Fethullah Gulen, throughout his life, has advocated a marriage between religion, science and society to achieve the much needed social harmony in any culture/social structure. He always emphasized the importance of faith in keeping individuals together with a sense of unity, and science as a way to both excel in religious life as well as create more developed civilizations. Gulen’s ideas on the topic and how they coincide with those of Jurgen Habermas’ and other western philosophers were dissected at a conference by Zaman columnist Ihsan Yilmaz.
Below is Yilmaz’s column on the conference.
For me, the month of November is a month of conferences that I have to both endure but also enjoy. From New Orleans, I flew to Lahore to present a paper at another international conference titled “Ideal Human and Ideal Society in the Thoughts of M. Fethullah Gülen.” Scholars from many parts of the world presented their papers on the topic.
Several papers focus on the Hizmet movement’s activities in the Muslim world such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt. My paper’s title is “Sacred, Secular, Twin Tolerations and the Hizmet.” It elaborates on Gülen’s society-centric understanding of Islam as opposed to the state-centric approaches of both Islamists and Kemalists.
