The Way of Dialogue and the Gulen Movement

⁰ For many in the West, it was their first encounter with Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Confucians, Taoists and many other religious traditions of the East. Notable for their absence were the native traditions of North America and Muslims from abroad (There were two American Muslims in attendance.) It was a remarkable event, with Swami Vivekananda, who would later found the first Vedanta societies in the West, as one of its major stars. At its conclusion, Vivikenanda remarked that “if the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: it has proved to the world that holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possession of any religion in the world, and that every system (faith) has produced men and women of the most exalted character.” It was an event that the American historian of Christianity, Philip Schaff, would see as inaugurating “a new epoch in the history of religions.”
In contrast, as the nineteenth gave way to the twentieth century, there were those in America who believed that this would be the Christian century.⁰ But neither prediction was prescient. Only the Ramakrishna Mission that Vivekananda established in India remembered the World’s Parliament of Religion. I was surprised on visiting the Ramakrishna Mission bookshop in Mysore in 2008 to discover a half-dozen titles on Swami Vivkekanda and the Parliament of Religions for sale. The rest of the world would be swept up in the events of the 20^th century, forgetting the promise of the World’s Parliament of Religions.
Instead, the 20^th century brought us an unprecedented century of global conflict: two world wars and European colonialism that circled the globe. It also brought unprecedented scientific, industrial, technological and social change. In 1959, the Soviet Union landed the first space craft, Luna 2, on the moon; and a decade later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong became the first human being to step on its surface. These remarkable achievements made ours the first generation to see the earth as it had never been seen before: from outside. We were able to look back at this wondrous blue/green planet in a boundless blue/black space. We saw our planet as one. But did we gain a new consciousness of ourselves?
Introduction
My purpose here is to do three things. First, to look at our century of two global conflicts as a tragic source, along with the end of European colonialism as a second source, for one of the most remarkable developments of the post-WW II era: the emergence of the dialogue of religions, the encounter and meeting of men and women from the world’s faiths across the globe. Secondly, I want to chart some of the features of this new Way of Dialogue that promises to redress relations between our traditions of religious and spiritual life. And thirdly, I want to look at the Gulen movement in the context of this new Way of Dialogue.
Global Conflict
I turn first to the two global conflicts. The First World War was also known as the Great War and the War to end all Wars. It began as a conflict between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France, Great Britain, and the Russian Empire. Much of the war was a prolonged battle along the Western Front in France. At Verdun, the trench warfare went on for years, with one side, then the other, gaining and losing a yard or two of land. But men died by the hundreds of thousands. When the War concluded in 1918, it had drawn in other countries including the Ottoman Empire on the German/Austrian side and the United States on the Allied side. More than 15 million were dead. The War extended into Africa, the Middle East, India and as far as the Pacific Islands (German Samoa) and China (the German Port City of Quingdao).
I remember visiting a WW I cemetery in France and being surprised to see, among all the crosses, the crescent moon. When I got closer, I realized they were markers for the Algerian Muslims who had fought and died. There were also many Indians and Africans from the British colonies who died in the war, as well as Muslims from the Ottoman Empire. The end of the war meant the dismembering of the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Much of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East became Protectorates under the British (Palestine) and the French (Syria), but the modern secular Republic of Turkey under Kemal Ataturk also emerged in 1923.
Although the “War to End all Wars” was concluded in 1918, it was only 21 years later that WW II began, when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. When the costliest war in the history of humanity ended in 1945, more than 50 million people were dead. It had come to an end in Europe when the Allies – Soviet, American, British, and French forces – converged on Berlin and Hitler, the architect of the Third Reich, took his own life. It came to an end in Japan after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – obliterating the city and its population in an instant – and then on Nagasaki. Even more than WWI, this was a global conflict spanning the globe and involving men and women from all parts of our common planet.
The end of the war also brought to light the horror of the Holocaust/Shoah, the murder of 70 percent of the European Jewish community. It also spelled the end of the colonial era as peoples around the world began to regain their independence after centuries of colonial domination by European powers.
The end of the war also meant for many people in the Christian world a painful period of self-examination as they plumbed the ways that the Christian traditions had contributed to these horrendous events.
At the end of World War II, there was only one or two international organizations dedicated to what we would now call interreligious or interfaith encounter and dialogue : the World Congress of Faiths in Great Britain and the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the USA and Europe. But that was all about to change.
Taking Stock: Christian Self-Examination
For many Christians and Churches in the West, the end of WW II and the revelation of the Holocaust led to painful self-examination. Were the Christian traditions, with their deeply entrenched anti-Semitism, part of what made the horror of the Shoah possible?
Lutheran Christians wondered how this could have happened in the land of Martin Luther and the great traditions of thought and music (Bach, et. al). As one who had been raised in the Lutheran tradition, I was appalled to discover while at college that Luther had written a treatise in 1543 “On the Jews and their Lies” that urged the “burning of synagogues and schools,” the “razing of Jewish homes,” and the “confiscation and destruction of all Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writing,” etc. Twenty years earlier he had written another treatise entitled “That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew” where he condemned the “inhuman” treatment that Jews had received at the hands of Christians, urged humane treatment and reminded his readers that “we (Christians) are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ.” And even earlier, he had urged that anyone not acknowledging Jesus’ Jewishness be considered a “heretic.” What had happened to Luther’s earlier views? Had his later these attitudes towards the Jews permeated the Lutheran traditions?
It wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s and later that national Lutheran Churches in Europe and North America publically “rejected the violent invective” of Luther’s 1543 Treatise, “painfully” acknowledged their anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and pledged their “love and respect for Jewish people.” (See 1994 ELC Statement)
Catholics too wondered about the role of the papacy and the 1933 Concordat between the Vatican and Germany that had granted freedom to the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. In the eyes of many, the agreement had done much to legitimize to the world the new Nazi government. However, the papal encyclical “With Burning Anxiety” (Mit Brennenden Sorge) of 1937 had documented Nazi violations of the Concordat, condemned the paganism of the ideology of National Socialism and rejected the myth of race and blood. Throughout the War, there were Catholics who supported the Nazis and their murder of Jewish people, as well as those who risked their lives on behalf of the Jews.
In the 1980s, I was teaching a course on Religion and Literature that included Elie Wiesel’s Night ⁰ on the reading list. Towards the end of our discussion one evening, one of my students, a Jewish woman in her early 50s, told her story. Her parents, fearing for their lives and the lives of their children, had given her to a Polish Catholic family in the early 1940s. That family had raised her as their own. It wasn’t until 1947 that an older brother had returned for her. They eventually emigrated to Israel, and years later, she married and emigrated to Canada. Her Polish stepparents were later recognized as “Righteous Gentiles” in the Holocaust Museum in Israel. There were many heroic figures, both Protestant and Catholic, who risked their lives on behalf of Jews during the War.
Nevertheless, it was clear to many in the Christian world that the anti-Semitism within Christianity must be addressed. There were individual efforts in this direction immediately following the War. It led to the establishment of Jewish-Christian groups such as the Canadian Congress of Christians and Jews in 1947. There was a growing conviction that new and mutually respectful relations between Christians and Jews must be established.

However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the matter of Jewish-Christian relations was officially addressed by the Catholic and Protestant/Orthodox worlds. This happened first at the 2^nd Vatican Council (1962-65) of the Roman Catholic Church in Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. It had begun as a document addressing the church’s relation to the Jews but was expanded to address other religions as well.

Nostra Aetate opens with these words:
“In our times, when every day men are being drawn closer together, and the ties between various peoples are being multiplied, the Church is giving deeper study in her relationship with non-Christian religions.”
It then continues, “All peoples comprise a single community, and have a single origin, since God made the whole race of men dwell over the entire face of the earth.” It mentions Hinduism, where human beings “contemplate the divine mystery,” and Buddhism that “teaches a path” whereby human beings can “attain supreme enlightenment.” It “looks with esteem” on Muslims, for “they adore one God…Maker of heaven and earth,” and notes that other religions “strive to answer the restless searchings of the human heart.” It concludes this section by saying that “the Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions,” “looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life” and calls for “dialogue and collaboration.”⁰
The document had originally been intended to address the Church’s relationship to the Jewish traditions but was expanded as to include other religions. However, the relationship of the Church to the Jewish traditions is addressed. The document notes the “spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews,” recommends “mutual understanding and respect,” “repudiates…anti-Semitism directed against the Jews,” and affirms God’s covenant with the people of Israel. This document was of immense importance in the Catholic world and initiated a new way in the relations of people of faith.
The New Way of Dialogue
Vatican II was an event of enormous significance in the Catholic world, half of the world’s Christian population. It opened the way to new relations between Catholics and peoples of other traditions. The new Secretariat for Relations with the Non-Christian Religions was set up in the Vatican and initiated meetings with people of different faith communities. The new watchword for relations with the non-Christian religions was “dialogue and co-operation.” This was the first note of the new beginning.
Three years later, in 1968, the World Council of Churches (WCC) announced at its meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, that it was establishing a Unit on “Dialogue with Living Faiths and Ideologies.” The WCC is a fellowship of 349 Churches – Protestant, Orthodox, and Independent – representing nearly 30 percent of the Christian world. It immediately began to organize conferences with Muslims, Marxists, Buddhists, Hindus, and other traditions. Sometimes these were bi-lateral meetings (Christians and Muslims); sometimes they were multi-lateral meetings involving people from several traditions. The WCC’s “Guidelines on Dialogue with Living Faiths and Ideologies” emphasized the importance of acknowledging the right of every faith community to define itself and encouraged deep listening on the part of Christians. It emphasized (1) “dialogue in community” that aims at understanding the other, (2) that dialogue events should be planned together, i.e., not simply by one community with another but by both communities together, and that (3) partners in dialogue must be free to define themselves.⁰ These became marks of the new way of dialogue.
Something new was happening.
Over the past 64 years, we have seen the emergence of new ways of meeting and encountering one another across the boundaries of our different faiths and ways of being religious.
Equally significant with these official initiatives were the lay initiatives emerging across the globe. In the 1950s, the World Conference on Religion and Peace would be founded along with the Temple of Understanding. And following the 1960s, there was a virtual explosion of interfaith initiatives and organizations. In the 1980s, Dr. Francis Clark of the UK published an Interfaith Directory that included more than 700 organizations around the world dedicated to interfaith activity. Clark acknowledged that his listing was not exhaustive.⁰
A new day in the history of the relations between people of different faiths was dawning.
The Emergence of the Way of Dialogue Part II
Thus far we have focused on the Christian and Western world. We want also to acknowledge some things that were happening in the newly decolonized world of India, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
The end of World War II was also the beginning of the end of European colonialism. When the Japanese surrendered in Indonesia in 1945, Sukarno asserted independence for Indonesia from the Dutch. Out of these events would emerge the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. In the Middle East, there was also an awakening of the Muslim world as it contended with its colonial past and struggled to find its own independent way. Already at the end of the 19^th century, figures like Jamal al-Din Afghani and Muhammad Abduh were seeking to come to grips with the modern world, but it wasn’t until the late 20^th century that dialogue began to emerge as an important aspiration of the Muslim world. WWI had left the Middle East fractured, with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states and protectorates in the region. Following WWII, the UN sought to create two new states in Palestine, one Jewish, the other Palestinian. In 1948, the new State of Israel was proclaimed, and more than 750,000 Palestinians, Muslim, Christian and Druze were expelled from their homeland. It has been a source of continuing conflict.
Across Africa, there was a growing cry for independence from colonial powers. And in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the countries of Africa gained their independence but now along boundaries and lines that had been created by the colonial powers. Algeria went through a protracted conflict with France to achieve its independence; in other cases, the process was less conflictual. Many African nations are still struggling to find their way.
In India, the nearly century-old struggle for independence was finally successful when in 1947, India achieved independence. But this was a bitter success for Mahatma Gandhi, since India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. In Gandhi’s own ashrams – he considered them social experiments – he had promoted cross-caste (and non-caste), cross-cultural, and cross-religious understanding. His ashrams always included people of different castes, Harijans (“Children of God,” Gandhi’s name for untouchables) and different religions (Hindus, Muslims, Jains, & Christians), and they honoured one another’s festivals and ways. During Ramadan, for example, everyone kept the fast. While Gandhi’s ashram-as-social-experiment left a legacy that continues across India, it did not transform the wider society, where conflict among the different traditions remained the norm.
In China, Mao proclaimed a new day in 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, but it was a new beginning that was deeply hostile to the religious traditions of China and the Buddhism of Tibet. The latter became clear when the PRC invaded Tibet. After a decade, HH the Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India along with 70,000 other Tibetans.
One of the early post-WW II Muslim pioneers in dialogue was Inamullah Khan (1912-1997), who was the Secretary-General of the World Muslim Congress from its founding in 1949 until his death. Inamullah Khan’s family was from India, but he was born in Rangoon, Burma, and immigrated to Pakistan in 1948. As the Secretary-General of the Congress, he worked to promote interreligious understanding among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, though there were Jewish groups that questioned his credentials when he was nominated for the Templeton Prize in 1988.
In the post-WWII era, the new way of dialogue has become a global phenomenon. It touches all areas of our common planet and peoples of all faiths. It is in this context that we now turn to the Gulen movement.
The Way of Dialogue and The Gulen Movement
I must admit that I am still learning about the Gulen Movement. I now realize that a splendid conference on “The Children of Abraham” that I attended in 2000 was initiated by the “Journalists and Writers Foundation,” part of the Gulen Movement. It was held in Sanliurfa/Harran and Istanbul, bringing together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders and scholars from around the world. It was a remarkable event that opened in the ruins of an ancient church in Harran, the place of Abraham, and concluded in Istanbul. A volume emerged from the Conference entitled Hazret-I Ibrahim’in Izinde, with all the contributions translated into Turkish.⁰
But this was a late development in the story that surrounds M. Fethullah Gulen (1941-), who came from Eastern Turkey and was the son of a local government official. He was educated at home and in the local madrassa, or Islamic school. Even then, he often chafed to know more about what was happening in the wider society and the world beyond traditional Islamic sciences. When he was only nineteen, he was licensed to preach in Edirne in Western Turkey. In his early twenties, he was an Official Imam of the Department of Religious Affairs. But it was in the mosque and its oral culture that he was nurtured and shaped. It brought him into contact with the people as he urged them to take up their responsibilities as Muslims for society and the world. He was a gifted and fervent preacher. He later moved to Izmir in the 1960s, a far more cosmopolitan city than his home region of Eastern Turkey. It was here that he began to focus much of his attention on schools. Rather than building mosques and establishing Quran courses, he began to recommend, according to Enes Eugene, “building schools based on modern science and morality.”
Initially a follower of Said Nursi (1878-1960), he went his own way in the 1970s. In 1976 he established the Bozyaka Boarding Centre in Izmir that accepted and supported bright students who didn’t have the necessary finances to pursue higher education. While attending government schools, the students also had educational programs at the Bozyaka. His popularity as a preacher in the mosque had continually grown – some see him as having revived the oral culture of the mosque – and he began to publish books, such as his two volumes on the Prophet Muhammad, entitled The Infinite Light,⁰ and popular works such as Questions This Modern Age Puts to Islam. He has produced more than thirty volumes.
He encouraged his students to establish new schools, and by the early 1980s, a movement had grown up around Gulen and his teaching. Enes Ergene argues that Gulen’s “mission has been to illustrate that religion and traditional cultural values…and scientific facts…do not contradict one another. On the contrary they support one another and they can be put to the service of humankind in genuine harmony.”
Turkey has gone through a tumultuous history in the 20^th century. The end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the secular Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) (later Ataturk) as its first President had put Turkey on a different course. Ataturk sought to secularize the country and severely curtail Muslim influence. Gulen had been born in the 1940s, and single party rule was ended in 1945. The next decades saw considerable turmoil in Turkish politics and social life. Gulen was seen as holding to a moderate Sunni/Hanafi Islam, but he sought to chart a “new way of proceeding,” one that “held firm to traditional values, acknowledged the great heritage of Islam and yet embraced new social and scientific values.”
In the 1980s, Fethullah Gulen continued to encourage his followers to establish schools but added the establishment of news facilities as a new initiative. The result was the establishment of newspapers, magazines, a television channel, and journals that had as their common message “No to polarization, conflicts, and enmity.” As Adbullah Aymaz reports, this new initiative sought to address the divisive issues of Turkish life – Turk vs. Kurd, Sunni vs. Aleve, Religion vs. Secular, Left vs. Right, Muslim vs. non-Muslim – and find ways to overcome divisiveness. Gulen did not hold any direct position in these new initiatives, but he was the acknowledged inspiration for them.
In the 1990s, Fethullah Gulen became the first imam in Turkey to meet regularly with the Orthodox Patriarch and the Chief Rabbi in Turkey. It was now that Gulen embraced the new Way of Dialogue that had been emerging in the post-WW II era. He would also meet Pope John Paul II and the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Eliyah Bakshi-Doran. In 1998, Gulen initiated the “Abant Meetings” that brought together scientists from different fields and intellectuals with a variety of cultural, political, and ideological backgrounds to “develop a new scientific and intellectual plan of action for the future.” These are annual events and have dealt with topics like “Religion, State, & Society,” “Pluralism and Societal Reconciliation,” “Globalization,” and “The Republic, Cultural Pluralism and Europe.”
All these activities have generated a certain amount of controversy. Some conservative Muslim opponents criticize his openness towards modern science and other religions, while some Turkish secularists criticize his adherence to traditional values and Islam. The political Right finds him too liberal while the Left finds him too conservative. Others see the Gulen movement as a potential political threat while still others criticize it for being apolitical. And so it goes….. In 1998, Gulen took up residence in the USA. The motivation for this move is still unclear to me.
An open investigation of the Gulen movement should lead us to see that it is a movement that seeks to contribute to the common good through dialogue, education, and the media. That it sometimes fails is to be expected, but that it also sometimes succeeds is remarkable. Gulen has remarked that “the most blessed of all people is the one who benefits other people.” Surely, that aspiration is one to applaud.

Some Tentative Final Thoughts
The post-WW II Way of Dialogue is a crucial development of immense importance for today and tomorrow. It promises to inaugurate a new direction in the history of relations between people of diverse religious communities. One of the great dangers to the movement is the tendency among the opponents of the Way of Dialogue is to politicize every act of dialogue, to turn it into an act either for or against someone’s political agenda. But the Way of Dialogue seeks to move beyond the political divisions of our time. Nor is the Way of Dialogue a search for some lowest common denominator between religions. Rather, it seeks to build new relations between human beings, relations based on mutual respect and a respect for differences. The Way of Dialogue is still in its early stages, and the Gulen Movement deserves to be seen as an important Muslim voice in that global movement.

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