This article appeared on Fethullah Gulen's official web site and numerous other ezines. It was written by Rumi Forum's President, Emre Celik
-------
I
had the privilege of traveling to Africa recently. It was somewhat a whirlwind tour of 4 countries - South Africa, Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Kenya and Ethiopia. It was full of many surprises. I hope to share some of my thoughts and feelings over the course some words in this article.
The purpose of this journey was to discover and note the Hizmet activities (commonly referred to as the Gülen Movement in academic circles). For the uninitiated, Hizmet is a loosely connected group of individuals and NGOs inspired by the ideas and ideals of Fethullah Gülen - a Turkish Muslim scholar and thinker. The movement's activities span some 140 or so countries occupying an important place in the field of education, intercultural dialogue, health and relief activities. The main emphasis is a selfless approach to serving all others while personally gaining God's pleasure.
During my visit to Horizon International School in Johannesburg, which is privately funded, I met one of the teachers. He was a local young man who happened to also be a graduate of the same school to which he was now a teacher. His warm smile gleamed over his humble demeanor. He took me on a tour of the school. Many doors and windows were reinforced - unfortunately robbery was one of the common crimes in the area. Only the week before some new televisions were stolen. Like his peers this teacher was dedicated to his teaching, being a role model for each of his students - as were his teachers who only were teaching him a few years previously - now those same teachers were his colleagues. He had a great deal of respect for this school. It had taken him out of the slums of Soweto. Even more miraculous was his own personal family story.
He was kind enough to invite us to his home - now out of the slums. His mother was a pastor of a local 500 member Protestant church. What stood out in this household was the story of his missing siblings. He had fours brother. The two older were now in prison for murders, having received 40 year prison sentences. The two younger, (a sad irony) had been killed in gang fighting. He was the success story in the family. His mother, protective of her son, was the proudest mother in the neighbourhood. And pleased to have her son associated with and teaching at this Hizmet school.
The essence of these schools is typified in the above story. Taking individuals and their associated families and being a catalyst for them to shine - to remove the despair of the communities they belong to and the gruesome social conditions they may find themselves in. The school communities that are formed do not only play a positive role in the lives of its students, but as part of the wider school family touch the lives of students’ families, their relatives and friends and the neighbourhoods from which they come. Such Hizmet schools - and it’s becomes quite fitting and appropriate that the movement calls itself hizmet meaning ‘service’ - become beacons of hope as graduates play a role in giving something back through service. This can come in the form of volunteering time, financial support - or those that are so moved by the teaching vocation, come back to teach at the school.
The ripple effect these schools have is tremendous. They provide a safe haven, a kind of ‘peace island’ - a term coined by Gülen - for all those associated with the school. Those not directly associated with the school take comfort in knowing the school is a role model for other educational institutions. And just as important they show-case that no matter how adverse the conditions are that stories like the one above are possible and with time probable and expected. Given the conditions, the teachers of these hizmet schools have outdone themselves,. They should be proud of their achievements but yet resilient to the excesses of immodesty. Such success breeds success and in an area that can be barrain of ‘good news’ this school stands out and needs to be applauded.
And the moral to the story? These schools are doing fantastics things in many remote places under very difficult circumstances servicing students and families that are also in great need. And this and other stories need to be both understood and told.
Kudos to them!
Emre Çelik is an Australian based in Washington DC and President of the Rumi Forum.
Showing posts with label kimse yokmu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kimse yokmu. Show all posts
Friday, November 23, 2012
Thursday, January 27, 2011
TV - PBS 'Religion & Ethics' : The Gulen Movement aired on US public television last Sunday
PBS's 'Religion and Ethics' aired a program that discussed the Rumi Forum's Honorary President, Fethullah Gulen and the movement based around his ideas last Sunday on January 23, 2011. Below is the program and some quotes.
Some quotes from the television program:
PROFESSOR HELEN EBAUGH (Dept. of Sociology, University of Houston; Author of “The Gülen Movement”): When Fethullah Gülen began preaching in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Turkey, his message was we don’t need more madrassas. We need schools that would promote science and math and secular subjects, and his contention was that one can be modern and one can be scientific and still be a good Muslim....
WILLIAM MARTIN (Senior Fellow, James Baker Institute at Rice University): I think it’s fair to say that Islam has had difficulty in coming to terms with modernity, and in that I think that the Gülen movement offers a much more positive picture of what Islam can be....
MARTIN: Gülen has always emphasized education, and that really lies at the core of this movement. To be a good Muslim meant to be well educated, and to be a good Muslim who participated in modernity meant to be conversant and well educated in science, math, and technology....
SEVERSON: Kimse Yok Mu and in the US Helping Hands contribute millions of dollars in humanitarian aid each year. Professor Ebaugh says in Turkey Gülen urged businessmen to grow their businesses and give a part of their earnings, as much as a third, to support humanitarian aid and education....[CONTINUES]
Full transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-21-2011/the-glen-movement/7949/
Some quotes from the television program:
PROFESSOR HELEN EBAUGH (Dept. of Sociology, University of Houston; Author of “The Gülen Movement”): When Fethullah Gülen began preaching in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Turkey, his message was we don’t need more madrassas. We need schools that would promote science and math and secular subjects, and his contention was that one can be modern and one can be scientific and still be a good Muslim....
WILLIAM MARTIN (Senior Fellow, James Baker Institute at Rice University): I think it’s fair to say that Islam has had difficulty in coming to terms with modernity, and in that I think that the Gülen movement offers a much more positive picture of what Islam can be....
MARTIN: Gülen has always emphasized education, and that really lies at the core of this movement. To be a good Muslim meant to be well educated, and to be a good Muslim who participated in modernity meant to be conversant and well educated in science, math, and technology....
SEVERSON: Kimse Yok Mu and in the US Helping Hands contribute millions of dollars in humanitarian aid each year. Professor Ebaugh says in Turkey Gülen urged businessmen to grow their businesses and give a part of their earnings, as much as a third, to support humanitarian aid and education....[CONTINUES]
Full transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-21-2011/the-glen-movement/7949/
SEE ALSO :
- Press & Media - Washington Post, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Prospect, PBS TV, NPR Radio, The Age, Forbes, LA Times, Reuters
- The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue by Fethullah Gulen
- A Movement Originating Its Own Models by Fethullah Gulen
- Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi by Fethullah Gulen
- BOOKS by Fethullah Gulen and on the Gulen Movemen
- PBS 'Religion & Ethics' : The Gulen Movement aired on US public television last Sunday
- Honorary President (F.Gulen) commended by resolution passed by Texas Senate
- Gülen movement challenges Islamophobia, contributes to peace
- Fethullah Gulen: Following in the Footsteps of Rumi by Thomas Michel
- 'Gülen movement makes Turkey more noticeable'
- Greek broadcaster praises contributions of Gülen movement
- Civic engagement, success and the Gülen movement
- VIDEO - Peace Through Education and Dialogue
Friday, December 31, 2010
MEDIA - The New Republic: The Global Imam
The New Republic recently published a feature article by Suzy Hansen titled The Global Imam on Rumi Forum's Honorary President, Fethullah Gulen. Excerpts are below:
The Global Imam
by Suzy Hansen, The New Republic December 2, 2010
THE LEADER OF what is arguably the world’s most successful Islamic movement lives in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg, at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, otherwise known as “the Camp.” The Camp consists of a series of houses, a community center, a pond, and some tranquil, woodsy space for strolling. From this Poconos enclave--which resembles a resort more than the headquarters of a worldwide religious, social, and political movement--Fethullah Gülen, a 69-year-old Turkish bachelor with a white moustache, wide nose, and gentle, sad expression, leads perhaps five million followers who, in his spirit if not his name, operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and media organs around the globe.
Last spring, I visited the center and was warmly shepherded around by Bekir Aksoy, the president of the Camp. Just past a checkpoint, a portly Turkish man in a “Sopranos”-esque tracksuit was stretching, preparing for a jog. Along a road leading to the pond, we encountered a group composed mostly of Turkish men who had come from Japan to see Hocaefendi, as Gülen is respectfully called by his followers; they had been escorted onto the premises by a Columbia University student in a white Mercedes. The guest of honor for the day was a professor from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was fishing for trout...
...Gülen’s views are moderate and modern. He is fiercely opposed to violence and enthusiastic about science. According to Gülen, “avoiding the physical sciences due to the fear that they will lead to heresy is childish.” He is emphatically not a radical Islamist. “The lesser jihad is our active fulfillment of Islam’s commands and duties,” he has written, and “the greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego’s destructive and negative emotions and thoughts ... which prevent us from attaining perfection.” ....... His followers run nonprofit organizations that promote peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue, and Gülenist businessmen devote their resources to building secular schools.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gülen has many admirers in the West. “It’s a civic movement,” says Islam scholar John Esposito, one of many American academics who praise the Gülenists. “It’s an alternative elite within Turkish society, as in many Muslim societies, that can be modern, educated, and successful, but also religiously minded.” Particularly after September 11, Gülen’s movement had a lot of appeal in the United States, which was suddenly desperate for “good Muslims.” “It was 2003, two years after 9/11; we were just in the beginning of the Iraq war, and here’s this ecumenical Muslim movement that seems to be open to modernity and science and is focused on education,” said one senior U.S. government official who has had dealings with Gülenists. “It seemed almost too good to be true.”...
With the help of Turkish businessmen, Gülen began building dorms, or “lighthouses.” At the time, Turkey was urbanizing at a breakneck pace. Country kids often floundered, socially and financially, when they moved to the big cities. The “lighthouses” provided a religious community for these young people, one that offered help with academics and didn’t, say, watch porn or get carried away with leftist causes.
Within these safe havens, the Gülen movement introduced the pious to the possibilities of modern life. “My father was a teacher in a primary school. His father was a stonecutter,” says Kerim Balcı, a journalist who works for the newspaper Zaman, which is owned by Gülenists and claims to have the largest readership in Turkey. “And here I am a Ph.D. student, columnist, and academician probably earning my father’s yearly salary in a month.” Balcı’s life story--he hails from the small Black Sea city of Samsun, yet went on to receive his master’s from a university in Israel and is working toward his Ph.D. from Durham University in Britain--echoes the trajectory of many middle-aged Gülen followers from conservative families. The Turkish state had been founded on the notion that modernity meant rejection of religion--and, for a long time, it was dominated by a military and a political class that enforced this ideal, sometimes harshly. Gülen suggested there was an alternative path. “It may be possible to be both religious and a TV commentator,” Balcı says....
....Even as the movement has sprouted numerous organizations and companies, the schools have remained at the center of the Gülen orbit. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gülen dispatched his students to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where he rightly suspected that they might find some post-communist youths in need of religion. But it is not just Central Asia that hosts Gülen schools. They also exist in far-flung Muslim countries like Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as mostly non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan. In total, according to Ebaugh, Gülenists operate over 1,000 explicitly secular schools and universities in more than 100 countries. They emphasize science and technology, teach the Turkish language, and, by many accounts, are very good schools. Gülenist businessmen build these institutions and sponsor scholarships to them. Whenever you ask who’s funding anything, Gülenists reply “a group of Turkish businessmen,” “a Turkish businessman,” “a Turkish-American businessman,” or “our Turkish friends.”
When I recently visited Afghanistan, I was surprised to learn that Turks had been operating schools there since the ’90s, even during the Taliban era. They currently have schools not just in Kabul, but in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Shebhergan, and Kandahar. Behind the lovely painted-pink school in Kabul were dorms where kids from all over the country sat outside, some of them eager to say hello in English. Every Afghan I spoke to in Kabul, from politicians to cooks, told me that “the Turkish school” was the best in the city. As we left the premises, the teachers gave my Afghan translator some books by Fethullah Gülen....[continues]
SUGGESTED MEDIA LINKS on FETHULLAH GULEN
http://rumiforum.blogspot.com/2010/09/rumi-forum-suggested-links-has-been.html
SEE ALSO BELOW ARTICLES BY FETHULLAH GULEN
The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue
A Movement Originating Its Own Models
Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi
Sufism And Its Origins
FULL ARTICLE TEXT:http://fethullah-gulen.idcnj.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=207:the-global-imam&catid=83:op-eds&Itemid=199
ORIGINAL SOURCE:http://www.tnr.com/article/world/magazine/79062/global-turkey-imam-fethullah-gulen
by Suzy Hansen, The New Republic December 2, 2010
THE LEADER OF what is arguably the world’s most successful Islamic movement lives in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg, at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, otherwise known as “the Camp.” The Camp consists of a series of houses, a community center, a pond, and some tranquil, woodsy space for strolling. From this Poconos enclave--which resembles a resort more than the headquarters of a worldwide religious, social, and political movement--Fethullah Gülen, a 69-year-old Turkish bachelor with a white moustache, wide nose, and gentle, sad expression, leads perhaps five million followers who, in his spirit if not his name, operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and media organs around the globe.
Last spring, I visited the center and was warmly shepherded around by Bekir Aksoy, the president of the Camp. Just past a checkpoint, a portly Turkish man in a “Sopranos”-esque tracksuit was stretching, preparing for a jog. Along a road leading to the pond, we encountered a group composed mostly of Turkish men who had come from Japan to see Hocaefendi, as Gülen is respectfully called by his followers; they had been escorted onto the premises by a Columbia University student in a white Mercedes. The guest of honor for the day was a professor from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was fishing for trout...
...Gülen’s views are moderate and modern. He is fiercely opposed to violence and enthusiastic about science. According to Gülen, “avoiding the physical sciences due to the fear that they will lead to heresy is childish.” He is emphatically not a radical Islamist. “The lesser jihad is our active fulfillment of Islam’s commands and duties,” he has written, and “the greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego’s destructive and negative emotions and thoughts ... which prevent us from attaining perfection.” ....... His followers run nonprofit organizations that promote peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue, and Gülenist businessmen devote their resources to building secular schools.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gülen has many admirers in the West. “It’s a civic movement,” says Islam scholar John Esposito, one of many American academics who praise the Gülenists. “It’s an alternative elite within Turkish society, as in many Muslim societies, that can be modern, educated, and successful, but also religiously minded.” Particularly after September 11, Gülen’s movement had a lot of appeal in the United States, which was suddenly desperate for “good Muslims.” “It was 2003, two years after 9/11; we were just in the beginning of the Iraq war, and here’s this ecumenical Muslim movement that seems to be open to modernity and science and is focused on education,” said one senior U.S. government official who has had dealings with Gülenists. “It seemed almost too good to be true.”...
With the help of Turkish businessmen, Gülen began building dorms, or “lighthouses.” At the time, Turkey was urbanizing at a breakneck pace. Country kids often floundered, socially and financially, when they moved to the big cities. The “lighthouses” provided a religious community for these young people, one that offered help with academics and didn’t, say, watch porn or get carried away with leftist causes.
Within these safe havens, the Gülen movement introduced the pious to the possibilities of modern life. “My father was a teacher in a primary school. His father was a stonecutter,” says Kerim Balcı, a journalist who works for the newspaper Zaman, which is owned by Gülenists and claims to have the largest readership in Turkey. “And here I am a Ph.D. student, columnist, and academician probably earning my father’s yearly salary in a month.” Balcı’s life story--he hails from the small Black Sea city of Samsun, yet went on to receive his master’s from a university in Israel and is working toward his Ph.D. from Durham University in Britain--echoes the trajectory of many middle-aged Gülen followers from conservative families. The Turkish state had been founded on the notion that modernity meant rejection of religion--and, for a long time, it was dominated by a military and a political class that enforced this ideal, sometimes harshly. Gülen suggested there was an alternative path. “It may be possible to be both religious and a TV commentator,” Balcı says....
....Even as the movement has sprouted numerous organizations and companies, the schools have remained at the center of the Gülen orbit. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gülen dispatched his students to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where he rightly suspected that they might find some post-communist youths in need of religion. But it is not just Central Asia that hosts Gülen schools. They also exist in far-flung Muslim countries like Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as mostly non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan. In total, according to Ebaugh, Gülenists operate over 1,000 explicitly secular schools and universities in more than 100 countries. They emphasize science and technology, teach the Turkish language, and, by many accounts, are very good schools. Gülenist businessmen build these institutions and sponsor scholarships to them. Whenever you ask who’s funding anything, Gülenists reply “a group of Turkish businessmen,” “a Turkish businessman,” “a Turkish-American businessman,” or “our Turkish friends.”
When I recently visited Afghanistan, I was surprised to learn that Turks had been operating schools there since the ’90s, even during the Taliban era. They currently have schools not just in Kabul, but in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Shebhergan, and Kandahar. Behind the lovely painted-pink school in Kabul were dorms where kids from all over the country sat outside, some of them eager to say hello in English. Every Afghan I spoke to in Kabul, from politicians to cooks, told me that “the Turkish school” was the best in the city. As we left the premises, the teachers gave my Afghan translator some books by Fethullah Gülen....[continues]
SUGGESTED MEDIA LINKS on FETHULLAH GULEN
http://rumiforum.blogspot.com/2010/09/rumi-forum-suggested-links-has-been.html
SEE ALSO BELOW ARTICLES BY FETHULLAH GULEN
The Necessity of Interfaith Dialogue
A Movement Originating Its Own Models
Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi
Sufism And Its Origins
FULL ARTICLE TEXT:http://fethullah-gulen.idcnj.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=207:the-global-imam&catid=83:op-eds&Itemid=199
ORIGINAL SOURCE:http://www.tnr.com/article/world/magazine/79062/global-turkey-imam-fethullah-gulen
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