The Gülen Community: a Dynamic Muslim Movement of Peace and Dialogue

The topic that I want to address today is the movement associated with the name of the modern Muslim scholar, Fethullah Gulen. I suspect that as recently as 10-15 years ago, most of us had never heard the name of Mr. Gülen nor of the predominantly group of young Muslims who make up that community. Yet today, the community has over 600 schools, including six universities, and operates in over 100 countries. In addition to their schools, they are the main inspiration behind dialogue institutes such as the Rumi Forum, a dialogue institute which has over 40 counterparts in the United States alone, as well as other throughout Western and Easter Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa. For example, in Rome, where I was living until recently, there is the Istituto Tevere, that is, the “Tiber Institute,” which has very similar programs to those you will find here at the Rumi Forum.

Rather than give I will begin with an encounter I had three years ago in the city of Urfa in Turkey. Urfa is an ancient city in eastern Anatolia with a long and distinguished past. The city is called “the city of the prophets,” connected with the figures of Abraham, Job, Shuayb (the Biblical Jethro), Salih, and Elisha and revered by people in that part of the world as the birthplace of Abraham. Busloads of pilgrims arrive daily from all parts of Turkey, Syria, and Iran to pay homage to Khalil, God’s intimate friend. As Edessa, the city was once one of the great early centers of Christianity in the Middle East, and later on, the center of the scientific and philosophical community of Sabaeans, who had so much influence on the subsequent development of Islamic thought. The modern city is especially fascinating for a foreign visitor like myself, for Urfa is the crossroads of three great Middle Eastern civilizations, and its population is approximately 1/3 Turkish, 1/3 Arab, and 1/3 Kurd.

In 2002, I was in Urfa giving some lectures on Christian theology to the students of Harran University’s Islamic theological faculty. One evening I was invited by some friends who belonged to the movement of Fethullah Gulen to a dinner that was to be held for some of the local businessmen who acted as benefactors of the movement. As it happened, the man I was sitting next to owned a plumbing supplies company. We were speaking of various things, and I mentioned that I spend quite a bit of time in Southeast Asia. He surprised me by asking, “Have you been to Cambodia?” I said, “Yes, it happens I was there last year for a Muslim-Christian meeting.” He said, quite simply, “I have a school in Kampong Cham.”

Actually, I know the Turkish school in Cambodia established by members of the Gülen community. It offers excellent education to Cambodian students irrespective of religion - there are a majority of Buddhists, but also many Muslims and a few Christians in the school - but I never expected to meet the principal donor who made the school possible in a plumbing supplies businessman from an ancient city of Eastern Anatolia. This is one of the positive effects of globalization. Fifty years ago, Urfa and Phnom Penh might as well have been on different planets. Today they have been linked through the efforts of this Islamic movement.

Since the events of September 11, Muslims have so often been featured in the news media in connection with violence and terrorism that it is important for us to remember that such dynamic and quickly-growing efforts such as the Gülen movement are providing an alternative face to the Muslim community and showing that what Islam actually teaches has to do with building peace, fellowship, tolerance, and worship, rather than with aggression and conflict.

I believe that to truly understand the Gülen movement, we have to know something about his predecessor, Said Nursi, who remains one of the most important Muslim thinkers of the 20^th Century. Nursi, born in a Kurdish-speaking region in the far Eastern part of Turkey in 1876, after an activist youth spent in the military and in local politics, eventually came to the conclusion that the needs of modern people did not admit either a military or political solution. He felt that real change in Muslim society would only occur when individual Muslims would undergo an inner transformation that came from studying the Qur’an. To help his disciples to attain that transformation, Nursi wrote a 6,600-page commentary on the Qur’an entitled the Risale-i Nur (the Message of Light).

Nursi lived in a time of conflict. However, the real enemies of Muslims, he concluded, were not one or another group of Christians but rather three oppressive forces: ignorance, poverty, and disunity. As early as 1911, he called for “Muslim-Christian unity” to combat these types of oppression. This challenge would later be taken up by Fethullas Gülen and those who make up the community of those inspired by his writing and preaching.

Said Nursi died in 1960. Fethullah Gülen, was born and educated in the city of Erzurum in eastern Anatolia in Turkey in 1938. He started out as a religion teacher and preacher in the mosques, first in Eastern Turkey and then in Izmir. In 1958, at the age of 20, Gülen came to know the writings of Said Nursi; although Gülen never met Nursi personally, he notes that Nursi’s writings had a formative influence upon his thinking.

Gülen became a teacher of Qur’an studies in the Mediterranean city of Izmir, and in that modern, cosmopolitan environment the movement associated with his name had its origins. In the 1970s, Gülen was lecturing in mosques, organizing summer camps, and erecting “lighthouses” (dormitories for student formation) and slowly began to build a community of religiously motivated students trained both in the Islamic and secular sciences. The importance that the lighthouses, residences (yurts), and study halls (dershanes) play to this day in the formation and cohesion of the movement must not be underestimated.

There is no catalogue listing such residences, but reliable estimates are in the tens of thousands. In these centers of formation, the students not only supplement their secular high school studies, prepare for university entrance examinations, and continue their university education, but they also form friendships and a network of social relations, and also receive spiritual training through the study of the Qur’an and the Risale-i Nur and pursue their educational goals in a social environment free from the use of alcohol, drugs, smoking, premarital sex, and violence.

The Gülen community gradually began to take on an identity and direction distinct from the Risale-i Nur movement. Whereas for Nursi the emphasis is on personal transformation through the study of the Qur’an, for the members of the Gülen community, the central idea is that of serving society by fighting ignorance through education, fighting social divisions through dialogue, and fighting poverty through development.

In the new social and economic climate that emerged in Turkey during the presidency of Turgut Özal in the 1980s, the Gülen movement grew from involving a small number of students in a few cities like Izmir to become a huge educational endeavor with important business and political links. Although stemming from a broadly-conceived religious motivation, the schools are not “Islamic” schools, but secular institutions of high quality, as shown by the performances of students in science olympiads and standardized comprehensive exams and proficiency tests. In the 1980s, the community moved beyond its schools into the media with the publication of a daily newspaper, Zaman, and a television channel, Samanyolu and now publishes over 35 publications ranging from popular newsmagazines to professional journals.

After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989, the Gülen community was a key player in reconstructing post-Soviet education. Hundreds of schools and universities were set up throughout the former Soviet republics, both within the Russian Federated Republic - particularly in its predominantly Muslim regions such as Tatarstan, Yakutia, and Chechnya -, in the newly independent nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and in the Balkans. The movement made television programs which were aired in the vast reaches of Central Asia, and they granted scholarships for study in Turkey.

The 21^st Century saw a further expansion of the educational activities of the Gülen community as it moved beyond the boundaries of Muslim-majority regions into China, Western Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. An important but not exclusive focus was the education of migrants from Turkey and other Muslim countries. Here the pedagogic approach adapted to local needs. In many parts of Western Europe, economic and bureaucratic obstacles prevent the movement from opening and supporting new schools and, moreover, in these regions, the movement usually encountered a high level of education. The educational task became not so much one of competing with the existing national school systems, but that of ensuring that immigrant Turks and others would have an adequate educational background to be able to compete and succeed in the government schools. Thus, in many parts of Western Europe, the Gülen community has focused on weekend classes and tutorials aimed at supplementing the instruction given in the state schools and at preparing for standardized exams.

In the schools associated with the movement in the United States, mainly located in areas with a high concentration of Turkish-Americans, the challenge has been to provide an opportunity for students to attain a high level of academic achievement. In fact, particularly in scientific fields, in states such as New Jersey and Texas, schools run by members of the Gülen movement have been among the most highly awarded schools in the state. These schools are not “Islamic schools” in that even though the inspiration for the schools is found in enlightened Islamic ideals, both the teaching and administrative staff and the student body are made up of the followers of other religions as well as of Muslims.

3. Kimse yokmu

4. Commitment to dialogue

The community inherited its commitment to interreligious dialogue and cooperation from the writings of Said Nursi, but this commitment has been renewed and given new impetus in the writings of Fethullah Gülen. In his speech in 1999 at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Capetown, Gülen presented an optimistic vision of interreligious harmony: “It is my conviction that in the future years, the new millennium will witness unprecedented religious blooming and the followers of world religions, such as Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and others, will walk hand-in-hand to build a promised bright future of the world.”

Already beginning in 1911 and repeatedly down to his death in 1963, Said Nursi called for “Muslim-Christian unity” to oppose godless tendencies in modern societies. While endorsing Nursi’s appeal, Gülen goes beyond Nursi’s view in two important respects. Firstly, dialogue and unity is not limited to “good Christians,” as Nursi had proposed, but is now to be extended to the conscientious followers of all religions. The prominent presence and active participation of Jewish as well as Christian representatives at the Abrahamic symposia sponsored by the movement Mardin show that the movement is serious in its readiness to dialogue and cooperate with all believers. Secondly, the motivation for this dialogue is not simply a strategic alliance to oppose atheistic and secularizing tendencies in modern life, but is called for by the nature of Islamic belief itself.

The goal of dialogue among world religions is not simply to destroy scientific materialism and the materialistic world view that has caused such harm. Rather, the very nature of religion demands this dialogue. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even Hinduism and 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. (Gülen, Capetown, 1999, p. 14).

To further its pursuits of interreligious dialogue, the Gülen movement has created the Intercultural Dialogue Platform as a project of the movement’s Istanbul-based Writers and Journalists Foundation. The IDP has been particularly active in sponsoring and organizing “Abrahamic” dialogues with high-ranking representatives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Gülen movement also organizes associations for the promotion of interreligious activities at the local and regional level, such as the Cosmicus Foundation in the Netherlands, the Australian Intercultural Society in Melbourne, the Friede-Institut für Dialogue in Vienna, the Interfaith Dialog Center of Patterson, New Jersey, Houston’s Institute of Interfaith Dialog, and the Niagara Foundation of Chicago, and, here in southern California, the Pacifica Institute, all of which take independent initiatives toward promoting interreligious understanding and cooperation.

I will conclude with a final story, which I believe illustrates the theme given me this evening. The city of Zamboanga, at the tip of the southernmost peninsula on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, is about 50% Christian and 50 Muslim. In recent years, it has been the scene of intermittent fighting, snipers, kidnapping, and bloodshed caused sometimes by the rebels, sometimes by bandits, and at other times, by the military. Thus the traveler who takes the narrow road out of Zamboanga and up the coast can be excused for being a bit nervous, looking out the window for any possible trouble. After about ten miles, the car turns a corner and you are confronted with a large sign, reading: “Welcome to the Filipino-Turkish School of Tolerance,” and the traveler entering the compound discovers a little island of peace, tolerance, and excellent education, as Muslim and Christian teachers together conduct high-quality education for over a thousand Muslim and Christian children. This, to me, is an excellent example of our theme, “the contribution of interreligious dialogue to the building of peace.”

I have been working with Muslims throughout the Middle East, Europe, and southeast Asia for most of my life and I have encountered many groups of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and others who are sincerely working to build peace at the local, national, and interreligious levels. Sometimes they succeed in their efforts, sometimes they fail, but the struggle for peace is an effort based on hope that we have in common for future generations.

Source:
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