By Ehsan Masood
Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time
enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover, can
you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?
Fethullah Gülen, a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and
theoretician, has dedicated much of his life to resolving these
questions. From his sick bed in exile just outside Philadelphia, he
leads a global movement inspired by Sufi ideas. He promotes an open
brand of Islamic thought and, like the Iran-born Islamic philosophers
Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush, he is preoccupied with
modern science (he publishes an English-language science magazine called
the Fountain). But Gülen, unlike these western-trained Iranians, has
spent most of his life within the religious and political institutions
of Turkey, a Muslim country, albeit a secular one since the foundation
of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s republic after the first world war.
Unusually for a pious intellectual, he and his movement are at home
with technology, markets and multinational business, and especially with
modern communications and public relations—which, like a modern
televangelist, he uses to attract converts. Like a western celebrity, he
carefully manages his public exposure—mostly by restricting interviews
to those he can trust.
