Norwegian massacre showed us one more time that unconditional dialogue between different cultures is indispensible for our future. There will never be a true homogeneity in the minds, cultures, thoughts, faiths of people; we will always be able to find that “other” one in one way or another. History proved that we can never do away with an ideology or an entire culture by destroying its literature or killing its people; what’s left is to have meaningful dialogue without preconditions. As Mr. Fethullah Gulen put it “we need to accept everyone in their own positions” and have a dialogue not to convert or persuade but to get acquainted. Kerim Balci is comparing Fethullah Gulen’s dialogue ideas with the products of Oslo bomber’s sick mind.
It was in 1994 that I read Fethullah Gulen's declaration of all the ages until the resurrection to be an "era of dialogue." At that time, I was surprised to hear such decisiveness in the voice of a Muslim scholar, in labeling the ages to come as an especially peace-seeking era.
Mr. Gulen is the kind of scholar who believes in the "soul of history and time." We are all children of our times and Gulen was declaring our time, as well as the times of our children, great-grandchildren and so on, to be a time of peace-making, peace-seeking and peaceful coexistence. This observation was not borne out, in my understanding then, by our historical experience with the West. If any single word were to be chosen to characterize the thousand-year-old relationship of the Muslim and Western worlds, it would be "war." Look back into our common history, and you will see hatred, conflict, denigration, defamation and demonization. But Gulen was asking us not to look back into history, but to look to the future.
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