Mr. Gullen and Combating Extremist Cancer
I have never met Mr. Fethullah Gullen, but I have spent quite a bit of time with his supporters both in Turkey and the United States. He is a deeply religious man whose Islam corresponds to what we Jews call Modern Orthodoxy or Torah Umadda, Torah with Scientific/Secular Learning.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (“Muslims Must Combat the Extremist Cancer, WSJ, August 28, 2015) Mr. Gullen calls upon Muslims to denounce violence, create a flexible Islam, promote human rights, provide secular as well as liberal religious educational opportunities for everyone, and support equal rights for women. His vision is one I support. It is also one I suspect is doomed.
People prefer black and white to grey. They want to be Orthodox or Secular rather than some hybrid of the two. This is no less true in Judaism than in Islam. As the recent Pew Study of Orthodox Judaism in the United States shows, Modern Orthodoxy is disappearing while Ultra-Orthodoxy is thriving. Why? Because 1) Orthodoxy provides certainty while science offers only uncertainty, and 2) people prefer certainty to uncertainty. People want answers not more questions. Orthodoxy traffics in answers, science in questions. Orthodoxy asks people to believe, science challenges them to think, and, again, for most people thinking us just too much bother.
What we will see and are already seeing in the United States is a ghettoization of Ultra-Orthodox peoples—Jews, Christians, and Muslim—each into their respective enclaves. They will marginalize themselves from the mainstream society, and this self–imposed marginalization will metathesize into a sense of victimization that will justify the creation of terror groups. We can see this sense of victimization among certain kinds of Christians broadcast as Fox News’ War on Christianity of which Kim Davis is the most recent and public example. And we can see the potential for violence as Ms. Davis’ husband carries a handgun into the county courthouse.
Mr. Gullen’s modern orthodox Islam arose in a secular somewhat democratic Turkey, a Turkey that is fast disappearing. And he is calling for change in an Islamic world that has little or no experience with either. He cannot win. Just as Israel is falling under the control of religious extremists and their right wing political allies, the same is happening in Islam and, I’m afraid, in the United States as well.
What we need is not another interfaith conference that ignores the dangers of religion, but bold celebrations of religious humanism that draw from religious tradition to create a nontraditional world rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than literalist readings of Tanakh, New Testament, or Qur’an.