Much has been said about “peace and Islam” over decades. In the discussion, views vary from “Islam is spread by sword, therefore peace is just a cover” to “Islam by definition means peace and serenity, it brings about the desired life” but there haven’t been a scholarly work to show how these two concepts’ relationship in terms of peace making. Dr. Jon L Esposito and Dr. Ihsan Yavuz had completed such a work recently on how active civic engagement could eventually bring peace. Esposito and Yavuz focus on the initiatives undertaken by the Gulen Movement, this article is a review of their work by Hakan Yesilova and published on the Turkish Review magazine.
Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Professor İhsan Yılmaz of Fatih University in Istanbul do not subscribe to this divisive mindset. They add Fethullah Gulen to cellular phones and the Internet as a "border transgressor" between East and West. In their authoritative volume recently released by Blue Dome Press, New York, Esposito and Yılmaz bring together quality papers based on first-hand experience and field research by academics who have been extensively studying Gülen's school of thought and the Gülen movement.
Esposito was arguably the first academic in the West who pioneered research on the Gulen movement when he published "Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement" with M. Hakan Yavuz in 2003. Yılmaz is a frequent speaker on the movement and he convened two major conferences in 2007 on the Gülen Movement, one in London ("Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Gülen Movement") and the other in Rotterdam ("Peaceful Coexistence: Fethullah Gülen's Initiatives in the Contemporary World"), as well as contributing to many others. So the editors' names provide high credentials for the work.
Read more at the Turkish Review
