True religion in Turkey and elsewhere

We live in a godless world, and that’s a fact. Now whether it’s because God is actually dead, as Friedrich Nietsche asserted, or because He has just given up on the human race and planet Earth, and taken His attentions elsewhere, I can’t say, but it must be one or the other. How did I come to this conclusion? I did what people usually do in this post-modern world when faced with a difficult question or an existential dilemma . . . I did a Google search. I keyed in ‘true religion’, and I want to share my findings with you. I must admit, I didn’t check out all 226,000,000 results, but of the thirty-three on the first three pages, twenty-six were links to a brand of jeans. Sure, seven of them would take you to sites with a more spiritual content, but four of those were on page three – and I’m not sure how many Google-searchers get even that far.

There it is - Search over!

Well, Nietzsche published his famous statement in 1882, so I can’t claim to have made an astonishing new discovery. Nevertheless, as with all complex ideas, one can read and intellectually engage with it, but not immediately experience or internalise its full import. Many years ago, as a student in a senior English literature class, I remember our professor asking how many of us had read the Bible. Few hands were raised, and certainly not mine. ‘Then how,’ asked the professor, ‘can you presume to study English literature when you haven’t read its single most important influence for most of the centuries of its development?’  

Later, as a teacher of literature myself, I would sometimes need to explain to my students a reference in a text we were studying. It shocked me a little to find how few students in a New Zealand high school had even second-hand knowledge of the best-known biblical stories. Interestingly, those who did were more likely to be of Maori or Polynesian, than European descent. The quotation is variously attributed to Jomo Kenyatta and Bishop Desmond Tutu, but it applies equally to New Zealand: ‘When the whitemen came, we (Maori, African, Native American . . .) had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed, and when we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’

I have written elsewhere of how coming to Turkey gave me new insights into the influence of politics and government on the development of the ‘belief’ systems of Christianity. At the same time, I found myself looking with new eyes on the Muslim religion which was now all around me. Like Western visitors before me, I was fascinated by the call to prayer, emanating eerily from the minaret of my local mosque. As a child of the 60s, I turned to Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens, for information. Not every Turk can tell you what the holy gentleman is saying, so, for those needing assistance, this is it:

(4x) Allāhu Akbar                                                 God is [the] greatest.

(2x) Ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa llah                     I bear witness that there is no deity except God.

(2x) Ash-hadu anna Muħammadan-Rasulullah     I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.

(2x) Hayya 'ala s-salah                                          Come to prayer

(2x) Hayya 'ala 'l-falah                                           Come to success.

(2x) Allāhu akbar                                                  God is great

La ilaha illa-Allah                                                  There is no deity except God

It’s Arabic, of course, which bears a similar relationship to Turkish as does Latin to English – that is, it is the traditional language of religion and higher learning. To correct a misunderstanding in the minds of many Westerners, the word Allah is the Arabic for God, preceded by the definite article al-, and not the name of some pagan deity entirely unrelated to the focus of Christian worship. In the Muslim religion, Christians (and Jews) are ‘People of the Book’, part of the same great monotheistic tradition, and therefore brothers (and sisters) or at least cousins in religion.

Now no doubt some of you are thinking – this guy has been in Turkey so long, and seems so sympathetic, he’s probably become a Muslim himself. But no. In the first place, I incline to the Mahatma Gandhi, Donovan school of thought. I’m equally Buddhist, Baptist, Jew and Muslim, and equally none of them. And in the second place, I have an aversion to pain, and a strong attachment to that intimate part of my anatomy the removal of which seems to be regarded by institutional Islam as an important component of true belief. This, then, brings me back to the problem I experienced above with my search for true religion.

Check all the sources you like, you’ll find that religion is a difficult concept to tie down. The 19^th century German philologist Max Müller wrote that the original meaning of the Latin word religio, from which our word religion is derived, was ‘reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things’. In other words, it was a personal business, a feeble attempt by human beings to deal with the metaphysical, existential problems that most of us encounter in the course of a lifetime. This denotation of religion you will still find in modern dictionaries. However, it is the conflict between this and the other meaning of the word that causes most of our difficulties. The other meaning of course, is an ‘institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices’. It was institutional religion which persecuted Christians in Roman times, and which, when its turn came, used the tools of the Inquisition to torture and murder. It was institutional religion which Karl Marx called ‘the opium of the people’ for its power to induce acceptance of oppression instead of revolt.

Well, the struggle goes on, not only between religions, but within them as well. I have no intention of examining the struggle between Christendom and Islam. Enough nonsense has been written elsewhere, based seemingly on the assumptions that such a thing as Christendom still exists, and that Islam has some kind of unified integrity. Similarly, the tension within Christianity between the individual search for spiritual truth and the need of the institution to control by the imposition of doctrinal and ritual uniformity are well documented. What I want to look at is the situation in contemporary Turkey where the forces of secular modernity are supposedly in conflict with the AK Party government, whose secret agenda is said to aim at returning the country to the Shariah rule of orthodox Islam.

The personification of secular modernity in Turkey is the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who inspired and united nationalist forces, building a nation from the ashes of the moribund Ottoman Empire. One of the six principles on which he established the new state was the separation of church (mosque) and government. He saw religion as an anchor holding back his people from taking their place among the world’s modern states. To break the stranglehold of religion, he banned traditional forms of clothing (such as the fez), replaced the Arabic alphabet with a customised Latin-based one, outlawed the mystical dervish sects which constituted a serious threat to his programme of reform, and mandated the use of the Turkish language in place of Arabic in religious services – including the call to prayer. For eighteen years from 1932, the words heard from minarets in Turkey were these:

Tanrı uludur
Şüphesiz bilirim, bildiririm
Tanrı'dan başka yoktur tapacak.
Şüphesiz bilirim, bildiririm;
Tanrı'nın elçisidir Muhammed.
Haydin namaza, haydin felaha,
Namaz uykudan hayırlıdır.

Well, there’s something about the vernacular that appeals to populist philosophies, yet is anathema to organised religion. One could probably trace a correlation between the availability of the Christian Bible in English and other native tongues, and the long slow decline in religious observance in those countries. Probably Atatürk knew this. Surprisingly, then, it was the Democratic Party government of Turkey’s first popularly elected Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, that reinstituted the use of Arabic in Turkish mosques, among other Islam-friendly moves. Menderes epitomises for me some of the contradictions that perplex the foreigner in Turkey. He oversaw a period of rapid economic growth and Westernisation, while making major concessions to his majority Muslim electorate. He achieved a kind of superman reputation in his lifetime as a consequence of surviving a plane crash that killed most of his fellow passengers, yet ended his life on the gallows, hanged by the perpetrators of a military coup that seized power in Turkey in 1960.

Menderes was later exonerated, and his reputation restored to the extent that his name is honoured today in boulevards, airports and prestigious state high schools throughout the land. But the fact remains that he undoubtedly began the process of undoing Atatürk’s secularising reforms which has continued under subsequent regimes. Many of those secular Turks mentioned above, who maintain that the AK Party government has a secret Islamic agenda, see signs of this in PM Erdogan’s moves to pull the teeth of the Turkish military. In Turkey, the army has been seen by ‘secularists’ as having an almost sacred role to ensure the sanctity of the secular state, to the extent that they have applauded the generals when they have staged coups to overturn democratically elected governments.

Somewhat ironically, then, the last such military regime, which seized power in 1981, was also happy to make major concessions to the Muslim electorate, appealing to religion and extreme nationalism in order to suppress left-wing dissent. When the generals stepped back and handed power over to a civil administration, their choice for Prime Minister was Turgut Özal, formerly MP for an overtly Islamic party. Again, somewhat ironically, the Prime Mister deposed by the coups of 1970 and 1981 was a certain Süleyman Demirel, who later returned to office and installed a puppet PM in his place, before having himself appointed President of the Republic. In spite of this, when I first came to Turkey in the mid-1990s, Demirel too seemed to have restored his reputation and become a pillar of Kemalist secularism.

In another strange mating of secularism and religiosity, Demirel’s female successor Tansu Çiller, at the time a great symbol of Turkish progressiveness, formed a coalition with the Islamist Party of the day, allowing Necmettin Erbakan to become the republic’s first openly Islamic Prime Minister. Erbakan’s tenure was short-lived, however, and he was politely urged to stand down by the generals, in what has become known as Turkey’s ‘post-modern’ coup of 1997.

Returning then to our consideration of religion above, it’s hard to see much ‘reverence for God or the gods, or careful pondering of divine things’ in all these political machinations.  There is ample evidence in Turkey’s recent history that secular politicians and even the military guardians of secular Kemalism have been only too ready to play the religion card when it suited their purposes. So it does seem a little hypocritical now for the same people, and/or their followers to ride the high horse and attack PM Erdogan and his government for introducing relatively innocuous reforms such as allowing women wearing headscarves to study at university.

I do feel that a country such as Turkey, which struggles with serious inequalities of wealth distribution, could leave the building of mosques and the payment of religious leaders to local congregations and independent organisations. But funding of these by the state is not an innovation of the present government, and even the secular opposition are not interested in making such change an election issue. At the same time I have some sympathy for those who wish to see minarets continue as a feature of the modern Turkish skyline. I remember another of my professors drawing attention to an engraving of 17^th century London, in which church spires were the prominent architectural feature. His point, as I recall, was that a comparison with the same view today might suggest something about modern-day priorities.

Of course, the problem is vastly more complicated, and I have no wish to oversimplify. Those 17^th century London churches were representative of a religious establishment inextricably bound up with the government and the ruling elite of the day, and not necessarily a sign that their builders had any great interest in a search for spiritual truth. And I have similar misgivings when the muezzin of our local mosque wakes me around 5.30 these summer mornings with six minutes and 30 seconds of Arabic amplified by modern electronics and broadcast through loudspeakers attached to the highest point of his minaret. Perhaps he is genuine as he intones that extra line inserted into the morning edhan: ‘As-salatu khayrun min an-nawm’ (praying is better than sleeping) – but I would credit him with more sincerity if I knew he had actually climbed the spiral staircase to the lofty balcony, and used the unassisted decibels that God had given him.

Well, I don’t know if I have helped any of you here in your search for true religion. If the search comes to nothing, we can at least take consolation from the fact that globalisation is bringing our disparate institutional religions closer together. Witness the Shard Tower, recently opened in London, and now the highest building in Europe, financed, apparently by the Royal family of Qatar. And if you want a quick personal solution, get yourself a pair of those jeans.

More Treasures of Turkey – Lost and found

The Turkish government has been making some waves in international circles lately with attempts to reclaim antiquities found within its borders now located in public museums and private collections abroad. Clearly there are rights and wrongs on both sides of the debate, and each case must be judged separately on its own merits.

I read an interesting item in my local newspaper the other day. A gentleman in the US was cleaning out the North Carolina home of his recently deceased parents when he came across a fragment of a stone tablet and the head of a small statue. The inscription on the tablet is in Greek, and, though no official dating has been carried out, the items are likely to be between one and two thousand years old. Apparently this gentleman’s father served in the US armed forces and was based for many years in Turkey. His son Mark assumed that his father ‘requisitioned’ (I think is the military euphemism) the items at that time, and has informed the appropriate Turkish authorities that he wants to return them to their rightful home.

If this were an isolated incident it would be noteworthy and laudable, and certainly Mark is to be commended for his honesty. Surprisingly, the article goes on to say that, in the last five years, 3616 similar items have been returned to museums and antiquities authorities in Turkey.

Roman sarcophagus found near Antalya

In the mean time, there are plenty more ancient relics waiting to be discovered beneath the soil and waters of this amazing land. Just last week, a Turkish recreational diver spotted what he thought was a white plastic deckchair partially buried in sand. On closer investigation, it turned out to be an elaborately carved marble sarcophagus. According to the report, the guy was swimming in the sea not far from the ruins of the ancient city of Justinianopolis near modern Antalya, so his find is not altogether surprising. Still, I imagine there are not too many countries in the world where a diver would come across such a treasure by accident.

The curator of the Bodrum Museum, which specializes in undersea relics, said the sarcophagus is an excellent specimen, dating from Roman times, with relief carvings of Eros and Medusa on three sides. It took a salvage team six hours to raise it from the seabed where it had lain for more than a millennium.

Will the real Muslims please stand up?

As usual at this time of year we’re in Bodrum, enjoying the Aegean sea and sunshine along with the rich and famous from Istanbul and further afield. Fortunately, the rich and famous don’t venture much to our part of the peninsula, so we don’t have a paparazzi in every tree with a metre-long telephoto lens that can detect a patch of cellulite or an incipient beer belly at a range of two kilometres or more.

Saudi prince and daughter? Wife?

This last week the local glitterati have been somewhat overshadowed by the presence of a certain Arab gentleman with the impressive name of El-Velid Bin Tallal Bin Abdülaziz El Suud. According to reports, he is a/the nephew of the Saudi King, and CEO of Saudi Arabia Incorporated, in Turkey with his wife and daughters to enjoy some of the freedoms that  are generally frowned upon back home.

Fair enough. Even royals need to let their hair down occasionally, and what better way to do it than on your 88-metre gold-plated yacht anchored offshore from one of Muslim Turkey’s more relaxed summer resorts. The yacht, of course, is not for actually travelling in – the princely family apparently arrived from Riyadh, or wherever they live, in their private plane. Anyway, you wouldn’t expect them to fly Gulf Air or Turkish Airlines would you? But this is no footling Lear Jet like any run-of-the-mill executive CEO. It seems our Saudi neighbours arrived in their personal full-size 747 Jumbo.

Well, I’m happy for them, I have to say. Maybe they’ll pick up some good ideas while they’re in Turkey and there’ll be a little less stoning, whipping and beheading after they get back home. Perhaps the daughters will get a taste for bikinis and décolleté evening wear, and persuade the Wahhabi religious police to relax the dress code for Saudi women. Now that the Prince has experienced the freedom of cycling around the Turkish countryside in a skimpy pair of shorts, he may think about allowing his national athletes at the London Olympics to compete in more sporty outfits.

Who knows? The power of example to influence others is well-known. Turkey may not possess all the freedoms that citizens of Western democracies take for granted, but the rights to don a bikini for a day at the beach, or sip a cold beer while reclining on your deckchair are not to be undervalued.

Who’s Going to Rule the World? Fethullah Gülen?

For much of my longish life I have been hearing tales, historical, contemporary and fictional, about the latest megalomaniac individual or evil empire determined to rule the world. Traditionally the contenders have based their claims on the possession of some kind of superior weapons technology – but times have changed. We are well into the post-modern era, and most predictions of earlier ages about what the world would be like in the year 1984 or 2000 seem naïve and laughable to us now. It is pretty clear that the task of ruling the world has moved way beyond the power of one individual (if that was ever a realistic possibility). The vast military resources of the one remaining global super-power have proved insufficient to rebuild even minor third world states in the US’s own image. So now we have nothing to worry about, right? We can get on with the job of lighting up our own small corners with iPhone 4s and Galaxy SIIIs without fear of global annihilation.

Uh-uh, sorry folks. I’ve got bad news. There’s a new battle shaping up, and it’s about the enemies within.

One reason I enjoy living in Turkey is that I don’t feel so much like crying when I read the local news. Back in New Zealand, before heading to work, I used to listen to a morning roundup on the radio of what ‘they’ were doing to my beautiful country. I confess, there was a time back then when the idea of joining some revolutionary band of bomb-throwing anarchists began to have some appeal. Now, however, from a distance of some 17,000 kilometres, I find I can read news of events in the Land of the Long White Cloud with more objectivity, and the tears don’t flow as once they did.

Let me give you an example of the madness, though, from my own field of professional interest. The National (read Tory) Government in New Zealand, in its 2012 budget, announced its intention to save $43 million by putting the lid on teacher recruitment. The inevitable result of this, of course, would be a steady increase in class sizes in schools around the country. Luckily, the government has a select band of tame ‘education experts’ who can be called upon to explain why this won’t be a bad thing. One of these, a Professor John Hattie, has apparently conducted research showing that class sizes are not a major factor in student learning. As far as I can learn, Professor Hattie’s research has not involved any actual time spent teaching actual kids in actual classrooms – he has been an ivory tower academic since 1975. Not sure I would take my car to be repaired by an ‘automotive expert’ with no hands-on experience, regardless of how many years he’d been studying the theory, but that’s just me.

Well, there are experts and consultants, it seems, and you can count on these guys to back each other up. One of the latter, a Dr John Langley, was quoted as saying, "If I had a choice of putting my child into a class with a poor teacher with twenty kids or into a class of thirty kids with a good teacher I'd go for the latter. It's as simple as that." Reassuring to know the government has access to people with such incisive problem-solving ability, and New Zealand taxpayers can feel satisfied that Dr John well deserves his no doubt generous consultancy fee.

These days New Zealand has a system of proportional system for electing representatives to its legislative assembly. The system was instituted in 1996 in response to overwhelming public dissatisfaction with the old first-past-the-post, two-party system such as exists in the UK and the US. Unfortunately post-modernism has insinuated its way in here too. The several small parties that manage to win the occasional seat in the legislature are run mostly by fringe lunatic refugees from the far right or left of the two main parties. The main role of these minor participants seems to be putting forward outrageous proposals which the government can proceed to implement in slightly modified form after the initial public anger has died down.

One of the more fanatical of these minor political groupings is a coterie of doctrinaire libertarians known by the acronym ACT, arguing with religious fervour for deregulation, privatisation, flexible labour markets and reduced taxes for the wealthy. And one of the more significant achievements of these neo-liberal economic geniuses has been the move to privatisation of the prison system. A recent editorial in the New Zealand Herald observed that, ‘Something is clearly awry when a Government proclaims the economic benefits of a new prison’.  Nevertheless, Auckland’s oldest prison has already been outsourced to private management, and a newly built facility soon will be. The group to which the NZ Government is entrusting the care and security of its criminals is a multi-national outfit name of Serco – which a Guardian journalist has described as ‘. . . probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of.’  OK, come on, you may say. Leave aside your left-wing socialist prejudices and tell us how they are doing. Well, a recent report on the first eight months of Serco's management produced the following findings:

‘ . . .  as well as two prisoners being wrongfully released, the British firm had failed to meet 40% of its performance targets and was fined $150,000 after a prisoner escaped.

Targets for random drug testing and prisoner management plans were also not reached.

Annually, Serco can earn up to approximately $3 million in incentive payments, but instead it is having to pay for under-performing.

On top of the $150,000 fine it got after prisoner A. F. escaped, it was fined $25,000 for accidently releasing an inmate early and $50,000 for failing to file progress reports.

Another $25,000 fine is pending for releasing another prisoner early.’

In spite of these criticisms, the government is standing by its decision. Corrections Minister Anne Tolley said ‘ . . . there needs to be some improvement, but she also described it as a "bedding in" period for Serco’.

Well, once you have accepted handing over prisons to the private sector you have pretty much overcome, or chosen to ignore, all the arguments that can be mustered against privatization. So it is hardly surprising to see the free-marketeers turning their attention to schools and teachers. Unfortunately, private sector education has been around for a long time, and has often been associated with elitism, poor teaching, violence, and dubious educational standards. But even supposing they do find a good establishment, the wealthy resent having to fork out high tuition fees in addition to paying taxes, some of which are used to finance state-sector schools. So, our privateers have come up with a system which allows organisations to receive government funding for a school, while at the same time getting a special deal allowing them to avoid much of the normal regulation and overseeing. It’s called the Charter School system.

However, again unfortunately, there seem to be glitches in the system. In 2009, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University in the US, produced a report stating that ‘17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools; 46% showed no difference from public schools; and 37% were significantly worse than their traditional public school counterparts’.

Fethullah Gülen

Now, if you have read this far, you may be wondering what all this has to do with my topic, which, you will remember, was ‘Who’s going to rule the world?’ But I assure you, I hadn’t forgotten. I want to redirect your attention to those figures in the CREDO report, and in particular, the ‘17% of charter schools [reporting] academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools. A Turkish colleague of mine recently sent me the link to a ‘60 Minutes’ documentary looking into the connection between some very successful charter schools in Texas, and a certain reclusive expatriate Turkish citizen by the name of Fethullah Gülen.

I watched the documentary with interest, because I have been hearing this gentleman’s name in Turkey for some years, generally spoken in tones of fear and loathing that suggest some kind of hybrid monster cloned from the DNA of L Ron Hubbard, Sun Myung Moon, Attila the Hun and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I was hoping for some conclusive evidence of evil-doing, since I was assured that Americans were now seeing Fethullah Hodja in his true colours. The programme, then, I have to say, turned out to be something of a let-down. The presenter, a long-serving correspondent for CBS with a big reputation as an investigative tele-journalist, visited schools supposedly associated with the Gülen ‘movement’, and tracked the elderly Hodja to his secluded residence in the Poconos, a mountainous region in north-eastern Pennsylvania.

She and her camera crew spoke to school administrators and students. As far as I could see, they learned that:

• The school administrators are normal-looking, secular and articulate.
• The students are bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kids who love their school.
• The schools are among the most highly rated in the country in terms of academic success.
• There is a waiting list for entry exceeding the total capacity of the schools.
• There is no religious education taking place, and certainly no observable Islamic character.
• Curriculum focus is on mathematics and science.

They were unable to interview the Hodja himself since, apparently, he has been ill for some months and rarely appears in public. His representative assured the interviewer that he takes no direct interest in the running of the schools. The most sinister information emerging from the programme was the presenter’s comment that some people in Turkey believe Gülen and his ‘movement’ have a ‘secret agenda’ though the details weren’t made clear – one assumes that’s because otherwise it wouldn’t be secret.

Undoubtedly the activities of the ‘Gülen movement’ are beginning to arouse interest beyond the shores of the Hodja’s native Turkey – however there seems to be some debate about the nature of these activities.

My Apple Desktop Dictionary defines a movement as: ‘a group of people working together to advance their shared political, social, or artistic ideas: the labor movement’, or the cubist movement.

Merriam-Webster Online suggests: ‘a series of organized activities working toward an objective; also: an organized effort to promote or attain an end, eg the civil rights movement’.

Two questions seem to arise here: Does a ‘movement’ require a leader in the sense of a person who takes responsibility for organizing and coordinating its activities? And, is a ‘movement’ good or bad, according to the definition?

Addressing the first question, it seems to me that the key factor in a movement is a concept or philosophy, rather than a ‘leader’ in the normal sense of the word – a concept such as: that labour needs to organize to counteract the power of employers; that human beings deserve equal rights before the law regardless of race; the use of ‘multiple perspective and complex planar faceting for expressive effect’ in a work of art. Participants latch on to an idea formulated by an initiator or trend-setter and the movement takes on a life of its own which may be quite independent of that person. Subsequently leaders may emerge but again, the movement continues or dies out more or less regardless of the existence or activities of those persons. Think of Martin Luther King or Pablo Picasso. As for the second question, in general, movements tend to be, to a greater or lesser extent, revolutionary, in the sense that they are usually a reaction to the prevailing status quo, and their appeal is that they offer some kind of new approach to what is perceived to be an existing problem. I guess they will ultimately be judged according to which side of the fence the judge is sitting on – or alternatively, by their results. ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ (Luke: 6, 43) has always seemed to me a good criterion to use in evaluating any group or individual.

So let’s get back to the Gülen Movement. First of all there is an official website. You won’t find the ‘hidden agenda’ of course, because that would, of necessity, be hidden. But you will find a very fascinating and comprehensive source of information about the man, his beliefs and goals. According to the brief bio, he ‘is an authoritative mainstream Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader and educational activist who supports interfaith and intercultural dialogue, science, democracy and spirituality and opposes violence and turning religion into a political ideology. Fethullah Gülen promotes cooperation of civilizations toward a peaceful world, as opposed to a clash’. On this website you will find poetry and articles about education, the rights of women, the link between virtue and happiness . . . and other interesting topics too numerous to mention. You will find that Gülen cites as a source of his inspiration the 13^th century Sufi mystic Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, renowned for his inclusive philosophy of love and peace. 

Wikipedia will tell you, not surprisingly, that the Gülen Movement is inspired by the teachings of Fethullah Hodja. A key concept is the Turkish word Hizmet, meaning service, which connotes using your talents for the common good without looking for personal reward. On the other hand, Gülen does not discourage followers from making money through business – merely encourages them to use some of their energies to help the less fortunate. 

A recent Time magazine article  wrote about a meeting with members of the Gülen Movement in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır. In an economically disadvantaged region of the country with a large Kurdish population, local businessmen have been raising money for the foundation of elementary schools and public reading rooms. While the article does say that ‘many Turks view the Gulen Movement with suspicion’, on the face of it, you’d have to think that the fruits of its efforts seem quite positive, even laudable.

According to another website called ‘Gülen Inspired Schools’,  there are over a thousand such schools around the world, including 130 in the United States. Independent audits suggest that these schools produce excellent academic results, ranking them among the most successful in their respective countries. Interestingly, administrators deny any control by the Hodja, or a central body associated with him, unlike, say, Catholic Church-run schools. Investigators have found no evidence of religious teaching, Islamic or otherwise. On the contrary, Gülen has been quoted as saying, "Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping God," and the common thread running through the schools seems to be a curriculum focusing on these modern subjects.

Sounds ok, on the whole, what do you think? Still, I have to confess I found one or two negatives in my searchings. An article in the New York Times in 2006  reported that some of those Texas schools had been allegedly giving construction contracts and making other favourable deals with firms ‘connected to’ the Gülen movement. More seriously, Mr Gülen himself was apparently put on trial in 1999 for ‘attempting to overthrow the government.’ Still, when you consider that the present Prime Minister of Turkey served prison time in those days for a similar offence, you’d have to think that the legal criteria must have been somewhat more stringent than we would expect in the US or New Zealand. In his younger days, the Hodja also apparently fell foul of the military authorities after the 1971 coup in Turkey, being arrested, tried and convicted. Not surprising, then, that he chooses to reside in the USA – although Turkish courts did clear him of all wrong-doing in 2008.

Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your patience in reading so far. I’m not here to be an apologist for Fethullah Gülen or any political or religious ideology. I merely want to outline the philosophies and fruits of two movements, and ask you to consider who you would prefer to see ruling the world.

God or Mammon?

On the one hand, let me present bottom-line accounting, out-of-control free-market capitalism, as championed by Wall Street bankers, multi-national corporations and the so-called mainstream media. Key elements of this ideology are: privatisation of state-owned enterprises, belt-tightening (especially for the middle and lower socio-economic classes), welfare cutbacks, labour-market flexibility and outsourcing of manufacturing to countries with lower wage costs. MBA management courses churn out white-colour clones who can manage any enterprise, without needing to know anything about the activity of the industry they are managing. Governments are hijacked by corporate and financial interests with no personal morality or patriotism whatsoever, whose only belief is in the power of money to buy whatever they want, and a philosophy, if you can call it that, based on a firm sense of personal entitlement to rape the planet of its resources and exploit its people wherever they may be. Reduced taxes for the wealthy are an important tool in economic management. Why should the tax-payer pay for schools, hospitals, post offices, railways, electricity supply, relief for the the unemployed and disadvantaged? The tax-payer's money is needed to bail out the banks when they have finished milking ma and pa small investors, superannuation funds, poor borrowers – and there’s no one else in the capitalist system to defraud.

On the other hand, let’s postulate a group of people with a personal morality based on religious beliefs, and a philosophy founded on a concept of altruistic service to the community. A group of people who operate without the need for a centralised bureaucratic structure, their operations inspired by a teacher with a vision of a better world and directed by their own confidence in the truth of his message. A group of people who, in spite of their lofty ideals, do not divorce themselves from the real world, but rather work within it, using their knowledge, skills and resources to provide educational opportunities and support to young people in their communities.

In the end, I guess, life choices are never so simple. I don’t imagine you will get the opportunity to cast a vote directly for one or the other. But I like the sound of this:

Along the winding road to The Truth
A hero, all selfishness banished,
The key to the mystery of creation in his heart,
Weaves his way through time to reach his goal.

Moving ever upwards he breathes the air of eternity;
He has met with Khidr: he knows the way.
And to fellow wayfarers he gives the good news of dawn;
A message of hope in a night of choking darkness.

In his hands burns a torch; he spreads light everywhere
And he brightens the Way for all who would follow;
His ascent radiates peace and serenity;
His amber fragrance permeates every atom of creation.

Wherever he treads finds life and becomes green:
The hills and valleys, plains and mountains are all dressed in color:
And on every breeze is borne the perfume of spring;
Blossoms appear, flowers burst into life, trees are quickened.

His mind nurtured ever by eternity,
And everlasting melody flows from his lips:
All he sees is the richly colored tapestry of life to come,
The belief in which is part of his every being. 

Rescuing Constantinople, liberating Istanbul and de-bunking history

History, Henry Ford apparently actually said, is more or less bunk. It seems he and I have moved closer together over the years. I was always led to believe that he was claiming the one hundred percent bunkishness of history, and I disagreed most fervently. Now I gather he qualified his statement with that ‘more or less’, and I find myself increasingly coming round to the same opinion.

Let me give you yet another example. On Tuesday 29 May, Turks celebrated an event they know as the ‘Conquest of Istanbul’ (İstanbul’un Fethi). Some four and a half months later, they will celebrate another occasion they remember as the ‘Liberation of Istanbul’ (İstanbul’un Kurtuluş’u). The second of these dates is always a holiday for the school children of Turkey’s largest city, while the former is not.

Recent excavations related to the construction of Istanbul’s new underground Metro system have put back the date of the first human settlement on the site of this ancient city to around 6,500 BCE. That makes a whole lot of history, doesn’t it! So you can understand Turkish school kids experiencing some difficulties remembering exactly what happened when. The task is complicated, however, by the fact that there seems to have been some tinkering by authorities to ensure that school history books present the approved version.

Getting back to those two dates above, it surprises me anew every year to find how many of my Turkish students seem to think that 6 October was the day when Turks ‘liberated’ Istanbul from the Byzantine Greeks. In fact, what happened was that, after Mustafa Kemal and his Turkish nationalist army had chased the modern Greek forces out of Anatolia in 1922, British and other allied troops that had been occupying the Ottoman capital since the end of the First World War, decided to up sticks and head for home.

Turkey's most expensive film to date

I guess when you’re a kid at school, having an official day off is always going to be a powerful reason for remembering a date – so perhaps it’s a good thing that Prime Minister Erdoğan has stated his intention to make 29 May a public holiday in future. In that case, kids next year are much more likely to learn that the date will mark the 560^th anniversary of an earlier Tuesday, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II led his victorious army into the Byzantine Greek capital of Constantinople after a seven-week siege in 1453. Perhaps some of the confusion will be cleared up too, if the name of the celebration is altered to recognise the self-evident fact that the city didn’t become ‘İstanbul’ until after it had been conquered – some would say, until long after.

Perhaps it’s not so much history itself, but our knowledge and understanding of it that is ‘bunk’. And just possibly the reason is that certain ‘authorities’ have vested interests in fostering misunderstandings. When you compare what the average Turk knows about the history of Constantinople/Istanbul with the knowledge most of us in the West have, you perhaps get a better sight of the problem.

The event of 29 May 1453 is generally referred to in Western histories as ‘The Fall of Constantinople’. Some writers credit the influx of Greek scholars fleeing the city as a key element in the Europe Renaissance. Some consider the Islamic takeover to have been the spur that prompted Columbus and others to launch themselves across the Atlantic in search of India. The successful employment of gunpowder and cannons against the medieval world’s best-fortified city is often taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages. These claims are interesting, and undoubtedly debatable, but I will leave the debate to more able scholars. Of more relevance to my immediate purpose is the oft-heard claim that the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans was ‘a massive blow to Christendom’. It has even been said to mark ‘the end of the Roman Empire’. 

Now I don’t know what you were taught when you were at school, but I have a pretty clear memory of being told that ‘Rome fell to the barbarians’ in 476 AD/CE. The main authority for that precise date seems to have been the 18^th century English historian, Edward Gibbon. I also have hazy memories of Christians having been thrown to lions, but I can’t remember if these were sourced from the same book or the same teacher; nor do I have a clear memory of whether the barbarians were God’s punishment for what the Romans did to the Christians, or if they were just an unfortunate coincidence.

What I definitely do not remember being told was that, 140 years before the German upstart Odoacer deposed the resident Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus, an earlier emperor, Constantine, in response to the declining importance of Italy, and the rising importance of Asia Minor, had established a ‘New Rome’ at the mouth of the Bosporus Strait. While it was clear that, at some point, those ‘old Roman’ citizens had given up feeding Christians to lions, and transformed themselves into good Catholics, I do not remember its being made clear that the ‘Roman Empire’ continued in the east for another thousand years until finally laid to rest by that 21 year-old Ottoman sultan on that fateful Tuesday in 1453.

So why the confusion about the end of the Roman Empire? I guess part of the problem stems from the fact that those ancient ‘Romans’ used the name of their capital city as the basis for naming their empire – as if the British Empire had instead been known as Londonian. A second source of confusion is that the conferring of ‘Roman citizenship’ was used as an instrument of control and government, and was not restricted to residents of Rome itself, or even Italy. As a result, citizens in Constantinople, and elsewhere in Asia Minor continued to think of themselves as ‘Romans’ long after the fall of the city of Rome and its western Empire – and long after they had ceased speaking Latin and had reverted to the use of Greek. That’s why modern-day Turks still refer to their Greek-speaking citizens as Rum, and their church as Rum Ortodoks.

However, we can’t just blame the ancient Romans and Greeks for the confusion. Europeans have always had problems defining their relationship with their eastern cousins. For a start, there was bitter competition in the Middle Ages between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople. Doctrinal differences related to such issues as the Holy Trinity, the true nature of Jesus, and what sort of bread to use for the Sacramental Feast were the ostensible reason – but perhaps more important was the envy of Roman Popes for the temporal power of the Eastern Church. Papal attempts to resurrect the western Roman Empire in holy guise made it impossible to accept the existence of a rival in the east – which henceforth became known as ‘Greek’. In 1054 the Eastern and Western Churches finalised their split in what became known as The Great Schism, and relations went from bad to worse.

Around this time, traders from the Italian cities of Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi began setting up shop across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. Of course, both sides derived benefits from the arrangement, while at the same time friction also developed. Locals resented the accumulating wealth and arrogance of the foreigners, especially when their mutual rivalries broke out into violence. Resentment came to a head, apparently, in April 1182 when the local population went on a festive spree of riot and murder, known to historians as the Massacre of the Latins.

Latin revenge, however, was not long in coming. Roman Popes had been unleashing crusading knights eastwards for a hundred years, partly in response to appeals from the Eastern Emperors for help against the spread of Islam. The fourth and last of these crusades was, it seems, something of a fiasco. Shortage of funds for the journey obliged participants to render military services to the Doge of Venice. Subsequently they found their way to Constantinople, which they proceeded to besiege and sack in April 1204, installing a Latin Emperor of their own. Somewhere along the way, they seem to have lost sight of the main purpose of their venture (viz. fighting Muslims), and very few of their number managed to engage with any.

When those Latin Crusaders sacked, looted and destroyed the capital of their eastern rivals, subjecting its citizens to three days of rape and murder, the Pope of the day, the ironically named Innocent III, who, one assumes, had sent them in good faith to fight Saracens, Turks and other assorted infidels, was apparently somewhat upset, and gave their leaders a sound telling-off. Nevertheless, after piles of booty from the pillaged imperial capital began to appear in Rome, it seems the Pontiff found it in his heart to forgive his errant knights, and allow them back into his church. Today, visitors to St Marks Cathedral in Venice can see the copper statues of four prancing horses that had stood over the main gate of the Hippodrome in Constantine’s New Rome for nine centuries – just the most famous of the looted treasures.

The Greeks did succeed in winning back their capital some fifty-odd years later, but by then irreparable damage had been done. The Byzantine Empire (as it came to be called in later years) had been mortally wounded. By the time the young Ottoman Sultan Mehmet decided to add Constantinople to his growing empire, there was, in fact, very little of Imperial Rome remaining outside the city walls. Nevertheless, capturing the ‘Queen of Cities’ was not an easy task. Apart from the Fourth Crusaders, Persians, Arabs, Slavs, Bulgarians, even Vikings, had assailed the mighty walls on many occasions without success. This time, however, the Ottomans were determined, and laid their plans well. Even so, had ‘Christendom’ really wanted to stave off that ‘massive blow’ to their power and prestige, and turn back the Islamic Ottoman threat, you would think they could have made a little more effort.

Now, with the Ottoman forces massed outside those walls, might have been a good opportunity for the Western Church to show a little temporal solidarity – but they didn’t. Pope Nicholas V did, apparently, make a half-hearted call for another Crusade, but the call fell on deaf ears. Apart from a few hundred Genoese and Venetians with a financial interest in supporting their Greek patrons, the last descendants of Imperial Rome were left to fight their final battle alone. As history records, their valiant defence was at last broken, and Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror entered the city that would become his own capital.

History, at least the western version, is a little quieter on the aftermath of the conquest. As we mentioned above, the victorious Latin knights rampaged for three days through the city of their Christian cousins in 1204. To be fair to the Crusaders, a three-day mayhem of killing and looting was the standard reward for an army that had been put to the trouble of besieging and capturing a walled town. England’s noble King Henry V, according to Shakespeare, gave the French defenders of Harfleur a final warning:

Take pity of your town and of your people,

Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;

Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace

O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds

Of heady murder, spoil and villany.

If not, why, in a moment look to see

The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand

Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;

Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,

Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused

Do break the clouds . . . (Henry V, III, iii)

So we may be surprised to learn that the Muslim Ottoman Sultan called off his ‘blind and bloody soldiers’ after one day of such sport. He also allowed the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to maintain his seat in the new Ottoman capital. According to one source, ‘As a strange side-effect of the Muslim conquest, the doctrinal integrity of eastern Christendom was preserved: instead of the compromises with the Vatican that might otherwise have been inevitable, the patriarchate was able to hold to its view on the issues, such as the nature of the Trinity, that had led to so much bitter argument.’

And there he can be found to this day, ministering to his flock from his sanctuary in Istanbul, largest city of the Turkish Republic, with its ninety-nine percent Muslim population: Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of Constantinople, First Among Equals in the Eastern Orthodox communion. History, if not one hundred percent bunk, at least needs careful watching.