'A Dialogue of Civilizations'

Last Updated on Monday, 10 December 2007 04:51 by Sahin Alpay, Today's Zaman Monday, 10 December 2007 04:46

For over five years I have been writing a thrice-weekly column for Zaman -- currently the highest-selling daily newspaper in Turkey, with sales reaching over 800,000 copies -- which is published by a movement that shares the understanding of Islam of Turkey's most influential religious scholar, Fethullah Gülen. People often ask me, as a liberal-minded columnist who writes for Zaman, about my opinion concerning Gülen's teachings and the Gülen movement, which operates business and media enterprises and a broad network of schools and universities in Turkey and abroad. My response is briefly as follows.

In my youth I regarded religion as the "opium of the people." My views on religion have, however, substantially changed over the years, due partly to life experiences and partly to the changing approaches toward religion in the social sciences. Today I regard religion as coexistent with human life, due primarily to an inherent inclination among most human beings to believe. Science has discovered its limits: The more science makes progress, the more we realize how little we know. Religion and science have separate places. The former has to do with conscience, the latter with reason. Substitution of one for the other has resulted in terrible tragedies throughout history. It is therefore necessary that they respect and learn from each other.

Islam, like all other great religions, has had different interpretations depending on time and geography. Some of these have resisted re-interpretation, others have been open to such. As in the case of all other major religions, there have basically been two responses of Islam to modernization: understandings that reject modernity on the one hand and those which try to adapt Islamic beliefs to modern life on the other.

Gülen is one of the foremost representatives of modernist Islam. He teaches dialogue between and tolerance toward different views, beliefs and lifestyles, emphasizes not the formal aspects of Islam but those that have to do with its substance, i.e., ethical values of human compassion and solidarity. Gülen's views are supportive of human rights and democracy, secularism based on freedom of religion; he calls on followers to work hard, invest in companies and open schools that have had a big impact on Turkish society.

The civil society movement composed of those who respect Gülen's teachings has provided much of the "social capital" (interpersonal trust) crucial for the remarkable industrialization of Anatolia during the recent decades. The Gülen movement has played an important part in the rise of an Anatolian business class committed to a market democracy as well as Islamic ethical values. The remarkable ideological transformation of the Turkish Islamist movement toward the "conservative democracy" of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is surely related to the social and economic developments that have taken place in Anatolia.

I have had the opportunity to visit many of the educational institutions established by the Gülen movement abroad. These are situated all over the world, but primarily in Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and East Asia. Graduates of these schools, who acquire skills in English and Turkish, not only help establish cultural ties but also promote economic relations between their native countries and Turkey. Gülen's encouragement of dialogue and understanding between the faithful of different religions is a contribution to world peace. The growing international appreciation for this aspect of Gülen movement's efforts explains the increasing number of international conferences on Gülen's teachings organized by Western universities, such as Columbia and Rice in the US, the London School of Economics and University of London in Britain and Erasmus in Holland.

A recent example of the international interest in Gülen's thought is the book written by Dr. Jill Carroll of Rice University in the US. Titled "A Dialogue of Civilizations" (The Light Inc., New Jersey), it attempts to show the similarities between the views of Gülen and philosophers who have emphasized the value of individual freedom and responsibility (such as I. Kant, J.S. Mill and J.P. Sartre) on the one hand and those who have attached importance to the role played by elites and education in society (such as Plato and Confucius) on the other. The study presents an interesting approach to understanding Islam as interpreted by Gülen.