‘The Gulen movement is one of the very few that has managed to live what it preaches.’


Date posted: January 17, 2015

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the world’s leading authorities on Islamic law and Islam, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights. He is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law. He serves on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch.

“Hizmet Movement is, in my view, an Islamically-inspired, Islamically-grounded movement, or Islamically-rooted movement, founded on the universal and fundamental principle of peace and—the essential values of Islam—peace, mercy and compassion, as normative, moral objectives and which seeks to translate these principles into—through the dynamic of ta’aruf, the dynamic of coming to know one another, especially coming to know the other—into a reality, into a living sociological and anthropological reality. ”

“It focuses on what you can say is the nectar of Islam, the core, the heart or the spirit of Islam itself.”

“…it really becomes an attitude or a theology of embracing the Divine and embracing all that the Divine has created, embracing Allah as a transcendental Creator but considering all that God has created as valuable and worthy of love.”

“From what I have observed, or from my studies, it seems that the Gulen Movement has become far more adept at constructing serious discourse and serious dialogue that is substantive, that you can actually learn from substantively because it encourages people to come and bring out what is inside of them.”


*Produced by Spectra Media exclusively for Irmak TV, Atlas of Thoughts (Fikir Atlasi) connects the scholars, politicians, jurists, religious figures, journalists, and academics reflecting on Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen and the Hizmet Movement with the audience. Each episode features a person from a different segment of the society with diverse experiences regarding the Hizmet activities and its volunteers. If you are interested to hear about the Hizmet and Mr. Gulen from these people’s perspectives, do not miss this show!

Source: Spectra Media , April 10, 2014


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