Islam’s Trojan Horse?

ON AUGUST 5, 2007, an advertisement appeared in an Istanbul newspaper, Zaman, calling for applications for a newly established Fethullah Gülen Chair of Islamic Studies and Interfaith Dialogue, within a Centre of Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Fitzroy campus of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. The position had been advertised in Australia on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 8. The deadline for applicants was September 7.

The objectives of the Centre are stated to be as follows: “To promote the further development of inter-religious harmony and dialogue in Australia and in the Pacific-Asia region”. Its aim is also to “educate future leaders in the humanities, business, health sciences, social sciences and theological sciences in the writings of Islam, as expounded in Fethullah Gülen’s writing and in the teachings of Said Nursi”.

As this was the first I had heard of such a Centre or Chair (set up, evidently, on August 31, 2006) I could not help but be impressed by its thoroughgoing commitment to promoting a certain kind of Islam through a Catholic university, and filtering it through all the faculties to “future leaders”. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, it also offered a base from which the relatively little-known Turkish organisation that negotiated the setting up of the Centre and Chair—the Australian Inter-cultural Society (AIS)—could have outreach with some credibility throughout Australia, the Pacific and Asia.

I recalled a by-now virtually unobtainable book, Moslems in Europe and America by Ali al-Montasser al-Kattani, published in Iraq in 1976 by Dar Idris. It called for the establishment of chairs of Islamic Studies in universities in Europe, America, the West Indies and other countries, and the setting up of committees of Muslims to select other Muslims to occupy these chairs. At the same time it called for an end to any aid, moral or financial, that might already be being given to established chairs of Islamic Studies held by Christians or Jews.

On November 3, 2006, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne met with the AIS and expressed the wish “that Catholics cooperate with Muslims and therefore with the members of the Intercultural Society in every way possible”.

It now appears that the AIS, which is connected to the Fethullah Gülen and Said Nursi group, is also linked to the equally innocuously named but more up-front Turkish Muslim Affinity Intercultural Federation. The Executive Officer of Affinity, Mehmet Ozalp, and its Vice-President, Zuleyha Keskin, are regularly featured as speakers or representatives at ecumenical, inter-faith and intercultural/multicultural functions. In 2005 Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, received an award from Affinity for his support of inter-faith activities.

Affinity regularly describes itself as “an organisation founded in 2001 by a group of young Australian Muslims specifically to promote cultural and religious awareness and understanding across the entire Australian community”. On occasion it adds that it is a “Muslim Organisation for Religious Education and Interfaith Dialogue”.

On September 11, 2005, Affinity and the Feza Foundation sponsored a National Security and Harmony Summit entitled “Muslims in Australia”, at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. The AIS and Affinity were represented among the speakers by board members.

Irfan Yusuf, a Sydney-based lawyer, revealed in 2005 that Affinity is in fact the “Interfaith wing” of:

“a Turkey-based religious congregation (or ‘cemat’) linked to [the] Turkish Islamic scholar Muhammad Fethullah Gülen. That cemat’s interests are represented in Australia by the Feza Foundation Limited which runs two schools, including Sule College, in Sydney. These schools claim to be non-denominational, though [they] are modelled on other Islamic schools run under the auspices of the Gülen-led cemat.”

Yusuf mentions that he “acted for the Feza Foundation Limited and for Sule College for some five years”, and that he has “close friends from university who are heavily involved” in the Affinity Foundation.

Bediüz-zaman Said Nursi

AS SAID NURSI (originally known as Said Kurdi, “Said the Kurd”) and Fethullah Gülen figure prominently in the official designation of the Chair and in references to it, it may be useful to examine their background and teachings. It is proposed that “future leaders in the humanities, business, health sciences, social sciences and theological sciences” at the ACU are going to be educated in Islam as expounded in their writings. As Said Nursi is the master, and Gülen the disciple, I see some advantage in dealing more fully with Nursi’s background and teachings.

What follows needs to be read in tandem with an article I had published in Quadrant (June 2007): “Ignoring Signposts on the Road: Da‘wa—Jihad with a Velvet Glove”. Concerning da‘wa I wrote:

“The shadow of da‘wa—the public face of the understated, more subtle promotion of Islamist ideology … hangs like a pall over much of the information about Islam disseminated in the West by fundamentalists and their gullible supporters.
“Lenin and subsequent Soviet governments talked up peace with capitalist nations, while at the same time encouraging workers of these countries, through organisations like the Communist International, to overthrow these same capitalist governments. Radical Islam has opened up a second Jihadist front. Through da‘wa it hopes to achieve by sleight of hand what will ultimately prove to be unattainable by brute force …
“Some Western politicians, academics, clergy and media, oblivious of the currents surging through modern-day Islamist circles … appear to be unfazed by the often reciprocal relationship between various Islamic da‘wist NGOs and terrorist organisations. Many others simply pretend nothing is happening or when confronted by irrefutable proof of links between Islamic da‘wist charities and suicide-bombers, terrorist cells, revolutionary agendas and the enlisting and training of mujahidun, rarely go beyond impotent gestures and wrist-slapping. In the case of some particularly ill-informed people—religious people among them—they go into denial mode and accuse critics of prejudice and worse.”

The largest da‘wa organisation in the world is the Tabligh-i-Jamaat, based in Pakistan. Tabligh, like da‘wa, means “propagation” and “propaganda”. Tabligh-i-Jamaat was founded in 1927 by a prominent Deobandi cleric and scholar, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi (1885–1944).

According to Alex Alexiev, the extremist attitudes that characterise Deobandism permeate Tabligh philosophy. Ilyas’s followers are intolerant of other Muslims and especially of Shi’ites, as well as of adherents of other faiths:

“The West’s misreading of Tablighi Jamaat actions and motives has serious implications for the war on terrorism. Tablighi Jamaat has always adopted an extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam, but in the past two decades, it has radicalized to the point where it is now a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide. For a majority of young Muslim extremists, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the ‘antechamber of fundamentalism’.”

The largest da‘wa organization in Turkey and throughout Central Asia is the Nur (light) Movement (Nurcu Hareketi) founded just before Tabligh-i-Jamaat, in 1926, by Bediüz-zaman Said Nursi (1876–1960).

Nursi is an enigmatic figure, part spiritualist and part political eminence grise. In his early years, mainly through attending a Nakshibendi seminary in the Kurdish region of Turkey, he became devoted to the teaching of Mêvlana Halid, the Nakshibendi Sufi leader from Saleymaniye in Kurdish Iraq.

It should be noted that as a Nakshibendi, Nursi was in distinguished company: former Prime Minister and President Turgut Ozal (died 1993); former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan (1996-97); present Islamist Prime Minister (since 2003) Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Parliamentary Speaker Bulent Arinc (2002–07); former Foreign Minister (2003–07) and now President (sworn in August 29, 2007) Abdullah Gul—all either come from, or are much influenced by, the Nakshibendi Sufi sect.

A point seldom noted, however, but germane to our enquiry, is that the Nakshibendi Sufi order, according to Serif Mardin, is “a Turkish variant of modern Islamic fundamentalism”. It originated in the twelfth century.

Sufism is usually regarded by non-Muslim journalists and politicians as a “mystical” form of Islam that corresponds more or less to monasticism in Christianity —but this is to ignore Muhammad’s own warning that “the monasticism of this community is jihad”. Historian Christopher Dawson comments:

“Nothing could be less mystical than [Muhammad’s] religious teaching. It was a religion of fear rather than of love, and the goal of its striving was not the vision of God but the sensible delights of the shady gardens of paradise … the duty of man was not the transformation of his interior life but the objective establishment of the reign of God on earth by the sword and submission to the law of Islam … it is a militant Puritanism of the same type as the modern Wahhabite movement. But it was never a purely external system. Its Puritanism was not only that of the warrior, it was also that of the unworldly ascetic who spends his time in prayer and fasting.”

Sufism was a return to the early puritanism of the Kharijites, who reacted against the growing worldliness of Islam. Its founder, Abu Sa‘id Hasan, lived in Basra (643–728 AD). Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abd Allah (1844–85) the self-styled Mahdi whose dervish army killed Gordon and took Khartoum in 1885, was a Sufi.

Current Prime Minister Erdogan is on record as stating “We are Sharia-ists”; “We will turn Istanbul into Medina”; “I am the Imam of Istanbul”; “Our only goal is an Islamic State”.

Nursi was to play a part in the rebellion (actually the counter-coup) of March 31, 1909 (April 13, 1909, according to our Gregorian calendar) which attempted to re-affirm Abdulhamid II as an absolute monarch. This involvement, and what we can learn of his subsequent life, give the lie to the claim by Bulent Aras and Omer Caha that “Said Nursi became one of the most insistent supporters of the parliamentary system at that time and later of the republican regime in Turkey.” The truth seems to be, rather, that Nursi “was to become one of the most painful thorns in the side of the Turkish Republic”.

According to some, he was also involved in the “Sheikh Said” rebellion of 1924-25, whose aims ranged from Kurdish separatism to the restoration of the Caliphate. I remain unconvinced. The Kurdish Nakshibendi leader Said Nursi may be being confused with the other Kurdish Nakshibendi leader, Sheikh Said Piran—also known as Sheykh Said of Palu—from the Diyarbakir region of Turkey. Said Piran was captured in mid-April 1925 and hanged along with the other leaders of the rebellion.

Whatever may be the truth of his alleged involvement in the rebellion, Nursi was deported to the West by the Kemalist regime. Considered a threat to the stability of the secular state, he was again arrested in 1935 and imprisoned until 1946. While he was in prison his thoughts turned to a more indirect Islamisation of the state—through education.

CLAIMS THAT THE REVIVAL of Islam in Turkey has been sui generis in its causes and results, and that no Turkish Sayyid Qutb (the most influential of the Islamist revolutionary ideologues thrown up by the turmoil in Egypt in the twentieth century), or al-Mawdudi (founder of Islamic radicalism in British India) has appeared on the scene, are called into question by Anis Ahmad.

Ahmad, Director of the Academy of Da‘wa in the Islamabad International Islamic University, Pakistan, speaks of Bediüz-zaman Said Nursi in the same breath as Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (founder of Wahhabism in Arabia), Hasan al-Banna (founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers) and al-Mawdudi.

It should be noted that Ahmad is the former Dean of the International Islamic University of Malaysia (conceived in 1982 by the self-styled moderate and former Deputy Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim) and former Director of the Islamic Social Sciences Association of America.

Ahmad points out, as do all proponents of Nursi’s teachings, that the master promoted social change without focusing on political struggle. “This does not mean,” he adds, “that he separates between [sic] Islam and politics.”

Nursi promoted the view that there is what the Nur website calls an “ineluctable interlinkage between Islamic revival, reinterpretive reading of the religious sources—the Qur’an in particular—and the formation of religiopolitical organizations”. According to Khalil Hamidi, Nursi recommended to his followers the ideas and writings of al-Mawdudi “and expressed his full agreement with the methodology suggested by al-Maududi [sic] in his remarkable treatise The Process of Islamic Revolution”. Nursi, however, expected his followers to use wisdom (hikmah) in translating the ideas of Mawdudi in a new context:

“A comparison of the works of Mawdudi and Nursi is particularly apt … Mawdudi focused on purifying the Islamic faith … with a view to modernizing Islam while extracting Western influences from Muslim minds … he would scientifically prove that Islam is eventually to emerge as the World Religion to cure man of all his maladies … Mawdudi’s da‘wa (invitation to Islam) as the embodiment of his re-interpretation and revival of the Islamic faith ultimately became a movement directed at regimenting the lives of all those who had accepted Islamic ideals and molded their lives accordingly, erecting an Islamic order, and eventually revolutionizing human thought by instilling Islamic values into it. His scheme was holistic and all-inclusive. It began with the individual Muslim and culminated in a new universal order.”

This smacks of the ad hoc, softly-softly approach advocated in Egypt by revolutionary groups, among them the da‘wa wing of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the Muslim Brothers, who realised that the overt violence inherent in the Islamic Puritanism of Sayyid Qutb and others was not winning converts. Sayyid Qutb was half-right in his rejection of this “way of conciliation” propounded by the da‘wists. In itself it would not win over those Muslims who found his puritanism not to their liking. But, as I wrote in Quadrant:

“He would surely be amazed to see how effective such indirect tactics have proven to be in the more ignorant and gullible secular West—spiritually deracinated, and in thrall to its own PR machines. He would not, however, be deceived, as the West is deceived, into thinking that abandonment of overt violence means abandonment of the goals of the violence. What we are witnessing, as Daniel Pipes has made clear, is a change of policy, not a change of heart. Some radicals think that more subtle means are called for if their goal of world hegemony is to be achieved.”

Mawdudi and Nursi were critical of traditional Islam—basically aiming to eliminate from Islam everything through which Islamic teaching had been filtered since the time of Muhammad. “Philosophy, literature, the arts, mysticism and especially time-honoured customs and cultural mores were all condemned as syncretistic and impure adulteration of the Islamic faith, distracting Muslims from the Divine to the mundane.”

According to Mawdudi, politics was the only legitimate vehicle for the manifestation of Islamic revelation, and the sole means of the expression of Islamic spirituality a position that “correlated piety with political activity, the cleansing of the soul with political freedom, and salvation with Utopia”.

Criticism by Nursi’s followers of Mawdudi’s Jamaat-i-Islami’s failure to spearhead Islamists’ drive to power, despite its considerable organisational strength, highlights, I suggest the ambiguity inherent in the teaching of Said Nursi, and pinpoints the reasons for Nursi’s espousing of more subtlety in achieving his declared goal of Islamic supremacy.

The co-operation and dialogue between Muslims and Christians for which Nursi appeals has as its goal the dominance of Islam over Christianity—which he “hopes … will eventually be transformed into a form of Islam”. Nursi is quoted as saying, “The West is expectant with Islam.” He looks to a Christianity subordinated to Islam that will help conquer the world for Islam.

In a discussion of the verse in the Qur’an that says, “O ye who believe, take not Jews nor Christians for your friends,” Nursi has recourse to a verbal sleight of hand, claiming that the verse is not an ‘amm (a general rule that cannot be disobeyed) but a mutlaq (a law that is controlled). I don’t understand what he means by “a law that is controlled” but I see what he is trying to do. However, even mutlaq means “without exception”, “absolute”, “under all circumstances”, although it also can mean “free”, and “unrestricted”. Nursi concludes, after some argumentation along esoteric lines:

“Therefore the qur’anic prohibition is concerning not Jews and Christians themselves, but it concerns the religion of Christianity and Judaism … One can be beloved not because of one’s essence but because of one’s attributes and profession.”

Christians or Jews, it seems, may be befriended by Muslims but only despite their Christian or Jewish faith—their “essence”, to use Nursi’s term—which remains haram, or interdicted and unlawful by qur’anic law—and therefore sinful.

Clearly such Jews and Christians who uncritically accept this patronising and humiliating “concession” are abandoning their identity in their quest for friendship, and accepting monologue for dialogue. They are selling their patrimony, like Esau, for a “mess of pottage”.

If there can be no friendship between Islam and Christianity, or between Islam and Judaism, the pragmatism and opportunism inherent in Nursi’s outreach to Christians and Jews is evident. It is also evident in Mehmet Ozalp’s rather brazen questioning whether Cardinal Pell differentiates “between a religion in theory and religion as understood, experienced and practiced [sic] by its followers”. “If there is a dark side,” he adds, begging the question, “it belongs to the human being, not to Islam.” But there is a dark side (according to Nursi’s interpretation of Qur’an 5, 51) that resides not necessarily in Christians and Jews, but certainly in Christianity and Judaism.

No hint of this belief in the dark side of Judaism and Christianity seems to emerge from the Abrahamic Conferences, or the numerous contacts between the AIS and Affinity and organisations such as universities, police or immigration departments, multicultural departments, Christian and Jewish schools, churches and synagogues, youth groups and other organisations. Nor does it peep out of the text of Nursi supporters like Thomas Michel, SJ, a native of St Louis who belongs to the Indonesian Jesuit Province and is Secretary for Interreligious Dialogue for the Jesuits in Rome.

When asked if it were permissible for non-Muslims to serve in the (Turkish) army, Nursi replied that there was no shame in getting help from women, children or gypsies against an enemy, so (a fortiori) non-Muslims could be used. Also, he goes on, historically, janissaries (Christian boys handed over annually as tribute by subject nations, forcibly converted and drafted into Ottoman service) proved of benefit in military service. And (a final reason) if only Muslims fight in the army “this would cause a decrease in the Muslims’ wealth and population”.

On November 20 and 25, 2003, four suicide bombings occurred in Istanbul, killing more than sixty people. First two synagogues were attacked, then five days later the British consulate and the Istanbul headquarters of the HSBC Bank. The Islamist group responsible was made up of people who belonged to various radical Kurdish Islamist groups, including Kurdish Hizbollah. Incorporated in Hizbollah’s training manuals are passages from such disparate thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini, “and to a lesser degree, since the police crackdown in 2000, Said Nursi, the founder of the Nurcu movement in Turkey”.

Said Nursi is quoted by Hizbollah as teaching that “The right path for my followers is the path of the people who face the greatest zulm [that is, oppression] who suffer most imprisonment and have the most martyrs. This is the community that fights for Allah.”

Said Nursi, who reputedly possessed all the necessary qualities of a da‘iya—one who preaches da‘wa—wrote a Guide for Youth in 1952 in which he praised traditional Islamic dress for women, and called for the rejection of Westernisation and secularism in Turkey. He died in March 1960 in Sanliurfa and his body was later moved (allegedly by the military) to an unknown location in Isparta.

Fethullah Gülen

THE PROPOSED NEW Chair of Islamic Studies at ACU Fitzroy is to be called the Fethullah Gülen Chair in the Study of Islam and Muslim–Catholic Relations.

Fethullah Gülen was born in Erzurum in eastern Turkey in 1938, and even though he never met Said Nursi he was deeply influenced by his ideas. At the age of fifteen he took up a position as a government preacher. By the age of twenty he was teaching in a mosque in Edirne. In the 1970s he was a preacher in a mosque in Kestanepazari, near Izmir.

Like his master, Nursi, the disciple’s life, teachings and work are the subject of much controversy. The Nurcu Group (as followers of Said Nursi are called) that is headed by Fethullah Gülen is one of a number of competing sects of the Nakshibandi—“a dissident branch in Izmir … which was rumoured to have links with the intelligence component of the political establishment”.

One of the other splinter Nurcu groups attained prominence in the autumn of 1990 when it organised a celebration of Muhammad’s birthday not on the actual birthday—the twelfth day of Rabi‘ al-Awwal, the third Islamic month, that fell on October 2, 1990—but on the day of Atatürk’s death, November 10, which is actually the twenty-first day of Rabi‘ al-Akhir, the fourth Islamic month. The state prosecutor started proceedings against the group for attempting to undermine the secular foundations of the state.

To some, Gülen is a revered Turkish mystic and scholar interested only in education and preaching tolerance; to others he is a reclusive figure who secretly wants to reinstitute the Caliphate and establish an Islamic state in Turkey: an Islamic state that will extend from the Balkans, via Turkey, to all the Central Asiatic republics that were formerly part of the USSR, and on to China. Wendy Kristianasen, editorial director of Le Monde Diplomatique’s English edition asks, “Will Gülen then be the new Sultan?”

An investigative series by Turkish columnist Hikmet Cetinkaya reveals that Gülen was convicted in the 1970s for Islamist activities in Turkey, and spent seven months in prison. During this decade Gülen organised his followers in vakif (private foundations) and conducted clandestine summer camps in the mountains of western Turkey where children as young as primary school age were “taught Islam, and taught to hate unbelievers and to become jihad fighters”. The camps were protected by armed “brothers” and some were run in co-operation with the Suleymancilar Sufi sect, one of whose leaders was a founder of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) of the present Prime Minister, Erdogan:

“Gülen has faced criminal charges several times of seeking to overthrow Turkey’s established political order. The latest charges against him, made in 1999, were nullified after recent legal reforms there, according to Turkey scholars who say Gülen lives in the United States—in Pennsylvania and New Jersey—so he can be treated for a heart condition.”

The above is one version of what occurred in 1999. According to other Turkish analysts, during the Cold War the USA benefited from the Islamist activities of Fethullah Gülen’s organisation against the then Soviet Union, among the Muslims of the Crimea and other Muslims in adjacent regions of the Soviet Union. Following pressure from the Turkish authorities who wanted to arrest him on charges of subverting the secular state, the USA aided Gülen’s escape from Turkey before to his trial, and permitted him to settle in Pennsylvania. Some anti-Islamist circles in Turkey also believe that Gülen helped Erdogan get invited to the White House despite his Islamist background, and before he was even an MP.

Despite the fact that Gülen had gone to the USA before 1999, in 2000 Bulent Aras and Omer Caha would have us believe, in yet another version, that at the time of writing, he was “now retired and living in both Izmir and Istanbul in modest homes given to him by followers while continuing to write extensively”. The lie was given (perhaps inadvertently) to this by Fethullah Gülen’s own website. On November 15, 2005, it described Fethullah Gülen as having “been living in the US for six years because of his health problems”.

Other sources claim that Gülen is one of the richest Turks in the world, living on a large estate in Pennsylvania and running from there his million-member organisation. The perception in political circles in Turkey is that Fethullah Gülen, far from being retired, is the power behind many Islamist politicians, especially the AKP.

The occasion of Fethullah Gülen’s being sought by Turkish authorities in 1999 was the airing on Turkish television of footage of sermons he preached to his supporters in which he revealed his aspirations for an Islamist Turkey under Shari‘a law:

“You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here.”

In another sermon, he said:

“The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web, to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do. We don’t lay the web to eat or consume them, but to show them the way to their resurrection, to blow life into their dead bodies and souls, to give them a life.”

By the time this was aired, Gülen had already left for the USA, supposedly for health reasons. A year later, in 2000, he was indicted in absentia for attempting to change Turkey’s system of government and for “forming an illegal organisation with the purpose of establishing an Islamist state”. It was from that point that he built his international Islamist community. The indictment was eventually dropped by the Erdogan Islamist government, whose connections with Gülen have been noted.

CONCERN IN TURKISH ARMY circles at the infiltration of the state bureaucracy and mosques by another Nurcu offshoot calling itself Turkish Hizbollah, which is modelled on its Khomeini-inspired Lebanese namesake, and at the hosting of Islamist groups by political parties for the sake of votes, and at the Prime Minister’s meeting with them, cannot be dismissed out of hand as militaristic chauvinism. Changing the secular democratic constitution of a country can be effected by violence and terror or through clandestine and overt political activity and manipulation of elections.

In 2005, the BBC reported that an article by Sohbat Mammadov in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta had warned that Azerbaijan might turn into “an arena for struggle between various models and movements of Islam—Arab, Turkish and Iranian”. The article mentioned that the Nur movement founded by Said Nursi was gaining ground, and that followers of the Nur leader Fethullah Gülen, whose goal was declared by Nezavisimaya to be the establishment of a single Islamic Shari’a state in the region, had imported his teachings into Azerbaijan from Turkey.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta went on to say that Nur—which it described as a very strong and secretive organisation—was trying to counterbalance the increased activity of radical Iranian Shi‘i organizations. Nur ideology was described as preferring a peaceful assumption of power by actively promoting their people into government structures. Almost half of the Turkish business in the Azerbaijan market is concentrated, according to information from the Baku mass media, in the hands of the Fethullah Gülen movement.

Retired Turkish General Guven Erkaya holds a similar view:

“‘I see Fetullah Gülen,’ he wrote, ‘as a great danger, for [the] Turkish Republic when we consider [the] future.’ He said that [the] Gülen [organisation] advanced [by] establishing its own political ideology, adding that “… their goal for the coming five years is to establish 50 universities and 500 private schools. What is the source of this money?’”

More recently, according to a report in the Turkish daily Milliyet, the administration of Fethullah Gülen’s Turkish school in St Petersburg had been taken over by Russian authorities allegedly because of its association with the Nur sect of which Fethullah Gülen is the leader.

For reasons of space we have said nothing of the misrepresentations and half-truths to be found in much of the literature emanating from the Fethullah Gülen movement. Or of the duplicity that occasionally surfaces when organisations or individuals in debt to the movement promote it without declaring their special interest.

Probably the leading Nakshibendi master of modern times is not Fethullah Gülen, but Shaykh Mehmed Zahid Kotku (died 1980). He was part of the lower echelons of the Turkish General Directorate of Religious Affairs and seems to have been tolerated by the secular authorities, who were unaware of his many-sided Islamist strategies. In addition to his official duties, he organised Islamic discussion groups throughout Turkey, set up businesses, published a newspaper, and formed the first Islamic political party, the National Order Party. When this was dissolved by order of the Turkish Supreme Court it was reborn as the National Salvation Party. According to Esat Cosan, his son-in-law and successor, Kotku was instrumental in the selection of Necmettin Erbakan as its leader. Erbakan was to become Turkey’s first Islamist Prime Minister (1996-97).

From Kotku’s collected Sermons—Cihad (that is, jihad) and Mü’minin Vasiflari (qualities of the believer)—we learn that being religious for a Nakshi-bendi Sufi means being ready for jihad. Factories, he said, are not just distributors of consumer goods but places where this combat is to be waged. To do this requires that one learn worldly sciences like arts and commerce. The control thus achieved will be a means of gaining “freedom” for Muslims. Believers should forgo consumption and encourage national identity. Every Turkish adult wears a watch. This means, he said, that we are giving away 4 billion liras to the Swiss. We should free ourselves from economic slavery to foreigners. Muslims should strive to reach the highest positions in “social and political institutions in their country and establish control over the society”.

Conclusion

AFTER MENTIONING Pope Benedict XVI’s wish for dialogue with Muslims, Archbishop Denis Hart, on the occasion referred to at the beginning of this article, reaffirmed the importance of that dialogue for all Catholics.

Dialogue has always been of paramount concern to Catholics. Nevertheless, goodwill alone, unsupported by accurate and comprehensive knowledge of Islam, is demonstrably not enough. In fact it can fatally distort the process for all participants in the “dialogue”, non-Muslims and Muslims alike. The latter immediately sense when good-hearted but ignorant and incautious non-Muslims are utterly unaware of, or are not in agreement about, what is at stake, or what the rules of the game are.

However we may wish it to be otherwise, it is a kind of mind game that we are playing. The stakes are high—and none of the clichés and double-talk of coffee-table ecumenism will serve us well in this struggle of wits.

In a recent article entitled “Pawns in a Political Game”, a senior reporter for the Australian, Hedley Thomas, advised journalists “never [to] take at face value what [they’re] led to believe by politicians and their servants”; nor should they underestimate the propensity of powerful figures to score points by whipping up fear. Why pick on politicians and their servants? His points, made in the context of the much-publicised Haneef affair, are well taken. But like all truisms, they apply across the board; even, and perhaps especially, to the media themselves.

Mutatis mutandis, the Director of the Centre for Arab–Christian Documentation and Research in Beirut, Father Samir Khalil Samir, SJ, issued a similar caution. He noted that Christians often suffer from:

“a false understanding of the concept of tolerance. All this is an error and leads to the loss of one’s own identity. Never attack in word or deed, but seek the truth and always point out error. To say only half of what one is thinking is a lie; a complicit silence. Truth cannot co-exist with lies, intolerance and injustice.”

One is reminded of Vladimir Sakharov’s comments about US so-called intelligence organisations in the 1960s. He reportedly watched “with pain and dismay as Washington, apparently believing in détente instead of its own intelligence data … pursued a complacent, confusing, naive, inconsistent and suicidal Middle Eastern policy”.

Détente figures less and less in these post-September-11 days on the lists of options for the present US administration. US intelligence-gathering is lagging behind the terrorists because reliance on spy satellites, so-called smart weapons and assorted electronic gadgetry has replaced the irreplaceable spy on the ground. The dangerous “complacent, confusing, naive, inconsistent and suicidal” Middle Eastern policy deplored by Sakharov, on the other hand, has continued until now. In fact it has built up a terrifying head of steam especially under the Republican presidency of George W. Bush. This is borne out by daily news bulletins from Islamist flash-points across the globe.

A by-product of this toxic concoction of political correctness, fear and ignorance is the insistence by Western pundits and politicians that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion; Muslims who are unfaithful to the true meaning of the Qur’an, we are constantly being reminded, are the “problem”. This has to be seen in conjunction with strategies like that of the Muslim Brothers that emerged recently during the on-going hearing in Dallas, Texas, against the “Holy Land Foundation”, an alleged Hamas front. A secret document (Exhibit No. 003-0085) outlined a full-blown conspiracy by the major Muslim groups in America—all of which are considered “mainstream” by the media:

“The Ikwhan [sic!] must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging their miserable house by the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all religions.”

Organisations included in the scope of the Brotherhood’s strategic plan include: Islamic schools, kindergartens, women’s organisations, Islamic banking, publishing and media organisations, interfaith dialogue groups, Islamic courts, political action groups, research centres, a training organisation for female preachers, an association of Muslim lawyers, and many others.

A similar criticism of Western naivety and “suicidal” complacence was articulated recently by Salim Mansur, a columnist in the Toronto Sun. Mansur is a Muslim and the relevance of his insight is not confined to Canada. He describes what he calls “the appeasement mentality” of the mainstream liberal-left media, and of “politicians trolling for ethnic votes” and of “bureaucrats running public institutions” in the West. He quotes Theodore Dalrymple, a retired physician and prolific writer, who reported in New York’s City Journal:

“In an effort to ensure that no Muslim doctors ever again try to bomb Glasgow Airport, bureaucrats at Glasgow’s public hospitals have decreed that henceforth no staff may eat lunch at their desks or in their offices during the holy month of Ramadan, so that fasting Muslims shall not be offended by the sight or smell of their food. Vending machines will also disappear from the premises during that period.”

“Imagine the uproar,” comments Mansur, that would greet “any suggestion that the mainstream liberal-left media, in appearance at least, is treasonously on side with the newest enemies of freedom and democracy.”

In the light of the above, is one being over-cautious in recommending prudence on the part of Catholic and other Christian, Jewish and non-Islamic bodies generally, when they are invited to give moral support to, and to engage formally and publicly in “dialogue” with, Nakshibendi Sufi groups promoting the teachings of Said Nursi and his disciple Fethullah Gülen?

Prudence is especially called for if it be a question of a Catholic institution’s establishing a university chair with unspecified knowledge of and financial support from a group that is ex professo dedicated to promoting an Islamist ideology. Efforts to identify the source and amount of funding the proposed Fethullah Gülen Chair will receive have been stonewalled, at the time of writing, by the ACU authorities.

Fr Paul Stenhouse MSC is the Editor of Annals Australasia. A footnoted version of this article is available from the Quadrant office.