of the secular that are concerned with keeping such expressions out of public life can, in fact, be precisely those kind of approaches that can lead to the further entrenchment and development of these forms of religion. While the secular is often said to be the foundational of contemporary European models for the relationship between religions states and societies its meaning is not self-evident, and it is in fact referred to in ways that relate to a variety of diverse and contested meanings (see Weller, 2006a). As explained by Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito (2003: xvii), In many developing countries, secularism has become a theology of progress and development and that normative fault lines of modernity are nowhere else as clear as in Turkey. This is, of course, the context from which Glen and the community that has emerged around his teaching derive and in the setting of which they have had to chart a course that both engages with, and also differentiates itself from the twin challenges that arise from ideological secularism and political Islamism. In the twentieth century Turkeys story is one that has been dominated by the ideology of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (18811938), the founder of the modern Turkish state who abolished the Muslim Caliphate in 1924. Yavuz and Esposito (2003: xxiii) point out that in Kemalist ideology, modernity and democracy require secularism. Indeed, the version of secularism that has been dominant in Turkey is that of what these authors (Yavuz and Esposito, 2003: xvi) call a radical Jacobin liaicism in which secularism is treated as above and outside politics and in which, therefore, secularism draws the boundaries of public reasoning. Thus, until only a few years ago, any attempts to use religious language in public debate could result in the banning of any political party that did so and, notwithstanding recent developments following the double electoral victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP), ongoing conflicts related to the historical inheritance are, as yet, to be fully resolved. Forged in this crucible, Glens teaching offers a critique of a socially exclusive secularism. Thus of the Turkish Republic, Glen (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000: 148) warned that The republic is obligated to protect its citizens religious faith, feelings, and thoughts. If its leaders do not do so, but rather hold people in contempt because of their religious feelings and thoughts, violate their rights, and smear their good names, in reality they are holding the republic in contempt and violating all that it represents. At the same time, in contrast to those Muslims who advocate a defensive holding back from the public sphere Glens teaching as also, and importantly, expressed in the educational, media, and other social institutions created by the movement associated with it - encourages Muslims actively to engage with the wider (religious and secular) society. On the other hand, it also critiques those forms
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of involvement in which religion is politically instrumentalised and instead argues for engagement that is based on a distinctive Islamic vision characterised by robustness and civility. Thus, in ways that speak both to ideological secularists and political Islamists, and with relevance beyond the Turkish context, Glen distinguishes between an understanding of the secular that is concerned with the participation of citizens of all religions and none in the public life of a society and an ideological form of secularism that is concerned to promote positivist philosophical positions and their philosophical and political consequences.
6. The Need to Recognize the Specificity of Religions Religious traditions and communities offer important alternative perspectives to the predominant values and power structures of states and societies. Religions are a reminder of the importance of the things that cannot be seen, touched, smelled, tasted and heard, for a more balanced perspective on those things that can be experienced in these ways (Weller, 2005a: 197). Because of the distinctive perspectives held by religions, there is a fundamental sense in which religions cannot allow nation, state, or political ideology to claim ultimate value for itself. In the perspective of religious traditions, this is a usurpation of the loyalty that should only be offered to that which is unconditioned. Perhaps precisely because the ideas of the modern nation and of the state can have such a tendency to claim absolute power for themselves and their political values, religions offer important institutionalized reminders that the nation and the state are not the only significant realities; that they do not represent the only form of authority; and that the authority that they do have is not absolute. As Glen (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000: 149) summarises it in his own words, Powers dominance is transitory, while that of truth and justice is eternal. Even if these do not exist today, they will be victorious in the very near future. For this reason, sincere politicians should align themselves and their policies with truth and justice. This does not, of course, mean that civil belonging and loyalty is unimportant. But it does mean that they are to be understood in the context of other and more ultimate values. In his historical reflections on what are still the historically recent European attempts made to build societies in the absence of spiritual values. Again, as Glen (2004: 194) explains in his own words, but which also have resonance with this particular thesis: Enlightenment movements that began in the eighteenth century saw human beings as consisting of the mind only. Following that, positivist and materialist movements saw humans as solely material or corporeal entities. As a result, spiritual crises have followed one after another. It is no exaggeration to say that these crises and the absence of spiritual satisfaction were the major factors behind the conflict of interests that enveloped the last two centuries and that reached its apex in the two world wars. At the same time, it is clear that the historical record of religions has not always been in line with that to which they seek to point. Glen (2004: 194) recognises this, noting that, Claims are made today that religion is divisive and opens the way for the killing of others. Nevertheless, while it is certainly the case that religions have been historically ambiguous, Glen points out it is possible for the criticism of the role of religions by those who are secular to be informed by as much lack of selfcriticism as can be found among the religious. This, in turn, can lead to a superficial criticism being made of religion as something that is at the root of social conflict, but without adequate reflection
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taking place on the significance of the suffering brought about by the secular ideologies of fascism, Bolshevik communism, and capitalism. As Glen (2004: 196-197) explains it, religion (and especially not Islam) did not lead to what he calls the merciless exploitation that could be found in, .the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century that killed hundreds of millions of people and left behind even more homeless, widows, orphans, and wounded . Rather, Glen argues that the roots of this suffering was to be found in Scientific materialism, a view of life and the world that had severed itself from religion and a clash of interests caused this exploitation and also that this brought about environmental pollution as a consequence of a perspective that nature is an accumulation of things that has no value outside its ability to meet physical needs. In contrast, Glen speaks of nature as having a certain sacredness because he sees it as an arena in which Gods Beautiful Names are displayed. He (Glen, 2004: 194) also reflects that, Humans are creatures composed not only of a body and a mind, or feelings and a spirit; rather, we are harmonious compositions of all these elements. Developing this further, he explains that Each of us is a body writhing in a network of needs; but this is not all, we also possess a mind that has more subtle and vital needs than the body and that, Moreover, each person is a creature made up of feelings that cannot be satisfied by the mind, and a creature of spirit; it is through the spirit that we acquire our essential human identity.
7. The Imperative for Religious Engagement with the Wider Community Religious communities and traditions should beware of what can be seductive calls from within their traditions to form religious unity fronts against what is characterised as the secular state and what is perceived as the amorality and fragmentation of modern and post-modern society (Weller, 2005a: 197). While setting out the distinctive contribution that religion can offer, Glens approach can be seen as being over and against an understanding of religion which (by analogy with what used to the internal perspective of Soviet Communism and its fellow-travelling supporters) takes a form of an idealisation that is blind to the failings of the communities of really existing Islam. At the same time, it is also to be distinguished from the (ironically) modernist and political Islamism which (also by analogy with the history of Communism) could be seen as a kind of Trotskyite Islam that is dedicated to a permanent revolution against not only of secular, but also all existing forms of governance developed among really existing Muslims, and which seeks the future establishment of an ideal global Muslim Khalifate which is not yet here. As a defensive mechanism in societies in which there is clear evidence of at least some degree of hostility towards Muslims and Islam (see Allen and Nielsen, 2002), a significant section of the really existing Muslim community with migrant origins tend towards a defensive cultural and intellectual insularity over against their perceptions of the secular. Such Muslim reactions and groups are concerned primarily with trying to preserve Islam sometimes understood in a way that is all too uncritically elided with manifestly specific minority cultural traditions in what can be perceived as a sea of alien cultural, religious, intellectual and legal influences. In relation to this response among Muslims, Glen (in Capan, 2004: 3), Islam has become a way of living, a culture; it is not being followed as a faith.
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Other Muslims often identified by the term Islamists - have a more ideological project in relation to the secular and that is concerned with what, for example, the more modernist Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir calls the carrying or passing on of the concepts (see Husain, 2007) which they seek to inculcate among Muslims in contradiction to what is seen as a kafir secular system. Thus they campaign against this system using the slogan democracy is hypocrisy, on the basis that it is haram or forbidden to participate in something that is rooted in secular principles that are, by them, deemed to be contrary to the fundamental principles of Islam. With regard to Islamism, the contradictions that can emerge among the adherents to its principal groupings are well illustrated in Ed Husains recent book, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left. Of his personal experience, Husain (2007: 148) says, My life was consumed by fury, inner confusion, a desire to dominate everything, and my abject failure to be a good Muslim. I had started out on this journey wanting more Islam and ended up losing its essence. By contrast, while teaching that that religions do indeed have something distinctive to offer, Glen, stresses that only those who are self-critical can make an effective contribution. Therefore, instead of spiritually bankrupt Islamism vividly portrayed by Husain, Glen (2000: 9) argues that, Those who want to reform the world must first reform themselves. In order to bring others to the path of traveling to a better world, they must purify their inner worlds of hatred, rancor, and jealousy, and adorn their outer worlds with all kinds of virtues. And because of this, rather than anathematising the secular world, Glens practical actions have been geared towards overcoming the divide between the religious and the secular that can otherwise so easily be exploited by the ideological zealots of both traditions. What this means can be seen especially in the work of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, founded in 1994, and the seminars held by the so-called Abant Platform, one of the aims of which is dialogue and reconciliation in the light of knowledge and experience. The Platforms first meeting three meetings (1998-2000) all held in Abant, Turkey were on, respectively, the themes of Islam and Secularism; Religion, State and Society; and Pluralism and Social Reconcilitiation. Two meetings have also been held in Europe, one on Culture, Identity and Religion in the Process of Turkeys EU Membership, held in Brussels, Belgium, in 2004; and Republic, Multiculturalism and Europe, held in Paris, France, in 2006. The last two of these meetings were also followed up outside Europe, but with a Turkey-France emphasis in the Platforms 2007 meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, on Turkey-French Conversations II. This has been of particular significance both because of the relatively strong French opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union, but also because it has been the French model of republicanism, citizenship and secularism that has played an important role in relation to the Turkish intelligentsia following the Kemalist revolution. Such Turkish-French political and philosophical dialogue is therefore of significance both in Turkey and in the EU. The principles of the Platform can be seen as embodied in the commitment to it of some of its key participants. Thus a former chair of the Platform was Professor Mehmet Aydin who, between 20022007 was Minister of State for Religious Affairs in the AKP (Justice and Development Party) Government. Since 2006, Professor Dr. Mete Tuncay of Bilgi University has been Academic CoOrdinator of the Abant Platform. This is itself a clear embodiment in action of the principle of a Platform created out of a religious spirit. This is because Professor Tuncay refers to himself as, a
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person who believes in agnosticism in religion and as one those who accept the notion of living in justice and freedom without referring metaphysics. In relation to his own context, Professor Tuncay points out that, In Turkey, there has been a dispute among those who acknowledge religion and those who believed that religion and religious thought was the cause and the sign of ignorance and underdevelopment for at least two hundred years and so We have to comprehend and implement secularism in an appropriate manner which he defines in the following way: The bottom line is to attain a capacity of living together with a common sense of citizenship without changing each other. (http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1778/18/) In relation to a secularism that is understood in this way, as Glen (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000:167) summarises it, Secularism should not be an obstacle to religious devoutness, nor should devoutness constitute a danger to secularism.
8. The Need for A Reality Check National and political self-understandings that exclude people of other than the majority religious traditions, either by design or by default are, historically speaking, fundamentally distorted. Politically and religiously such self-understandings are dangerous and need to be challenged (Weller, 2005a: 197). Glens thought has sometimes been seen as being related to a strain of Turkish nationalism in which there was deemed to be a close relationship between the Turkish nation, the religion of Islam, and the glorious past of the Ottoman Empire. Thus Bekim Agai (2003: 63) argues that Glens notion of a Turkish Muslim identity (Trkiye Mslmanli) was, until the late 1980s, .to a large extent based on a nationalistic, Islamic chauvinism which included such ideas as Europe wanting to destroy Turkey by Christianizing it and enemies within Turkey wanting to destroy the Islamic identity of the Turks, but that this changed during the 1990s. Therefore in a 2000 interview with Hakan Yavuz (2003: 45), Glen acknowledged: We all change, dont we? By visiting the States and many other European countries, I realized the virtues and the role of religion in these societies. Islam flourishes in Europe and America much better than in many Muslim countries. At the same time Glen (2004: 42) is certainly not apologetic about the achievements of Ottoman civilization and, in particular, highlights the religiously informed realism of the Ottoman rulers in dealing with the cultural and religious diversity of their Empire: ..our glorious ancestors captured the hearts of people by means of tolerance and became the protectors of the general peace. The longest period of peace in the Balkans and the Middle East, which have always been volatile areas, was realized with the enduring tolerance of our ancestors. From the moment that tolerance and those great representatives left history, this region became void of peace and contentment. At the same time, while noting and praising the close relationship that there has been between the Turkish nation, the Ottoman Empire and the religion of Islam, Glen (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000:166) makes the telling observation that, Politicizing religion would be more dangerous for religion than for the regime, for such people want to make politics a means for all their ends. Religion would grow dark within them, and they would say: We are the representatives of religion. This is a
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dangerous matter. Religion is the name of the relationship between humanity and God, which everyone can respect. In the European inheritance, very close relationships have existed between religion and the state. In the first instance in western Europe this was manifested in terms of the religio-political entity of Catholic Christendom. But with the historical eruption of a Protestantism that was strongly related to areas of princely rule and territorial belonging, there also emerged what the Church of England Bishop and critic of established forms of religion, Colin Buchanan (1994), has called religion as a nationalised monopoly. The forms of these nationalised monopolies varied throughout Europe (Robbers, G, ed, 1996) but in each case they reflect the outcome of struggles for power and influence between different versions of Christianity as well as the espousal by rulers and politicians of these various forms of religion for diverse motives. In various ways these institutionalised monopolies of religion and state have been responsible for centuries of discrimination on the basis of religion. This discrimination has extended from the perhaps more passive effects of disadvantage experienced by those with less social space and less access to the instruments of state power, through to the active persecution of religious minorities. The tensions between these new forms of relationship and the old socio-religious order resulted in the savage and bloody religious bigotry of the Wars of Religion. It was then partly the moral reaction to the suffering and destruction of these years led to a growing religious indifference, scepticism, and the desire to confine religion to the private sphere. Eventually, this reaction also led to the development of the notion of the secular state. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, in the central and eastern parts of the continent with Communist governments, this reactive historical inheritance was further reinforced by the state-enforced separation of religion and state, informed and under girded by the promotion of state-sponsored atheism, more less vigorously pursued according to specific national contexts. In contrast to much of this European history of Christendom and the secular reaction to it, as also the Islamist attempts to form either nation state-based (for example, Iran under the mullahs or Afghanistan under the Taliban) or more global forms of theocratic systems (of the kind that Hizb utTahrir and others are seeking to establish), Glen (in Capan, 2004: 3) argues that, In my opinion, an Islamic world does not really exist. There are places where Muslims live. They are more Muslims in some places and fewer in other.
9. The Need to Recognize the Transnational Dimensions of Religions Religious communities and traditions need to pre-empt the dangers involved in becoming proxy sites for imported conflicts involving their co-religionists in other parts of the world. But because they are themselves part of wider global communities of faith, religions have the potential for positively contributing to a better understanding of role of the states and societies of their own countries within a globalising world (Weller, 2005a: 198). The salience of this thesis is much clearer in the European context after the Madrid and London bombings than it was when it was first articulated in the mid-1990s. In between times, there have been significant research programmes on transnationalism with regard to communities, including especially one sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and led by Dr. Steve
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Vertovec at the University of Oxford. In relation to this globalised work of transnational ethnic and religious communities, Glen (2004: 230) has observed: Modern means of communication and transportation have transformed the world into a large, global village. So, those who expect that any radical changes in a country will be determined by that country alone and remain limited to it, are unaware of current realities. This time is a period of interactive relations. Nations and people are more in need of and dependent on each other, which causes closeness in mutual relations. In an increasingly glocalised world in which all religions are increasingly becoming diaspora religions, the transnational connections of religions have the positive benefit of offering channels of insight into varied cultural contexts. But tragically they can also become conduits through which conflicts are transported from one part of the world to another. This, of course, is also a by product not only of scientific and technological developments, but also is a result of the history of colonialism and imperialism - words and concepts which are in many ways out of fashion in the polite western society of today, but which do describe historical realities of immense significance and import for contemporary life, including the question of co-existence between religious groups. As Glen (2004a: 239) has observed in realistically evaluating the current global context: Islamic societies entered the twentieth century as a world of the oppressed, the wronged, and the colonized; the first half of the century was occupied with wars of liberation and independence, wars that carried over from the nineteenth century. In all these wars, Islam assumed the role of an important factor uniting people and spurring them to action. As these wars were waged against what were seen as invaders, Islam, national independence and liberation came to mean the same thing. And it is against such a background that, despite the routine denials of, for example, the UK Government that terror actions should be discussed in relation to the impact of foreign policy and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there can be little doubt that for radicalised young Muslims in Europe such a connection exists. Thus, as clearly explained by Shehzad Tanweer, one the young 7/7 bombers in London, in a taped message broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite TV station on the first anniversary of the bombing: For the non-Muslims in Britain, you may wonder what you have done to deserve this. You are those who have voted in your government who in turn have and still continue to this day continue to oppress our mothers and children, brothers and sisters from the east to the west in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya. Your government has openly supported the genocide of more than 150,000 innocent Muslims in Fallujah. The message concluded that, You will never experience peace until our children in Palestine, our mothers and sisters in Kashmir, and our brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq feel peace. In the face of such perceptions of the world that are held much more widely among Muslims far beyond the small numbers who carry out acts of terror, the US and UK governments have argued and acted on the basis that military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and a War on Terror is necessary for ultimately enabling the possibility of peaceful co-existence. But in relation to the actions of Osama Bin Laden and those inspired by him, such as Shehzad Tanweer, Glen (in apan, 2004: 5) explains his position that: the only way to prevent this kind of deeds is that Muslims living the countries seeming to be Islamic and I stated earlier that I do not perceive an Islamic world, there are only countries in which Muslims live will solve their own problems.
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10. The Importance of Religious Inclusivity Religious establishments as well as other traditions and social arrangements that provide particular forms of religion with privileged access to social and political institutions need to be re-evaluated. There is a growing need to imagine and to construct new structural forms for the relationship between religion(s), state(s) and society(ies) that can more adequately express an inclusive social and political self-understanding than those which currently privilege majority religious traditions (Weller, 2005a: 198). In recent years there has been considerable debate among both Muslims and others around the relationship between Islam and democracy. Radical secular liberals, traditional Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaat-I-Islami, and modern Islamists have all shared agreement that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two. However, beyond that basic point of agreement, these three groups diverge. Secular liberals, for example, insist that Muslims have to reform and to modernize Islam in order for Islam and democracy to be a compatible in a way that, from the perspective of the Islamists, would be tantamount of selling-out authentic Islam. Traditional Islamists while ultimately seeking to use the modern instrument of the state to introduce a polity based on the application of the Shariah throughout society have generally been prepared to use electoral politics as a means towards this end. Others, such the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia assert their traditions as the authentic form of Islam, while the dominant clerical groupings among the Shia in Iran claim that the revolution that was ushered in by the Ayatollah Khomeini has created a real Islamic state. In contrast to these views, Glen (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000: 151) points out that while Supposedly there are Islamic regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia, in fact they are state-determined and limited to sectarian approval. Glens perspective is different and starts from the position that, Islam is a religion. It cant be called anything else. When the West defeated the Islamic world in military and technology, salvation was sought in politicizing Islam or transforming it into a political system. Islam as a religion is based on enlightening the mind and brightening the heart. Thus faith and worship come first. The fruit of faith and worship is morality. Thus, although as previously noted, Glen does sometimes point to the positive aspects of the Ottoman heritage, this is not on the basis that it was a model Islamic state. In contrast to the regimes in majority Muslim countries who claim to adopt the mantle of Islam, modern Islamists seek to bring about an Islamic polity that is not national in scope, but global, under that is understood to be a recreated global Muslim Khalifate. As Husain (2007: 142) explains it, in such a vision, existing majority Muslim countries are imperial creations and deserved no recognition, while the duty of Muslims living in any historical state is, to prepare the ummah for the caliph, to swear allegiance to the future Islamic state (Husain, 2007: 135). In such an approach, in words originally coined by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, al-Islam huwa as-hall, or Islam is the solution a phrase which has widespread resonance among ordinary Muslims but which, in the thinking and action of Islamists of both the more traditional and more modern kinds, is reinterpreted to refer to the establishment of an Islamic state as the answer to the fragmentation, tensions, conflicts of the contemporary world. Again, Glens vision is one that different from this. Based not only on political realism but also Islamic scholarship and Quranic interpretation, Glen (2004: 249-250) argues strongly against
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entertaining the illusion that difference will be left behind, maintaining rather that the .different beliefs, races, customs and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village, and also that wanting anything else is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. As a result, he argues that the future peace of the world lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Without such dialogue Glen believes that .it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end. Thus Glen accepts neither the attempt to recreate an imagined historical unity, nor one to bring this about in the future. At the same time, he does advocate a future-oriented vision of Islam, but of a different kind and with equal relevance to Islam and Muslims in both majority and minority contexts. Thus in a 2000 interview with Hakan Yavuz, Glen (in Yavuz, 2003: 45) summarized his position as being that, .Islam does not need the state to survive, but rather needs educated and financially rich communities to flourish. In a way, not the state but rather community is needed under a full democratic system.
11. The Imperative of Inter-Religious Dialogue Inter-religious dialogue is an imperative for the religious communities and for the states and societies of which they are a part. There is a need to continue the task of developing appropriate interfaith structures at all levels within states and societies and in appropriate transnational and international structures (Weller, 2005a: 198). Modern Islamists have no time for dialogue certainly not as a principled activity, but also not either as a pragmatic or even tactical response to the existence of religious and philosophical plurality. As Husain (2007: 142) puts it, Muslims who advocated inter-faith dialogue and co-existence we condemned as having a defeated mind. By contrast, Glen most certainly does not accept such a contention, nor even does he see dialogue only as a pragmatic response to the need for co-existence amidst the realities of a pluralistic world. Rather, he sees inter-faith dialogue as an Islamic imperative, rooted in the Sunnah of the Prophet. The core of Glens (in nal, A. and Williams, A. ed., 2000: 241-256) commitment to such dialogue is set out in his article on The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue: A Muslim Perspective. This, it is important to note, was published prior to 9/11. His commitment to dialogue is therefore not merely reactive and pragmatic, but is rooted in his vision of Islam and the contemporary world. Perhaps the most comprehensive collection of his thinking about dialogue was developed in his (Glen: 2004) book, Towards a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance. Of this book, the Catholic priest Thomas Michel (in Glen 2004: i) has said in a foreword that a significant part of its purpose was as ..a call to Muslims to a greater awareness that Islam teaches the need for dialogue and that Muslims are called to be agents and witnesses to Gods universal mercy while at the same time (Michel, in Glen 2004: i-ii) it was also an invitation to non-Muslims to move beyond prejudice, suspicion, and half-truths in order to arrive at an understanding of what Islam is really about. In his reflections for the Millennium, published Towards a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, Glen (2004: 231) set out his conviction about the importance of dialogue in the following way:
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I believe and hope that the world of the new millennium will be a happier, more just and more compassionate place, contrary to the fears of some people. Islam, Christianity and Judaism all come from the same root, have almost the same essentials and are nourished from the same source. Although they have lived as rival religions for centuries, the common points between them and their shared responsibility to build a happy world for all of the creatures of God, make interfaith dialogue among them necessary. This dialogue has now expanded to include the religions of Asia and other areas. The results have been positive. As mentioned above, this dialogue will develop as a necessary process, and the followers of all religion will find ways to become closer and assist each other.
12. Conclusion In Europe at this historical juncture, there is a need for positive resources that can be drawn upon by Muslims, Christians and other members of civil society, to contribute to a transformation in the relationships between religion(s), state and society that will allow peaceful co-existence to become embedded in the present and to flourish for the future. That the historic relationships in Europe between religion(s), state and society - and especially between religion(s) and secularity are shot through with ambiguity is clear for all to see. And that the presence of Islam and Muslims presents a challenge to previous models is also clear. Within this ferment, it is important for Muslims to engage with, and try to understand, the particular histories that gave rise to the current sets of arrangements (see, for example, Weller, 2006b) in different European countries. It is also important for the wider society to try, in relation to these matters, to gain a better and more refined understanding about the inherited traditions of the Islamic world that have a bearing upon contemporary Muslim understandings of these questions from classical forms of Islam found Muslim Empires of the past, through the newer perspectives of traditional Islamists, and of more modernist Islamists, to the kind of ideas expressed by Fethullah Glen. In parts of the world where Islam has had particularly strong influence, such as the Middle East, the image of a mosaic of religions and culture rather than a melting pot of them has historically been invoked as one that offers the most appropriate pattern for structuring these complex and challenging relationships. In many ways the classical expression of this was the millet system that developed in the Ottoman Empire and has often been held up by Muslims as an example of the Islamic accommodation of the plurality of beliefs. In reality this was historically far from perfect, with Christians and Jews often being treated as inferior members of the Islamic empires (see Maoz, 1978). But in due course reforms granted Christians and Jews official equality within the political community, although those who insisted on their legal rights of emancipation were often bitterly opposed. Thus, partly due to the historical inheritance of this pattern, and partly as a consequence of the history of colonialism and present global conflicts, the contemporary position of the ancient Christian communities (see Wessels, 1995) in the Middle East is one in which, as minorities, they have suffered considerable social and demographic pressure and consequent population attrition, leading to migratory and refugee movements to the Netherlands and other European countries. Consequently, in their key areas of historic geographic presence in Syria, Turkey and other similar countries, the ancient Christian Churches have been struggling to maintain a social foothold.
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It is also the case that, within the Islamic Empires, Muslims of traditions other than the majority Sunnis, such as the Shias, Ismailis, Alawis and Druzes, have often had an even more difficult position since they were viewed as being unorthodox or, at best heterodox. They were therefore sometimes seen as more of a threat to the unity of the ummah than people of religious traditions and communities that were completely distinct from the household of Islam. Nevertheless, relative to the history of the patterns found in Christendom for the relationships between religion(s), state and society and exemplified by the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, or the later Protestant-influenced approach of cujus regio, ejus religio, the traditional mosaic approach was relatively successful within the boundaries of the predominantly Muslim societies in which it operated. Hence, for many Muslim minorities in Europe today, it continues to have an appeal as a possible model that, with appropriate modifications, it is argued could now be applied for understanding and accommodating a variety of religious beliefs and practices in public life. In fact, within contemporary Europe there are some adaptations of this classic treaty-based approach that might to some extent resonate with what Muslims could realistically hope for within a European context where they are in the minority rather than majority position. An example of this can be found in the not widely known but significant Acuerdo de Cooperacon del Estado Espaol con las Comison islamica de Espaa395 that, in 1992, was ratified by the Spanish Parliament. This is an agreement between the Spanish state and its Islamic communities (see P. Antes, 1994, 49-50) and is parallel to other treaties of a similar kind established with both Protestant Christian and Jewish communities. It guarantees a range of rights for Muslims such as civil recognition of religious marriages and the declaration of mosques as inviolable. As Peter Antes (1994: 50) commented, The treaty is the most comprehensive recognition of Muslim rights signed in Europe so far. However, while this traditional mosaic model might be able to claim some historical success in relation to diverse populations of broadly settled geographies, its weakness is that it admits of little movement or change. It is therefore questionable how adequate it is in the context of the globalized population movements and the highly mixed societies of the contemporary world. There are no easy solutions here. But in moving towards a conclusion, with regard to the situation of Christians, people of other faiths and the secular in Europe, it perhaps worth bearing in mind the following points about the secular within the contemporary Christian, secular and religiously plural landscape of Europe, and as identified by the author as summarised in a recent paper.396
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In English, Co-Operation Agreement of the Spanish State with the Islamic Commission of Spain. The title of the paper was Human Rights, Religion and the Secular: Variant Configurations of Religion(s), State(s)
and Society(ies), and it was given at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Clemens Nathan Research Centre and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers Colloquium on Human Rights and Religion, held at The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, On 28th February 2005. These summary forms were also presented at in an unpublished conference paper by the author on Insiders or Outsiders? Religious Groups, Polite Society and the (Post?) Modern State at St. Columbs Park House 8th Inter-Isles Forum on Faith and State: Getting the Balance Right, held at the University of Westminster, London, 27th January 2007. Publications by the author that expand upon and discuss the summary presentations of these points as presented here include Weller, 2006b and Weller, 2007.
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1.
In the totality of a global historical perspective it is perhaps worth remembering that it is the secular that must be considered to be a new experiment in social organization and integration. The reactive origins of the secular can be found in the European inheritance of the Inquisition, nationalised monopolies of religion and the impact of the seventeenth century Wars of Religion and the responses to these of economic liberalism, revolutionary Republicanism, and the emergence of socialism and Marxism The European roots of the secular, which can make it problematic for societies whose other experience of imports from Europe has been in terms of colonial and imperial takeover. There remains a need to see especially how the secular can relate with the Muslim civilisational heritage. Acknowledgement of the need explicitly to consider the secular can result in formerly common sense formulations of problems and issues being turned on their head, making it possible to see them from new and previously unrecognized perspectives.
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The Christian theologian Robin Gill (1975) once argued that, while reductionist sociological theory seeks to explain away religion in terms of social and economic determinates, because religious teaching is itself a social factor, and religious bodies are social actors, it is entirely possible that, theological variables can become social determinates. Bearing this in mind, it is the argument of this paper that the thinking of Glen and the practical initiatives of the community that has been inspired by him offers resources that engage with the secular; are ready for dialogue with Christians; are confident of what Islam can offer, and yet also acknowledge the current reality of the situation for Muslims and Islam in Europe rather than promoting only an idealized vision. While reflecting in a mature way about the achievements of Islamic and Ottoman civilization, they do not idealize past Islamic states, support current theocratic claims of really existing Islam, or support a radical Trotskyite type Islamism that seeks for a future global Khalifate. Because of all this, it is argued the theological variables of Glens teaching and of the movement associated with him have the potential to become positively transformative social determinates towards the embedding and development of co-existence in European societies. For the Muslims of Europe, the transformative resources offered by Glens teaching recognise the need for Muslims, by the way in which they articulate and seek to live out Islam, to overcome the association that, post-9/11 and 7/7 has become widespread between Islam, Muslims and terror. As Glen (in nal & Williams, eds., 2000: 248) puts it: The present, distorted image of Islam that has resulted from its misuse, by both Muslims and non-Muslims for their own goals, scares both Muslims and non-Muslims. Taken in the round, Glens key approaches offer the possibility to Muslims to live not according to a traditional distinction between dar al-Islam (the land of Islam, or peace) and dar al-harb (the land of war, or conflict) which in the hands of Islamists have become corrupted politicised concepts that tend to accentuate division and promote conflictual understandings that undermine the possibility for peaceful co-existence but according to to the newly articulated concept of dar al-hizmet (country of service).
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Such a rethinking is not an example of the kind of calls for superficial modernization of Islam heard so often today among the secular liberal elites of Europe. Rather, as Yilmaz (2003: 208-237) puts it in the title of a paper on the movement that has formed around Glens teaching, what his Glens teaching stimulates is an ijtihad and tajid by conduct. In other words, it is the deployment of an appropriate ijtihad or interpretation that is directed towards Islamically faithful engagement with the realities of the current historical and geographical and socio-political contexts. And such ijtihad is both based upon, and directed towards, a tajid or renewal of Islam and of Muslims in which Muslims are once again called to live according to the authentic spirit Islam, whether doing so in majority Muslim societies or as minorities. Indeed, it is the argument of this paper there is benefit both to Muslims and the wider society, when a contribution is made to civil society and to public life that is based on clear Islamic perspectives and motivations, but which is offered, seen and accepted as one contribution alongside others which also have their own integrity. For the wider society, the challenge is to appreciate the great depth and breadth of resources that exist in the heritage of Islamic civilization; the contribution that Anatolian heritage can make through the full membership of Turkey in the European Union; and also the spiritual insights and alternative perspectives offered by Islam itself. For both Muslims and European societies and states, neither phantasmagoric and prejudicial enemy images, nor real threats to co-existence, can ultimately be overcome by security measures, however important such measures may be for the immediate safety of citizens and residents. Rather, whatever are the enemy images and whatever might be the enemy realities that exist, Muslims and others have no choice but to live alongside one another in Europe. The only question is about the way in which Muslims and others are currently living in European societies, and about how they will do so in the future. In responding to that question, this paper argues that resources from Fethullah Glen and the movement associated with his thinking offer important and transformative resources for religion in public life, and for the co-existence of people of diverse religions and philosophical beliefs.
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Motivating Peaceful Coexistence: Understanding Glen's Pluralism
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DIALOGUE AS A SOURCE FOR PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE BETWEEN MUSLIM AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS IN A SECULAR STATE
KARINA V. KOROSTELINA 397
Abstract In his speeches and writings, Fethullah Glen stresses the role of democracy, peace, dialogue, and tolerance in the development of peaceful co-existence between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples. Some Western concepts of national identity connect tolerance with the submission to the values of a majority. But, as Glen explains, Tolerance does not mean being influenced by others or joining them; it means accepting others as they are and knowing how to get along with them. He points out that dialogue decreases our disagreements with one another. This paper considers dialogue about the formation of common secular identity (national or regional) as a tool for the development of peaceful co-existence between Muslim and non-Muslim groups in a secular context. Such dialogue aims to develop a new dual identity, one which is connected with religious identity and the other which reflects membership in a secular nation. The paper describes the role of interfaith dialogue in developing tolerance and a common secular identity with respect to religious identity. Such a dialogue must involve participants in a discussion of the values, needs, and traditions of each religious group as well as the possibilities for the creation of a common identity concept that would satisfy and respect the values and needs of all religious groups. This new common identity resolves contradictions between region and secular state, changes peoples conceptions of themselves as members of different groups in conflict to members in a much more inclusive group, and makes attitudes toward other religious groups more positive, even if they have had a long history of offences. On the basis of a new positive balance of religious and secular values, of differences and similarities, all members of the new group can build positive attitudes toward each other.
1. Introduction In his speeches and writings, Fethullah Glen stresses the role of democracy, peace, dialogue, and tolerance in the development of peaceful co-existence between Muslim and non-Muslim populations. Some Western concepts of national identity connect tolerance with submission to the values of a majority. But, as Glen explains, Tolerance does not mean being influenced by others or joining them; it means accepting others as they are and knowing how to get along with them(Glen 2004a).
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Associate Professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, and a Fellow of the
European Research Center of Migration and Ethnic Relation. Prof. Korostelina has been a Fulbright New Century Scholar, a Kennan Institute Fellow and received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Soros Foundation, the United State Institute of Peace, US National Academy of Education, USDS, INTAS, IREX, and Council of Europe. Current interests: identity conflicts, the relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim populations, conflict resolution and identity management, history education in conflict and post-conflict societies. Recent publications: The Social Identity and Conflict: Structure, Dynamic and Implications (Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), Interrelations between National and Ethnic Identity and the Readiness for Conflict Behavior, in James Peacock (ed.) Identity Matters (Berghahn, 2007). She is an editor of Identity, Morality and Threat (Lexington, 2007) and Conflicts in Central Asia (Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 4, 2007).
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As Glen repeatedly stresses, to overcome violence and hate, people of different religions and faiths must develop an atmosphere of mutual respect and peaceful co-existence and engage in dialogue. He stresses that dialogue decreases our disagreements with one another. This paper analyzes Fethullah Glens approach to dialogue and tolerance and uses it as a framework for the development of a dialogue considering the formation of a common secular identity (national or regional). The paper argues that it is possible to negotiate different identities and shows how to employ dialogue as a tool for reconciling identity differences. The aim of a dialogue like this is the development of a peaceful co-existence between Muslim and non-Muslim groups within a secular context. Such a dialogue leads to the development of a new dual identity with one component connected to religious identity and another component that reflects membership in a secular nation. The paper concludes with a summary of the role of interfaith dialogue in the promotion of national and international tolerance, peace, and mutual understanding.
2. Glens Approach to Dialogue Since the early 1980s, Glen has developed an approach to inter-religious understanding and has formulated a framework for an Islamic approach to interfaith dialogue. Glen, in his career as a state preacher in Turkey and as an inspirational scholar and teacher to people throughout Turkey and beyond, has championed dialogue as a necessary commitment and activity in the contemporary world (Carroll 2007:12). Through his dialogue with other thinkers and writers with different perspectives, Glen showed the importance of dialogue in the process of revision of knowledge by focusing profoundly on the issues of peace and human life. Glen formulated his conception of dialogue within the framework of the religio-philosophical worldview of Islam, which protects humanity and categorically forbids any disrespect for it. Glen has a clear vision of human greatness, of the traits that define great human beings, those who actualize in themselves the highest and best of human potential (Carroll 2007:38). Even though Glen acknowledges the differences between the West and Muslim countries, he sees no innate incongruity between Islam and democracy in general. He shows that both approaches have a basic commitment to human beings and their essential rights. Thus, dialogue between people of different cultures and faiths could bring mutual understanding, respect, and dedication to justice. Dialogue means the coming together of two or more people to discuss certain issues, and thus the forming of a bond between these people. In that respect, we can call dialogue an activity that has human beings at its axis (Glen 2004b). Dialogue about identities does not require the acceptance of another groups way of life or values, nor does it provoke assimilation. It offers an opportunity to understand the beliefs, ideas, and positions of others, as well as the basis of their identity. Accepting all people as they are, regardless of who they are, does not mean putting believers and unbelievers on the same side of the scales. According to our way of thinking, the position of believers and unbelievers has its own specific value I have such strong feelings and thoughts about him this does not prevent me from entering into dialogue with someone who does not think or believe the same. (2002a). The conflicts between European governments and Muslim minorities in the past several years have made clear the necessity of dialogue about vital issues of tolerance, identity and religion in society. As Carroll stresses, We may isolate ourselves and craft the arc of our lives into familiar orbits of people who look, think, speak, believe, and pray like us, but such isolation or minimizing of difference is not workable over time. In todays world of global connectedness, we must develop the capacity to
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dialogue and create relatedness with people vastly different from us. Part of that project involves finding ideas, beliefs, purposes, projects, and so forth, on which we can achieve resonance with each other (Carroll 2007:11). In his article Tolerance in the Life of the Individual and Society, Fethullah Glen points out that Today, more than anything else, our society is in need of tolerance our citizens in European countries can only live in harmony in those countries by means of a vast atmosphere of tolerance (Glen 2004a). For Glen, dialogue, tolerance, and trust reinforce each other: tolerance is the acceptance of differences that arise from dialogue in order to pursue the larger goal of cooperation. Hostility is unacceptable. Relationships must be based on belief, love, mutual respect, assistance, and understanding instead of conflict and realization of personal interest. Social education encourages people to pursue lofty ideals and to strive for perfection, not just to run after their own desires. Right calls for unity, virtues bring mutual support and solidarity, and belief secures brotherhood and sisterhood. Encouraging the soul to attain perfection brings happiness in both worlds (Glen 2002a). Glen has not only helped develop the conception of interfaith dialogue, but has actively contributed to the development of concrete action across the globe. He personally brought about several initiatives that strengthened connections among people and cultures involved in conflict. "Our ongoing activities are for the good of all humanity. They should not be considered limited to our own country, Turkey" (Glen 1993). Thus, in the late 1980s, Glen initiated dialogue between Greeks and Turks in Turkey in order to discuss discrimination and prejudice against the Greeks. He established good relations with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew. This dialogue brought hope and positive change for Greeks in Turkey. Glen also supported education in Armenia and encouraged Turkish businessmen to establish a high school in Yerevan. A similar school was also established in Moscow. Activities such as these emphasize the prospects and importance of interfaith dialogue.
3. Negotiating Identities As theories show, people sharing the same identity believe they have similar fates and interests and, in some cases, share a mutual experience of deprivation and aggravation due to another group. Identity groups like these establish the common goals of improving their social situation and of reinforcing ingroup loyalty and support in order to achieve their aims. Radical religious identity leads to the clear recognition of intergroup differences and can even reinforce the willingness of group members to perceive others as enemies, encouraging them to fight for power and resources. The negotiation of a national identity aims at bringing together previously incompatible identities within a larger, common group concept that would be mutually acceptable to everyone and would connect all groups and parties. As Kelman (1997b, 2001) stresses, the possibility of negotiating and changing identity rests on two facts: (1) identities are not zero-sum concepts like territory and resources; and (2) as social constructs, they can be reconstructed and redefined. In fact, the reconstruction of identity is a regular, ongoing process in the life of any national group. Identities are commonly reconstructed, sometimes gradually and sometimes radically, as historical circumstances change, crises emerge, opportunities present themselves, or new elites come to the fore (Kelman 1997b:338). Undoubtedly, national identities contain some core elements that cannot be negotiated: a sense of peoplehood, attachment to the land, confidence in history, and commitment to culture and religion (Kelman 2001). In order to protect the essential components of identity, only a few central elements can be reconsidered and redefined. To reduce intergroup tensions and develop a common
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understanding, these elements can be discussed and negotiated during specially organized workshops. One of the basic assumptions of the theory of protracted identity-based conflict is that basic needs are not negotiable and that people need universal justice. In reality, basic needs and conceptions of justice are also identity-based concepts, and their meaning depends on the meaning and structure of particular ingroup identities. Security, freedom, and community have different meanings and are perceived in various ways among people with different social identities. Even for the same person, a basic human need can have a different meaning depending on which social identity is most salient for that individual at that moment. Conceptions of justice also differ among groups. For some, justice means revenge and prosecution of perpetrators; for others, it suggests reimbursement in terms of money, contributions, or labor. In other cases, people can be satisfied with truth and reconciliation committees where people who have committed violence confess and admit their crimes, and some communities are ready to forgive the perpetrators if they show their commitment to peace. The study conducted in Uganda (Pham et al. 2005) has showed that four groups within the country (the Gulu, Kitgum, Lira, and Soroti regions) have different perceptions of justice. Nearly half of the respondents perceived reconciliation as forgiveness (52%). Thirty-one percent defined justice as trials; however, the respondents in Soroti showed only 15 percent agreement with this statement. For one-third (35%) of people in that region, justice meant reconciliation, while only 12 percent and 3 percent of Gulu and Kitgum, respectively, agreed that justice was reconciliation. Eleven percent of all respondents associated justice with truth and fairness, while 22 percent of the respondents in Kitgum saw this association. Out of all the respondents in the study, 24 percent thought that reconciliation required confession, while 23 percent said that reconciliation was connected with togetherness, unity, and peace. Only 9 percent associated reconciliation with a traditional ceremony. The understanding of human rights also varied among the respondents: 29 percent said that human rights meant a life with peace and security and without fear; more than one-third of them mentioned freedom of speech, 21 percent mentioned dignity, 18 percent noted socioeconomic rights, 16 percent cited justice, and 12 percent mentioned freedom of movement. Understanding of the different meanings associated with concepts like justice, reconciliation and basic human needs can help to reconcile different identities, even conflictual ones. An identity negotiation workshop includes a dialogue which considers differences in the meaning of these basic concepts, and which develops ways for their accommodation. Because of variations in the perception of basic human needs and justice among different groups, it is possible to negotiate these concepts among groups in order to develop new common perceptions and a new identity which reconciles existing identities. The process of identity negotiation in a workshop setting has been described by Kelman (1982, 1997b, 2001, 2004) as an informal, unofficial progression of give-and-take among groups whose ideas of their respective national identities conflict with one another. In this paper I describe negotiation processes that are designed to create a new common identity or reconcile conflictual identities. Such a practice can be organized into different forms, ranging from mediation between ethnic groups in the self-determination process of creating a new nation, to the redefinition of identity through reconsidering history, and from negotiations among political leaders to discussion workshops in communities.
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Kelman (2001) describes negotiation of national identity within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He stresses that each group perceives its own relationship to land and history, the defining element of identity, as its exclusive right, rejecting the claims of the opposing group as illegitimate. To overcome this, the parties have to accept the possibility that certain elements of identity may be shared with the other, acknowledging that the other also has a profound attachment to the land, anchored in authentic historical ties to it (Kelman 2001:193). Sharing the land requires developing common elements of identity as well as an understanding that land can belong to two groups simultaneously. As Kelman describes in his work, the Israelis and Palestinians began to accept a shared concept of land but failed to perceive Jerusalem as a mutual element of their identities. The example of Morocco shows that national identity can be negotiated in two ways: through an exchange among the new nationalist elites, and by stressing characteristics and traditions common for all groups. A vision of a national Moroccan identity was developed during a negotiation led by the king as a compromise among various visions of the elite (for a more in-depth analysis, see Mezran 2001). One of the most important problems for newly independent Morocco was a confrontation between the mainly urban Arab Istiqlal and the Berber tribes of the interior. During its period of dominance, the Istiqlal government forced the assimilation of the Berbers into a larger Moroccan identity. A Berber was defined as a man who had never been to school, and the Istiqlal goal was to change the Berbers identity, language, and way of life to fit its Arab nationalist model. Between 1956 and 1958, the Istiqlal Party developed policies to impose a dominant Arab identity on the Berber parts of Morocco. All local leadership posts were held by Arabs; the Berber college, established by the French, was transformed into an ordinary school; Berber-language broadcasts were prohibited. These Istiqlal policies soon led to Berber uprisings against the Arab-dominated government and its policies. King Mohammed realized the importance of creating a common concept of Moroccos national identity and decided to act as a mediator in order to facilitate agreement around the various competing concepts of identity. The concept of national Moroccan identity had various meanings among different parties, including the Arabist party, the Islamist conservative portion of the Istiqlal party, the Democratic Party, the Berber socialist Popular Movement, and secular republican Marxist groups. Instead of acting as a party in this conflict over identity, Mohammed V declared himself a national leader and symbol of national unity. He aimed to develop a shared national identity and to unite fragmented elites under the monarchy. To make the negotiation process more compelling, the king himself intervened as the mediator at the center of numerous competing visions and interests. A series of meetings with the leaders of all the competing groups was organized to discuss visions of national identity and to find common ground for a final agreement. The basic concept of national identity which emerged included three main components: Islam, Arabism, and Moroccanism. Moroccan Islam became the central component of the uniting national identity. Mohammed V stressed the strong connection between Islamic and democratic principles, the innovative role of Islam in society, and its function as a basis for national identity. To mediate differences between the Arabist Istiqlal and the Berberist Popular Movement, the king developed the idea of Moroccan Arabism, stressing that the vast majority of Moroccans are not pure Arabs but rather Arabized Berbers. As a basis for territorial nationalism that would unite different elites, Mohammed V developed the conception of Moroccanism (Marocainet). This national
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territorial idea became the main content of a new Moroccan national identity that encompassed, but never denied, local Arab and Berber as well as tribal and urban identities. Using these three concepts, King Mohammed developed agreement among all the rival groups. He conducted his negotiations on the basis of an issue framework, approaching the development of a common identity by discussing single issues. As Mezran (2001) describes, in dealing with the democratization issue, he [the King] acted in such a way as to appease each party within this framework while asking concessions of others. Thus, in exchange for their consent to the formation of a National Consultative Assembly, the King offered to the left wing of the Istiqlal a wide agrarian reform. To the Berbers, after secret negotiations the monarch offered recognition of their political party, the Popular Movement. On another table, in exchange for their acquiescence on the Berber issue, the King offered to the Istiqlal the implementation of a wide campaign of Arabization through the school development program to be held in Arabic and to the Berbers wider representation in the army and in the bureaucracy. (156) Thus, while negotiating a new national identity, the king of Morocco invented the concept of Arabized Berbers and satisfied the most important concerns of Arabs (such as teaching Arabic in all schools) and Berbers (recognition of political party) within the framework of a unified nation (Byman 1997; Mezran 2001). In addition to being an integral part of nation building, the negotiation of identities is also essential in the process of developing peaceful coexistence between former adversaries. Conflictual identities have to be reconfigured to accommodate a new type of intergroup relations and to accept multiple meanings of events. Such a step-by-step process of re-creating identity, demanding the cooperation of both parties, characterized the negotiations between France and Germany after the World War II. These negotiations focused on overcoming the conflictual past and accentuating the two nations commonalities through a process of mutual reidentification: brothers who have engaged in a long fratricidal war (for a more in-depth analysis, see Rosoux 2001). For centuries, French and German people had negative stereotypes of one another, perceiving each other as unfriendly and aggressive. As Rosoux (2001) stresses, in the last century, the French associated the German and Prussian identities with barbarism, a concept further tied to Protestantism in the eyes of Catholics and militarism in the eyes of Republicans. The French considered the Germans physically and intellectually inferior as well as morally uncivilized. The Germans, on the other hand, accused the French of lacking fundamental public and private ethical norms and religious beliefs. The Germans perceived their nation as dynamic and prosperous, while describing France as weak and decadent. This mutual hatred and opposition were inflamed by numerous wars and conflicts. These negative perceptions became a significant part of each nations identity, stressing differences and opposition between the two nations. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer decided to redefine the relationship between France and Germany. This required a reconsideration of perceptions and memories, the reconstruction of a common past, as well as the development of a basis for the common interpretation of future events and collaborations. This process necessitated the acceptance of the complexity contradictions of the past as well as an understanding of the other partys meaning of events and actions. Between 1958 and 1962, de Gaulle and Adenauer had several meetings aimed at overcoming the negative perceptions rooted in past events and at achieving reconciliation. They stressed that the former enemies were determined to become friends. One of the most crucial steps was understanding
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and officially recognizing the sufferings of the other nation. The new changes in German national identity included a confrontation with the past and acceptance of responsibility for the most difficult episodes of national history. De Gaulle also recognized the negative actions of France and described Germany as a great nation. Both nations decided not to emphasize the conflictual past, but instead to highlight the solidarity that also characterized relations between them. The history of war and conflict between the French and Germans was redefined as a common past of collective suffering, and both nations became brothers who had mutually endured a common tragedy. In Ukraine, I conducted workshops with community and NGO leaders on negotiating the meaning of national identity and sources for the formation of a new common identity. The participants discussed the values, needs, and traditions of each ethnic group and the possibilities for the creation of a common identity concept that would satisfy and respect the values and needs of all groups. By using the appreciative inquiry method, I encouraged the participants to think about possible actions which might help lead to national identity formation. A catalogue of such actions was created and several activities were developed in the participants communities. Among them were celebrations of holidays of other ethnic groups, the Common Culture festival, and the Day of Crimea. One of the most amazing initiatives was the creation of a collage of the elements of Common Culture in several schools. Students drew different objects that characterized their culture and then created a wall collage that included all the ethnic groups of Ukraine.
4. Identity Dialogue Identity dialogue aims to transform dominant identities into multiple identities with polymodal meanings. The structure of narratives that are based on the perception of They as an enemy and that reflect negative attitudes, feeling, and stereotypes, can be replaced by a new structure rooted in a nonviolent self-image. This type of dialogue has to involve participants in a discussion of the values, needs, and traditions of each religious group and the possibilities for the creation of a common identity concept that would satisfy and respect the values and needs of all religious groups. This new common identity resolves contradictions between religion and the secular state, expands peoples conceptions of membership from exclusive groups in conflict to a single more inclusive group, and makes attitudes toward other religious groups more positive, even in spite of a long history of mutual offences. On the basis of a positive balance between religious and secular values as well as differences and similarities, all members of the new group develop positive attitudes and stereotypes of each other. The first step for identity reconstruction involves increasing awareness of the role of identity in conflicts, of We-They perceptions, and of collective axiology which leads to violence. Stories of different conflicts and violent actions, analyzed through the prism of identity, provide insights about salience and dominance of identity, alterations of perception, misbalanced and projective axiologies, and accepted or expected aggressive behaviors. It is important that the cases of conflict discussed at this stage of the workshop be dissimilar to the conflict in which the participants are themselves involved. Similar events and situations will provoke comparisons and strengthen negative attitudes and emotions. The more distinct the cases are from the participants experience, the lower the resistance to understanding the possibility of misperceptions. Thus, in Crimea, where conflict developed between Muslim Crimean Tartars and Orthodox Russians, the discussion of conflict in Bosnia exacerbates strong negative feelings and aggravates aggressive attitudes toward other ethnic
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groups. On the other hand, the discussion of conflicts perceived as very different from the Crimean situation, such as discriminative practices in the Dominican Republic or violence in Sudan and Rwanda, allows for more objective analysis which increases the understanding of the roots of vicious actions and which facilitates changes in perceptions, leading to the recognition of aggressive behaviors of ones own group. The recognition of the violent actions of ones ingroup, as well as the human rights of outgroups, poses a threat to ingroup identity, which rests on the idea of positive Wenegative They. As Glen stressed, Many Muslims, even educated and conscious ones, believe the West seeks to undermine Islam with ever-more subtle and sophisticated methods Western colonialism is remembered. The Ottoman State collapsed due to European attacks. Foreign invasions of Muslim lands were followed with great interest in Turkey. The gradual "transformation" of Islam into an ideology of conflict and reaction or into a party ideology also made people suspicious of Islam and Muslims For interfaith dialogue to succeed, we must forget the past, ignore polemics, and focus on common points (Glen 2002b). Dialogue also can change the negative perception of Muslims: This negative image has been fed to the world and now we must once more communicate the essential facet of Islam to those who are presumed to be civilized, using the principle of "gentle persuasion" (Glen 2004b). The acknowledgment of negative ingroup actions requires reviewing and reconceptualizing ingroup identity in ways that always invoke strong resistance. Ingroup members have a strong desire to defend their positive self-image and defy negative information that can destroy it. Stressing other positive components of the groups identity, such as cultural heritage, deep traditions, history of peaceful coexistence with other groups, and so on, can help preserve a high level of self-esteem and ingroup pride. Such narrative intervention has to emphasize the positive features in the self-description of an ingroup, such as peaceful people, value of tolerance, open-mindedness and understanding, and pleasure of forgiveness. These features always exist in the self-descriptions of all peoples and serve as powerful sources of self-esteem and pride. As Glen points out, I can and do say that peace, love, forgiveness, and tolerance are fundamental to Islam (Glen 2004c). He continues: Indeed, peace is of the utmost importance to Islam; fighting and war are only secondary occurrences which are bound to specific reasons and conditions. In that respect, we can say that if an environment of peace where all can live in peace and security cannot be achieved in this land, then it would be impossible for us to do any good service for society or for humanity (Glen 2004b). As Glen describes, Another aspect of establishing and maintaining dialogue is the necessity of increasing the interests we have in common with other people. In fact, even if the people we talk with are Jews and Christians, this approach still should be adopted and issues that can separate us should be avoided altogether (Glen 2004c). By stressing peaceful images of the ingroup and the outgroup simultaneously, dialogue can provoke supporting narratives that describe the ingroups peaceful history and glory as well as positive situations in interethnic relations. Such storytelling by different constituents of each group will reinforce these narratives through complimentary ideas. The positive emotions produced during the dialogue workshops will strengthen the formation of peaceful self-concepts, with an emphasis on tolerance, reconciliation, and goodwill. To turn such models into positive attitudes and actions, the intervener has to take the next step: form a common, overarching identity that can lead to the de-escalation of conflict. Common or shared
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identities can reduce intergroup hostility by minimizing attention to ethnic/racial/religious differences and instead creating the sense that all involved are one unit. Sources for an overarching identity can be found in a common geographic location, common national ideas, shared community problems, and so forth. For example, Glen shows the similarities of democracy and Islam: In democratic societies, people govern themselves as opposed to being ruled by someone above. The individual has priority over the community in this type of political system, being free to determine how to live his or her own life. Individualism is not absolute, though. People achieve a better existence by living within a society and this requires that they adjust and limit their freedom according to the criteria of social life... As Islam holds individuals and societies responsible for their own fate, people must be responsible for governing themselves (Glen 2002a). By asking questions about positive present and future developments and the possibilities of collaboration with others, the intervener can reinforce the formation of a common identity. The interveners task is to facilitate the creation of narratives of productive partnership, which are based on peaceful concepts of the ingroup and which emphasize possible positive images of outgroups. The formation of a new common identity is possible only if ingroup members do not perceive that the new overarching identity being created poses any danger or threat to their primary identity (ethnic/racial/religious).. If values, core ideas, or new identity needs contradict the possible (perceived) values and ideas of the existing identity, a new circle of violence can begin as a response to this sense of threat. The intervener has to construct the concept and perception of the new common identity very carefully, using narratives of existing collaboration and situations of successful teamwork. By asking such questions as What can we do together to make our future better? and What can we do for our children?, practitioners can shift the emphasis of narratives from past opposition to mutual understanding, mutual responsibilities, and the mutual defense of human rights among former enemies. In this case, the concepts of a peaceful ingroup and of a new We-ness will be developed simultaneously and will reinforce each other.
5. Conclusion In his teaching and writing, Glen constantly stresses the necessity of dialogue as the way to overcome differences and bring about peace to society. People with different ideas and thoughts are either going to seek ways of getting along by means of reconciliation or they will constantly fight with one another. In fact, our nation should have this dynamic today and should give it priority; it should represent tolerance to the world because our glorious ancestors captured the hearts of people by means of tolerance and became the protectors of the general peace. The longest period of peace in the Balkans and the Middle East, which have always been volatile areas, was realized with the enduring tolerance of our ancestors. From the moment that tolerance and those great representatives left history, this region became void of peace and contentmentAt the same time, our citizens in European countries can only live in harmony in those countries by means of a vast atmosphere of tolerance (Glen 2004a). The formation of a peaceful common identity requires a set of actions that includes increasing identity awareness, re-conceptualizing salient identities, negotiating a common identity concept, and forming a civic and multicultural meaning of national identity. The construction and understanding of national identity can be created by the facilitation and mediation of an ongoing dialogue among representatives of ethnic and religious groups. Glen points out essential
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components of the process of dialogue, including the recognition of the ingroups violent actions and the human rights of the outgroup, and focusing on common points. He also stresses the importance of emphasizing the positive features in the self-description of an ingroup, such as peaceful people, value of tolerance, open-mindedness and understanding, and pleasure of forgiveness. Glen argues that no interfaith dialogue will be successful without increasing interest in the values and ideas that people have in common and without an understanding of the similarities between democracy and Islam. Dialogue about the meaning and content of a common national identity also includes discussion of and planning for specific actions in specific regions that must be achieved in order for the successful formation of this identity to take place. The formation of a national identity with an emphasis on multicultural and civic meanings will help to construct a society with (1) equal rights for all ethnic groups and adequate resources to maintain their ethnic culture and (2) a distinctive non-ethnic civic culture with peaceful coexistence and civic responsibility among all citizens. A new common identity would include elements of the particular ethnic and religious identities and common goals, values, and aims. It would be based on the reconciliation of past grievances, with an emphasis on future mutual development and peaceful coexistence within the state. As Glen stresses we can say that if an environment of peace where all can live in peace and security cannot be achieved in this land, then it would be impossible for us to do any good service for society or for humanity (Glen 2004b).
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REFLECTIONS ON EUROPEAN MULTICULTURALISM, ISLAM AND PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: TARIQ RAMADAN AND FETHULLAH GLEN
ERKAN TOGUSLU 398
Abstract The Islamic scholars Fethullah Glen and Tariq Ramadan are two major personalities whose ideas and views are admired and valued by the Muslim community, especially its younger generations, in Europe. These two thinkers are calling for a better understanding of civilizational and religious pluralism, a moderate way of practising Islam, and the coexistence of different ethnic and religious affiliations. Their ideas promote universal human rights, tolerance and forgiveness among European peoples in contexts marked by mistrust, intolerance and fear. The assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Popes lecture in Regensburg, the cartoons affairs, revealed the heightening of tensions and how much European multicultural societies are in need peaceful voices to reduce the misunderstandings that create fearful communities on the brink of open hostilities. Both these scholars affirm the role of democracy, and speak out against terrorism, racism, Islamophobia and prejudice, and in favour of cultural pluralism. This paper analyses the circulation of their ideas among the younger generation, their education and dialogue initiatives, and the cassettes of lectures that have opened up a space where ideas about human civic responsibility, democracy, citizenship, pluralism, dialogue and tolerance can take root.
1. Introduction In recent years questions take on particular importance between Muslims and western societies that these issues not only lead Muslims to reformulate things but also the interaction between Islam and Europe in spaces, discursive parallel arenas as describes Frazer,399 and The nature of Muslims presence in Europe is changing and we cannot identify Europeans Muslim temporary guest worker. Gle notes that the interpenetration and interaction make close West and East, Islam and Europe and give the new challenges.400 As a result of this new phenomena, Islam cannot only still link to Arabs, Turks, Pakistanis, it becomes as a European phenomena. Muslims are now permanent part of Western civilization, however the history of relations between Europe and Islam is dated till 7th century, begun with conquest of Spain by Omayyads and from east the Turkish pressure, but this presence is obviously limited and did not touch the whole Europe. The phenomena of growing Muslim presence in Europe is a new phenomena, is looked with new visibility like as Muslim headscarf, Muslim schools, market, the everyday life practices. In major European capital cities, the Muslim populations presence and visibility is clearly seen. The demographical aspect, the increase of later,
398
Currently studying for PhD in sociology at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Research interests:
the production of Islamic actors in the public sphere, pietist movements such as the Fethullah Glen movement, interactions between Muslim and Christians in a secular context.
399
Nancy Fraser,. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" in Nilfer Gle, Interpntrations. L'Islam et l'Europe, Paris, Galaade Editions, 2005
Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, (ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 109-142.
400
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the existence of different ethnics Muslims among European societies are dealing with coexistence, plurality, integration, terrorism, democracy, the ability of habits and manners in public life and nowadays Islam and Muslim actors through their visibility and demands shape European mind and history. They take part the symbolic role in definition of European identity by creating new debates and challenges that Europe faces today as the relation between state and religion, the place of sacred in the common public sphere, the collective European identity. The Muslim factor is not only considered a geographical and demographical terms, the new dimension in a multicultural Europe offer a range of opportunities containing new challenges for new Europe. Europes engagement with enlightenment is not achieved; this communal project is continued as a response inherited with intellectual, practical of Islamic-Muslim occurrence. Nevertheless, the new issues relating the place of religion, especially Islam in Europe, the western societies seem to pursue a closer Union. The debate issue Turkish membership candidate mention us this question; the political and religious tolerance, European identity, the relation between sacred and profane. Multiple face of Islam, even ethnic diversity, cleavages due sociopolitical and generational differences, is at the core of the institution of Islam en Europe. Europes Muslims is divided in several groups and dont form a monolithic group.401 New young Muslim generation choose to identify themselves with their country in which they live and raise, prefer to speak in French, English or Dutch. The emergence of Islamic identities with national local loyalty is reinforced and enhanced by schooling, working. Bayat remarks the shift from the discourse of politicization of Islam to personal pietism, ethics after 11 September terrorists attacks.402 In this new period of accentuation on pietism and on ethic, the new Islamic faces in challenging with ancient discourses. Glens and Ramadans views, their typology and portrait as new pioneer of Islam in secular context remain us the shifting of pioneers of Islamic thinkers and thinking. The emergence of new personalities is quiet different in terms of the evaluation of the West, nationalization, ijtihad, coexistence between non Muslims while the first generation like Mawdudi, Al-Banna emphasizes on anti imperialism and against westernization, the second group of Islamic intellectuals speak about the coexistence between East and West, the pluralism, the democracy and human rights.
2. Making of Muslim Youth and the New Islamic Intellectuals: Speaking for Western Muslims After a traditional Islamic education in eastern medreses and mosque school, he continued his formation at secular school. This was fallowed the official preacher in Religious affairs. Glen makes speak about him since the nineties when he was appeared in public secular sphere during the interfaith dinner organized by the journalist and writer foundation affiliated Glen movement.403 These dinners contribute gathering people from various religious, political and ideological identities. Since 1998, he lives a voluntary exile in the United States after laics pressure. His close relations with political leaders, his charisma, and his sermons eloquent make him surfer on the media. As a matter of fact, his sphere of activity should have increased over the past years. He shows a capacity to adopt his discourses and speeches in variable secular context, having a talent to fascinate his supporters,
401 402 403
Lela BABES, L'islam positif. La religion des jeunes musulmans de France, Editions de l'Atelier, Paris, 1997. Asef Bayat, Piety, Privilege and Egyptian Youths, ISIM Newsletter 10, July 2002. For more information see www.gyv.org.tr
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spreading among the young university students and businessman. Fascinating people by his tears during his sermons, his ability to contact and circulate his message reveals new Islamic intellectual character shaped Islamic discourse and emotional aspect that form his spiritual dimension. Raised in conservative pious family, received religious education and secular teaching, acquiring these two spheres, offer him the possibility to speak about different themes. After secular project and forced laicization and modernization by the new rulers of Turkish Republic which deligitimate and decline the ulamas powers replaced by the new bureaucrates elites whose formation is culturally and socially differentiate. On this point, zdalga notes: (Glen) adopts a solid, conventional Hanafi/Sunni understanding of the religious traditions. So it does not seem to be the content of the religious interpretation as such, but the very existence of a new relatively strong group, filled with religious fervor and claiming a place in the public arena that annoys the establishment in Turkey radical margins who see this as a threat to their ideology.404 His profile is closer to the alim-arif typology. Gaborieau indicates oulema-soufi type that is seen in the same character.405 A heuristic glance at Glens works and speeches enable us to define him as arif-alim who gather two poles which are called zahiri (exoteric) and batini (esoteric). Glen plays the double role and figure: arif and alim, spiritual and rational, the sacred and the profane. This two figures intermingle in an extricable way as noting Watt that many soufis were retired from this world, at the same time a great astonishing number of Sufis were lawyer, Muslim scholars, scientist like AlQusahyri, on of the great personage soufi at his time, was a shafite lawyer.406 Glens sermons are marked by a strong emotion, sacred tears which accompany pain and psychic state that encourages the cry of people who are present in his sermon. Through this emotional aspect relating with esoteric style of interpretation of Quran, in various subjects, Glen refers a spiritual knowledge (marifa), is pointed out. He emphasizes this sufistic way of interpretation, while Ramadans discourse is outlined by an academic critical position and scholars approach, Glen develops a language shaped sufistic idioms, narrations. Ramadan was born in Geneva, a Swiss Muslim. His grandfather Hasan al-Banna was the founder of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his father was also is a figure in that community and exiled to Switzerland. He studied philosophy, French literature, social scinces and Islamic studies. He is an advisor in many governments and teaching in many universities as a visiting professeur. His works emphasize on Islamic studies, theology and European Muslims and he endeavors the reinterpretation of Islam on many issues. Ramadans use of fluent English and French is very influent on young Muslims. Ramadan wants to penetrate in European public sphere via political critics, his Islamic talent and capacity. He uses a political language which is not contradictory to the principles of democracy and the rule of law. This critical and reactionary language and discourse is different from the Glens discourse which is not
404
zdalga, Redeemer or Outsider? The Glen Community in the Civilizing Process, in Islam in Contemporary Turkey: Marc Gaborieau et Malika Zeghal, Autorits religieuses en islam , Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 125
The Contributions of Fethullah Glen, The Muslim World, V. 95, N. 3, 2005, p. 441
405
(2004) Autorit religieuses en islam, p. 7 and Ahmet Turan Alkan, Entellektel ile Arifin Kesime Noktas, in Ufuk Turu, op.cit, p. 202-203
406
W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual, A study of al-Ghazali, Edinburg, Edinburg University Press, 1971, p. 128
www.muslimphilosophy.com/gz/articles/watt-p1.htm
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protest. While Glens discourse outlines the moral values to the fulfillment of Muslims morality through the formation of ethical principles and he opposes to violence, thus the main aim is to develop the inner life of all Muslims, in Ramadans writings we see the critical approach which is result of his scholar background. The controversial multifaced discourse of Glen and Ramadan is hard to analyze and classify, so people call them double faced, making takiyya, having a hidden agenda, hypocrite.407 One claims that they threaten the universal democratic values, human rights by hiding their real identity and strategy concerning islamization of people. To followers, they are man of dialogue and Islamic reformer who want to reformulate Islamic issues dealing with new questions in secular world. Both of them refused that they are called islamist. Their reflects about putting a distance vis--vis islamists and political Islam are lacking in their approach. The Europe and Occident is major theme seens in his writings. He believed that the crusades, European colonialism had influenced Muslim community and Westernization have a deep impact on Muslim societies. This appearance of a new charismatic leader testifies in modern society where secular orientation is dominant in cultural, political and scientific fields. They push their faith oriented views in hosted societies and Muslims daily life. Among the secular elites and intellectuals, the modern Islamic figures are raised and a new style of Muslim intellectual emerged. These new could be identified authentically Islamic and a continuation of the radical tajdid tradition in Islam. In practice, they built on the accomplishments of the early Islamic modernists and the new-style Muslim associations. but at the same time, went far beyond the traditionalism of the remaining conservative ulama establishment.408 Thus Fethullah Glen and Ramadan assume this role of old traditional ulema left by the secular politics and they represent an orthodox modern Islam. In turkey, at the end of Ottoman Empire, this new Islamic corps appears and starts from Tanzimad period marked by young ottomans who are identified as bureaucrats-ulemas.409
3. Ijtihad and Islamic Renaissance Ijtihad is an important element of renewal in Islamic history and tradition through which the ulema play a crucial role to determine the needs in modern time.410 They speak about Islamic renaissance in
407
Lionel Favrot, Tariq Ramadan dvoil, Lyon, Lyon Mag, 2004. Caroline Fourest, Frre Tariq : discours stratgie et
mthode de Tariq Ramadan, Paris, Grasset, 2004. For Glen see Faik Bulut, Kim Bu Fethullah Glen : Dn, Bugn, Hedefi (Who is Fethullah Glen ? His Past, Today and Target), Istanbul, Ozan Yaynclk, 1998 and Hikmet etinkaya, Fethullah Glenin Krk Yllk Serveni (The 40 years adventure of Fethullah Glen) , Istanbul, Gnizi Yaynclk, 2004.
408 409
John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Makers of contemporary Islam, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 20 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: custodians of change, Princeton, Princeton University John O. Voll, Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islah, in Voices of Resurgent Islam, John L.
Press, 2002
410
Esposito (edt), New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 32-47, 1983
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Muslim world that the Muslim generation need to develop consisting the rediscovery of human values and morals, knowledge, fine arts, religious thought in a new manner. Glen says: We are in search of an awakening of reason, as well as of heart, spirit and mind. Yet, if it possible to assume a harvest fruits of efforts and works resulting from this.411 Thus, Islamic renaissance in modern world give intellectual rebirth. Beside his positive approach to the reformulation and a new way to understand Islamic interpretation, he outlines some of the hindrances and the reasons why ijtihad have been forgotten and was lost: political oppression, inner struggles, the misuse of the institution of ijtihad, an extreme trust in the present legal system, the denial of reform, the blindness caused by the dominant monotonous present system of the time. He says also that the door of ijtihad has never been closed. After saying some reasons why the door of ijtihad was considered closed, Glen expects a great revival of religion and religiosity in Islamic world. The similar motivation is claimed and formulated in Ramadans writings. He described an open mind and tolerant Islam promotes enlightenment of Muslim world. Referring the European Muslim is understood as a way of Modern Islam. He notes a reflexive approach to interpret and reconstruct Islamic knowledge. a new, positive and constructive posture which relies on a fine comprehension of Islams priorities, a clear vision of what is absolute definitively fixed and what is subject to change and adopting412 We took the example of ijtihad and the question of dar al-harb and dar al-islam that are reformulated by Glen and Ramadan to understand how they apply Islamic knowledge on modern not only theological, also social and cultural issues. In western societies, this traditional binary formulation does not respond Muslims demands. On this issue, Glen uses term of dar al-hizmet which is an intention to serve Islam by presenting good example, then one or she has to obey the lex loci, to respect others rights and to be just, and has to disregard discussions of dar al-harb and dar al-Islam.413 Before giving his reflection on ijtihad on this issue, Ramadan identifies the essential elements of Muslim personality and identity.414 His treatment and analyze on Muslim personality serve us why he supports a renewal on this binary opposite conception. The first element is faith and spirituality which is manifested in several cases by practice that is the second element. Practices perform Muslims faith like praying, fasting. Thirdly, the protection of human being based on respect and toleration that provide the recognition of humankind. Freedom is also indicated as an important element. The fifth element is based on participation on social affairs which means, for Ramadan, to act in favor of his society and environment. The analysis of this five elements of muslim blooming identity goes alongside with rights and responsibility. The European arena appears a land and a space within which Muslims can profess their faith; participate in social affairs, in which Muslim take care the social and
411 412 413
Glen, in Muslim World, op. cit., p. 458 Tariq Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, Leicester, The Islamic Foundation, 1999, p. 101 Ihsan Ylmaz, Ijtihad and Tajdid by Conduct, in Turkish Islam and Secular State, The Glen Movement, M Hakan Ramadan, ibid, pp. 132-134
Yavuz, John L. Esposito (edts), New York, Syracuse University Press, 2003
414
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political responsibility. Ramadan emphasizes on Fiqh and Islamic tradition to find a way to preserve the Muslims spirituality and identity. He does not refer to the notion of dar (abode) and this old binary geographical representation. In Ramadans formulation, Western societies have a crucial role and a specific space which leads Muslims to express their faith and Islamic message. Muslims enforce to create in this new space to avoid reactive and overcautious attitudes and to develop a feeling of self-confidence, based on a deep sense of responsibility.415 The treatise of complexity of sciences in contemporary context remains main hindrance, Ramadan argues that ijtihad is the most important instrument to reinterpretation et reconstruction of Islam.416 Ramadan urges the necessity of ijtihad in specific situation, giving example Muslim Europeans, dealing with the participation of women in public life, the distinguish of geographical boundaries as dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, foods, mosques, cemeteries, hospitals, schools, headscarf which have occupied detailed points of European Muslims life. The debate on definition Muslim land and non-muslim land based an old conception and thought which, in Ramadans views, is not sufficient to draw out the dilemma of binary vision of world. Applying this binary model is a methodological mistake that increase the complexity of problem.417 Thus, Ramadan discusses old conceptions in new context examining their ability and utility in new political, economical and social issues. Identified three observations, the westernization as a model and closed lies between Muslim and European countries, Muslim generation who live in western societies and the time of diversity and complexity which prevent a simplistic vision, force to find the required way and solution to act with accordance Muslims belief and with environment. The internalization of matter pushes to Muslim leaders and scholars to debate not only Islamic issues, but to intend coexistence among variable thoughts. Contrary some ulama who accept that the old distinguish of dar al-islam and dar al-harb is still relevant and exist, like Hizb at-Tahrir movement or Tabligh movement in Europe who defend applying of this classification following literally, Glen and Ramadan are in favor of reformulation, at least they are calling redebate on this concepts. After discussed the traditional appellations, Ramadan suggest the concept of shada (testimony) which seems him more applicable in a global period, which permits Muslims to participate and involve in their society. This shahada is not only a matter of speech. A Muslim is the one who believes and acts consequently and consistently. Those who attain to Faith and do good works, as we read in the Quran, stresses the fact that the shahada has an inevitable impact on the actions of the Muslim whatever society he/she lives in. To observe the shahada signifies being involved in the society in all fields where need requires it: unemployment, marginalization, delinquency, etc. This also means being engaged in those processes which could lead to a
415 416 417
Ramadan, p. 150 Ramadan, p. 89 Ramadan p. 127
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positive reform of both the institutions and the legal, economic, social and political system in order to bring about more justice and a real popular participation at grassroots level.418 In this sense, referring to term shada, Ramadan is overlapping the ancient forms of binary opposition to demonstrate a further overture for Muslims. Analyzing and classifying on conditions and qualities required to become a mujtahid and to make an ijtihad, Ramadans position is rather opaque then Glens, nevertheless Glen does not claim that the gate of ijtihad is have been closed.
4. European Islam and Citizenship Muslims who have grown up in Western Europe, themselves think about the implication of their faith and daily practice which continue to form theirs lives and it is evident that Muslims face with issues, thus they research new approach for their questions to exit increasingly deeply about their dilemma: between European and Muslim.419 It is not only an identity and So called faith based movement, Glen movement seeks to escape the minority status and isolation of Muslim in Western societies. In last years, Glens followers who inspired his ideas, establish non denominational educational and dialogue activities all around world. Creating private schools, foundations and organizing intercultural activities are serving to make connection between Muslims and non Muslim. Glen encourages hi followers and sympathizers to achieve the exemplarity of god Muslim, being devote and ascetic in their daily life. The essential element of integration used by the movement is education. Although these schools do not give religious courses, the essential orientation is based on the teaching of ethics420. Glen stresses on education inspired an ethical vision rooted in Islam but not limited in its expression to sympathizers of the umma (community).421 The Glens inspired schools education style aims to respond the question of how to generate an ethical human with common values. Teaching is considered a holy duty422 to achieve the finality to demonstrate the right way of ethical dimension of life with daily conduct as many scholars indicate the methods applied in schools.423 Many scholars, like Balci and Michel, note that the coexistence of pupils comes from different religious, ethnic origins.424 The choice of secular education rather than religious Quranic school mainly is adopted in Glens inspired schools to find common spaces with host society which provide an enormous impact to diminish Muslims profiles in western context. Ramadan says that his first aim is reconciliation between two sides, firstly Muslims can profess their faith and loyal to the secular principles and he wants to show the comptability of Islam and Muslim ethics in secular western societies.425 Thus, Muslims become an actor in public space where people
418 419 420 421 422 423
Ramadan, p. 147 Robert J. Pauly, Islam in Europe: Integration or Marginalization? Burlington, VT Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Bekim Agai, The Glen Movements Islamic Ethic of Education , in Esposito and Yavuz, op.cit, p. 49 Thomas Michel, Fethullah Glen as Educator, in Esposito and Yavuz (edts), p. 82 Agai, op. cit, p. 58 zdalga, Elisabeth, Worldly ascetism in islamic casting Fethullah Glen's inspired piety and activisms, Michel, op.cit. The Christian Science Monitor, 31 October 2006
in.Critique:Journal for critical studies of the Middle East, n. 17, septembre 2000 and Balc, op.cit, p. 221
424 425
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bring common to debate and formulate a common good. Muslim identity operates in publicly through their demands with construction of spaces, visibility.
5. Civility That Matters Muslim actors participate in western social imaginary giving new debates. The presence of Islam is shaping secular modern life and practices through the visibility of body, discourse. Penetrating in public sphere, they create inconvenient asymmetric relations426 and they are seeking to perform their manners and habits in Europeanization process. Muslims in Western Europe is confronted; firstly; they immersed deeply in a secularized societies. Paralell of the loose of structuring capacity of the religion, Islam take his part in this secularized situation and paradoxically religious feelings are recombined and manifested in terms of enthusiasm, emotion.427 Secondly, the visibility of Muslim community in public sphere create the challenge which faced Muslims of western societies, or in Europe, the dominant religious and cultural figure is Christianity, even with his plurality in different forms. In this sense, Glen movement certainly contribute Muslims assertion with their own distinctiveness, it is not an assimilations and symmetric project of modernization. Inspired by the Sufistic terminology, the followers elaborate a language to strengthen their good conduct. One is an ascetic body, consciously or unconsciously, that affects ones acts such as eating, drinking, going to bed and getting up, talking and keeping silent, remaining in solitude or with people. Fashioned and displayed, the ascetic adab rules govern everyday life of the believers. The pleasure in this world is considered ephemeral and the followers do not pursue the hedonism because they believe that they are sent to this world to enhance his devotion and seek Gods contentment. He has the idea that he will not stay for a long time here in this world for the reason that the essential duty is in the terrestrial world, therefore, it is necessary to move away from cheerfulness, joy, and temporary happiness to live the eternal life. The hedonism kills the idealism of the sympathizers. Against the hedonism, the sympathizers follow the value of altruism which Glen regards as the criteria of life according to the ideal man which requires the effort of follower as developing the detachment from the pleasure and seductive needs, except that the intellectual and aesthetic dimension is allowed and accepted.428 Ramadan remarks profession of faith in secular modern world that makes matter. The public space has become non-religious, if not sometimes anti-religious, and growing numbers of Believers find it difficult to face this situation. the power of attraction of the public sphere, with its sacred values founded on individualism, money and entertainment is so powerful and efficient that it seems illusory to imagine that any kind of resistance might be possible.429 Glens and Ramadan views as a third way, via dialog, affect the problem between sacred and religious that is considered a secularization on Muslims practices and faith.
426 427
Gle, op. cit. Danile HERVIEU-LEGER, Le plerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement, Flammarion, coll. " Essais ", Paris, 1999
and also Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World, Resurgent Religion in World Politics, Washington, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999
428 429
Fethullah Glen, kindi Yamurlar, stanbul, Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakf yaynlar, 2006, p. 187 Ramadan, To Be, op. cit, p. 216
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6. A Possible Peaceful Coexistence The picture of Islam presented via events, the political situation, and manipulation raise the prejudices and meta-discourse about Islam, binary against western societies and Muslims.430 To involve and prevent from this manipulation, Muslim should admit in loyal field to protect theirs rights and have a consistent dialogue with their neighbours, so Muslims can to modify the negative image of Islam. Glens inspired dialogue and educational activities serve the recognition of Muslims in host society.431 Glen encourages interfaith dialogue among different representants of religions. In his early publication of The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue, he demonstrates his interest and commitment to interfaith dialogue. In Turkey and via dialogue foundations, he establishes a major force in dialogue. His writings and encouragement, concern set out the principles for his followers to participate in dialogue and social action. He is e mentor, nevertheless lacking a scholar approach to the study of comparative religions, his argument produce a practical aspect to a response for the difficulties of his engagement, provides the critics of nationalist and conservators. 432 In terms of human responsibility which is seen to transcending theological and civilizational differences and a realization of studying on common good, his endeavour remarks the notion of civility logic.433 He presumes that the people whatever his faith, race and nation, have much in common and forgot the ancient misunderstanding and conflicts. He invites to debate and find solution against poverty, environment questions, and undeniable human rights. This civic logic contains to involve in society, diminish the borders with others. Ramadan also urges that it is becoming urgent that Muslims rediscover the power of unity not only between Muslims and it is not sufficient but he remarks the urgent of engagement in dialogue and collaboration with others. But at least, he emphasizes the intra community dialogue.434
430
Van P.S. Koningsveld and W. Shadid, The Negative Image of Islam and Muslims in the West: Causes and Solution in
Shadid, W & P.S. van Koningsveld, P.S (eds).Religious Freedom and the Neutrality of the State: The Position of Islam in the European Union. Leuven, 2002, pp. 174-196.
431
Anne-Sophie Lamine notes that in dialogue activities the main issues debated and the final target is mutual recognition
of altrite which play a central role in definition of modern subject. Anne Sophie Lamine, La coexistence des Dieux, Pluralit religieuse et lacit, Paris, Puf, 2004
432 433 434
Anne-Sophie Lamine, op. cit Ibid Ramadan, To Be..., p. 220
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INTERFAITH DIALOGUE AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC THOUGHT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FETHULLAH GLEN AND ABDUL KARIM SOROUSH
HEYDAR SHADI 435
Abstract Contemporary Muslim scholars hold different positions on religious pluralism and tolerance; some (so-called fundamentalists) are exclusivist and regard Islam as the only true religion and reject the religious pluralism and tolerance, others (so-called traditionalists and modernists) believe that religious pluralism and tolerance are acceptable in Islam. Traditionalists mainly rely on Islamic concepts and Sufism and generally do not emphasize or explicitly endorse pluralism, preferring to promote only the religious virtue of religious tolerance. The modernists on the other hand use modern Western philosophical theories and explicitly espouse religious pluralism. This article discusses the approaches, sources and arguments of Fethullah Glen and Abdul Karim Soroush as contemporary Muslim scholars on religious pluralism and tolerance. It concludes that both thinkers emphasize the necessity of peaceful communication with the followers of other religions, as well as with secular groups, and also both use theological and Sufi sources. However there are some differences between them. While Soroush mainly relies on epistemological arguments, Glen reasons as a pragmatist. Also, Glen, adhering to the traditional interpretation of Islam, believes in Islams superior position. Soroush departs from the traditional interpretation of Islam and admits to the same truth of other religions. Perhaps because of his adherence to the traditional interpretations of religion, Glen has been more successful than Dr. Soroush in winning a following among people of his own country and around the world. Nevertheless, the practical outcome of both thinkers positions is the same and both espouse tolerance and peaceful co-existence with the followers of other religions.
1. Introduction Religious pluralism and tolerance is one of the basic foundations of a civil society. It is the belief that no religion, singularly, has a monopoly of the truth or of the life that leads to salvation. Religious pluralism establishes the possibility of tolerance and co-existence of followers of different religions and cultures (Hick 1993)
435
Currently doing a PhD in of Islamic Studies in Erfurt University, Germany. (Graduate of the Seminary of Qom (1996), he
also holds a BA from Mofid University (2000) and an MA from Tehran University (2003), whre his dissertation was a critique of modernity based on Charles Taylors Three Malaises of Modernity.) He has worked as researcher in Research Center of Iranian Radio & TV Organization (20022003), as lecturer in Philosophy and Islamic Thought in Jami` University, Tehran (20042007) and the Bioethics Institute of Tehran University (20032007). Among his recent papers are: Theological Critique of Jon Hicks Religious Pluralism, Seminary and University Quarterly, 3 (2001); The Ethics of Authenticity, Name-ye Farhang, 14/53 (2004); Modernism and Postmodernism (2004); Four Principles of Bioethics from the Islamic Point of View, Iranian Journal of Diabetes and Lipid Disorders, 6 (2006); Euthanasia: an Islamic Point of View, American Journal of Bioethics, 7/ 4 (2007); Iran's Reaction to the Popes Speech at Regensburg University, The Conference of Islamic Worlds Reaction to Popes Speech (Eichsttt, 2007).
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Islam, one of the main religions of the world, is often labeled exclusivist and accordingly intolerant (Mesalmany 2006). Here it is important to examine what is the real attitude of Islam towards pluralism and tolerance? Is there a pluralistic interpretation of Islam? Muslim scholars have different views on this subject. Among the three main intellectual movements in Islamic world (Kurzman 1998: 3), fundamentalists reject religious pluralism and tolerance, and consider it as an aspect of the ideological war of the western world (Mesbah Yazdi 2002.14) but both traditionalists and modernists accept it, though traditionalists generally do not emphasize and specify pluralism and prefer to accept solely the religious tolerance. Traditionalists mainly rely on Islamic transcripts and Sufism, but modernists use modern western philosophical theories such as Kants noman-phenomena theory and John Hicks religious pluralism theory. This article is a short review of the approaches, sources and arguments of Fethullah Glen and Abdul Karim Soroush as two contemporary Muslim scholars on religious pluralism and tolerance.
2. Fethullah Glens Views on Religious Pluralism and Tolerance 2.1. Definition and Background Glen believes in the religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue and has several important activities and achievements in this field. In 1999, his paper The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue was presented to the Parliament of Worlds Religions in Cape Town. He maintains that dialogue is a must and that people, regardless of nation or political borders, have far more in common than they realize (Glen 2005b: IX). He suggests tolerance and dialogue as two keys to provide peace in society. And in his view, "no one should condemn another for being a member of a religion or scold him for being an atheist (Bulent and Omer 2000). He personally visited religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron. (Wikipedia, Fethullah Glen) and (Glen 2004: XIII) Glen realized a very important progress in interfaith dialogue by establishing Foundation of Writers and Journalists which he is its honorary chairman. This foundation, by its activities including annual meetings, has reconciled different intellectual movements in Turkey. In the meetings the representatives of different movements are invited.
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2.2. Arguments In Glens opinion interfaith dialogue has five main reasons: Saving Modern Human from Materialism The first reason of Glen for interfaith dialogue is cooperation among religions in saving modern man from materialism which has deprived human from the original, natural, and harmonic life. He believes that materialist worldview which limits religions influence in contemporary social life, is the main cause of modern humans problems. According to Glens view social harmony and peace with nature, between people, and within the individual only can come about when the material and spiritual realms are reconciled. Peace with nature, peace and justice in society, and personal integrity are possible when one is at peace with Heaven. Religion reconciles natureDivine Books, the materialthe spiritual. (Glen 2000: 4-9) The Same Source and Nature of All Religions The second reason of interfaith dialogue from Glens point of view is the very nature of religion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even Hinduism and other world religions accept the same source for themselves, and, including Buddhism, pursue the same goal. He states: as a Muslim, I accept all Prophets and Books sent to different peoples throughout history, and regard belief in them as an essential principle of being Muslim. A Muslim is a true follower of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and all other Prophets. Not believing in one Prophet or Book means that one is not a Muslim. Thus we acknowledge the oneness and basic unity of religion, which is a symphony of Gods blessings and mercy, and the universality of belief in religion. So, religion is a system of belief embracing all races and all beliefs, a road bringing everyone together in brotherhood. (Glen, 2004: 376) Glen argues that regardless of how their adherents implement their faith in their daily lives, such generally accepted values as love, respect, tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, human rights, peace, brotherhood, and freedom are exalted by religion. Most of them are accorded with the highest precedence in the messages brought by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, as well as in the messages of Buddha and even Zarathustra, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, and the Hindu scholars. Glens metaphor is very helpful to understand his true belief in diversity. He likens the diversity of religion to a symphony and names all religions as a symphony of Gods blessings and mercy. Of course, the diversity of a collection of notes and instruments brought together in a collaborative unity that characterizes a symphony. Musical harmony cannot consist of people playing the same notes and a symphony cannot be played by a collection of people all playing the same instrument (Kurtz 2005: 375). Qurans Call to Interfaith Dialogue In addition to rational reasons for the necessity of interfaith dialogue, Glen refers to Verses of Quran and Prophets deeds: Fourteen centuries ago, Islam made the greatest ecumenical call the world has ever seen. The Quran calls the People of the Book (Christians and Jews primarily): Say: "O People of the Book! Come to common terms as between us and you: that we worship none but God; that we associate no partners with Him; that we take not, from among ourselves lords and patrons other than God." If then they turn back, say you: "Bear witness that we are Muslims (i.e., those who have surrendered to Gods Will). (Quran 3:64) This call comes in the ninth year of the Hijra. A very important point is that in case this call was rejected, Muslims were to adopt the attitude expressed in
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another sura: "Your religion is for you; my religion is for me." That is, if you do not accept this call, we have surrendered to God. We will continue on the path we have accepted and leave you to go on your own path" (Glen 2000: 5). Religious Tolerance as the Request of Human Life Glen believes that diversity is a necessary part of human life and if we do not respect the diversity and unlikely desire to unify all people under one religion we will be engaged in an unlimited net of conflicts: Different beliefs, races, customs and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village. Each individual is like a unique realm unto themselves; therefore the desire for all humanity to be similar to one another is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. For this reason, the peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Otherwise, it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end.(Weller 2006: 77). Love as the Essence of Being Requests Tolerance Inspired from Sufism as the inner side of Islam, Glen insists on love as the essence of being; Love is the most essential element of every being, and it is the most radiant light, and it is the greatest power; able to resist and overcome all else. (Glen, 2004: 1) Sufism emphasizes on love as a central attribute of a believer and focuses on love for others. Glen especially is influenced by Turkish Sufis and he follows a line that stretches from Yesevi to Rumi, then from Yunus to Haci Bektas-i Veli. Glen, following this very basis, re-generates this tolerant interpretation and understanding of MuslimTurkish Sufism within contemporary circumstances. He insists that Love is the most essential element in every being, and it is a most radiant light and a great power which can resist and overcome every force. (Glen 2004: IX). Glen uses the metaphor of the famous Sufi poet Mawlana Rumi to explain how one can be both rooted in ones own tradition, but open to others: such a person is like a compass with one foot well-established in the center of belief and Islam and the other foot with people of many nations. (Kurtz 2005: 375-7). Glen in his book Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance argues on the necessity of love in the words of the famous Turkish poet Yunus, loving the created simply because of the Creator. He explains that every creator, for example, a painter loves his/her creatures, so God loves all creature especially humans, and we must love humans at least as the Gods creatures. (Glen, 2004: 46) Glen is himself a true Sufi when says: Applaud the good for their goodness; appreciate those who have believing hearts; be kind to the believers. Approach unbelievers so gently that their envy and hatred would melt away. Like a Messiah, revive people with your breath. (Glen 2005a: 75)
3. Dr Soroushs Views on Religious Pluralism and Tolerance 3.1. Definition and Background Dr Soroush, the Iranian contemporary religious thinker and theorist, is considered as one of the most significant religious intellectuals of the Islamic world. In spite of his fundamental thoughts and activities during the 1970s -80s, as well as his close cooperation with Islamic Republic of Iran, Dr. Soroush has converted into one of the modern critical interpreters of religion and Islam. He has written several books on interpretations and understanding of religion and Islam in modern times up
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to now. Dr Soroush started his movement in the field of intellectual religious thoughts by introducing The Theory of Evolution of Religious Knowledge Or-Text in Context in the late years of 90s he started to emphasize on pluralism and religious tolerance in the middle of the closing decade of the twentieth century (Hashemi 2006: 123). In the recent decade he has become one of the most critical advocates of religious pluralism and tolerance in Iran, as well as in the Islamic world. Writing several books and articles, as well as participating in national and international conferences and meeting the scholars and thinkers of other religions is just a part of his activities in relation to religious pluralism. Dr. Abdul Karim Soroush was chosen by Time Magazine (April 2005) as one of the 100 most influential people of 2005 in the world. Scott MacLeod has introduced Dr. Soroush as the Irans democratic voice. He also received the Erasmus Prize (2004) of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.436
3.2. Arguments Dr Soroush in clarifying and classifying the theory of pluralism has used mainly four sources and characters including: first of all Emanuel Kant the 18th German philosopher and his theory of nomanphenomena, second, Jalal-al-Din Rumi and his mystical and sufistic world view which pluralism and tolerance are a significant part of it, third, Karl Popper the science and political philosopher of the 20th century and his critical realism theory, and fourth, John Hick, the contemporary theologian and religions philosopher who puts forward the theory of religious pluralism in the modern era. Dr Soroush's reasoning and argumentations can be mentioned briefly as follows: Epistemological Argument The basis of Dr. Soroush's argumentation in believing in religious polarity is his belief in diversity of religious knowledge and epistemology. In his opinion religion has two major sources: religious texts and religious experiences437, since these two sources are silent, and people are influenced by their outer side and by their interpreters, therefore none of these two, religious knowledge and religious interpretations, might be definitely regarded as the monopolistic and exclusive authority. Consequently, there is no way out of accepting religious plurality and tolerance. This argument can be explained and clarified through the following arguments (Jhanbakhsh 2004: 231). Religious texts and experiences are the primary sources for gaining religious knowledge. Therefore human does not have access to the essence of religion itself. In fact religion is nothing but various interpretations of it, throughout history. Religious texts and experiences are silent; human beings interpret them. In interpreting religious texts, interpreter employs his/her own expectations, questions, and presuppositions. These expectations, questions, and presuppositions come from somewhere out of religion.

436 437
for more information visit Dr. Soroush's official site: http://www.drsoroush.com/English.htm In a recent speech Dr. Soroush stated that prophethood and revelation are religious experiences, just like Sufis religious
experiences. The difference is that prophets have the mission of preaching. Refer to: Soroush, A. Expansion of Prophetic Experience, Serat Publication, Tehran, 1378. [In Farsi].
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Out of religion is changeable, variable, and indeterminate. Science, philosophy, and human properties are constantly increasing and changing. Inevitably interpretations that come out of such expectations, questions, and presuppositions would be also variable and changing. Considering the fact that human being is always liable to err, therefore not any interpretation can be claimed as the single and definite authority.
Mystical Argumentation Dr. Soroush also employs other reasoning mainly derived from mystics and Sufism, especially from Rumi that can be summarized as follows: according to mystical trainings there is an obvious difference between the internal [Baten] and external [Zaher] world. What human see of religious diversity is just the apparent and outward of religion, the shell of it, and the essence is hidden in all religions. Although the followers of different religions are worshiping different names, they are in fact in search of one single essence. The external diversity is caused by the limitation of materialistic world. Incompatibility of Religious Exclusiveness with God's Guidance and Conduct If just as the exclusivists, for instance, just 70-80 millions Twelve Imam Shiite Muslims have been guided, or if just 12 millions of Jews are guided, this would contradict Divine attributes of conduct and leadership. It definitely contradicts divine attributes of mercy, wisdom, and conducts, if most of human beings are not guided and remain misled and imperfect. Hereditariness of Religious Believes Among the Pious It is not always like this that followers of all religions, for instance Christians, all choose their religion based on reason and research, but people become Muslim, Christian, or Jew on the spur of family and society demands. In other words human beings' religion has some "cause" rather than "reason". Therefore, is that logical or compatible with God's wisdom to say that human's salvation or tribulation is a result of something hereditary and unintentional? (Soroush 2001: 50-51).
4. Comparison and Conclusion According to the comparison made on Fethullah Glen and Dr. Soroush's views on pluralism and religious tolerance, some similarities and some differences between the two views are recognizable. Both of the thinkers emphasize the necessity of peaceful and positive communication with the followers of different religions, as well as with secular groups. Furthermore, they reject the fundamental, violent, and exclusivist interpretations of religion. Both put emphasis on the comprehensive tolerance and do not restrict it to some religions (for example, those having heavenly books). Concerning their sources and arguments, both of them use mystical, especially Rumis heritage, and theological sources and arguments. Their books and activities prove this claim. However, in spite of their major common point of view they are different in their approaches, arguments, sources, results and achievements. While Dr. Soroush employs mystical and theological (Shiite-Mutazeli) sources as well as western sources, Fethullah Glen mainly uses theological (Ashari-Hanafi) and mystical sources. Soroush uses theological (Divine conduct), mystical (distinction between shell and essence of religion), experimental (hereditariness in religion) reasoning
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and epistemological argumentations. Glen uses mystical (comprehensive love), theological (referring to Quran and Prophets tradition) and pragmatist (common goal of all religions). Consequently, it is possible to conclude that Soroush mainly has an epistemological approach and with an emphasis on religious diversity, ends up in pluralism and religious tolerance. Glen emphasizes on pragmatist reasoning (to help the common goal of all religions that is to fight materialism and to revive the existence of God in people's lives). In sum, Fethullah Glen is seriously concerned with religion and in order to improve the religious life of contemporary human being suggests tolerance and interfaith dialogues. To achieve this goal he maintains his traditional interpretation of Islam, which is to believe in Islam's superior position and tending to reject other religions' truth. But Soroush because of epistemological necessity and probably because of his concern with modernity chooses the path of religious pluralism. And because of this closeness and fairness to traditional interpretations of religion, Glen has been more successful than Dr. Soroush, not only, in the eyes of the people of his own country, but also among the people throughout the world. Nevertheless, the practical results of both points of views are the same and both of these thinkers suggest tolerance and influential communications with the followers of other religions.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Ms. Maryam Najafi for her review of the entire text and helpful comments.
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GLENS PARADIGM ON PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: THEORETICAL INSIGHTS AND SOME PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVES
GURKAN CELIK 438, KATE KIRK 439 AND YUSUF ALAN 440
Abstract This paper contains an exposition of Fethullah Glens model of peaceful coexistence. Based on qualitative analysis of his writings, conversations, sermons and public speeches, the authors distinguish four dimensions of peace eternal peace, inner peace, interpersonal or intercommunal peace, and global peace not from a theoretical perspective, but as a practical guideline for those who seek to pursue peace. The paper argues that these four dimensions of peace are possible only when accompanied by moral values, mutual knowledge and acceptance of cultural and religious identity. In particular, the authors present and describe Glens idea of education as a practical means to achieve peace, and his dialogue approach as an alternative for dispute resolution and as a tool for building a culture of peace between and within societies. This analytical exploration of Glens teaching is helpful in challenging the thesis of an impending clash of civilizations in two ways: first, to live in peace as a result of dialogue and education is vital in todays world, where globalization, mass communication, and technology have pushed individuals and groups together in ways never before seen in human history. Second, Glen pursues an inclusive middle way between fundamental futures of modernity and the Muslim tradition science and Islamic knowledge, reason and revelation, progress and conservation, and free will and destiny accepting them as two sides of the same reality.
1. Introduction Cultural diversity and social plurality are inevitable both in Western and Eastern democracies. Over the past few decades, the passive, but accepting approach towards ethnic and religious multi-
438
Gurkan Celik: Currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on Glen's views on peace and the human condition from the
perspectives of education, dialogue and theological anthropology at Radboud University, Nijmegen. (MA in policy and organization studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.) He has written articles for learned journals, and is (co)author of several publications, including Glens Approach to Dialogue and Peace in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations (2007); Fethullah Glen as a Servant Leader in International Journal of Servant-Leadership (2007); Voorlopers in de Vrede [Forerunners for Peace] (2005); Hizmetkar Liderlik [Servant Leadership] (2003).
439
Kate Kirk: Currently writing a doctoral dissertation, at Queens University, Belfast, on Dutch integration policies and
their implications on citizenship practices. (A graduate in social science, University College Utrecht; MA in political science, Leiden University.) Ms Kirk is also doing research on social problems in a deprived neighbourhood in Amsterdam for the Wiardi Beckman Foundation (WBS), the Dutch Labour Party think tank. She has recently published Enlightened Embodiment: the Submissive Islamic Female Body in the Contemporary Dutch Enlightenment Project in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations.
440
Yusuf Alan: (MA in English translation and interpretation at the Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey.) Editor at
Time Media Group in Rotterdam. Some publications: Aktif Dusunme ve Yenilenme [Active Thinking and Self-renewal] (Rotterdam: Libertas Media, 2001); Sozun Gucu [The Power of Discourse] (Rotterdam: Libertas Media, 2003).
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culturalism in European societies has been replaced with concerned pleas for integration and even assimilation. This ideological and policy transition started with a number of intellectual contributions (Schnabel 1997; Bolkestein 1997; Scheffer 2000; Shadid & Van Koningsveld 2002), and was brought into full swing by a number of developments such as the 9-11 attacks and the subsequent atmosphere of unrest and mutual distrust between Muslims and non-Muslims around the world. European countries, in which a large number of Muslims are now living, have prided themselves for their open attitude and assumed a smooth accommodation of immigrants. Following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, European countries experienced some violence on their own soil convincing people that social, cultural and religious boundaries are deeper than previously thought. Particularly, in the Netherlands Pim Fortuyn, a charismatic politician with a number of anti-immigrant arguments on his agenda, gained tremendous popularity. His legacyhe was murdered in 2002 by a native Dutch environmentalistconsists of a disregard for leftist multiculturalists politicians and of the belief that adjustment on the side of ethnic minorities was urgently needed (Ter Wal 2004). In November 2004 interethnic and inter-religious tension was stirred up again, when a young Dutch-Moroccan Muslim murdered another critic of Islamic culture, filmmaker Theo van Gogh. This incident provoked a wave of vandalism directed at mosques and Islamic schools, extremely prejudiced utterances, and an almost tangible discomfort among the Dutch of all descents. Considerably, the Dutch have long renowned for their tolerance, an image they seem to thank to their tradition of pillarization, in which Catholics, Protestants, socialists, and liberals lived separately in harmony (Vermeij 2006:19). The need to live in peace has been underscored by all these events of the past few years. M. Fethullah Glen [1941] is considered to be one of the most prominent Islamic scholars and a pioneer of dialogue that contributes to world peace. He has had great influence on young people with his modern approach in interpreting the Qurn and with his global activities in promoting education and seeking dialogue between members of different religions and cultures. Glen is an important advocate of intercultural dialogue and in particular interfaith dialogue. He provides a source of inspiration for a new and cooperative approach to all monotheistic religions (Valkenberg 2006), which aims at supporting dialogue, harmony and conciliation between the People of the Book: Christians, Jews and Muslims. Glens vision for the future is an inspirational hope, where peace and justice are maintained in the world (Glen 2005b). He has inspired an immense civil society movement that since the late 1960s has evolved and grown to encompass many facets of social life (Yavuz & Esposito 2003; Hunt & Aslandoan 2006). The movement is trying to act as a bridge in realising unity in multiplicity, synergy, social innovation, interaction and dialogue between the members of different cultures and civilizations. The movement advocates diversity and dialogue, and pays at great deal of attention to the reality of social and religious pluralism, contributing to communality and solidarity within society. More specifically, the Glen movement is offering Muslims a way to live out Islamic values amidst the complex demands of modern societies. As well as belief and finding peace or the danger of being drowned in disbelief and distrust, Glen expends efforts to solve a multitude of social, economic, political and cultural problems. Along with Mohandas
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Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa, Fethullah Glen can be seen as one of the twentieth centurys great exponents of non-violent resistance.441 Through the writings of Fethullah Glen we find a proper interpretation of Islamic teaching leads to truly spiritual values like forgiveness, social justice, inner peace, social harmony, honesty, and trust in God. This paper contains an exposition of Fethullah Glens understanding of peaceful coexistence. In particular, this paper highlights Glens idea of education as a practical concept of peace, and as a tool of building a culture of peace. Glen has the conviction that the reliable and real road to peace and justice for humanity is dependent on the provision of an adequate and appropriate universal, multicultural and moral education integrating scientific knowledge and spiritual and ethical values. After a quick survey on the index of words in Glens works, we found that peace is one of the most used terms among other words like love, tolerance, affection, reason, faith, and humanity. Based on our analysis of his writings, conversations and public speeches, we distinguish and debate some aspects of peace, not only from a theoretical perspective, but also as a practical guideline for those who seek to pursue peace. In addition to a systematic review of Glens works we used a number of semi-structured interviews with his sympathisers and the Glen experts to give some ontological explanations concerning the following four dimensions of peace and to demonstrate its social implementations and implications in human lifes and societies: eternal peace, inner peace, interpersonal and intercommunal peace, and universal peace. Interviews were conducted face-to-face or via electronic mailin either Turkish or Englishlasting an average of one hour each. Interviewees were randomly chosen from a group of pre-selected experts and sympathisers who know Glens movement and are well acquainted with his ideas and initiatives as well. It is of particular interest to investigate what these respondents think about the Glens teaching, how they interpret his discourses and actions regarding peace. Interview questions were both open and close-ended and attempts to identity his vision of peace. We prepared an interview protocol, and pre-tested the interview by interviewing a religious studies scholar and a member of the Glen movement. The interview guide was modified according to the suggestions made by these people. After an examination of Glens understanding on moderate Islam and peaceful West, we will begin with the detailed and analytical exploration of Glens theological and sociological point of views on peace. Then, we will discuss peaceful coexistence through Glens educational initiatives, and his dialogue method as an alternative for dispute resolution between and within societies. The paper will end with some concluding remarks.
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A series symposia, entitled 'Frontrunners for Peace', held on February 11, 2004 (Radboud University Nijmegen), and
March 16-17-18, 2005 (Tilburg University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and University of Amsterdam) at four Dutch universities, discussed Glen among contemporary heroes of peace; see the booklet edited by Gurkan Celik, et al. 2005, Voorlopers in de Vrede [Forerunners for peace]. Damon: Budel, The Netherlands; Glens efforts for worldwide peace have also been echoed at The Peaceful Heroes Symposium, organized on April 11-13, 2003 at the University of Texas, Austin. Furthermore, in March 2004, the Spirituality Foundation of Kyrgyzstan awarded Glen with its Intersociety Adaptation and Contribution to Peace Prize for his contributions to International peace through his thoughts and initiatives in education.
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2. Moderate Islam and Peaceful West Glens views are dictated primarily by his religious belief and interpretation of Islam. Therefore, in order to understand what Glen thinks about the West, it is important to first explore how Glen understands Islam. For Glen, Islam is by its very nature moderate and therefore the recently popular phrase moderate Islam is incorrect as it implies that Islam can be anything but moderate or that there are some versions that are not moderate. Glen espouses the conviction that moderation is such a central characteristic of Islam that any understanding of it that does not embody this cannot be Islamic. Moderation for Glen means the middle-way and this is what he argues Islam is: Islam, being the middle way of absolute balance between all temporal and spiritual extremes and containing the ways of all previous Prophets, makes a choice according to the situation (Glen 2005:145). Glen holds the conviction that while there are certain fundamental tenets of Islam that are uniform and not open to interpretation, there are other realms of Islam which are. This provides Islam with a degree of flexibility and allows for various practices of Islam to develop that can manifest differences in terms of nuances and points of emphasis. Historical conditions, disparate settings, socio-cultural characteristics, language, and so forth are all factors that can help develop and produce a particular idiosyncratic practice of Islam unique to that region. So in Morocco, the Islamic conception of life came to mean activism, moralism, and intense individuality, while in Indonesia the same concept emphasized aestheticism, inwardness, and the radical dissolution of personality (Geertz 1971). Glen firmly argues that Anatolian Islam resulted from the willing conversion of the Anatolian Turks, a number of influential Sufi orders originated in Central Asia and Anatolia emphasising Islams value of love, tolerance and inclusiveness and the adoption of the Hanafi maddhab (school of law) by the Turks in their practice of Islam. The Ottoman State experience with Islam meant that the Turkish people had greater opportunity to explore and experience Islam in various ways and thereby develop a better understanding of this religion. According to Glen this all contributed to a broader, deeper, more tolerant, inclusive, pluralistic, spiritual and loving practice of Islam. Glen states that the word Islam has three meanings, one within the other like three concentric circles. The narrow meaning at the very core of the three circles is that Islam is the name of the religion which stipulates how human should conduct his or her life. The second meaning is that Islam refers to the attributes and actions of people in the abstract, completely independent of the person himself. According to this meaning therefore, being honest is an Islamic attribute and may be found within a non-Muslim. Thus, a persons attribute(s) and action(s) may be Muslim while, she or he by social or religious classification is not. Likewise, the act that manifests itself from this attribute is categorised according to this meaning as either Islamic or non-Islamic. For example, stealing is a nonIslamic act and may be committed by a Muslim. Therefore, a Muslim who subscribes to the religion of Islam may, nonetheless, commit non-Muslim actions. The third concentric circle and most wide and encapsulating meaning of Islam, as emphasised by Glen, is that it means the laws of creation (seriat-i fitriye) according to which the universe conducts itself. These laws, just as the rules of religion, were ordained by God. The only difference between the two is that while human beings have the free will to follow the laws of religion or not, he or she has no such choice when it comes to the laws of creation. Therefore, according to this view, everything, whether animate or otherwise, is a Muslim because it, unavoidably, continues its existence in accordance with the laws of creation.
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Important to note here is that the above analysis of the meaning of Islam does not include any reference to the notion of Iman, that is belief in God. Glen emphasises the importance of the difference between the two. Islam is the laws and rules of God, Iman on the other hand is belief in God. Therefore, in drawing this distinction, Glen states being a Mumin (one with faith) does not necessarily mean that one is a Muslim (one who follows Islam) and vice versa. In other words, a person may have faith and belief in God and as a result be a Mumin, but may not conduct his or her life according to the rules of Islam and thereby fail to be a Muslim. The opposite is also possible according to Glen. A person may be a Muslim by attribute in the second concentric meaning of the word Islam but not have any belief in God. The following diagram visualises the three concentric meanings of Islam with its relation to Iman.
Laws of creation Attributes and actions Islam
Iman
Diagram I. Three Concentric Meanings of Islam Having looked at how Glen understands the ethos, semantics and practice of Islam we will now attempt to evaluate how he views Western civilisation. It is clear from Glens views about Islam in general and Anatolian Islam in particular that Glen adopts an inclusive, embracing and moderate approach. Therefore, Glens views of the West are primarily based on these dynamics. Furthermore, Glen considers his belief in God to be his greatest asset. Therefore, in light of recent misrepresentations of Islam in the West, Glen argues that a Muslims primary obligation is to make sure that this is rectified through showing Islams true character to the world. This can only be done by engaging with that world. On a practical level, Glen states that the world has become a global village and that it is no longer either desirable, if it ever was, nor possible to close borders and not engage with the rest of the world. Thus, Glens view that Turkey and all other Muslim-populated countries should engage with the West rests on an inclusive, embracing and loving understanding of Islam as well as practical considerations of the time. In this regard, Glen does not agree with those who are against the idea of interaction with the West on the basis that this will lead to the assimilation of the Muslim identity. Glen argues that Muslims should have no such fear if they are sincere in their belief.
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On the basis of the three concentric meanings of Islam, Glen states that the West is more Muslim than the geographical Muslim countries because (a) it has more Muslim attributes than the Muslim countries in being just, progressive etc and (b) it has inevitably explored, discovered and engaged nature and cause in order to succeed in scientific and technological advancement. In discovering coal, melting steal, enhancing rocket science and reaching the moon, the West has learnt the laws of creation and used it to its advantage. Whether Western civilisation has done good or bad with this scientific knowledge and experience is another matter. The point here is that in attaining such an understanding of science and in engaging the laws of creation, Western civilisation has become Muslim in the second and third sense of the word. As a result of this perspective Glen states that he cannot understand how a devout Muslim would be against the West, as the West has attained its supremacy through inevitably following and obeying the universally applicable laws of creation ordained and created by God. Having noted that, Glen stresses that the scientific advancement in the West and its notion of modernity have also lead to materialism at the exclusion of belief, spirituality and morals. This, Glen argues, has resulted in crude fanaticism. The opposite however, the plight of Muslim countries is one of ignorance and bigotry. Thus, while Glen finds that Western civilisation embodies some certain commendable attributes and a beneficial collective knowledge and experience of positive science, he also criticises its exclusively materialistic approach that, at present, provides no space for belief in God or spirituality within its realm of modernity. This sense of belief and spirituality remains and can be found in the Eastern world. Thus, Glen strongly believes that the East and West have a lot to learn from each other and that a balanced and prosperous civilisation with a correct understanding of life can only be achieved through the fusion of the two. Therefore engaging with the West is a two-way process for Glen, that which involves taking and giving.
3. The Middle Way and the Nature of Human Being In his comprehensive study, Pannenberg (1985) considers human beings to be part of nature and discusses the human person in his or her social world: its culture, history and institutions. Hence, it could be said that the human being is the essence and the vital element of being, the index and core element of the universe and societies. Democritus described the human being as a world in miniature, a microcosm (Diels, Frag. 34). A human being is an image of the macrocosm by virtue of containing all the strata of reality (body, mind and spirit). The Stoic approach understood humanity in the framework of the cosmic order as a microcosm that reflects on the macrocosm of the physical universe (Pannenberg 1985:27). In a similar respect, Glen considers the human person as a sample or a model of the universe. Glen (2000:7-8) symbolizes human beings as mirrors for Gods names and attributes, and confidently argues that therefore human beings are distinguished from the rest of creation with the honour of being responsible for making the Earth prosperous in Gods name. He argues that the individual and collective happiness lie in disciplining three innate faculties (reason, anger, and lust) to produce a young, golden generation that will learn theoretical aspects of the middle way between materialism and metaphysics, between modernity and tradition, and will bring it into practice. This generation is supposed to absorb and represent both modern realities and Muslim morality and identities through its mind, its behaviours and its spirituality. The middle way is an important concept in Glens understanding, which is, to a great extent, similar to Aristotles (Kuru 2003). Aristotle criticized the Platonic virtue versus vice categorization and
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classified phenomena in three groups, two of which are vices (excess and deficiency) and one of which is virtue (the mean or the middle way). In his typed series of sermons entitled Ahlaki Mlahazalar (vols. 1-14) Glen (1998) interprets and repeats the important Islamic concept of srat- mstakim (the straight path), which is recited in a Muslims prayers forty times a day, as the middle way between ifrat (excesses) and tefrit (deficiency). From this perspective and since the time of Ibn Miskawayh442, human faculties or drives have been dealt with in three categories: intellect, zeal, and lust (nal 2006:30). Intellect or reason enables the human person to make the right decision, and encompasses all human powers such as conception, imagination, calculation, memory, learning, and so on. Zeal or anger covers the power of self-defence, which according to Islamic jurisprudence is defined as that needed to defend the faith and religion, sanity, possessions, life and family, and other sacred values. The man and woman desires or lusts after the opposite sex and loves their children and worldly possessions. In other words, lust or desire is the name for the driving force of ones animal appetites. These three main drives or faculties are presented in the following matrix (Celik & Alan 2003:25-26): DRIVES LEVELS / LIMITS Excess Intellect Zeal Lust demogogy rage licentiousness Middle way wisdom courage chastity Deficiency stupidity cowardice frigidity
Table I. Drives of a human person In sum, a most important characteristic of ideal human is that he or she finds a balance in the middle way and practices these sources of all abilities and qualities in human life.
4. Four Dimensions of Peace from Glen Perspective In this section, we examine how the concept of peace fits into Glens ethical thoughts. In his writings and speeches, we find that he treats various aspects and elements of peace. Using some practical consequences of his thoughts and teachings, we have identified four main dimensions of peace (Celik & Valkenberg 2007) which will allow us to conceptualise Glens ethic of peace within a theoretical framework.
4.1. Eternal Peace First, Glen envisages eternal peace as the ultimate goal of human life, almost synonymous with salvation. Specifically, it is the final destination of the collective personality of those who serve humanity (hizmet). In the eschatological sense, when one manages to direct oneself toward the path
442
Ibn Miskawayh [c.930-1030] is a Muslim moralist, philosopher and historian. His moral treatise Tahdhib al-Akhlaq, in-
fluenced by the Aristotelian concept of the mean, is considered one of the best statements of Islamic philosophy. His universal history Kitab Tajarib al-Umam wa Taaqub al-Himam (Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate), was noted for its use of all available sources and greatly stimulated the development of Islamic historiography.
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of eternal life and happiness, however miserable and troublesome ones life may be, as one considers this world to be the waiting lounge for Heaven, one accepts everything contentedly and gives thanks. He sees the members of his hizmet (service) movement, through their efforts carried out in solidarity and sincerity, as contributing in their diverse activities to the building of an eternal realm of peace and happiness. This concept not only gives meaning and direction to individual acts, but in this way the believer also achieves a kind of conquest over death. Glen (2004a:78) indicates that people have a great need for religion, and for the peace and security provided by religion. In his writings, Glen relates to a hadith including: deeds are judged by intentions443 and he emphasized that the intention of the believers is more important than the act itself. Human beings will try to live with a greatness of intention that will be great enough to enable them to appreciate eternity and thus imbue them with an inner peace that comes from being connected to eternity. For Glen, eternal peace means achieving Gods approval, walking in the greatest spiritual ecstasy, overstepping the boundaries of existence and reaching Eden, with contemplation of the eternal togetherness in the hereafter. On the contrary, a believing soul, giving expression to the chilling nature of the denial of truth and any attempt to conceal it, yet at the same time, expressing the eternal peace that faith promises, calls out in the following ode of Akif:444 A rusted (rotten or morally corrupt spiritual) heart which has no faith is a burden for the breast (Glen 2004a:137). Islam literally means surrender. Epistemologically, the word Islam derived from the root words silm (security) and salamah (safety), means surrendering, guiding to peace and contentment, and establishing security, safety and accord. Etymologically speaking, the word Muslim and the verb sa-lima, both come from the root silm. Muslims greet everyone with salaam, thereby placing love for themselves in everyones heart.445 They end their prayers with salaam. According to Glen (2004a:54), these principles are essentials to and permeate the lives of Muslims: When Muslims stand to pray, they cut their connection with this world, turning to their Lord in faith and obedience, and standing at attention in His presence. Completing the prayer, as if they were returning back to life, they greet those on their right and left by wishing peace: Remain safe and in peace. With a wish for safety and security, peace and contentment, they return to the ordinary world once again. Glen (2004a:58) considers this peaceful attitude of greeting and wishing safety and security for others as one of the most beneficial acts in Islam. Glen (2004a:218) describes those who dedicate themselves to doing good for humanity as altruistic that they can even sacrifice their lives for others, and in doing so they have found peace in their conscience.
4. 2. Inner Peace A second dimension of peace might be called inner peace: tranquillity and peace of mind, an inner confidence born of faith that enables the religious believer to face adversity without anxiety or despair. In the psychological sense, peace of mind has been seen as being in the possession of new technological equipments and the achievements of physical comfort. At times it has been connected with tranquillity, hard work, financial wealth, the satisfaction of carnal desires, and boundless freedom. However, for Glen (2004a:159) it is only possible as the peace of mind pursued of is the
443 444 445
Bukhari, Badul-Vahy 1, Itk 6; Muslim, Imarat, 155; Abu Dawud, Talak, 11. Mehmed Akif Ersoy [1873-1936] is the renowned Turkish poet who also wrote the Turkish National Anthem. Buhhari, Iman, 20; Muslim, Iman, 63.
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fruit of virtue within faith and can only be attained through perfect faith. Particularly when one is facing the approach of death, the believer can attain a peace of mind which will enable them to overcome spiritual turmoil and fear. He describes the people of faith as peaceful with themselves: worldly people who are enslaved by their egos live only to fulfil their carnal desires. Never content, they feel no tranquillity. But ideal people are always at peace with themselves (interior peace) and always feel secure. They are content and, furthermore, they place their knowledge and understanding at the service of humanity (Glen 2004a:129,159). As a result, people of faith feel themselves to be in an expansive atmosphere of peace and the society becomes a society of conscience and peace. Jihad is an element of Islam which is primarily defined as the inner struggle of a believer against all that stands between the believer and God. Glen (2004:171-172; 1998a,b) describes that jihad occurs on two fronts; the internal and the external. The internal struggle (the greater jihad) is the effort to attain ones essence; the external struggle (the lesser jihad) is the process of enabling someone else to attain his or her essence. The first is conducted on the spiritual front, for it is ones struggle with their own inner world and carnal soul (nefs). In other words, the greater jihad is based on overcoming obstacles between oneself and ones essence, and the souls reaching knowledge, eventually divine knowledge, divine love, and spiritual bliss. The second is, however, material and based on removing obstacles between people and faith so that people can choose freely between belief and disbelief. Both of these jihads have been carried out successfully, the desired is established. If one is missing, the balance is destroyed. Glen argues that believers find peace and vitality in such a balanced jihad. Further, Glen (2004a:1-2) states that love is the most essential element of every being, and becomes a magic elixir to overcome every obstacle, a powerful key to open every door, and a source of altruism, stating: Those who possess such an elixir will sooner or later open the gates to all parts of the world and spread the fragrance of peace everywhere, using the censers of love in their hands. Moreover, Glen (2004a:6) stresses that a human is a mirror of another human. He emphasises that the level of ones understanding and appreciation of one another depends on how well one recognize the qualities and riches that each person possesses. Also, he has the conviction that peace, happiness and security at home is the mutual accord between the spouses in thought, morals, and belief, which can result in a healthy family life and a good education for their children (nal & Williams, 2000:311).
4. 3. Interpersonal and Intercommunal Peace A third aspect of peace refers to interpersonal, and broadly formulated, intercommunal peace. Glen sees interior peace, not only of individuals but of environs, communities and whole societies, as a precondition for healthy and hearty dialogue among peoples, and as one of the marks of Islamic civilization. He has the conviction that along with justice, harmony, brotherhood, solidarity, human progress and spiritual advancement, peace should characterize the Muslims daily life. It is peace as the basis of societal relations which should be the force that attracts others to Islam. So important is the element of forgiveness and pardon in human relations that Glen constantly recommends his students and followers to pardon each others faults immediately. Glen (2005a:75) expresses the core of his massage regarding tolerance, dialogue and peace in his book Pearls of Wisdom: be so tolerant that your heart becomes wide like the ocean. Become inspired with faith and love for others. Offer a hand to those in trouble, and be concerned about everyone. He defines tolerance as the most essential element of moral systems, a very important source of spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people (Glen, 2004a:33-34). To him, tolerance does not mean being influenced by
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others or joining them; it means accepting others as they are and knowing how to get along with them and to become protectors of the general peace and contentment (ibid:42). At the same time, Glen claims that Muslim citizens in European countries can only live in harmony in those countries by means of a vast atmosphere of tolerance (ibid:43). In addition, Glen frequently refers to the Qurn accepting forgiveness and tolerance as basic principles. He suggests that to expend efforts for dialogue with the belief that peace is better (Qurn 4:128), and continuously advocates peace, nationally and internationally. The Qurnic verses that introduce the servants of God are as fellow: [] And the servants of (God) the All-Merciful are those who move on the Earth in humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say: Peace (Qurn 25:63). [] When they meet hollow words or unseemly behaviour, they pass them by with dignity (Qurn 25:72). [] And when they hear vain talk, they turn away there from and say: To us our deeds, and to you yours. (Qurn 28:55). The general gist of these verses is that when those who have been favoured with true servitude to God encounter meaningless and ugly words or behaviour they say nothing unbecoming, but rather pass by in a dignified manner. In short: everyone acts according to his own disposition (Qurn 17:84) and thus displays his or her own character. The character of heroes of dialogue is gentleness, consideration, and tolerance. This mildness is presented in the Qurn as gentle words. When God sent Moses and Aaron to a man who claimed to possess divinity, as the Pharaoh had done, he commanded them to behave tolerantly and to speak softly (Qurn 20:44). Without exception and regardless of differences in faith, ethnicity and culture, one meets everyone and this generally breaks the tension of people toward probable opponents. For Glen, it is an Islamic principle to love those things or people who must be loved in the way of God and to dislike those things or people who must be disliked on the way of God. Disliking in the way of God applies only to feelings, thoughts and attributes. Thus, people should dislike such things as immorality, disbelief and polytheism, not the people who engage in such activities. Glen (2004a:60) cites that Prophet Muhammad once stood up out of respect for humanity as the funeral procession of a Jew passed by. When reminded that the deceased was a Jew, the Prophet replied: but he is a human, thereby showing the value Islam gives to human beings in general. This action demonstrates how people of different faiths and cultures should respect every person to coexist peacefully. Besides this, Glen (2004a:61) gives another example to state that the Prophet was inordinately sensitive with regard to respecting others: the Prophet one day admonished a Companion who had been heard insulting Abu Jahl, when in an assembly of Companions where Abu Jahls son Ikrimah was present: Do not hurt others by criticizing their fathers.446 Glen (2004a:74-75) also significantly views the form and style of debate inherited from Nursi: Anyone who is happy about defeating an opponent in debate is without mercy. He explains the reason for this further: You gain nothing by such a defeat. If you were defeated and the other was victorious, you would have corrected one of your mistakes. Debate should not be for the sake of ones ego, but rather to enable the truth to come out. He suggests that debate can only take place in an environment that is conductive to dialogue. The Qurn (29:46) prescribes: [] And discuss you not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation). This verse describes the method, approach, and manner that should
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Hakim, al-Mustadrak, 3:241; Muttaqi al-Hindi, Kanz al-Ummal, 13: 540.
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be used to communicate and interact with the other(s).Those who consider themselves addressed by these aforementioned verses, all devotees of love who dream of becoming true servants of God merely because they are human beings, those who have declared their faith and thereby become Muslims and performed the mandated social and religious duties, must behave with tolerance and forbearance and expect nothing from other people. Glen (2004a:61) suggests the approach of Yunus Emre:447 not to strike those who hit them, not to respond harshly to those who curse them, and not to hold any secret grudge against those who abuse them. In addition, one conspicuous characteristic of Glens understanding of peaceful coexistence is that he begins by addressing closed circles and subsequently seeks ways to approach broader and more open societies (Celik & Valkenberg 2007).
4.4. Universal Peace A fourth dimension of peace distinguished by Glen is universal or global peace. He emphasized the importance of the indispensability of religion and intercultural dialogue for world peace through his efforts to meet with other religious and community leaders within his native country and abroad. In addition to rules that guarantee peace and security, there are also verses in the Qurn related to attitudes that should be taken against criminals and people who cause anarchy and terror; for such people there are legal sanctions, punishments, and retaliations. Indeed, the Qurn (4:128) states peace is better as a general rule. Glen (2004a:72) stresses that peace, justice and stability are of the utmost importance to Islam; fighting and war are only secondary occurrences which are bound to specific reasons and conditions. He opposites the use of violence to attain political ends, and teaches his followers that the days of getting things done by brute force are over. In todays enlightened world the only way to get others to accept your ideas and ways is by persuasion and the use of convincing argument. (nal & Williams, 2000:319). Only through cooperative understanding, interfaith and intercultural dialogue, and a process of mutual respect can communities coexist in harmony. He expresses the longing for a time of peace and prosperity for all. Even though the consideration of the world as a village becomes firmer and more prevalent over the course of time, different beliefs, races, customs, and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village. Glen (2004a:250) powerfully argues that the peace of this global village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of nature and in ensuring that people appreciate and share these differences. A major concept related to Glens teaching on peace is his understanding of nation. Although this concept refers particularly to the Muslim world and the Turkish nation in the context of their roles in shaping human history, as major players and representatives of global peace, there is certainly more to it than just the concept of one particular nation, especially when we look with Glens vision and his idealism of dialogue and tolerance. In his teaching, Glen discourse-solutions for freedom and an honourable stand can be used by any suppressed community. The motivating ethos behind Glens career as clearly manifested in numerous dialogue activities and education initiatives is one of a worldwide peace which will be accomplished by the participation of all nations. His definition of nation does not comprise one race or ethnic group; Anatolian has always been a land of diverse ethnic groups throughout human history, which form one united nation today. Exempt from any chauvinist
447
Yunus Emre [1238-1320] is a poet and Sufi who had a powerful influence on Turkish literature. He was well versed in
Sufi philosophy, especially that of Rumi, and, like Rumi, became a leading representative of Sufism in Anatolia on a more popular level.
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characteristic, he addresses the colourful mosaic of Anatolia including like a crucible for peoples that have come from Central Asia, Balkans, and Mesopotamia. Concretely, Glen (2004a:261-262; Capan, 2005) was one of the first Muslims who released a press declaration within 24 hours of September 11th terrorist attacks renouncing them. He regarded these atrocities as a great blow to world peace that unfairly tarnished the credit of believers: [] terror can never be used in the name of Islam or for the sake of any Islamic ends. A terrorist cannot be a Muslim and a Muslim cannot be a terrorist. A Muslim can only be the representative and symbol of peace, welfare, and prosperity. [.] If a ship is carrying nine criminals and one innocent person, Islam does not allow for the ship to be sunk in order to punish the nine criminals; doing so would violate the rights of the one innocent person (Glen, 2004a:62,261). He further defines a Muslim as a person of love and affection who avoids every kind of terrorist activity and who has no malice or hatred for anyone or anything. To him, true Muslims can only the most trustworthy representatives of universal peace. Glen proposes education as a method to realise global peace and progress. In the following section we will discuss educational initiatives inspired by him from the perspective of peaceful coexistence.
5. Peaceful Coexistence through Universal Education Glen is convinced that a better and peaceful future for humanity can be established only through universal and intercultural education. An education of the heart and soul as well as of the mind and character, aimed at reviving and invigorating the whole being to achieve competence and providing goods and services useful to others. Education is the most important element in the Glen movement and it is also an effective tool for the longevity of the movement (Agai 2002; Celik & Celik 2005). The Glen movement opened about 500 schools all around the world (Agai 2004). In these schools children from different ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are educated by mainly Turkish graduates from renowned Turkish universities (Ates, Karakas & Ortayli 2005). Thomas Michel, who was active for years in Asia as part of the Vaticans Councils initiative for inter-religious dialogue, was impressed by such schools. Michel describes how he came into contact with schools inspired by Glen during his residence in Zamboanga, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Initially, Michel found the name of the school, The Philippine-Turkish School of Tolerance, in Zamboanga rather surprising and a startling affirmation in an area characterized by outbursts of violence between Muslims and Christians. Michel (2003) indicates that the school seems to do justice to its name by employing an equal number of Christian and Muslim teachers, by educating Muslim and Christian children and by promoting cooperation with Christian institutions in the area. An overwhelming majority of the respondents emphasized that the process of education for harvesting peace is a lifelong process and continuum that extends from early childhood to adulthood as modes and levels of education. Related to the role of education in peace and dialogue process respondents also stressed: Glens educational understanding for building peace encourages learners to draw lessons and inspirations from the role models provided by innumerable human beings respected for practising values, virtues and conduct that transcend greed, animosities, and desires to control and possess others or things.
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In addition, respondents pointed out that Glens conviction is that the reliable and true road to peace and justice for humanity is dependent on the provision of an adequate and appropriate education integrating scientific knowledge and spiritual and ethical values. Many of Glens followers say that educational practices, media activities and dialogue projects inspired by him to build a culture of peace promote key values in various faith and spirituality traditions that have been recognized through interfaith and intercultural dialogue as a body of common and shared values for guiding peaceful conduct and relations among peoples, communities and nations. The movements schools form white islands on the Earth, what Glen calls islands of peace. To many respondents, the schools of his volunteer movement make a significant contribution to the construction of a happy world, and attempt to build on universal values and peace: The Glens movement attempts to build on universal values and peace. The schools form, peace islands where cultures and civilizations meet and reach a consensus. His volunteer movement is a framework of emphasizing and gathering around universal humane virtues, and a framework of respect for the position of those with "different" perceptions, beliefs, and thoughts. The respondents maintained that building peace through education is a sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Glens educational vision involves not only schools, but also families, communities, and the media. Interviewees indicated that Glen claims a holistic education requiring a learning circle that consists of family, school, friends, neighbours, faith and cultural organizations, and workplaces. This allows children from an early age, to learn that they are members of communities (local or global) who need to live together in harmony and peace.
6. Dispute Resolution through Dialogical Approach In this section, we set out to highlight insights on dispute resolution through dialogue and tolerance, using some paradigms contained in Glens and others teaching. From tolerance and dialogue, Glen (2004a:45) understands embracing people regardless of differences of opinion, world-view, ideology, ethnicity, or belief. There is a need to recognize that differences do exist and the objective is not to correct but to hear and listen to the other side. From another approach, for Glen it meansin the words of the Turkish poet Yunus Emreloving the created simply because of the Creator. On the basis of our study, we proposes here that Glens tolerance and intercultural dialogue method can be seen as an alternative method for dispute resolution in and between societies. So important is the element of forgiveness in human relations that Glen (2004a:27-29,34) recommends that his followers and sympathizers pardon each others faults and mistakes immediately. Comparably, the Pope John Paul II (2002) believed that forgiveness and justice will heal most of our wounds in social life, and are the divine instruments to coexist peacefully. Similarly, Gopin (2001) presents forgiveness as an element of conflict resolution in religious cultures to walk the tightrope of reconciliation and justice. Religion is usually cited as the cause of or at least a factor to conflict around the world (Coward & Smith 2003; Smock 2002; Gopin 1997, 2002; Abu-Nimer 2001). Arthur Schneier (in: Smock 2002) points out that religion is never the real cause of conflict within or between societies, but it is often identified as an excuse for other causes such as ethnicity, economic disparities, and regional differences. Based on his experience and studies on conflict resolution, Abu-Nimer (2003) identifies four phases of development in an effective experiment of interfaith dialogue. He suggests that the
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earlier encounters should focus on individual and group similarities in theologies and scriptures. One example could be to jointly study the sacred texts of each religion. It must be remembered that the goal for these studies is not debate or conversions. These shared studies should yield deeper bonds through invitations to homes and meetings with families. The second phase is to deepen the relationship through joint prayers that are not contradictory to the other faith and by participating in the other faiths rituals. Having established trust and an understanding of the other faith, the third phase is to discover and confirm differences in religious values and faith practices. The final step should be exploring the ways in which messages of different faiths can benefit people from other religious traditions in the same community. The core of Huntingtons (1993) clash of civilizations thesis is based on the observation of a shift of paradigm. A paradigm is the product of the interaction of the cultural medium and of the thinking minds and provides a basis for understanding. A shift in paradigm means that we start to understand, or interpret same realities in a different way. Huntington claimed that the clash of civilizations is inevitable because the modern paradigm was a paradigm of clash and conflict. Huntington has been harshly criticized by advocates of dialogue for his remarks on the inevitability of clash. But one has to give the credibility to Huntington on the observation he made about the shift of paradigm. Indeed, the world is more and more exposed to a possible clash of civilizations. The twentieth century produced more prejudices than the totality of the twenty preceding centuries: now we need a strategy to heal these wounds. In medical terminology curing an illness is something, preventing its symptoms is another. Conflict resolution strategies, usually do not cure, they only suppress the symptoms. Prejudices, and paradigmatic thinking patterns are learnt behaviours; a person does not forget them easily, and needs to replace them with other habits, patterns, bits of knowledge. Paradigms do not shift daily. They are produced through continuous hermeneutical circles that change us by changing how we interpret reality. Gadamer formulated the philosophy of hermeneutical circles to show how understanding the other changes the self. If these hermeneutical circles of understanding are healthy than a dialogue between different cultures gives way to a higher level of understanding, a new paradigm where members of each cultures learn how to appreciate the others. But if these hermeneutical circles are false, if the other is a false, imagined, non-existent other than the circles give way to an unhealthy shift in the paradigm. In epistemological terms the real other is killed through not knowing it. Once the other is killed, in Levinass understanding, the self is also killed, and the subject of knowing, the I commits suicide. An interviewee exemplified what a false hermeneutical circle means in practical life: Lets think that Muhammad and Jonathan are speaking. Muhammad is not free of his cultural medium. He has been educated about the crusading, colonizing and evangelizing Western Christian. And Jonathan knows of 9/11, Jihad, suicide bombers, invading Ottomans, and of course the mushrooming mosques all over his country. These are not necessarily wrong. But any hermeneutical circle that will be based on these perceptions is going to be a false circle of understanding. In the end their speech will turn out to be more of a dialectical or apologetic nature, than a dialogical one. A collection of such contacts in time forces the paradigm to shift further. What produced a shift in the civilizational paradigm is actually a continuity of false hermeneutical circles. False, because the dialogue is done not with the other, but with the false other, or the perceived other, or in Levinasian
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terms, the killed other; and false, because once the other is false, the self is false either; a perceived self, or a self that committed suicide through killing the other, or a Bakhtinian non-existent self. Healing of the paradigm, as such, necessitates a creation of the other and the self through reverse hermeneutical circles. In practical terms, we can say that a dialoguer needs to create a new, local or universal, paradigm so as to facilitate peaceful interpretation of the actual reality. We, as different ontologisms, or as adherents of different faiths, ideologies, religions, need to speak to each other, in a way to heal the paradigm, to reverse the vicious circles of misunderstandings, prejudices, libels. And the end product of this healing of the paradigm is not only peace, but existence. You are not really you, because you define yourself according to your definition of me and of others. And since you define me wrong, you define yourself wrong. Epistemologically you have committed suicide. Give me my life back, and be resurrected. This is the promise of dialogical philosophy for the sake of peaceful coexistence.
7. Concluding Remarks In todays global village, borders have blurred and several cultures come into contact more often and more intensively with each other. The interethnic and interreligious climate throughout the world, in particular in the Netherlands, has undergone a dramatic change in recent years. Social mediation and peaceful coexistence within the context of cultural, ethnic and religious divisions, hierarchies, rivalries and conflicts that are grounded in socio-economic and political realities have become vital necessities of our time in order to maintain social cohesion where an appreciation of diversity must stand as a main point of reference, paving the way for intercultural dialogue vis--vis processes of globalisation, migration and the transnationalization of social relations. In order to achieve this and to build bridges between different cultures socially innovative projects should be implemented to tackle the problems stemming from the migration, the emergence of transnational and diaspora communities and their role in (inter)national conflicts, as well as the re-emergence of religious groups and identities, the politicisation of religion and the rise of religious fundamentalisms in the context of global geopolitical and economic coalitions, and hence new conflicts and wars. Both compassionate love as a way for inner peace and intercultural dialogue as a preventive strategy for dispute resolution and social mediation are important socially innovative methods in our age of globalization that refers to the intensification of worldwide social relations and the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections between the states, societies and peoples, which make up the modern world system. Our analysis of Glens ideas is helpful in disproving the thesis of clash of civilisation, and provides a healing of this paradigm in two ways. First, to live in peace as a result of dialogue and education is vital in todays world, where globalization, mass communication, and technology have pushed individuals and groups together in ways never before seen in human history. In todays world of global connectedness, peoples must develop the capacity to dialogue and create relatedness with people coming from vastly different worldviews. Developing strategies and capacities for peaceful coexistence amidst radical difference and shrinking natural resources is the central challenge of our era. Second, Glen pursues an inclusive middle way between fundamental futures of modernity and the Muslim traditionscience and Islamic knowledge, reason and revelation, progress and conservation, and free will and destinyaccepting them as two faces of the same reality. Dialogue and the four aforementioned dimensions of peace are possible only when accompanied by moral values, mutual knowledge and acceptance of cultural and religious identity. We can arguably
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say that the movement that has evolved around the ideas of Fethullah Glen provides initially and primarily an example of a renewal with a potential to influence both the Muslim and non-Muslim individuals (Yilmaz 2003). A number of positive NGOs and peaceful institutions (e.g. schools) led by volunteers, social innovators and peaceful, servant leaders can form islands of peace throughout the globe. This depends on deep and large-scale systems change, involving work with idealist people from all faiths, multi-national corporations, government agencies, and civil society organizations all over the world. The Glen movement provides a unique case in this regard. The movement is a growing approach to the reunification of faith and reason with hopes for a peaceful coexistence between liberal democracies and the religiously diverse. Glen has developed a peaceful approach to religion and science as two aspects of the same reality complementing one another. Byhim inspired civic movement challenges to build a peaceful world based on dialogue, tolerance, respect and compassion, and to raise individuals who use their intellect, zeal and lust lawfully and in moderation.
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Glen's Initiatives for Dialogue and Education
Anatolian Muslimness in Practice:
PART
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INVESTIGATING THE CONTRIBUTION OF FETHULLAH GLEN THROUGH THE ACTIVITIES OF A GLEN-INSPIRED RELIGIO-CULTURAL SOCIETY BASED IN IRELAND
JONATHAN LACEY 448
Abstract Fethullah Glen motivates his followers to mobilize by insisting that the mere aversion of transgressions is not sufficient to being a good Muslim. One must also become active in order to improve the conditions in the world. This principle has inspired the establishment of a multitude of organizations around the world devoted to interfaith dialogue and peaceful co-existence. This article focuses on a Glen-inspired society based in Ireland, namely the Turkish Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS). This society provides a range of interfaith and intercultural activities, several of which I discuss in this paper. I draw on ethnographic work and qualitative interviews I conducted with members of TIECS. The study hopes to shed light on the real and practical contribution of Fethullah Glen. Ireland provides an interesting site for this study because unlike Holland, France and Britain, inward migration is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, as are debates on multiculturalism and integration. Since the mid1990s, Irelands economy has grown from strength to strength to become one of the leading economies in Europe. Consequently, it has witnessed unprecedented levels of immigration and likewise an unprecedented mixture of cultures and religions. Until recent years interfaith dialogue in Ireland was dominated by Catholicism and Protestantism and the dialogue was often focused on crisis intervention. Islam is now the fastest growing religion in Ireland, with over 31,000 adherents and has now become part of the national conversation vis--vis Irish identity. Muslims living in Ireland originate from a multitude of nations, counting Ireland, and from a number of Islamic zones. The paper argues that TIECS and the Glen community practice Turkish Islam which has Sufi principles at its core, promoting tolerance and reason as the keys to peaceful coexistence. This article illustrates how Fethullah Glens principles are practiced in a European context.
1. Introduction Fethullah Glen motivates his followers to mobilise by insisting that the mere aversion of transgressions is not sufficient to being a good Muslim. One must also become active in order to improve the conditions in the world. Islam, according to Glens articulation, is action-oriented. This principle has inspired the establishment of a multitude of organisations around the world devoted to interfaith dialogue and peaceful co-existence. This article focuses a Glen-inspired society based in Ireland, namely the Turkish Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS). This society provides a range of inter-faith and intercultural activities. From my study of this group, I hope to shed light on the real and practical contribution of Fethullah Glen.
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Doing a PhD in the Department of Sociology in Trinity College Dublin, where he did an MPhil in Ethnic and Racial
Studies. Part-time research assistant with one of Intels Senior Ethnographic Researchers, focusing on Independent Living for older people. Current interests: the sociology of religion, social movements and global networks.
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Ireland provides an interesting site for this study because unlike Holland, France, Britain and Germany, inward migration is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland and likewise debates on multiculturalism and integration. Piaras MacEinri and Paddy Walley argue that Ireland can now be understood as a microcosm of the realities of globalisation (2003: 18) and Fintan OToole insists that The Republic of Ireland is the most globalised country on earth (2003: 4). Trade and finance pass fluently in and out of the territorial boundaries of Ireland. As of 1993, Ireland received 25% of all new U.S. investment into Europe, employing 94,000 people in 2002 (OToole, 2003: 6). This inward investment since the early 1990s along with EU contributions over the last two decades has resulted in Irelands economy flourishing, making it one of the strongest economies in the world (OToole, 2003). This effervescent economy is necessarily coupled with inward migration to Ireland. Since 1997, Ireland, for so long suffering from an emigration haemorrhage, became an immigration destination (Lentin and McVeigh, 2002; Ruhs, 2005). Immigrants were courted by Irish companies and the government to fill job shortages. Consequentially, we have witnessed unprecedented levels of immigration in Ireland and likewise an unprecedented mixture of cultures and religions. Irish culture has moved from one defined by Catholicism, nationalism and economic isolationism, to one oriented towards economic and cultural liberalism. Ireland has moved from a nation that largely perceived itself as homogenous to one that is renegotiating its identity on the recognition of heterogeneity. Irish culture has been steeped in the Catholic tradition for centuries and though their has been a decline in practicing Catholics in Ireland (see Inglis, 1998; Tovey and Share, 2003), over 3.6 million of the total population of nearly 4.2 million in Ireland still claim to be Catholics (Central Statistics Office (CSO), 2007). The Irish state still pays great deference to religion in Ireland, inviting religious groups to perform prayers at state events. The most recent example of this was the National Day of Commemoration; an event that pays tribute to all the Irish people who died in wars or on United Nations duty. Leaders of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic communities were invited to say a prayer peculiar to their faith tradition, at this event (OReagan, 2007). Until recent years interfaith dialogue in Ireland was dominated by Catholicism and Protestantism and the dialogue was often focused on crisis intervention. Islam is now the fastest growing religion in Ireland, with over 31,000 subscribers (CSO, 2007) and has now become part of the national conversation vis--vis Irish identity. Muslims living in Ireland originate from a multitude of nations, counting Ireland, and from a number of Islamic zones. I maintain that due to historical, geographical and cultural reasons, we can talk of Islam in the plural sense. Drawing on the work of M. Hakan Yavuz (2004), I argue that TIECS and the Glen Movement practice Turkish Islam449 which has Sufi principles at its core, promoting tolerance and reason as the keys to peaceful coexistence. This article illustrates how Fethullah Glens principles are practiced in a European context. I begin this paper by surveying the various Islamic institutions in Ireland. I describe the multiple and diverse expressions of Islam practiced by Muslims living there and issues arising vis--vis integration into Irish society. This is followed by an articulation of the need to talk about Islam in the plural sense and a description of one expression of Islam, namely, Turkish Islam. I establish the links between Fethullah Glen and Turkish Islam before describing the potential for Glens approach to dialogue as a possible remedy to the integration problems faced by the Turkish diaspora in the complex German situation. Subsequent to this I introduce the Glen-inspired TIECS. I firstly focus on its members
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This expression of Islam has also been referred to as Anatolian Islam. However for consistencys sake I will use the
term Turkish Islam throughout this paper.
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attitudes towards integration in Ireland before analysing their principal pursuit, namely, conferences celebrating the commonalities amongst the Abrahamic religions. I show how members implement the thought of Fethullah Glen in these symposiums and evaluate their effect in the Irish context.
2. Islam in Ireland Islam is the fastest growing religion in Ireland. Census figures indicate that in 1991 there were only 3,873 Muslims living in this country. The 2006 Census shows a massive increase with over 31,000 Muslims now living there (CSO, 2007). The activities of Muslims in Ireland have, however, attracted little academic attention. An exception is Kieran Flynn (2006) who offers a timely survey of Muslims in Ireland. Importantly, he notes the diversity of practices amongst Muslims and observes that despite its small size, it is quite fragmented. Flynn notes that whilst the early Muslims living in Ireland were typically students or working in the textile or catering industries, Muslims are now predominantly middle-class and involved in a much wider range of professions, including medicine and information technology. There appears to be a strong Arab influence amongst Islamic institutions in Ireland. One of the most prominent establishments, the Sunni-oriented Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI) based in Dublin, is run by the Al-Maktoum Foundation and directed from the United Arab Emirates. This has caused some tension amongst the Islamic community, some of whom feel disturbed by the fact that they do not have control of their local centre. Flynn astutely recognises that the heavily subsidised ICCI cannot be considered independent given the fact that it is fiscally dependent upon this Arab Foundation. Despite this, he insists that the ICCI is an important organisation for Muslims all across Ireland, playing a vital role in civil society by hosting politicians and religious groups, and operating several Quranic schools, with hundreds of students attending. Though there are several state recognised Muslim primary schools in Ireland (though no secondary schools), the majority of Muslims in Ireland attend mainstream schools. Surveying the various Islamic communities in Ireland Flynn notes a wide diversity. Besides the Sunnioriented ICCI, there is also a strong Shia presence in Ireland with up to 2,000 members, originating predominantly from the Middle East and Pakistan. 1996 saw the official opening of Shia Ahlul Bayt Islamic Centre in Milltown, Dublin. Flynn pays tribute to this organisation claiming that The Shia community and its leadership have emerged as the voice of moderation within the Irish Islamic community, representing an Islam that is at once tolerant, progressive and in tune with the challenges of a modern society (2006: 227). Flynn cites its endorsement of democracy and human rights in the Middle East as evidence of its commitment to moderation, noting that this has also gained the group positive regard vis--vis the media in Ireland. Flynn (2006) also notes the emergence of the Urdu-speaking Islamic Communities in Ireland and points to the opening of two prayer rooms as evidence of this. The numbers attending Friday prayers reach 1,000 and members originate from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. This group has courted a degree of scandal in relation to some of their more radical and reactionary members (ibid: 227). There are also a number of other Islamic communities around the country, notably in Cork (which hosts the second largest Muslim population in Ireland) and Mayo. Writing in The Irish Times, Mary Fitzgerald (2006) notes that around the country there are many different prayer rooms subscribing to different schools of thought within Islam, including several different Sufi-inspired groups.
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Flynn argues that the greatest challenge to Islam in Ireland is its diversity. This is supported by Fitzgerald who notes that one of the newest Muslim communities in Ireland is that of Nigerian Muslims, led by an imam originating from Lagos, who claims to preach African Sufism. The preacher argues that Its a real Nigerian community thing. Islam as a religion is based on unity and we recognise that but we are different in some respects to Arab and south Asian Muslims (cited in Fitzgerald, 2006). I believe this statement, describing the specificity of culture and geography is the key to understanding Islam in Ireland. This will be discussed in greater detail in the next section, when I introduce the concept of Turkish Islam. According to Fitzgerald (2006) there has been thus far no comparable institution to the Muslim Council of Britain, with a clearly defined leadership in Ireland. This has led to a spate of squabbling between different groups and personalities vying for control. The outspoken South African, Sheikh Shaheed Satardien argued that Muslim leaders in Ireland were in denial regarding a growing number of extremist Muslims here. These claims have been denied by most Muslims and remain largely unproven. The South African Sheikh gained a lot of media attention for his outburst and has subsequently been ostracised by some members of the Muslim community in Ireland (Fitzgerald, 2006). This incident is an illustration of the lack of consensus amongst Muslims in this country. This brief survey of Islamic communities in Ireland is an explicit illustration of their diversity and indicates the desire of different groups to organise societies peculiar to their faith and culture. According to the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) (2007), most Muslims living in Ireland have successfully integrated. However, they have faced some difficulties due to racism/Islamaphobia from members of the host society. Until recent years there was a fallacious notion that Ireland was free of racism. Given that Ireland was a post-colonial state, it was argued that how could they be racist. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh led the charge in 2002 illustrating that racism has been present in Ireland for a long time, noting that anti-Traveller racism and anti-Semitism were seen as common sense and unproblematic. With the dramatic increase in migrants over the last 15 years, racism has become far more conspicuous to the point whereby there is a general acceptance of the problem of racism by the state and civil society. There has been quite a lot written in recent years about racism in Ireland (see Lentin and McVeigh, 2002; 2006; Fanning, 2002; Garner, 2004) though little attention given to the topic of Islamaphobia (exceptions include, NCCRI, 2007; Lentin and McVeigh, 2006). In this regard, Flynn argues that Muslims in Ireland tend to experience racism through avoidance and indifference (2006: 235). There may be some truth in this, though the NCCRI argue that there have been more explicit forms of Islamaphobia in Ireland, especially in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack on the twin towers in NewYork on September 11, 2001. These incidents included physical and verbal abuse. The NCCRI (2007) also note that typical Islamaphobic abuse reported to them include verbal abuse, other forms of harassment and disrespect rather than physical assaults or criminal damage. They also draw attention to some recent hyperbolic headlines in major Irish newspapers that help create a milieu whereby Islamaphobia can thrive. Examples include: Fascist fundamentalism is rife among young Irish Muslims (cited in NCCRI, 2007) The green jihads (cited in NCCRI, 2007). The NCCRI note that whilst the actual article may be balanced, these sensationalist headlines can have a powerful impact on the reader, leading to irrational fear of Muslims. Wilson and Gutierrez (1985) take this point up in a more general context, arguing that because there is a lack of positive
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portrayals of minority ethnic groups in the media, then it is quite conceivable that in the minds of the audience, this partial representation of minority ethnic groups becomes accepted as the reality (cited in Campbell, 1995: 83). It becomes the taken for granted expression of how things really are. It thus enters into the realm of common sense and largely goes unchallenged (Hall, 1982). The race theorist Teun Van Dijk insists that this systematic negative representation of the Other leads indirectly to the enactments and reproduction of racism (Van Dijk, 2000:48). Stuart Hall (1982) contends that this reproduction of the ideology of racism often takes place on the unconscious level. He does not believe that there is a group of media elite who consciously and malignly promote their version of reality to the explicit exclusion of others. Rather he argues that statements may be unconsciously drawing on the ideological frameworks and classifying schemes of a society and reproducing them so that they appear ideologically grammatical without those making them being aware of so doing (Hall, 1982: 72). In other words, when journalists and broadcasters frame media narratives, they do so drawing on classifications signified by the ruling group in society. Those working in the media therefore unconsciously reproduce these categories as if they were natural and immutable. Returning specifically to the Irish context, despite some Muslims in Ireland experiencing Islamaphobia, the NCCRI note that the majority of Muslims in Ireland have integrated successfully and Islamaphobic incidents are isolated.
3. Turkish Islam Edward Said (1997) argues, rightly in my view, that the majority of opinion-makers in Europe and America, both journalists and academics, have predominantly portrayed Islam as a monolithic group determined to challenge the West through terrorist activities. This articulation has intensified in recent years due to high-profile terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists. Said points out that many Western scholars understand western civilization as complex and heterogeneous and have devised a multitude of theories in an attempt to understand its multifaceted nature. Yet when it comes to Islamic society, it is treated as a single undifferentiated group. Aziz Al-Azmeh is critical of this view and rightly argues that there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it (cited in Yilmaz, 2005: 385). Too often ignored are the distinguishing factors of geography, culture and history. These features are integral in order to account for the manifold differences across borders (both territorial and symbolic). This point is supported by the Turkish-born sociologist Talip Kkcan, who argues that Islamic movements are very diverse in terms of their clientele, origins, ideology and composition. This leads us to conclude that one should talk about Islams in the modern world rather than one bounded and fixed Islam (1999: 191). Social, historical and geographical conditions must be taken into consideration when discussing what one means by Islam. Yavuz (2004) concurs with Kkcans position regarding the existence of multiple Islams. He maintains that there are seven different ethno-cultural zones of Islam: Arab countries, Persia, Turkey, South Asia, Malay-Indonesia, African and places where Islam is a minority faith (Yavuz 2004: 215). Each zone is peculiar to a particular region and its interpretations of Islam differ due to a variety of factors: Each zones understanding of Islam is primarily informed by its own national culture and by diverse historical and economic factors (ibid: 215). He argues that Turkey has its own zone that offers something unique regarding Islamic thought. This zone, however, is not restricted to the territorial boundaries of Turkey but rather refers to the Turkic people. Yavuz draws on Ahmet Ocak, who suggests that We should accept the fact that there is a specific way of being Muslim which reflects the Turkish understanding and practices in those region [which] stretch from Central Asia to
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the Balkans. (cited in Yavuz, 2004: 218). Ocak refers to this form of Islam as Turkish Islam. Yavuz argues that it differs vastly from Arab and Persian Islam regarding the interpretation of Islamic principles (Yavuz, 2004: 218). He argues that Sufism is an integral part of Turkish Islam and the Turkish understanding of Islam is very much punctuated by the tolerance of Rumi, love of Yunus and reasonability of Hac Bektasi Veli (2004: 219). Rumi, Yunus and Hac Bektasi Veli are all Turkish Sufi mystics, who according to Yavuz have been extremely influential to Turkish Islam (for a more comprehensive discussion on the origins of the concept of Turkish Islam see Uur, 2004; Bilir, 2004; Kkcan, 2004).
4. Fethullah Glen and Turkish Islam Writing in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, nal Bilir (2004) attributes the popularising of the concept of Turkish Islam to Fethullah Glen. Narrating the history of Islam in Turkey, Glen, of course, recognises that Islam emerged from Mecca and Medina, but goes on to insist that Islam did not come directly from these areas but was routed through Central Asia. (cited in Unal and Williams, 2000). The Turkic people of Central Asia adapted Islam to their own culture before exporting it through migration to the Anatolian region. A key point, according to Glen, is the fact that Islam was not forced on the Anatolians but they embraced it freely and wholeheartedly in great numbers. The corollary of this, he maintains, is that Islam in Turkey has remained tolerant, open, and un-dogmatic (Bilir, 2004: 267). Glen calls himself a Muslim Turk because he sees the two as inseparable, noting that the Turkish nation put its true values on a solid foundation after becoming Muslim (cited in Unal and Williams, 2000: 56). Islam in Turkey has gone through many phases since the founding of the Turkish Republic and abolition of the Caliph in the 1920s. It has, however, undoubtedly remained a constant feature vis--vis identity formation amongst Turks, despite the various state and military interferences over peoples practice of Islam (privately and politically) over the years. The discursive construction of Turkish Islam may be understood as an attempt to enshrine a sense of national patriotism within Islam in order to conjure up consensus as Turkey continues to modernise. Glen acknowledges that some may see a contradiction within his articulation of Turkish Islam, given the importance to universality within Islam. He responds: Islam is universal with respect to its principles. Details can be interpreted differently. Its my humble opinion that the Turkish nation has interpreted those interpretable matters quite well. If Ottoman tolerance existed today in the world, I believe there would be a very good basis for dialogue not only among Muslims but also humanity. In a world that is becoming more and more globalized, being open to dialogue is very important. (cited in Unal and Williams, 2000: 56) Glen clearly recognises the universal principles of Islam, though he importantly notes the differences in interpretation. As I argued above, based on geographical, cultural and social elements Islam is interpreted and expressed in different ways which leads us to talk about Islam in the plural sense. Glen draws on the Ottoman legacy as an example of tolerance and relatively convivial relations between various religious groups further noting that In our history, a synagogue, a church, and a mosque stood side by side in many places (cited in Yilmaz, 2005: 395). Zeki Saritoprak of the John Carroll University and Sidney Griffith of the Catholic University of America, echo this sentiment:
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The Empire was composed not only of Muslims, but of many Christian and Jewish groups, and Zoroastrians. Until the emergence of modern nationalistic ideas, Muslims, Christians and Jews had managed to live together more peacefully and productively in Ottoman times than has been possible more recently in the twentieth century (2005: 332). Though this is a largely uncritical view of the Ottoman Empire, it is still fair to claim that relative to most other empires of this period, the Ottoman Empire had a comparatively more tolerant attitude towards minority religions. In recent years, Fethullah Glen has become renowned for his work on dialogue between different groups supporting different interpretations of Islam and between different monotheistic faith groups. In his pursuit of peaceful coexistence he has met with several world religious leaders, including the former Roman Catholic Pope, John Paul II, the leader of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Barthalemeos; Turkeys Chief Rabbi, David Aseo; Israels Sephardic Head Rabbi, Eliyahu Bakshi Doron. He has also met with and influenced Turkish presidents and academics. These endeavours have made Glen an important religious figure both in Turkey and around the world. With a belief in the necessity of Dialogue between different cultures and religions he helped establish the Journalists and Writers Foundation in 1994. He is the honorary president of this Foundation which organises conferences and meetings to promote dialogue and tolerance between different sections of Turkish society. Glen has also inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of organisations in all continents promoting interfaith and intercultural dialogue. All of these activities come out of Glens articulation of Turkish Islam as grounded in openness and tolerance. It is my intention to analyse the practical contribution of Glens work by focusing on a society inspired by him, based in Dublin. Firstly however, I briefly look at the role of Turkish Islam vis--vis social and cultural integration of Turkish migrants in the German context.
5. The Glen Movement and Turkish Islam in Germany: Prospects for Integration? nal Bilir (2004) investigated the potential for Glens articulation of Turkish Islam in helping the Turkish diaspora in Germany to integrate. The majority of foreign settlers in Germany were the part of the guestworker system and by far the largest group of settlers were Turks. The number of Turks in Germany is estimated to be around two million, many of whom born in Germany (Oezcan, 2004; Yurdakul, 2006). Atalik and Beeley are correct, in my view, to suggest that The cultural impact of Turkish labour migration to Europe may prove to be at least as durable and penetrating as the economic (1993: 168). Turkish people differ from the majority of Germans with regard to culture, religion and language. These factors made Turks in Germany easily visible as a separate ethnic group. Landau is right to claim that they met with serious cultural and linguistic difficulties of acculturation to their new milieu (1996: 223). He further contends that because the Turkish language is very different in both syntax and origin, it was difficult for Turks to acquire the German language: [like] a left-handed person having to master physical skills with his right hand (Landau, 1996: 222). This cultural and linguistic distance made Turkish migrants susceptible to prejudices and racism by some Germans. They were an easy target for scape-goating during the economic recession of the 1970s and again during the anomic conditions of reunification between East and West Germany (Castles and Miller, 2003).
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According to Doomernik, assimilation into German society or a return to the country of origin appear to be the only options which the German government is willing to accept (1995:12). Due to these assimilationist tendencies, Castles et al suggest that for a Turkish youth in Germany to be successful in educationoften means rejecting their origins and accepting middle-class cultural dominance as a pre-condition for selection from higher levels of education (Castles et al 1987:167). This is anathema for many Turks who take great pride in their national heritage, culture, customs and language. This results in a high failure rate amongst Turkish children in German schools (Castles and Miller, 2003). Yagmur contends that rejection and subordination by the majority population can lead to a boost in language maintenance (2004:139). This was to prove the case for the Turks in Germany. In many German cities, Turks have carved out areas with a quasi-oriental character (Gogolin and Reich, 2001). In such areas, one can acquire all ones daily needs, including goods and services, through the Turkish language. Gogolin and Reich (2001) acknowledge that youths that are raised in these quarters from an early age are normally as linguistically competent in Turkish as most monolinguistic youths living in Turkey. The German citizenship law has traditionally been based on jus sanguinis (law of blood). With the Citizenship law (1999) there was a shift in orientation towards jus soli (law of land) which makes it easier for immigrants to become naturalised Germans. However Castles and Miller (2003) note that this measure disallows the immigrants from holding dual citizenship. They note that a variety of Turkish immigrant organisations have been established to challenge such issues at the political level. Gke Yurdakul (2006) takes up this point in her study of Turkish associations in Berlin. More will be said about this in a later section. It is enough to note at this stage that Yurdakul makes the point that Turkish migrants in Germany are not passive recipients (2006: 437) of German state policy. She illustrates that Turkish migrant associations are active participants in negotiating and lobbying for their rights in Germany, despite the various obstacles. Bilir (2004) notes that although the presence of the Glen Movement in Germany is small it has the potential to grow and have a large impact on the Turkish diaspora there. The Islamic political group, Milli Gorus (National Outlook Movement) is popular amongst Turks in Germany, though the German government is unwilling to engage with them. This is due to Milli Gorus checkered past where until recent years its ideology was underpinned by a strong anti-Western stance (Yilmaz, 2005: 401). Bilir contends that Glens moderate articulation of Islam has the potential to counter radical Islamic Turkish groups in Germany. He argues that Germanys Glen Movement can gain the confidence of the German government to act as a mediator between the Turkish diaspora and the German state in order to improve conditions for integration. He does, however, acknowledge that the Glen Movements emphasis on the priority of Turkish culture may prove difficult for the German state that still prioritises assimilationist policies. Jill Irvine of the University of Oklahoma is optimistic about the impact of the Glen Movement in Germany. She conducted a series of interviews with members of the Glen Movement in Munich, Berlin and Ingolstadt. She argues that their vision of integration is one of cultural exchange and enrichment rather than assimilation (Irvine, 2007: 83). She contends that the activities of this movement in Germany may act as a middle way between the German population and the isolated Turkish migrants. Due to the complexity of the German situation, much more analysis is needed in this regard. I now turn to the Irish case and analyse the contribution of the Glen Movement and its expression of Turkish Islam in the context of an emerging multicultural society.
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6. TIECS Attitudes to Integration Before describing how TIECS was initiated, I relate some demographics regarding the number of Turkish migrants living in Ireland. According to the Turkish embassy in Ireland, there are 650 Turkish migrants living in the Republic of Ireland (phone call with the Turkish embassy, 21 February, 2006). However, this is contested by Turkish migrants themselves who suggest it is between 2,000 and 3,000. The Turkish embassy may have an investment in down-playing the number of Turks in Ireland given the negative reception of Turks in other European countries, such as Germany, Holland and France (Castles and Miller 2003; Atalik and Beeley 1993). Another reason for understating these statistics may be due to the negative attention the Turkish construction company GAMA received vis-vis the alleged underpaying of Turkish workers in Ireland (Barry 2006). Coupled with the everincreasing racism in Ireland (Lentin and McVeigh 2002; 2006;Garner 2004), the embassy may have thought it wise to keep its guesstimate low. The numbers provided by the Turkish embassy are only an educated guess, as Turkish migrants do not have to declare themselves at the embassy on arrival. The Turkish Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS) was established by Turkish labour migrants living in Ireland. The precursor to TIECS involved gatherings of Turkish migrants congregating in order to deal with common bureaucratic issues such as visa problems. Another issue discussed amongst these migrants at this early stage concerned the socialisation of their children in a society dominated by a different culture than their own. The most prominent members of the Turkish community in Ireland are men and several members claimed to have difficulties gaining a visa that would allow them to bring their families to Ireland. As these Turkish migrants settled down a few years, bureaucratic issues became less urgent. They began to focus on developing a social and cultural society. This culminated in the establishment of TIECS in 2004. Though TIECS was established by members of the Turkish diaspora living in Ireland, its composition has changed and it now includes temporary migrants from Turkey and Turkmenistan. These migrants were recruited in order to build up an affiliate of the Glen Movement in Ireland. With the growth of the organisation and the lack of manpower, other members of the Glen Movement contributed. It appears then that members of the Glen Movement help set up organisations whereby members of the Turkish diaspora have already established a base. Active members of the Movement periodically travel to Glen-inspired organisations and advise its members on the best way to implement the objectives of the Movement. Ireland has become an important European centre for business and culture and the initiation of the Glen-inspired TIECS may be seen as a strategic move in order to make an impact in Europe. There appears to be a concerted attempt to gain influence in Europe by the Glen Movement in recent years with the initiation of other Glen-inspired associations not only in Dublin, but also in Belfast (NITECA), Edinburgh (Dialogue Society for Scotland) and Brighton (Interfaith Dialogue Society) all opened in 2004/5. The Dialogue Society in London preceded these and was established in 1998.450 One cannot fail to notice that the mushrooming of these organisations run concurrent with the opening up of talks between Turkey and the European Union (EU) regarding Turkeys possible accession into the EU. The political scientist Hasan T. Ksebalaban draws attention to some interesting insights in the context of Glens views on European integration. He argues that Fethullah Glen is the leader of a
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www.dialoguesociety.org
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formally apolitical social movement who nevertheless has influenced Turkish political debates, including those related to international relations (Ksebalaban 2003: 171). This has particularly been the case regarding European Union (EU) accession. Ksebalaban (2003) notes the polarisation of opinion regarding Turkeys relationship with Europe. Some argue that European integration will lead to the loss of Turkish-Muslim identity. Alternatively, Glen has been an avid supporter of EU accession from the start (see Glerce, 2004; Yilmaz, 2003: 235). He maintains that Islamic identity and European identity are not necessarily incongruous but can be complimentary. Given Glens support for European integration of Turkey, it is plausible to view the emergence of Glen-inspired organisation as a concerted attempt to promote a positive image of Turkey in an attempt to gain support for European accession. TIECS is inspired by the thought of Fethullah Glen and consistent with his emphasis on Turkish culture, tolerance and dialogue, its members developed a variety of pursuits. These include Turkish language classes, interfaith dialogue conferences and several trips to Turkey per year for Irish people and others. It is important to note that TIECS members do not appear to be involved in any sustained transnational economic activity. Nor are they involved in any political quests. Indeed several members of TIECS noted that both TIECS and the Glen Movement are apolitical. TIECS endeavours appear to be purely of the socio-cultural type. Surveying TIECS website we can get a summarised version of its aims and objectives: It is the mission of Turkish Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS) to serve societal peace, love, and friendship by striving to bring forth the common values of humanity; values such as tolerance, respect, and compassion. TIECS acknowledges the importance of spreading these most significant values within Dublin's diverse communities, hoping for all to take them on as a common virtue. In order to build a better future, TIECS will work hand in hand with Irish and other communities and groups that recognize the same mission and uphold the same values (TIECS Homepage) From their earliest meetings, members of TIECS were adamant that they did not want to assimilate into Irish society. They rather intend to simultaneously integrate whilst preserving their own culture and traditions and passing these down to their children. Integration according to these early members was the key to successful settlement. This is echoed in their Mission Statement above, which emphasises values such as tolerance, respect, and compassion. It is furthermore consistent with the wider goals of the Glen Movement. This is a useful starting point to outline the principal goals of TIECS. However, by interviewing various members of this society, I was enabled to explore these goals in more depth and establish the principles adopted from Fethullah Glen. It is useful to look a little deeper at the views of TIECS vis--vis integration into Irish society. Members of TIECS I spoke to insisted that they had learned from the mistakes of other Turkish migrants abroad who made little attempt to integrate in the early years, which led to subsequent generations of Turks feeling displaced and isolated from the mainstream society. Several participants pointed to Germany as the principal site where Turkish migrants were caught in an in between or liminal space. The majority of these Turks are a legacy of the guestworker system established in the 1960s. One member of TIECS claims that:
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what happened to the Turkish people in Germany? They didnt start to do volunteering work or social work 30 years ago and now they have big problems with the young generation because they have a kind of dual identification, actually not dual identification, no identity. They dont feel they belong to any society. They dont describe themselves as German. It is not easy to say I am Turkish. So they are kind of in the middle somewhere. And this is not integration, not assimilation even, just standing in the middle of somewhere and you dont know where you are, who you are. And we want to stop this because we were lucky here, our generation, our children are very small at the moment, so if we start now we can provide them with a healthy environment. I discussed the complex nature of the Turkish diaspora in Germany in a previous section and illustrated how the German government must take a large proportion of the responsibility regarding the lack of integration of Turkish migrants there. The TIECS member above is dismayed that Turks in Germany are caught in a liminal space, arguing that they are neither here nor there. They are unsure if they are Turks or Germans. They are neither integrated, nor assimilated. In the words of the above respondent, they have no identity; they are kind of in the middle somewhere; just standing in the middle somewhere, and you dont know where you are, who you are. This articulation of the position in Turkish migrants in Germany has been well documented (Castles et al, 1987; Atalik and Beeley 1993). However what is less discussed is the important contribution Turkish associations in Germany make to immigration reform and integration through political engagement in Germany. Gke Yurdakul (2006) analysed the role of two Turkish associations, TBB and the Cemaat (Glen movement), in Berlin. Acknowledging the difficulties faced by Turkish migrants in Germany, she shatters the racialised view of the Turkish diaspora in Germany as a single homogenous group, by illustrating the diversity in attitudes and actions of its various members. Her principle focus, as mentioned previously, is to show that some Turkish associations in Germany are actively promoting integration and reform through political engagement. She notes that Many German political authorities refer to the TBB and the Cemaat as the supporters and guardians of immigrant integration. (ibid: 444). Yurdakuls study is important as it shows not all Turkish migrants are caught in a liminal space but many have adapted to the German context, whilst often preserving their own culture. Though the TIECS member quoted above referred to Turks in Germany in a stereotypical fashion, his main point is that members of TIECS want to avoid the problems of integration that did indeed face many Turkish migrants in Germany. Later in the interview, he says that: And also, we are part of this culture. We are not here just here for doing this work. We are living here and we are contributing as part of society. This is an interesting example of the promotion of integration of the Turkish community in Ireland. The interviewee insists that they are not just here as representatives of Turkey but they are now also part of Irish society and they are keen to contribute. They are part of the broader Irish society and not just part of the diaspora community. However, they have no intention of assimilating but instead intend to integrate, whilst simultaneously showing their culture and learning others culture. I now look at one of TIECS main activities in order to evaluate the contribution of Fethullah Glen in a very real and practical way.
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7. TIECS, Dialogue and Turkish Islam TIECS has initiated a variety of social and cultural events. This section focuses on a series of conferences celebrating the Abrahamic Religions, organised by this society. I have chosen to discuss this event as I believe it best illustrates TIECS relationship with the work of Fethullah Glen and his promotion of Turkish Islam. TIECS has held two conferences celebrating the Abrahamic Religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 2005 the conference was staged in University College Dublin (UCD) and in 2006 it was held in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). There were speakers from each of the three religions and all were interested in promoting interfaith dialogue. The Jewish and Christian speakers were residents in Ireland, whilst the Muslim speakers were rather of Turkish origin, living in London, and related to Glen-inspired organisations in England. In 2005 Kerim Balci, a journalist with the Glen-inspired Zaman newspaper represented the Muslim view of interfaith dialogue. In 2006, Ozcan Kelesh, of the Dialogue Society of London (a Glen-inspired organisation promoting interfaith dialogue), spoke on the theme of compassion in Islam. Admission to these conferences was free and the attendees included representatives of different faith groups, academics and students. I asked one member of TIECS, why this society organised these conferences: The conferences are so important to introducethe correct Islamic views to the society, because nowadays Islam is one of the main religions, which is[misunderstood] by the people, especially in the Western world. There are many reasons and also because of the mistakes of some Muslims... Also because of bias[es] and prejudices by some of the intellectuals in the western world. So as a Muslim, we believe we have some responsibility to introduce our belief to the society some people have forced it to be recognised as a kind of religion for violence. And it was not easy for us to accept this without doing anything. The conference series is one of the projects which we would like to tackle this misunderstanding problem... From this excerpt we can see that the main aim of the interfaith conferences organised by TIECS is to introduce the correct Islamic views. It may be argued that interfaith dialogue is of secondary importance to members of TIECS whilst promoting a tolerant understanding of Islam is the main objective. This is understandable given the imbalanced nature of reports regarding Muslims in both academia and the mainstream media. The above respondent maintains that Islam has been largely misunderstood in the Western world. He blames both the prejudices of various intellectuals towards Islam and indeed some Muslims who misinterpret the Koran and engage in violence. With regards to the former, Edward Said (1997) takes up this point, claiming: Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians. (1997: xi/xii) In any other context, such denigration would be rightly regarded as racism. However in the context of Islam, such vilification appears acceptable as it has become part of the common sense thinking of many people in the Western world. In the absence of a collective effort to portray positive representations of Muslims by western opinion-makers, it is only the negative depictions that filter down to the general media consumer. Said (1997) notes that for every book written fairly on the
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subject of Islam, there are numerous written with an unbalanced orientation towards depicting Muslims as terrorists. The corollary of this, according to Said, is that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing (ibid: xvi). For the average person, Islam becomes synonymous with terrorism, violence and atavism. Saids position was articulated before the terrorist attacks in New York (2001). A variety of authors have since shown that the denigration of Islam by Western opinion-makers has intensified since the attacks in New York (Modood, 2005; Anwar, 2005; Parekh, 2006; Ishay, 2004; Wu, 2004). The objective of TIECS in this context is to illustrate that not only is Islam not synonymous with violence, but on the contrary, the religion is tantamount to peace. Another member of TIECS explained other reasons for holding these conferences: it isgood to show the similarities between the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaismthis really builds a bridge in society between believers and it really brings a kind of synergy between the people, breaking prejudices and biases. And it is good for a healthy society because when Irish society knows what Islam is, what true Islam is: when they deal with the Muslim people in Ireland, they have more open and healthy perspective because of the information and knowledge they get. So conferences help us to achieve this goal and also it helps us to make good friendships and to collaborate with other groups... And we are focusing on the common point between us. All of us believe that there is one God. And this is the main moving point for us and when you put common points on the table, you see more common points than which you conflict on and you can just focus on the common points. This doesnt mean we are all the same. That is normal, the differences, but respect and tolerance [are] the magic words if you live. So conferences help us to succeed these goals. By illustrating the parallels amongst the Abrahamic religions, members of TIECS are attempting to find common ground with other monotheistic religions in Ireland. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, as mentioned previously, to educate other faiths on the tenets of Islam in order to dispel the malign myth that Islam is tantamount to brutality. Secondly, the above TIECS member believes that it will aid the integration process for Muslims and serve to prevent them being isolated from the mainstream society. He recognizes that people are different but stresses that respect and tolerance [are] the magic words. The words spoken above and actions taken through the conferences are entirely consistent with Fethullah Glens articulation of Turkish Islam, grounded in the Sufi principles of tolerance and dialogue. Members of TIECS use the same strategy as Glen to bring apparently irreconcilable groups together around the one table. The focus on commonalities to build a strong and secure foundation upon is the key to their success, ignoring or suspending the dogma of each sect, faith or cultural group. Through TIECS interfaith conferences, members naturally attempt to promote Islam as they understand it. In the two conferences they have held so far, the Muslim speakers were of Turkish origin and members of Glen-affiliated groups. They emphasised tolerance, love and the reasonability of Islam as promoted by Glen and other Turkish Sufi mystics. There is, however, competition regarding the interpretation of Islam in Ireland. As previously mention, Islam is the fastest growing religion in Ireland today, and these followers of Islam come from many different
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regions in the world, including Ireland, and from all the Islamic zones mentioned by Yavuz (2004). TIECS is now involved in a competitive market with other interpretations of Islam. TIECS is first and foremost a Turkic religio-cultural society, with an emphasis on Turkish culture and the Turkish understanding of Islam. It is too much to ask this small organisation to solve the problems of multiculturalism in Ireland. Indeed it is too much to ask that this group resolve the complexities of even Muslim integration in Ireland. What this society has, however, accomplished is a small platform, whereby they promote a positive and moderate image of Islam, countering the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of this religion by leading opinion-makers in the West. They have further contributed to Irish society by engaging in dialogue with different faith groups and cultures. Indeed, the efforts of this group are an example of how migrants with different cultural, linguistic and religious differences can adapt and integrate into a host society dominated by a very different culture. Furthermore, the presence of this Glen-inspired organisation is an illustration of the very real and practical contribution of the thought and action of Fethullah Glen. The fact that such an organisation is present in Ireland (a country that up until 15 years ago was understood by many outsiders as a backwater of Britain), is indicative of the reach of the thought of Fethullah Glen. Their various activities, inspired by Glen, are an example of how peaceful coexistence is possible amongst different ethnic groups in a diverse society in a European context.
8. Conclusion This article began by surveying the various Islamic communities living in Ireland. I noted that there has been an academic deficit in this department in Ireland, though Kieran Flynn (2006) must be commended for his work. My principle aim in this section was to illustrate the diversity and different expressions of Islam practiced in Ireland and support my argument that based on geographical, cultural and social differences we can talk about Islam in the plural sense. This section also served to contextualise TIECS in the Irish setting. Subsequent to this I introduced the theme of Turkish Islam as one expression of Islam, before evaluating Fethullah Glens contribution to the popularising of this concept. Drawing on the work of Bilir and Irvine this section questioned the potential of the Glen Movement in Germany to act as a positive force in helping the Turkish diaspora in Germany to integrate into their host society. I then moved to the heart of this article by introducing the Gleninspired TIECS and exploring its members attitudes to integration. They show a deep commitment to becoming part of Irish society, whilst simultaneously maintaining their Turkish identity. They refuse to isolate themselves, arguing that they have learned from the mistakes of other Turkish migrants, especially in Germany. Drawing on Yurdakuls work I also noted the active role Turkish associations in Germany play vis--vis promoting integration and lobbying for better conditions for Turkish settlers in Germany. This section then showed how TIECS are an exemplary of Glens thought regarding openness and tolerance. The final section focused on TIECS very practical and visible contribution to integration and interfaith dialogue in Ireland. I examined their motivations for organising a series of conferences devoted to exploring the commonalities between the Abrahamic religions. I argued that one of the main reasons for this conference was to counteract the overwhelmingly negative media portrayal of Muslims as violent and atavistic. Drawing on the work of Said, I contended that in any other context such denigration would be referred to as racism but in the context of Islam, such denigration appears uncritically acceptable to many in the West. This section also showed how TIECS adopts Glens
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articulation of Turkish Islam grounded in the principles of openness, tolerance and reason and promote these in their conferences. Despite the lack of consensus amongst Muslims in Ireland, Flynn (2006) points out several positive points, arguing that both the main Shia and Sunni institutions in Ireland have made attempts to engage with the Irish public and civil society through a variety of activities. It is my contention that TIECS will become another major player in the debate about the role of Islam in Ireland. Drawing on the experience of Fethullah Glens dialogical work between apparently irreconcilable groups in Turkey, TIECS may be able to draw together the different expressions of Islam as well as different world faiths present in Ireland in a spirit of open discourse. In conclusion, this article has attempted to show the real and practical contribution of Fethullah Glen by focusing on a society inspired by his thoughts. By analysing the motivations and activities of TIECS, I illustrated how a group of Turkish Muslims have comfortably settled into a country with a very different culture and contributed in a very meaningful way. This may be understood as an exemplary case of peaceful coexistence amongst different ethnic and religious groups in a European context.
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RESEMBLANCE OF FETHULLAH GLEN'S IDEAS AND CURRENT POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN UZBEKISTAN

VICTORIA LEVINSKAYA 451
Abstract This paper reflects on Turkish influence and specifically the ideas of Fethullah Glen and his community on formation of identity and values in Central Asia. After the collapse of the Soviet Ideology new independent states in Central Asia started to look for a new value system. The beginning of the 1990s was a time of great enthusiasm among researches and scholars, who tried to revive Islamic values and cultural traditions in the region. Many of them looked to Turkey as a moderate Muslim state with a democratic form of government. It was the time when Fethullah Glens ideas began to be introduced to a wider Central Asian audience. Uzbeks and other Central Asians could appreciate Glens approach to Islam, and his two keys to peace in society tolerance and dialogue because they were very much in tune with the modernist ideas of the Jadidis of the 1920s and very close to the temperament of the local people. The teaching of Glen, with his state-oriented philosophy and ideas about market and neo-liberal economic policies, was very much in tune with the state ideology. One of the most crucial phenomena in post-Soviet Central Asia was the establishment of a wide network of Fethullah Glen community schools in Central Asia. These schools provided the best standards of education, excellent teaching materials and IT equipment and emphasized respect between teachers and students. But in 2000 in Uzbekistan these schools were closed down due to the deterioration of relationships with Turkey. Some state officials were looking for an aggressively visible Islamic factor and Glen become undesirable, since they wanted to see a backward, radical Islam, in order to justify authoritarian measures in the country. However, Glens ideas and writings surely will be used by Central Asian nations for further development in the region in order to create a better society based on religious tolerance and modern values, and alert to the importance of education and the pursuit of knowledge, and to the positive role of religion and spiritual life in forming a peaceful and harmonious social order.
1. Introduction This paper analyzes the Turkish influence and specifically ideas of Fethullah Glen and his movement on the formation of identity and values in Central Asia.
451
(PhD in social and political philosophy.) Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Uzbekistan, Head of
the Learning Resource Centre at the Westminster International University in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Visiting Fulbright scholar at the Catholic University of America, Visiting Fulbright specialist in Jackson State University (Mississippi). She has organized a number of International Summer schools for young faculty members of NIS in Uzbekistan, including an Islam and Civil Society summer school. She is the author of over 20 publications on different topics of social, political and environmental philosophy, has participated in many different international conferences, and been a visiting lecturer in many US and European universities. Research interests: civil society and the process of democratization in Central Asia; Islamic philosophy and political Islam; sustainable development and globalization.
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Glen has published more then 30 books, the majority deal with explicitly Islamic topics. They range from studies of the biography of Prophet Muhammad, to a basic induction to Sufism and elaborations of essential themes of Islamic faith. These studies are directed not toward specialists but at a more general audience of educated Muslims and adherents of other religious systems or beliefs. Fethullah Glens educational vision is profundity of ideas, clarity of thought, and depth of feeling, cultural appreciation and spiritual values. At the same time he has very deep ideas regarding improving quality of education by harmonizing modern secular education, with its orientation on material values and traditional religious education, oriented on spiritual values. These ideas are realized by Glens missionary schools in Central Asia and throughout the world. Unfortunately, these days Glen schools were closed down in Uzbekistan, the most populace country of Central Asia, because of the misunderstanding by the government of this country the goals and missions of these schools. But, in a long run, educational approaches suggested by Glen and his followers and educational standards accomplished by his schools will be valued much higher by people in Central Asia.
2. Islam in Central Asia Islam arrived in Central Asia (CA) with Arab armies at the down of the eighth century. By the ninth century, Muslim geographers considered Transoxiana (as the lend beyond the Amy Darya river or Central Asia) to be an integral part of the Muslim world. Indeed, some of the most important figures in Islamic civilization came from this region. Sunni Muslims hold six compilations of hadith to be authoritative. Two of the six compilers, Abu Ismail al-Bukhari (810-70) and Abu Isa Muhammad alTirmudhi (825-92) were from Central Asia.; the great scientist Abu Nasr al-Muhammad al-Faraby (950), known as the second teacher (after Aristotel); and the rationalist philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sina (980-1037, known in the West as Avicenna) - figures of absolutely central importance in the Islamic civilization were all born in this region. Although it was Arab invaders who took Islam to the region, the conversion patterns and sociocultural structure created a vernacular Turkic-Islam. One of the commonly disseminating myths was that of Baba Tukles or Saman one of the Muslim saints, (although Islam does not have officially canonized saints), who converted Uzbek Khan, the Genghizid ruler of the Golden Horde, to Islam by beating the khans court shaman in a religious contest. Saman and Kam, as legendary religious and charismatic leaders, known as baba and ata452, personified the old religion and become the agents of Islamization in Central Asia. By thirteen century Sufism also had become a dominant part of religious and cultural life of the Turkic world. Sufism represents a complex of diverse religious trends and includes mystical philosophy, a cult of saintly figures and distinctive liturgical practices. In Central Asia three Sufi orders: Yessavie, Kubreviyye and Naksibendiyye were very powerful. Russian conquest of Central Asia brought this region into the modern world via colonialism. Educated people in Turkistan (theyve been called Jadids in Russia and in Turkic world) thought
452
De Weese, D. (2000) Sacred History for a Central Asian Towns: Saints, Shrines, and Legends of Origin. London, 89-90;
Ibid. (1994) Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: BabaTukles and Conversation to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition., University Park, Penn, 541-43
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that Muslim society of Central Asia is in a serious crises. According to Jadidish, social reforms have to be based on the traditional identity of the people and acknowledged by the Koran. Everything was in need of change, with traditional education at central stage. The course of action was clear: enlightenment and modern education would solve all the problems of the society. Many of them opened private schools, where they tried to combine religious with secular education. Much more attention was devoted to secular (hard and economic) sciences as an alternative to the educational standards providing by old madreses. The Jaddids453 emphasized the idea of progress and incorporating the elements of modern scientific education into traditional religious Islamic education and also importance to educate girls along with boys. In 1906 in Urgench one of them Khusan Dushaev open the first school for girls. In other cities of Turkistan girl-schools were also opened, where mostly secular sciences were thought. Such outstanding jaddid scholars as Avlony, Rasuly, Fitrit, Bekhbudy and others worked as schoolteachers. They wrote and published the textbooks for their schools and promoted equality between men and women. These ideas if Jadids were very much in tune with Fethullah Glens philosophy of a holistic education system, which promotes spiritual enrichment and critical thinking for man and women. He sees the economic and moral decline in the Muslim world as a result of spiritual and intellectual decline, and aims to renew the Muslim tradition. The main strategy for achieving this aim is education. For Glen, serving Allah means raising perfect youth who combine spirituality with intellectual training, reason with revelation, and mind with heart. 454 The call of reform was made from a self-consciously Islamic position. The acquisition of modern knowledge, the Jadids argued, was mandated by Islam itself. In common with other modernists of the period, the Jadids ascribed the decline and degeneration of their community to its departure from true path of Islam. When Muslims followed true Islam they were leaders of the world in knowledge, and Muslim empire were mighty. Corruption of the faith led them to ignorance and political and military weakness. The solution was a return to true Islam. The main idea that united the most outstanding thinkers in Turkestan was oriented towards spiritual freedom and human dignity. Rather then oppose one class or group against another; they believed that all human beings are equal irrespective of their religion, social origins and so on. The overwhelming population of the region is Sunni and belongs to the Hanafi school of law (one of four interpretation of Islam), which was founded by Abu Hanifa an-Numon ibn Sobit in the 8 century. Hanafi is considered to be the most liberal, modest, and convenient as far as rituals are concerned, among other interpretations of Islam. The Jadid movement played a key role in articulation of national identities. Turkic and Islamic identity were used interchangeably which, in turn, played a constitutive role in forming national identities of the new Central Asian states. Therefore, religious network played an important role in Central Asian relations with Turkey.
453
Khalid, A. (1998) The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia., Berkley, University of California Glen, F (2005) An analyses of the Prophets life (The Messenger of God Muhammad), (Rutherford N.J., The Light),
Press, 75-124
454
257-261
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3. Islam after the Independence. (1990s). Turkish-Islam After obtaining of the independence, Central Asian republics started the process of reviving of Islam. Interest in religion soared throughout the Soviet Union on the Gorbachev years. Glasnost led to quest for moral and spiritual values that were now seen to have been corroded by Communism. Islam becomes to be used as a leading source for constructing of national identity and selfhood. Many people, who never prayed before began to pray regularly and to observe other Islamic injunctions. It become possible again travel to Mecca, new mosques began to build, some old ones were put back to service and religious education began. A number of madrassas were opened in the first years of independence to provide higher Islamic education. Of course, this revival was not a simple return to the past. The legacy of the Soviet era did not evaporate. The governments of Central Asian republics have tried a dual strategy to cooperate with Islam while controlling it. In the beginning of the era of independence (1991-1995), Turkey was the main model of development for Uzbekistan and other Central Asian republics. Democratic Islamic state with a strong economy and pro-Western orientation and at the same time a very close to all five Central Asian republics in language, traditions and customs was the ideal model from the point of view of Central Asian policymakers. Turkey also has been trying to use commonly shared ethnoreligious culture to create a number of institutions that will develop cooperation. Turkey has been very active in Central Asia in exporting soft and nationalized Turkish Islam to this region. The nature of Islam in Central Asia was the same as it is in Turkey: modern and moderate; not at all hostile to secular power. Sufi-oriented and softer Turkish-Islam has been more appealing to the younger people of Central Asia as they reconstruct their faith rather then Saudi-based Wahhabism or the Iranian version of the rigid Islam. This time ideas of Fethullah Glen become known and popular in Central Asia and especially in Uzbekistan, country with the most populace Muslim community. Being Hanafi Muslims, Uzbeks could appreciate Glens approach to Islam, because they were very much in tune with modernists ideas of Jadids of 1920s and very close to the national mentality of the local people. With strong ethical sense at the heart of his understanding of Islam, Glens many writings of the life of Muhammad affirm his role as Prophet who brought the Quranic revelation but emphasize even more strongly the figure of Muhammad as moral exemplar for Muslims, Muhammad as the first hearer of the Quran whose life was preeminently shaped by its message. Glens central concern could seem to be Muhammad as role-model for the Muslim of today. This leads him to concentrate on the moral qualities of Muhammad manifested in personal relationships with his companions, wives and enemies, and the qualities of leadership shown in being Commander of the Faithful. What Glen seems to find a special importance of the life of Muhammad are personal qualities such as piety, sincerity generosity, modesty, determination, truthfulness, compassion, patience, and tolerance. And also his leadership characteristics, such as realism, courage, a sense of responsibility and farsightedness, and a readiness to consult, delegate and forgive.455
455
Glen, F. (1998) Prophet Muhammad as Commander, Konak-Iznir (Kaynak) 122-123
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Glen does not favor to the state applying Islamic law, the Sharia. He points out that most Islamic regulations concern private life and only a small portion of them concern state and government. 456 These latter needs to be enforced because religion is a private matter and its requirements should not to be imposed on anyone. He looks at the Islamic regulation bearing directly on government (such as taxation and warfare) in light of contemporary realities. This leads him to the conclusion, for example, that the democratic form of government is the best choice, an outlook that causes Glen to oppose strongly the regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia.457 After seventy years of domination of planned economy and communist ideology, Central Asian states has become free-market oriented and started to seek for new neo-liberal values. Doctrine of Glen, with his state-oriented philosophy and ideas about market and neo-liberal economic policies, was very much in spirit of the state ideology. According to Glen, in order to preserve their uniqueness and respect uniqueness of others as well. Muslims need to share a new legal code, and to have a free-market economy, private education and free thinking. Being a Muslim in a modern world necessary to support and consolidate modern institutions of democracy, the rule of law, a free-market economy, and so forth458. On the question of women, Glen also has progressive views. The veiling of women is a detail in Islam and no one can suppress the progress of women through the clothes they have to wear459. Furthermore he said that Muslim women can be administrator and guide men, if it is necessary. Glen holds that the Anatolian peoples interpretation and experiences of Islam are different from those of others, especially the Arabs. He frequently emphasizes that there should be freedom of worship and thinking among Muslims. He writes of an Anatolian Islam based on tolerance and excluding harsh restrictions or fanaticism. He proposes two keys to provide peace in society: tolerance and dialog. In the philosophical dilemma: What should we do: to modernize Islam or Islamize modernity? Glen choose to modernize Islam. These ideas were widely discussed on some scientific conferences, such as Tolerance and Islam (1999), Islam and Modernity (2000) and many others. Therefore, ideas of Fethullah Glen have no difficulties in adapting to this region. Some of his works (for example, The essentials of Islamic Faith, Religious Education of the Child, An analysis of the Prophet Life) been translated to Russian and Central Asian languages. These books were easy to find near mosques and in some private book shops. The most popular become ideas of interfaith dialog between adherents of Islam and other religions. In his view, no one should condemn the other for being a member of a religion or scold him for being an atheist460. Glen believes that interfaith cooperation is imperative today and should be compulsory for Muslim to support peace and harmony. Referencing the Medina Constitution, Glen stressed that the Prophet himself practiced such cooperation. For some reason Muslim neglected this tradition for a certain period of time, yet its roots are well grounded in core teaching of Islam.461 Because of it,
456 457 458 459 460 461
Glen, F (1996) Understanding and Belief, ( Rutherford N.J., The Light), 45 Glen, F. (2002) Essays, Perspectives, Opinions ( Rutherford N.J., The Light), 67-69 Glen,F. (2002) Essays, Perspectives, Opinions ( Rutherford N.J., The Light), 97-103 Glen,F. (2002) Essays, Perspectives, Opinions ( Rutherford N.J., The Light). 25-28 Glen, F. (2004) Towards to Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, (Rutherford N.J., The Light) Glen, F. (2005) An analyses of the Prophets life (The Messenger of God Muhammad), (Rutherford N.J., The Light)
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Glen has become a symbol of interfaith cooperation among many Muslim intellectuals in Central Asia.
4. Educational Vision of Fethullah Glen and Establishment of the Network of his Schools in Central Asia Glen believes that the main problem in the world is lack of knowledge, which involves related problems concerning the production and control of knowledge. He thinks it can only be done through education. Education is very important if one wants to become a better Muslim. Not religious education: he is talking about secular education, science and humanities and of course religion as well. Glen believes that those three forms of education should enhance and compliment each other rather then compete with each other. The Kyrgyzstan Spirituality Foundation in 2004, for example, awarded him an honor for his contribution for the world peace through his educational efforts. Analyzing an educational system in Turkey in 20th century, Fethullah Glen brought to light a problem of lack of coordination among the various types and systems of education. He regards the development of education in Turkey as an unhealthy competition among mutely exclusive systems of education, which has produced graduates who lack an integrated perspective towards the future of society. At a time when modern schools concentrated on ideological dogmas, institutions of religious education (madrasas) broke with life, institutions of spiritual training (takyas) were immersed in sheer metaphysics, and the army restricted itself to sheer force, this coordination was essentially not possible.462 Challenge of the modern time, according to Glen, is to find a way in which these traditional pedagogical systems can move beyond regarding each other as rivals so that they can learn from each other. This principle he implemented in schools, which been associated with his name. He tried to marry modern secular education and traditional values. Cut off from traditional values, young people are in danger of being educated with no values at all beyond those of material success. Non-material values such as profundity of ideas, clarity of thought, depth of feeling, cultural appreciation, or interest in spirituality tend to be ignored in the modern educational ventures which are largely aimed at mass producing functionaries of a global market system.463 Schools educational goal has to be the integration of the study of science with character development. Calling for a type of education that seeks to develop both the material and spiritual needs of the students, Glen sees educational reform as the key to positive societal change. He said: The permanence of the nation depends upon the education of its people, upon their lives being guided to spiritual perfection. If nation have not be able to bring up well-rounded generation to whom they can entrust their future, when their future will be dark.464 Like other former Soviet republics, Central Asian states have been struggling to maintain high educational standards since they gained independence. Yet, economic depletion has forced them to reduce their educational budgets, leading to a significant decrease in teaching standards. In addition, unattractive salaries have drained the profession of many of its most competent teachers and university professors.
462 463 464
Glen, F. (1996), Towards the Lost Paradise, London: Truestar, , 11 Glen, F. (1996) Towards the Lost Paradise, London, Truestar, 16 Glen, F. (1996) Towards the Lost Paradise, London, Truestar, 55-56
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The Glen schools arrived to Central Asia as early as 1992, in the wake of considerable Turkish investment, which helped to local governments to overcome this situation. They have had the tactic support of Turkish government, which sees in them a Turkish presence in the region. The schools have quickly covered a niche for themselves everywhere in Central Asia. The schools are private, and initially had been free-based institutions are thus accessible for elites, which whom they were popular because they offered a rigorous, world-class education and impart skills in the contemporary world. Leading businessmen and bureaucrats send their children to these schools because of the high probability that they will pass their university entrance examinations. The language of instruction in these schools is English, though some subjects are taught in language of the host country; the curriculum also includes Turkish and Russian. The schools posses excellent teaching materials and computer equipment and emphasize such traditional themes as respect to teachers and students, hygiene, personal appearance and discipline. They also provided scholarship to poor but brilliant students. Although Glens teachers are devoted Muslim believers, they do not teach religion at school and strictly observe Turkeys state-sponsored secular curriculum. As in Turkey, a strong emphasis on sciences, ethics, and self-discipline is what characterizes these schools. They are also open to nonMuslim students, including representatives of ethnic Slav minorities. Rather, the Glen community seeks to win hearts and minds by setting an example of excellence. There is nothing traditional, and then about the Glen schools, which has little precedent in the Muslim tradition, either in Turkey and Central Asia. In their enthusiasm in education, the followers of Glen are heirs to the Jadids, but as Bayram Balci argues, they are best understood as Muslim Jesuits in that they seek to transform society through educating of elites465. They provide a good image of Islam, not so much through introduction, but to teach Islam through its members setting a good example by becoming good specialists in different areas of specialization. Rather then teaching religion, the Glen schools stress the transmitting of ethical and moral values (ahlak). The two key notions in the Glen movements understanding of Islam are morality and identity. The Glen schools see themselves as working for Islam because they provide guidance and moral example for students. Another key notion is tamsil, meaning representation. Rather than preaching Islam, the teachers are expected to be good role models for the students, and personify the values of Islam through their good deeds and moral conduct. Teachers in Glen schools tried to establish excellent relationships with parents. It was very important because it helped to defend these schools. After the first crises in Uzbekistan the intervention of some important parents dissuaded the authorities from expelling schools from the country altogether. Of course these groups were not strong enough ultimately to save schools, as it was shown in September 2000, when all of them finally been closed down in this country.
465
Balchy, B. (2003) Fethullah Glens Missionary Schools, New York.
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5. Worsening of the Relationships between Turkey and Uzbekistan and Its Negative Effect on Dissemination of Glens Ideas Paradoxically, while Glens schools served the interests of official Ankara by paving the ground for extensive business cooperation between Turkey and Central Asia, many state officials in Turkey view the Glen community with suspicion. That is true that in the early 1990s a crises between the schools and Uzbek government was provoked by a report produced by the Turkish embassy about the nature of Glens movement. The report warned the Uzbek government about danger of this movement, which according to the embassys research had proved to be fundamentalist and Islamist. In reality in order to guarantee its presence in each country, these educational establishments offered their support for the governmental policy and post soviet ideology. In the schools Glens followers teach the students to love the new independent state, the president, the flag, the new institutions, and the new heroes, who have been chosen by the new regimes and so on. For the same purpose, the General Directorate of the high schools will have translated some of the presidents works into Turkish and distributed in Turkey. The schools become ambassadors to Turkey for these CA regimes, promoting their culture and history and also contributing to the formation of new local elites.466 After the crises with the Uzbek government in 1993 the General Directorate of the schools and the director of each high school decided to forbid Islamic practice in the schools as dangerous for the future of the movement in Central Asia. Of course there are numerous differences amongst Central Asian republics. In Uzbekistan the Glen movement has engaged in no proselytizing since the very beginning, in 1992-93. President Karimovs anger against Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) limited religious education and Islamization of society. In Kazakhstan until recently it used to be easier to teach Islam at schools, but not any more. In Kyrgyzstan everything is possible. In Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashy, state control was even stricter then in Uzbekistan, but the situation is slowly changing in that country after his death and at this point there is no clarity which way it will take. Since September, 2000 Glen schools were forbidden in the most populous country of Central Asia, in Uzbekistan. For various reasons Tashkent has always tried to limit their presence from the first years of independence. The Uzbek government in fact has been trying to place limits on any kind of Turkish presence in the country. Crises are chronic between Tashkent and Ankara. The first crises arose because Uzbek opposition leaders Muhammad Solih, chairman of Erk and Abdurahhman Polat, chairman of Birlik, fled as refugees to Turkey, when they were threatened by the Uzbek government. Uzbek president demanded that the Turkish authorities expel them, fearing that they would influence Uzbek students in Turkey, but met with a refusal. Karimov is also hostile of the strong Turkish foreign policy in Uzbekistan (and indeed in Central Asia as a whole). He blamed Turkey for the aspiration to be a new big brother in the region. The official reason for shutting down all Glen schools in Uzbekistan was the open teaching of namaz and recommendation to girls to wear headscarves.467 However, Ecevit urged calm: The Uzbek President has several unjust concerns about TurkeyTurkey does not intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries. I attribute great importance to relations
466 467
Khalid, A.(2007) Islam after Communism, Berkley: University of California Press, 124-125 Sobranie Zakonodotalstv Respubliki Uzbekistan, N 37-38, September, 2000.
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with Uzbekistan. We cannot allow that these relations have been damaged by unnecessary touchiness.468 Another reason for closing down Glens schools in Uzbekistan was the differences in educational philosophy between the state and the Glen schools. According to Anne Solberg469 there are four key categories in traditional educational approaches: 1. Non-denominationalism, school system which do not include any form of structures religious education. Single- denominationalism, school system which include the teaching of one particular religion using methods which protects, and operate from the tradition of that religion. Multi- denominationalism, school system which include the teaching of many religions. However, each religion is taught separately, with students electing for classes in their religion. Inter- denominationalism, school system which include the teaching of all religion to all students regardless of their particular religion of any group of students. The teaching methods based on respect and understanding each religion. (Fethullah Glens approach to education).
2.
3.
4.
Educational system in Uzbekistan is strictly non- denominationalists and does not allow any other types of education to be presented in the country. In 2000 it became clear that Uzbek model of economic reforms is not effective. Uzbekistan always followed the path of gradual economic transition to a market-based economy. The Government has tried to balance the transition to a market economy by retaining aspects of a command economy. The rate and depth of Uzbekistans economic and political liberalization have been modest and tightly controlled by Government sought to move cautiously to establish a market economy, while at the same time maintaining social expenditures. Privatization has been very slow and prices more strictly controlled then in other Central Asian republics. In general, the transition has resulted in a significant fall in living standards for most of the population. It has been accompanied by decline in production, an increase in unemployment, high inflation, decreasing standards of living, and finally increasing income differentiation and inequality. Of course, all of these negative factors challenged the respect to the government among population. In order to justify poor economic course of action and reinforce their positions, Uzbek government called for an ostensible Islamic factor. They started to present contemporary Islam as innately political, intolerant, oppressive for women and inimical to the secular state and its values, democracy and modernity. Glen has become unlikable for these people, because they want to see a backward, radical Islam, in order to justify authoritarianism. Officially Islam nowadays is recognized only as a cultural and traditional heritage of people, modern Islam considered being aggressive and dangerous, contemporary thinkers, who are presenting an alternative view on Islam, are not encouraged to disseminate their ideas in the country.
468 469
Middle East review of International Affairs, (December, 2000), Vol. 4, No 4. 6. Solberg, A. The Glen schools: A perfect compromise or compromising perfectly?, Internet article.
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6. Fethullah Glens Community and Development of Civil Society in Central Asia Previously we already described the most important activity of Fethullah Glens community through establishing of a wider network of Glen schools in Central Asia. But this movement is also important as the model of Turkish civil society organization. Formation of the strong civil society, which can be an equal player along with states on the political stage, is a very important and timely goal for all Central Asian republics. The contemporary theoretical literature on civil society tends to divide civil society groups into ideal types to help the observer understand their empiric manifestation in various context, and to appreciate the different roles they can play in effecting change. These ideal types suggest ways that civil society has developed as system of values, political projects and organizational form. Many of contributions here with have sought to engage with unfolding debate about the possibility of categorizing models of civil society by testing their applicability in Central Asia. The two such types of civil society that are the most relevant in the region can be termed neo-liberal and communal470. During the late 1980s, as massive social and political upheavals transformed the nature of the state in East and Central Europe, civil society was (re)defined as primarily a neo-liberal concept. At that time civil societys emergence was linked to the empowerment of dissident opposition movements who launched a liberal political project to terminate their regions communist experiment. Civil society groups clamoured for the protection of the value of freedom, justice, human rights and democracy. As changes swept the region, citizens in independent organizations were empowered to open the dialogue with government to protect their interests. Neo-liberal civil society was the primarily conceived of as a political project, where activists were engaged in lobbing and advocacy. According to the neo-liberal definition, civil society can best be associated with the values of 18 century Western Europe modernity during the time of nation-states creation. Based on this understanding to be a member of a civil society was to be a citizen- a member of the state471. Members of such a society had the right to vote and serve in public office; participation in public affairs was institutionalized. It was also voluntary. Citizens were engaged in civil society independent of state, family and community bonds. As an organizational form most often neo-liberal civil society has been described as the realm of autonomous voluntary organization, acting in the public sphere as an intermediary between the state and private life472. It is best represented by non-government organizations (NGOs) and the voluntary sector made up of organizations that are private, non-profit distributing, self-governing and voluntary473. Yet it is possible to argue that a second form of civil society much more powerful in Central Asia. Civil society as a communal concept can be considered as having roots in centuries of community
470
Sabine Freizer, (2004) Central Asian fragmented civil society: communal and neo-liberal forms in Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan, in Marlies Glasius, David Lewis and Hakan Sekinelgin, edc., Exploring Civil Society: Political and Cultural Contexts ( London, Rutledge) 130-141
471 472
Joan Keane, (1988) Civil Society and the State (London, Verso) 36 Larry Diamond and Mark F. Plattner, eds., (1996) The Global Resurgence of Democracy, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins Leslie Salamon and Helmut Anheier, (1996) Social origins of civil society: explaining in the non for profit sector cross
University Press
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nationally, Voluntas, Vol.9, # 3, 213-148
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organizing, with the development of mutual aid and localized forms of decision making. This argument is substantiated by a second wave of theorizing on civil society, which began through the expansion of the civil society debate to non-Western contexts on mid-late 1990s. Scholars from the Islamic world were frequently in the forefront of this re-conceptualization of a civil society as a communal concept. Here civil society was not viewed as a neo-liberal construct but as a communal one. Communal civil society was less concerned with state-society relations, and the ability of citizens to resist amoral and power hungry political elites, then with relationship within society, with community solidarity, self-help and trust. The main aim of this civil society is to insure that members of the group had the necessary means for survival. Based on family ties, friendship or good neighborliness it organized to offer services, community infrastructure and other essentials. Religious and ethnically based organizations also fit a communal definition of civil society. Communal civil society could be defined as sphere of social interaction where people come together on a voluntary basis along interest lines, to exchange information, deliberate about collective action and define public opinion. It is a space made up of organization as well as highly informal model of interaction. Communal, civil society could be located in families, communities, friendship network, solidaristic workplace ties, spontaneous groups and movements.474 It is most often bound by a set territory and focused on a local community, the site of face-to-face encounters. The values that this civil society espouses aim first and foremost to maintain community stability and security; they tend to be conservative and patriarchal. Community meetings generally seek consensus; shared ideas and values tend to be more appreciated then divisive and innovative ones. Commitment to civil society is not necessary based on the assertion of an individuals will, but often on group and community expression of solidarity. The ensuing environment can be oppressive to those who did not wish conform to the majority. This civil society contains repression as well as democracy, vice as well as virtue475. Various organizational representations of communal civil society involved in Central Asia, often adopted new functions, and forms of interaction with the state, in changing political environment. They include Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic hordes (zhuz), which were based on extended clan networks through which economic, political and social issues were addressed. Amongst urbanized and sedentary populations especially Tajiks and Uzbeks- kinship ties were strengthened by links on proximity in mahallas. These were geographic neighborhoods but also the site of intensive contacts, information exchange, opinion formation and decision making. In the post-Soviet period mahallas survived in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan but often with new occupations and levels of accountability. Throughout Central Asian traditions forms of community self-help termed hashar still have empirical meaning today. Development of civil society in a neo-liberal sense in Central Asia and in Uzbekistan particularly is still in rudimentary stage. There are a lot of debates in academic sphere that some communal institutions of civil society, such as Mahalla have a long history and still very powerful in the region. Fethullah Glens movement is included as neo-liberal as well as communal aspects of civil society. It is voluntary organization which trying to harmonize traditions with modernity and brings together Islamic intellectuals (journalists, teachers and students) and businessmen. Glens community is
474
Dekker, P. and Van den Broek, A. (1998) Civil society in contemporary perspective involvement in voluntary Van Rooy, A. (2000) Civil Society and the Aid Industry, London, Earthscan.
associations in North America and Western Europe, Voluntas, Vol 9, #1, 13

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based on complex of business networks and controls a large media empire. In addition it controls one of the fastest growing financial institutions, Asya Finance. The main principles, which underlie their activity, are taken from Fethullah Glen doctrine. They are included following list of elements: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. the first principle is belief; self-sacrifice with resources and self and altruism; dialog/tolerance; avoidance of political and ideological conflict; taken action on a positive and harmonious way; taking responsibility; to give with no expectation of praise or reword; humbleness.
There is no official way for joining Glens community. Members encounter the movement through context such as secondary or university educational setting or perhaps through personal contacts. Community becomes a family for a new adherent. Like in any family, it has a father-founder, older sisters and older brothers. Mahalla communities in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan also have a very similar structure. At the end necessary to mark that Glens community has a very broad support at all levels of Turkish society and can be used as a valuable source for civil society development in Central Asia.
7. Concluding Remarks The formation of the modern nation is not a smooth or straightforward process. Obstacles and drawbacks are common. There is no doubt that relationships between Turkey and Central Asia are very important for both regions and have a very bright future despite of present divisions in a political sphere. Glens ideas and writings can be used for further development in our region in order to create a better society, based on religious tolerance, modernity, value and the importance of education and the pursuit of knowledge, and the formative role which played by religion and spiritual life. His quest to establish an accommodation between Islam and modernity, its resonance with the contemporary concern with civil society, and its possible contribution towards more harmonious relationship between East and West at a time when many are unfortunately using the language of clash of civilization is one of the most valuable resources, which have to be applied in a modern society because the two key words are dominated the Glen philosophy: tolerance and dialog. Fethullah Glen sees Medina at the time of Prophet as proof that there is room for other religions and even non-believers to coexist with Islam. Although many Islamic leaders may talk of tolerance in Islam, it may be problematic to put in into practice. Glen himself has shown that he has no fears of meeting leaders of other religions, including the Pope and the representatives of Jewish community in Istanbul. He also crossed the boarders of Islamic discourse to meet with important people in Turkish society who are atheists.
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His educational approach, which is integrated traditional religious education, with its emphasis on spiritual values with modern secular scientific education, and technologies of the twenty first century is very important especially in Central Asian countries. Because from one hand overwhelming majority of people living in these countries are Muslim and they are one of the most educated people in Islamic world. But the most important thing that the new world requires top professionals in any area of human activity and at the same time people who have high moral principles, enable them to co-exist in peace.
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A COMMUNITARIAN IMPERATIVE: FETHULLAH GLENS MODERN TURKEY AS A MODEL

MARK SCHEEL 476
Abstract In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in a communitarian philosophic approach, such as that espoused by Amitai Etzioni to American societal reform and progress. Communitarianism is a social philosophy defined as the third way beyond liberalism and conservatism. Upon close examination, the vision embodied in it has close parallels with much of the peaceful, educational, spiritual and moral philosophy found in the work of the M. Fethullah Glen Movement and in much of modern Turkish culture and society as a whole. The paper examines the particulars of each and what exactly is being advocated ,with emphasis on the common ground between the two, drawing especially on the efforts of the Institute of Interfaith Dialogue and their sponsored trips to Turkey. It then recommends ways in which Etzionis group might reach out to the Glen Movement for mutual understanding and borrowing of the most effective methods evident in their approach to peace, dialogue and understanding. It suggests that co-operative ventures in a similar vein might also be initiated between communitarianminded groups in Europe and the Dialogue Society. It anticipates what might be some obstacles peculiar to American society in adopting such an effort and how these obstacles might be circumvented. There is also much that American society, and perhaps others as well, could learn from the spiritual and moral framework displayed in present Turkish society that embraces the Glen spirit. As the paper concludes: The possibilities for a true communitarian imperative become manifest but will demand great joint effort. An effort, however, that can bear sweet fruit, like the trees along the thoroughfares in Turkey, for all. The Turkish word to describe the impetus of the Glen movement is hizmet. That translates into English as service, which is a near perfect description of communitarianism.
1. Introductory Overview One avenue in the furtherance of peaceful Muslim and non-Muslim relations is the identification of shared values and the adoption of joint efforts based on those values toward building civility and good citizenship among peoples. It would seem that many of the core values of the M. Fethullah Glen movement and modern Turkish society together with those of the American-based Communitarian movement might offer one such fecund opportunity. Through dialogue and personal interaction, these two groups might discover ways of jointly advancing their mutual goals toward a more
476
Author and editor based in Kansas City, working on Voices magazine. Past vocations include Red Cross worker, teacher
and librarian. His Red Cross service included overseas assignments in Vietnam, Thailand, West Germany and England. He took graduate studies in English and taught at Emporia State University. He retired from the Johnson County Library in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, in 1997. His essays, articles, stories and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and on several Web sites such as Kansas Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, The Kansas City Star and roguescholars.com. He has published three books; the most recent, A Backward View: Stories and Poems, received the J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award from the Kansas Authors Club. His latest book Star Chaser is not yet published, and he has work forthcoming in Fountain magazine.
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harmonious and pious society for all. The following treatise attempts to explore that possibility and offer some concrete steps to begin the process. While, in the interests of specificity, the discussion will focus on the Glen movements Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID) headquartered in Houston and the Communitarian Network located in Washington, D.C., it is hoped that the principles elucidated will by extension be equally applicable to other groups around the globe such as the Dialogue Society of London in Europe and the U.K. and European social movements sympathetic to and in communication with the Communitarian Network. The discussion proper is divided into seven subsections. The first, A Century of Turmoil, establishes the historical and political context of communitarianism. The second, The Third Way, defines the communitarian movement in the U.S. Next, The Turkish Connection relates discovering the relevance of modern Turkish society and the Glen movement to communitarian ideals. Then, A Communitarian Cousin compares the elements of the Glen movement with those of The Responsive Communitarian Platform, stressing the underlying similarities to be found there. Next, A Communitarian Fertile Ground explores modern Turkish society and community and the Glen influence as a possible communitarian model structure. Then, The Challenge of Community in America examines whether the present American social and political fabric would realistically support a broad communitarian appeal, giving special attention to the two greatest obstaclesa failing education system and an oppressive tax code. Finally, A Blueprint for Action suggests several practical steps that might be taken by both the Glen movement and the communitarian supporters to further their mutual interests and broaden their common ground into the population at large.
2. A Century of Turmoil If there has been one great political lesson the 20th century has taught us, surely it is the undeniable truth of Lord Acton's astute dictum "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Notable examples abound such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, communist Russia, communist North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Idi Amin's Uganda, Saddam Hussein's Iraqtragically the list goes on and on. It would seem only logical, then, that a benevolent thinker on the cusp of the 21st century would naturally distrust and eschew those political systems embracing some form of "central planning" warned about by F. A. Hayek and be drawn instead to one variety or another of a "classical liberal" or libertarian alternative. (Hayek, 1944, p. 34) Those words "individual freedom," when set against the term "totalitarianism," do possess an appealing ring. But as the post-9/11 world has revealed, liberty does come with its own set of challenges. Although a segment of the political sympathies in the U.S. throughout much of the '90s did align well with a libertarian spirit, over time, particularly with the Libertarian Party's paltry response to 9/11, certain inadequacies in any strict adherence to that outlook began to reveal themselves. A libertarian system, almost by definition, presupposes a citizenry that is already educated, moral, ethical, informed, self-disciplined and respecting of the natural rights of every individual within that system. In that regard, it would seem to be a reward for a well-developed society rather than the beginning point for nurturing one. Specifically, weaknesses in two main areas of that philosophy might be assailed. The first concerns the question of exactly how does a free society inculcate a moral point of view among its people, especially the youth, such that the interactions within that society can be conducted from a common frame of reference? And the second relates to the question of how does a free society deal with the
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citizen who refuses to observe its most basic precepts in his conduct toward his fellow citizens? Under scrutiny it appeared that libertarianism could offer no satisfactory practical answer to either.
3. The Third Way The communitarian movement commenced to gain some currency in the mid-90s through references to them in the political literature and discourse of the time. Dr. Amitai Etzioni founded the Communitarian Network in 1990 and serves at present as the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, both organizations being based at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (Etzioni, 2003, home page) The Communitarian Network is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, transnational coalition of individuals and organizations who have come together to shore up the social, moral and political environment. (The Communitarian Network Web site, home page) The Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies is a research organization dedicated to finding constructive solutions to social problems through morally informed policy analysis and open moral dialogue, bringing the best scholarship and analysis to bear on policy issues affecting family, schools, the community and the moral climate of society. [The Institute] is committed to fostering a greater sense of personal and social responsibility among individual citizens; to strengthening the cohesion of families and local communities; to encouraging reconciliation among different racial, ethnic, and religious groups; and to fostering a national policy debate more cognizant of humankinds moral horizon and the social responsibilities of the individual and the community. (Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies Web site, Who We Are page) Upon examination of their tenets, some intellectuals discovered much to like there. Those with a social science background were especially appreciative of their recognition that, within the world in which we find ourselves, man is first and foremost a social being with social needs to be addressed. Man does, and shouldregardless of individual preferences concerning degrees of autonomyalways exist within the body of a society. Furthermore, especially appealing to persons of faith was their recognition that man is additionally a moral and spiritual being. And any societal system that fails to take that into account is doomed to unravel. Perhaps the greatest charge that could be leveled against them was their lack of specificity. One might characterize communitarianism as basically an attitude, not a policylong on theory and ideals and short on practical detail, lacking a clear mechanism to effect their vision. And we all do well to bear in mind that adage "the devil is always in the details." Nevertheless, in 2003 a serendipitous chain of events commenced that would lead me personally to a whole new assessment of the possibilities for a "living" communitarian imperative.
4. The Turkish Connection Following the explosion of the evolution/education debates of 2000 in Kansas, I joined an Internet listserv to keep abreast of the ongoing controversy. I was intrigued with the frequent postings of a Turkish Muslim in Istanbul, a rising young journalist named Mustafa Akyol. (Akyol, 2004) We struck up an e-mail friendship and working journalistic relationship, which in turn led to my acquaintance with a group of Turkish students in my locale who were associated with IIDan
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organization promoting the vision of compassion, education and peace espoused by the Turkish spiritual leader M. Fethullah Glen. (The Institute of Interfaith Dialog, 2002, p. 5) And this connection eventually resulted in my joining with a group of clergy in December, 2005, for an 11-day tour of Turkey to witness the Glen philosophy in action. It was, for me, an experience of profound import. What the tour provided to the participants was an opportunity to experience directly the history, culture, faith and people from which the Glen movement took root and flourished. We were privileged to visit Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, Konya, Ankara, Gaziantep, Urfa and Harran. At every stay the occasion for personal interaction with the people was made available and encouraged, especially during home visits. And guides were at our elbow at every turn to field our bevy of questions and serve as interpreters. (Scheel, 2006) By way of background, M. Fethullah Glen was born in Erzurum, Turkey, in 1941 and, following his retirement, came to the United States and presently resides in Pennsylvania. Often referred to as the "Mahatma Gandhi of Turkey" and "the modern Rumi," Mr. Glen has been a teacher, Islamic scholar, thinker, prolific writer and poet of broad and significant influence. Topics of interest in his speeches and writings have ranged far beyond religious matters to include education, science, Darwinism, history, economics and social justice; however, his efforts in world interfaith dialogue and interfaith education have been groundbreaking and monumental. Glen has observed, There are so many things we have in common to emphasize. (Unal, 2000, p. 205) A unique aspect of the following he's engendered is that it is self-sustaining and self-proliferating, not dependent upon the charisma of its founder but rather upon the efficacy of his vision. (Glen, 2004, pp. 3-9)
5. A Communitarian Cousin It might be said that the core of the Glen philosophy is a theistic view of the universein his case specifically a moderate Islamic one, but one compatible with the other Abrahamic faithsand the moral order of man descending from that recognition. In contrast to the libertarian stance, Glen articulates his perspective on individualism by stating, [I]t is impossible to have unrestricted individualism. This is because humans are either both free with no acceptance of any moral values and rebellious with no moral criteria, or they are servants who are dependent on God and seriously obedient to His commands. (Saritoprak, 2005, p. 447) Much of his religious writing quotes both Christian and Judaic sources as well as Qu'ranic ones. And the central corollary to this view is the great emphasis on education "cradle to grave," education that encompasses the whole person intellectually, physically, emotionally and spirituallyand is geared toward invigorating that person's heart and soul as well as mind to achieve competence in a societal niche useful to both himself and others. Education that occurs optimally within the context of a strong family structure, a historical heritage and a democratic polity. (Glen, 2004, pp. 66-90) Education that awakens the individuals sense of responsibility because, according to Glen, Connecting or relating action to responsibility gives action its primary humane dimension. (Glen, 2005, p. 99) This vision has spawned a host of humanitarianlike efforts on an international scale. More than 700 Glen schools of every academic level, where students of all faiths are taught together (sans "religious indoctrination" per se) by teachers of Turkish background, have sprung up across Turkey and in many countries far beyond on every continent. (Unal, 2000, p. vi) The emphasis is on academic excellence, and Glen students always take the lion's share of trophies at world science, math, biology, chemistry
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and physics olympiads. Glen was quick to recognize the power of mass media in disseminating his views and toward that end helped found the Journalists and Writers Foundation in 1994. In the area of health care, Glen hospitals were established. (Scheel, 2006) In the interests of world peace and understanding, numerous intercultural and interfaith dialogue activities were created, our tour of Turkey sponsored by the IID being one. Businessmen and industrialists, power elite and community leaders have rallied to his call to help fund and support the creation and maintenance of these programs. A community spirit of good will and desire for harmony and progress permeates the Glen vision throughout. (Unal, 2000, p. 325) So, might there not be a correlation to communitarian philosophy evident in Glen's perspective? A reading of "The Responsive Communitarian Platform" reveals clearly that movement's most salient concerns: the reciprocity of social life; renewed moral values; the importance of historical context; strong, participatory democracy; a vibrant family structure; schools and education; government involvement guided by degree of necessity; responsibilities of citizenship; protection of human rights; social justice; public safety and public health; and internationalizing the primacy of human community. (The Communitarian Network Web site, Project and Activities page) It would appear to be a most sensible outline of focus areas for community-minded attention that would, indeed, mesh well with the Glen aim. In the words of Glen himself, speaking of a spiritually-centered life: "Order is evident in every effort, and compassion resides in every achievement." (Glen, 2004, p. 55) And elsewhere in an interview he states: Personal and social responsibilities are inter-relatedthe life of heart and spirit, and social and governmental issues are all facets of one unit. (Saritoprak, 2005, p. 449) Words which, it strikes me, apply equally to both the Glen vision and the communitarian platform.
6. A Communitarian Fertile Ground What cultural milieu might best be suited to fostering a communitarian approach? Might the land which nurtured the heart and soul of Fethullah Glen be a candidate? Although all societies to one degree or another bear some burden of past injustices and current internal strifeTurkey being no exception as is vividly depicted in the novel Snow (Pamuk, 2004)a focus on, and examination of, life and interaction at the local, community level can yield propitious insights regarding communitarian possibilities. The modern Republic of Turkey dates back to 1923 and owes much of its progressive societal advancements to the efforts of its revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; however, its legacy as the heart of the once sprawling Ottoman Empire still exerts a measurable influence. (Ergener, 2002, p. 5) Traveling there, one quickly comes to appreciate certain bedrock strengths evident throughout the culture. To begin with, while Turkey prides itself on its secular governance, religiosity in day to day life is almost exclusively Muslim and pervasive. The call to prayer defines the structure of each day and provides a commonality to the flow of life. The moral obligations of one man to another revealed in the Qu'ran are taken very seriously and inform the interactions at all social levels. Discretion is left up to the individual in matters such as imbibing alcohol or the wearing of the head scarf, but a spirit of comity is instilled at an early age and is evident everywhere, especially in domestic hospitality. When one is invited to a Turkish home for a meal, one comes away not only with a satisfied palate but also with a storehouse of good stories and lovely gifts. Tesekkur ederim, which means "thank you," are bound to be the first Turkish words learned and the most frequently employed.
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Historically the land area now occupied by Turkey has been both a geographic and a cultural bridge between Europe and the Middle East. Countless armies and evangelists have crisscrossed these mountains and shores leaving behind their legacy in stone. And the Turkish people are mindful always to take pride in and preserve their archeological treasures as stones in the foundation of their modern civilization. (Ergener, 2002, p. 5) Standing as a bulwark against civil unrest is a firm, ubiquitous military presence, and all young men must undergo a brief period of military training and service. Yet a great deal of emphasis is placed on individual responsibility and self-reliance throughout that society. Family structure is of the extended variety and sons are expected to care for their old. The family is also obliged to direct the religious training of the young and to oversee their schooling and education. Welfare assistance, when necessary, is often administered anonymously family to family or through the local mosque. (Ergener, 2002, pp. 31-37) The culture is rich with charming observances and customs that in one way or another reveal a concern and charity toward one's fellow man. The prevalence of beautiful fruit trees and water fountains in public space, of which anyone may avail themselves without charge, is said to be provided so that no man need be left hungry or thirsty. The concept of neighborhood is inclusive of many dwellings round about any given one such that a family may quite literally be acquainted with more than 100 neighbors. And on an occasion such as the Festival of Sacrifice, these neighbors visit one another and exchange sacrificial meat. That would seem to be, indeed, the very definition of "community." (Ergener, 2002, p. 38) All in all, Turkey is a modern nation putting itself on a par with many of its European brethren, yet at the same time retaining many of its classical traditions. Its strength as a nation of caring people derives from its moderate form of Islam, the secular reforms of Ataturk and, now, the compassionate vision of Glen. During our visit there as we were departing a Turkish home one evening, an American priest remarked to me, "You know, there's a 'communitarian' flavor to all of this." This observation is by no means confined alone to our travel companion of the cloth but rather is one shared by a number of other religious scholars writing on Glen and Turkey. Dr. Tom W. Boyd at the University of Oklahoma states unequivocally, Glens strategy is predominantly communitarian. (Boyd, 2006, p. 48) Marie-Elisabeth Maigre, in alluding to Glens analogy of society as an organism with interrelated parts in need of one another, characterizes his view as defending a communitarian vision of society. (Maigre, 2006)
7. The Challenge of Community in America The contrasts of American and Turkish societies are, admittedly, apparent and many. America is a young land of mobile, nuclear families and religious differences underscored by a materialistic bent. Yet Americans are caring in their own way and generous, too, particularly with domestic and international relief efforts. And as for group spirit, ask any fan what it is that reigns at any college or professional football or basketball game. But of the numerous conundrums facing the nation, there would seem to be two overweening obstacles to a "communitarian reformation" in America: a broken public education system and an out-of-control federal government. Discipline and achievement are waning in U.S. schools. Philosophical naturalism and "political correctness" dominate the zeitgeist of Americas learning institutions as opposed to the universal theistic/Islamic frame of reference in
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Turkey. (Santos, 2006, p. 97) And government increasingly intrudes into the citizens private lives, forcing them to pay for those intrusions with an oppressive tax system. Neither major political party seems willing or able to confront those stifling excesses and pursue serious corrective action. These conditions prevail as obstacles to revision in both external societal circumstances and within the internal mind-set of a significant segment of the population who have adopted an attitude of what can Washington, D.C., do for me rather than what can I do for my community. So efforts toward substantive change are bound to be fragmented. From a personal perspective and experience, it seems to me that the two largest subgroups in America today most closely resembling what we observe in Turkish society are the Catholic diocese and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Although one would be less than candid not to stress the differences in doctrine and ritual practices of these two Abrahamic-tradition religions, there is much common ground to be observed in the communal order, values and ethos of their adherents. Here we find superior education and discipline in the school systemespecially the Catholic parochial schoolscoupled with a nurturing of the spirit. (Boffetti, 2001) Each population is bonded by a common liturgy as well as various social activities and religious observances. There is a strong emphasis on tradition, family, charity, responsible stewardship and missionary efforts. An ambience of healing concern for one's neighbor is evident among the various congregations. For the individual, life is centered and grounded in the faith, and all ones decisions and actions emanate from that core, contributing to a stable, comely social environment. All of which proves that some of the most laudable attributes of the Turkish community are certainly evident in some form in America also. (Whitney, 2007) (Handbook for Todays Catholic, 1991) Much of the systemic, bloated rot observable in American government today can be traced to the structure of the IRS and the lobbyist-driven manipulation of the tax code. To put it simply and bluntly, tax favors are sold for votes. Votes beget power. Power perpetuates itself. And now we're back to Lord Acton's admonishment. All of which results in an ever-ballooning federal bureaucracy with bumbling tentacles stifling the autonomy of those local and regional communities so necessary to an effective communitarian initiative. It would be disingenuous and remiss to pretend that realistic gains might be achieved in moving the social order toward a more communitarian structure without first confronting these gross impediments. At present there are two major activist groups working at the grassroots level to address this problem and offer a reasoned, logical solution. Americans for Fair Taxation and Citizens for an Alternative Tax System (CATS) both advocate a retail sales tax at the national level concomitant with the abolishment of the income tax and IRS, and eventual repeal of the 16th Amendment. (Americans for Fair Taxation, Home page) (Citizens for an Alternative Tax System, Home page) Such a revised system would devolve power from both lobbyists and politicians while maintaining a revenue-neutral funding source for necessary government services. An additional monumental step, although not one advocated by either tax reform group, would be the enactment of Congressional term limits. With these measures in place, it would then become feasible to earnestly address the public education dilemma. I believe a great starting point would be the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, a concept that once held great currency, and a return to local control of the constitutional responsibility for educating the young. Let's be frankthe No Child Left Behind Act is an abysmal failure. And with local control would come the renewed opportunity for community input and direction in other areas as well. And, yes, for the preparation of a seedbed for the planting, tending and flowering of a true "communitarian imperative." This axial role of education is aptly described by
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Glen himself: The main duty and purpose of human life is to seek understanding. The effort of doing so, known as education, is a perfecting process through which we earn, in the spiritual, intellectual and physical dimensions of our beings, the rank appointed for us as the perfect pattern of creation. (Unal, 2000, p. 305)
8. A Blueprint for Action Having once been introduced to the communitarian concept, it was my acquaintance with students associated with the IID and my fortuitous travel to Turkey to experience the land and people that enabled me to envision its practical implementation. At its most fundamental, I see communitarianism as a mind-set and life style of individual social responsibility and reciprocal moral obligation. In many ways, I believe Turkish society infused by the Glen movement offers a sterling example thereof. But what of its recognition and influence within the American homeland? How can it more effectively suffuse its message throughout the nation regarding a third approach for a concordant social order? It is my perception that the character of government and education in America today precludes an optimal receptivity to communitarian ideals and must undergo some radical changes before such can hold sway. Because there is strength in numbers and leverage in coalition, I'd strongly urge communitarian leaders to join forces with Americans for Fair Taxation and Citizens for an Alternative Tax System to rid this nation of the scourge of the IRS and lobbyist domination. I would further encourage making Congressional term limits and the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education items on the communitarian agenda. The people desperately need to regain local control of their children's education and future. Once progress is accomplished in these areas, I believe the Glen movement has much to teach and share with communitarians. First, in that regard, I would encourage communitarian leaders to establish a relationship with the IID and attend the conferences/symposiums they sponsor annually such as the recent one in Norman, Oklahoma, titled Islam in the Contemporary World: The Fethullah Glen Movement in Thought and Practice. An abundance of information can be obtained from the IID Web site. (The Institute of Interfaith Dialog Web site, home page) I would suggest in turn that IID leaders extend invitations to communitarian leaders to participate in an Interfaith Trip to Turkey. The cross-pollinization of ideas could be immense. Second, because communitarianisms influence at present tends to be centered in academic settings, IID might consider establishing a liaison with the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies with the aim of promoting the common elements of their respective messages beyond the classroom into American society at large. Both would profit from an increased exposure at the grassroots level. Third, it might prove most beneficial for both IID and the Communitarian Network to foster a closer relationship with both the Catholic and Mormon churches. A reciprocity of good will there could reap quick results in spreading a recognition of communitarian goals among large numbers of people, especially those with a faith-based life style. I believe with the reestablishment of the balance of power within American society combined with a greater public awareness of the communitarian mind-set, the possibilities for a true communitarian
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imperative become manifest. But achieving that balance of power will demand great joint effort. An effort, however, that can bear sweet fruit, like the trees along the thoroughfares in Turkey, for all. The Turkish word to describe the impetus of the Glen movement is hizmet. (Kalyoncu, 2006) That translates into English as "service." What a perfect word to describe communitarianism.
9. Concluding Summary How might peace-loving Muslims, such as those associated with the M. Fethullah Glen movement, contribute directly to the promotion of a more harmonious, community-minded and spirituallydirected society in a Western nation such as the U.S.? Where the social and political theory of communitarianism relies mainly on abstract concepts, can the daily life in a Muslim nation such as Turkey suggest practical guidelines for that philosophys implementation? An inquiry has been undertaken here as to whether a substantial possibility exists for the broader dissemination of communitarian ideas and ideals into present-day U.S. society and by extension internationally as well, and whether an approach employing peace-promoting, interfaith joint efforts with the Glen movement might prove a feasible course. The particulars of both The Responsive Communitarian Platform and the Glen vision were outlined with especial attention drawn to the parallels therein. One can observe numerous attributes in common including a reverence for the spiritual and moral needs of humankind, a focus on bonding in a community venue, a strong emphasis on the centrality of education, an awareness of the responsibilities of citizenship and a desire for spreading good will internationally. Additionally, of vital importance is the fact that both groups exhibit a compassionate commitment to outreach. Then modern Turkish society at the community level was described and offered as an example of how a living communitarian ethos might take form, illustrated by such customs as the Festival of Sacrifice and the general domestic hospitality of the people. Following that, a comparison was drawn between the Turkish example and the Catholic and Mormon church groups in American society, stressing social similarities with that of the Turkish Muslim community and establishing the realistic potential for a true communitarian structure in the U.S. Then two especially formidable obstacles to progress were identifiedthe failing public education system dominated by Washington, D.C., and the stranglehold of IRS and lobbyist influencesand remedies were suggested for both to better permit a groundwork receptive to communitarian thought. Finally, suggestions were put forth as to the ways and means the Glen movement and the communitarian movement might exchange ideas and initiate joint ventures to the mutual benefit of both including attendance at the Glen conferences, establishment of a liaison with the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies and participation in the Interfaith Trip to Turkey project. All in all, an evaluation of the facts herein presented would seem to indicate a cooperative relationship between the two above-mentioned groups that would broaden the awareness of communitarian ideals and promote a positive public image of Islam would, indeed, be quite practicable. Furthermore, it is hoped that the recommendations pertaining to the work of IID and the Communitarian Network may by implication be germane to similar groups in other global regions such as the Dialogue Society (www.dialoguesociety.org) in Europe. The promise of deeper mutual understanding among those of Muslim and non-Muslim faiths through shared projects encouraging peace, responsibility and civility within communities is certainly one to be cherished, nurtured and embraced throughout the world.
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NEW RELIGIOUS SOCIABILITIES IN EURO-ISLAM: THE ORGANIZATIONAL LOGICS AND RECOGNITION POLITICS OF GLEN MOVEMENT IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
EMRE DEMIR 477
Abstract This paper examines the individual and collective de-stigmatization strategies of the Glen Movement in France and Germany. Firstly, it describes the organizational structures of the neocommunitarian Glen Movement in Europe. Despite the large Turkish population in western Europe, the Movement arrived relatively late, compared to other Islamic organizations it has been present in Europe for almost 10 years. We seek to analyse particularly the educational and interfaith dialogue activities of the Movement. Secondly, by following the theoretical approaches of Erving Goffman and Charles Taylor, we examine the recognition politics and de-stigmatization strategies of Glen Movement members. At the individual level, the search for recognition through visibility in the public sphere indicates the struggle of the members to cope with the stigmatized image of Muslims and to compensate for this public deficit by excelling in their occupation (at university or professional life etc.) This consciously appropriated religiocommunitarian identity paradoxically may become in some cases a factor for integration to the global societies. Consequently, the Islamic identity is transformed from a stigma to a subcultural advantage. At the collective level, the Glen Movement is primarily focused on the problems of the immigrant youth population in Europe. The reintegration of immigrant students into the educational system of the host societies is defined as a first goal. The total absence of religious discourse in these educational establishments constitutes the most interesting and paradoxical feature of this Movements strategy: by softening the visibility of their religious identification, the Movement look for recognition in the public sphere in Germany and France in order to build an educational network in these countries.
1. Introduction This paper examines the individual and collective destigmatization strategies of the Glen movement members in France and Germany. Firstly, we will describe the organizational structures of the neocommunitarian Glen movement in Europe. Despite the large Turkish population in Western Europe, the movement took hold relatively late from other Islamic organizations and they have been present in Europe since almost 10 years. We seek to analyze particularly the educational and interfaith dialogue activities of the movement.
477
PhD student of sociology of religions at Strasbourg Marc Bloch University in France. He wrote a thesis titled Les
identits echelle no-communautaires dans la communaut Turque en Allemagne et en France (Neocommunitarian identities in the Turkish community in Germany and France). Current interests: Turkish faith-based social movements; political Islam in Turkey; the organization of Turkish Islam in France and Germany; Islam in Europe; and religious minorities in France.
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Secondly, by following the theoretical approaches of Erving Goffman and Charles Taylor we examine the recognition politics and destigmatization strategies of the Glen movement members. At the individual level, the search for recognition through visibility within public sphere actually indicates the struggle of the members to cope with the stigmatized image of Muslims and to compensate this public deficit by excelling in their occupation (at university or professional life etc.) This consciously appropriated religio-communitarian identity -paradoxically- may become in some cases an integrator force to the global societies. Consequently, the Islamic identity transform stigma to a subcultural advantage. At the collective level, the Glen movement is primarily focused on the problems of immigrant youth population in Europe. The reintegration of immigrant students to the educational system of the host societies is defined as a first goal. The total absence of the religious discourse in these educational establishments constitutes the most interesting and paradoxical point of this movement. By softening the visibility of their religious identification, the movement seek for recognition in the public sphere in Germany and France in order to build an educational network in these countries. This article is based on semi-directive interviews with the directors of the learning centres in Germany and France and a 6 month participative observation of Glen-inspired-activities in Strasbourg.
2. Islamic Movements as Socialization Agents in Europe The studies on the social organization of the Turkish immigration in Europe show that the ethnicreligious identity plays an important role amongst the Turkish Diaspora in Europe. In a recent research on Turkish immigrants in France and Germany, two Turkish scholars noticed this accentuated religious identification.478 The majority of the immigrants defined themselves as Turkish-Muslim (40%). This investigation indicates us that the Turkish-Muslim identity constitutes the majority amongst Turks of France and Germany. (61% in Germany, 56% in France) Thus, the religious practice becomes an important identity-maker in the minority situation. Because of importance of the Turkish-Muslim identity, Islamic communities of Turkish origin naturally play an extremely active role amongst the Turkish immigrants. These organisations of Turkish origin shape opinions of the Turkish community and play a significant role in transmission of communitarian values to younger generations.479 Although these various Islamic associations are often regarded as centres of Islamic fundamentalism and also as an obstacle for integration, the Turkish immigrants who participate in these communal organisations are not generally motivated by such a commitment. These collective initiatives are not only actuated by a certain determination to preserve the ethnic-religious identity. Their reattachment to ethnic-religious organisations appears as an opportunity to establish solidarity networks. Such networks also occur as defensive structures against the everyday life experiences of the socio-economic life in Europe such as racism, social isolation, insecurity and exclusion.480 We suggest that the emergence of such institutions at the local
478
Ayhan Kaya and Ferhat Kentel, Euro-Turks: A Bridge or a Breach between Turkey and the European Union? A Mano, Ural, La question de lmigration Turque : Une diaspora de cinquante ans en Europe occidentale et dans le reste Altay Mano, Turquie : vers de nouveaux horizons migratoires ?, Paris, Turin, Budapest, LHarmattan, coll.
Comparative Study of French-Turks and German-Turks. CEPS EU-Turkey Working Papers No. 14, 1 January 2005
479
du monde, in La Turquie sous la direction de Semih Vaner, Fayard-Ceri, 2005, Paris pg.567
480
Comptences interculturelles , 2004, op. cit. 152
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and transnational level indicates the motivation for a sub-integration481 to the host society. These organisations offer a socialization opportunity to young people who do not actually have an easy access to autochthon social structures. Lastly, these associations led by Islamic mobility became active agents of socialization in the sedentarisation process of the Turkish community in Europe along with a conservative role of the Turkish-Islamic identity through the religious and ideological transmission. These associations fulfil multiple functions such as disseminating information, finding jobs, facilitating new friendships and allowing access to diverse social networks in the Turkish community. By the valorisation of the Islamic communities, the first generation of immigrants who are pooreducated and non-speakers of the host country language (German, French etc.), commonly live in suburbs, sought to rebuild an authority on their family. They consider the Islamic associations as an alternative to vices of the street such as prostitution, drug consumption and urban delinquency and so on. Owing to the legitimacy of these associations, the young generation could meet out of the family enclosure, without concerning their parents. Moreover, the women branches of these associations promote inter-individual relations between women immigrants which constitute the most excluded group of the immigrant population. The existence of such common platforms of meeting relieves the members from social exclusion, isolation and loneliness.482 In short, Islam is a tool for an integration which refuses assimilation, a way through which young Muslims strive for a public visibility as both a member of the global society and Muslim. Islam provides this young generation with an opportunity to be the part of the society differently, and to do this, they need to make their difference visible in the public sphere in a positive way.483 In spite of this fact, we observe a dilemma between two dimensions in the activity fields of these Islamic organizations: a social dimension which consists in dealing with the daily problems of migrants, and other, political activities which are particularly based on anti-western and communitarian vision. In the discourse of the mainstream Turkish Islamic movements such as Milli Gr, Suleymanci community and the fundamentalist movements like Kaplanci community etc., the Western influence are always considered as a threat more than a resource or an enrichment. This mistrust also comes from historical competition between two religious universes, Christianity and Islam. The essential differentiation of the Glen movement from the other Islamic communities occurs in this anti-western attitude.484 The social role of the Islamic associations led by various cultural, educational and sportive activities which favours a socialization ( following a sub-integration to host society) were always defined as a secondary goal by disciples of these organizations. The ultimate goal was reislamization of the society or reestablishment of the shariah regime in Turkey etc; however, particularly after the failure of political Islam485 in early 1990s, the big ideological goals are replaced by more pragmatic objects. Furthermore, the Islamic associative institutionalization and bureaucratisation process gave
481
The term sub-integration indicates an indirect integration to autochton social structures by participating in communal
organisations. The indivudal attempts of diaspora members to publicly affirm an identity give birth to an integration process to the host society. Muslim citizens have dialogue with society through their expressions of identity and difference.
482 483 484
Idem, p. 152-153 Farhad Khosrokhavar, Islam des Jeunes Nadine A Weibel, Pour une bauche de lislamisme Turc en Alsace et en Allemagne, Jund Alain, Dumont Paul, Stphane Olivier Roy, Lechec de lIslam politique, Paris, Seuil, 1992
de Tapia Enjeux de limmigration Turque en Europe Harmattan, 1995, pg. 267

485
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birth to an inner-secularisation amongst the members. Recently, these various socio-religious associations however witness a relative secularisation process as a result of the rejuvenation of their administrative staff. The administrative staff of these associations preoccupies more and more with the everyday life problems of Turkish immigrants who are victims of a social and economic exclusion and who suffer from a constant alienation process. As a result, the social, educational and sportive activities of these associations which were always considered as a medium to gain more members have become an ultimate goal. 486 During the 1980s and early 1990s, the communitarian functioning of these associations generated an ideological and psychological closure amongst the younger generations. But today we witness the emergence of a new religious discourse in the Turkish Diaspora in Europe. Associations whether they refer directly to Islam or not, engage in a social militancy which concerns the activities such as after-school tutoring and political participation etc.
3. The Glen Movement in Germany and France 3.1. The Settlement Process of Glen Movement in Europe Despite the large Turkish population in Western Europe, the movement took hold relatively late from other Islamic organizations and they have been present in Europe since almost 10 years. After a research on Fethullah Glens old sermon records, we learned that Fethullah Glen frequently visited some French and German cities at the end of 1980s. But the institutionalization process of the movement started after mid-1990s. Contrary to the other Islamic movements, the Glen community did not follow the Turkish migratory flow. We can explain this late arrival by two essential reasons: 1) The appearance of the Glen movement in Turkey is relatively recent from the other mainstream Islamic movements such Milli Gr and Suleymanci community. When Suleymanci community and Milli Gr started to institutionalise their European affiliation in 1970s, Glen movement was a little religious community in Izmir, a city located in the Aegean coast of Turkey. This religiousconservative community transformed to a transnational educational movement in the early 1990s. 2) After the demise of Soviet Union, Fethullah Glen gave a priority to the Turkish world in Central Asia and other Post-Soviet countries. Thus he allocated a major part of social and economic capital of the community to these regions. Especially, Central Asia, as an unoccupied region by the other Islamic movements, was more attractive than Europe. In early 1990s, the Turkish diasporic Islam scene was largely dominated by Milli Gr (National Outlook) movement. However, in the last years, the followers of Glen have disseminate their ideas in the Turkish Diaspora which live in the immigrant-populated cities such as Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin and Kln. In fact, the movement adapted its educational strategy to the European conditions by creating learning centres. Generally, the Glen-led associations primarily prefer to establish private schools in Central Asia, Africa and Balkan countries. But, due to the difficult administrative procedure of establishment a private school, Glen community adapted a different settlement strategy in Europe. The first arriving members found a learning centre, and after the institutionalization period, they took initiatives to found a private school. As a result of our
486
Ahmet Kuru and Ahmet Ykleyen, Avrupada slam, Demokrasi ve Laiklik:Fransa, Almanya ve Hollanda
rnekleri(Islam, Democracy, and Secularism in Europe: the cases of France, Germany, and the Netherlands), Istanbul, TESEV Yaynlar, 2007, p. 59
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observation, we suggest that the community considers the learning centres as a preparative period to reach the main goal, i.e. the private school. For instance, as we learned from the community members, the first learning centre BIL Learning House (Das Bildungshaus BIL) in Germany was established at Stuttgart in 1995. After the BIL learning centre gained a considerable popularity amongst Turkish families and developed good relations with the local administration, they transformed the BIL learning centre to a private school in 2003.487
3.2. Organisational Structure of the Glen Movement in Europe Discursive and organisational strategies of the Glen movement differ from the other Turkish Islamic communities. Mainly, the associational organisation of Turkish Islam in Europe base on two axes: the construction and sponsoring of mosques and Quran schools. Contrary to two other settlement strategies of Islamic movements, the Glen movement members in Europe insist on the great importance of secular education and they refuse to build or sponsor mosques. They also do not focus on Quran education for the youth like Suleymanci community. The mosques and Quran schools led by Turkish Islamic movements play an important role in transmission of religious and communitarian values to the new generation. Instead of trying to build mosques or Quran schools, the Glen movement transposed the Islamic mobilisation in the educational, cultural and entrepreneurial field by forming new voluntary associations. Glen movement members in Europe have founded a variety of establishments which operate in the major European cities. Essentially, we observe three main types of establishments: 1) Learning centres which offer particular courses in after-school groups to the students of the primary school by the college and private schools 2) Intercultural dialogue associations which organise intercultural events and meetings in order to promote the cultural exchanges between the Turkish population and the native society 3) Entrepreneurial associations which assemble Turkish businessmen who financially support the movement. In this article, we especially focus on the educational activities of the movement. Learning centres, intercultural centres, entrepreneurial establishments and high schools are typically governed by a registered association. The members of the association, typically Turkish immigrant members of the movement, choose a board of directors, generally consisting of seven members.488 These centres typically serve about a hundred students at a variety of levels from grades secondary school to college-preparatory class offering courses such as English, French, German, math, chemistry, physics and biology. In addition, the learning centres offer language courses for newcomer adults. Furthermore, the learning centres try to encounter the needs of the students primarily of Turkish background. The centres organise seminars for the student parents to make them conscious about the importance of education. The staff at learning centres is composed by paid French/German teachers and volunteer university students of Turkish descent. Although with some exceptions-such as the Horizon learning centre in Mulhouse, France-, the learning centres dont receive direct financial support from the state and local administrative institutions. In the last years, administrative
487
Aydn, Ali hsan, Dynamiques religieuses et logiques ducatives: Les Centres dducation du mouvement de Fethullah Jill Irvine, Glen Movement and Turkish Integration in RobertHunt and Yuksel Aslandogan, Muslim Citizens of the
Glen en France, Unpublished M.Athesis, Insttut dEtudes Politiques de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 2004, p.68
488
Globalized World: Contributions of the Glen Movement The Light Publicaition, 2006. pg.59
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staff of the movement in Germany established good relations with the local and national political leaders. In France, the relations with the local political authorities are in the minimum level because of the secular context of France and modest visibility of the movement in the public sphere. But we observed that learning centres in Strasbourg and Colmar have close relationship with the deputies of their region and local administrative institutions. Glen inspired associations possess more than 100 learning centres in Germany and 16 learning centres in France. More recently, Glen-led associations in Germany established three private high schools in Stuttgart, Berlin and Dortmund. The private schools offer a full college-preparatory curriculum to the students primarily of Turkish origin. These schools offer the same curriculum as public college preparatory high schools with the difference that they offer Turkish as the third language choice, after German and English. The Glen movement doesnt have any private school in France. Although the movement members express their eagerness to establish a private school in France, the community hasnt reached a tangible size to realise their purpose. 489 The Islamic organizations are usually managed by a head organization in Kln, the city which became the capital of Turkish Diaspora in Europe. Unlike the centralist organization of the other Turkish Islamic communities such as National Outlook Movement and Suleymanci community, interinstitutional relations between Glen-led associations is loose and there is not any head organization or federation in Kln for assembling the Glen educational associations. As a typical character of the movement, the Glen community in Europe is highly decentralised. In Germany and France, each city or town is responsible for organising and maintaining its own schools and centres. Strasbourg Le Dialogue Learning Centre director Nihat Sarer says: We have no official relation with the other learning centres in France. Furthermore, we dont have a common strategy. Maybe, we are all inspired by the ideas of Fethullah Glen but we are not controlled by a top organisation which decides everything. Sometimes I discuss my problems with the directors of other centres in Paris, Metz etc. and we share our experiences. But everybody lives in a different region or country, in different social and political circumstances; so everybody works with his own method.490 Despite this decentralized structure of the movement, the movement developed a complicated network on country level, continental level and inter-continental level. Firstly, the European edition of Zaman Daily Newspaper491 which is located at Offenbach, Germany plays a central role on the communication between the community members in different European countries. Every day, the journal publishes articles (particularly in the 17th page) about local activities of the Glen-led associations, the educational achievement of private schools etc. By this way, a member of the
489
When we compare the settlement degree of movement in Belgium, Denmark and Netherlands with France, we see a
relative success of the movement due to the more liberal immigration policy of these countries. The first school of the movement in Europe was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark (HAY Skolen) in 1993. There are also five private schools in Belgium and two in Netherlands.
490 491
Interview with Nihat Sarer, 12.05.2007 The principal media organ of the community, Zaman (Time) daily newspaper publishes a special edition for Turkish
diaspora in Europe. The European edition of Zaman is published in Offenbach (Close to Frankfurt). The newspaper is sold more than 45.000 in 12 European countries. Zaman organized a large campaign called as Football Unites during the World Cup 2006 in Germany. The daily newspaper made a call to the Turkish community to support the national team of Germany.
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movement in Paris gets informed about the activities in other French cities, or in Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium etc. Secondly, members of the movement constantly organise touristic voyages to the other countries in Europe, and even in Asia of Africa. In these touristic voyages, they also visit the Glen-led educational establishments. For example, the local representatives of Zaman Daily Newspaper in Metz recently organised a visit to Turkmenistan and Kirgizstan for the Turkish origin entrepreneurs who financially support the local establishments of the community. They visited also the Glen-led schools in these countries. Thirdly, according to information given by Hseyin Glerce, a columnist in Zaman and Fethullah Glens close friend, every city or town in different European countries sponsors the Glen inspired educational activities in the African countries.492 As a result of these strategies, the members feel themselves not only as a participant of a local association in his city but also as a part of the worldwide educational movement.
3.3. Stigma Correction Strategies of the Glen Movement We will borrow Erving Goffmans concept of stigma to understand the normalisation strategies of Glen movement and immigration-originated youth in the host societies. Stigma refers to an individual sign, to social information the individual transmits about himself that disqualifies him and creates an obstacle to being fully accepted by society. A stigma therefore designates an attribute that profoundly discredits the individual.493 But we must emphasize that the normal and stigmatised are not persons, but viewpoints. These viewpoints are socially constructed by the mainstream values of the society.494 According to Goffman, ethnic, racial, religious or national identities are also the particularities which can put a distance with the normal. Goffman named these types of stigmas as the tribal stigmas. The young population of the Turkish community who are separated from their peers by the denominations such as the suburban youth, immigration-originated youth etc. are marginalised by the majority of the native society. They suffer from a stigmatization due to the negative image (delinquency, drug, urban violence, religious extremism etc) which sticks to the suburbs/ghettos where they live. The majority of the young generation experiences the school failure in an early age and they are oriented towards non-qualified works. Even when they have reached an adequate school level for a qualified employment, they face with discrimination because of the tribal stigmas which they carry.
A. Individual Destigmatization Strategies a. Quest for the recognition of authenticity To put it bluntly, the principal actors of the Glen movement are Turkish origin university students. In this section, we focus on the transmission of communitarian and religious values of the Glen movement. We are also interested in individual normalization strategies of its members.
492 493 494
Hseyin Glerce, Gnlller Hareketi, Zaman, 12.03.2005 Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Touchstone Books, 1963. ibid, pg.61
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In the imagination of Glen, the golden generation must hold in her womb Islamic values and vocabulary of the community. The most leading features of this generation are worldly activism and asceticism. The key opposition of the Glen movement members to the Western life produces in the private space. The moralization (or islamisation) is done by creating informal networks in the Glen movement. Through light houses and religious study circles, the community offers a pietistic life to its members. In their daily life, they avoid from alcohol, cigarette, no halal food and nightlife etc. But in the case of Glen movement, the moralization of daily life does not prevent its members to penetrate friendship circles at school or in professional life. Per contra, the discourse of the movement favors these kinds of relationships, because the representation (temsil) of a "good Muslim" is merely possible through the active participation to the social life. The words of the President of the Association of Intercultural Dialogue Strasbourg (ADIS) Mr Talat is interesting in this manner: Every week, we meet with our members in our local. I often ask them these kind of questions: How many French friends do you have? How many have you met this week? Maybe, it looks like a bizarre question but it is important! I know many Turks working in qualified jobs, but they have no French descent friend. I find it normal. Because these people have a social environment quite satisfactory within the Turkish community. But we must now put an end to this conformism. But for some members of the community in Strasbourg, its not merely a matter of "conformism." My relations with my friends at university are rather good. We often hang out after school. But I am not like the others. So, our friendship is therefore somewhat limited. Sometimes they invite me to go to night-club and sometimes I refuse their propositons. I attempt to explain them why I dont use alcohol. But, at the end, i think that they find me a little bit odd. But over time, they got used to this situation. Now I think everybody accept and respect each other as they are. (Mehmet, a community member at Strasbourg)
As we can see in the case of Ali, movement members are concerned about issues relating to their identities. Repeating the words of Anne Sophie Lamine, when one asserts his/her own identity, obviously a different comprehension of ones identity becomes worrisome. 495 So, the member is motivated by a communitirian discourse which favors an active participation to the social life of the main society, which favors to try to find his/her place among the "establisheds"496 of the main society while keeping his/her tribal stigmas497. This dilemme sends us to Charles Taylors famous discussion about authenticity. Taylor defines authenticity as being in touch with ones inner feelings. He acknowledges that our significant others make a major impact on those inner feelings, and not only while the self forms, but throughout the whole life of an individual. 498At a multi-cultural and multimodern context, the authenticity is one of the characteristics of a believer of any religion. In our case,
495 496 497 498
Anne Sophie Lamine, La Cohabitation des Dieux, Pluralit Religieuse et Lacit , Puf, Paris, 2005, p. 276 Selon la formule de Norbert Elias Selon la formule dErving Goffman Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992
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we suggest that the Glen movement members strives or the recognition of its authenticity. Interestingly, the community members dont create new ghettoisations, but rather encourages one to find a solution to his/her problem of recognition of authenticity in the public sphere.
b. Dar-al Hizmet: The Inclusive Discourse of Glen in the Immigration Context The second important actor of Glen movement is the Turkish descent entrepreneur and workingclass. In this section we will analyze normalization strategies of the movement regarding to this second type of members. Many scholars who specialise in European Islam build their analysis on the traditional Islamic contrast between dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and dar al-harb (House of war) which presents somehow the historical antagonism of Islam toward non-Muslims. But the conflict is merely one facet of the complex relationship of Muslims with 'Western' society. Contrary, for a great part of the Muslim population in Europe dar al-Islam and dar al-harb distinction is not a pertinent method to define relationship to non-Muslim societies. In Germany and France, many religious Muslims have recently undergone a significant shift toward a more 'integrational' stance.499 Glens frequently used term dar al-hizmet (country of service) is a new concept in this regard, which helps to his followers to develop a particular discourse for propagation in the Turkish Diaspora. According to Glen, If ones intention is to serve Islam by presenting a good example, then one can stay wherever one desires. Glen stresses a Muslim who lives in a non Muslim society; he or she has to obey the lex loci, to respect others rights and to be just, and has to disregard discussions of dar al-harb and dar alIslam.500 The conceptualisation and practical use of the term Dar al-hizmet looks like a practical solution offered by Glen, more than a new politico-legal contribution to the Islamic law. A separate note is needed here to summarise Glens geostrategic vision and particularly his prowestern attitude. Glen has always been a strong supporter of economic and political integration with the EU, while he has a sceptical attitude towards cooperation with Iran and the Arabic world. This pro-European attitude represents a differentiation in the Turkish Islamic scene. The other leading Islamic groups such as Erbakans National Outlook Movement appropriated an essentialist antiEurope or anti-western discourse since 1970s.501 Most of the Turkish Islamic community leaders considered the EU membership as a danger of assimilation in the Judeo-Christian world. But Glen affirms that Europe represents no danger to the Turkish-Islamic identity: We should be comfortable in our outreach to the world. We will not lose anything from our religion, nationality and culture because of developments like globalisation, customs union or membership in the European Union. We firmly believe that the dynamics that hold our unity are strong. Again, we also firmly believe that the Quran is based on revelation and offers solution[s] to all the
499
Heiko Henkel, Rethinking the dar al-harb: social change and changing perceptions of the West in Turkish Islam. Ihsan Ylmaz, jtihad and Tajdid by Conduct in Turkish Islam and the Secular State The Glen Movement by M Hasan Ksebalaban, The Making of Enemy and Friend: Fethullah Glens National-Security Identity in Turkish
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 9/2004

500
Hakan Yavuz and John L Esposito (ed), Syracuse University Press, 2003, New York
501
Islam and the Secular State The Glen Movement by M Hakan Yavuz and John L Esposito (ed), Syracuse University Press, 2003, New York
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problems of humanity. Therefore, if there is anybody who is afraid, they should be those who persistently live away from the invigorating climate of Quran. (2003)502 Furthermore, in an interview in 1995, he assigns a particular task to the Turkish Diaspora in Europe: Our people who live in Europe must come off from their old situation and become a part of the European society. Their children must be oriented to universities more then artisanal high schools. Also, they must transmit our cultural and religious richness to European society. In the future, they will constitute our lobbies which we highly need today. In the past, only the 2 percent of the Turkish immigrant population was fulfilling their religious requirements. But today, 40 or maybe 60 per cent of the young population regularly prays in the mosques. Obviously, our people didnt undergo to an assimilation process, contrary, they impressed the host societies by their conviction and culture. 503 The essential idea of the Glen movement regarding to the Turkish Diaspora is to become a recognized part of the main society without losing ones Turkish-Islamic identity. During our research, we observed that the concepts such as dar al-hizmet and renewal of intention (tashih-i niyet) are frequently used by the disciples of the Glen community in Europe. As a matter of fact, The Turkish immigrants mainly immigrated for the economic reasons. Therefore, to gain more money may become raison dtre for a Turkish entrepreneur or an employee, in Europe. By these concepts, sympathizers of Glen movement try to change the mentality regarding to main society. A Turkish small entrepreneur Kasm A. (age 46), community member who lives in FrankfurtGermany says: We all came here (Germany) with an economic motive, to gain more money and have a more comfortable life. Nobody can deny it. But after 30 years, we became the members of this society. We cannot continue to live in our small communal worlds. Fethullah Glen advises us to renew our intentions. That means we are not here just for a more comfortable life, but also be a good example for our entourage and work for the good of this country. Despite the politically correct aspect of this declaration, it indicates a discursive change regarding the host society. The Glen disciples in Europe advise to followers to renew their intentions (tashih-i niyet). The term tashih-i niyet is partially inspired by the idea of hegira504. With referring to the compulsive immigration of the prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, the Islamic preachers in 20th century created a universal doctrine of hegira, by urging the Muslims to immigrate to non-Muslim countries in order to make Islamic proselytism in these societies.505 According to Bassam Tibi, this doctrine largely forms the worldviews of the preachers of Muslim Diaspora in Europe. If we return to our case,
502
Fethullah Glen, Hogr ve Medya. Available at: http://www.m-fGlen.org/eser/article.php?id-442. Accessed 18
July 2003. Cited in Hasan Ksebalaban, The Making of Enemy and Friend: Fethullah Glens National-Security Identity in Turkish Islam and the Secular State The Glen Movement by M Hakan Yavuz and John L Esposito (ed), Syracuse University Press, 2003, New York
503
Nuriye Akman, Hocann hedefi Amerika ve Almanya (Hodja targets USA and Germany) ,Turkish newspaper Sabah, Hegira is an important notion in the Muslim tradition. The prophet Mohammed ordered his followers to make Bassam Tibi, Europeanizing Islam or Islamization of Europe in Timothy Brynes, Peter Katzenstein, Religion in
28.01.1995, http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/7853/74/
504
hegira i.e. to immigrate and disperse to the different regions of the world in order to propagate the Muslim faith.
505
Expanding Europe, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006, op.cit 210
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the reference to the hegira doctrine is obvious in conceptualisation of tashih-i niyet. But it does not contain a proselyte or missionary connotation. This concept occurs as a resource of motivation for the community members to present a good example in their entourage. Consequently, the term dar al hizmet, by eliminating the contrast between the dar Al harb and dar Al Islam, allows especially the immigration-originated youth to express their will to be recognized individually and collectively in the host society, not only as a diasporic -passive subjects, but also as veritable subjects506, who are searching a constructive role in the host society, as the autonomous authors of their trajectory and as the producers of their own existence. 507
B. Collective Destigmatization Strategies A. THE LEARNING CENTRES: QUEST FOR NORMALISATION? Different to the worldwide settlement strategy of the movement, the followers of Glen in Europe encounter some difficulties with the establishment procedure of private schools. Its not only because of the difficult administrative procedure; but also the prejudices against Muslim immigrants and the rise of Xenophobia- Islamophobia in the old continent. The Glen movement in Central Asia or in Balkans etc. always searched a direct contact with the host society. Differently to the other regions, the followers of Glen in Europe meet with a sizeable Turkish population; a population who has became an object of negative characterizations and stigmatizations. Therefore, the Glen community implements a new immigrant-oriented strategy to gain legitimacy in the host societies. According to Goffman, stigmatised persons adopt five principal strategies to correct their stigma:508 1. To try to correct the essence of the stigma or to dissimulate the stigma signs and to deny its influence: search for assimilation To show that ones difference from normal persons doesnt prevent him/her to be successful in society; try to excel in the society (at school, work etc.) to achieve which is difficult even for the normal persons To perform the personality who is bound to his social, cultural or ethnic identity, as a reaction to the disreputation of normal ones. Cash in on from a persons stigma; seek to instrumentalize his/her stigma; To redefine your difference as reason of pride and advantage on the normal ones, (assertion of the negritude: i.e. Black is beautiful etc.)
2.
3.
4. 5.
The first and third strategies go through with a process of self-devalorisation, while the second, fourth and fifth strategies are experienced by a process of self-valorisation. All the strategies -except
506
For a larger explicaiton of the term veritable subject see: Alaine Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble ? gaux et Dounia Bouzar, Lislam entre mythe et religion : le nouveau discours religieux dans les associa-tions socio-culturelles We borrow Lorceries simplified model of the stigma correction strategy classement. See at: Lorcerie Franoise.,
diffrents, Fayard Editions, 1997

507
musulmanes , Les Cahiers de la scurit intrieure, n54, 2003,pg. 174, www.islamlaicite.org/article235.html.

508
LEcole et le dfi ethnique : Education et intgration , Paris, ESF &INRP, 2003, op.cit., 34
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the last one- can be lead to a collective action. Moreover, the first, second and fourth strategies can be perceived as manoeuvres by the normal persons. We can observe the practice of all these stigma correction strategies by the Turkish immigrant youth. But in our case, the young students who participate in the educational activities of the Glen movement adapt the second strategy. They try to excel in the host society via educational success and differentiate from their friends, other stigma carriers. Its the same case for the Glen movement. The administrative staff of the Glen inspired institutions, frequently complain about the host societys perception of the learning centres as an Islamic association, a communitarian association, or an ethnic association etc. During an interview with a responsible of the movement in France noted: We did not come to Europe merely for the Turkish immigrants. We want to serve to the French society. But when we talk about our private school project with the local administrative responsible or politicians, they maintain a sceptical attitude to this idea because of the negative image of the Turkish community in France. They evoke the poor situation of Turkish students at the school. It is really very saddening! So, firstly we will focus on the educational problems of our children. If we achieve to break this negative image, we will have a chance to start a dialogue between equals and we can realise our private school project. 509 The community members think that they are victims of a racialisation as a result of juxtaposition of the Turkish community in France and Turkey-originated movement. In spite of the fact that the Glen-inspired associations which we observed are largely dominated by Turkish origin volunteers, they complain frequently of their Turkish association image. For the director of Paris EtudePlus learning centre director, these associations do not target merely the Turkish population, but the whole Parisians. The faith-based movement try to break this accentuated ethnic-racial image of the movement by organising intercultural activities. But because of the particular problems of the Turkish population, the followers of Glen privilege the problems of Turkish population in Europe. The reintegration of immigrant students to the educational system of the host societies is defined as a first goal. So, we observe a double strategy of normalisation: On the one hand, the immigrant youth appropriates the communitarian values of Glen community which legitimates the second correction strategy. On the other hand, the administrative staff who is disturbed by stigmatisation by host society is in a search of success and excellence in their occupation i.e. the educational activities. The movement also adapts the second correction strategy during the settlement process in Europe.
b. The invisible religion: Towards secularisation in public sphere During our observation period at the learning centres in France and in Germany, we did not observe any religious propaganda or a visible proselytism in these establishments. This secular education policy in Europe is a by product of the worldwide strategy of the Glen movement. According to Bayram Balc who performed a survey at the Glen-led schools in Central Asia, the school curricula are prepared in accordance with the instructions of the national education of each country and they
509
Interview at the coulisses of Etude Plus learning center in Paris, 12.04.2007.
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are totally secular and scientific. Even the Muslim students, who demand a place to practice their prayers in the school, are not authorized to do it. 510Elizabeth zdalga notes that: The main objective [of the education provided in these schools] is to give the students a good education, without prompting any specific ideological orientation. One basic idea of Glen's followers is that ethical values are not transmitted openly through persuasion and lessons but through providing good examples in daily conduct.511 The total absence of the religious discourse in these educational establishments constitutes the most interesting and paradoxical point of this movement. By borrowing the concept of Pierre Bourdieu, we suggest that the religious manner constitutes the doxic experience of the movement. Doxa is the fundamental and unthought beliefs that inform an agents actions and thoughts within a particular field.512 A doxic experience is one in which members of a society share a common perspective that is transmitted by a series of implicit assumptions and values that appear as a matter of fact, us a truth.513 Through the concept of Hizmet514, Glen sacralise the secular education. What is essential in this faith-based social movement exists implicitly in the body of the community.515 Despite the relatively weak religious visibility of Glen inspired activities, the followers of Glen in Europe do not encounter a big difficulty to multiply their members due to their conceptualisation of hizmet (service). Glen disseminates knowledge to his community as the most effective way to serve the religious cause ensuring the highest religious recompensation.516 For instance, we observed that some student parents in Strasbourg influenced by the idea of hizmet and believing the secular education in Glen-led establishments will help their children to be successful not only in life but also in thereafter. Hizmet promotes the appropriation of individual piety and Islamic ethic (adab) values in private sphere and a militant participation to the modern secularised world in the public sphere. Apparently, this softened religious image of the Glen-inspired institutions facilitates the emergence and expansion of the movement in the public sphere. However, as a consequence of these strategies, the movement voluntarily or involuntarily revalorises a secularisation process amongst the members. They offer a new communitarian identity to the Turkish community by appropriating the secular codes in public sphere and appropriating the religious codes in the private sphere. Consequently, we suggest that the followers and sympathizers of the movement develop a syncretic
510
Bayram Balc, Missionnaires de l'Islam en Asie centrale : Les coles turques de Fethullah Glen, Maisonneuve & Larose, Elisabeth zdalga. "Entrepreneurs with a Mission: Turkish Islamists Building Schools along the Silk Road, " Paper
2003
511
delivered at the Annual Conference of the North American Middle East Studies Association, Washington, D. C., November 19-22, 1999. Published in Turkish: slamcln Trkiye Seyri, stanbul, letiim Yaynlar, 2007
512 513
Pierre Bourdieu. Les Meditations Pascaliennes, Paris, Folio Editions, 2003, pg. 22 Pierre Bourdieu and Passeron, Jean Claude, La reproduction: Elements pour une theorie du systeme denseignement,
Paris, 1970 cited in Nilfer Gle, Islamic visibilities and public sphere in Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe, Istanbul, 2006, Bilgi University Press
514
Movement members use the term hizmet to refer to all educational, social, civil engagements of the Glen community. Uur Kmeolu, A Sociologically Interpretative Approach to the Fethullah Glen Community Movement Bekim Agai, The discoursive and organizational strategies of the Glen movement Paper submitted in Rice University,
From an essentialist point of view, Hizmet can be described as any volunteer service or work done for the community.
515
Unpublished thesis, Directed by Nilfer Gle, Bogazici University, 1997

516
USA, 12-13 November 2005
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attitude towards the modern-secularised world in the public sphere. By adopting an attitude as we call religio-secular (an expression of Martin E. Marty), they blur, mesh, meld, and muddle together elements of the secular and the religious, the worldly and the otherworldly. 517 But the Glen movement must not forget that Islam for the European Muslims was largely considered as a clannish518 reinvestment.519 As a characteristic of the Diasporic Islam, Religion and ethnicity march hand in hand in Europe because they construct the compensatory refoundation of an us lost in the difficulties and reversals of immigration.520 The associative institutionalisation of Islam in Europe fulfils many complementary functions such as a wish for identity, a community-centred life and fidelity to the ethnic group. Therefore, Islam in Europe is more culture (than faith) and more tradition than belief.521 Although there is an accentuation of Turkish identity and patriotism in Glen movement, Fethullah Glens conception of Islam is more close to the Universalist orientation of Islam more than this culturalised form of Islam. The movement in France and in Germany, seeks to find a middle way between the cultural devastation implied by assimilation and the ghettoization of a minority group living apart from the host society culture522 But in this search of a middle way, the community confronts a risk to lose the fine balance between the Diasporas community-oriented conception of Islam and the movements more universalist Islam and its integrationist stance. This balance is menaced by two main factors: a. In spite of its relative success in expansion, Glen movements relatively liberal interpretation of Islam causes some criticisms from its members. For instance, Director of Le Dialogue Learning Centre Nihat Sarer tells that parents of secondary school students severely object to mixed education in the learning centre: When I talk about the importance and necessity of mixed education at class, the parents says (No, This is a Turkish association. We dont want a mixed education here) 523Another example, the visit of Plateforme de Paris, Glen inspired intercultural dialogue association in Paris, to a catholic church evoked the critics of some community members. 524 These micro-level tensions within the Glen community reflect rightly the inner confrontation between the members who interiorised the culturalised and universalist conception of Islam. During our observation in Strasbourg, we noted that the transposition of community values and know-how of the movement realises through the intermediary of Turkey-originated graduate students. These students whom have already an experience in the associations and schools of the movement in Turkey play a vertical role at the expansion of the movement. We observed in our particular research area- that these students
517 518
Martin E. Marty, Our religio-secular world, Daedalus( Special issue on secularism and religion), June 2003 Clannish is the approximative translation for the French adjective communautariste which refers to a society whose
organization tends to consider the affiliation to a specific community (such as religion, foreign origin etc.) as important as the affiliation to the French nation or the European citizenship etc.
519 520
Jocelyne Cesari, Etre musulman en France aujourdhui, Hachette, 1997, Paris, pg. 26 Albert Bastenier, Lincidence du facteur religieux dans la conscience ethnique des immigres marocains en Belgique, Abdessamad Dialmy, Belonging and Institution in Islam, Social Compass, 54 (1),2007, pg. 70-71 Jill Irvine, pg. 56 Interview with Nihat Sarer, Director of Le Dialogue Learning Center, 12.05.2007 Erkan Toguslu, Le difficile quilibre dedans-dehors : les activits culturelles d'un centre musulman comme stratgie
Social Compass, 45 (2), 1998, pg. 197

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d'intgration dans l'espace public et les critiques au projet au sein de leur communaut Paper submitted in Colloquy La Religion de lAutre 5-6 February 2007, Paris
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looks like more tolerant towards a fully secular mixed education or interfaith dialogue meetings at churches etc. This tolerant/pluralistic attitude causes some tensions between them and the immigrant members. (Especially with the members of elder generation) Turkey originated students try to adopt a socio-cultural representation relating to the logic of the French/German associational structure. The elder members of the movement follow an inward-looking life strategy. b. Although a relative retrogression of the community-oriented Islamic movements such as Suleymanci community or fundamentalist movements like Kaplanci community, a large variety of Sunni Islamic associations constitutes a veritable religious market in Turkish Diaspora. These associations which maintained their own clientalist networks criticise integrationist, less community-oriented and liberal discourse of Glen movement. For instance, The Milli Gr community harshly criticises the interfaith dialogue activities of the Glen movement in Europe. While the Alevi community and the nationalist groups such as Ulkucus strictly opposes to the Glen model of integration.
4. Concluding Remarks Consequently, the socio-political problems and economic vulnerability of the Turkish Diaspora in Europe transform the strategies of the Glen movement. If we consider the schools in Central Asia, in the Balkan countries or in Africa, we can assume that the settlement strategy of the movement is not dependent on the Turkish immigration waves throughout the world. In different regions, the disciples of the movement always seek to contact with the host societies. Differently to evolution of the movement in Central Asia or Balkans etc., the movement does not focus on the host societies in Turkpopulated Western European countries. As a result of our qualitative research, we observed that the members of the Glen community acts in two different trajectories. On the one hand, as a neocommunitarian religious community, they strive to have a larger share -more members- within the religious market of Turkish Diaspora by producing a fresh religious discourse and new organisational strategies, as they did in Turkey. The followers of Glen inculcate Islamic values and norms in society through sohbets (religious study circles). So, the clientalist perspective and the search for an ethnoreligious reference of the community members are not neglected by the Glen movement. On the other hand, by interiorising the modern-secular codes and by organising around the non-religious, cultural and non-profit associations , they seek to gain legitimacy in the public space in Germany and France in order to build an educational network in these countries, as they did in Central Asia or in Balkan region. In these two different trajectories, the Turkish population appears both as a backing population and as an obstacle. As a result of the synthesis of these trajectories; a reinvented and reinvigorated community took place in Europe. Therefore, the fine balance, is procured by a reciprocal compromise between the ethno-religious attachment of the Turkish Diaspora and integrationist stance of the movement. This is why the Glen community became a neocommunitarian movement in Europe. At individual level, the key opposition of the Glen movement members to the Western life produces in the private space. The member is motivated by a communitirian discourse which favors the moralization of daily life and the active participation to the social life of the main society in order to find his/her place among the "establisheds" of the main society while keeping his/her tribal stigmas. The community members dont create new ghettoisations, but rather encourages one to find a
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solution to his/her problem of recognition of authenticity in the public sphere. The members instrumentalize some Glenian concepts such as dar al-hizmet and renewal of intention (tashih-i niyet) to develop a fresh discourse for the elder members of the community. At the collective level, Glen inspired establishments are in a search of success and excellence in their occupation i.e. the educational activities. Apparently, this softened religious image of the Glen-inspired institutions facilitates the emergence and expansion of the movement in the public sphere.
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Anatolian Muslimness in Practice: Glen's Ideas in Western Context
PART
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PEACEFUL MUSLIMNON-MUSLIM CO-EXISTENCE IN A SECULAR CONTEXT

FARHOD ALIMUHAMEDOV 525
Abstract This paper is about the conditions of inter-ethnic, inter-religious and inter-class relations in Glen schools and looks into their operation in non-Turkish and non-Muslim settings. It aims to examine the relations among young people coming from different groups. The initial and main steps of the integration processes among different ethnic and religious entities are well observed at school we hupothesize that it is much easier to transfer knowledge and values to young people with the same or closely similar identities. The field of research is in Russia because Russian society offers an interesting context for the observation of inter-ethnic and interreligious relations. There we observe the strong ethnic identity arising after the collapse of the Soviet Union with concomitant rise in social rivalry among different groups. The students at Glen schools are initially selected on academic merit, and the results then obtained by the schools make their reputation. That reputation increases the attractiveness of the schools and the best young people from different ethinic groups try to get places in them. However, the major focus of my research is to check the level of social integration rather than of academic success and to observe how Muslim-based schools can transmit values in non-Muslim context. The example of these schools could be useful for ethnically changing societies like the French one. French society should be reassured by the republican school model, and should question the academic and social effectiveness of its methods and approaches rather than the ethnic or religious belifs of the young French students who attend such schools.
1. Introduction The reason of my interest in Glen schools lies on my educational background. I studied at the Uzbek Turkish school in Tashkent which was opened in 1992 just after the first anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Uzbekistan. (1st September 1991). I spent 4 years at that school instead of 3 (we have to study at preparatory class first) in order to get the secondary level permitting to apply to the university. Nevertheless, I do not regret much about it, even if at that time one extra year seemed to be very important. During these 4 years I had not learnt anything about Fethullah Glen. Even after graduating the school I never questioned about him. The first information about Glen I found was in Russian analytical paper named Compass in 1999 (in the same year all schools were closed in Uzbekistan) which described him as the leader of the Nurcular movement, Islamic oriented powerful stream with a strong financial and political support coming mainly from private funds in Turkey. Although
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Currently in the fourth year of studies for his PhD in political sciences at Dauphine University of Paris, France. After
studying in the faculty of International Relations of the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, he obtained in 2001 a scholarship to do graduate studies in geopolitics and international relations at the Institute of Political Studies of Toulouse, France, where he was invited to continue his studies in following years.
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that 10-page-article could not change my opinion about my 4-year-experience at school, it created a sort of suspicion towards the schools because that paper was and remained the only information about Fethullah Glen and his schools for a long time.
2. Glen and His Schools I was informed lately that Glen possesses no school by his own. He is not a businessman and he did not inherit enough to open hundreds of schools. The difference is clear between Glen and other famous philanthropist like Soros, Ford or Gates who finance directly schools and education programmes by their own. He was a preacher in Edirne (Turkey) where he received the degree and later in Izmir city from 1966 to 1981526 years. The functions of imam being not limited to preaching, but especially educating and writing (he has written about 60527 books) he describes himself as an educator528. Modern education was not included at his early stages of activities, since at that time he played an important role in educating religion of Islam in Turkey. Therefore the name Hocaefendi, which comes for the role of religious title529 is often used to replace his name. The sector of contemporary (modern) education is one of the domains of his group activities behind the others. That field was actively taken into consideration after 1980530 by the opening of private schools and became by the time the most discussed and publicly known sphere of activities. The schools which are associated with his name follow his line and vision of modern education which is based on both mind and heart 531. He thinks that modern education is job oriented and lacks the spirituality whereas madrasas532 (Qurranic schools of Ottoman Empire) did not follow modern evaluation. However, he finds that Turkish secularism eliminates the religion from the public sphere and encourages the development of violent religious movements. Therefore he proposes the schools both compatible with and critical of modernity and Muslim traditions. Glen does not see modernity and Islam as opposing entities, but in contrary suggest the participation of Islam in modern Secular State533. Even if his points of view are taken from Turkish experience, he tries not to establish one model to all schools over the world. There are some 250534 Glen schools in Turkey and even more abroad. They are located in different countries, but mainly in developing ones. In the countries closer to Turkey they are densely implanted. For example, they exist in different forms in the majority of the post communist countries bordering and closely located to Turkey. In some countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan there are even universities which are linked to the Glen movement. The schools, however, cover a large
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fethullah_Glen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fethullah_Glen Thomas Michel, S.J. Islamic Modernities: Fethullah Glen and Contemporary Islam , p.1 ibid Agai, B Discursive and Organizational Strategies of Glen Movement p.3 Thomas Michel, S.J. Islamic Modernities: Fethullah Glen and Contemporary Islam , p.6
In fact, the word madrasa which is the same as medersa, madrasah, medrese literally means "a place where learning/teaching is done". However, by the time this word lost its original meaning and stands for ancient schools which existed before establishing republican regime in Turkey. Therefore, people refer directly to Quranic school once they use the word madrasa. http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/2178/20/ http://www.turkokullari.net/
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geographical area starting from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Northern America and even in Europe. Glens role is not so much a planning one, but rather visionary one, since in new regions locally operating groups are better acquainted with needs and realities on the ground535. Therefore the forms of the schools are multiple. There are schools recognized as lyceums or gymnasium which are attached to the local schools. They share the building and interfere for the elder pupil. There are also Language and Computer centres that are in developing countries where the need for the subject is vital, but also in developed countries where difficulties to open the schools (mainly Europe) exist. Beside Glen has several International Schools which is open to local pupil and for the children of diplomatic corpus residing at that country. However the main form is so called Turkish schools which undergo through intergovernmental agreements. These schools obtained certain recognition in many countries. Famous political leaders, even presidents have claimed about them in public. For example, recently Afghan president Karzai demanded Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Gul in their meeting to multiply the numbers of Afghan Turkish schools536. The director of Crimean-Turkish School in Ukraine Mehmet Sevketoglu has received a medallion for his work by country president Youshenko537. The students of Turkish school Horizon Japan International School) were received by Prime Minister Koizumi Junishiro, whereas the mother of Georgian president Saakashvili, Dr. Giuli Alasania Saakashvili works at one of the Turkish schools538.
3. The Missions of Missionary Schools The success of Glen schools is achieved almost everywhere they open. However, the question rises about the main aim of these schools from Turkish side, as well as from hosting country side. Several schools have been closed in Russia, and all schools in Uzbekistan. It is difficult to make parallel between these accidents, but in both cases the problems come from political and not from educational drive. In order to avoid all suspicion the schools keep a very strong control over the look of their students. The common characteristics of students are being well-bred, well-dressed and not having an ostentatious look. Traditional clothes are banned; students are obliged to have the uniform. The uniform is composed of jacket, trousers for young men and skirt for girls. In spite of modern image, the presence of these schools abroad was discussed in Turkey for several times as they were considered to be the drive for pro Islamic, missionary education. Glen stated the purposes of these schools as follows: Our schools are missionary like other missionary schools of Europeans and Americans. Our purpose is to carry out missionary activities to prepare the suitable conditions for creating Turkish lobby and to train bureaucrats539.
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Hermansen.M, Understanding of Community within the Glen Movement, p.9 Zaman , 28-02-2007 http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=84&Itemid=42 Zaman, 22-09-2006
Cennet Engin Demir, Ayse Balci, Fusun Akkok The rle of Turkish schools in the educational system and social transformations of Central Asian countries: the case of Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan , Central Asian Survey (2000), 19 (1), p.151
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In fact, making parallel between missionary schools and Glen schools is somehow interesting. The presence of Christian missionary schools in Muslim countries is a fact, why it would be difficult to accept the vice versa? From other hand, it remains very difficult to understand the notion of islamization of Muslim societies. Central Asian societies have been Muslim societies for the centuries; even Turkey itself is composed of more than 90% of the population of Muslims. How it is possible islamize already Muslims? There is, undoubtedly rising ethnic and religious identity formation which is replacing more and more left/right or communist/capitalist identities. Therefore there is a need for schools giving religious education after the revival of the religion in post communist countries. There is a need for sharing the history of Turkic nations those were in the same geopolitical area before being annexed by Russia. Schools are by their composition and acts may be considered as the promoters of the modern and needed education. They offer in fact, what lacks to that society in academic and moral terms. Michel says that given the lack of integration between scientific knowledge and spiritual values, Glen and his companions introduced a new style of education which reconciles the two540. I think, by his comparison Glen does not want to oppose his schools to missionary schools. On contrary, he takes them partly for example which has a role to play in contemporary political and social conflicting situation among the religions. Islam is considered as an enemy for some especially after that theory was officially promoted by Huntington. Therefore he favours inter religious dialogue in order to avoid the clash, whether than discussing sticky points among the religions. Glen advocates acceptance and dialogue with the non-Muslim community. To advocate this notion of tolerance, Glen met important Christian and Jewish religious leaders including the Pope, Chief Rabbi of Israel and the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church to promote inter-religious dialogue541. If his role was to islamize or re-islamize he would better limit to Muslim societies, if his role was the revival of Panturkism he would better fix only on Central Asian countries. Therefore he favours opening the schools in non Muslim countries like Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Brazil, Mexico, etc. which establishes another image of Muslims as educators and not as the bombers in a very crucial period called post September 11th. That lets non Muslims and non Turks get known abroad by the best image as he told above. If there are similarities in the methods of education between Glen schools and missionary schools, in the purpose they remain different. In fact, there is a clich of missionary schools applied to Glen schools. In methodology Glen schools accent on family-like study which strengthen ties among the students. The schools are prevailing general level, in spite of individual which make an almost equal level of all the students. They have a strong discipline, strict control and very good information over each pupil. The parents are permanently enrolled in education processes and pupil stay at the dormitory during the week. By the functioning they may resemble to Christian missionary schools acting nowadays. The purpose of missionary Glen School is far from converting to Islam. In fact, it is impossible to convert somebody to Islam (we see the use of the terms to other context again) as according to Islam everybody is a Muslim by the birth. The parents make Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists from them, that means if somebody decides to be Muslim, he would have come back to Islam. From that,
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http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/2009/22/ http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=17551
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we can say that, being different from Christianity where the conversion542 is the purpose, in missionary schools, it would be incorrect from religious point of view to suppose Glen schools convert pupil to Islam. Briefly, we can't use terms islamization or conversion as the purpose of these schools.Another divergence is based on the notion of Land. The missionary schools come from so called Christian Land to another non Christian Land that is located in between 10/40 window543 (which points on territorial aspect). In contrary, Glen points on society and schools act within the society and not on territorial basis. They knowledge should serve for the people and for the necessity of the nation544, therefore one can find several schools in one small territory, and no school in large territories in spite of religious or ethnic proximity. The purpose of the missionary schools is to use the pupil in Christian drive once they obtain important leadership career545, whereas Glen School believes that the pupil would work for the sake of his/her society and be the good person whilst having an important role in the government. Glen considers that the majority should obtain the knowledge and thinks that danger comes when only minority possess it546. Therefore his schools do not have a target group and open to everybody, whereas Christian missionary schools are active among the vulnerable groups like orphans547, minorities, etc. The purpose, aim is more important than the method, because it effects to a long term result, whereas, the method effects to a short term result. Hereby, I would like to look through the activities of Glen schools in Russian Federation.
4. Case study: Schools in contemporary Russia The secondary education remains one of the high priorities of Russian education system. The country achieved almost 100 per cent of alphabetisation even before 1990s. Therefore, basic and general level of education was high in the country. At the beginning of the 1990s many specialists spoke about the decline in educational sphere in almost all countries of former Soviet Union. It was linked to the decline of the salaries of all employees depending from the state budget. In fact, it would be true talking about the transformation of the education in general, with new priorities and new approaches. New education sector would shape a new face of the Russian society. In terms of society, Russia was no more cosmopolitan, but extremely nationalistic in its internal policy at the first stages of its independence. In terms of economy, country accepted market economy to state regulation which affected to all budget sectors. In terms of politics, the leaders established power based on multi class society, rather than on workers or agricultures as it was in Soviet time. The division into the classes was very quick after a long single class society. In sum, the country transformed its system from egalitarian to market oriented education even in primary levels and increasing in higher steps. Initially, authorities could not provide necessary basis to accomplish such education therefore they were open to accept foreign specialist who proposed their study systems.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_(Christian) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_(Christian) http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/1887/6/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_(Christian) http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/1887/6/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_(Christian)
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Glen schools entered Russia as to other ex communist countries from a very beginning of the independence as an actor partly linked to Turkey and less to Turkish education system. In fact, they were aware of that, Turkish education system did not achieve much success until the recent years. The country is still placed among the highest among OECD countries having attained only primary education level (64,2%)548. The part of those who continue in tertiary and advanced research programmes is lower than in Russian Federation (9,1% to 20,8%)549. Only in this year (2007) the best Turkish universities entered among 500 leading universities list. In terms of yearly expenditure for each student in secondary level both Russian Federation and Turkey have the same expenses550. Briefly, Turkey itself cannot represent a better model of secondary or higher level education and lesser export it to other countries. Therefore, schools had to prove much in Russia. In fact, Glens schools represent elitist schools even in Turkey. The students are selected under the selective basis. They compose the best students and increase eventually better reputation of the school. As mentioned above, the schools have a relatively short experience even in Turkey. The possibility of acting abroad represents a double challenge for them. The results would have affected not only to Turkeys representation abroad, but also strengthening role of the schools inside the Turkey. Their ambassadorial role functioned with the best, young specialists who went to exercise teachers functions abroad, with a small experience in pedagogy, in general. Russia has given a green light to promote lyceums or gymnasiums or other types of schools that distinguished by better level from other ordinary schools. The interest for learning foreign languages, especially English and Computer Sciences became important points of attractiveness. The country aimed to have not only national, but more and more internationally oriented youth accepting the importance of English which have a lesser use in Soviet political zone. The change from equal level to stratified level of secondary education is very important in the Russian system where the entrance to higher education is done through the examinations. The competition on the secondary education based in two areas. If the first is national and partly international Olympiads, the second and most important is university entrance results. Glen schools have a different methodology in teaching at secondary level. They should adapt to each national education system which varies from one another even at post communist countries. In general, they try to keep the control over the teaching of natural sciences in English and leave social sciences teaching to local teachers. School programme is based on obligatory study (between 35-38 academic hours) and working hours (about 10-12 hours) controlled by educators in the evening time. 5. Academic results These schools have spoken of them very quickly in Russia. Of course, their importance was not as strong as in Central Asia where they possessed unequal reputation based on domination in all sorts of competitions. However, with the small number of establishment, the schools achieved academic success in different fields, even though the education programme was not the same with the general secondary programme. For example, in 2007, Ms Katya Bikova, pupil of International Moscow Lyceum 56, obtained the second place in Russian national Ecology Olympiad551. M Vasili Raska who
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www.oecd.org/edu/eag2006 www.uis.unesco.org/publications:wei2006 www.uis.unesco.org/publications:wei2006 http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=153&Itemid=2
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studies at the same school obtained the first place with his project on the bio indicators. In sum, 8 pupil from that school participated successfully in 29th Lomonosov Olympiad organized by Moscow State University552. The list of success is long and it is permanent each year. For example, only Tatar Turkish Girls School obtained 52 winning places within 10 years553, which makes that each year they obtain more than 5 winning places in Olympiads. University entrance statistics of Schools are also high. More than 90% of pupil enter the university from the first tentative, the data that is extremely high in comparison to national level.
6. Human Relationship The force of the schools resides not only in academic, but especially humanistic aspects. In fact, it is still difficult for Russian families to release the education of their children to foreigners. Especially, when this foreigners come from developing country which was considered for the centuries as an enemy. The image of Turkey as the centre of education remains unwilling because for the Russians it represented during Soviet Union Islam and Pan Turkism vis--vis the conquered Central Asia. Surprisingly, the relations between teachers and students remain in the very good basis. Although, the age scale which is admitted to schools remains the most difficult (12-17), and the fact that the difference of age is considered to be low between educators and students (5-15) the authority of the teacher is very strong. The respect of the teacher is gained very quickly, in spite of cultural, religious differences. The assimilation with the local people, studying the local languages and traditions let the young teachers get rapidly the respect and trust of the parents and authorities. Even though the fact the cadres are very young (between 20 and 30) and composed of majority from the male (in Russia school teachers are composed of mainly women)554. M Kuznetsov555 says that the teachers are selected ones in Turkey. He notes that the relations between teachers and parents are in excellent stage which is the result of active relationships of teachers with parents. Things go even much farer by the example of the marriages of teachers with local women. For example, M Mustafa Boder (teacher of Turkish at Tuva Turkish College) married the daughter of president of Tuva M Serigo-ool Oorjak - Anyeta556. Teacher selection for Glen schools is not based only in academic criteria. Yet, before being teacher, young people try to understand the teachings of Glen and the aim of educating. Glen writes that those who want to reform the world should reform themselves before557 Therefore, teachers are firstly well educated and thereafter competent ones. That puts into the first plan the character of the school staff which is neglected actually in contemporary education system, based only on competences558. The school offer not only academic success, but also transfer good moral education. The schools give a parallel education and apprehension which is not offered by any other school in the
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http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=119&Itemid=2 http://www.nabchelny.ru/school80/nash_dosug/2005-02-27/nashi_dostizheniia http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=93&Itemid=2 Hurriyet 19.01.1998 www.zaman.com.tr (08/01/2007) Fethullah Glen The Necessity of Interfaith dialogue : A Muslim Approach , p.30 Nelson, C Fethullah Glen, A Vision of Transcendent Education, p. 4
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region559. Ali Bayramoglu notes that, schools do not rely on religious (Islam) teaching, but to make moral education for the youth560. In his article Changing values: Russian youth in transition, Mikhail F.Chernys, speaks about the rapid changing of post-soviet Russian youth. He indicates that so called rise of consumption needs among the younger people. They start to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, etc. much younger than previous generation561. He notes that, a sharp change within the several years create a great antagonism between two generations living together. Many parents in Russia noted that the choice of sending their children to Turkish schools was linked to the moral education. Some parents openly say that they prefer these school for their English and non smoking education. Hulusi Turgut562 notes that, many pupils stopped drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes after commencing studying. Another aspect of the schools lay under the resolving multi ethnic or multicultural problems within the society. Glen schools are attractive by having several ethic groups. Kuznetsov noted that Moscow school has pupil from 12 different origins563. In Tatarstan Muslim and non Muslim pupil continue studying together. In spite of rising ethnic view all over the Russia, the schools keep attracting diverse ethnic groups. The schools have almost the same prestige in the big cities or in the smaller ones and even in the central cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg though the ethnic portrait is completely different. These cities are the centres of competing educational institutions; therefore it remains very difficult to get known. It is notably that ethnic Russians from these cities choose Glen schools in spite of the large choice of different international schools.
7. Conclusion: The Movement in Europe Glen schools exist also in developed countries like Japan, England, USA, etc. The role of these schools is determinant in putting into practice a new system of teaching as they make prior the teachers education. Glen movement in Europe has other priorities actually. They concerned with moral education and academic support to local citizens of Turkish origin. Turkish Diaspora is one of the biggest in Europe, therefore they have much activities to do. I suppose that the movement is aiming to multiply the number of schools in Europe because there is an increasing need for them. The need is coming from the gap left by the society in the formation of the individuals. The role of human upbringing has much changed and therefore the institutions which play role in it have different power actually. The society is getting lesser role in human upbringing. Its role is reduced by non recognition as an institution like school, university or kindergarten. Therefore its share is partly taken by primary and secondary schools which make an important role in human development in European context. Parents leave all the responsibility to school which should play today the double role. If the task of the modern school is centred on knowledge transmission, the educating aspects are becoming more and more important. The schools are facing this problem in many European countries
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Ali Unal Fethullah Glen : Bir Portre Denemesi , p. 272 ibid Values and Post-Soviet Youth. The Problems of Transition, p. 166 Sabah, 22.01.1998 http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=93&Itemid=2
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and this is clearly seen especially in immigrant families who are coming from the different context where society is still have a word to say in human upbringing. For example, the French education system is very known by being republican, egalitarian. The state controls majority of primary, secondary schools and higher education institutions. The galit is written in French constitution which is guaranteed in France by the equal conditions of education. But French sociologist Bourdieu has already shown that egalitarian machine was not working well throughout the years. The sector of education is the main factor of social stratification in the country. Recent studies show that primary and especially secondary education results very much from one part of the city to another. The so called creation of ghetto schools within the ghetto districts resulted in a very low degree of the pupil studying there. The school is reflecting social problems which are based on class, ethnic and religious tensions. Actually, many critics come towards the school and education institutions in general as they are giving no chance to change the social status. Besides, the school is becoming the area of the conflict based on religious or ethic means. These conflicts show the different perceptions of the role of the school by diverse groups and the incapacity of the republican school to satisfy the needs of the new generation. In actual French education system, there is an increasing need for education oriented schools. Parents leaving their children to the sake of society do not easily perceive its absence. Children have individually organized study programmes which are based under the stronger parental academic control. When it comes to immigrants or parents with low degree studies who can't transmit necessary knowledge and control, it becomes clear that children are going towards fiasco. Therefore, parents are surprised to see their kids having not being necessarily educated, nor academically fit in spite of studying for several years at school. It is no more surprising when we find some Muslim parents sending their children to Catholic schools in the search of the better education and qualification. The purpose is to avoid the risks and giving their children good moral education. However, Catholic schools are also known well for their academic success that means parents prefer them not for being religious but effective. One can go to Christian University of Paris to search for Christianity, but he/she find that the majority of the students are there not for Christianity, but the quality of higher education. Parents trust these schools, whereas the trust to republican school is diminishing especially in certain districts. Today's France is a multicultural, multi ethnic and multi religious society. Although major political drive tries to keep ancient identity vision, they are aware of the need of reforms in very transforming society. The best reforms go through the education, as it is better and easier to educate the younger than the older one. France and Russia resemble much in their vision of society, central governance and actually more and more multi ethnic society. The experience of Glen schools in Russia may be tempting for French educators in search of rapid reforms in nowadays.
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SEARCHING FOR A NEW UNITY OF THOUGHT (FKR BRL) AMONG PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS: VOICES FROM CENTRAL EUROPE
GABRIEL PIRICK 564
Abstract Generally, the more windows are opened the more light enters our space. Fethullah Glen is one of those charismatic Muslims of our time who try to open windows of true dialogue and to overcome the image of furor Islamicus commmunicated by the European media. In his effort to engage in inter-religious tolerance Glen condemned the use of term kafir to describe people of other faiths and he also called on Turks to build mosques next to Alevi assembly centres (cemevleri) in order to set an example to the outside world. This paper investigate the possibilities of peaceful coexistence of all humankind as seen from Central European perspective. Current techno-scientific civilization is systematically obscuring our connection with the metaphysical world, and serious reflection is often replaced by cynical polemics, such as the debate about who came first. The paper focuses on the ideas and attitudes of the Czech Catholic priest Tom Halk and Slovak Catholic missionaries in Azerbaijan. Both groups represent people who are engaged in dialogue with the Muslim world, on the one hand in everyday life in predominantly Shià Azerbaijan, on the other hand in scholarly circles and the Czech intellectual milieu. By surveying their beliefs and opinions it is possible to throw some light on perspectives of inter-religious dialogue in fast-changing conditions. People of Muslim faith who in the broadest sense stand close to the ideals of Fethullah Glen, but do not necessarily form an organizational backup as his supporters, are sometimes termed as those who create with him the unity of thought (fikir birlii). The present contribution would like to point out that similar unity of basic principles should bring about those who urge the necessity of dialogue and sharing of values. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have lived since time immemorial at close quarters, and they are likewise so closely related in a structural sense as religions of revelation, that tensions and petty rivalries have been common. (Hans Kng 1987: 6) As a Muslim, I accept all Prophets and Books sent to different peoples throughout history, and regard belief in them as an essential principle of being Muslim. (M. Fethullah Glen 2000: 4)
564
Research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and currently vice-
chair of the Slovak Oriental Society. (Graduate of Charles University, Prague and SOAS, University of London.) Main interests: Islamic, Arabic and Turkish studies, with special emphasis on Islam, nationalism and secularism in modern Turkey. He has published and lectured extensively at various universities both in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, his monographs include Turkey A Short History (2006, in Czech) and Islam in Turkey (2004, in Slovak). Gabriel Pirick also worked as a diplomat, secretary of the Slovak section of the Association of European Journalists, and as managing editor of the scientific journal Asian and African Studies.
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1. Introduction A few years ago, on the eve of the Christmas holiday and New Years Day, Czech Roman-Catholic Archbishop Miroslav Vlk has sent his congratulations to Karol Sidon, the Jewish rabbi of Prague. But his Christmas is not a holiday for me, reacted the rabbi, he himself equally of Czech nationality, and further explained his position at length: I also do not send him congratulations to our New Year. Cardinal Vlk means well, and I am pleased, but at the same time under such a display I perceive a certain meticulously calculated Christian attitude that counts on all of us becoming one day Christians. The afore mentioned minor example reminds us of the fact that mutual perception and interfaith relations cannot be seen in isolation from their historical, doctrinal, societal or political context. Likewise, people of different religious, ideological or ethnic background would often like wholeheartedly to engage in a dialogue, but each would prefer to carry it on a little bit differently. Some are prepared for self-criticism, indeed even self-irony, acting friendly, while other people may be more reserved or trying to approach partners with an enormous ego. There are those who have no mutual reminiscences of a conflictual past, but someone elses mind may be full of unpleasant memories that influence dialogue and interaction until the present day. For Muslims too, dialogue can be understood as reflective thinking and exchange of inner experiences, whereas others may approach dialogue as dacwa (in Turkish davet), a term that is translated mostly as appeal, call to believe in Islam, invitation to share the same faith, sometimes challenge, but also mission or propaganda.565 Be it as it may, secular-minded or agnostic Westerners in particular could feel that such a dialogue is unattractive, although it may be reflecting mutually acceptable boundaries of dialogue for Christians who are engaged in missionary activities. The best response to such problems of definition could be in intercultural dialogue that is not based on or rooted in any particular philosophical, religious or semantic system, but this may seem almost unattainable, indeed at best illusory, especially when participants have their own religious convictions. In the age of radical pluralism and massive contact between various faiths, however, the necessity of sharing certain basic values is an area of considerable importance if humans are to behave as humans, and not as Rambo-style super-humans. Dialogue then, in spite of its many shortcomings, may be the only practical way of empathic approximation to the Truth, and the way to put ourselves in somebody elses place. When debating issues of inter-religious dialogue, the matter in question is always much more than just theology, aspects of a political and economic character are involved almost by definition and conflicting claims often cause discord rather than harmony.
2. Delusive History? History, especially in a mythopoetic garment, is a pet topic for evaluation too, although almost never on purely academic grounds. Historical events ressemble deep sediments in human relations and not even the majority of them are presented, let alone acknowledged, in unison. If one only thinks of the loss of Constantinople as witnessed by the Christians, and the loss of Granada, or possibly Jerusalem, as perceived by the Muslims, it becomes clear how much historical events influence and deeply hurt the mental ecology of those who are concerned.
565
See the headword dacwa in EI2 (1960-2003) Encyclopaedia of Islam (New Edition, Leiden, E.J.Brill); also Mendel, M.
(1995) The Concept of ad-Dacwa al-Islmya. Archv Orientln, 63, 286 304.
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What is more unfortunate, however, is that serious debates are often replaced with peripheral historical consciousness and polemics, such as the one that deals with the who came first issue. On the one side, for example, the argument sometimes goes as follows: it was only in 863 AD that Byzantine missionaries Constantine and Methodius were invited to Moravia Magna (on the territory of present-day Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary), and only in 988 AD that Prince Vladimir of Russia accepted Christianity, almost three centuries after the arrival of Islam to al-Andalus (in 711 AD) and long after Islam established itself in the Volga region, southeast of Moscow. In this context, Muhammad Abbas, editor-in-chief of the Czech webpage Muslimsk listy (the Muslim Journal), observes that Islam arrived in Andalusia about two hundred years before Christianity reached Central Europe, the argument which apparently wants to indicate that Muslims are justified in feeling at home in Europe at least to the degree Christians do (Revue Prostor 2006: 145).566 As an illustration of how zealously these matters can be treated one need only mention the argument of the imam of one of Moscows four mosques who points out that the word minority should not be used in connection with Muslims living within the territory of the Russian Federation, because Islam emerged on Russias territory far earlier than Christianity did.567 Arguments of primordiality on the Muslim side are countered by similar undertakings on the Christian side. Here the notion of Spanish reconquista is instrumental, as if those who have lost the lions share of the Iberian peninsula to the Muslim armies, namely the Visigoths, were culturally, religiously or ethnically identical to those who re-captured Spain several centuries later, namely Castilians, Basques, Catalans, Portuguese and others. In his famous saying, Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset once asked to his great astonishment how is it possible to call something that lasted for eight centuries a reconquest?568 To name but one additional example, the Christian Crusades were also partly driven by pursuit of the primordial state of affairs and legitimate claims, whilst these were further supported by genuine anti-Muslim philippics. Perhaps even more insidiously, because more in evidence for the present generations, the Muslims of Bosnia were recently depicted by some non-Muslims as aliens and late-comers in the Balkans, as those who arrived with the Ottomans roughly six hundred years after the Slavs, and consequently those who should go home to Turkey. Strangely enough, the same argument, reduced to absurdity and slightly altered in accents, could be used even against the Turkish Muslims by claiming that the apostles disseminated the message of Christ in Turkey (or as contemporaries would put it, in Galatia, Antiochia, Cilicia or Pamphylia) well before the arrival of Islam to Anatolia. Against this background, we may be tempted to ask then, how many years of residence does one need under any given conditions to be considered indigenous?569 As this brief sketch shows, the irrepressible power of history and the natural human passion for polemics are hard nuts to crack. That is why it is not by coincidence that Catholic theology since the Second Vatican Council urges everyone to forget the past. The first step in establishing dialogue, as understood by the prominent and charismatic Turkish Muslim thinker, religious reformer (mceddid,mujaddid) and activist Fethullah Glen too, is forgetting the past (Glen 2000: 5). No
566
Authors frequent attempt to avoid countrys present name, Spain, in favour of al-Andalus is deliberate and significant, See A benign growth, The Economist, 4 April 2007. In Spanish original: cmo se puede llamar Reconquista a una cosa que dur ocho siglos ? Pinson, M. Ed. (1996) The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Harvard University Press, Cambridge), p. x xi.
if not abusive in itself, as if somebody referred to Turkey constantly as Byzantium.

567 568 569
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matter how deep are differences among human beings, in our world that is marked by various aberrations, argues Fethullah Glen, it is important to remove distances in understanding through unity of thought and to work for the sake of coming together (bir vahdet tekiline almak). The oftrepeated assertion about forgetting the past should certainly not invalidate history as a scholarly and academic discipline, neither should it promote and encourage historical amnesia. It is only a symbolic Ausdruck that aims at challenging our self-confidence, whereas for obvious reasons we should still make efforts to understand better our separate conflictual histories.
3. Tom Halk and the Idea of a Link between the Secular West and Islam When we look at the possibilities of finding interlocutors for Glens peace initiatives on the Central European scene, the name of professor and priest Tom Halk comes to my mind. No doubt, nowadays only a handful Christian thinkers are similarly open to atheists as well as to non-Christians in the Czech Republic. Before 1989 a clandestine student of theology in communist Czechoslovakia, Halk was active in underground church and samizdat publishing work that developed around Czech dissident circles embodied later by ex-President Vclav Havel. After the fall of communism he became the President of the Czech Christian Academy and promoted Czech-German reconciliation and ecumenical dialogue. Having been influenced deeply by current sociological concepts, well versed in the religious science, Halk is a prolific writer, widely known for his extensive publication activities and media presentations (noisy tele-evangelism is not his niche, however), scientific and popular as well, both at home and abroad. Since the mid-1990s he has been internationally involved in promoting dialogue and inter-religious understanding in India, Japan, the USA, Israel, Thailand, Nepal, Great Britain as well as two Muslim countries, Egypts Al-Azhar University in Cairo and Jordan. As is usually the case, there are also those who are discomforted by Halks openess. One critical voice, for example, described him as the opposite of an apologist, and eo ipso a person who is not defending his faith, but recontextualizing it.570 Since Halk understands politics as a spiritual duty, it came as no surprise, that he was even considered to stand for the president of the Czech Republic in 2002. Similarly as in the case of M. F. Glen, to attain political position is generally outside and sometimes even contrary to Halks primary objectives, but there are nevertheless elements of a political project in his activities anyway, though he never formulates political or ideological slogans. Drawing from ideas of Fethullah Glen we could say that if a man who tries to avoid politics per se engages in bringing up a new enlightened golden generation (altn nesil), he as an individual, by means of a silent and conciliatory evolution rather than a noisy and bloody revolution, also posseses a societal and political project to transform and reshape the future administrative, entrepreneurial, decision-making and ruling structure of the state, figuratively speaking one prepares the ground for an alternative state (alternatif devlet).
570
Other critics also drew attention to the fact that Halk treats more traditional Catholic thinking with contempt and
labels it dogmatic or, more straightforwardly, that he does not feel intellectually at home in a priestly environment. See Fuchs, J. (1998) Tom Halk Ptal jsem se cest. Distance, 1/4 (retrieved in August 2007 from http://www.distance.cz/ieindex2.htm). Furthermore, we could legitimately ask whether Halks pluralism would also translate into readiness to become internally Muslim in order to experience the deepest avenues of Islam, as some progressive Christians propose.
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From the strictly Christian point of view it may seem a bit discomforting when Halk states that secular Western society is neither the end of Christianity and religion, nor an enemy of Christianity, but a form of Christianity (Halk 2004: 61).571 To put it more precisely, however, it is important to say that Halk understands Catholicism as one of the historical isms that no longer shape our lifes today. Being the dominating principle in Europe roughly until the 19th century, Catholicism has lost its monopoly of religion as religio and is today in the period of decline. Since religion, and later also science, have ceased to be the religio of Western societies, claims Halk, the medias have taken their place. Reflecting our deep-seated aesthetic and visual dispositions, they are todays religio of the West, new altars of the times incarnated in television and PC screens. Europe of the present is not less religious than before, reassures Halk nevertheless, she only picked the media as a new functional equivalent of the previous religious systems that frames our existence into the culture of image (Halk 2004: 40). Meanwhile, he differentiates between religion as religio, confessio and pietas. Whereas religio integrates the society as a whole and has been distinctive in Europe during the pre-modern era, confessio, based on doctine and institution, links together certain groups as gemeinschafts. Finally, assures Halk, pietas, understood as spirituality and personal choice, governs our present time of Catholicity. Instead of Catholicism Halk proposes the non-hegemonic concept of Catholicity. For Halk, secular society is in its essence a victory of faith over religion, more exactly of Catholicity over Catholicism, because unlike in the era of Catholicism, today it is possible to think responsibly about the faith we confess. Boundless secularism should be avoided though, especially in its extreme form: secular fundamentalism that he denounces as late Jacobinism which breaches the principles of laic society. As he does not wish to exclude spirituality from social and political life, Halk (Halk 2004: 117, 126-128) backs those who think that we should revise the paradigm of secularization.572 In general, it is possible to argue that his ideas on secularism as a non-hegemonic principle that refrains from incursions into individuals private lives are akin to the reasoning included in the final declaration of the Abant platform, a regular forum of distinct voices on Turkeys pressing societal issues, as well as to the ideas of Fethullah Glen, who is not construing secularism as a non-Muslim phenomenon either. Summarizing their argument that secularism should be defined primarily as
571
The Czech Republic is usually mentioned among the most atheist countries in the world where believers in God
represent only a minority. Partly due to historical legacy, Czechs view church Christianity and institutionalized religion in their majority with deep suspicion, and this fact is reflected also by Halk. According to the Czech Ministry of the Interiors recent report, in 2005 there were some 11 thousand Muslims living in the Czech Republic (out of 10.3m inhabitants), about 63% of them are classified as originating from the Sunni Turkic sub-civilization, mostly immigrants from Russia, Kazakhstan, ex-Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey. The two big congregational mosques in the Czech Republic are situated in Prague and Brno. Halk has supported the construction of the first mosque in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism. See Topinka, D. Ed. (2007) Integran proces muslim v esk republice pilotn projekt (Praha, VeryVision)
572
He refers to the article Secularization, R.I.P. by Stark, R. Finke, R. (2000) Acts of Faith (Berkeley and Los Angeles).
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a legal and not as a politico-ideological, philosophical, ecclesiastical or behavioural issue, Glen and his supporters take stand against the notion of a boundless secularism too.573 Let us now limit our discussion on Halks ideas to those aspects that cover the area of interfaith relations and understanding. In his essays Halk lays specifically considerable emphasis on the idea that Christianity could serve as a link between the secular West and the Muslim world. Christianity, as is clear from what he says, has a unique and so far unused chance to communicate, so to speak, to both sides. On the one hand, having had many common characteristics with Islam and Judaism, Christianity stands close to its sister monotheistic religions that originated in the Middle East. On the other hand, it is in contact with the laicist humanism of the West, because secularism in fact has its roots in the heart of Christianity (Halk 2004: 286). Shortly and aptly, he proposes to hold out both hands to both sides in order to create a hermeneutics of trust and methodological sympathy. At the core of Halks idiom lies his idea of the third path between Catholic triumphalism and militant secularism. Faithful to his commitments, he considers it necessary to reject both religious and secular fundamentalism. We may notice that in the writings of Fethullah Glen similar antifundamentalist paradigm with reference to the extremist religio-political or militant Islamism is convincingly defined as a clear enemy of humankind as humanum. Glens claims that politicizing of Islam represents one of the biggest insults toward religion (dini politize edenler dine byk ktlk etmi olurlar) stands very close to the famous statement of the outspoken Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Sacid al-cAshmawi, namely that God intended Islam to be a religion, but men have attempted to turn it into politics (Ashmawy 1994). Likewise, Glen warns that politicizing religion will harm religion before it harms any particular government (nal Williams 2000: 36).
4. Abrahamic Religions: Coexistence, Tolerance and Dialogue The most concrete achievement so far of the Christian-Muslim dialogue, indeed of the trialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews, can be summarized as the acknowledgement of the common Abrahamic heritage that both faiths share with Judaism. Meanwhile, Halk warns all sides not to fall into the temptation to expropriate Abraham only for self-satisfaction in order to show him as a
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The platform that is organized by the associates of Fethullah Glen near the Anatolian city of Bolu deals annually with
various issues, the one on secularism has summarized its conclusions in the 1998 Final Declaration (Abant Sonu Bildirgesi). The state is here understood as a human institution that does not possess sanctity [it] removes all obstacles from religions [and] guarantees everyone freedom of religion[so that] secularism is essentially an attitude of the state, and a secular state cannot define religion or pursue a religious policy (Yavuz Esposito 2003: 251-253; compare also nal Williams 2000: 152). Contrary to these proposals were the statements made by the former Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer (2000 2001) that verged on secular fundamentalism. As an illustration let us mention only two cases in point. During his opening speech at the 21st World Congress of Philosophy in August 2003 in Istanbul President Sezer proclaimed that philosophy must be modern and secular. In September 2004 during a symposium on religion organized by the state Diyanet he declared that secularism is a way of life, which should be adopted by an individual. Fethullah Glen, in contrast, is inspired by the idea that a state is secular because secularism is a legal issue and as a consequence he stands against the ideological secularism (or laicism) promoted by the Turkish Kemalist hard-liners, a unique model of militant wordliness that is better to call secularity or laicisness (in Turkish labeled likilik instead of the official term liklik) find more details in Trkne, M. (2006) Trk Modernlemesi (stanbul, Lotus). p. 120-123 and 267-410. In general terms, the American-style (ethos of) secularism which is well-known for its respect for a wide range of religious liberties strengthened by clear constitutional guarantees represents an example that the mainstream of Turkish Muslim elites considers worthy of imitation. Because of the historical legacy, the issue of legal pluralism is also often raised by some Muslim circles (e.g. Ali Bula), but this idea is opposed by the lik judiciary.
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Christian before Christianity or a Muslim prior to Islam, in other words he urges us to take pains to prevent any sort of domestication or particularization of Abraham (Halk, 2004: 296). On All Saints Day Halk encourages his co-religionists to think also of those men and women who remember their own saints worshiping at all the other Christian churches, but also in synagogues and mosques (Halk 2004: 199). Furthermore, he feels that in adressing sainthood Christians should not start with St. Benedict, but with Saint Abraham (Halk 2004: 199). Proceeding from the assumption that there can be no talk or attempt at assertion of shared superiority over other non-monotheistic religions, the idea of strengthening the Abrahamic ecumenae is closely linked, in his opinion at least, with efforts to search for points of continuity with secular Western society (Halk 2004: 73). As an important participant in interfaith dialogue, he warns us not to give way to a cheap politeness that is without true interest (Halk 2002: 81) Ideally, second-hand dealers with dialogue are truly unwelcome. Hence dialogue, underlines Halk, should not have a missionary character, the missionary work in consequence should not be regarded as identical with proselytism. As he sees a disjunction between dialogue and mission, he opposes winning people of other religions over to our side (Halk 2002: 87). Being aware of the difficulties that impede dialogue, Halk reflects on the strategies for coming closer to Muslims without destroying the bridges connecting Christians with the West (Halk 2004: 298) To get to know other religions has to do with serious mental work which should be done by inspecting religious life in its own home conditions (Halk 2002: 78). In spite of having been blamed from time to time for using bons mots and wisecracks, he makes a wide use of turns of phrases. His favourite quote concerning the three revealed religions and atheists is the one borrowed from Nicolas Lashe who emphasizes that Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists are at one with each other in that they do not believe in gods. It seems to me that a similar spirit must have led Fethullah Glen to say that one cannot be a Muslim unless one believes in the pre-Islamic prophets.574 Halk finds special liking for contemplation and common prayer in order to overcome the fear of contact with believers of other religions, the fact that he expresses in the following way: Allahu akbar, It is God who is magnificent, sounds several times a day in so many parts of the world from mouths of a billion of our Muslim brothers and sisters; There is no God except Him starts their confession, There is no God except Him. It is necessary to pronounce loudly these words to all corners of the world (Revue Prostor 2006: 282). He turns against those who would intend to adopt a bellicose definition of the term ecclesia militans and transform their spiritual struggle into the fight against others from our midst and outside. This he compares to the externalization of the term jihad which, according to his apprehension, equally transforms the spiritual struggle with our own sins into a fight under the this worldly logic (Halk 2004: 200-201). Yet, what is missing here is a closer clarification that would explain in greater detail the semantics of the word jihad in its Arabic original, meaning in principle striving on the path of God. This would be appropriate in order to make distinction between jihad and qital (killing, war). Moreover it is always necessary to elucidate to most European readers that numerous Muslim thinkers, including Glen, differentiate between a greater and lesser jihad. Greater jihad is understood by Glen as a fight against evil desires, convictions and superstitions or as an internal struggle with ones self. Lesser jihad means a material fight, but as I understand it, always in the sense
574
Saritoprak, Z. (2005) Introduction. The Muslim World, 95, p. 326.
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of iustum bellum, not bellum sacrum that is more often than not translated as the holy war (qtd. in Yavuz Esposito 2003: 178). In addition, argues Glen, the fight with unbelievers or non-Muslims is always to be comprehended only as a lesser jihad. Apart from that, failure in a greater jihad cannot lead to any success in a lesser jihad.575 Halks irenic approach becomes more palpable when he writes that for him it is unacceptable to join those who demonize Islam after September 11, 2001, whilst he simultaneously rejects Western fundamentalists call for rearming the West ideologically, an idea that reminds him of the rule of a strong hand.576 At the same time Halk, however, refuses to negotiate with terrorists and he gives preference to those peaceful people who try to understand the Islamic world and the circumstances that produce deviant offshoots of Islam. A rapid reaction to confront terrorism as a diabolic method came within only one day after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York from Fethullah Glen as well. In an open letter he wrote among other things that [J]ust as Islam is not a religion of terrorism, any Muslim who correctly understands Islam cannot be thought of as a terrorist.577 Viewed from yet another angle, it may be useful to go back to the idea of tolerance and moderation which represents a common ground in both Glens and Halks writings. As has been indicated elsewhere, Glen attributes the quality of moderation and middle way to Islam itself, more exactly to the idea which can be found in the Holy Quran as expressed by the well-known verse 143 in the Srat al-baqara (and so we made you the community of the middle way, in Arabic wa-kadhlika jacalnkum ummatan wasatan). The balance between materialism and spiritualism, modernity and tradition, or asceticism and worldliness is then de facto an expression of the Muslim concept of the straight path (Kuru 2003: 117-118). Furthermore, Glen based his conception of tolerance on ideas of charity and love. In his effort to engage in inter-religious tolerance and coexistence Glen condemned the use of term kfir to describe people of other faiths and he stimulated believers of various faiths and urged all those who go to mosques, churches and synagogues to shake hands with each other. Similarly, on the intra-religious Muslim-to-Muslim level he called on Sunni Turks to build mosques next to Alevi assembly centres (cemevleri) in order to give example to the outside world, moreover he openly expressed sympathy for both practicing and non-practicing Muslims. Nevertheless, according to some observers, Glens tolerance in a plural society - Turkish as well as Western - is still not allencompassing and his attitudes towards the Iranian Twelver Shiis, women, individual rights, communists or ethnic Kurds let alone members of the Church of Scientology or gay people are insufficiently clarified, leaving thus space for speculations as far as the honesty of his endeavour is concerned. For example, Glens harsh criticism, suspicion and deep mistrust towards the Iranians (mainly Persians) and in a lesser extent also towards the Arabs indicate that quite a lot of innovative work remains to be done on both sides in order to broaden the scope of intra-religious understanding.
575
http://www.mfethullahGlen.net/questions (retrieved in Spring 2001) or see Pirick, G. (2004) Islm v Turecku: http://www.halik.cz/ja/before.php (retrieved in August 2007). It is also noteworthy in this context that as early as in
Fethullah Glen a Nurcuovia (Trnava, UCM). p. 102-103.

576
2003 Halk condemned the USA for her war against Iraq with the argument that it is impossible to use military intervention in order to implant Western style democracy (Halk 2003: 193 194). In contrast, he supported the intervention of NATO forces against Serbia in favour of the Kosovo Albanians in 1998.
577
Quoted in Michel, T. (2002) Turkish Experience for Muslim-Christian Dialogue: A Thinker: B. Z. Nursi & An Activist: M.
F. Glen. Paper presented at the Conference held in Australian Sydney: Peace and Dialogue in a Plural Society: Common Values and Responsibilities, p. 5.
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On the religious level, needless to say, it is Catholicity that Halk situates in the middle from where he extends moderation and tolerance to both non-Christian believers and atheists. Since man is an incurably religious being according to his opinion, the middle way serves to bring closer to the Catholic spirituality all those urban agnostics who feel interested. If Halks principal aim is to extend both hands to both sides in various lifetime situations, then his intermediary position in the middle dictates a pragmatic, but judicious and spiritual, middle way that is nevertheless not just an adjustment, but a dignified way of arguing. Yet, apart from following Halks endeavours with admiration, concerning his strategy and practice vis--vis the Czech atheist majority one is also tempted to ask doubtingly whether it is not refreshingly nave to await something more than marginal results that go outside of the general public. Also, further obstacles are based on the fact that Halks activities are not supported by such a powerful and influential dialogue and entrepreneurial foundations, school networks and media outlets as in the case of the Glen community (e.g. Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakf, Hayat Dayanma Dernei, Akyazl Vakf or Feza Gazetecilik).
5. The Empowerment of School Manuals One of the issues raised by Fethullah Glen has to do with a proposal to set up a new type of education, where science is combined with personal character under the formula religion plus knowledge, yet the religious commitment is inculcated through personal example, interaction and service (in Turkish hizmet) rather than teaching. The theoretical aspects of his understanding of the middle way are put in practice through the upbringing and education of the young generation. Complementary in this regard is Glens emphasis on the future of every individual that is closely related to the impressions and influences experienced during childhood and youth. If children and young people are brought up in a climate where their enthusiasm is stimulated with higher feelings, they will have vigorous minds and display good morals and virtues (Glen 2005: 39). Consequently, in their early stages, children are best adjusted to stimulate their feelings of coexistence, dialogue and cooperation, and to become committed to them. Education is also highly valued by Tom Halk and in his estimation we will not manage European integration without reform of national and confessional history, therefore a certain rewriting of our national histories is needed, because the art of reading our own history also from the perspective of others is a necessary dimension of European coming together (Halk 2004: 153-155). Pessimists would say that religions belong to their differing histories and segregated interpretations, characterized by specific historical matrixes, and so to use Kenneth Craggs terms it is best to never venture to translate their own ethos into the idiom of another (Cragg 1999: 2). Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that reading ones own history from the perspective of others is also delicate, because it may hit self-confidence (Halk 2004: 154). From my personal perspective, in order to coexist and cooperate in harmony and to promote a certain unity of thought, the role of school manuals and teaching materials, to say nothing about the visual media, has to be considered very seriously. As the French scholar Etienne Copeaux emphasizes in his monograph, school manuals dealing with history and religion have a rare quality in comparison to other books and publications: they hardly ever cross state boundaries and are therefore hidden from a broader audience (Copeaux 1997: 21). Foreign scholars and observers are usually unaware of the content of curricula taught at primary or secondary schools in various countries. More significantly though, for the majority of young people, school manuals which are usually meticulously prepared
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and overseen by the state authorities represent the only source of information on alien cultures and religions in a lifetime. Thanks to the fact that these publications influence human beings in their formative period, it is probably right to say that school manuals brand us for our whole lives.578 What is even more important, they considerably form our identity and collective memory, and above all, contribute to consensus building within different societies (Copeaux 1997: 22). Consequently, when writing about the historical and religious developments of rival cultures, the general outline, especially in school manuals, should always be presented in a way recognizable to the other side, with winners and losers points of view next to each other. Because of the often conflicting views on history and religion, wholesale acknowledgement or adoption of rivals renderings of the past cannot be intended here, yet certain comparative perspective on the level of school manuals for pupils could perfectly help to transform mutual exclusiveness into inclusiveness at an age when minors form their ideas about the Gestalt of this world. Acquiring this dialogue literacy is supposedly a long-term process, but if the aim is to build more stable and harmonious society, educational reform has to start with school manuals as well and assure an honest two-way traffic of information on religions and cultures.
6. The Salesians of Don Bosco in Azerbaijan My second case in point is an example of dialogue through mission as being witnessed by the Slovak Salesian missionaries in predominantly Shia Azerbaijan, who had no previous experiences of massive interaction with Muslims.579 Although dialogue has often been understood as antithetical to mission, believing that one compromises the other (Zebiri 1997: 37), interfaith dialogue is nevertheless sometimes, be that as it may, closely connected with interfaith competition. But in practice, apart from Catholics there are many other educational and missionary centres in present-day Azerbaijan, among them high schools and educational centres run by the Turkish Sunni Muslim associates of Fethullah Glen.580 To put these two groups side by side as partners in dialogue in Azerbaijan is more accidental than it is genuine, of course. And sure enough, various Christian circles and scholars of Turkish religious communities have already compared the followers of Fethullah Glen to other organizations, such as
578
For further information see e.g. Ferro, M. (2004) Comment on raconte lhistoire aux enfants travers le monde (Paris, The society of Salesians, made up of both clerics and laymen, was founded in Italy by St John Bosco in 1855 and named
Payot) or Burckhardt, J. (2007) Judgements on History and Historians (London, Routledge).

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after St Francis de Sales. As far as Muslims in Slovakia are concerned, the following may be said in brief: with its clear Catholic majority and Protestant minority, Slovakia has only some 5 thousand Muslims according to the unofficial reports (we do not have authentic statistics), mostly immigrants, out of 5.3m inhabitants. The Slovak authorities have not allowed the erection of a single congregational mosque up to now. According to the new and also more strict legislation adopted in 2007, registration of religious communities and churches requires at least 20 thousand signatures of citizens with permanent residency in Slovakia. The new laws are considered discriminatory by the Muslims living in the country.
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The late Turkish Prime Minister Blent Ecevit once said that Glens schools in Azerbaijan had saved the country from
falling under Iranian influence.
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the Catholic Opus Dei or the Jesuits.581 While the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei (Work of God), an organization dedicated to missionary activities, has developed from the Spanish national movement to a worldwide net of members and supporters who dedicate their talents to the service of God, the Jesuits (Societas Iesu) are among the largest and most influential religious orders of the Roman Catholic church. As far as Protestantism is concerned, points of convergence were stressed by some researchers who likened the enterpreneurial mentality or even the reformist agenda of Glens followers to the allegedly similar phenomenon initiated earlier in the Protestant world.582 Educational activities and the engagement of lay people, side by side with their missionary role, represent the bulk of the activities of the Salesians of Don Bosco. Although certainly not representing scholar-missionaries, the Salesians are recognized by the Catholic Church as an institute of pontifical right dedicated to apostolic work. They promote Christian education of the young and help to erect hostels and houses for young people in difficulties and build retreat houses. Being educators of the faith for the ordinary people, they usually proceed by means of social communication. For the Salesians, the Christian perfection of its associates is obtained by the exercise of spiritual and corporal works of charity towards the young, especially the poor, and the education of boys for the priesthood. If Halks critics reproach him for trying to leave out more traditional Christians, even for being a pluralist with much airing among agnostics or atheists; Salesians are firmly integrated into mainstream Catholicism and adopt an inclusivist approach to non-Christians that is in accord with the Vaticans line today. In Azerbaijan, the work of Salesian missionaries concentrates on the revival of the Catholic Church in the country.583 Due to the harsh conditions under the Soviet rule, the Catholic Church in Azerbaijan, albeit small in numbers, has been scraping a living for seventy years without a church or a priest. It was only in 2007, more than seventeen years after the fall of the totalitarian communist regime and seven decades after the destruction of the original church building in Baku by the Bolsheviks (1931), that the first Catholic church on Azeri territory was re-established by the Slovak Salesian missionaries
581 17
For example, two leading scholars working on the Glen movement, Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balc, expressed these
views in an interview for the Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; available at http://www.rferl.org/features/features Article.aspx?m=06&y=2004&d=A6393817-E7D9-4C2C-951A-EDBC2131DE25 (on 7 June 2004). According to Yavuz, both members of Opus Dei and associates of Glen represent elitist missionary religious movements that are characterized by the lack of formal structure, secrecy and participation in networking activities seeking to influence Turkeys polity by networking with decision-makers. In this context I refer also to Introvigne, M. (2006) Turkish Religious Market(s), in: M. H. Yavuz (Ed) The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy an the AK Party (Salt Lake City, The University of Utah Press). p. 42. See also A Bridge to Inter-religious Cooperation: The Glen-Jesuit Educational Nexus (forthcoming), paper that is planned to be presented and published at the international conference Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Glen Movement, London 25-27 October 2007. In authors view the Jesuits and the Fethullahcs share similar approaches to education and both movements aim at educating new generations holistically in science and ethics as well. Besides, other common aspect is to be found in the importance they give to the lay leadership.
582
See Pirick, G. (1999) Some Observations on New Departures in Modernist Interpretations of Islam in Contemporary Some 350 Christians are living nowadays in Azerbaijan, 150 locals and 200 foreigners, further information at
Turkey: Fethullah Glen Cemaati. Asian and African Studies, 8, 90.

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http://www.saleziani.sk/azerbajdzan-dar-polskeho-prezidenta-katolikom-azerbajdzanu.html
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and consecrated.584 This has been made possible thanks to the positive, though uneasy, steps of the Azeri government and its Muslim community. The donors of the new church have included the Azeri sheikh of Islam Allahkr Paazade. Apart from that, Azeri Muslims have been praised by Christians for artistically creative work they have done on some of the interior parts of the new Catholic church: windowpanes, font or ceramic composition of the main altar.585The church is dominated by a five meters high statue of the Virgin Mary the work of local artist Hseyn. The statue is said to be the symbol of unity of both Orthodox and Catholic churches as well as Muslims, since for all of them Mary represents the mother of Jesus, and the value of this connecting aspect is complemented by a firmly established common-held belief that Jesus will return. On the whole then, here we are witnessing an example of those Catholics who see a genuine link between dialogue and mission in its more classical sense, similarly to a great many Muslims who perceive dialogue to be an intrinsic part of dacwa. Their preaching is combined with service, one is even tempted to use the Turkish word hizmet, yet on closer examination, it is probably right to say that the first represents a smaller proportion of Salesians missionary activity. Doing good deeds for the needy may serve as a point of intersection with numerous believers of different faiths. For Salesians, it seems, dialogue is a means of becoming better acquainted with what the other actually believes in order to facilitate the communication of the message to them in an appropriate form (Zebiri 1997: 38), or an umbrella term that can serve at least to reduce political conflict. Surely, those who consider dialogue as a cover for proselytism on the Muslim side remain afraid and unconvinced as far as the motives for the revival of Catholicism in Azerbaijan are concerned. It only remains for us to hope that dialogue will be led not in order to persuade, but in the interest of accommodating each other.
7. Towards Unity of Basic Principles People of Muslim faith who in the broadest sense stand close to the ideals of Fethullah Glen, but do not necessarily form an organizational backup as his supporters, are sometimes termed as those who create with him the unity of thought (fikir birlii) that translates into a certain mind linkage (fikir balant). The present essay would also like to point out that similar unity of basic principles should bring together those who urge the necessity of dialogue and sharing of values, in brief, who side with the jihad for tolerance and cooperation. As I tried to insinuate, excessive passion for hegemonic history may be more a contributing cause to present problems, as well as an impediment on the way to a true and genuine dialogue, because history as a human science is subject to human errors and distortions. It is more history in conversation and comparison that could make intelligible our different human destinies, but here too it means being truly ready for the questions and not being too ready with the answers as if they were all foreordained (Cragg 1999: 11). Forms of evaluation of our respective traditions must be coupled wherever and whenever possible with the irreducible dictum: be critical but not negative. As has been
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See their own webpages at http://www.catholic.az and http://www.misie.sdb.sk, Slovak missionaries include Jozef
Daniel Pravda (2000 - 2003), Martin Bonkalo, Jn apla (senior head of mission), Peter erve, Marin Kali, tefan Kormank and Jozef Marek. In the course of his ninety-sixth pontifical journey to Azerbaijan (22 23 May 2002), the late Pope John Paul II praised both former Azeri President Heydar Aliyev, the sheikh al-islm of Transcaucasia Allahkr Paazade and the Salesians for their contributions leading to the rebirth of Catholicism in the country.
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In addition, certain Muslim businessman met all expenses for the altar.
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emphasized, it is unsufficient to read other religious systems in the light of the assumptions of ones own , thus producing a picture which is not recognized by members of the tradition which is under scrutiny. Although on the whole we are nowadays experiencing numerous downs in the relations between the major monotheistic religions, and even in better times we will certainly never achieve a complete harmony in Christian-Muslim encounters, the basic need for understanding remains. Indifference is not the right track because it was only in the times of the Roman Empire that territories outside the imperial domain could be described in terms of hic sunt leones, today, however, we need to get to know and understand the inner experiences of all previously unknown and distant religious and cultural systems in order to survive. Accommodation between Christians and Jews has been reached in course of the twentieth century not so much on a theological basis, but rather on historical and societal platform. Similarly, Muslims and Christians could expand distinctive paths towards accommodation and dialogue by drawing inspiration from their specific interests and conditions. Encouraging examples are not so rare as it seems on the surface. Recently, for instance, Czech Christians, Jews and Muslims, irrespective of their Abrahamic roots, have banded together against the proposal of a legal norm that would make euthanasia unpunishable. A distinguished Czech religionist Jaroslav Krej speaks of the ethos of symbiosis, an ethical principle which asks for stretching a point towards all religions or social theories that are willing to respect the Western conception of human rights (qtd. in Mller 2005: 123). In order to reduce the distance between various religious denominations, Fethullah Glen, by the same token, proposed to open a theological faculty in Urfa (Harran), a major town in south-eastern Anatolia that is considered to be the birthplace of Abraham, where scholars and teachers of the three monotheist religions would teach together. The call for Muslim-Christian cooperation and dialogue as a fulcrum in human relations is to be found equally in the writings of Bedizzaman Said Nursi, a Turkish religious leader and author of the Epistles of Light, a seminal contribution to the interpretations of Islam in the fast changing conditions of the twentieth century. The re-opening of the Catholic Church in Baku is an encouraging example in Muslim-Christian relations, as is similarly inspiring the intelligent interest of Tom Halk in Christian-Muslim dialogue. If dialogue today is to reach wider segments of the population, it cannot be limited to the elites, but has to be spread properly. Further possible steps in the area of education have been humbly suggested in this essay, too. No one is fully a believer until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself, says one of the numerous Muslim hadiths. It could be taken as an example, an invitation indeed, to throw out all past and present misunderstandings and failures in communication. And last but not least, paraphrasing somewhat one could also make a suggestion: let us hope that the fundamentalists of tolerance and responsibility will expand their ranks.586
Acknowledgement. I am indebted to Ivan Horek and Viktor Krupa for their intellectual and emotional help and support while working on this paper.
586
The Glen community was once described by Milliyet newspaper, that has a nation-wide circulation in Turkey, as
Fundamentalists of Tolerance. See Ouz, .: Kkten hgrcler, Milliyet, 30 April 1997.
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HARMONIC LEARNING: THE CONGRUENT EDUCATION MODELS OF FETHULLAH GLEN AND JAMES MOFFETT
TOM GAGE 587
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to introduce to the Glen community a kindred spirit, whose work and career complement the innovative achievements in non-denominational education of Fethullah Glen. The late James Moffett influenced teaching in the English-speaking world by inspiring educators to teach what they knew to be successful but whose efforts were impinged upon by a calcified curriculum that limited development of the whole individual. Moffetts pedagogy is effective with teachers and students of any language for improving student writing and reading. I compare the seminal ideas of Glen and Moffett in their efforts to engage students with the domain of knowledge inclusive and beyond the cognitive. The hypothesis underlying the paper is that Moffetts work in improving reading and writing is congruent with and complementary to Glens mission to foster, enhance, and develop students tolerance, attitudes of inclusivity and mutual good will. Moffett shared with Glen a grave concern that both sectarian education and non-denominational education were failing to provide students an opportunity to develop as fulfilled human beings. The paper enumerates particular methods, devised by Moffett, for teaching reading and writing that improve student learning in every discipline. Though he often taught at leading universities, Moffett never represented any particular school or governmental institution but inspired educators at elementary, secondary, and tertiary levels through his speeches, workshops, and extensive publications. His ideas are congruent with those of Fethuallah Glen, who also sought an education that developed the whole individual. Ironically, Moffetts ideas were seminal for the US Federally funded National Writing Project, and, additionally, for Californias Statewide testing program, which he judged fraudulent and refused to accept any financial benefits. Rather, like Glens, the influence of Moffett was driven by educators (not administrators), who experienced in their classrooms the heuristic effectiveness of Moffetts methods of teaching reading and writing.
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Professor Emeritus, Humboldt State University, Tom Gage earned all his degrees at the University of California,
Berkeley. As a student in the 1950s, he hitchhiked from California to Damascus; subsequently, he has journeyed to the Eastern Mediterranean two dozen times. A senior Fulbright lecturer at Aleppo, Syria, 19831984, Gage has taught widely, including in China, Greece, and Turkey; he has delivered many papers in conferences in the United States, recently at the 2007 Conference on Exploring Models for Peace, University of Texas. He has been resident lecturer on comparative education in China. Gage was a principal in creating Humboldts International Studies department, the architect of the English departments masters degree in Teaching Writing, and founder of Humboldts Redwood Writing Project. Presently working with Fatima Mernisi, co-recipient of the 2004 Erasmus Award, Gage is advancing opportunities for dialogue among secondary students in both Morocco and California. He has been an officer of the National Council of Teachers of English and is a member of the Board of the Consultants for Global Programs, with student exchanges in China, Cyprus, Mexico, and South Africa. Gage has published articles on travel writing, co-authored anthologies of literature in translation, and a book on steel.
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Over a century ago H. G. Wells asserted that the planet is in a race between education and oblivion. Yet in Education and Political Development, published in 1965, James S. Coleman and his contributors found that schooling around the world that prepared students essentially in science and law for jobs in bureaucracies would likely add, rather than mitigate, global problems, the main educational goal being to prepare future citizens for a materialistic reality. As predicted, the educational policies of these states during the Cold War led to swelling governmental bureaucracies, funded by foreign loans, which were obtained by playing off the US and the USSR, while discouraging free enterprise that promised jobs to the unemployed. One grave outcome of the negative influence of education was that such schooling transformed populations of illiterate, unemployed, and starving masses into populations of literate, unemployed, and starving masses, a literate population of individuals seething with resentment and devoid of adequately developed spirituality to offset their desire for material acquisition. During the last half-century, mobility and technology have exacerbated world problems, as environmental, social, and political changes have integrated people economically and socially, a process resulting in individuals struggling with conflicting identities. Kofi Anann, the past General Secretary of the United Nations, recently said, Many people, particularly in the developing world have come to fear the global village as cultural onslaught and economic drain on their way of life. World terrorism is but one manifestation. As eloquently stated in one of the aims of this colloquy, all right-minded people need to respond creatively, to re-double their efforts, to sustain the hope for peaceful co-existence in a world of accelerating change. Fethullah Glen cogently identified a solution: Now that we live in a global village, education is the best way to serve humanity and to establish dialogue with other civilizations (Glen 2004: 19). Mr. Glens idea of education differs from the ubiquitous factory model of the last century, which has failed to avert much of todays violence, perpetrated by either individuals or states. He further says, . . . each person is a creature made up of feelings that cannot be satisfied by the mind . . . ; it is through the spirit that we acquire our essential human identity. Each individual is a combination of all of these factors. When a person around whom all systems and efforts revolve is considered and evaluated, as a creature with all these aspects and when all needs are fulfilled then this person is able to attain true happiness. At this point, true human progress and evolution in relation to our essential being is possible only through education (Glen 2004: 194). The nondenominational schools around the world inspired by Mr. Glen augur hope that informed education can secure Wells victory over chaos. The curricula of nearly all secular states lack, at this point, the goal of broadening the mind while enriching the spirit, the latter which includes attributes of love, dialogue, forgiveness, and tolerance. As Mr. Glen states, Humans are creatures composed not only of a body and a mind, or feelings and a spirit; rather, we are harmonious compositions of all these elements (Glen 2004a: 194). The late James Moffett concurred: Thought that is not spiritual is intellectually inferior because it is too partial (Moffett 1994:43). The two philsophers coincided by implying that education that addresses one without the other is fractional and unfinished. In many nations the idea of educating the whole person threatens to dissolve the division of religion and state, a division that has hence resulted in ignoring the need to address spirituality. Many years
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ago while working for the state of California, I participated in an evaluation of a Catholic high school. In one class I witnessed how the nun commenced first period class by asking her students to participate in audible prayer. Volunteering, one student with head bowed caused the class to chortle when she asked God to stop her brother from drinking up all the orange juice every day before she reached the breakfast table. Another sobered all with a prayer to give succor and strength to her mother facing breast cancer surgery. Throughout my career I have remembered how remarkable this spiritual exercise was in bonding students into a caring community, one that allowed any alert teacher to become aware of what students were bringing to class. Having taught for five years in inner city public schools, I realized how useful this spiritual exercise could be when angry, ghetto pupils entered a class to discuss a character in a 19th Century British novel. A shared prayer could enable a teacher to bridge with personal accounts the universal issues in Dickens Great Expectations. But this Catholic lesson plan is impossible in Californias secular schools. Today those who subscribe to the rhetoric of the Clash of Civilization as the source of terrorism and discontent blame religions. Yet, according to Richard W. Bulliet in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, nearly all the fanatical terrorists, like the engineer bin Ladin and the doctor al-Zawahiri, or for that matter the half dozen medical workers in England and Scotland who failed in their recent attempts to bomb innocent citizens, received their education in secular, state-funded universities, not in religious schools or medressehs (Bulliet 2004:159). Instead, those in the media blaming Islam as the source of criminal behavior should make accountable secular education that has developed the mind at the expense of spirit. By raising moral and spiritual awareness through dialogue, the Glen movement is in the forefront by emphasizing a common ground among Muslim and non-Muslims. Such a common ground fosters through dialogue inclusion and centripetal integration rather than exclusion and centrifugal fragmentation that leads to alienation and violence. Dialoguing with the Other increases the identify of both, or as the Moffett said, As we know, so we identify. If we know as we identify, then the more broadly we identify, the more we know. (Moffett 1992: 32). On writing or speaking of dialogue, Moffett further elaborated: I gradually disengage myself from my sole point of view and learn to speak about myself, first, as if I were another person (objectification), then about others as if they were myself (identification), and finally about others without reference to myself (transpersonalization). Put another way, I evolve from passion to compassion to dispassion (Moffett & McElheny 1995: 593). The pedagogical implication of dialogue assure a kind of distancing that results in an interim cessation of egoistic aspects of ones identity in order to afford openness to negotiation and reconciliation. Moffetts ideas and pedagogy could benefit the work of the nondenominational schools inspired by Mr. Glen, as the two philosophies of education are interestingly congruent. Further, students in these schools could use electronic dialogue to expand the knowledge of each other by sharing cultural expressions. Author of theory, research, and pedagogy, Moffett heralded a holistic education for elementary, secondary and tertiary institutions. His work influenced curriculum in many English-speaking nations through the auspices of the classroom-teacher initiated, educational reform movement known in the United States as the National Writing Project, a project that extended in-service teacher training throughout every state in the US and abroad in such nations as Germany, Indonesia, and
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Sweden. In 1984 while a senior Fulbright lecturer in Syria at the University of Aleppo, I used Moffetts pedagogy in a four-day writing workshop in Athens for sixty teachers in schools from Morocco to Bangladesh One of Moffetts unique insights, central to the Writing Project, was that writing through dialogue was another means for learning. Previously, the purpose of having students write was for them to report on what they learned. Writing, like dialoguing, witnessing, attuning, and collaborating, often results in new learning, as I will later explain. As important as Moffetts ideas were to teaching writing and reading in secular schools, he advanced the need for public schools to include spirituality to better foster and develop reason, a central message in his two publications Harmonic Learning: Keynoting School Reform and The Universal Schoolhouse: Spiritual Awakening Through Education. Let me share an episode from Moffett's career that exemplifies his dedication to dialogue and spirituality. In 1974 the Board of Education for Kanawha County, West Virginia, approved adoption for students in elementary and secondary schools a number of series of textbooks including Moffett's Interaction series, published by Houghton-Mifflin. But some conservative members in the county objected to literary selections from the series that they judged to be excessively negative, blasphemous, and Un-American. This clash of values resulted in violence. Publishers asked authors to go to West Virginia to address the Board in defense of the books. Authors attending the board meeting, made up of a selected audience that excluded representatives from the religious community, were all surprised when Moffett scolded the board for excluding those who had objections. He felt that what is needed in modern times is dialogue and coexistence of diverse opinions, not segregation and exclusion, particularly parents whose children were to be assigned to read material they deemed offensive to the families values and identities. Moffett was not criticizing the Houghton-Mifflin materials but rather was faulting the Kanawha Country Board failure to organize an authentic dialogue. Against his economic interests, he pleaded for a plurality of consciousnesses in decisionmaking. Although it had come under attack, Moffetts work was frankly the best material available for teachers to teach writing and reading. As a measure of its timelessness and worth, Robert Romano, a graduate student in my seminar on the Development of Writing Abilities in the late 1990s, created a series of CDs, utilizing Moffetts 1968 curriculum. In 2000, the nation-wide Association for Curriculum and Development awarded Romanos CD series The Best of the Best Educational Software for that year. The CD series was also one of five finalists for the annual Cody Award for the best software in any field for that same year. At present, the CDs are distributed by Riverdeep International. Central to the educational recommendations of both Moffett and Mr. Glen is teacher in-service education, identified as one of the factors behind the remarkable achievements of the nondenominational schools (Aslandoan and etin 2006:49). These schools would do well to implement another teacher in-service using Moffett's pedagogy in teaching writing and reading, a pedagogy that could complement the outstanding curricula in mathematics and science. From my reading in print and website about Glen-inspired schools, I am impressed with the achievements of the Putnam Science Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Amity School in Brooklyn, New York, the latter enrolling pupils from pre-school through high school. In Brooklyn this year twentyeight students from Amity won medals in New York Citys competition for the Science Olympiad. But I do not see evidence of success in teaching writing and reading nor about how students learn to use the language arts for dialogue among the student populations.
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In the US the phrase the English language arts is ambiguous; I suspect that the phrase for other languages, such as the Turkish language arts, is equally ambiguous. When describing language arts for either private or public schools, one usually hears clichs like the basics, the fundamentals, skills, etc. But these abstractions lack agreed upon specifics. You can count on the heads in any audience nodding affirmatively when hearing of the need to teach the ''basics'', but what does ''basics'' mean? Moffett wrestled with these ambiguities until at the 1968 Anglo American conference on English education at Dartmouth University he stunned those present with the clarity of his explanation. Rather than the triad of language, composition and literature, which dominates US elementary and secondary curricula, Moffett's concept of language arts is based upon authentic language use in social contexts. He criticized as being out of balance the non-parallel, three-legged stool of language, composition and literature. Literature and language are subjects dealing with empirical data; they are about substantial things like the novel Don Quixote, nouns and parts of speech, or punctuation in sentences. But composition in contrast is an activity, not a substantial body of empirical data. In effect, Moffett answered the question What is English language arts? by pointing out that the language is a symbolic system about X for Y; X being any subject of discourse delivered to Y, an audience (Moffett 1968: 3-10). Unlike literature or language as content, composition is a process of negotiating meanings while the speaker and the listener are dialoging. The novel Mehmet, My Hawk is a product. Student writers do not write Mehmet, My Hawk; rather they discourse about Mehmet, My Hawk. Moffett's English curriculum is not grounded in the study of literature, though the literature of a culture or nation often is the X, the subject under discussion with another. In dialogue students use language to communicate with living audiences (Y) about subjects (X), ranging from the Piri Reis 16th Century map of the New World to the poetry of Rumi. The subject of writing for another implies social contexts. To paraphrase Mr. Glen, dialogue is a means of discussion of certain issues by the coming together of two or more people, a process that forms a transcultural bond. As just one method to achieve such a bond, I am proposing, to heighten cross-cultural fluency, a series of online, dialogic exercises between students from two schools in diverse social contexts. Cross-cultural fluency is defined as more than the symbolic system of language; it entails non-linguistic codes of geography, of history, and of business; codes of art, music, and food; codes of time and space, interpreted differently in various parts of the world; codes of play, entertainment and different educational practices; and class codes within every society - - all signifying cultural expressions. The following two aspects of Moffetts work will enable teachers to engage students in electronic dialoguing that actualizes levels of thinking under Theory: Orders of Knowledge and a Practicum: Electronic Dialoguing. First, Moffett Identified his orders of knowledge as four levels of discourse, sustained over a range of utterances from a simple phrase to a book length monologue. 1. What is Happening, 2. What Happened, 3. What Happens, and 4. What (should/should not) Happen.
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In my elementary Turkish, I conjugated the following forms of the verb ''olmak'': Oluyor = What is Happening Oldu = What Happened Olmak = What Happens Olmal/olmal deil = What (should/should not) Happen In the English language, modals or verb tense mark shifts in Moffetts four orders of thinking: the present progressive as indicated by ing, (as in leading in the sentence, With seven minutes of play, Fenerbahce is leading Samsun. This is the discourse of the traffic reporter on radio in a helicopter at mid commute. The past tense is indicated by ed, (as in, Yesterday, Samsun defeated Fenerbahce by one score. The gnostic present tense - - the tense of generalization - - is indicated by s at the end of the verb (as in the second verb of the sentence, Harvey discovered that blood circulates). And the assertive utterance of theorizing or exhorting is signaled by a modal preceding the verb - - the language of law and theology (as in, Thou shall honor thy father and mother or Thou shall not kill). Those of you in the audience or reading this essay who speak languages other than English or Turkish might formulate the four levels of knowledge in your own language to see how universal Moffett's schemata is. It works perfectly in Spanish and Japanese. In the 2006 fall semester, I taught what I am sharing with you to fifteen Spanish-speaking university professors from Quito, Ecuador. One of my former students from Humboldt, Charlie Robertson, is today teaching in Japanese these very ideas to his students in Kochi, Japan. In every language, utterances beyond sentence length are only predominantly either What is Happening, What Happened, What Happens, or What (modal) Happen. In such lengthy discourse the writer shuttles temporarily from the chosen or predominant order to another level - - at once illustrating by using the past, or by tallying up to report, or by inferring from one incident what happens with plural incidences, or by interjecting a caveat with a modal (as in English ought, must, shall, should, will, would, can, could, and their respective negative forms). One might detect that these orders appear to be nothing more than the traditional modes of description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. Moffett did not simply reinvent a wheel by reformulating these established modes of discourse. The four modes only address the X in Moffetts formula, that is, what the subject of writing is about. For Moffett the element Y is crucial to his definition of language arts and to dialogue, as he complemented each of the orders of knowledge with audiences, recipients for what is uttered. And here, again, is where Moffett concurs with Mr. Glen, for dialogic context must be at the heart of lessons (Moffett 1968:72-83). Lets look at Moffetts orders from a literary angle. In dialogue, a speaker of Turkish describing "oluyor" or What is Happening? is always recording unfinished actions; the outcome of the SamsunFenerbahce game is yet to be. Like audible symbols on sheet music or the words of Shakespeare on pages of some play, a performer or actor needs to put life into this simulated reality. At any moment during a performance of The Sultans of Dance, the observer is in doubt about how the Prometheus figure will be revealed in the performances last moments. In literature, this is the genre of drama.
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In the case of "Oldu" or What Happened?, sustained discourse of any length is about action completed. A speaker is reporting an account, not recording an experience existentially. In literature, past action is typically the tense of the genre of the novel or of the short story like an yk by Saray ahiner. In the case of "Olmak" or What Happens, sustained discourse of any length is the order of scientific generalizations or hypotheses. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When developing this thesis, the author may exemplify by digressing to What Happened to illustrate an incident that subordinates the generalization. In literature, present active is the predominant tense of the genre of the essay. And in the case of "olmal or olmal deil " What (should/should not) Happen?, sustained discourse of any length is persuasion, argumentation or exhortation, the phrasing of debate or advanced critical theory or moral imperatives. In belles letters or sacred texts, imperatives are the markers of rhetorical summation, divine injunction or discursive, moral proposition. Another major contribution to language theory that Moffett posited is that in these orders of knowledge or levels of thinking, at least in English, there is no structural difference between non fiction, the discourse about fact, and fiction, the simulation of factual discourse. Moffett required that the audience of discourse be authentic. Sociality is probably the best learning device of all timeand the one least used in public schools. A single authoritarian adult per isolated classroom gives it little chance to work. Commercial materials have been substitutes for human relations. Twenty to forty people is a lot in one room, but in the interest of control and standardization this tremendous human resource is wasted. Students have been forbidden to interact . . .. (Moffett1994: 49). By embedding writing and speaking as dialogue in social contexts, Moffett contributed a stunning heuristic to the theory of discourse in any language. An educator who views traditionally the four modes of discourse without regard to audience deals with four unrelated categories or boxes. Audience is a needed component in every writing prompt, but audience in dialogues imply that participants are on equal though perhaps different footing; one is not measuring or assessing the other. When a teacher is the only audience, the assignment fails to be what Mr. Glen refers to as bonded partners in dialogue. But, an assignment, with teachers and remote students as audiences, can be an academic bond to foster much more lasting and important learning. Let me illustrate the difference. I have written this paper for you, an international audience that presumably knows little or nothing about James Moffett or how his ideas relate to the work of Fethullah Glen nor how Moffetts pedagogy might benefit the curriculum in the nondenominational schools. Clearly, at this stage I know more about my topic than you do about what I am discussing. Some months ago while writing a draft, I enumerated what I believed you need to know of Moffetts ideas. Should I have written this essay to fellow English educators at a convention, much of what Ive written would have been unnecessary, for that audience, like a choir, is already in tune with my subject. But now imagine how writing for an author differs when the audience is an authority on the subject, a professor lets say. Imagine how a graduate student might write about this same essay, not for you as audience, but to me in a class in the graduate program at Humboldt State University. That student would favor generalities, assuming that to elaborate would insult my intelligence, since much of what he knows came from me. In such school exercises, the student is condemned to write on a
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subject about which his teacher knows more than the student does. Now, I must ask you, when in life, after leaving school, do you ever write to an audience who knows more about your subject than you do? Never! Nearly all writing in school is writing in which students address the teacher; nearly all writing in the real world is typified by the writer informing an audience on matters about which the audience knows little to nothing. When teachers craft writing prompts that enable students to inform the uninformed, these teachers develop in their charges a whole host of skills and strategies previously unaddressed when taught as independent units of study of grammar, usage, diction, spelling, and composition. Now that I have outlined Moffett's four orders of knowledge, I would like to propose a pedagogy of cross-cultural fluency with which your students in Astana, Kazakhstan, can dialogue with students in Tokat, Turkey; or your students in Samarqand, Uzbekistan, can dialogue with students in Urumqi, China; or your students in Ankara can dialogue with students in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan; or your students in Tashkent can dialogue with students in Rotterdam. Remember Mr. Glens wise observation: Different beliefs, races, customs and traditions will continue to cohabit in this [global] village. Each individual is like a unique realm unto themselves; therefore the desire for all humanity to be similar to one another is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. For this reason, the peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences [Glen 2004:249-250]. With such guidance, students fluent in English in Istanbul, in Baku, in Zamboanga in the Philippines, can dialogue with students in the US to engage in Moffetts four orders of knowledge. Sensitive teachers could easily fashion appropriate linkages, void of political nuances, to afford students rich opportunities to develop their language skills while fostering multiculturalism in the increasingly global world. These opportunities are made possible through electronic media in the context of secular modernity. Incidentally, with the assistance of the author Fatema Mernissi, the co-recipient of Europes 2004 Erasmus Award, I have been working with just such an exchange involving students at Six Rivers High School in California and with students in Rabat, Morocco. The aim of these exercises in cross-cultural fluency is to provide global dialogues. According to Moffett, the elements of dialogue - - witnessing, attuning, imitating, helping, collaborating, and interacting - - occur so spontaneously, just as part of living, that we seldom think of these six basic learning activities as education (Moffett 1992: 161). From Moffetts pedagogy of reciprocal discourse, students, teachers, and schools can reassemble the pieces of Mr. Glens metaphor, the common ground of a universal mosaic of communication, by engaging youth of different faith traditions in Internet exercises to improve NorthSouth and EastWest relations. The mosaic entails both dimensions of time and space: students, annihilating space, dialogue across the world using the genres of E-mailings, Blogs, and Wikis; and students, fusing the past, broadcast on CDs and DVDs, how cultural achievements have contributed to modernity. What could better refute inherent assumptions about the clash of cultures than such sharings among students of Izmir and Iowa City or Berkeley and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In each of these electronic spaces, students will dialogue according to an appropriate order of knowledge. Blogs, E-mail, Wikis, and Pod casts on CDs, or DVDs, require students to record nonconsciously What is Happening, or to report non-consciously about What Happened, or to generalize
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non-consciously on What Happens, or to theorize non-consciously about What (Should, Should Not) Happen. 1. A Blog is a website lexia for chronologically documenting Breaking News. It is a private, password protected, Internet screen for only two populations by which students dialogue electronically in a forum. Students in different classrooms around the world record simultaneously what is happening within the realm of some assigned subject, like a football game or reading a poem. It might be a joint Blog on which school students from dramatically different parts of the world can document evidence of how global warming is affecting their respective locales. Those dialoguing on a Blog can post in near simultaneity what is happening. Pedagogically, such writing fosters chronological skills of recording and reporting. Recording is simultaneous elaborating; reporting is chronological outcomes of such elaborations. Each requires precision of diction and shifts in verb tense, from present progressive to past, and back, as student writers record simultaneously or report completed action. Students describing a terrible snowstorm will use the progressive tense, a tense that in other modes of writing, like exposition, would not be as necessary. When the students in one school report What Happened after a storm, they favor the past tense, since the chronology of completed action is not happening but has happened. Students learn the subtleties of how to include detail without unnecessary verbiage, for their audiences, in addition to their teachers, will correct them. The educational goals of this exercise include developing vocabulary, diction, and tempo in phrasing, goals attended to with chronological skills of recording and of reporting. In pen pal dialogue, students intuitively use different orders of knowledge than are used in Blogs, with less frequent inclusion of recording What is Happening but more reporting of What Happened and sometimes creating hypotheses of What Happens. Because time lapses between the reception and the response, the writers mix what has partaken over a week's period and speculates as generalities or hypotheses about upcoming events or moralizes about what should have or should not happen. Unlike postal correspondence, electronic discourse allows for near immediate response. Instant feedback gratifies and motivates students, especially when hearing from real world audiences. A Wiki is like a Blog but with expository themes agreed upon by the participating schools. In the tradition of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Wikis are about What Happens or What (should/should not) Happen. Individual students produce and edit what they have researched of some assigned theme. The purpose of the theme as well as the representation is to have students produce meaningful and correct information in clear language of what they survey, tally, and categorize. They collaboratively generalize and theorize about common themes like the festivals in their cultures, such as Thanksgiving in the American tradition or the Eid in Islamic cultures, or about the local events like the Kinetic Sculpture Race at the Humboldt Bay or the Jump Dance on the Hoopa Native American Reservation. Students from Izmir might describe the annual Turkish wrestling competitions every June. Through Wikis, students learn to develop the following educational goals: to develop expository and argumentative skills, to research, to demonstrate resourcefulness, to acquire many conventions of documentation, to share values in building civility and citizenship, and to understand the benefits of democracy in different social contexts. Pod casting, produced either as audio or video programs, actualizes What Happens/What Happened/What (Should/Shouldn't) Happen. This pedagogy insures comprehending how image, text, and sound mix rhetorically to heighten message and representation, and it develops
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exposition, narratization, and living drama, as we all witness today on television. Learning can be made permanent in CDs or DVDs that become documents preserving the students' education over years. As I alluded earlier, these exercises necessitate acquiring Moffetts orders of knowledge naturally and non-consciously. When the teacher elicits from students an explicit explanations of their nonconscious reasoning (what Vygotsky referred to as scientific concepts), the most lasting learning takes place. Some schools undoubtedly face economic limitations associated with computer availability and online hookups. Not all schools are as electronically fortified as Sabanci University in Tuzla, where I lectured in 2001. The electronic facilities at Sabanci humble those at Humboldt State. In answer to those worried about there being no computers online at local schools, there are internet cafes in nearly every village in the world, cafes which will charge little for usages by groups under teacher supervision. Presently, we are investigating how students in California can link with their counterparts in Rabat. In addition to students crossing global space to communicate electronically, I also alluded to broadcasting that fuses time into tiles in Mr. Glens universal mosaic, portions of knowledge of what the East has contributed to the modernity of West, South, and North. I have in mind still another aspect of Mr. Glens vision: how the cultural influences of the Ottomans and of Islam in general influenced the present. Student CDs and DVDs can reveal much about which the West is frankly ignorant. Let me conclude by sharing with a few examples of what I mean. Students working on a history Wiki dealing with their state share with those in North Africa how Morocco in 1781 was the first country among the world's nations to recognize the US as an independent nation or that many of Humboldt County's Portuguese citizens are from the Azores Islands, which are historically linked to the republic of Sale in Morocco. And in Morocco, students inform their American counterparts that in the tenth century in nearby Fez, the medresseh/university al Qaraouiyine educated a student named Gilbert d'Aurillac, who, at the turn of the second millennium, was to become Silvester II, Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. When I teach classes at Humboldt, I often point out to my students that much of their daily life derives in large measure from Islam in ways that they are totally unaware. First, their university derives from Islam, for Silvester II studied in a Moroccan university a full century before the first European university opened in Bologna, Italy. Secondly, Founders Hall, the building that dominates the Humboldt campus, which houses many of their very classrooms, is a replica of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. Next, the Balabanus Quad at the base of the long stairway leading up to Founders is named after the Nestor of the Humboldt faculty, a man born in Turkey. And, finally, the name of their state, California, derives from two words: the Arabic word for successor, ''Caliph, and from a word shared in Turkish ''firin. In short, California means ''the Caliph's oven. By wedding Moffetts educational theory to electronic pedagogy, Glen-inspired nondenominational schools can increase cross-cultural fluency among Muslim and non-Muslim communities, insuring, thereby, the secular co-existence of these populations. As I have indicated, students in such communities engage across space and time in electronic dialogue that would reassemble the pieces of a universal mosaic into a composite that binds all together in much greater commonality than that envisioned by those short-sighted polemicists that believe in the inevitable clash between East and West.
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THE VISION OF EDUCATION WITHIN PLURALISTIC SOCIETIES IN THE THOUGHT OF FETHULLAH GLEN: THE CONTRIBUTION OF NON-DENOMINATIONAL EDUCATION TOWARDS INTER-RELIGIOUS AND COMMUNAL UNDERSTANDING, PEACE AND IDENTITY. A STUDY OF CONTRASTS IN THE UK, TURKEY AND THE USA
IAN G. WILLIAMS 588
Abstract 'But in the provinces, where Islam is strong, there would be trouble ... The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the Mahdi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Moslems are threatening trouble. There is a dry wind blowing through the East and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border...' 'It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing that we thought', I said 'I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire'.
In his novel, Greenmantle, published in 1916, John Buchan speculated on the possiblity of a mass-mobilisation of Islamic sentiment directed against Britain, France and Russia, which would assist Germany and Austria to defeat the Allied forces. The generalisations of Islam made by the characters in Greenmantle, as cited above, reduce Muslims to an undifferentiated whole that strides across fundamental clefts in political, social and religious terrain. Dialogue between people of faiths and with those of no faith is a condition for communal global survival. This paper examines the contribution of Fethullah Glen in his writings and their outworking in schools, their curricula and universities associated with his name towards global peace and understanding. It is based upon field work in the UK, Turkey, the USA, the Caucasus, and Africa.
1. Introduction This paper examines the contribution of Fethullah Glen in his writings and their outworking in schools, their curricula and universities associated with his name towards global peace and understanding. It is based upon field work in the UK, Turkey, the USA, the Caucasus, and Africa.
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Ian G. Williams: Before coming to the Birmingham City University, Ian lectured in Religious Studies at the Universities
of Chester, and Derby UK. He has taught and researched in the Middle East and India. Research interests focus upon the Fethullah Glen Movement in Turkish Islam, Martyrdom in contemporary Islam, and Sufi movements in the UK, Publications include: Modern Movements in Islam and Zoroastrianism in Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World (IVP: Leicester, 2003). Fundamentalist Movements amongst British Muslims in Fundamentalisms: Studies in Contemporary Religious Radicalism (Exeter: Paternoster, 2000). Modern Movements in Islam and Zoroastrianism. (2003), in Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World, IVP, Leicester. Sufism in British Islam. (2003), in Contemporary Mysticism, Paternoster, Exeter. Relics and Reliquaries: Signs and Semiotics in contemporary UK Islam (2004]), London, Ashgate.
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Glen is against the categorisation of Muslim and non-Muslim, East and West. Each must be a part of the future inclusive civilisation to achieve balance in the world and universal peace. This is a noteworthy vision drawing upon Quranic ideals, Western empirical science, and respect for the Semitic faiths in particular. Binding the strands of the movement in its polymorphic engagements with the contemporary world is an Anatolian Sufi influenced Islam redolent of Buchans character Richard Hannay and his words, I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire'
2. The Context: Europe One of the most striking features of religious life in contemporary Europe is the evident mismatch between different measurements of religiousness. There exists, first of all, a set of indicators which measure firm commitments to the institutional life of a faith tradition and knowledge of the creedal statements of religion. For the majority of Europeans this still entails awareness of Christian professions of belief formed by Judaeo-Christian monotheism and the Decalogue, Greek and therefore Enlightenment Rationalism, and Roman organisation in the polity [OConnell 1991]. Awareness of the first criterion shows a marked reduction in Europe as a whole, but most of all in the national states of northern Europe. Thus, countries such as Denmark and Sweden are regarded as profoundly secular. These indicators are, of course, closely related to each other in so far as institutional commitment [in the form of religious membership or regular practice of worship] both reflects and confirms religious belief in its orthodox forms. The believing Christian attends church to express his or her belief and to receive affirmation that this is the right and necessary thing to do. At the same time, repeated exposure to the institution and its teaching necessarily informs, not to say disciplines, belief and its expressions in propositional statements and thence into behaviour. In the European Values Survey [1981 2004] respondents in Great Britain were questioned: Do you belong to religious denomination? BASE=1000 Weight [with split ups] Yes No Dont know Total Frequency 823 164 13 1000 Percent 82,3 16,4 1,3 1000 (100%) Cumulative Percent 82,3 98,7 100,0 987 (100%) Valid percent 83,4 16,6 Cumulative valid percent 83,4 100,0
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And: How often do you attend religious services? BASE=1000 Weight [with split ups] More than once a week Once a week Once a month Total 5,8 8,6 4,5 Male 6,1 5,4 4,3 6,9 2,0 5,7 8,4 61,3 484 (100%) Female 5,5 11,7 4,7 8,4 3,8 5,0 10,4 50,4 504 (100
Only on special holy days/Christmas/Easter 7,7 days Other specific holy days Once a year Less often Never practically never Total 2,9 5,4 9,4 55,7 988 (100%)
And: Do you pray to God outside of religious services? BASE=1000 Weight [with split ups] Every day More than once a week Once a week At least once a month Several times a year Less often Never Total Total 16,9 7,0 5,0 4,7 6,2 12,0 48,3 932 (100%) Male 12,1 5,0 5,3 5,3 4,5 12,9 55,0 462 (100%) Female 21,6 8,9 4,7 4,2 7,8 11,1 41,7 470 (100%
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The disparity in belonging, attending and personal spirituality was significant. There was value evidently placed upon identification with a religious tradition but active participation in both public and personal ritual practice was placed on a low premium. Two trajectories are running consequently and simultaneously in the religious life of northern Europe. The fact that they have occurred at the same time is partly a coincidence; each however encourages the other. On the one hand, the historic churches, despite their continuing presence are losing their capacity to form the religious thinking of large sections of the population especially amongst the young. At the same time, the range of choice widens all the time as new forms of religion come into Europe from outside, largely as the result of the movement of people. Populations that have arrived in Europe primarily for economic or political reasons bring with them different ways of being religious some of which are Christian and some not; conversely European people travel the world, experiencing amongst other things considerable religious diversity. In this sense a genuine religious marketplace is emerging in most parts of the continent. The crucial question lies, however, not in the existence of the marketplace in itself but in the capacities of Europeans to make use of this phenomenon. Hence, in my view, the significance of an increasingly observable trend which is taking place both inside and outside the historic churches, from an understanding of religion as a form of responsibility to an increasing emphasis on utilization. What until moderately recently was simply imposed with all the negative connotations of this word, or inherited becomes instead a matter of personal choice. I go to a place of worship because I want to, maybe for a short period or maybe for longer; to fulfil a particular rather than a general need in my life. This is where I will continue my attachment so long as it provides what I want, but I have no obligation either to attend in the first place or to continue if I do not wish to do so. In essence there is a move towards designer or preference religion where religion becomes commodified. A further ingredient in the religious life of northern Europe is the growing diversity in its faith traditions not least with the arrival of significant Muslim communities. A private Islam makes no sense; indeed it is almost an oxymoron. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Europes Muslim communities make increasing claims on public space in European societies to the discomfort, in many cases, of their host societies particularly those whose dominant mode of religious life has been to believe but not to belong [Davie 1994]. Islam, in other words, disturbs Christian nominalism (i.e. the increasingly privatized forms of inherited religion). It disturbs very much less those Christians who have chosen to belong to their churches. Indeed the latter are beginning to see in Islam a positive role model, despite the disquiet amongst those of them whose theology embodies exclusive forms of Christianity. The role model argument proceeds as follows: if small and newly arrived Muslim communities can make claims on public space in Europe, so too can Christians in for example the complex moral debates of modern societies and in the competition for adequate institutional provision for all those in European societies who take religious practice and faith seriously. . The latter point can be exemplified in any number of ways; it concerns amongst many other things the political sphere, educational provision and access to the media. The pressure to include a question about religion in the 2001 UK Census was a case in point. The Muslim community provoked the debate by wanting to be counted as Muslims (rather than in national or ethnic categories). But if Muslims made such a claim, why should not Christians, or at least certain kinds of Christians who wished precisely to stand up and be counted? Numbers, after all, can be used to support initiatives elsewhere in society, not least in terms of education and the media. The size of the community
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becomes a bargaining point in the on-going negotiations between different societal groups and a national government. It is an unfounded scheme therefore to predict the demise of either the European churches or of religious practice or of the latent support that is given to religious traditions and communities by significant sections in the population. Already innovative forms of religion have begun to emerge, both inside and outside the traditional churches and amongst the now settled faith expressions that have migrated to northern Europe since 1945. Such groups may be numerically small but they will, I suggest be capable of sustaining forms of religion that become one crucial variable among others in the competing claims of Europeans in their public as well as their private lives. This gradual and ongoing metamorphosis is arguably incorrectly described by the term privatization. With this mind, Casanovas analysis of public religion in the modern world can be applied as much in northern Europe as it can in the rest of the world [Casanova 1994. In essence Europe proffers an intriguing diversity of religious practice both wary of radical appearances of religious fervour and yet responsive to the ineffable. It is into this paradoxical shared discourse that such a movement as that engendered from the writings and teachings of Fethullah Glen enters the wider European stage.
3. A Counter Movement Originating in Turkey but becoming increasingly transnational, the movement represents novel approaches to the relationship between faith and reason, peaceful coexistence in liberal democracies with religious diversity, education and spirituality. [Aslandogan, 2007: vii]. Hendrick [2007: 123, 30-1] concludes that the Glen Movement is the Turkish-based, globally expansive service movement [and] a civil/cosmopolitan mobilization that strives to present itself as exemplary in regard to ways in which Islamic morality and ethics might fuse with, rather than combat, the financial and political institutions of neo-liberal globalization. As Melucci [1999: 177] argues, such an understanding brings to the surface most notably the right to be different. In terms of political action, this requires opening up new channels of representation and granting access to so far excluded themes, projects and services. Rather than in contentious, political or direct action, the Glen Movement has exerted itself in constructive efforts to form the public space and to consolidate and revitalize education, inter-religious dialogue and democratization. This is an expression of Quranic altruism as a counter movement. Glens understanding of duty, to serve humanity especially in the field of education, permits no expectation of material or political gain. Sincerity and purity of intention should never be harmed or contaminated [nal and Williams, 2000: 22]. Woodhall [2005: 2, 14] maintains: It must be remembered, however, that his philosophy of education is not utilitarian, nor a social and political activity which can be divorced from the rest of his philosophy or faith, but a firmly integrated and well-developed component of his world view. ...He indicates that the means must be as valid as the end, apparent or material success is not the only measure... In the same vein, Tekalan [2005: 3, 78] describes the purpose of the movement: The basic purpose is to ensure respect for objective and universal human values, to never have ulterior motives to seek material interests nor to impose any ideology or to seize power through politics in any country.
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This understanding of service is geared primarily to offering in Turkey and abroad. Simply, this mobilization presents alternative models which state systems cannot replicate. Hence, it has attracted broad attention, in favour and against, within a short period of time [nal and Williams, 2000: 22). Melucci 1999: 359] argues that such action, such offering, represents another breakdown in the rules of the game, for it is a symbolic challenge against the dominant cultural codes and the customary basis of strategic and instrumental logic in complex societies. He adds that the unilateral power of giving and thus generating and providing cultural models, constantly result in a movements predominance in societies, as the autonomous and gratuitous production of cultural models are not governed by cost-benefit calculations. The business, educational and interfaith organizations operating across the borders of economic, political and cultural spheres adopt a common rationality based on knowledge, skills and shared ethical values (Fountain, 2002: 5). This educational mobilization addresses time, space, personal relations, and individual selfhood, and the affective deep structure of individual behaviour. Therefore, the rationality of the Glen Movement does not exhibit change, whether in Turkey or anywhere else These successful trans-national and joint projects yield significant recognition, cooperation and acknowledgement from foreign entities and organizations [Stephenson, 2006: 30 1; Aslandogan and etin, 2006: 458; Irvine, 2006: 5574; Hendrick, 2006: 29, Ates, et al., 2005: 14]. Glen especially encourages people to serve humanity through education, intercultural and interfaith activities and institutions, in order to lessen the gaps between peoples and to establish bridges for the common good and peace. These initiatives to cooperate with other faiths and cultures bring acknowledgement of the non-violent and peace-making vision of the Glen Movement (zdalga in Akman 2003; Weller, 2006: 868). Glen (2004a: 259) stresses this frequently in his articles, now compiled as a book, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance: Now that we live in a global village, Glen extends this idea to contend that the best way to serve humanity is to establish dialogue with other civilizations, to come together on some common ground, with mutual understanding and respect, and thus to work for peace, the cooperation of diverse peoples, and the prevention of the predicted clash of civilizations. Taking the image of the global village, Glen extends this idea to contend that the best way to serve humanity is to establish dialogue with other civilizations, to come together on some common ground, with mutual understanding and respect, and thus to work for peace, the cooperation of diverse peoples, and the prevention of the predicted clash of civilizations. He argues that education is the most effective vehicle, regardless of whether it is in Turkey or abroad, and whether or not people have systems working or failing, as every problem in human life ultimately depends on human beings themselves [nal and Williams 2000: 30531; the site http://en.fGlen.com/, and Aslandogan and etin 2006: 31ff; Yildirim 2005: 120].
4. And the wind is blowing Key facets of the Glen Movements culture accordingly include its Quranic ethic, the ideal of the insan i-kamil, flexibility, altruism, adaptability and reliability [Keles 2007]. These are invaluable resources in accommodating to new situations, whereas more rigid and exclusive cultures would have experienced greater difficulties in coping with true uncertainty. Simultaneously, destructuring has been accompanied by restructuring or the revival of collective energies through the experience,
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credibility and heritage which the service-networks had already established and from which it has benefited because the collective actor of the Glen Movement has not sunk into a total subjugation or a sort of collective psychosis at the cultural and group or service network levels. (Melucci, 1996: 375) Also, a number of explanations can be given for the capacity of the Glen Movement to respond to such a situation positively and peacefully, instead of retreating into passivity, as in Meluccis argument (1996: 3767). The first is the reliability and legitimacy of the authority that Glen and his readers already enjoyed. The second is the density and vigour of the formal and informal networks of belonging, and the entire heritage present in the Glen Movement, and the ability to restructure, redirect, and reshape them in new situations. The third is the ability to listen to society at various levels. The Glen Movements activities flourish most amidst political systems that are marked by confinement and authoritarian rule. Its adherents for example as teachers do not aim to maximize the advantages of the actor in political decisions. No matter how their worldview or services might empirically affect the political system, they do not threaten or infringe on the system of rules of a state nor extend to alter its institutional boundaries. The services given by the community are not a contest among adversaries for the distribution of control over the allocation of social production and the creation of imbalances of power among social positions. Thus, all the efforts of the Glen Movement need to be analysed as collective social altruism, using analytical categories other than political ones. zdalga [2000: 8990; 2003: 612; Akman 2003] attempts to explain this use of Webers notion of worldly asceticism. In social movement theory ends or goals are a central term which often synonymously includes and relates to plans, schemes, projects and strategies. Researchers vary in their conceptualizations and the diversity tempts them to choose or ignore one or a few elements relating to different or other variables (Lofland, 1996: 257, 259). Rather than advancing political ambitions, his [Glens] objective is to foster an ethic that comes very close to what Max Weber described as worldly asceticism, an activist pietism with a tendency toward the rationalization of social relationships. To intolerant reactions, which imply that he is after political gains or seeking a new political formation in the Turkish or any context Glen responds: I have absolutely no political aspirations and expectations. I have never been involved in any political effort or activity. But I see myself as a genuine member of this nation, as one of the threads in the lace of this culture. So as long as I live, if I have an opinion about an issue related to it, I wont hesitate to express it. [nal and Williams, 2000: 177] The Glen model of active non-political engagement with a host society contrasts with northern European experiences where denominational or faith sector education is ineluctably involved with the political process and lobbying. As indicated by the EVS evidence [EVS 2006] there is considerable disparity between belief and practice of religious values in European societies and most certainly in the UK context. As I have already indicated it is oxymoronic to suggest that in Muslim observance there is a divide between public ethic, social construction and observance, and personal devotion. Consequently, the debate surrounding the provision of faith sector schools in the UK has consistently embraced a public and political colour. Education Acts from 1870, to 1944, to 1988 and subsequent legislation have secured the place of Christian and Jewish denominational education. Since 1997 and 2001 the UK government has reinforced this commitment to its provision of faith based educational
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environments for Muslim, Sikh and other faith groups present in British society [Open Society 2005. 124-125]. The atmosphere of the deliberations and policies is one characterised by conflict, contentiousness, protectionism and misunderstanding. Esposito [1995] examines media coverage that portrays the relationship between European / Western societies and Islam as one of antipathy. Press reporting focuses upon particular global events ranging from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the current antagonistic relationship between Iran and the USA, to the also contemporary combative activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. This ideological collision is in addition present in education [Halstead 1993] both in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands with debate ensuing over the nature of state funding, religious observance and education, and the wearing of the hijab by girls. From finance to the curriculum, from religious symbolism to wearing of a head scarf, the discussion concerns the management and encouragement of religious pluralism, integration, diversity, unity and equality of opportunity in education The UK Islamic Human Rights Commission conducted research in 2004 on British Muslims expectations examining educational provision. Of 1125 respondents 47.5% stated that they would prefer to send their children to a Muslim school rather than a state school; 40% responded that religious values were of the utmost concern for them in nurturing their children; 38.5% would opt for the best school available; and only 8.5% would choose a mainstream state funded secular school [Ameli & Merali 2004]. It is not simply the weak educational achievements of Muslim children in state schools that result in such a low preference response for such schools but also the apprehension that Quranic ethics and values are challenged in such environments. There is no division between personal piety, religious observance, morality and citizenship in Islam. It is an oxymoronic perception. Modood comments that the real; division of opinion is not between a conservative element in the Church of England versus the rest of the country, but between those who think religion has a place in secular public culture and those who think not. [Modood 1994. 71]. In a similar mode Newbigin asserts in our present situation in Britain, where Christians and Muslims share a common position as minority faiths in a society dominated by the naturalistic ideology, we share a common duty to challenge this ideology [Newbigin et al 1998]. It may be added that it is a common duty to challenge not only secularist ideologies but also the nominalism as evidenced in the European Values Surveys in religious adherence, understanding, practice and understanding of beliefs. Faith sector / denominational schools create Christian, Jewish, Muslim or whatever faith educational spaces which are valued and sought after by parents. These are spaces where respect for particular faiths are respected, cultivated and accepted as integral for framing contemporary UK society. It is only by creating such spaces that the faith communities become normalised, visible, incorporated and established in wider society.
5. Conclusion Fethullah Glen simultaneously embraces and represents several aspects of both traditional and also innovative Islamic thought and practice. This combination of characteristics, abilities and qualifications, some of which have hitherto seemed mutually exclusive, marks him out from other scholars and reformers and has provided him with a transformative edge [Keles 2007].
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The Glen synthesis is significant. It seeks to empower and enable people through education and dialogue, which challenge cultural perceptions and religious dogmas [Keles 2007]. It seeks to mobilise the individual and society towards achieving and becoming insan-i kamil which can only progress in a free, fair and just society [Keles 2007]. Since Glens goals and teachings are justified in traditional Islamic sources, they should have no problem of legitimacy or authenticity. Just as Glens and the movements efforts have helped strengthen the influence of Muslim thought and active social engagement from the periphery increasingly to the centre in Turkey, my contention is that this is being replicated both in the wider Muslim world and in non-Muslim societies [Keles 2007]. The pace of this influence naturally depends on the movements wider presence. It can be said that the Glen Movement is most successful in the sight of communities globally when it mobilises inactive, dormant, but innovative energies present in societies. It absorbs conflicting pressures and eases tension within fragmented communities. It has transformed the potential for coercion to induce changes in political systems into efforts to produce beneficial services. Also, it has never shown any inclination whatsoever towards violence, despite provocations and ill-treatment. [Aslandogan and etin, 2006: 434, 514]. The Glen Movement has involved diverse people within a comparatively brief period of time over a large geographical area to achieve educational and other projects. It appears to have established the exact ratio, or the ideal balance, between risks and advantages, so that millions of people take part in serving. By recognizing the outcomes of its actions and securing positive recognition from others, the participants in the movement compare and perceive its consistency and continuity over time and across borders. The movement has formed a large number of organisations operating across borders in economic, political and cultural spheres. It circulates and diffuses ideas, information, new patterns of action and cultures. In this way, it is able to transfer latency into visibility through collective action and services, which are then institutionalised. Through associational and relational service networks and through the media the participants in the movement harmoniously integrate and liaise between its many layers formally and informally when needed (zdalga, 2005: 443). 76 Karaman and Aras (2000: 56) argue, Glen represents the continuation of a long Sufi tradition of seeking to address the spiritual needs of the people, to educate the masses, and to provide some stability in times of turmoil. And, like many previous Sufi figures (including the towering thirteenth-century figure, Jalal ad-Din Rumi), he is wrongly accused of seeking political power. The movement inspired and guided by Fethullah Glen is offering Muslims a way to live out Islamic values amidst the complex demands of modern societies and to engage in ongoing dialogue and cooperation with people of other religions [Michel, 2005 91]. As Thomas Michel also acknowledges, Glen [2004a: 250] deserves the last word: The peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, in considering these differences to be part of our nature, and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Otherwise, it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end. This is a new wind that is blowingfor religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire of humanity.
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Transforming the Muslim World: Glen in Re-Conceptualisation "the Muslim Citizen
PART
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FROM NEW MAN TO WORLD CITIZEN: THE REPLICATION OF FETHULLAH GLENS RENEWAL VISION IN THE DUTCH CONTEXT
TINEKE PEPPINCK 589
Abstract This research590 elaborates the question of what the vision of Fethullah Glen is with regard to renewal and modernization, what the historical context is for this vision and what relevance this has for the Dutch context. First of all we note that modernization was a necessity in Turkey to catch up with the Western world and avoid the risk of being exploited by more civilized nations. As a result of the reforms in the Turkish top-down modernization, the role of religion (Islam) in the public domain was marginalized. In his vision Fethullah Glen is challenging this interpretation of modernization. He argues that in fact it is diminishing the role of historical and religious values that leads to a weakening of the Turkish nation, because in this way it loses its identity and is subjugated by materialism. As a solution he sees the hope of a renewal of the nation through a golden generation of young people who have secured their identity in line with their history or belief but who are at the same time well educated, specially in modern sciences, and so form a lead group willing to engage in sustained service to humanity. In this way they can serve as an example function to the wider society of unity and common purpose around shared values, which help that society to achieve the unity of common purpose and so be an example to the world as a whole. In the Dutch context it seems that the people are mainly sympathetic to this vision and opposed to the Dutch sub-categorization. The Glen Movements members are striving to put people with different backgrounds, who usually live alongside each other, in dialogue and let them work together on shared goals. The Movement is socially very active in its mission of serving humanity regardless of ethnicity, religion and culture, in the hope that this will reflect on the Dutch society. Some of its members have even expressed their expectation that, in this manner, the Netherlands, as a diverse but peaceful society, will become a role model for other countries. In this respect the paper emphasizes the development and participation of the Turkish community as a pioneer group in Dutch society and in the development of Dutch youth into world citizens, tolerant towards other beliefs and cultures, a programme fully in line with the vision of Fethullah Glen and the Glen Movements role models.
589
Trained as a of teacher of foreign living languages (OALT, Opleiding tot Leraar Allochtone Levende Talen) at the
Hogeschool Brabant in Breda. In 2001 she extended her study of Turkish at the department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East at the University of Leiden. She has been a teacher of Turkish at the Volksuniversiteit Amsterdam since September 2004. In August 2007 she finished her study of Turkish. Her thesis under the supervision of Professor ErikJan Zrcher at the University of Leiden is on The Vision of Fethullah Glen on Renewal as an Alternative to Modernization, and its Reflection in the Dutch context. Her interest in this subject came from the desire to deepen as a Christian in her perception of and approach to the activities of Turkish Muslims in the Netherlands.
590
This paper is a result and recapitulation of authors research conducted in the spring of 2007 under supervision of
professor Erik-Jan Zrcher at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.
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1. Introduction Modernization, secularism, democracy: these are all important issues for us in the Western world, but for sure in Turkey as well. Even more than in Europe, modernization in Turkey was already an important issue and a necessity in the nineteenth century. Why? Turkey, then the Ottoman Empire, found itself in a difficult position. For centuries the Ottoman state had been powerful and seemed insuperable, but from the early 1800s the tide had begun to turn. After the industrial revolution in the West, the Ottoman Empire was confronted with a renewed Europe that had leapt forward in the area of science and technology. In a modernizing world such renewal is a pre-condition for national survival without loss of independence and domination by the so-called civilized nations. Modernization was also the reference point in the ideology that was espoused in order to liberate Turkey from Western domination Kemalism introduced through the leader of Turkeys war of independence and founder of the modern Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatrk. Kemalism is an enlightening ideology, with the goal of raising a generation with free minds, freedom of conscience and freedom of knowledge.591 According to Atatrk, this attitude was the foundation of Western successes in the scientific arena and would now prove to be the key for the success of Turkey as well. This success would guarantee it a place among the family of civilized nations.
2. Turkey as Indivisible Unity Religion was seen by the modernizing Kemalist elite as the great obstacle to that goal. The dogmas embedded in religion were bound, according to Kemalism, to prevent people from critical, scientific reasoning. Moreover, religion was bound to lead to divisions during the later Ottoman era it had already been demonstrated how its different constituent communities (called millets) could be exploited to justify and enable foreign intervention. Atatrk had concrete plans to take care of this threatening diversity stemming from religion. Under the influence of the European model of the nation state, it was decided that Turkey should form an indivisible unitary state identified with a territory and a people and with Turkish as its national language.592 This ambition for unity was reflected in the establishment of a Directorate of Religious Affairs that would decide what the correct explanation of Islam was and control all appointments to religious office in the country. That is why, even now, all religious officials in Turkey are government employees. That brings up the question of what the separation of church and state means in Turkey in this case. It was clear for Atatrk that secularism means that the state implements the definition of Islam as the religion of understanding and reason of modern Turks; all other dimensions of religious belief and affiliation are matters for private conscience, excluded from public concern.
591
Sina Akin, The nature of the Kemalist revolution in David Shankland (ed.), The Turkish Republic at 75 Years Article 3 in the Constitution of Turkey: Trkiye Devleti, lkesi ve milletiyle blnmez bir btndr.
(Cambridge, 1999), 1428 at 17.

592
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3. Risale-i Nur In the first years of the Republic when everything other than state-sanctioned expressions of religion were kept out of the public domain, Risale-i Nur was written. This Quran commentary had the goal of equipping all faithful Muslims and any doubting ones to hold onto Islam through the challenges of modern times. This commentary was written by Said Nursi, an Islamic thinker viewed as a dissident by the regime, and who therefore spent the greater part of his life in prison or in exile. According to Nursi this treatment was unjust, because he complied with the rules of the game that religion should be restricted to private conscience. He challenged the accusations laid against him by arguing that what he aimed at was in fact individual, private conscience and nothing else; that his discourses were based on inspiring and encouraging individual, personal consciences, as well as emphasizing that, in these days, it is not sufficient to have faith through imitation (taklid iman). In these days what is needed is a faith through personal quest and individual research (tahkik iman).593 That is why he tried to make people aware through his exposition of the Quran that science and religion should be combined; that science should not be eschewed on the basis that revealed books like the Quran and other revelations have already provided the answers to all questions. One should, on the contrary, focus on science in order to gain insight through the book of the universe into the reality that scientifically established facts do not undermine religious insights; rather, they subtly affirm and illustrate them. Despite the obstacles put in the way of Said Nursis work, the number of people who smuggled his writings and commentaries on the Quran out of prison, then made multiple copies of them in secret and distributed them, increased. They were called the Disciples of Light (Nur talebeleri). The young Fethullah Glen, who was studying Islamic theology in the provincial city of Erzurum became acquainted with some of these Disciples of Light and the work of Said Nursi, the Risale-i Nur, in 1960, shortly before Nursis death. The Risale-i Nur must have made a big impression on him because many elements of it can be found in the vision that he would develop in the following years. As a teacher in a Quran school in the big city zmir, in the years after his study, Glen strove to enliven the personal belief experience of young people. As a preacher he knew how to touch people in such a way that they made funds available for summer camps, for example, where young people could be guided in their studies, but where there was room too for open discussions about religious and social subjects. He also encouraged his sympathizers to rent houses where students could stay, the so called Light Houses (Ik evleri), establish dormitories and later in the period between 1980 and 1995 when Turkish politics followed a liberal course for private educational institutions and schools.594
593 594
Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford, 2003), 15760. 19711979/19801988 Hayat Kronolojisi at http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/3500/5/ ;
http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/3499/5/.
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4. Glen-Inspired-Schools With the fall of the Iron Curtain the group of people inspired by the vision of Fethullah Glen (the Glen Movement) focused on Central Asia, which was a religious and ideological vacuum after the fall of communism. In Central Asia and world-wide schools were set up that had the same curriculum as the state schools and with a neutral, rather than any overtly religious or Islamic, character, the Glen schools. Sources from 1998 mention 150 schools and 250 other institutions in Turkey, and 250 schools including 7 universities, mainly in Central Asia and the Balkans, but also in the Philippines and in Africa.595 Although there are conspiracy theories about how educational institutions on this scale are financed, Fethullah Glen has always made clear that these are an initiative and a result of generous Turkish citizens and of the self-sacrifice of volunteers, like the teachers who are willing to work at (or at less than) minimum wage. What then is this vision of Fethullah Glen that appeals to so many people and that leads to such results? It turns out that, in certain respects, it is rather like Kemalism, in that it tries to deal with the dilemma: How do we Turks hold our identity as Turks and secure our position in the world? In Glens way of dealing with it the word Turks denotes mainly the Islamic community; and for him, the term identity refers not only to being ethnically or linguistically Turkish, but also (indeed, mainly) to the Turks Islamic identity and the ethical values linked to it.596 The Islam that Fethullah Glen preaches is in fact not necessarily a dogmatic Islam to which religious rules are central.597 It is more of a mystical Islam, one that aims at personal development of the individual, of a good human being who matures in the qualities esteemed by everyone qualities like loving ones fellow human beings, courage, modesty and the willingness to do something altruistically, for the benefit of others. Besides, Fethullah Glen is known to many people as the face of tolerant and liberal Islam. He is therefore presented as a champion of dialogue, with goodwill and tolerance towards people of other cultures and beliefs. He visited the Pope in 1998, which was seen as a good example of his practising the principles he preached.
5. A Threat to Democracy? It was astonishing then that in 1999 tapes came in at the Turkish television broadcaster ATV, in which this universally esteemed and respected teacher (Hoca Efendi) seems to call his disciples to wait for the right moment to seize power in Turkey. The public prosecutor opened a lawsuit to investigate Fethullah Glen on the basis of the charge of founding an illegal organization aiming to change the structure of the secular state, in order to found a state based on religious laws.598
595
Unal Bilir, Turkey Islam: Recipe for Success or Hindrance to the Integration of the Turkish Diaspora Community in M. Hakan Yavuz, The Glen Movement in Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito (eds.) Turkish Islam and the Secular nal Bilir, Turkey Islam, 269 Nuh Mete Yksel, Fethullah Glen rgtu hakknda iddianame at
Germany in: Journal of Muslim Minority affairs, 24 (2004): 25983 at 264.

596
State (New York, 2003), 2147, at 24.

597 598
http://www.belgenet.com/dava/Glendava_04.html#1)
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Were these well-founded accusations, or were they an act of hostility on the part of the Turkish state? There are arguments for the latter explanation, expressed by members of the Glen community. In regard to the accusations it is only proper to note that the state has always had the monopoly on the definition of Islam, as well as of important concepts like democracy and secularism. Indeed, Hakan Yavuz argues that one of the reasons for the hostility on the part of the Turkish state may have been the establishment of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, which is traced back to the Glen community. This Foundation seemed to have the potential to win over the Turkish cultural and commercial elite, through involvement in shared projects aiming at the formulation of a social contract.599 The importance of the ideas that the state favours democracy, secularism and modernization is recognized by Fethullah Glen and he says he supports them. Why then is he being accused of being a threat to those ideas, and even accused of striving for an Islamic state? In the so called Abant Declarations published by the Journalists and Writers Foundation subjects like Islam and secularism are clearly presented and not in any way that contradicts the meaning or content of concepts like modernity, Islam and democracy, the definition of which the state monopolizes. Now, Fethullah Glen himself acknowledges the value of ideas like modernization, secularism and democracy, but he tries also to discuss their content and to give them a provenance and meaning different from that given by the Kemalists. Thus, for him democracy is an idea, a value, that is inherent to Islam. According to him the Turkish people need a higher type of democracy than the present one; a democracy that offers more room to the spiritual (religious/Islamic) faculties, of which in his view the people are in need. Secularism envisages that the state will not interfere in the religious experience of its citizens, so that it can create a climate where everyone can sow his ideas unhindered and harvest its crop.600 Fethullah Glens vision is, in itself, an alternative form of modernization. As we said earlier, modernization seems to be a necessary condition for maintaining the right to sustain independent existence in this world, without being oppressed or taken advantage of by the so-called civilized nations, without having to relinquish ones own identity in exchange for a civilized culture. It is interesting that this is the starting point as much of the Kemalist vision as it is of that of Fethullah Glen. Both want to avoid dependency and being dominated, but at the same time their ideas about how to achieve that differ strongly. Fethullah Glen has sharp criticisms of the results of the type of modernization that Atatrk strove for. He does not blame Atatrk for this, because according to him Atatrk had the same opinion as himself, only he was understood in a wrong way and it was presented to the people in a wrong way.601
599 600 601
Hakan Yavuz, The Glen Movement, 42 Reha Muhtars interview with Fethullah Glen,12-09-2001 at http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/222/5/ 06-03-2007). Taha Akyol and Cengiz andars interview with Fethullah Glen, 27-02-1998 for NTV, at
http://tr.fGlen.com/content/view/1464/74/.
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6. Imitation of Western modernity According to Fethullah Glen, the example of the ideal is to be found in the situation that obtained in the first centuries after the appearance of the Prophet, and again during the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire. According to him, in those days the Islamic society was seen as the most ethical and developed in the world. The Muslims were able to develop a tremendous governing body because they were able to appreciate the value of (as he calls it) the tripartite foundation of inspiration, rationality and experience.602 Their moral excellence and progressiveness, relatively to the time they lived in, were due to the traditions and structures that made them stop and reflect on the transitoriness of the earthly life and the reality of the eternal one. Accordingly, people were able to focus on the value of immaterial goods like science, knowledge and the defence of law and justice.603 This was the reason why they seemed destined to rule in the world. However, the moral and spiritual legacy that promised them authority in the world was wasted in that they sacrificed their religious values in favour of the hope of greater worldly prosperity. In point of fact the escape of imitating Western modernity made the Turkish nation vulnerable, because that is how they lost their identity and became a slave and puppet of the West: We have made one of the most unforgivable mistakes of history sacrificing our religion in return for prosperity. We accepted a way of thinking in which this worldly life is regarded as superior to religion. Since that moment on, we have been struggling to get out of the web of impossibilities in which we have been trapped. Religion is long gone, but the expected worldly prosperity has not been obtained.604 The result, according to Glen, is dependency, with Turkey obliged to seek to please the West at all costs; moreover, the Turkish people find themselves in a miserable state because of their addiction to materialism. Although according to the Kemalist ideology a human can only be free if religion is deprived of influence in the public sphere, Fethullah Glen points out that the opposite is the case. Because of the missing influence of religion, modern man becomes a slave to his greed and primitive drives, and to other selfish fellow human beings who exploit him. The pursuit of ever greater worldly comfort consumes ever more of a persons energy, and takes away the peace and serenity that, according to Glen, finds its roots in a religious life. Nor does this make the person, from a scientific point of view, more objective, because, being ruled by selfishness , he seeks and manipulates knowledge primarily in order to serve material wants.605 What is the solution according to Glen? The solution, like the problem, again resembles the goals of Kemalism in many ways, but the content is completely different: his solution is to raise a new generation of people who are truly free. Not freed from the influence of religion so as to think and act in an unfettered, abandoned way, but free through the notion that they are servants of God, who are bound to obey only His commands and who, therefore, need not bow before other kinds of power. Free because they are aware of the reality that the core of belief is to strive for Gods approval, so they are enabled to free themselves from worldly desires. And free to do scientific research in an honest way because in their quest they are not manipulated by their own interests, so they can seek and apply
602 603 604 605
M. Fethullah Glen, Ruhumuzun heykelini dikerken (The status of our souls; Ulm 2003),12. M. Fethullah Glen, Zamann altn dilimi (The golden period of time; Ulm 2003), 5558. M. Fethullah Glen, Ruhumuzun heykelini dikerken, 7. Ibid, 20, 23.
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knowledge for the good of the whole of humanity. Moreover, they take a broader view of science, a holistic view, because in their scientific research, they consult, as well as the book of the universe, the book of the religion also, and so they can obtain deeper insights. This new generation of people will be active, dynamic not in the pursuit of luxury in the pursuit of the approval of God, which is obtained through loving all creatures for the sake of the Creator, so that they become and remain ever-conscious of their responsibilities towards their fellow human beings, the wider society and the world.
7. The New Man Just as the Kemalist elite sought to implement their own type of modernization in Turkey, so too do Glen and those who follow his way. He is convinced that the masses will not be able to implement far-reaching changes in their present condition. For that to happen, people of insight are needed, who will serve as pioneers. He expresses his expectations on this point as follows: Out of the masses that are wandering behind people without the capability of reasoning and sound thinking or following fantasies, as if they were sleepwalkers, a New Man will arise. This man will be able to think in a modern and rational way, and he will put his trust not only in the mind but also in his experiences and he believes as much in inspiration and conscience as in those two.606 According to Glen, the New Man generation, as he calls them, are heroes, loyal to their own cultural and religious values, but also developed in all fields and in harmony with the time in which they live. These are people who, inside themselves, have realized a dialogue between elements that are perceived as opposites by modernity: heart and mind, feeling and logic. They are people who focus on the present world and at the same time keep their hearts and minds on the next. The New Man deploys himself using all these elements in order to become an enlightening example to others in all walks of life, including the social, scientific and technological. He does this through radiating ethical values and professionalism at the same time. Because the New Man is a peacemaker, he also enters into dialogue with the rest of the society. His goal is to unite the diverse components of society around shared values like virtuousness, decency, diligence and being helpful to others. If the New Man succeeds in this, a prosperous and peaceful society will emerge through dialogue and through the persuasiveness of practical examples of service to others. If such an effort succeeds in the case of the Turkish nation, this nation can become an example to the rest of the world, and at the same time demonstrate that Islam offers solutions where merely political or economic ideologies fail. Instead of being like the ignored child who is set to one side, the Turkish people can become a pioneering nation able to unite the world around shared values, so that eventually a peaceful world can come about not through repression of the beliefs and cultural traditions of others, but by winning hearts and minds through the influence of a good model of service . The emphasis that Glen puts on the importance of education is completely in line with this general mission. He says that an ideal community, society or world consists of ideal individuals. Ideal individuals come to be through self-development, but especially through the example that they imbibe
606
M. Fethullah Glen, Ruhumuzun heykelini dikerken Ibid, 17.
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from a teacher, one who radiates knowledge and excellence and enables them to realize and fulfil their potential to follow the same path.
8. Glens Vision in the Dutch Context What is the relevance of this vision of Fethullah Glen in the Dutch context? Does it, can it, have any application in the Netherlands? In summary, Glens vision seems to envisage an alternative to the type of modernization in Turkey that is geared to a rigorous secularism. The Netherlands (by contrast with Kemalist Turkey) is a very liberal country, offering a lot of space to different beliefs. Let us not forget that, as elsewhere, in the Netherlands this openness was not achieved without effort. The influences of the French Revolution were felt for a long time in the Netherlands so that it too strove to become a unitary nation-state, as illustrated by King Willem I commanding the Reformed Church to nurture love for King and Country.607 This is quite comparable to the way the present Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs takes particular care to ensure that Islam serves national consciousness. In the Netherlands it was the so-called separatists who were against this drive for unitary nationhood and who were convinced that there is a dependency on God, which makes [one] independent of the state.608 After that Abraham Kuyper was one of those who acted against measures to expel Christianity from the public domain. He pleaded against uniformity in the public domain and on behalf of diversity, arguing that citizens would be more loyal to a government that would allow them to live according to their own beliefs, than to a state that wanted to pour them into the same mould, and that therefore the public domain should be open to every philosophy of life and not only the reasonable ones.609 Ever since, the Netherlands has been a composite society divided by different beliefs, each given the opportunity to found its own schools, foundations, hospitals, help organizations etc. During my research on the Glen movement in the Netherlands, I was surprised to find that this tendency to form and live in sub-groups, still very much present in the Netherlands because of its particular historical background, was the very thing that the people that I interviewed found most awkward. Of course, some of the people that I spoke to in the Netherlands and who said they were inspired by the vision of Fethullah Glen, also stressed other problems that, in their view, Dutch society was facing. One of their concerns was that the capitalist system, according to them, ignores the peoples need for spiritual nourishment and education something that is reflected in the growing number of psychological problems among the Dutch people, the growing number of divorces, and the lack of respect for the elderly because they are no longer economically productive. But the principal concern was the lack of mutual openness and exchange between the various sub-groups. People in the
607
George Harinck, Een leefbare oplossing, Katholieke en Protestantse tradities en de scheiding van kerk en staat in
Marcel ten Hooven and Theo de Wit (eds.), Ongewenste Goden. De publieke rol van religie in Nederland (Amsterdam, 2006), 10630, at 107.
608 609
Ibid, 109. Marcel ten Hooven, Religie verdeelt Nederland in Marcel ten Hooven and Theo de Wit (eds.), Ongewenste Goden. De
publieke rol van religie in Nederland, 1337, at 36.
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Netherlands live alongside each other, isolated in their own world, so that there are many groups in a splendid diversity the Turkish community is one of these groups but they live next to each other without really living together with each other.
9. Tolerance and Dialogue But how does this relate to the Glen vision? Well, in the lack of tolerance that the different separate groups show at times of crisis occurs (for example 9/11), there is an evident parallel with the situation in Turkey. There are tensions between different groups (Kurds, Turkish Sunnis and Alawis, Armenians) because the government has sought to impose a uniform identity on its citizens, as if it meant to say: You will be Turkish and speak Turkish and you shall never ever divide our country because of divergent convictions. Glens answer to this is, as we saw, an effort to be tolerant through the love of God, expressing love and being of help to all creatures, to enter into dialogue in order to find out what is important for everyone, so that collectively it can be striven for. In the Dutch context everything appears to be sorted out: everyone has the right of freedom of speech, and there is space made for every possible conviction, and yet this is not the ideal picture of integration in the eyes of everyone. From the point of view of Glens vision, a few people hold that the fact that people experience their own identity in their own sub-group undermines mutual tolerance and prevents dialogue about shared problems and prevents collaboration to achieve shared goals, which would lead to unity while preserving different identities. Therefore, what they propose is to know ones own identity and encourage the exchange of the richness in that identity with the different richness of other groups.610 How is this ideal to be practised in the Netherlands? Some of my interviewees said they were convinced that self-development towards the ideal of a perfected human being (insan-i kmil) is the highest priority.611 This was especially the case for the Turkish and other communities of Muslims in the Netherlands, who (according to the majority of my interviewees) were impeded by their poor level of development relative to the main society.612 The ideal expressed by these interviewees is that Muslims should understand the very first command of the Quran (iqra in Arabic, translated in Turkish as oku, meaning not only recite but also read and study) as an imperative addressed to themselves, namely: study and develop yourself through deepening in understanding of the book of the universe and the book of the religion, to become a human being who has developed the heart, head and hands.613 Hands are included with the meaning of agency, of being active because they recognize the importance of their personal responsibility towards the wider (Dutch) society. They do so through awareness of the transitoriness of this life and the reality of the eternal, through the acceptance that a human being is not the outright owner of his qualities, skills and talents, but a steward who is supposed to use those qualities for the benefit of humanity and not only to satisfy his
610 611 612
Authors interview, 14-03-2007, with Mahmut (pseud.). Authors interview, 17-04-2007 with Grkan elik. Authors interviews, 26-02-2007, 13-03-2007, 16-04-2007 and 14-03-2007, with, respectively, Yusuf Alan, Alaattin Authors interviews, 26-02-2007, 13-03-2007 and 14-03-2007, with, respectively, Yusuf Alan, Alaattin Erdal and
Erdal, Ahmet Takan and Mahmut(pseud.)

613
Mahmut(pseud.)
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own material needs. 614 Full development and consciousness of this kind must surely lead the Turkish and Muslim citizens of the Netherlands to be of more help and service to their fellow-citizens. Thereafter, they will surely go on to send out their message, because playing a full part in society and the possibility of influencing the world around you are closely related, indeed two sides of the same coin.
10. Being a Good Example Being a good example to others was understood as the means to reach the primary goals. Being a role model is a constant theme in Glens vision, which can be traced in the independent foundations set up in the Netherlands by people who have let themselves be inspired by Glens vision. You can find role models and mental trainers in the students association Cosmicus and in a few educational centres in big cities in the Netherlands trainers who want to encourage Turkish young people to do better, go higher. You can find role models in the Cosmicus College, which wants to encourage young people to develop themselves as world citizens as people who have the right qualities and who are appreciated all over the world altruistic people who are secure in their own identity, but who also happen to be able to develop themselves so that they release that identity and their own story to the rest of the world, to people of different culture and different belief. You can find role models in the newspaper Zaman, that wants to improve the participation of Turkish Dutch citizens in their society by, on the one hand, making them aware of Dutch realities and, on the other hand, by motivating them through presentation of appropriate role models successful female Turkish entrepreneurs, academics and students to demonstrate what is possible.615 By being active in this way, it is possible for the people who are inspired by the vision of Fethullah Glen to join in everything that the Dutch society expects of its Turkish Muslim citizens. Let us take the slogan of the new administration: Work together, live together. The efforts of these Gleninspired people fits smoothly with that. Dialogue, tolerance, working together and participation are ideals that are indeed universally valued. Then, those who join in so well have the room to add their own content to these ideals, making it possible for others to come to understand them even as they know and hold onto their own identity. They do this not only in order to have a way of existing in Dutch society, but also, beyond that, in order to be an example, hopeful that this example may be followed by their fellow-citizens so that they too can participate in a dialogue and no longer focus only on their own interests, so that they too may become self-sacrificing servants of their fellow human beings. If as a result the different groups in Dutch society come, over time, to live peacefully with each other, if it is proven that this concept works, then the Netherlands can be a role model for the whole world, since the Netherlands, with all its diversity, is a reflection in miniature of the diversity of the world as a whole. Then, if that example takes root in the wider world, we can make it into a place of peaceful coexistence, free from suspicion, mistrust and conflict. 616 That high ideal can be sought after on the
614
Authors e-mail correspondence, 31-03-2007, with Yusuf Alan about the article Kimim ben? at: Authors interview, 13-03-2007, with Alaattin Erdal. My interview, 12-04-2007, with Cemal (pseud.).
http://www.zamanhollanda.nl/haberdetay.asp?id=540.
615 616
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basis of universal principles and values that, according to the Glen Movement, find their origin in Islam.
11. Concluding Remarks What to make of all this? It very much depends on ones personal beliefs. As a Christian I recognize in this whole story many of the elements of my own faith. I also recognize the influence of my Abraham Kuyperian background in my way of thinking, because a uniform society or world on the pattern of a unitary nation state is my greatest fear. The Turkish and Dutch reality seem to have proven that the world and humanity are not built to be uniform; rather, they exist within the grace of diversity. A society where people are focused on knowledge and spiritual values, instead of material things and personal interests, and one that is based on appreciating ones own identity, exchange and working together, seems to me much more attractive. Loving, being mutually helpful, and working together are indeed universal values that are more likely lead to peaceful coexistence than consumerism or national pride. What I might be critical about in this vision is that the important principles in it that are supposed to lead to peace lack the foundation that they have for me as a Christian. I cannot see Islam as the basic origin of these principles because, for me, they find their ultimate fulfilment in Jesus. Consider, for example, the ideal of service (hizmet), which makes you an example for others. It is a fact that the influence that such service exerts is far stronger and more real than the effect of top-down power. Jesus is for me the ultimate example of one who rejected earthly power and choose the way of serving by choosing the cross for the sake of humanity; to make it possible for peace to enter between God and man, so that people enter into dialogue not only with one another but also and especially with God Himself. So that His Holy Spirit as mental trainer can come to dwell in man, to make a New Man out of him, serving others according to His example.617 For me it is difficult to understand how you can be an example to others of the love of God, if you have not first seen for yourself what the example of love of God means for you. How can you sacrifice for the interest of others if you have not first experienced how God shows His love by sacrificing Himself for you? However, I would counsel everyone, regardless of what belief they hold, and are concerned about the growth of the influence of the Glen movement, or of Islam or whatever conviction it may be, to study the example of the Glen movement. Instead of complaining, look into the mirror and ask yourself what you have done by way of striving whole-heartedly for the well-being of your fellow human beings. For sure they are more likely to be open to the influence of those who earn the right to have such influence. In some sense everyones particular view of life will determine the way a vision like that of Fethullah Glen is received and interpreted. Maybe that could be an interesting new topic for research.
617
Ephesians, 2:1320.
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NOW MORE THAN EVER: MAKING NON-VIOLENT CHANGE IN A GLOBALISED WORLD

T. STEVE WRIGHT 618
Abstract It is a dangerous thing telling truth to power. It is even more dangerous to live a life based on non-violent values. Yet human bridges between truth and power are vital if we are to evolve our collective human values to a higher level. An artificial split has been created between two civilizations essentially Christian versus Islamic which reinforces false images of the other, as other than human. Many biased commentators who reinforce emergent Islamophobia, are largely ignorant of Islamic culture, or deliberately distort it to fit false stereotypes. Such ignorance needs to be both challenged and exposed. The Glen movement has started to redress the balance, showing the world that Islam in action, is more about initiating peace and reconciliation, than war. Quite different approaches to non-violence exist between East and West, yet both can learn from each other. Conflicts are easier to start than avoid. Islam is the worlds fastest growing faith, so there is much to learn from the Glen emphasis on interfaith sharing based on spiritual awareness rather than social, political or economic gain. But this very role may be seen as a threat by others who do not share that humanitarian agenda. The paper argues that in the midst of their spiritual and practical teaching, the Glen community should take inspiration from Western groups who apply peaceful non-violent action for social change in the face of repression. This series of Glen conferences, evidences a clear awareness that mutual learning and self respect are essential if we are to move on together from these days. That willingness to move across boundaries, to discuss important issues with similar members and organizations of good will, is needed now more than ever.
1. Introduction It is a dangerous thing to tell truth to power. It is even more dangerous attempting to live a life based on non-violent values, especially in turbulent times. Yet without key groups of peace-minded people willing to communicate their values, by living them out, we all risk losing our humanity. An artificial split has been created of two civilisations: essentially Christian versus Islam, which is in itself divisive, polarizing and ultimately destructive in reinforcing false images of the other as other than human. Many commentators reinforcing emergent Islamophobia are largely ignorant of Islamic culture and often deliberately distort it to fit false stereotypes. Such ignorance both within the West as
618
T. Steve Wright (PhD on New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control, Lancaster University): Senior
Lecturer in the School of Applied Global Ethics and an Associate Director of the Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University. For almost thirty years, Dr Wright has lectured extensively across five continents on the social implications of new internal security tactics and technologies. His most recent work covers new border control technologies and the climate change crisis. Concerned that the US War on Terror may be masking new and unsustainable global security agendas, his ambition is to evolve human security programmes based on mutual respect which put the well-being of people first. This is an updated version of the paper presented in the Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Gulen Movement Conference, House of Lords, SOAS and LSE, 25-27 October 2007.
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well as within those who seek to pervert the teachings of the Quran to justify terrorism, need to be both challenged and exposed. In that regard, the Glen movement has rather a unique place. it has a community and a set of inspirational teachers and practices, which are transparent, firmly rooted in Anatolian Islam, which can show the world that Islam in action, properly understood, is about initiating peace and reconciliation rather than war. Visionary peace researchers, such as Professor Johan Galtung have expressed profound concerns over the way that the relationships between Christians and Muslims are developing. Galtung has highlighted the fact that a largely Christian Europe could soon face an Islamic Union stretching from Casablanca to Mindanao and one which does not necessarily recognize the state borders defined by previous Christian wars of aggression. Galtung is at pains to stress that this should be seen as an opportunity for co-operative partnership and not a threat.(Galtung, 2005) In that regard, the Glen community offers a potentially vital bridge to such sharing, largely because of the transparency, tolerance and core values for future evolution of spiritual wellbeing advocated by Fethullah Glen himself. (Glen 2006) This presentation seeks to explore some of those issues, together with the wider context both of the challenges presented both by the geographical location of the Glen movement in Turkey, the political complications of Turkey being the neighbour of Iran and a future Kurdistan and the military threats to all peace movements in the Middle East if America follows through a game plan to launch an all out attack on Iran. Different approaches to non-violence exist between the East and the West and both can learn from each other. And yet conflict is easier to start than avoid especially given the social economic and political contexts within which the Glen movement and communities undertake their work. Given that the Muslim community is the fastest growing faith on earth, there is much to learn from the Glen emphasis of interfaith sharing based on spiritual awareness rather than social political or economic gain. And yet this very role may be seen as a threat by others who do not share that humanitarian agenda. The paper argues that in the midst of their spiritual and practical teaching, the Glen community should be encouraged to learn more about the practical implementation of Western peaceful non-violent action for social change, and vice versa. This conference and the others organised by the Glen community are evidence of the groups awareness that mutual learning and self respect are essential if we are to move on together from these days. That willingness to move across boundaries to discuss important issues with similar members and organizations of good will, is needed now more than ever.
2. Peace by Peace? We are living in dangerous times. We can anticipate further polarization between Islam and the West, as the official line becomes increasingly focused on achieving military solutions to what are essentially political and cultural issues. The situation in regard to the Fethullah Glen community is complicated by both national and geo-politics. For example more than one publication called the July 22nd. Elections , the battle for Turkeys soul.(Finkel, 2007) The military in Turkey are paranoid about a perceived Islamist agenda and the associated rafts of constitutional issues which could flow from any significant change from the status quo. Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher in a recent report have made a comprehensive analysis of US plans to attack Iraq as part of an ongoing war game plan after Iraq which includes Lebanon and Syria. They provide the official scenarios using both conventional and nuclear strategies. If this came to pass, they
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conclude that it would destabilize the middle east but conversely the impact of setting up an autonomous Kurdish state on the border of Iran and Turkey would have impacts which would be difficult to over estimate.(Plesch & Butcher,2007) Given these contexts, we should not be surprised if our peace building and conflict reconciliation skills are required as people respond to changing events, misconceptions and paranoia about the role of any peace organization, seeking peace by peace, including that of the Glen movement. If I am right then I would anticipate that even the role, function and activities of these recent Glen conferences will have been misunderstood of spun out as part of some hypothetical set of conspiracies, the more ridiculous, the better. Please let us discuss some of the examples which are emerging.My presumption is that they reveal not truth but a smear agenda which attempts to dis-empower the work of the Glen movement. So why have I decided focus on the role of non-violence in presenting this paper to such a timely conference? Well, a short answer is that Fethullah Glen is unusual in providing a distinctly Islamic voice to the call for a non-violent approach to conflict resolution. But how well do Glens teachings on non-violence lead to peaceful transformation on the ground? Is his a static and passive approach bounded by dogma, or are we witnessing an innovative, active and self aware spirit of transformation which really can lead to a new way of defining Islam in action? The presentation attempts to explore these questions via a comparison with Western writers such as Johan Galtung and Paul Smoker who have deconstructed positive and negative peace and recognized that structural violence is as important as direct violence, both of which need to be eliminated to establish new cultures of peace. Is the teaching capable of being translated via techniques which can action a non-violent belief in change and social justice, in the way that Gene Sharpe has used Gandhis teaching to formulate an arsenal of non-violent tactics and strategies to challenge injustice and create peaceful transformation? Are Fethullah Glens teaching most appropriate for spiritual salvation in the hereafter or are they sufficiently integrated to be used now in a similar way in which Sharps work was utilized to create a non-violent peaceful revolutions in Romania and the Ukraine?619 For sure, Glens approach is to work within an Islamic framework and apply the principles of the Quran to create positive change based on mutual respect. How does this differ to more Western approaches that share similar outcomes? It is important for this conference to hear something of past voices that share the vision of peace through peace and their similar experiences in telling truth to power. A key question is the extent to which these different approaches converge or diverge and the extent to which learning can be mutual. This goal is particularly pertinent in a time of terror when extant counter-insurgency models incorporating organized violence against innocents can easily provoke responses used to justify even more violent repression. A crucial issue is whether or not Fethullah Glens teachings on non-violence, can inspire a new non- violent praxis towards peaceful social change? The notion of peace by peace has a rich western tradition from Tolstoy to Martin Luther King. In the East, the non-violent tradition is much more ancient. Emperor Asoka, presiding over India the Third
619
For a detailed discussion and resource pack on these strategies, see the writings and presentations contained in the
Force More Powerful initiative: http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/
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century B.C. slaughtered more than a hundred thousand before experiencing a Buddhist conversion which led him to proselytizing non-violence, from a distinctly spiritual and pragmatic perspective.620 Middle Eastern spiritual leaders teaching non-violence have had an enormous significance in the West, but it is a truism that there ahs been much less of a connect between spiritual theory and earthly praxis. 2000 years of Christianity has not led to a reduction of violence, far from it since Christians have slaughtered each other for much of that period and most other races as well. And yet the diversity and complexity of the Christian community ,as one of the reviewers perceptively highlighted, can not be so easily dismissed in terms of their differing dimensions of tradition, time and space. We know that many Christian communities, inspired by their faith have successfully attempted to translate their spiritual ethics and a belief in non-violence into a practical set of transformative actions. For example Pax Christie and the Quakers teach peace through service at community, national and international levels. It is not an exaggeration to say for example in the UK, that nearly all the most significant groupings for social change and epace have benefited from the funding of Quaker groups like the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, without which a tremendous set of changes for the good would simply not have happened. However, at a state level, despite the non-violent message of their founder, the practical messages have been much more mixed And this is my point: believability is the extent to which teaching and practice are one. This is what is so attractive about the Glen movement to external observers since even to an outsider the motivation is to unify outward behaviour, with a spiritual credo. And then there is transparency of the Glen movements teaching which is absolutely essential Peace is of course central to Islamic teaching, the Quran refers to it being one of Gods names (59:23). Islamic scholars have cogently argued that the sunnah or Prophets way, can be understood as a deliberate choosing of the of the path of non-violence a distinctly Islamic approach to non-violence based on dawah or peaceful struggle for the propagation of Islam.621 It is in his sense that Fethullah Glens contribution might be best understood through the lens of western practices of non-violent action for social change. This remains a slow process of recognition since it is only in recent years that the larger peace research networks have begun to recognize and assimilate the thoughts of Islamic scholars on non violence and that this form of non-violence is active and transformative.622 Of course within Islam, Arab elders have used such principles for centuries to resolve family and community disputes and there is a continuum of practice for scholars willing to research it as such. (Abu-Nimmar M., 2003) Historically, the East has provided us with some of our most inspirational teachers, translating their spiritual beliefs into a philosophy of both peace cultures and peace through non-violent direct action. All of us active in peace movements today will acknowledge their debt to Mahatma Gandhi. His quest
620
. For an extensive elaboration, see Seneviratana, A., (ed.) (1994) King Asoka and Buddhism Historical and Literary
Studies, Buddhist publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka http://urbandharma.org/pdf/king_asoka.pdf(checked 29 June 2007)
621
Points made by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan inan undated paper on Non-Violence and Islam presented at the
Symposium on Islam and Peace sponsored by Non-Violence International and The Mohammed Said Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at the American University Washington D.C.) See http://www.alrisala.org/Articles/papers/nonviolence.html
622
See for example Paige G.D, Satha-Anand, C., & Gilliat, S. (2001)
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was seen as a process of transformation, of tackling the violent injustices of the largest empire ever assembled. He rejected violence as a tactic because in the long term it was counter productive. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent623 For Gandhi, Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary624. There are certain similarities between Gandhis deeply practical spiritual teaching and sayings and those of Fethullah Glen. For example Gandhis persistent concern with the world of inner spiritual responsibility, crystallized in his often quoted remark: 'As human beings our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world ... as in being able to remake ourselves.625 Yet for Western peace activists, the power of Gandhis contribution is that it incorporates dimensions of technique which can be replicated elsewhere. This is the framework that pioneer peace researcher Theodore Lentz once called a Science and Technology of Peace626. Both Gandhi and Glen stress the importance of truthfulness and this is an important test for any movement towards peaceful change, does it work in practice. The quest for testing truth occupied not only the earliest philosophers but also the earliest scientists. The English 17th century natural philosopher, Francis Bacon, once said, Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible. But he went on to conceptualise a founding notion of scientific practice, namely that of falsifiability. Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion627. In other words, all notions of truth should be open to question and testability. This was an approach which put Copernicus and Galileo into conflict with the Church of Rome, because their astronomical observations and resultant hypotheses contradicted biblical doctrine. The result was a classic story of paradigm challenge and shift628. Bacon himself was aware of the dangers of telling truth to power: Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. And yet Francis Bacons abiding conclusion was that Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority. Why is this relevant to any comparative discussion of modern notions of non-violence especially in regard to Turkey? Well Glens approach to non-violence is totally rooted in Anatolian Islamic belief systems, which to an outsider are based on the timeless wisdom of the Quran which is viewed as immutable holy writ. A closer reading however reveals that Glen sees the inspiration of his faith as a work in progress rather than being set in concrete. He values interfaith dialogue and ongoing cultural exchange as evidenced by his role as honorary chair of the Journalists and Writers Foundation. But Glen also emphasizes inner peace, social harmony, truthfulness which are shared by many other spiritual belief systems. At core, Glen in his written works can be seen as a change agent based on ethics in action. He sets out
623 624 625
Gandhi, M (1925) YI, 21-5-1925, p. 178 Gandhi, M. (1919), 'Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13,May 19 Recently quoted for example when Leeds Metropolitans Great Hall was renamed the Gandhi Hall by the great Indian For a discussion of Lentz work on peace technology and peace action, see Eckhardt, W. (1971) Symbiosis between
actor, Amitabh Bachchan, in June 2007.

626
Peace Research and Peace Action , Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 67-70
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-3433(1971)8%3A1%3C67%3ASBPRAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
627
Originally from Francis Bacons aphorisms in Novum Organum (1620) Quoted in Ed. J. Spedding, R. L, Ellis, & D. D. Kuhn T., S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press.
Heath (1896), The Works of Francis Bacon, (New York, p.210

628
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an evolutionary antidote to the negative impacts of globalization in his book Love and Tolerance, (Glen, 2004) which is essentially based on spiritual practice. In this work, Glen specifically addresses the issues of jihad, terrorism and human rights, asking: How could a religion that associates such a high importance upon human rights neglect the human rights of even one person?629 On Jihad, he is equally clear: Even in an atmosphere in which two armies have fought against each other and blood has been spilled, if the enemy forgoes fighting and want to make a treaty, then the Muslims are commanded not to react emotionally, but to make a treaty, putting their trust in God. Thus a universal principle regarding this subject has been established. Consequently, to talk about fighting or conflict is completely contrary to the basic spirit of a religion that enjoins treaties and reconciliation, not only in time of peace but even during wartime.630 Glen concludes that real Muslims can not be terrorists and he strongly condemns both Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden for creating a contaminated image of Islam which for Glen might have been prevented by education.631 The present author wonders about this and the way we define education for there are many forms of learning. It may be possible to learn how to swim by reading a book on swimming but it would be unusual, usually the process of experiential learning is heuristic and quite literally in the case of swimming, demands immersion. At the time of writing, such contradictions have been vividly illustrated by events in Burma. Paradoxically both the 500,000 plus monks and the more than 500,000 plus soldiers are Buddhists. And yet the army have killed, maimed, beaten and tortured monks despite the religious teaching. Nevertheless, the monks have courageously told truth to power but their training in spiritual practice is not the same as training to avoid coercive crowd control management. All the while, the Peace Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has always advocated non-violence, remains under house arrest whilst being blamed for the monk versus military showdown. By contrast, alternative approaches to non-violence theory such as Gene Sharps tactics and theories of civil disobedience632, or Brian Martins work on backfire techniques are essentially heuristic. They are about learning by doing and anticipate that violence by the authorities might be unjustly directed against peace advocates, Sharp lists 198 methods of what are essentially techniques used as part of a political rather than a spiritual process of non-violent direct action. These include (i) protest and persuasion; (ii) social, economic and political non-cooperation as well as (iii) non-violent intervention. (See Vol II) Similarly, Brian Martins work is a study of the dynamics of state power in facing down resistance and how certain tactic of non-violence can use Gene Sharps techniques as a form of political jui-jitsu which has the power to make the weak stronger by making repressive policies of the authorities backfire633. Does that mean that Glens work on non-violence is ossified by comparison? No, on the
629 630 631 632
Glen, 2004, p170. Ibid. p. 176 Ibid page 90 Sharp, G. (1973) The Politics of Non-Violent Action, Sargent, Boston, Massachussetts, (Available in 3 paperback Vols For an online list of Brian Martins publications giving examples of the backfire process, see his website:
only: Power & Struggle, The Methods of Non-Violent Action and the Dynamics of Non-Violent Action).
633
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/backfire.html
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contrary, he is open to the scientific process and sees science and religion as complimentary as long as there is a social responsibility amongst the scientists.634 What it does mean is that there may be limits on the extent to which the different processes of nonviolence in action can cross fertilize. Is such a conclusion deterministic? Again the answer is no, since at the core of Glens teachings, is the importance of education. His perspectives on technological innovation are instructive since Glen emphasizes the importance of society understanding what else is innovated when new technologies are constructed.635. In coming to any conclusions about the relevance of such differing paradigms of non-violence in practice and in faith, it is worth being humble. Most authors in this field have to admit to some level of ignorance of one path, or the other or both. The current author is no exception. I am sure that I have only a crude grasp of the writings of Fethullah Glen, neither may I do justice to key nonviolence theorists such as Gandhi or Sharp. Nevertheless, I think the exercise of comparison is worthwhile. Western voices have stereotyped Islam to a dangerous extent, as a violent, backward system of beliefs which breed a medieval approach to justice and a terrorist approach to world politics. Glen is aware of these stereotypes which he has addressed in his typical thoughtful way. In the sense that he offers a powerful approach to spiritual change in Turkey and the wider world which is based on a non-violent understanding of core Islamic values, we should listen. However, there are lessons learned from Western non-violent peace activists and theorists that have verisimilitude and their truth content should be shared. In that humble spirit, the brief analysis of non-violence and peace cultures which follows is compared with some of the teachings of Fethullah Glen. My hope is that discussion at conference will enable us to better understand the similarities, the differences and the limits that all such non-violent approaches face, in making any difference in a time of terror. Glen has written widely on the Sufi notion of Safa (purity) and the challenge of ridding human hearts from the things that contaminate it, jealousy, hatred, feelings of vengeance and suspicion.636 His antidote from the Quran is mercy, tolerance and forgiveness.637 Glens philosophy is beginning to be understood by non-Islamic scholars as offering a bridge between worlds. It is an inspirational philosophy whose essence is education in action, teaching love, tolerance and mutual cultural respect.638 In many senses the Glen movement is a practical global networking effort for peace and understanding. And yet paradoxically in Turkey is where its essence has been most widely understood and misunderstood. On the one hand by all accounts the moral teaching in Glen schools offers an exemplary moral and practical training for young people. And yet there are sectors in the military who distrust any pro-Islamic movement of whatever description because of the threat they perceive to Turkeys avowed secular identity. Fethullah Glen himself has made it abundantly clear that the
634 635 636 637 638
Glen, F., (200) Regretting Science and Technology, Website http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1283/13/ http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1218/49/ http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/1809/33/ Ibid. For an insight into how some scholars have responded and been deeply inspired by the to the Glen community, see
Carol, J.
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movement has no interest in seizing economic, political or cultural power either inside or outside of the country. In an interview with Turkish newspaper Zaman he has reiterated his spiritual credo of serving humankind by self-sacrifice: As in the past, I am currently maintaining the same distance to all political parties. Even if power, not only in Turkey, but that of the entire world, were to be presented to me as a gift, I have been long determined to reject it with contempt.639 Although we might take this at face value, perceptions are often just or even more important than realities. And this is possibly the missing link between our different cultural perspectives on nonviolence. It is not enough to simply withdraw from future political challenges to a spiritual movement toward peace, even though that might be necessary, it is not sufficient. Glens expressed philosophy does not falter when it comes to characterizing the unacceptability of terrorism. For him. terrorism is against the very fabric of Islam. On the absis of his erudite understanding of the Quran:No Muslim can be a terrorist, no terrorist a Muslim. Western commentators lack the scholarly authority within Muslim communities that Glen brings when he concludes that suicide bombing, whatever, wherever, whenever is absolutely forbidden in Islam and for those that commit such crimes, the logical prospect is eternal banishment. It is important that such debates over interpretation are had within the Muslim community and that powerful voices are heard that can with full knowledge declare can make an extremely articulate attack on those who would attempt to use religious justification to commit atrocities. Islam never approves of any kind of terrorism.640 There is no ambiguity there. And yet there is a need for caution. It is possible that a willingness to clearly define position according to faith whilst absolutely necessary may still be insufficient. Those building new communities in turbulent times also need to better understand the dynamics of nonviolent action in order to preserve their integrity, even in the face of those who seek to either undermine or destroy it. My hope is that participants at this conference might consider this bridge between different but complementary approaches to no-violent progress, one that is worth crossing.
3. Cultures of Peace Under the auspices of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), considerable analytical work has been done on what constitutes a true culture of peace. It is worth reflecting on these elements before moving to the specific question of comparative approaches to non-violence. One of the foremost minds conceptualizing the nature of cultures of peace is former IPRA Director, Professor Paul Smoker, who with his wife Dr Linda Groff, articulated the necessary steps to creating such cultures.641 Smoker and Groff emphasize the micro and macro aspects of creating cultures of peace. They identify a tire approach to the peace concept:
639 640 641
Quoted in Dr Serif Ali Tekalan article A Movement of Volunteers: http://en.fGlen.com/content/view/2139/31/ http://www.cam.net.uk/home/aaa315/peace/islam.htm See http://www.gmu.edu/academic/pcs/smoker.htm , for a comprehensive explanation
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4. Evolution of Tire Peace ConceptEspecially in Western Peace Research: Six Stages The approach of Smoker and Groff towards cultures of peace is unusual, comprehensive and apt since they are explicitly identifying dimensions that Glens identifies as important, namely relationships with others, relationships with nature and relationships with God. Their view is holistic and assumes an inner-outerworld relationship towards peace. They explore different levels of the evolution of the peace concept in the west. These can be summarized as follows: Peace as an absence of War Many people and politicians still take this rather primitive view. Nevertheless, an absence of war has to be a precursor for making progress on the other dimensions of non-violent pace building Peace as Negative Peace (No War) and Positive Peace (No Structural Violence) The Norwegian Peace Researcher, Professor Johan Galtung articulated the notion of structural violence in his paper of 1969642. That is even when there is an absence of overt conflict, the system is still structurally violent if people starve when there is food available, people dont get medical treatment when the society has hospitals to treat them, women and men of equal rank do not enjoy promotion because of gender or ethnic prejudices and so on. Negative Peace is when there is still structural violence: positive peace is the absence of both overt and structural violence. Such notions may have particular bearing within an Islamic context if matters of faith preclude equal opportunities Feminist Peace: Macro and Micro Levels of Peace To quote Smoker and Groff (1994)
642
Galtung, Johan.(1969) "Violence, Peace and Peace Research" in Journal of Peace Research, No. 3.
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During the 1970s and 80s, a fourth perspective was ushered in by feminist peace researchers, who extended both negative peace and positive peace to include violence and structural violence down to the individual level. The new definition of peace then included not only the abolition of macro level organized violence, such as war, but also doing away with micro level unorganized violence, such as rape in war or in the home. In addition, the concept of structural violence was similarly expanded to include personal, micro and macro-level structures that harm or discriminate against particular individuals or groups. This feminist peace model came to include all types of violence, broadly defined, against people, from the individual to the global level, arguing that this is a necessary condition for a peaceful planet. Holistic Gaia-Peace: Peace With the Environment Smoker and gruff compare non-western cultures emphasis on harmony with nature and the western consumer approach that passes certain economic costs on to the environment, endangering the health of future generations and precipitating extinction events for some species. Smoker and Groff conclude: It would be a positive development in the environmental area if we could combine the Eastern value of living in harmony with nature with the Western democratic value of taking responsibility for one's own actions based on an internalized value of the need for all of us to be caretakers of planet earth. Holistic Inner and Outer Peace Smoker and Groff emphasize the importance of this dimension. They argue that both outer peace making (more emphasized in the West) has to be complemented by holistic inner peace (more practiced in the East). Either perspective alone makes it more difficult to achieve the other perspective. For example, if one tries to achieve outer peace in the world only, but does not deal with inner peace, then one's inner conflicts can be projected out onto the world, making it difficult to achieve outer peace--the supposed goal. Likewise, if one tries to achieve inner peace only, but does not pay attention to creating outer peace in the world, then the social injustices and structural violence in the world will make it more difficult for most people experiencing those conditions to be able to find inner peace--the supposed goal. Thus the achievement of either inner or outer peace helps create the conditions necessary for the creation of the other type of peace. This is a crucial part of Glens teaching. Smoker and Groff suggest that multi-cultural visions of peace are required and formally made such an analysis to the UN over a decade ago643. Conferences such as this can begin to bring these different visions together.
643
Smoker, Paul, and Groff, Linda (1995). "Spirituality, Religion, and Peace: Exploring the Foundations for Inner-Outer
Peace in the 21st Century. " Conference Proceedings, Second UNESCO Conference on "Contributions of Religions to a Culture of Peace," Barcelona, (Conference was Dec. 1994)
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5. Sharps Tactics & Politics of Non-violence Vision is one aspect, transformation is another. This authors concern is about how different approaches to Non-Violence can be operationalised at a rate that can make a difference and in a way that is self-reflective, so that new more effective ways of non-violent change can evolve. Gandhis work on civil disobedience has been a magisterial influence on what has so far emerged in the West and probably the key exponent of tactics of non-violent action is the American Gene Sharp. In his first volume on non violent action(Sharpe 1973) questions why there is such an inertia amongst populations who put up with cultures of violence and repression when they could enjoy a vastly different system if only they could collectively engage. It is worth quoting some extracts from Volume 1 Sharps views on why this is the case? 1. Habit: In my opinion habit is the main reason people do not question the actions their "superiors" expect of them. Habitual obedience is embedded in all cultures. After all, isn't that what culture ishabitual behavior? Fear of sanctions: It is the fear of sanctions, rather than the sanctions themselves, that is most effective in enforcing obedience. Moral obligation: This "inner constraining power" is the product of cultural programming and deliberate indoctrination by the state, church and media. Self interest: The potential for financial gain and enhanced prestige can entice people to obey. Psychological identification with the ruler: People may feel an emotional tie with the leader or the system, experiencing its victories and defeats as their own. The most common manifestations of this are patriotism and nationalism. Zones of indifference: People often obey commands without consciously questioning their legitimacy. Absence of self-confidence: Some people prefer to hand control of their lives over to the ruling class. They may feel inadequate to make their own decisions. (Sharpe 1973)
2.
3.
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Some of these lessons are pertinent to the Glen movement as are the lessons Sharpe elaborated on why a non-violent approach has not been recognized in the mainstream as a legitimate means of struggle for justice and a better world. Sharpe concluded that there is in fact an invisible history and there are a number of reasons why such nonviolent philosophies have failed to enter the national psyche: Rarely have nonviolent actionists been romanticized as heroes. Rather, warriors and terrorists and their dramatic acts of heroism are mythologized for future generations. Historians have accepted the dominant culture's view that violence is the only legitimate form of combat. Historians conspire with the ruling class to keep the people ignorant of their own power. Western civilization is "biased toward violence." It requires a "new way of viewing the world." It is a paradigm whose time has not yet come.
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Nonviolence has never been seen as a coherent conceptual system. Consequently, historical examples of nonviolent action are viewed as isolated events rather than as different aspects of the same technique of struggle. Nonviolence is unfairly compared to violence. Nonviolence is often used when violence has no chance of success. When nonviolence fails, the method is condemned. But when violence fails, strategy or tactics are blamednot violence as a method. Nonviolence successes are written off as flukes. Partial successes are seen as total failures.
6. Brian Martin & The Dynamics of Backfire In Volume 3 of Sharps first book, he examines the dynamics of non-violent action as a means of understanding what works and why. Such analyses are crucial if non-violent processes are to become living heuristic realities rather than dry scholastic or monastic theories. Sharp teaches how the power imbalance between groups can be used to the advantage of the weak by a process of political jiu-jitsu and how these tactics can succeed even in the face of quite brutal repression. This was one of the first efforts to understand how non-violence can disperse power through communities, brining increased self esteem and personal development a phenomena also being reported in the emergent Glen communities. Such healing and empowering processes lie in sharp distinction to the use of violence, which creates feelings of callousness and dehumanization which affects victims and victors alike. The Australian researcher Professor Brian Martin, has taken some of these analyses and techniques further in a theory which he calls backfire.(Martin, 2007) Typically, non-violent activists exposing injustices by the authorities against a weaker group, can precipitate righteous indignation or outrage. Martin examines the dynamics of these processes in order to empower those who would use nonviolent action but then face official retribution. He concludes that perpetrators typically use five main methods to inhibit outrage and prevent backfires (Martin, 2007), namely: covering up the event; devaluing the target; reinterpreting what happened; using official channels to give the appearance of justice; and intimidating and bribing the people involved.
He also examines the propaganda and black or grey media operations which typically accompany any official cover up. These have the aim of creating public outrage against the target of the operation, and can be analysed using the same framework. To be effective, a black operation uses deception to foster an interpretation that the victim was actually responsible. The (black) attack is not covered up - it has to be open in order to backfire - but responsibility for it is hidden. Martin provides invaluable information for countering such attacks, including expose responsibility for the event; validate the target of the operation (the falsely alleged perpetrator);
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interpret the operation as unfair and underhanded; avoid or discredit official investigations, at least when they seem likely to dampen public outrage; and resist intimidation and bribery.
Such behaviour has spontaneously evolved by many non-violent groups wishing to sustain behaviour consistent with their beliefs. In fact I would argue that the behaviour of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi is a case in point. Nursi used his spiritual insights to follow similar tactics albeit at a substantial personal cost to his health. (Markham and Ozdemir, 2005) Such response and counter responses can become quite complex. According to Martin and Gray) , In a conflict between a powerful and a weak side - for example between a group of police and a single suspect, or between a government and a small group of opponents - the powerful side holds many advantages. If the weak side mounts an attack, this can provide the pretext for the powerful group to use its superior resources. The exception is when the powerful side is exposed in a gross abuse, for example when police seriously assault a suspect or troops gun down protesters and this abuse is exposed to a wide audience, leading to a change in public opinion. These are instances of backfire, such as the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police and the shooting of peaceful protesters in Dili, East Timor, by Indonesian troops, both in 1991. They are white backfires, because the perpetrators made no attempt to attribute their own actions to their opponents. Given this dynamic, it is not surprising that powerful groups sometimes use black operations to give themselves the benefit of public outrage. They want their own actions to be seen as an outrage-generating attack by their opponents, as when police use agents provocateurs to encourage protesters to be violent. These sorts of black operations involve promoting actions that will backfire on their opponents, in what can be called black backfires. (Martin & Gray, 2007) Despite the fact that Fethullah Glen has adopted an inspirational spiritual rather than a politically instrumental approach toward implementing non-violent pathways to peace, many of these negative techniques have been used against both him and his followers.644 So much so that Glen now lives in exile in the United States. In the sections which follow, the question is put, to what extent do the nonviolent philosophies of Glen match with more Western Implementation and instrumentalist strategies outlined above and can useful bridges be built between these two worlds?
7. Glens Non-Violent Spiritual Paths & Practices Attempting any reasoned comparison of Glens non-violent philosophy with those of more western practitioners is fraught with difficulties, not least because of the way that Glens life and work has been molded by the very specific cultural roots of Anatolian Islam and the specific writings of Said Nursi, though it would be a mistake to think that Glens approach is merely a next generation of Nursis approaches. A more accurate description of the relationship would be that of mentor. And yet
644
That is not to say that Glens followers have not taken an instrumental approach in structuring and expanding the
process of formal teaching. The point here is that the focus of that work has been spiritual rather than political change.
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there are, some interesting overlaps. Nursi used the tactic of silent withdrawal and non-co-operation in many of his struggles towards resolving conflict without bloodshed. In many ways the maltreatment and imprisonment of Nursi is a classic case of backfire since his repeated representation of the evidence to different tribunals and his unjust punishment actually served as a recruitment engine for his movement and brought about the exact opposite outcome of that desired by the authorities. The Glen movement, from an outsiders perspective, can be considered to have an explicit ambition of eroding structural violence for example through providing education and shelter to youngsters. But any Western non-violence theorist, taking a purist approach, could find certain elements within the organization that from a superficial perspective might not square with classic non-hierarchic theories of peaceful cultures. Such criticisms could be seen as nonsense by the Glen community. From a Western point of view, the centralization of power via any hierarchy might be seen as evidence of an unequal distribution of power. Then again, most large faith groups operate on some form of hierarchy the Quakers being some kind of exception but even then there is an elders structure, which is interpreted as simply experienced sets of hands to mentor the process of listening. The buyuk abiler could be considered by some in the Glen movement to fulfil a similar role. The important strength of the Glen movement is its transparency and those who manufacture conspiracy theories around the Glen movement might be less than forthcoming in being as transparent about their own motives and connections. Many of these confusions will be influenced by cultural differences especially in regard to the traditional role of women in Turkish society and the central and unquestionable bedrock of the Quran which cannot be questioned in any way, without attracting counter criticism. Western peace movements adopting non-violent strategies regard them all as a work in progress and not very much is so sacrosanct that it is beyond review. There are also difficulties in wedding all the prescriptions of the Sharia to a philosophy of complete non-violence. This is a contradiction which is not unique to Islam Christian and Judaic views on punishment: turn the other cheek versus an eye for an eye, are cases in point. Even the great Emperor Asoka, whose lifes work became the promulgation of Buddhist scripture, refused to revoke the death penalty for reason of public order, despite this view being an outright contradiction of the teachings. (Seneviratana, A., 1994). In many senses, Glen is following the holistic, spiritual and cultural approaches to peace identified by Smoker and Groff above. It is now a global faith based movement with schools in more than one hundred countries including Kazakhstan, Kenya, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil and Bosnia. We are informed that today there are more than 300 private high schools and seven universities affiliated with the Glen community, with over 150 schools in Turkey alone.645 It is a sign of the health of the Glen movement that today, that number is undoubtedly far greater. Why should this matter? Well Glens teaching instrumentalizes the teaching of the Quran towards performing daily acts of service based peaceful social change. Such an approach in a time of terror can make a difference through interfaith dialogue. To my mind, Glens Abant platform for dialogue is akin to the Pugwash movement when it first began its work to prevent nuclear war in the fifties.
645
Quoted from Gulay, 2007.
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Pugwash allowed a backchannel for diplomats and scientists to keep talking even during the difficult days of the cold war and led to the processes which not only ended the Vietnam War but the Cold war too. One of the reviewers of this paper said the analogy was pregnant with possibilities. Such inter-faith dialogue is more important now than ever. The Western stereotypes of Islam need to be constructively challenged by Muslims as well as pundits in the West. Glens active compassion for peaceful change based on a precise reading of the Quran, can act as a powerful palliative to those who would smear Islam with the label of terrorism. Such work can only be achieved through making a critical mass of thinkers and doers who will engage in peace in the wider world and that characterises the Fethullah Glen movement today.
8. Conclusions And yet it is wise to be cautious given the turbulent political changes occurring both within Turkey and on its borders with Kurdistan; Iran; Bulgaria; Georgia; Greece; Armenia; Azerbaijan; Iraq and Syria. It could be argued that the Glen approach to peaceful change from a truly enlightened Islamic perspective is necessary but not yet truly sufficient. It continues to be a work in progress The very success of the Glen movement could be misinterpreted by those with alternative agendas and alliances in the Middle East, during this time of rapid change and potential instability. In some senses this very conference is an act of wisdom by the Glen community in taking the initiative to broaden the worldwide base of associates who are sympathetic to the credos of the movement and wish its work well. The challenge to us all is to find ways of future collaboration that do not undermine our strengths and differences but complement the project and processes with which we are broadly in tune with. Some authors welcoming such kinetic Islam see the process of change wedding Islamic activism into a process of regulated improvisation.646 The wisdom of this according to commentators like Hendrick, is that it enables Islam to be wedded without contradiction to processes of modernity that do not contradict any secular governmental line within Turkey. This process of regulated improvisation can be further developed to anticipate and survive any future political turbulence but it will need deep meditation and creativity, especially if the US Pentagon military globalisation is implemented with the utter lack of cultural sensitivities that we have witnessed from this administration to-date. Just as in previous times, wise authorities made provision for famine and flood when there were no signs that these were inevitable so in this time, it is wise to think through future peaceful responses to challenges which may or may not come. For example, the extent to which the Glen movement can once again respond to state repression using non-violent means may become the test of the integrity of the movement. Many techniques evolved by non-violent activists elsewhere in the world could then come to be of use and significance to the Glen movement. This is especially important given the emphasis on self-awareness and wisdom in perusing a pacifist approach without compromising beliefs
646
Hendrick J.D, The Regulated potential of Kinetic Islam:Antitheses in Global Islamic Activism. In Hunt & Aslandogan
2007
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The Glen community is a proselytizing movement in the positive sense in that it is not keeping its beliefs hidden but is actively engaged in widening the base of its activities and is actively engaged in communications with more secular communities of which this conference is just one small but important part. Inevitably, any new and expanding faith-based movement will draw attention. I am sure that the proceedings of these conferences will be widely reported and misreported in Turkey and beyond. The conference organisers should expect critical flak if they have done their jobs well as I am sure they have. This is especially so when that movement has the potential to influence other Muslims overseas, as well as change the wider perception of what it is to implement the teachings of the Quran. In future times such a role may require new notions of non-violence and civil disobedience within its heart. So far, the movement has steered an intentional course away from confrontation with the authorities. But this very success may bring about future confrontation as the popularity, educational, business activities and economic independence of the movement grows. Fortunately, at its core is a leadership who values ethics and wisdom and truthfulness above all. I feel sure that the many teachers, thinkers and proponents encompassed by this movement will already be meditating on how they should behave to ensure future progress towards new cultures of peace on Earth. A central purpose of this conference is dialogue and a useful outcome of our exchanges is to share all the organized knowledge that comes from all our communities to truly bring about peaceful change, despite the current difficulties. We have compatible but different learning visions and resources to share.
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PROMOTING HUMAN RIGHTS VALUES IN THE MUSLIM WORLD: TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE CIVILIZATION IN GLENS THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 647
OZCAN KELES 648
Abstract The premise of this paper is that human rights values are a persistent theme of Fethullah Glens thought and tajdid and expressed by the Glen movement through example. That tajdid is collectively constructed and communicated by allowing for adaptation and indigenisation in flexible response to different socio-cultural contexts. What is more, Glens views on democracy, pluralism, human rights and freedom of belief directly promote human rights values and norms. The paper argues that the Muslim world is very important to Glens overall aspiration for an inclusive civilisation and thus the movement is now active in most parts of that world. In time, as in Turkey, Glens ideas will enable and empower the periphery in Muslim societies to influence the centre ground and open the way for wider enjoyment of freedom and human rights. The paper is in three sections. The first looks at the underlying dynamics of Glens influence and the nature of his tajdid, to assess whether his influence is transferable elsewhere. The second appraises the content of Glens tajdid vis--vis human rights values and freedom of belief, illustrating Glens incremental ijtihad on temporal punishment for apostasy in Islamic law. The third part traces the movements activities in the Muslim world, arguing that the movement has now entered a phase of adolescence, and asks whether Glens tajdid and discourse, through the practice of the movement, can indeed promote human rights values in this world.
1. Introduction The premise of this paper is that human rights values are a persistent theme of Fethullah Glens thought and tajdid and expressed by the Glen movement through example. That tajdid is collectively constructed and communicated by allowing for adaptation and indigenisation in flexible response to different socio-cultural contexts. What is more, Glens views on democracy, pluralism, human rights and freedom of belief directly promote human rights values and norms. The paper argues that the Muslim world is very important to Glens overall aspiration for an inclusive civilisation and thus the movement is now active in most parts of that world. In time, as in Turkey, Glens ideas will enable and empower the civil periphery in Muslim societies to influence the centre ground and open the way for wider enjoyment of freedom and human rights.
647
This is a revised and shortened version of a paper presented at the Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Ozcan Keles (member of the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn; Bar Course from Inns of Court School of Law, 2005;
Glen Movement conference in October 2007, London.

648
LLM in Human Rights Law from SOAS, University of London, 2002; LLB, 2000): a barrister, studying for PhD on Muslim minorities in Europe Human Rights in the Muslim world: Promoting Freedom of Belief and Harmonisation in International Human Rights Law at the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, where he holds the Scholarship Award of 2006. Research interests include: international human rights law, the European Court of Human Rights, freedom of belief, and the Glen movement.
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I must stress at the beginning that although there is a growing body of literature and research surrounding Glen and the movement, there is extremely little, if any, so far concerning his influence in the Muslim world. This is largely due to the fact that the movement has been less visible or active in the Muslim world than elsewhere. More empirical research is required in this field. The challenge this presents therefore is to first contextualise Glen in the Muslim world, before moving on to look at what influence, if any, he has in promoting human right values in this region. Thus, the paper is in three sections. The first looks at the underlying dynamics of Glens influence and the nature of his tajdid. The purpose behind this is simple; in order to predict whether Glen has any meaningful scope of influence in the Muslim world it is imperative to first understand what makes Glen influential in the first place, how influential he is in Turkey and whether that influence is transferable elsewhere. The second appraises the content of Glens tajdid vis--vis human rights and freedom of belief, illustrating Glens incremental ijtihad on temporal punishment for apostasy in Islamic law. The third traces the movements activities in the Muslim world, arguing that the movement has now entered a phase of adolescence, and asks whether Glens tajdid and discourse, through the practice of the movement, can indeed promote human rights values in this world. In assessing Glens potential influence in the Muslim world, I will refer to Serif Mardins Centre/Periphery model. I suggest that the current power struggle in Turkey, as manifested by the tip of the iceberg political battle recently unfolding between the newly emerging, previously rural, democratic yet conservative public as represented by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party and the militant-secular status quo margins as represented by the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), is in fact a struggle between the periphery and centre, respectively. In this paper, I argue that just as Glens discourse and the Glen movement were instrumental in empowering the periphery in Turkey649, their presence will have a similar effect in the Muslim world. Finally, any theological discussion in this paper is tangential to the main premise and argument. What is significant for the purposes of this paper is that Glen is perceived and considered to be working within the traditional framework of Islamic jurisprudence and theology not that he actually is. The argument that he is, helps explain the perception and influence he enjoys in Turkey and increasingly abroad. Whether that is actually the case, is the subject of another study.
2. Glens Influence and Tajdid Glen is many things at once and it is this combination of characteristics, abilities and qualifications, some of which have hitherto seemed mutually exclusive, that marks him out from the rest and has provided him with a transformative edge. Glen is an Islamic scholar, peace activist, intellectual, civilfaith-based movement leader, social reformist, mentor, poet and writer. He has motivated and inspired a whole generation in Turkey and abroad numbering millions (not used lightly) into a multiethnic (and even multi-religious) movement, which he calls a Community of Volunteers. While there is a lot interesting about the Glen persona and psyche, for the purposes of this paper, I will look at the dynamics that enables him to enjoy an immense influence in Turkey.
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Ozdalga 2005: 441
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2.1. The Glen Trio-Formula: Devout-Intellectual-Alim I suggest that it is the combination of three particular characteristics that have enabled Glen to become immensely popular and influential in Turkey, namely being a Sufi-orientated spirituallydevout Muslim, an intellectual in contemporary reading and thought and an acclaimed Islamic scholar or alim. Ali Bulac, a well-known independent Muslim scholar and columnist, was the first to emphasise Glens intellectual-alim credentials and its importance, stating that Glen is the most recent reviver of the Ulema tradition. Alim (singular for Ulema) is an Arabic title provided only to the most knowledgeable Islamic scholars who have an impeccable command of the traditional Islamic sources, sciences and methodologies. However, Bulac argues that being merely an alim renders one insufficient, a mere conveyor. To be effective and relevant one has to be a janahayn (the dual wing), in other words an intellectual versed in western sciences and thought as well. Concerning Glen, in this respect, Bulac states: Of the very few contenders, Glen is perhaps the foremost representative of janahayn. His outlook has several key features: a profound understanding of Islamic sciences; a deep knowledge of biography (ilm al-rijal) in Hadith narration; and a thorough understanding of Islamic methodology (usul) His book, Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism is an extremely important work in terms of thought and Sufi tradition. Glens most important characteristic is that he analyzes contemporary issues and brings forth solutions using the traditional methodology of Islamic jurisprudence and Hadith.650 Glens appreciation of Western philosophies, history, literature and science is evident from the references he draws from these disciplines and interpretations he makes of contemporary issues. In an interview with Eyup Can, Glen lists Kant, Descartes, Sir James Jean, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Puskin as some of Western intellectuals whose works he has read651. We know from his memoirs that he studied Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, Emile, Schiller and the works of such existentialist philosophers such as Camus, Sartre and Marcuse during his military service in 1961652. In his 14 cassette sermon series delivered in 1978 over several months to a mosque-congregation regarding the existence of God (Tawheed), Glen speaks in some detail about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the big bang, astrophysics, astronomy, probability, atomic physics and biology in substantiating his arguments. Many other sermon-series, structured and methodological in themselves, include this variety of discipline and content. There are legendary stories told among Glens followers of how unaccustomed listeners used to sleeping during sermons, or left-wing intellectuals nudgingly persuaded to attend, wake up bemused and disoriented during the sermon to Glen speaking about protons, electrons and neutrons. It is Glens ability to draw his references from both Islamic and Western philosophies and interpret one within the other that marks him out as a janahayn. This dual-wing, allows him to achieve two650 651 652
Bulac 2006: 101 Can 1996: Ref Erdogan 1997: Ref
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things, one draw sympathy and a gathering from those who draw their references from positive sciences and sympathise with the Western Enlightenment thought and two, demonstrate to the Western-liberal and conservative-religious that there is no inherent contradiction between Islam, science and the necessities of modern age. However, this duo characteristic is insufficient to explain Glens influence. There is another wing missing in Bulacs description and that is Glens Sufi orientated spiritual devotion and fervour often manifested through intense emotion and dedication and poetic prose in his speech. Glen is perceived by the public as a deeply religious individual who has remained celibate from devotion to God and cause and leads a deeply ascetic lifestyle, sleeping and eating very little and spending most of his time, especially now, in solitary worship and study with his personal students. His unusual religious fervour and zeal is clearly evident in his excitement when delivering sermons in which he often ends up crying, in return causing the congregation to follow suit. Among the wider Turkish public, Glen is known as the crying Hodja. Referring to Glens religious upbringing, Lester Kurtz notes: [Glen] memorized the Quran at a young age and testifies that he began praying when I was 4 years old, and has never missed a prayer since. He dedicated himself early on to a simple lifestyle devoted to prayer, meditation, religious writing and teaching. Eschewing family life, he chose an ascetics path, devoting his life to prayer and religious pursuits and owning virtually no possessions.653 Or at least that is how Glen is perceived and perception is extremely important. In fact, without this reputation, Glens intellectual-alim credentials would win him little influence. Simply put, the common Muslim has become weary of so-called Islamic scholars in recent years, especially those who have an appreciation of Western sciences. Trust is only inspired if scholarly credentials are supplemented with devotion and practice and even then the question of orientation remains, i.e. Sufi, Selefi, Shiate or secular. Thus, an accurate understanding of who Glen is is more important than what he says. The influential Rand think-tank in the United States for example, wrongly identifies Glen as a modernist and states that although modernists are the most suited allies of the West in terms of their discourse and beliefs, they lack the authenticity of the traditionalists and the service-outlets through which to influence the public654. The overall observation concerning modernists are correct, categorising Glen as one is not. The consequence of this is misjudging Glens influence. Had Glen been a modernist as such, he would never have enjoyed the kind of influence he does in Turkey, let alone have any meaningful chance of doing so in the Muslim world. Hence the significance of getting this right. The question of course is whether Glen will be able to transfer his influence to the wider Muslim world. The Muslim world is a vast geography made up of over 50 different countries. A crude reply, leaving aside a detailed study of each countries idiosyncratic nature and its relevance vis--vis the Glen movement, is yes, since the underlying cultural dynamics and characteristics are similar. If anything, religion is as important in most of the Muslim world as it is in Turkey. Glens devotion to faith and cause and fifty year proven track record will exchange as good currency in this part of the
653 654
Kurtz, 2005 p375 Benard 2003: 38-40
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world. However, the main determining factor of Glens influence in the Muslim world will be the presence and effectives of the Glen movement in this region.
2.2. Glen movement: Collective Tajdid Glens spiritually-devout, intellectual-alim credentials comprises the first field of influence he enjoys among the Turkish Muslims. These characteristics have helped him form a second field of influence, the Glen movement. Where Glens personal reputation fails to reach, this wider movement goes. So one can imagine two concentric circles one within the other. Glen influences the movement, the movement influences wider society. Since Glen not only combines but preaches the unification of spiritual devotion with scientific appreciation and religious knowledge, his followers also manifest this trio-quality. An active volunteer of the movement will be a practising Muslim or believer of some tradition, of moral character who seeks to abstain from worldly indulgences, usually at least of graduate level degree, well read in Islamic theology and fairly informed of other religions, thereby becoming a miniature-Glen.655 Thus, the effective formula of influence replicated throughout the movement to varying degrees. This characteristic empowers the Glen-follower with self-confidence and is highly effective in influencing those who find themselves on one or the other side of the religious-secular spectrum. So although Glen is influential on an individual basis for the reasons given above, it is the faith based movement he now inspires which allows him to put his views into practice, and which marks him out as a candidate who can effectuate real change at the ground level. Without a mass following and wide influence among the grass roots of society, Glen would have remained a scholar of great depth but no means of implementation. An elitist, an academic, a thinker who is waiting for the right masses to develop to be heard. With Glen, the masses are ready, waiting for him to speak. It is for this reason that Yilmaz argues that Glen is engaged in tajdid by conduct656. Tajdid means to renew, revive and restore religion. It is an authentic Islamic mechanism prophesised by the Prophet himself.657 Tajdid can only be undertaken by a mujaddid. A mujaddid in his effort to renew (tajdid) religion will use a tool called ijtihad (reasoning) and in doing so also become a mujtahid. Ijtihad is a re-reading and re-evaluation of religious text and sources to deduce and derive a re-understanding of its teachings for contemporary times while keeping within its overall framework and spirit. It too is an authentic mechanism and in accordance with Islamic orthodoxy. Ijtihad has its limits, rules and conditions and should not be confused with reform which has neither. All mujaddids are also mujtahids but not all mujtehids are mujaddids. In relation to ijtihad, I coin Glens efforts in this vein as incremental (tedriji)658 ijtihad, since (i) he develops and communicates his ijtihad incrementally over many years and different mediums,
655 656 657 658
Active volunteers should not be confused with supporters and donors, who make up the backbone of the movement. Yilmaz, 2003 Hadith (Ref) In Islamic terminology, incrementalism usually refers to the revelation of the Quran over 23 years by the instigation of
certain events (sebebul nuzul). The prohibition of alcohol in the Quran in four steps is often given as an example of incrementalism in Islam.
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respectively, and (ii) he does not claim that he is engaged in ijtihad at all, thus further delaying the recognition that he is. The relevance for this paper is that Glen is currently engaged in incremental ijtihad regarding the death penalty for apostasy in Islamic law as explored below. In relation to Glens tajdid, Yilmaz states that: Glen has reinterpreted Islamic understanding in tune with contemporary times and has developed and put into practice a new Muslim discourse... on religion, pluralism, jurisprudence, secularism, democracy, politics and international relations.659 Yilmaz argues that Glen is undertaking this tajdid through conduct, because his ideas are put into immediate effect through the movement and affects the surrounding wider society in la longe dure.660 I suggest that Glens tajdid is collectively constructed by the movements conduct and Glens views. If Glens tajdid is based on conduct, then the movement plays a significant role in the construction of that tajdid. What is more, Glen encourages the contribution of the active player here, namely the movement. Thus, Glen is aware that his general views and teachings will be locally received, interpreted and adapted in the process of application. I suggest that the movements contribution to Glens tajdid is in the form of (i) its interpretation of Glens views on receipt, (ii) its reformulation of those views to meet local realities such as funding and capability on application, (iii) its adaptation of those general views to meet local culture and customs (indigenisation) (iv) new realities formed by local conduct and activities of the movement pose new questions and challenges which Glen responds to, and (v) the movement innovates new forms of conduct itself which are put to Glen, to which he replies and the above process renews itself. Thus, there is continuous and interactive dialogue between the movement and Glen, the net outcome of which is a collective tajdid. Some may claim that the same process of interpretation and adaptation is present in other (or all) forms of tajdid as well. While that may be true to some degree, since the movement is active in over a hundred countries, the spectrum across which Glens views are received, adapted and localised is ever more great. What is more, the fact that the movements volunteers are well educated, well read and very mobile means they are more critical, analytic and innovative in their dialogue with Glen. Also, Glen promotes collectivism within the movement through his emphasis on joint decision making and consultation (sura). As such, every venture and project of the movement has its own committee responsible for making its own decisions. Locally and collectively made decisions explain the movements success in vastly different socio-cultural and economic markets across the world. Thus, Glen acts more like a chairperson in the construction of this tajdid. He sets the guidelines, objectives and principles. But then how those principles and objectives are put into action depend more on the movement than on Glen. Simply put the movements dialogue efforts tell us much more about Glens tajdid on Islam and society than any of his essays or interviews on the topic. The clarification of how Glens tajdid is constructed and communicated is important since it demonstrates that this tajdid is indigenised by the local people influenced by it. This does not mean
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Yilmaz 2003: 209 Yilmaz 2003: 220
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Glens original thought is watered down; clearly it is not. But Glens global discourse and teachings are localised to best serve local conditions. The difference of the movements educational projects in Turkmenistan with, lets say, the United State or Germany helps illustrate this point. The significance of this regarding the Muslim world (and elsewhere for that matter) is that Glens views and discourse demonstrates that it is adaptable, flexible, durable and practical. These are essential qualities if Glens ideas and tajdid are to influence the Muslim world. Otherwise, without provision for indigenisation, the strong Arab culture would easily reject and react to this new discourse. This is something that will be explored further below.
2.3. Glen Movements Influence in Turkey The Glen movement is one of the most influential revivalist movements in modern Turkey.661 On Glens influence over his own the movement, Yavuz notes A decade ago, this religious community was not even willing to allow their daughters to go to secondary or high schools. They preferred to send female students to the Quranic courses or strictly female Imam Hatip schools. For years, Glen publicly and privately encouraged the community to educate all their children regardless of gender. Today, there are many all-female schools and many of their graduates go onto universities.662 Bacik states that the relationship between the Muslim self and Islamic groups has undergone significant change due to, inter alia, the Muslim selfs understanding of some important concepts such as Europe and democracy and that members of the Islamic community are coming from better educated backgrounds663. I argue, that Glens contribution to this change is significant as stated by Kosebabalan Glens pro-Western attitude has played a key role in the domestication and softening of other Islamic groups anti-Europe and anti-U.S. positions. Although many Islamists eventually came closer to embracing this idea, a majority of them initially criticized Glen for his pro-Europe views. He was one of the first Islamic leaders to embrace the idea of EU membership and at a time when Islamists in general regarded it as a threat to Turkish security and Islamic culture.664 On Glen and the movements influence in Turkey, Kosebabalan notes Fethullah Glen and the movement he established and leads comprise two of he most important actors in Turkish social and political life. His ideas, despite a number of complications and contradictions in them, directly influence Turkish foreign policy and certainly would bring some vivacity to that policy if put to practical application.665
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Ozgalga 2005: 430 Yavuz 1999: 125 Bacik 2003: 31 Kosebabalan 2003: 176 Kosebabalan 2003: 170
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Kosebabalan notes how some credit Glens intellectual contributions that led to the EU-OIC summit in Istanbul in 2002666. Supporting Kosebabalan, Yavuz states that Glen is the engine behind the construction of a new Islam in Turkey.667 On Glens influence of thought, Yilmaz states Preliminary observations indicate that Glen not only is renewing Muslim discourses and practices, but also transforming the public sphere, without claiming or boasting that he is doing so. In this regard, the movement is evolving into a school of thought based on Glens discourse and with the potential to influence the whole Muslim world. This transformation process is definitely a tajdid in the Turkish public sphere.668 On Glens transformative discourse and evolving a new school of thought, Yavuz states In the clashing visions of globalizations, Fethullah Glen is a force in the development of the Islamic discourse of globalized multicultural pluralism. As the impact of the educational activities of those influenced by him attests, his vision bridges modern and postmodern, global and local, and has a significant influence in the contemporary debates that shape the visions of the future of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.669 We have already studied the dynamics of this influence, whether it be the Glen persona or the movement. Through this influence, Glen has helped strengthen the periphery in Turkey. The Glen movements education, media and business initiatives have empowered and enabled the workingclass silent-majority in Turkey who where hitherto unable to contest for the centre ground. What is more, through this new school of thought, Glen has helped remove the theological and cultural dogmas, which until recently, prevented the periphery from positively engaging in society and therefore from moving into the centre ground currently occupied by the militant secular margins. The AK Party phenomena, which has its roots in the pro-Islamic National Outlook movement, owes its evolutionary success in becoming a modern, inclusive and democratic Party, largely to Glens transformative discourse. In 1994, when Recep Tayip Erdogan was characterising democracy as a means to an end, Glen stood up at the Journalists and Writers Foundation and said there is no return from democracy; its not perfect, but is the best system we have. Again, in the polarised Turkey of the 1990s Glen was the first to speak of dialogue, tolerance, acceptance of each other and peaceful coexistence. It was the Glen movements conferences, interfaith fast-breaking dinners, peace awards and so forth that brought together people of opposing ends of the political spectrum. Many expressed pleasant-surprise, even shock, at how they could share the table with once considered arch-enemies. However, at the time, many criticised Glen on this, including some members of the current AK Party government and the Religious Affairs Directorate. It is interesting to note that the Religious Affairs Directorate now hosts several interfaith dialogue events itself and that the current government has adopted Glens approach of reconciliation.670
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Kosebabalan 2003: 181 Yavuz 1999: 121 Yilmaz 2003: 237 Voll 2003: 247 Yilmaz 2005: 399-405
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Glen helped ease the ideological rift in Turkey and the resultant community tension. When the Alevis where offended by the Sunnis he made a televised announcement as a Sunni imam, saying, if loving reverend Ali makes one an Alevi, then I am an Alevi for I love him dearly. Regarding the communists of the 1970s and 80s he is known to have said, they love this country as much as you do. You cannot question their patriotism. Even on secularism, Glens announcements that he looks favourably on a Anglo-Saxon-style open secularism (against a French-style militant laicism) has helped ease tensions on this fault line as well. The Abant meetings which brought together academics, writers, journalists and politicians (including leading members of the current government) to discuss deeply dividing political issues in Turkey and arrive at a consensus reflected in the Abant declarations are efforts in this vein.671 Glens views on democracy, secularism, pluralism, human rights and modernity have helped empower Muslims in Turkey, who until recently fought to withstand the lure of these values despite their better judgment out of fear that giving in would run contrary to their faith. Muslims in Turkey were now able to socially, politically and more importantly, sincerely and constructively, participate in Turkeys public life and contemporary debates. The fact that the AK Party government has done more during its first term than any other in the past 40 years to achieve Turkeys accession to the EU, is proof of this point.
671
In 1998 the Abant platform discussed the relationship between Islam and secularism, in 1999 democracy and human
rights, in 2000 pluralism and reconciliation. The 1998 Abant Declaration states that revelation and reason do not conflict; democracy and secularism does not conflict with Islam; the state should remain neutral towards every kind of ideology, belief and philosophical view; the state should ensure basic human rights and freedom of belief, conscience and religion and should not seek to exclude nor deprive any person of the right to public participation. (Ref) The 2001 Abant Declaration reads: Civil and political freedoms, headed by the freedoms of belief, thought and expression, education, and organization, are the prerequisites of pluralism (Journalists and Writers Foundation 2001: 316).
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3. Human Rights Values in Glens Thought Having studied the nature of Glens influence and tajdid, the next question is what that means so far as as human rights values. The following therefore is an appraisal of human rights values in Glens discourse and tajdid.
3.1. Human Rights Glen looks at human rights from three perspectives: (i) the inherent value of freedom vis--vis freedom of choice and willpower, (ii) the contingent value of freedom vis--vis personal and social development and (iii) metaphysical human rights (kul hakki in Turkish). Glen views humans as the centre of the universe. For him, humans are the purpose of creation. Following the Islamic tasawuf (roughly translated as meaning and spirit of Islam) concept of all beauty and fairness require to see and be seen, Glen states that God is All-Beautiful and All-Fair and that He wanted to see His beauty and wanted His beauty to be seen. It is for this reason that God created humans. Humans have intellectual, emotional and bodily faculties to observe, enquire, understand, admire, praise and love God. Thus, humans were created as intelligent and conscious beings that can travel from the created to the Creator, marvel at the beauty and majesty of Gods art and arrive at some estimation and understanding of His attributes, names and qualities. Like Nursi, Glen argues that all creation manifests Gods infinite names and attributes and that humans are intelligent mirrors who can turn and look at what creation is manifesting and appreciate their Creator. However, there is an important magical switch in humans which turns all of this on672 and differentiates it from angels, who also marvel, worship and love God, and that is the element of choice. This choice is what makes humans human. The fact that man chooses to recognise and worship God changes everything. Glen explains that with this choice, humans can surpass angels in piety or fall lower than demons in barbarity. God wants humans to choose Him. Thus, choice was bestowed on humans as a gift and, simultaneously, test from God. Once the matter is approached from this perspective, preserving the freedom of choice bestowed upon humans by God becomes an intrinsic, inherent and inalienable right of ones very humanness. Being free and enjoying freedom are a significant depth of human willpower and a mysterious door through which man may set forth into the secrets of the self. One unable to set forth into that depth and unable to pass through that door can hardly be called human.673 Summarily put, the universe was created for humans; a human is defined by its ability to choose. Choice is protected by freedom. Freedoms therefore allow humans to fulfil their purpose of creation. Hence, for Glen, human rights which protect freedom of choice have an inherent value and must be promoted at all cost to preserve the balance of creation and purpose of existence.
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Glen 2005: 15 Ref
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While this is not a new outlook, and many Islamic scholars have shared this view, the fact that Glen is willing to make the logical connection between this religious definition of choice and faith-neutral doctrine of human right norms and practices is quite significant. By visiting the State and many other European countries, I realized the virtues and the role of religion in these societies. Islam flourished in Europe and America much better than in many Muslim countries. This means freedom and the rule of law are necessary for personal Islam.674 Glens second consideration of freedom is as a contingent value in relation to personal and social development675. Glen states that a human must strive to become an insan-i kamil that is perfect person. This perfection is one of belief, thought and practice. However, it does not solely relate to religious matters in the conventional sense but includes perfection and piety (taqwa) in worldly matters as well.676 Freedom, in this context, therefore is a prerequisite to allow for personal and social perfection and development. Without freedom, the room and dynamic force for perfection and development is non existent. The most pertinent form of freedom in this respect, is freedom of thought and expression: True freedom is the freedom of the human mind from all shackles that hinder it from making material and spiritual progress, as long as we do not fall into indifference and heedlessness.677 Glen considers free-thinking as a significant personal attribute of the inheritors of the earth or Golden Generation as he refers to elsewhere. These are the new generation of Muslims who have a balanced disposition, appreciation and awareness of this world and the next; who combine reason with revelation; who have love towards humankind and burn with the sensation of altruistic cause and action. For Glen, this generation will contribute towards stability and eventual peace between not only people and nations but also between faith and science, matter and metaphysics. [W]e have to be more free-thinking and free-willed. We need those vast hearts who can embrace impartial free-thinking, who are open to knowledge, sciences and scientific research, and who can perceive the accord between the Quran and Sunnatullah [Gods pattern of creation] in the vast spectrum from the universe to life.678 Free-thinking and freedom of thought is therefore an imperative climatic condition for personal development. Without this freedom, development will stagnate on all fronts. Although Glen is against the categorisation of this world and afterlife, since he see the two as inextricably linked, it
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Ref Carroll 2007: 28-9 Glen argues that God determined the laws of religion and the laws of nature and causality. Thus, a believer must follow
both. Failing to follow the laws of nature and causality means failing to obey Gods laws in achieving a desired result. Hence, Glen re-defines taqwa (piety) as including, living in accordance with Gods sunnutullah (Gods way, laws of nature). As such, Glen states that the West is more Muslim than Muslims in that they have achieved superiority by following Gods laws of causality while the religious-Muslims have not.
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Glen 2006: 65 Ref
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is clear that according to him, without this freedom, development regresses both in the worldly and in the spiritual and religious sense. For Glen, to achieve social development, you must begin from the individual. A group of individuals who have attained a certain awareness and concern for others can then come together to engage in further altruistic works. This way, a virtuous cycle that feeds itself will be born and help strengthen civil society and social infrastructure. Thus, for Glen, freedom of thought has a direct link with developing society as a whole through developing the individual. That is what Glen is trying to achieve through education: if you wish to keep masses under control, simply starve them in the area of knowledge. They can escape such tyranny only through education. The road to social justice is paved with adequate, universal education, for only this will give people sufficient understanding and tolerance to respect the right of others.679 In this respect, the hundreds of Glen-schools that provide a broad and balanced curriculum and instil values of tolerance and respect for differences are significant in putting Glens views into practice on free-thinking to the wider public. The very notion that education is worthy in itself, regardless of its topic, whether mathematics, geometry or English, is a huge step forward in removing the cultural shackles on freedom of thought in cultural Muslim thinking which in the past only valued Quranic or religious teaching. Secondly, education empowers people to think, reason, listen, research, extrapolate, relate, argue and learn which is immensely important in enabling individuals to become independent free-thinkers. Once the mindset of constantly challenging the modes and mediums of the present is fully internalised, then perhaps the movement will have achieved what Glen refers to as freeing oneself from the shackles of thought: [A]s we draw toward renewal, it is imperative that we should review the historical dynamics of the last thousand years and question the changes and transformations of the last one hundred and fifty years of our past. It is imperative because judgments and decisions are nowadays made according to certain unquestioned taboos.680 Finally, metaphysical human rights. For Glen, human rights include not only the enforceable rights included in law, but also those rights that we hold regardless of enforceability in this world. In that sense, a right is a right and is no less real simply because it cannot be enforced. For Glen, there is no categorical distinction between the right not to be tortured with the right not to be backbitten (giybah). From a religious point of view, all transgressed rights will be accounted for on the day of judgement. This is quite significant in Islam, since Muslims are taught that God does not permit Himself to forgive the transgression of another, unless the transgressed forgives first. Thus, Glen lists su-i zan (negative thought about another), giybah, slander681 tax evasion and, even, non payment
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Ref Glen 2005: 39 Glen 1995: 277
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of utility bills682, the charge of which will be picked up by others, as transgressions of human rights. For Glen, they are all one and the same, namely basic human rights. Hence, Glen extends the scope and depth of human rights to include the unenforceable as well. In doing so, however, he also extends the scope of the unenforceable to include tax evasion and illegal use of electricity and water. What is more, I argue that while Glen directly promotes human rights values in the form shown above, his overall tajdid and the movements activities also promote such values by default since Glens discouse is (i) person based and therefore contain an ever present underlying streak of humanistic values, and (ii) help eradicate the cultural and religiously-couched objections towards human rights values. This means that, given its normal course, human right values will spread with the movements influence as a matter of default. Glens well known views on Anatolian Muslimness, political Islam, democracy and secularism help illustrate the point further, as shown in Keles 2007.
3.2. Incremental (tedriji) Ijtihad in the Making: Apostasy in Islam Freedom of belief has been a tricky topic for the Muslim world. A quick survey of the debates surrounding this freedom during the drafting of art 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights will prove this point. The exact difficulty relates to the concept inherent in this freedom, namely the right to change religion. The question for Muslim countries has been whether Islamic law allows for Muslims to convert out of Islam. The conventional answer is that it does not and that one who does (murted) is punishable by death in Islamic law. Regarding freedom of belief, Glen is unequivocal. He clearly states in a number of articles that faith is a matter of choice and conscience and that no one can be coerced into believing or worshipping.683 In one article684 on the topic (a transcript of Glens response dating back to the late 1970s), Glen passingly refers to the issue of temporal punishment for apostasy. Whilst he reiterates the conventional position as his own, he treats the matter as political rebellion towards the state and equates it with high treason. This latter comment marks the beginning of an incremental ijtihad on the topic which will eventually manifest itself as part of an evolving tajdid on dialogue, pluralism and human rights in Islam. I claim that Glen is engaged in incremental ijtihad, since (i) he develops and communicates his ijtihad incrementally over many years and different mediums, respectively, and (ii) he does not claim that he is engaged in ijtihad at all, thus further delaying the recognition that he is. 685 His evolving position on the death penalty for an apostate is an example of this incremental ijtihad.
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Glen 1995: 280 If individuals cannot live by the principles of their religion freely because of certain obstacles put before them, this Dinde Zorlama Yoktur Ayetini Izah Eder misiniz? See Glen 1995: 218 for a short discussion about the need to consider the socio-cultural conditions, perceptions and
means that they have been denied the freedom of belief and conscience. (An Interview with Fethullah Glen 2005: 448)
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(http://www.asringetirdigitereddutler.com/index.php/content/view/470/12/)
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customs of the time.
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Since the aforementioned article, Glen has not expounded on his position that apostasy is a political act of high treason. Instead, it has been picked up by Dr Ahmet Kurucan, a personal student of Glen for many years and columnist of the Zaman Daily Newspaper on fiqih (Islamic jurisprudence) related issues. Given his expertise, columns and affinity with Glen, Kurucan is known as the movements teacher on Islamic jurisprudence. In 2006, I attended a Conference in Germany in which Kurucan gave a talk on apostasy and punishment. He explained that the death penalty for apostasy was an ijtihad itself, not a definitive commandment of Islam, and that therefore it could be superseded by another ijtijad today. He argued that the time in which premodern jurists arrived at their decision, communities were deeply divided over Islam and Muslims were under political and physical siege from a number of fronts. Thus, you were either a Muslim defending Islam or a non-Muslim attacking it. For these jurists, apostasy at the time meant rebelling against the State and joining forces against the Muslims. There are a number of incidents at the time when apostates subsequently took arms against Muslims. According to Kurucan therefore, apostasy was treated as high treason by the premodern jurists and their ijtihad of execution is in relation to this, not to the mere renouncing of faith. This is an important observation backed by other scholars today as well: Many of the scholars and jurists define apostasy in terms of rebellion against the State, where a Muslim-subject of the Islamic State after denouncing Islam joins with those who take arms against the Islamic State and thus commits a political offence against the State.686 Kurucans PhD thesis (2006), entitled Freedom of Thought in Islam, substantiates this argument further. In summary, it argues that the Quran makes no reference to temporal punishment for apostasy, that to the contrary it states that there is no compulsion in religion687; that there are a number of recorded incidents in the Prophets lifetime when an apostate went without punishment whatsoever; that much of the justification for this ijtihad is based on incidents that occurred during the reign of Abu Bakr when whole communities uprose against the central government and that therefore these were political acts of rebellion against the State; that the Hanafi school of thought states that a woman apostate is not punishable by death since she cannot take arms against Muslims, which, coupled with the fact that Islam treats man and women equally in reward and punishment, helps prove the overall point that in the premodern jurists mind, apostasy was equated with high treason and political rebellion. Kurucan argues that since apostasy can no longer be charged with such meaning today (as imminent physical attack by the apostate) and that times have changed, then this ijtihad can be superseded by another. Whether or not one agrees with Kurucans reasoning is irrelevant for the purposes of this paper, since we are not engaged in a theological study. The point is that Glen and the movement are using Islamic tools of reinterpretation and renewal to reunderstand Islamic history and teachings. In doing so, they are referring to traditional texts and methodologies and forming a new discourse and school of thought. Given the importance of the topic and its potential for controversy, it is unthinkable that Kurucan would take such a stance without Glens prior approval. Thus, the various incremental stages of this
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Baderin 2003: 124 Quran: 2:256
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ijtihad include Glens article dating back to the late 1970s, the overall dialogue works that became a priority for Glen in the mid 1990s, the various meetings with minority religious leaders in Turkey in same period, the repeated emphasis on freedom of belief and human rights in the Abant meetings in the 2000s and Kurucans academic work in 2006. All of these comprise a further reason and justification in themselves towards a new position on the issue of change of religion in Islam. Therefore, what we have here is an incremental development and communication of a hitherto minor opinion through new arguments to change the conventional thinking and attitude towards freedom of belief in general, apostasy in particular in traditional Islamic law. I expect that Glen will publicly endorse this position in the near future, completing the incremental process of this ijtihads formation. This will then comprise a significant piece of the Glen tajdid on dialogue, pluralism and human rights. 688 It is true that Glen does not criticise the punishment for apostasy in the article referred to above or since. However, it should be noted that this was back in the 1970s, that in the same article Glen hinted at the line of thought that would be later developed by Kurucan and that since then an incremental change of position has taken place in conduct and word. What is more, this is perhaps one of the most sensitive topics in Islamic law and given that Glen is simultaneously lambasted by some religious fanatical groups for allegedly pacifying religious sensitivity in Turkey order to Christianise the Turks and ultra laicist militant groups on the grounds that he is seeking to establish an Islamic State in Turkey and Islamisize the whole world, one can appreciate why Glen would take a cautious note on this issue. A number of jurists and scholars have also held that apostasy is not a punishable offence. However, the difference in Glens case is that he has the influence to change the thought of a critical mass to make a real difference. In doing so, Glen and the movement are challenging a religiously-couched cultural reaction to the right to change religion in the Muslim world. Religion is a matter of conscience and many Muslims believe that it is there duty to oppose the freedom to convert out of Islam, because of Islam. It is this which Glen is incrementally challenging. This does not mean that opposition to change of religion will immediately crumble, especially in the political circles. For them, controlling the right to change religion is a means to controlling opposition and religious authority. After all, it is they who decide what amounts to apostasy. However, the likes of Glens efforts will undermine the religious, cultural and public support for such a stance and in time will influence the thinking of the masses on freedom of belief in the wider Muslim world.
4. Glens Influence in the Muslim World What we have examined above are some of Glens transformative views on frontline contemporary debates in the Muslim world. The point is to now assess whether Glen can influence the Muslim world along the lines of the discourse espoused above.
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Other Glen incremental ijtihads incubating for the time being include metaphysical democracy and art in Islam.
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4.1. Glen on the Muslim World Glens goal of universal peace allows us to judge the importance he ascribes to the Muslim, and for that matter, non-Muslim world. In his short English biography, often used as an introduction to most of his translated books, it states: Glen envisions a twenty-first century in which we shall witness the birth of a spiritual dynamic that will revitalize long-dormant moral values; an age of tolerance, understanding, and international cooperation that will ultimately lead, through intercultural dialogue and sharing of values, to a single, inclusive civilization (emphasis added).689 In one of his early writings, Glen states that this inclusive civilisation will emerge from the cooperation of the East and West and the respective values and strengths each represent: Communities based on the cooperation of science and morality always have established true civilizations. For this reason, Western civilization remains paralyzed because it is based mainly on science, and Eastern (Asian) civilizations are not "true" because, in their present conditions, they have no scientific background. The civilization of the future will have to be established upon a combination of Western science and eastern faith and morality.690 In another of his writings, Glen explains further what those values and strengths are; The West cannot wipe out Islam or its territory, and Muslim armies can no longer march on the West. Moreover, as this world is becoming even more global, both sides feel the need for a give-and-take relationship. The West has scientific, technological, economic, and military supremacy. However, Islam possesses more important and vital factors: Islam, as represented by the Holy Book and the Sunna of the Prophet, has retained the freshness of its beliefs, spiritual essence, good works, and morality as it has unfolded over the last fourteen centuries. In addition, it has the potential to blow spirit and life into Muslims who have been numbed for centuries, as well as into many other peoples drowned in the swamp of materialism.691 Thus, for Glen, universal peace and the will of God can only be achieved in an inclusive civilisation that merges the values and strengths of the East and West. That is how we should read Glens request of his students to replace a map on his wall that solely shows the Muslim world, with one that shows the entire world. That is also consonant with the movements efforts that span four continents and more than one hundred countries. Therefore, Glens primary objective is religion-neutral and includes all people. To achieve this however, the Muslim world must be willing to contribute. To do so, Glen argues that they must reform and revive themselves.692 As to the nature of that revival, Glen explains elsewhere
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Woodhall & Cetin 2005: viii Glen 2006: 56 nal and Williams 2000: 247 The Islamic world continues to squirm in the vicious grasp if error[W]e must work within the Islamic world which
will lead to a comprehensive renewal The Islamic community needs to be revived (Glen 2003: 3)
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With all sincerity, we support a renaissance that would consist of the rediscovery of lost human values and the rapprochement of humanity with universal human morals. Again, we support a renaissance that allows the questioning of dictatorship and the end of dictators, and working towards a democratic society. A renaissance that fosters great achievement in the fine arts and promotes a careful reading of the book of the universe, which has been lost for a long time, is greatly applauded. We support a renaissance that promotes a longing for research, a passion for knowledge, and the articulation of religion in accordance with the understanding of our century in a new style and new manner. (Emphasis added)693 From another perspective, it is clear from these essays that for Glen, Turkey is socio-culturally, historically, geographically and geopolitically very important. Indeed, if we are to judge Glens priority by the scale of the movements investment, then again -no doubt- Turkey tops the list. Unlike Hakan Yavuz, who seeks to explain Glens emphasis on Turkey, as nationalistic tendencies originating from his dadas spirit or frontier experience694, I believe that this is due to Glens estimation of Turkeys past and future potential to lead the Muslim world towards an inclusive civilisation. Turkey is critically important to Glen, because the future of Islam, the Muslim world and universal peace are so inextricably linked in Glens mind. In his essay The World We Long For, Glen speaks of our nation may shortly realize a second or third renaissance and his prayer to God to [s]ow our people to the ways to revival in the Muhammadi line695. In this essay, Glen is alluding to the leadership role of the Turks in reviving the Muslim world After long ages of crises and depressions, despite all odd, this nation is still capable of such regeneration; it still has the potential to realize a new resurrection Moreover, it has the advantage of the subconscious acceptance by peoples which shared history, a leadership which may possibly be of use again in the future.696 Thus, Turkeys significance in Glens estimation is due to the role it is yet to play in this Muslim world. Another clue on the topic is Glens ongoing intellectual project since 1991; a compilation of essays running into four volumes, entitled Key Concepts of Sufism. Here Glen looks at key terminology and values in the practice of Sufism by locating these concepts within the Quran, the sunnah and the lifetime of the Prophet. Glen oscillates between concepts such as ashq, jazba, tevazu, tevekul, vasil, halvet, kurb-buud, and the Quran, Hadith and practice of great Sufi masters. Thus, in these essays, Glen is legitimising Sufi practice, thought and perception. He is meticulously threading a theological and philosophical link between Sufism and the sharia. In doing so, Glen is strengthening one of the fundamental dynamics and underlying bedrock of Anatolian Muslimness, namely Sufi appreciation and perception.
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An Interview with Fethullah Glen 2005: 458 Yavuz 2003: 22 Glen 2005: 28 Glen 2005: 25
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These essays were clearly intended for Muslims. Its purpose is to spiritually reform. To do so, it defines and contextualises Sufi concepts in Islamic sources. Turkish Muslims do not need to be convinced of the legitimacy of Sufism in Islam. They accept this outright. I therefore argue that the primary audience of these works are not Turks but the wider Muslim world which, according to Glen, desperately needs the Sufi touch. For Glen, Sufism (or tassawuf to use a better word), is the spirit of Islam and a practice void of this is didactic, rigid and conformist. Thus, Glens intellectual project spanning sixteen-years is, in part, geared towards the Muslim world. Why then is the movement so much more active in the West than it is in Muslim countries? The answer is practicality. The Glen movement moved very quickly into Central Asia because it could, and because Glen wanted to pre-empt Saudi and Iranian influence in the region. As for Europe, there was already an existing Turkish Diaspora there and the movement quickly flourished as a result of this existing base. What is more, for Glen, Turkey is the most important Muslim country in the Muslim world, with its history, Anatolian Muslimness and ability to bridge the East and West and therefore the movement has always been at the heart of the Muslim world from the very beginning. Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt are some of the other Muslim countries where the movement is also now active. The main reason why the movement has not, until recently, been active in Saudi and Iran is to do with these countries refusals. Saudi and Iran consider Turkey and Turkish-Islam as a threat to their Wahhabi and Shiite practices, respectively. It is widely known that both countries spend millions of dollars each year to convert Muslims to their Islamic outlooks through Islamic cultural centres, mosques, bookshops, student sponsorships etc. However, none of this should be taken to mean that Glen is not concerned with the Muslim world. My contention is that Glen is seeking to mobilise and influence the Muslim and Arab world through the example and credibility the movement gains in the West. Glen needs this credibility, since he is seeking to enter a resilient and, at times, hostile market Q: What do you say about the attitude: "Forget about Europe, and become the leader of the Muslim world in the East. You're not European anyhow." A: We have one side in common with Europe and one side in common with the Muslim world. Our integration with Europe will necessarily bring the other. (Emphasis added)697 The well-known Professor Akbar Ahmed states in the Forward of A Dialogue of Civilisations, [t]he size and effectiveness of the Glen movement has grown exponentially over the past thirty years and adds: While conducting a research project for the Brookings Institution entitled Islam in the Age of Globalization during the spring of 2006, I travelled to nine Muslim countries, and my research team and I were shown just how influential Fethullah Glen has become. In an attempt to understand the mind of Muslims throughout the Muslim world, we prepared a questionnaire that asked direct personal questions to each participant. The questions posed attempted to gauge reactions towards the West and globalization. We found that many people are following those who seek to put barriers around Islam, and to exclude everything
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Sevindi 1997: 189
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else, especially Western influence. This idea is rapidly gaining popularity across the Muslim world. In Turkey, however, we saw that the most popular contemporary role model was Fethullah Glen, indicating to us the importance of his intellectual movement and also its potential as a countervailing force to ideas of exclusion that are gaining more traction within the Muslim world.698 It is this potential influence of Glen in the Muslim world that we now turn to appraise.
4.2. Glens Influence in Muslim World As noted at the very beginning, human rights values are an intrinsic them of Glens discourse. For Glen, human rights values are an inalienable part of ones humanness. Glens ideas surrounding tolerance, acceptance of one another, pluralism, democracy and the West are all connected with human rights and human freedoms. Glens Anatolian Muslimness, in particular, is a conveyor of Sufi perception which is favourable to human rights discourse. Thus, Glens influence in the Muslim world on human rights will not be as distinct as some would have thought at the beginning of this paper. Rather, it will part and parcel of the Glen-package. In fact, as seen above, Glen will not claim to be changing or influencing anything. That is why he has a greater chance of success. Instead, the movement will concentrate on schools, dialogue efforts, media and intellectual gatherings. In time, the Glen tajdid, ethos and principles will permeate the Muslim world through the example of the movement. This is in fact what is needed. The problem in the Muslim/Arab world is intricate, complex and deep rooted and no progress can be made on any front unless the solution is encapsulating, incremental and localised or locally driven. The problems that surround the practice of human rights in the Muslim world are vast and complex and cannot be tackled on its own. A wider approach that deals with the real underlying cultural, economic, social and political dimensions of the problem is needed. An approach that is not reactive to the problems of the Muslim world, but is positive and proactive. That is why the Glen solution is significant. It seeks to empower and enable the common people through education and dialogue which challenges cultural perceptions and overcomes dogmas. It seeks to mobilise the individual and society towards achieving to become insan-i kamil which can only progress in a free, fair and just society. Since Glens goals and teachings are justified in traditional Islamic sources, they have no problem of legitimacy or authenticity. Just as Glens and the movements efforts have helped strengthen the periphery in Turkey, my contention is that this will be replicated in the wider Muslim world. The pace of this influence naturally depends on the movements presence in this region. Since 2005, the Glen movement have begun a new initiative in the form of an Arabic magazine, called Hira.699 The magazine is published quarterly and includes topics such as religion, theology, culture, education, science and poetry and an editorial article by Glen for each issue. The magazine is based in Istanbul and Cairo and draws writers from both Turkey and the Arab world. Contributors from the Arab world include very well known and respected writers and scholars. This is a new
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Akbar 2007: Foreword http://www.herkul.org/yazarlar/index.php?view=article&article_id=2727.
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development; the only Glen initiative that is exclusively dedicated to engage the Arab world. Clearly this is a medium through which Glen is seeking to introduce the underlying dynamics of Anatolian Muslimness to the Arab world. The overall ethos of the magazine, reflect the Glen emphasis and thinking of religion and society. Although the magazine does not engage in politics, its discussion of faith, religion and society will eventually help communicate Glens views on these issues. The challenge for the magazine is to catch and maintain the interest of the Arab youth. It is too early to assess whether it is achieving this. The 12th Abant meeting, entitled Islam, the West and modernization, was held in Cairo over two days in February 2007.700 Intellectuals, scholars and journalists from both countries took part in this two day-long platform. This was the first time the Glen movement organised a significant conference in an Arab country. The event was co-organised by the prestigious Al Ashram centre for Political and Strategic Studies think tank which publishes a daily newspaper with a circulation of one million. The meeting in Cairo was entitled Turkey-Egypt Talk I, signalling that its mark the beginning of a series of events to be organised by the Abant platform. The underlying objective of this meeting was to look at modernisation in the Muslim world; how to overcome common problems among Muslim societies; universal values such as human rights, democracy and rule of law and spreading these notions in the Muslim world through Muslim interpretation. The second of these meetings will be held in February 2008 in Istanbul and it is expected that leading universities from Egypt such as Al-Ezher and Seem University will take part. Clearly it is very significant that this meeting was held in Cairo and can be taken as a further indication that Glen is starting to slowly engage the Arab world. The fact that both Hira and this Abant meeting was based in Egypt is no coincidence. It is well known that both countries have good relations and share a long history together. Unlike, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Glen speaks favourably of Egypt. Perhaps Egypt will serve as Glens springboard to the rest of the Arab world. If Hira and Abant are anything to go by, this certainly seems likely. Other than the meeting itself, the very topic is also quite revealing: Islam, the West and modernisation. Given that the Glen schools are not centrally coordinated, there is no verifiable data as to the exact number of schools in any given region. Recent estimates suggest six hundred schools in over a hundred countries701. The website for the 5th Turkish Language Olympics organised in Istanbul by the movement states that 550 contestants took part in the event in Istanbul from 100 different countries702. It is well known that all of these contestants were service-recipients of the Glen movement in some capacity, often as a pupil in one of Glens schools. This confirms previous estimates regarding the number and span of Glen schools. The list of contestants from Muslim countries include: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, BosniaHerzegovina, Algeria, Chad, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Morocco, Philippines, Ghana, India, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, Maldives, Malaysia, Mali, Egypt, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Jordan and Yemen. Of the 57 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which includes all but a very few countries of Muslim population, the Glen movement is active in approximately 42 of these. What is
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http://www.gyv.org.tr/bpi.asp?caid=336&cid=874 Ref http://www.turkceolimpiyatlari.org/
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more, we know that some of these countries have more than just one school, for example there are seven each in Pakistan703 and Yemen704, six in Afghanistan705, and three in Northern Iraq. Some of these we know about from the Internet706 others from word of mouth. So at the very least, the Glen movement is active in over forty Muslim countries; the more credible likelihood is that this activity involves at least one school if not more. Clearly therefore, there is a Glen presence in the Muslim world. What is lacking is the Middle East. Attentive readers will have noticed Iran in the above-list of countries. During discussions with volunteers of the movement who have worked in the region, I was told that there are studentdormitories in Iran and in every major city of Saudi Arabia. Apparently, one purpose of these dormitories and hostels are to serve pilgrims. This is very significant. Conventional research and thinking on the movement has always maintained that the movement is non-existent in Iran and Saudi. My research suggests otherwise. Whether the movement will set up schools in Iran707 and Saudi is another question, but they are certainly active there. What is important to note at this juncture is the pace at which these schools and the span of the movement is growing. If we are to go by the Turkish Language Olympics, the number of countries taking part is growing at a phenomenal speed. In 2006, the number of countries that took part was 87, in 2007 this number reached to 100. Clearly, this is not a definitive estimation of growth, since a Glen school may have chosen to only take part in 2007 despite being around in 2006. While this is quite possible in theory, it is unlikely in practice, given the importance Glen places on these Olympics. In this respect, it would not be far off to suggest that the countries and schools that take part in these Olympics reflects the approximate size and scope of the Glen movement in general and schools in particular. Another indication of the Glen movements pace of growth, for example, is in the media sector. In 2006 the movement owned two international TV stations, Samanyolu and Mehtap TV. In 2007, three more TV stations came on air: Samanyolu Haber, a 24 hour news channel; Ebru, an all-English TV channel based and broadcast from the U.S and Yumurcak, a childrens TV channel. In 2007, Zaman, the movements Turkish newspaper, became the highest circulating daily at an average of 650,000 copies. In 2006, the movement launched its first English daily newspaper, Todays Zaman which is already the highest selling English newspaper in Turkey.708 Glens books translated into Arabic include, the Infinite Light, a topic based commentary on Prophet Muhammads life (pbuh); Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism; The Statue of our Souls Revival
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http://www.pakturk.org/ http://www.tissenior.com/ Abdullah Glen (the then Foreign Secretary), attended the opening ceremony of the Afghan Turkish Girls school with a
1500 student capacity, in Kabul in February 2007. It was later reported that Mr Gul informed Margaret Becket (the then Foreign Secretary of Britain) of these schools and that she encouraged him to make these efforts known to the European leaders: http://www.zaman.com.tr/webapp-tr/haber.do?haberno=522069
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There are a few websites that list some links to Glen schools, such as I was told that when the movement proposed opening a school in Iran, the Iranian authorities replied give us the funds http://www.TodaysZaman.com
http://www.turkokullari.net/index.php?option=com_weblinks&catid=14&Itemid=22
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and we will open it for you.

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in Islamic thought and action and rad Ekseni.709 Glens official website is accessible in twenty languages including Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
4.3. Movements Relief Charity: Phase of Adoloscence The founding of an international relief and development charity in 2004, called Kimse Yok mu? (Is There No One? (hereinafter charity)), which seeks to alleviate suffering and poverty in the world, signals a new phase for the movement, a coming of adolescence. The ambit of this charity is not just the Muslim world but poverty in the South and suffering all over. The charity website explains the various national and international relief programmes and projects carried out by the charity. The charity first undertook national relief programmes and ad hoc relief efforts to alleviate poverty and help natural disaster victims (Agri 2004, Bingol 2005, Eastern Turkey 2007). From 2005 onwards, the charity began relief programmes abroad. In January 2005, the charity appealed for donations for the victims of the South Pacific earthquake. With funds collected, the charity provided water sanitation machinery, clothes, food and medical help and support to victims of the Ace province in Indonesia. In 2006710 and 2007711 the charity provided aid and support to Pakistan and Lebonan. The local Glen institutes help coordinate the aid and support in these countries. The efforts of this charity vis--vis the Muslim world is important for two reasons: (i) the credibility it will provide the movement in the Muslim world, and (ii) the wider implications of the movement entering a phase of development. The charities efforts to date prove that the Muslim world is important to Glen and the movement, and is an excellent way to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim people in the region. What is more, this is also an excellent means of raising the profile and visibility of the local Glen movement in the region and use of their local experience and knowledge. Through such relief work, the Glen movement is gaining the awareness, sympathy and support of Muslims in the wider Muslim world, enhancing its prospects of success in this region. The second point is that this relief charity demarcates very clearly a new phase in the development of the Glen movement. Crudely put for the purposes of this paper, until recently, the main focus of the movement has always been to build its own capability, credibility and capacity. In that sense, all works and projects were geared towards winning over volunteers and support. These works in themselves were always charitable but one unchanging dimension was the contingent gain for the movement. One example is that all donations received would only go to a public cause organised directly by the movement itself. In this sense, the movement was still in its early developmental stage.
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Not translated into English Following the 2006 eartquake in Asia, the charity built three tent-villages in Pakistan which accommodated
approximately 5000 victims. The charity provided these villages with food and support for six months. The charity also presented the Pakistan authorities with a four million dollar cheque as relief aid to the victims of this earthquake. The charity also built ten pre-fabricated schools, each with a capacity for 350 students, and provided school material and equipment.
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In 2007, the charity began a campaign entitled Hand in hand with the Palestinian and Lebanon People. This involved
sending food to Palestine (13 lorries) and Lebanon (14 lorries). The list of other international support programmes undertaken by the charity continues.
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What this relief charity does, is clearly mark out what was slowly emerging anyway; that the movement has now entered a stage of adolescence where it undertakes more complex and burdensome projects which do not necessarily benefit the movement itself. The fact that the relief charity collects money from businessman in Turkey, often the same people who fund Glen projects, and then donates that money to earthquake victims in Pakistan, despite the movement needing that money elsewhere, is a sign that the movement has now entered a new phase where it considers itself capable of making such a donation. Put differently, the Glen movements charitable works have moved to a whole new altruistic level defined by need of society as opposed to gain for the movement. In the past the movement was criticised for remaining indifferent to wider public issues like poverty and human right violations. It appears that Glen and the movement were not so indifferent to these issues after all, but building the mechanisms through which a meaningful attempt of contribution towards a solution could be made. I argue that this will mean a more active Glen in the Muslim world and South. The movement will not only spread as it first did in Turkey, but do so with more authority and greater speed. The relief charity is a clear indication that the movement considers itself to be of sufficient maturity to attempt bigger and more complex issues and that it has turned its energies towards the Muslim world. In summary therefore, the Glen movement is clearly present in most parts of the Muslim world. The movement is obviously strongest in Turkey and the Turkic states. However, the movement has clearly moved well beyond this and is now active in approximately 42 Muslim countries. The movement is not so active in the Middle East for reasons more to do with these countries than to do with Glen. Glen and the movement have demonstrated that they are now turning their resources to the Muslim world. The Hira magazine, conference in Cairo and expanding schools in the Muslim world demonstrates this and proves that this is not just a Turkish movement. Glens view concerning the Muslim world in general and the Middle East in particular has been that much of the non-Arab Muslim world still approaches Turkey with affinity and as their natural leader given the Ottoman past. This subconscious affinity and acceptance is significant for Glen as shown by his repetition of this. I contend that Glen is now seeking to cash that subconscious credit in the Muslim world. Given that the problems in the Muslim world are complex, deep rooted and intricate and that there is to some extent- an Arab and Iranian resistance to Turkey, the Turkish-model and the Glen movement, Glen has sought to build leadership in the Turkic world and credibility in the West before attempting to permeate the Middle East. That attempt is well underway and I predict a growing number of schools, periodicals, newspapers and eventually TV channel in the Middle East in the next 10 years.
5. Conclusion This paper argues that Glens infuence is transferable to the wider Muslim world, given its underlying dynamics and nature. The scope and depth of this influence depends on the presence and activity of the movement in this region. All research indicates that the movement is now investing greater energy in the Muslim world, whether through Hira, book publications or a growing number of schools.
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The movement introduces Glens philosophy, views and tajdid to the Muslim world through example. Glens tajdid proves itself to be adaptable, flexible, durable and practical. Most importantly, it is collectively constructed, based on action and conduct and spread among the grass roots of society. In this way, it lends itself to localisation and indigenisation providing it with a greater chance of success in the Muslim world. An ever-present underlying streak in Glens tajdid and discourse are human rights values. This is significant since it means Glens views, of themselves, promote human rights values by default. Glens views are spread through the example of the movement. This is best illustrated in the movements dialogue activities among Muslims. These activities usher in Glens dialogue theology and Anatolian Muslimness. Anatolian Muslimness is Glens perception of Islam, which gives prominence to Sufi perception, love, tolerance, forgiveness and peace. Glen would say that this is Islam in itself. I suggest that Glen is promoting Anatolian Muslimness among Muslims to fine-tune the rigid, conformist and literal Muslimness in practice in some parts of the Muslim world today. This is significant for the development of human right values in the Muslim world. What is more, Glen promotes human rights directly by internalising democracy, human rights, freedom of belief, pluralism and Anglo-Saxon secularism. Democracy and pluralism are prerequisites for the enjoyment of human rights. Where there is antagonism towards either, there can never be the true enjoyment of the former. Furthermore, by de-politising Islam and replacing any support for an Islamic state or theocratic governance with respect for rule of law, elections and other fundamental principles as noted above, Glen is directly promoting human rights through Islam, or because of Islam. His incremental ijtihad ongoing on change of religion in Islam is significant in this respect. The net effect of Glens efforts has been to contribute to a new type of Muslim in Turkey, who while a strong believer supports democracy, pluralism and human rights because of his faith not despite it. This has helped strengthen the silent and significant periphery in Turkey, who are now constructively participating in Turkeys public life and contesting for the centre ground. By tracing the movements presence and growth in the Muslim world, this paper suggests that a similar effect will take place in this region as well. The movements relief charity proves that the Muslim world is important to Glen and that the movement has now entered a new phase of adolescence where it is undertaking more complex social issues. One of these, I suggest, is enabling the civil society of the Muslim world. The growing activity and schools in this region bolsters this point further. This runs contrary to conventional thinking on the movement to date, which suggests that the Muslim world is not significant to Glen. I argue that the Muslim world has always been central to Glens vision of an inclusive civilisation but practicality as opposed to philosophy prevented greater prominence to this region. What is more, the strong and resilient Arab culture against a Turkish model could only be countered through significant credibility. I argue that the movement now possesses that credibility through it works and activities elsewhere and is now seeking use it in the Muslim world. Based on the movements projects so far and a long history of good relations, it is very likely that Egypt will serve as the springboard to the movements wider activity in the Middle East. The fact that Turkeys profile has been on a steady rise in the Muslim world in recent years will only add pace to the movements efforts here. In time, and as in Turkey, that will lead to a change of culture, perception and mood on points pertinent to human rights enjoyment and contribute to a wider debate in the Muslim world on developing an internally meaningful and effective and externally coherent and consistent set of human right norms.
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THE RELEVANCE OF FETHULLAH GLENS THOUGHTS FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
LEONID R. SYKIAINEN 712
Abstract Today political reforms are a central public concern in the Muslim world, where Islamic traditions coexist with universally accepted standards and Western liberal values. In these countries politics and the operations of state power make up a specific sphere of interaction between Islamic principles and Western norms. Fethullah Glens believes that the fundamentals of Islam do not contradict political reform in the contemporary Muslim world; rather, they can contribute to it. His thoughts about the political reform of the Muslim world are of particular importance in the light of the necessary collaboration of different political and legal cultures. Glen pays special attention to the involvement of Islam in political life and to Islamic methods of realizing political goals. While stressing the importance of law and order, he condemns absolutely violent and coercive ways of attaining political ends. He does not see a contradiction between genuine Islamic principles and democracy: he explains that the well-known principle of consultation is extremely flexible and responsive to the needs of every era. Glen is an advocate of dialogue between different cultures and civilizations so as to benefit from each others knowledge and views. in any case, he argues, people always need to learn from the experience of the experienced. This position opens the way for the Muslim world to benefit from modern democratic models of governance. Fethullah Glen does not believe there is going to be a clash of cultures or civilizations. Instead of this idea he puts forward the principle of dialogue. The first step in establishing it is to forget the past, ignore polemics, and give precedence to the common points that far outnumber differences.
1. Introduction It was late in the 20th century that Islam developed into a major issue of contemporary world politics. It left the realm of academic deliberations to be discussed by political scientists, publicists, and journalists. They normally concentrate on several subjects inherited from the past like Islams attitude towads international terrorism and political extremism as well as several recent ones, namely the Muslim world's future in the context of political changes and the role of Islam in the process. All these issues cannot be properly discussed outside the main trends of Islamic thoughts: ideas hold a special place in the Muslim world, in which all deep-cutting changes and important projects of
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Professor and Chair of Theory of Law and Comparative Law, Law Faculty, State University-Higher School of Economics,
Moscow, and (from 2000) Professor of Institute of Asian and African Countries, Moscow State University; Member of Dissertation Scientific Councils in Institute of State and Law, Russian Academy of Sciences and State University-Higher School of Economics; as Member of Scientific Consultative Council, Ministry of Interior, Russian Federation. Prof. Sykiainen is the author of more than 160 learned works on Islamic law and comparative legal studies. One of his recent publications is Democracy and the Dialogue between Western and Islamic Legal Cultures in Robert A.Hunt and Yuksel A. Aslandogan (eds.), Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World: Contributions of the Glen Movement (Somerset, NJ: The Light, Inc. & IID Press, 2006).
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national dimension are scrutinized through the prism of Islamic principles. What is more, devoid of an Islamic foundation they will never take off. This means that all positive solutions for the abovementioned issues should be sought within Islam. In other words, to discuss the prospects of political transformation of the Muslim world today means first of all to interpret Islam in the light of contemporary world realities. That is why Fethullah Glen pays special attention to this problem when evaluating the Muslim worlds political future.
2. Today Islam is not understood properly In a number of his publications Fethullah Glen analyses in a short but very deep manner the present situation in the Muslim world. He agrees that during a long period of time the Muslim societies have been witnessing a multidimensional political, social and cultural crisis. On one hand, this crisis embraces the Islamic thought and education at the moment. But one the other hand, it is itself caused by the decline of Islamic ideas and knowledge. That is why Fethullah Glens teachings must be estimated by their impact upon the development of the modern Islamic theory and by their contribution into overcoming the crisis of the Muslim world. The thinker points out a few main reasons of the present weakness of the modern Muslim countries. In his view, the three ones deserve to be mentioned before others: - prolonged and continuing political backwardness which manifests itself first of all in the absence of genuine democratic institutions and processes coupled with domination of the authoritarian regimes; - spiritual and moral crisis which consists in particular in the growing influence of imported - western standards of life; - unsatisfactory knowledge of Islam. When touching leading roots of backwardness of the Muslim world the thinker underlines some key problems of Islamic societies linked directly with the perspectives of their political reformation. He especially stresses that Islamic societies entered the twentieth century as a world of the oppressed, the wronged, and the colonized. After their liberation and creation of independent states political authorities worked for the well-being of the dynasties of which they are members, rather than working for the prosperity of their countries and trying to establish the unity of public and the power, and thus these administrations have been degraded to the position of mere oppressors and are deserving of loathing in the eyes of the public (Glen 2004:239-240). Values like democracy, basic human rights, the spread of knowledge and education across society, economic prosperity, equality in production, the institutionalization of consumption and income in a way that prevents class formation, the supremacy of law and justice, values which today are general accepted throughout the world, have never been fully realized in Islamic societies (Glen 2004:240). Maybe more important than all of the above, the fact that religion, and the religious values, spirituality and ethics that are connected to religion have been eroded away throughout the world constitutes the most important source of major social problems that threaten humanity today. The Muslim world is going through a spiritual crisis as all the essential supporting pillars of humanity have collapsed and have been destroyed (Glen 2004:241).
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To sum up, Fethullah Glen formulates the most important and bitter conclusion: today, in his opinion, an Islamic world does not really exist. There are places where Muslims live. Islam has become a way of living, a culture. It is not being followed as a faith. There are Muslims who have restructured Islam in accordance with their thoughts. It doesnt mean radical, extremist Muslims, but ordinary Muslims who live Islam as it suits them. The prerequisite for Islam is that one should really believe, and live accordingly. Muslims must assume the responsibilities inherent in Islam. It cannot be said that any such societies with this concept and philosophy exist within Islamic geography. There are no administrators having this vision. The Islamic world is pretty ignorant, despite a measured enlightenment that is coming into being nowadays. Today, there is an Islam of the individual. There are some Muslims in different places of the world. One by one, all have been separated from one another. Its difficult to see anyone who is a perfect Muslim. If Muslims are not able to come into contact with one another and constitute a union, to work together to solve common problems, to interpret the universe, to understand it well, to consider the universe carefully according to the Quran, to interpret the future well, to generate projects for the future, to determine their place in the future, then we cant talk about an Islamic world. Since there is no Islamic world, every one acts individually. It could even be said that there are some Muslims with their own personal truths. It cannot be claimed that there is an Islamic understanding which has been agreed upon, approved by qualified scholars, reliably based upon the Quran, and repeatedly tested. It could be said that a Muslim culture is dominant, rather than Islamic culture. As a result we must realize that no Islamic country, when considered from viewpoint of administrative, legal, and economic matters, exists. Today Islam is not understood properly. At best we can say that Islam is not known at all (Glen 2004:184).
3. Regarding Islam as A Political Force and An Instrument for Terrorism To prove this sound idea its enough to refer to Fethullah Glens ideas on Islam attitude towards politics and terrorism. First of all the thinker determines some principal theoretical approaches to this issue pointing out that if we want to analyze religion, democracy, or any other system or philosophy accurately, we should focus on humanity and human life. In this light Islam cannot be compared on the same basis with democracy or any other political, social, or economic system for it focuses primarily on the immutable aspects of life and existence, whereas political, social, and economic systems or ideologies concern only certain variable social aspects of our worldly life. The aspects of life with which Islam is primarily concerned are as valid today as they were at the dawn of humanity and will continue to be so in the future. Contrary to that, worldly systems change according to circumstances and so can be evaluated only according to their times (Glen 2004:219). At the same time Fethullah Glen refers to the historic facts stressing that beginning from the first half of the century Islamic societies were engaged in wars of liberation and independence. During decades Islam assumed the role of an important factor uniting people and spurring them to action. As these wars were waged against what were seen as invaders, Islam, national independence, and liberation came to mean the same thing. When national states were established in these parts of the world, the states were not compatible with their public. Whereas the states should have instructed the public in Islam with its true identity and nature, they acted in a way which disregarded the public, a way contrary to the values and traditions of Islam. This made the latter a pillar, a refuge against the administration in the eyes of the public. Consequently, it is regrettable to say, Islam has come to be
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regarded as a traditional political ideology by many. And what is more some Muslims and policymakers consider and present it as a purely political, sociological, and economic ideology, rather than a religion (Glen 2004:219, 239). In the light of this evolution of Islam as a political force Fethullah Glen pays special attention to the political process and the methods of ensuring political goals. In particular he never advocates the use of violence to attain political ends. He absolutely condemns violent and coercive means and methods and believes that the days of getting things done be brute force are over. Fethullah Glen stresses on the importance of law and order in society and does not believe that respect for others can be instilled by force or that a modern world can be built by repression (Glen 2004:246-247). But the analysis of real circumstances makes him to recognise that in the countries Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon to hand than their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes. In fact, Islam is a true faith, and it should be lived truly. A Muslim cannot say, I will kill a person and then go to Heaven. Gods approval cannot be won by killing people. One of the most important goals for a Muslim is to win the approval of God, another being making the name of Almighty God known to the universe (Glen 2004:185). This leads us to Fethullah Glens thoughts about relationships between Islam and terrorism. To touch briefly this side of Fethullah Glens intellectual contribution into proper understanding of modern Islam it is enough to refer to his conclusion that it is hard for a person to remain a Muslim if he becomes involved in terrorism. In true Islam, terror does not exist (Glen 2004:184-185). Fethullah Glen believes that any terrorist activity is the greatest blow to peace, democracy, humanity and religious values. Many Quranic verses are dealing with the concepts of justice and peace: Deal fairly, and do not let the hatred of others for you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just, for that is next to piety; and fear Allah (Al-Maida 5:8); If the enemy inclines toward peace, you (also) incline toward peace and trust in Al1ah, for He is the Al1-Hearing, Al1-Knowing (Al-Anfal 8:61); and O believers, enter into peace (Islam) wholeheartedly, and do not follow Satan's footsteps, for he is your avowed enemy (Al-Baqara 2:208). At the same time Fethullah Glen quotes the famous Hadith, stressing that the Prophet describes Muslims as those people from whom others are secure from their tongues and hands. In other words, those Muslims who are not known for their provision of security and trustworthiness to others must reexamine their claim to be Muslim (Glen 2002). To sum up Fethullah Glen underlines: Please let me reassure you that Islam does not approve of terrorism in any form. Terrorism cannot be used to achieve any Islamic goal. No terrorist can be a Muslim, and no real Muslim can be a terrorist. Islam demands peace, and the Quran demands that every real Muslim be a symbol of peace and work to support the maintenance of basic human rights Even though at first sight terrorist acts seem to harm the target, all terrorist activities eventually do more harm to the terrorists and their supporters (Glen 2004:261). Thus we can say with full confidence that there is no terror in Islam. They are sharply different from each other, and terror cannot approach Islam. In connection with the above logic, Muslims must be legitimate in their intentions when it comes to their goals, thoughts, and actions, for only a straight and allowed way can lead them to their exalted objective (Glen 2002).
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In other words, Fethullah Glen believes that Islam couldnt be an instrument for attaining political goals. Rather it is a goal of political activity and that is why any political decisions must be enriched by Islamic religious and ethical values. If any Muslims are joined to or associated with terrorism and anarchy, it is because they do not understand Islam correctly and because the existing realities in their countries to do not allow them to acquire a correct understanding. The thinker is convinced that this situation could be prevented by education: There is a remedy for this. The remedy is to teach the truth directly (Glen 2004:190). True understanding of Islam is closely connected with the political reforms which we are witnessing today in the Muslim world.
4. Democracy and Islam: Are They Opponents or Allies? Recently the problems of democracy and human rights have acquired a special importance for forecasting the development of the Muslim world in the nearest future and in particular for evaluating the perspectives of the promotion of political reforms including democratization. It is quite natural for today most Muslim states are developing in .a rather contradictory way in the political and legal sphere where Islamic traditions coexist with universally accepted standards and Western liberal values. We should always bear in mind that politics and the principles of state power functioning form a very specific sphere of interaction (cooperation and competition) between Islamic principles and Western patterns. Islamic thought believes that the most specific feature of this sphere is created by the fact that the traditional Muslim legal doctrine (fiqh) offers no detailed, exact, and unambiguous answers to the vast majority of specific questions. It limits itself to identifying the most general landmarks, such as consultation, fairness, and equality to be realized in different, including borrowed, versions. When applied, these general principles may produce different results. The consultation principle, for example, can be put into practice in the form of a consultative council accountable to the head of state or as representative body with full legislative powers elected by universal suffrage. Today, Muslim legal postulates are invoked to prove that Western experience of parliamentarism, elections, political pluralism, the division of powers, and even human rights should be tapped. In these spheres, however, the borrowing is limited to outward features, yet the very fact that Islamic legal thought does not issue rigid instructions about the power system in general opens the road to the widest possible reliance on the experience of political democracy. What is more, today any modernization and democratization project has good prospects in most Muslim states if realized within the Islamic political and legal tradition, or at least with due account of it. The opposite is also true: no political reform stands a chance of survival if it is aimed at setting up formally democratic institutions that go against the grain of Islamic thought. Objectively, the people at the top and the public at large are interested in democratic developments if they are accompanied by political stability and security. This can be done if democratization is realized within the Muslim political and legal traditions, Islamic interpretation of all the changes included. The strategy of political and legal reforms of the Muslim world should aim at incorporating it into the globalization process together with its Islamic values (legal and political among other things) that are compatible with the universal democratic principles and remolded to fit contemporary reality. This can be achieved if the positive potential of Islamic political and legal thought is tapped in a very active
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way and if the thinkers are encouraged to work on the problems connected with new realities and Islam's role in the globalizing world. We should bear in mind that the use of Islamic arguments is neither a trick nor empty talk. The present state of mind in the Muslim world has made the attitude of the Muslim political and legal doctrine toward the possibility of blending Islamic and Western principles extremely important. The latest works of those Muslim thinkers who share a moderate and balanced attitude toward the Shari'a admit, at least theoretically that this blend can be achieved Different sides of the intellectual achievements of Fethullah Glen are of special interest for discussing the above mentioned issues. First of all it concerns the compatibility between the Western liberal and the Islamic approaches to democracy and human rights. Regarding this subject Fethullah Glen stressed that when comparing Islam with democracy, we must remember that on one hand democracy is a system that is being continually developed and revised. It also varies according to the places and circumstances where it is practiced. On the other hand, religion has established immutable principles related to faith, worship, and morality. Thus, only Islams worldly aspects should be compared with democracy. Estimating this point he argues that democracy -in spite of its shortcomings- is now the only viable political system, and people should strive to modernize and consolidate democratic institutions in order to build a society where individual rights and freedoms are respected and protected, where equal opportunity for all is more than a dream. According to the thinker, mankind has not yet designed a better governing system than democracy. Fethullah Glen also maintains that as a political and governing system, democracy is, at present, the only alternative left in the world (Yilmaz 2005c:396). As for Islam, it is characterized by immutable religious and ethical values. But it does not propose a certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Instead, Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a governments general character, leaving it to the people to choose the type and form of government according to time and circumstances. If we approach the matter in this light and compare Islam with the modern liberal democracy of today, we will be better able to understand the position of Islam and democracy with respect to each other (Glen 2004:220). Along with this idea Fethullah Glen refers to the following fundamental principles of Islamic form of governement: Power lies in truth, a repudiation of the common idea that truth relies upon power. Justice and the rule of law are essential. Freedom of belief and rights to life, personal property, reproduction, and health (both mental and physical) cannot be violated. The privacy and immunity of individual life must be maintained. No one can be convicted of a crime without evidence, or accused and punished for someone elses crime. An advisory system of administration is essential
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Fethullah Glen does not see a contradiction between these principles and democracy. The duties entrusted to modern democratic systems are those that Islam refers to society and classifies as absolutely necessary, relatively necessary, and commendable to carry out. People cooperate with one another in sharing these duties and establishing the essential foundations necessary to perform them. The government is composed of all of these foundations. Thus, Islam recommends a government based on a social contract. People elect the administrators, and establish a council to debate common issues. Also, the society as a whole participates in auditing the administration. In short, Islam addresses the whole community and assigns it almost all the rights and duties entrusted to modern democratic system. It is necessary to stress that regarding establishment of Islamic form of state Fethullah Glen is in favor of a bottom-up approach and his desire is to transform individuals, an ideal that cannot be fulfilled by force or from the top. Islam considers a society to be composed of conscious individuals equipped with freewill and having responsibility toward both themselves and others. The Quran says: God will not change the state of a people unless they change themselves (with respect to their beliefs, worldview, and lifestyle) (Ar-Rad 13:11). In other words, Islamic society holds the reins of its fate in its own hands. The prophetic wording emphasizes this revelation: You will be ruled according to how you are. This is the basic character and spirit of democracy which does not conflict with any Islamic principle (Glen 2004:222). Answering a question wether can Islam live in democracy and vice versa Fethullah Glen said: Its wrong to see Islam and democracy as opposites (Unal and Williams 2000:150). In the light of these provisions Fethullah Glen shows the main obstacle on the road leading to establishing the just Islamic rule: todays world presents a situation where regimes of oppression do not have much chance to continue unchecked. Instead of these regimes the thinker proposes the Islamic remedy the famous Islamic principle of consultation.
5. Consultation and Human Rights as Key Directions of Political Reforms Explaining the meaning of this principle for the modern Muslim world Fethullah Glen states that for the Muslims of today, consultation (shura) is a vital attribute and an essential rule, just as it was for the first Islamic generations. According to the Qur'an, it is the clearest sign of a believing community. The consultation is mentioned in the Qur'an together with salat (prescribed prayers) and infaq (giving to maintain the religion and people for the sake of God): ...Those who hearken to their Lord, and establish regular prayer, who conduct their affairs by mutual consultation, who spend out of what We have bestowed upon them for sustenance (Shura 42:38). In this verse, we are reminded that consultation as a type of conduct is like prayer. That is why a society which does not consider consultation important can hardly be considered to be a fully believing one, and a community which does not apply consultation is not accepted as being Muslim in the full and perfect sense. In Islam, consultation is an absolute essential, which both the rulers and the ruled must obey. The ruler is responsible for conducting consultation about political, governing, legislation and all affairs related to society. The ruled are responsible for expressing and conveying their views and thoughts to the ruler.
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The important things which should be noted are: consultation is the first condition for the success of a decision made on any issue. Even if a person has a superior nature and outstanding intellect, if he is content with his own opinion and is not receptive and respectful to the opinions of others, then he is more prone to make mistakes and errors than the average person. The most intelligent person is the one who most appreciates and respects mutual consultation and deliberation (mashwarat), and who benefits most from the ideas of others. Consultation is one of the prime dynamics which keep the Islamic order standing as a system. To consultation belongs the most important mission and duty of resolving affairs concerning the individual and the community, the people and the state, science and knowledge, and economics and sociology. Even if the head of state or the leader is confirmed by God and nurtured by revelation and inspiration, he is under obligation to conduct affairs by consultation. This principle in the Qur'an is mentioned directly in two verses. The first of them was given above, and the second one, which does not require any interpretation whatsoever, is: Consult them in the affairs (of moment) (Al 'Imran 3: 159). Along with these commands the Messenger of God also saw the salvation and progress of his community in mutual consultation: "Those who consult can never lose, One who consults will not have cause to regret, One who consults will not come to harm, One who consults is secure, There has been no community which used consultation but could not reach the right result. After discussing the fundamentals of consultation Fethullah Glen declares the final conclusion: both of the revealed verses and the Prophets sayings related to the principle of consultation are extremely flexible and responsive to the needs of every era. They have a breadth which surpasses all ages, such that, no matter how much the world changes and no matter how the times alter, even if humans were able to build cities in the sky, they would not feel the need to add new things to these decrees. In fact, all the other rules and principles of Islam are open to similar flexibility and universality, and have always retained, and will also retain in the future, their freshness, relevance and validity, despite the passing of time (Glen 2005). Fethullah Glen follows the similar approach when discussing human rights as an important side of political reforms in the Muslim world. He is convinced that Islam is balanced, broad, and universal on this subject. Except for those who strive to tear down the state or the legitimate administration, or who have willingly taken someones life, the Quran teaches us: Anyone who kills a person, unless it be for murder or for causing dissension and spreading corruption in the land, it would be as if he killed humankind all together; and if any one saves a life, it would be as if he saved the life of humankind all together (Al-Maida 5:27-32). Pointing out the other side of the issue the Prophet stated: Whoever is killed while defending their property is a martyr. Whoever is killed while defending their blood (life) is a martyr. Whoever is killed while defending their religion is a martyr. Whoever is killed while defending their family is a martyr. Ibn Abbas said that a murderer will stay in Hell for eternity. This is the same punishment that is assigned to unbelievers. This means that a murderer is subjected to the same punishment as an unbeliever (Unal and Williams 2000:133-134). In short, in Islam, in terms of the punishment to be dealt on the Day of Judgment, a murderer will be considered to be as low as someone who has rejected God and the Prophet (an atheist in other words). If this is a fundamental principle of religion, then it should be taught in education (Glen 2004:190). Islam does not discriminate based on race, color, age, nationality, or physical traits. The Prophet declares that all people are equal as the teeth of a comb. He also declares: You are all from Adam,
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and Adam is from earth. O servants of God, be brothers and sisters. At the same time Fethullah Glen is convinced - in Islam there are no minor or major rights. The right of the individual and the right of society are equal. One cannot be sacrificed for the other, to the extent that it has been decreed: If a ship is carrying nine murderers and one innocent soul, that ship cannot be sunk to punish the nine murderers (Glen 2004:220-221, 230-231, 237). The thinker analyses different rights recognized in Islam like the freedom of religion and belief, thought and expression, to own property and the sanctity of ones home, to marry and have children, to communicate and to travel, and the right to an unimpeded education. He underlines that the principles of Islamic jurisprudence are based on these and other rights, all of which have now been accepted by modern legal systems, such as the protection of life, religion, property, reproduction of humanity, and intellect, as well as the basic understanding of the equality of people, which is based on the fact that all people are human beings, and subsequently, the rejection of all racial, color, and linguistic discriminations. Fethullah Glen draws our attention to the fact that all these values have been protected as separate principles in modern legal systems which consider them as being indispensable. Islam approaches human rights from the angle of these basic principles which will be and should be indispensable in the new millennium (Glen 2004:169-170, 231).
6. Diversity and Dialogue as Indispensable Prerequisites for Political Reforms and Domination of Democracy Compatibility between Islamic and modern democratic liberal values is not more than theoretical ground to combine the both for success of political reforms in the Muslim world. It will be possible only through the dialogue of different cultures and civilizations. In this respect Fethullah Glen underlines that for centuries the civilizations of the East and the West existed separately from each other. This separation was based on the fact that the former retired from pursuits of intellect and science, while the latter retired from spirituality, metaphysics, and eternal and invariable values. But now the whole situation has changed. Modern means of communication and transportation have transformed the world into a large global village. So, those who expect that any radical changes in a country will be determined by that country alone and remain limited to it are unaware of current realities. This time is a period of interactive relations. Nations and peoples are more in need of and dependent on each other, a situation that causes closeness in mutual relations (Glen 2004:230). More precisely Fethullah Glen srtesses that people must learn how to benefit from other peoples knowledge and views, for these can be beneficial to their own system, thought and world. Espessially they should always seek to benefit from the experiences of the experienced (Unal and Williams 2000:149). This position opens the way for the Muslim world to benefit from the modern Western democratic patterns. Regarding Huntingtons claim about the clash of civilizations, Fethullah Glen considers that rather than being realistic evaluations regarding the future, these types of claims seem to be determining new goals in an attempt to influence public opinion. Actually, up until now, conflict is something that is desired by certain power centers. The masses have been put on alarm against a frequently conjectured and feared enemy. This enemy is more imaginary than real. It is in this manner that the masses have been prepared for every kind of war.
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On the contrary, Islam is strictly against disorder, treachery, conflict, and oppression. Islam means peace, security, and well being. Thus, in a religion based on peace, security, and world harmony, war and conflict are negative aspects. In exceptional cases there is a right to self-defense but this can be done only according to certain principles. Islam has always breathed peace and goodness. Islam considers war as a secondary event. Rules have been placed in order to balance and limit it. For example, Islam takes justice and world peace as a basis: Let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice (Al-Maida 5:8). In this respect, Fethullah Glen states that tolerance and dialogue should be represented everywhere in the best possible way and should be an example to the whole world. Such an example will encourage people to come together, to gather round the same basic human values and, God willing, humankind will live one more spring before seeing the end of the world (Glen 2004:257). Coverung this issue from the other side Fethullah Glen points out: I dont believe theres going to be a clash between cultures or civilizations. If some people are planning such thing based on their current dreams and making claims on this subject, and if such a wave has risen and is on its way, then before we suffer such a clash, lets put a bigger wave in front of it and break their wave (Unal and Williams 2000:189). At the same time Fethullah Glen sees diversity and pluralism as a natural fact. Even though the consideration of the world as a village becomes firmer and more prevalent over the course of time, different beliefs, races, customs, and traditions will continue to cohabit in this village. Each individual is like a unique realm unto themselves. Therefore the desire for all humanity to be similar to one another is nothing more than wishing for the impossible. For this reason, the peace of this (global) village lies in respecting all these differences, considering these differences to be part of our nature and in ensuring that people appreciate these differences. Otherwise, it is unavoidable that the world will devour itself in a web of conflicts, disputes, fights, and the bloodiest of wars, thus preparing the way for its own end (Glen 2004:250). The thinker wants those differences to be admitted and professed explicitly. That is why he is an adamant supporter and promoter of inter-faith dialogue. In his view, a believer must communicate with any kind of thought and system. Fethullah Glen points out that the dialogue has now expanded to wide regions of the world. In general, the results he believes have been positive. At the same time he is not optimistic about the present contribution of the Muslim world into this dialogue and does not suppose that Muslims will be able contribute much to the balance of the world in the near future. Till now they couldnt solve the problems of the world. Perhaps it could be achieved in the future (Glen 2004:186). At the same time Fethullah Glen puts forward the leading pronciples of such dialogue which is a must today. The first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and givig precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones (Unal and Williams 2000:244-245).
7. Conclusion Today, the Muslim world is torn between two contradictory trends: advancing along the road toward democratization and upsurges of radicalism. Modern Islam approaches these phenomena in quite a different way. Until recent times, balanced Islamic thought did not manifest the necessary dynamism when issues of democratization and political reforms or the possibility of the Muslim world joining the globalization process came up for discussion. In other words, even some decades ago this moderate trend of Islamic political and legal thought hadnt proposed definite and convincing
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solutions of the above mentioned problems based on the genuine Islamic mental traditon. We couldnt help but feel that, at the ideological level, Islam had so far been unable to meet the challenges of our times. No wonder, in the absence of a clear Islamic strategy, most contemporary authors remained reserved, or even pessimistic, about the future of the Islamic civilization. Those who would like to detach it from the world came up with a much clearer message. There is still a widely shared opinion outside countries with predominantly Muslim populations that democracy and traditional Islamic values are incompatible. Islamic extremists share this view for different reasons: they are convinced that the contemporary developments threaten Islam. The global "Islamic project," or Islamization of mankind, is seen as the only adequate answer. This leads to a question of fundamental importance: is Islamic ideological potential big enough to finally arrive at a formula that would bring Islamic values and the latest achievements of contemporary civilization together? When trying to answer this question, we should take account of the fact that Islamic thought abounds in various trends, three of which until recently were considered the main ones. One of them, the traditional trend, justifies conservation of sorts of Muslim society's present state; another, the fundamentalist trend, insists that the public and state structures should undergo radical changes and return to the literally understood Shari 'a. The modernist approach uses the outwardly Islamic interpretation in an attempt to justify liberal reforms patterned on the West. Until recently, another of the many trends that interprets the contemporary world along Islamic lines remained lost to the public, which has its attention riveted on the three prominent trends. We have in mind the idea of tapping Islam's internal potential, which says that reality should be measured against the Shari 'a cornerstones, values, and general principles rather than its petty rules related to minor things and interpreted in a narrow-minded manner. This is very close to what the Muslim reformers of the turn of the 20th century thought, even though they never got beyond the calls to return to ijtihad and never tried to apply the other Shari'a principles to put their purely Islamic idea of the changing world on firmer ground. It should be added here that since the mid-20th century this position has been limited to the works of those scholars who preferred to concentrate on the immutable principles of the Shari 'a as opposed to its particular, and never consistent, solutions. Just recently, this theoretical construct had absolutely no influence on political and legal practices. Now the situation is obviously changing: the formerly ignored trend has come to the fore as the most promising soil on which the strategy of contemporary Islam and the Muslim world will probably grow. Fethullah Glen together with the other prominent Muslim thinkers played the decisive role in this evolution. As it was shown, he has his own views on all above mentioned issues. In particular Fethullah Glen believes that the only prospects of the Muslim worlds political development and stability depend on its democratic transformation.: Democracy has developed over time. Just as it has gone through many different stages in the past, it will continue to evolve and improve in the future. Along the way, it will be shaped into a more humane and just system, one based on righteousness and reality. If human beings are considered as a whole, without disregarding the spiritual dimension of their existence and their spiritual needs, and without forgetting that
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human life is not limited to this mortal life and that all people have a great craving for eternity, democracy could reach the peak of perfection and bring even more happiness to humanity. Islamic principles of equality, tolerance, and justice can help it do just this (Glen 2004:224). It is obvious that Fethullah Glens thoughts about the role Islam could play to respond to these key questions are the most convincing ones. And what is more he has a movement which can implement his ideas (Yilmaz 2003; Yilmaz 2005a; Yilmaz 2005b:174-179).
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NECESSITY AND IMPORTANCE OF INTERCULTURALINTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND INITIATIVES OF FETHULLAH GLEN

NYAZ KTEM 713
1. Introduction Being belivers of different religions and different cultures, we should confess that religions, especially monotheistic religions do not like tolerencevery much. Most of the religions and sects, at the risk of their own decline, prefere protecting the faithful against, so called deviation of the faith they uphold: Heresies, schism, heterodoxy etc. , must be condemned. That was the logic and the mentality of the religious wars during the history. For the fanatic members of the religions, there is no mercy for the others. In the Old Testament, the expressionchosen people for a fanatic jew means, the place of the members of the other religions is lost in the univers;salvation is a privilage only for the Jews. In the other hand, for a liberal jew, all the believers of one god might have the privilage of being chosen people. For a fanatic christian, the members of the other religions ara anthe-christs children. But for a liberal, rationalist chrisitan, Jesus Christ, who is the incarnation(in Coran Jesus Crist is Kelamullah or Kelimetul Allah which meens logos), would embrace all the children of God. Djihad is the word for self-defence in the Koran. But, for a fanatic muslim, according to this concept, beliveres should kill all the pagans. He does not know the deeper meaning of the djihad which means making war agains our desire and our ambitions. If believers make an effort to learn and to understand the deeper meaning and the aim of their faith, tolerance and peace can find a beter place in the social and political life. Ignorance is the main obstacles of tolerance and peace for humankind. . Ordinary people dont know his own religion and a fortiori otherss religions. Thus believers of the other religions, other sects and denomonations become ennemy for them. Ignorance humiliates other beliefs and other toughts. Ignorance brings nationalism and chauvinism, and consecequentially war and caos. Only liberal and open minded religious leaders can break religious ignoranc and fanatic aproaches. This kind of leaders, philosophers can open the way of the interreligious and intercultural dialogue procesus which could be institutionolize with the support and the participation of the masses. Institutionaly, the Second Vatican Concil (1958-1963-65), whit the great effort of Pope John the Twenty Third interreligious dialogue started in our modern times. But of course, before that we always can see, during the centuries philosophers, priest, Saints, mams, Rabins who had worked seriously for the interfaiths diologue. Among the others, names such as Saint Franois of Assisi, the catholic;Maimonides, the Jew;Mawlana Djalaleddin Roumi the Muslim are some of the thinkers and the activist of the dialogue.
713
Professor at Bilgi Univesity, Istanbul, Turkey.
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In modern times in the Muslim Word, one of the Pioneer of interreligious dialogue is Mr. Fethullah Glen. Mr. Glen is the first Turkish muslim religious leader who institutionalise intercultural and interreligious dialogue worldwide. He founded in 1994 The Journalists and Writers Foundation where he is now honorary president. Coming from Said Noursi tradition, Mr. Glen always had appaciated interreligious and intercultural dialogue, but institutionaly the start took a run-up whit this foundation. His masterSaid Noursi exerted his personal efforts at building reconciliation and friendship with Christians. Noursi, in 1950, sent a collection of his studies to Pope Pius XII in Rome and recieved in reply a personal letter of thank. In 1953, he went to visit the Ecumenical Patriarche Athenagoras in Fener-stanbul to seek cooperation between Muslims and Christians against to the face of aggressive atheism. But, first intitutional start came up from Fetullah Glen.
2. Intellectually, Who is Fetullah Glen? Born in 1938, in Erzurum. east part of Anatolia Fetullah Glen, while child, started to learn soufi interpetation of Islam from Sheikh Muhammed Ltfi. In his moral training, especially his mother, and his Soufi teacher played formative roles. His unofficial Soufi education affected his ongoing spiritualitiy. I think that Soufi formation is the main stream for him to realise the importance of the interreligious and intercultural dialogue, because Soufism, mystical approches in religion could open the concept of unification and equality among the human being. Soufism is humanism. But on the other hand, he grew up whit the concept of nationalism, because Erzurum had lived the reciprocal atrocities with Turcs and Armaniens. He has always been nationalist, but not chauvinist. His moderated nasionalism focuses on loving his people and respecting all the other nations, religions and etnicities. Co-existance pacifique in is his main aim to estabilish peace in the World. His nationalism, maybe, opened the vison of founding schools in Central Asia and also worldwide. The Glens attitute of nationalism thus differentiates itself from other islamic and nationalist groups is adopting the free market, modern education and liberal interpretation of Islam. This new national islam of Turkey marked by the logic of market economy and Otoman legacy which means to know how to co-existe whit the other religions and etnicities in the different liberal social and political states. Glen believes the virtue of democracy. He also thinks that Democracy and Islam are compatible. Islam does not propose a certain unchangeable form of goverment. In the other hand democratization is an irreversible process in Turkey. From this perspective, Fetullah Glen fallows, like his master Said Noursi, the path of islamic intellectuel movement Nahta(Islamic Renaissance of Mouhammed Abdouh and Djamalettin Afgani). According to the Nahta movement, tree main principles of Islam ara creed(iman), ritual obligations(ibadet) and legal-economic affairs(muamelat). Interpetations principles in creed and ritual obligations should be literally. But for muamelat, rulers, juges, that meens all the Muslims can apply in jurisprudence sociological and theleological interpretations. That means, if there is an inflation in the conjoncturel economical situation in a Muslim country, you can not apply the literally the verset of Coran which says that interest is a sin. If you apply this principle, poor people, having noting than a small amont of money, will loose more if he doesnt accept a reasonable interest from
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the bank. Justice is is one of the main principle of Islam. If that men looses his money with the inflation, without having interest you avoid one of the main principles of Coran which is justice. As a philosophical concept, justice can appear differently according to the socio-economical situations. Appling Coran in muamelat needs a socio-economical and teleological approach. Teleos is the ultime aim of our holly principles. So, we should always concern the aim of Islam which is creating city of Justice. So did Khalif Omar when a thief was expecting the sentance of cuting his hand he said: it is famine, there is general scarcity of food. It is not fair if we cut the hand of this thief. Omar did not apply the literally interpretation of the verset of Koran but he prefere the sociological and teleological interpretation. With this kind of approaches, Nahtas principles are compatible with the principles of the modern democracy. Turkish Muslim thinkers and modern Muslim businessmen are not far a way from Nahtas principles. With the support of modern and moderated Muslim businessmen and his ordinary fallowers, Glens modern intellectuel vison of Islam and his activist nature gave him the chance of being honorary and spirituel leader of many important activities in different fields. Media, schools, intellectuel foundations, intellectuel platforms. In my speech Ill talk about intellectuel foundations and intellectuel platforms. In dead, we can find and regroup in a concrete way his intellectuel aproachess is the activities of Journalists and Writerss Foundation.
3. Journalists and Writers Foundation Journalists and Writers Foundation, which was founded in 1994, promote dialogue and toleranc among all stratum of society. According to his president, Harun Tokak, the Foundation took as its principle the performance of activities that develop and consolidate love, tolerance and dialogue, first among journalist and writers, and than throughout Turkish society and humankind. From this perspective above, Journalist and Writers Foundations created Abant Platform and Intercultural Dialogue Platform.
3. 1. Abant Platform In 1997, pioneered by the Journalists and Writers Foundation, a group of Turkish scholars and intellectuels of different political tendencies decided to organise a thin-tank in order to discuss regularly Turkeys and Words social, intellectel, religious, political and philosophical problems. On july 16-19 th, in a hotel, by the Lake of Abant hidding behinde Bolu mountains with its natural beauties, a group of intellectuels from different places, of different opinions and stands took a first step fort the peace and dialogue. Most of them came togather fort he first time, most of them newly meet. The initial timidity turned into friendship, distances into understanding, while hard looked, frictions transformed into witty remarks, intellectuel bickerings;and diversities became a richness. From 1998 to 2007.
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Within a very short time, The Abant Meetings became a classic, a tradition. We call itAbant Spirit which is pluralism, freedom, individualitiy, civil consciousness. search, courage, resistance to impositions, persuation, tolerance to opposition, knowledge and critical intelelct, to search for a common denominator, vision, respect, feeling outer worlds, dialogue and tolerance, complete democracy. Seen as having aweek choice, tried tone and being colourless and drained, for a period that coul be considered a long one, The Turkish intellectuel has returned to life with the Abant Spirit. Accomplishing that at atime when ideologies and dogmas besieged life and held living and thinking spaces in mortage was a great move possessing the quality of a mental revolution, a reform Regularly, trought the years, such issues have been discussed whit the collabarations of the different national and international institutions: Islam and Secularism. 1998. Abant-Turkey Religion, State and Society. 1999. Abant-Turkey Democratic Law State. 2000. Abant-Turkey Pluralism and Social Reconciliation. 2001. Abant-Turkey Globalisation. 2002. Abant-Turkey War and Democracy. 2003. Abant-Turkey. Islam, Democracy, Secularism and the Turkish Experience. 2004 Whashington DC. John Hopkins University. In the Process of Turkeys Accession to the EU:Culture, Identity and Religion. 2004. European Parliment. Brussels. Catholic University of Louvain. On the Verge of New age :New Searches in Education. 2005. Erzurum-Turkey. Paris I. April 2006. Maisons des Siences de LHomme et Conseil International des Sciences Sociales. Maubert-Mutualite. Republic, Cultural Diversties and Europe. Paris-Istanbul II. April 2007. Palais de France-Istanbul. Fondation pour lInnovation Politique and Revue Esprit. Franc, European Union and Turkey. Alevilik. Historical, Culturl, Folkloric And Actuel Aspects of Anatolian Alevis. May 2007. starbul Turkey.
3. 2. Intercultural Dialogue Platform Intercultural Dialogue Platforme is also one of the important institution of the Journalists and Writers Fondation. In that context, the Honorary Prisedent of the Fondation held talks whit many religious leaders and institutions, such as Pope John Paul II(n 1998), Greek Eucumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos(in 1996), Sepharadic Chief Rabbi of Israel Eliyahu Bakshi Doron(in 1999) and others religious leader of Turkey in many occations.
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Beginning from 1997, men and leaders of the different religions living in Turkey took places, under the umbrella of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, around the table of the Ramadan diner. Among the academic meetings, Intercultural Dialog Platform have organised fallowing symposiums: I. II. III. IV. V. VI. Intercivilisational Dialogue Symposum 6-7 June 1997 Istanbul. The art of Living Togather. Tolerance700 1999. Istanbul The Globalisation and Intercivilisational Dialogue. 2004 Tbilisi. Georgia. From Terror to Universal Ethics:Religions and Peace Conference. 2005 Moscow. Russia. Hunger and Poverety:Solutions Offers by Religions. 2006. stanbul Harran Meetings.
It is known that the Abrahamic traditions holds an important place in Anatolia which is the crossroads of ancient cultures. The fact that a part of Abrahams life has passed in nordern Mesapotamia. Abraham is the common father of tree monotheistic religon. Chiristians and Muslims of different sects, who lived in this region, tried to keep Abrahamic tradition continuously alive. In the context of interreligious diologue, Intercultrel Dialogue Platform organised two symposium in two important cities of this area, where the Abrahamic tradition is practised. a) a)13-15 April 2000. First one took place in anlurfa which is accepted as the birthplace of Abraham and has a position of being the center of the Hararn region that has been housing a rich scientific and cultural heritage since Babylon. Different religious leaders and scholars from diffrent countries came to participate to the symposium. His Hollyness Bartholomeos and Chief Rabbi of Turkey were among them. . b)13-16 May 2004. The second one took place in Mardin also in nordern Mesapotamia. Among the participants I can mention the fallowin names:His Hollynesb Bartholomeos ;Abdulkadir Aksu, Minister of Internal Affairs, Mor Ignatius Iwas, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch;Rav Izhak Haleva Chief Rabbi of Turkey, Mgr. Edmond Ferhad, Vatican Ambasador. Also worldwide, differant scholars and religous leaders took place at the symopsium.
b)
V- Common Prayers for the Peace. The intercultural Dialogue Platform has created a tradition for The Common Prayers for the Peace. Religious leaders of the differents religions and sects living in Turkey have come togather each year for a common prayer for the peace. First one was organised in January 15th 2004 in stanbul. After the prayers, a panel is always organised within the framework of issue that is on the spirituel agenda of World an Turkey. VI- Whit the participation of the different religious represantatives, Intercultural dialogue Platform organise also panels on fallowing subjects: -The concept of incarnation in the three monotheistic religion. -The Concept of God in the three monotheistic religion -The concept of ethics in the three monotheistic religion.
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4. Conclusion Like the other religions, Islam has different interpretations. It is undoubted fact that certain Islamic traditions and interpretations and practices are might have conflict with the modern state and modern society. In judisim and in chritianity, we can also see fundamentalist approaches. I think that, like the other religions philosophicly, sociologically and theologically Islam is multudimensional and has many aspects. I believe thet rationalist and mistical interpretations of faith are perfectly consistent with international human progressiveness. In respect of its historical, sociological and judicial heritage, Turkey and Islam in Turkey, whit Sunnite and Alevit interpretations and sects is not clasical traditional Muslim society. Our rich historical heritage gave us the opportunity of having liberal and humanistic interpretation of Islam. Mr. Fethullah Glen and the tradition that he fallows has opend to the Turkish society the doors of the intercultural and interreligious dialogue activities. Dialogue can only can give us a concrete way for the peace.
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Editors
Dr Ihsan Yilmaz London Centre for Social Studies, UK Prof Khalid Abou El Fadl University of California, USA Mr M. Jean-Michel Cros French National Center for Scientific Research, France Prof Eric Geoffroy University Marc Bloch Strasbourg, France Prof Andreas Kinneging Leiden University, the Netherlands Prof Johnston McMaster Irish School of Ecumenics, Belfast, Ireland Prof Thomas Michel The Vatican Prof Paolo Naso La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy Prof Ton Notten Rotterdam University, the Netherlands & Vrije University Brussel, Belgium Prof Klaus Otte Universities in Basel, Mainz and Frankfurt, Germany Prof Emilio Platti Catholic Leuven University, Belgium Prof Simon Robinson Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Prof Karel Steenbrink Utrecht University, the Netherlands Prof David Thomas University of Birmingham, UK Dr Pim Valkenberg Radboud University, the Netherlands & Loyola College Maryland, USA Prof Paul Weller University of Derby, UK Prof Anton Wessels Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The need for peaceful coexistence among the people of various cultures has long been recognized. The much publicized failures in relations in recent years, which are both a cause and effect of the situation in many parts of the world should spur all right-minded people to redouble their efforts to sustain the hope for peaceful coexistence. Fethullah Glen is an Islamic scholar and peace activist whose ideas have inspired many people to undertake charitable works, especially in education and dialogue. They now constitute one of the most effective and influential worldwide civic movements of the 21st century. They work to construct a culture of harmony and peace by founding non-denominational educational institutions and so encourage intercultural dialogue and understanding. Their work makes a practical contribution to constructive, positive relations between the West and the East, the North and the South, with special focus on issues such as democracy, multiculturalism, globalization, citizenship, and intercultural dialogue in the context of secular modernity. By focussing on Glens ideas and practice, the Conference aims to explore the appeal and impact of the Glen movements worldwide initiatives to help people respond creatively to the profound social changes that are taking root everywhere.
organisers:
Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
I SBN 0 - 9555017 - 7 -7 6
9 780955 501777

Peaceful Coexistence Fethullah Gulens&#39;s Initiatives

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Leeds Metropolitan University Press London,2007

Fethullah Glen's initiatives in the contemporary world

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Part 1: Reason and Faith in Glen's Philosophy

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Part 2: Envisaging Dialogue from Theological Perspective

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Part 5: Motivating Peaceful Coexistence: Understanding Glen's Pluralism

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3. 1. Abant Platform 3. 2. Intercultural Dialogue Platform 4. Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Peaceful Coexistence Fethullah Gulens's Initiatives