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?

The Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, winner of our intellectuals poll, is the modern face of the Sufi Ottoman tradition. At home with globalisation and PR, and fascinated by science, he also influences Turkish politics through links to the ruling AK party.(Ehsan Masood)


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.

Many of his converts come from Turkey’s aspirational middle class. As religious freedom comes, falteringly, to Turkey, Gülen reassures his followers that they can combine the statist-nationalist beliefs of Atatürk’s republic with a traditional but flexible Islamic faith. He also reconnects the provincial middle class with the Ottoman traditions that had been caricatured as theocratic by Atatürk and his “Kemalist” heirs. Oliver Leaman, a leading scholar of Islamic philosophy, says that Gülen’s ideas are a product of Turkish history, especially the end of the Ottoman empire and the birth of the republic. He calls Gülen’s approach “Islam-lite.”

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?search_term=G%C3%BClen&id=10263

I can't wait to buy one of his books. Thanks Roswitha..good article.

i think Mevlana said the most trues be4 ages by ''come whoever or whatever you are'',and Fetullah Gülen is one of good follower of him today

Ayhan and Teaschip, thank you both for your positive comments.

and i believe Fetullah Gülen and all others who thinking like him trying to keep alive http://www.revver.com/video/587818/seven-advice-of-mevlana/ on today by their methods..So thats more then to be İslam or Muslim..

I personally believe Fethulla Gülen is a sort of dangerous man..

Buy one of his books to see for yourself (or just rent it, dont support that man financially ): he speaks to 'us infidels' as if we are children that need to be raised, and the book drips off sentences that actually try to say 'oh please convert'. I read his book on the basics of islamic faith. His 'proof' for the existnece of Allah is just hilarious. Even I, an infidel, can do better than that! Reading his book made me believe even less

Ayhan, thanks for your encouragement! Believe me, I get hit over the head alot by some others. Have a good day!