About the paper:
This paper will raise the following issues and ideas. First, that included among the issues repeatedly raised by Socrates more than 24 centuries ago was his concern to define terms that we habitually use. With that concern in mind, what is violence? Is there one kind or more than one, and if the latter, what kinds? Second, that Socrates also added to Western thought the idea of ethics as an important component of everything that we do, and of the process of dialogue as a means of both defining terms and bringing morality into nearly every discussion. Third, that Socrates stands out. Thus Fethullah Gulen places a high value on intense and far-reaching education on the one hand and dialogue--not only among individuals, but among groups and traditions. Fourth, that the movement that bears his name is the Plato to Gulen's Socrates: it has created a means of translating Gulen's words into actions, through an extraordinary web of institutions that share the sort of goal that Socrates had for Athens and that Gulen has for the world: improving it in every way possible, in reaching for the Good. Fifth, that the endgame of the Gulen movement, by means of its varied educational programs, of diverse types and at diverse levels, is to offer strategies that yield other means than violence as modes of human expression and with them, a far-reaching peace. Finally, that this is peace arrived at not casually but through constant effort--through struggle, a concept inherent in Islam as Fethullah Gulen and the Gulen Movement embody it, and applicable across religious and cultural lines and not defined (so we end where we began: with the issue of definition before us) merely as an absence of war, but as a condition of competeness; not as toleration but mutual acceptance and even embrace.
About the author:
Ori Z. Soltes: Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former Director of the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated over 80 exhibitions on a variety of topics. He is the author of over 150 articles, exhibition catalogues, essays and books on a range of subjects, including Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and, Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source (Westview) and, The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust (Eschel) and Searching for Oneness with the One: Mysticism in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Traditions (Rowman and Littlefield). Professor Soltes is conversant in over a dozen languages and has lectured throughout America and in Europe, Asia and Central America. He is currently at work on a book on the relationship between the thought of Fethullah Gulen and Jelaluddin Rumi.
