Fethullah Gulen and the Gulen Movement

I am Lia Fidas and I am just overwhelmed with this trip. I have had just a wonderful time. I have read a lot about your history; and now to see some of these wonderful sites in person has been enormously impressive. I must tell you that I am a little bit like Turkey: We have some similarities here. I transformed myself over my career four five times. I began my career as an economist, then an agricultural economist, and then international relations officer, and on and on. Now I retired from the government and I am working in a private US corporation. But like Turkey, I followed Turkey in the 1970s when Turkey was; there was a problem with too many poppies. The United States Department of Agriculture was assisting; my colleagues were assisting the Government of Turkey in transforming itself. We all said, how can they do this, they won’t do it, but they did, they transformed themselves from poppies to growing wheat and other crops. That’s the great energy that I see in this country all the way from 1970s to here; one of transformation, two of change. We talk about change, but it is not really change, it is transformation: taking the best of from the old and transforming yourself into something new. This is what I see here at Fatih University. The energy and the enthusiasm that I have seen throughout this trip, the love of learning in all of the schools, the happy faces have really impressed me enormously. There is no cynicism, no doubt that of the students, and of the faculty; that they move ahead and move into, and they are in the modern world, using English, because English is the language of technology, language of business management, language of so many breakthroughs in the sciences. Turkey is going to be a part of that. I am just enormously honored to have witnessed this transformation that I see here in Turkey today.