Mr. Erdogan’s witch-hunt in Turkey accelerated with the globalization of the Hizmet movement. When he closed the doors to activities such as language and culture festivals, other countries welcomed them. When Mr. Erdogan urged Turkish ambassadors to lobby their respective foreign governments to help close down schools started by Hizmet participants, those governments refused to go along.
Speaking with TheCable in an interview on Friday, Cemal Yigit, spokesman of NTIC, said Gulen does not own the Turkish schools in Nigeria, and that the schools are the property of private investors – some of them Nigerians. He said that the Turkish government was on a purge of the opposition in Turkey, and that it was trying to decimate any organisation that shared the philosophy of Gulen by tagging them terrorists.
President Erdogan needs a victory so he can prove to the public and supporters that Fethullah Gulen was behind the failed coup and therefore get him extradited, says Ibrahim Dogus, the founder of the Center for Turkey Studies in London.
The Ufuk Dialogue Foundation is a platform where Christians and Muslims come together to promote peaceful coexistence, mutual understanding and dialogue, especially between the two religions. This is because we believe that if we come together we can talk the talk and walk the walk.
An interview with Fethullah Gulen, the self-exiled Turkish leader whom Erdogan accused of being behind yesterdays’s coup. Mr. Gulen lives in a compound in Saylorsburg, PA. Fetullah Gulen gave an interview to major media representatives at his Saylorsburg, PA compound. NYT’s Stephanie Saul filmed it.
In the interview that was published at one of Russia’s most popular newspapers, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Mr. Gülen talked about the aircraft crisis between Russia and Turkey, the divided state of the Muslim world, secularism, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and terrorism. “Certain things done [the Turkish government] in recent years were wrong. The downing of that warplane was wrong,” he said.
For Muslims, myself included, the inspiration to serve humanity through education is coming from Hizmet philosophy which states ‘Serve human beings irrespective of differences in colour, race, ethnicity or nationality, in order to please the creator’. Otherwise, it can be rephrased to read ‘Serve the Created, in order to please the Creator’.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who launched an all-out war against the faith-based Gülen movement in late 2013, kept his strategy to eliminate the group a secret until he decided to sever ties with it completely, Yeni Asya daily Editor-in-Chief Kazım Güleçyüz has said, adding the elimination strategy was state-sponsored.
“ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham] is far from following ‘Prophetic methodology.’ ISIS preaches hatred and contempt for human life. Nowhere are these parts of anything that could be remotely described as the Prophetic methodology, and their killings and brutal treatment of other Muslims, Christian, Jews and others show that their methods are truly illegitimate,” according to Professor Zeki Sarıtoprak
The English-born Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald, one of the Catholic Church’s main experts on Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, has said that Fethullah Gülen has inspired many Muslims to engage in interfaith dialogue, and that this is a good thing.
“ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham] is far from following ‘Prophetic methodology.’ ISIS preaches hatred and contempt for human life. Nowhere are these parts of anything that could be remotely described as the Prophetic methodology, and their killings and brutal treatment of other Muslims, Christian, Jews and others show that their methods are truly illegitimate,” according to Professor Zeki Sarıtoprak.
Prophet Muhammad refers to Islam as the religion that he and his companions promote. So he attracts attention to the Quran, sunnah and the righteous caliphs. We call the era where Islam was practiced well the age of happiness…