SOUL FOOD:One man’s remedy for religious tensions

Among the 200-some men and women gathered in the Crystal Ballroom of the Hilton Irvine for dinner, no doubt a good many would have been able to sing John Lennon’s 1971 ode to peace “Imagine” if asked.

After all, it was already ubiquitous Muzak when it became the backbone of Amnesty International’s Imagine campaign when last year Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, gave the organization the rights to the song.

I wonder, though, apart from those hosting the third annual interfaith dinner sponsored by Global Cultural Connections, how many could have, when they arrived, answered the question, “Who is Fethullah Gülen?”

The name isn’t exactly a household word in the United States. At least not yet.

Gülen is a Turkish scholar, theologian and religious leader, born in eastern Turkey in 1938. He has a command of traditional Islamic as well as Western literature. His own books have been bestsellers in Turkey, where his teachings have given rise to controversy.

In a secular republic, he embraces the importance of faith while warning against politicizing religion, which he believes corrupts faith. He argues for the compatibility of faith, science and reason, and for the peaceful coexistence of differing faith groups, social and economic classes.

This has at times won him enmity among the country’s Islamic fundamentalists and within the secular Turkish state. During the 1970s, Gülen was arrested for promulgating Islamic views. He was convicted and jailed for seven months.

A decade later, he faced prosecution again. In 2003, charged with trying to undermine the Turkish republic, Gülen moved to the United States, where he still lives in New York. Earlier this year, the Turkish courts acquitted him of all charges.

Gülen’s many followers — by most estimations, 3 million, though others suggest there may be as many as 6 million — form what is, in varying views, either a movement, a network or a community throughout Turkey, Central Asia and the United States.

Among them are the members of the Global Cultural Connections, whose expressed mission is “to promote and advance dialogue and understanding among different faiths and cultures toward building a society where individuals love, respect and accept each other regardless of religion, race or culture.”

“[We] get inspired by him. We accept his philosophy as our goals,” Yalcin Aslan, a volunteer board member of the nonprofit told me.

The Rev. Peggy Price, past-president of the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council and former senior minister of the Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science, introduced me to Aslan. Last October, accompanied by Aslan, Price traveled to Turkey with several other religious leaders. Speaking at the Thursday-night interfaith dinner, she recalled one of her most treasured memories of the trip. They had visited a school where, from a very young age, the children are trained in conflict resolution.

“In light of what we have been seeing in our schools here in the U.S., we need to teach our children these skills, too. We have so much to learn from one another. Dialogue, getting to know more about each other, is key,” Price said.

Schools, like the one she visited, built and staffed by followers of Gülen, are examples of — call it the Gülen movement, the Gülen network, the Gülen community — his philosophy in practice.

The theme of the dinner was “Respecting the Sacred.” One way to do that, Price suggested, is to respect every life as sacred and holy. How then, she asked, could we ever harm another human being?

She echoed the words of Gülen, which we had heard in an earlier video presentation: “Be so tolerant that your heart becomes wide like the ocean. Become inspired with faith and love for others. Offer a hand to those in trouble, and be concerned about everyone.”

This could be the motto of the followers of Gülen, not all of whom are either Turkish or Muslim. Last year at Rice University in Houston, there was a conference called “Islam in the Contemporary World: The Fethullah Gülen Movement in Thought and Practice.”

It was sponsored by The Institute of Interfaith Dialogue in Texas, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Dedman College at SMU and the Office of the Chaplain at the Southern Methodist University as a way to “explore the appeal, meaning and impact of Fethullah Gülen and the Gülen movement on Turkish, regional and — increasingly — global societies.”

Among the papers presented there was “Defending Religious Diversity and Tolerance in America Today: Lessons from Fethullah Gülen,” by the Rev. Loye Ashton, Ph.D., from Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.

Another conference was held in March at Southern Methodist University. A third is scheduled for Nov. 3-5 at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

What’s the appeal? The vision of a remedy for our own national religious tensions. The desire for a world at peace without banishing religion from our public squares.

“Imagine,” wrote John Lennon in his bromide for peace, “there’s no heaven … no hell below us … no countries … no religion, too … .”

“It’s easy,” he proposed, “if you try.” But 25 years later, it’s looking harder than ever.

In spite of recent books like Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” Sam Harris’s earlier “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the End of Reason” and, last month, Richard Dawkins’ “The God Illusion” that in their own way take up Lennon’s anthem, urgently calling for the abandonment of religious beliefs, billions of the world’s religious adherents are unlikely to give up all they hold to be true and sacred without a fight.

If our hope for peace rests on that, it may forever remain unrequited.

Those with less cynical views of faith and religion than Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Lennon seek other ways to quell the storms of our religious differences. Among them are Fethullah Gülen and the growing community of his followers.

Lennon’s dream is a desert to those who yearn to be so tolerant their hearts become wide like the ocean — not by disowning their faith, but by diving deep, very deep, into it.