January 1, 2008
http://www.jihadwatch.org/Islam's Trojan Horse? Turkish Nationalism and the Nakshibendi Sufi Order
An extraordinarily important and revealing article by Paul Stenhouse in Quadrant (thanks to GG):
ON AUGUST 5, 2007, an advertisement appeared in an Istanbul newspaper, Zaman, calling for applications for a newly established Fethullah Gülen Chair of Islamic Studies and Interfaith Dialogue, within a Centre of Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Fitzroy campus of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. The position had been advertised in Australia on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 8. The deadline for applicants was September 7.
The objectives of the Centre are stated to be as follows: “To promote the further development of inter-religious harmony and dialogue in Australia and in the Pacific-Asia region”. Its aim is also to “educate future leaders in the humanities, business, health sciences, social sciences and theological sciences in the writings of Islam, as expounded in Fethullah Gülen’s writing and in the teachings of Said Nursi”.
As this was the first I had heard of such a Centre or Chair (set up, evidently, on August 31, 2006) I could not help but be impressed by its thoroughgoing commitment to promoting a certain kind of Islam through a Catholic university, and filtering it through all the faculties to “future leaders”. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, it also offered a base from which the relatively little-known Turkish organisation that negotiated the setting up of the Centre and Chair—the Australian Inter-cultural Society (AIS)—could have outreach with some credibility throughout Australia, the Pacific and Asia.
I recalled a by-now virtually unobtainable book, Moslems in Europe and America by Ali al-Montasser al-Kattani, published in Iraq in 1976 by Dar Idris. It called for the establishment of chairs of Islamic Studies in universities in Europe, America, the West Indies and other countries, and the setting up of committees of Muslims to select other Muslims to occupy these chairs. At the same time it called for an end to any aid, moral or financial, that might already be being given to established chairs of Islamic Studies held by Christians or Jews.
Could this be the smoking gun of MESA Nostra? I expect this applies also to reliably dhimmi academics who will do the Muslims' bidding. I'd like to know what Omid Safi and Carl Ernst in Chapel Hill would say about this. Or John Esposito, John Voll, and Yvonne Haddad at Georgetown. Etc. etc. etc. That is, I'd like to know what they would say about this if they were all injected with truth serum.
On November 3, 2006, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne met with the AIS and expressed the wish “that Catholics cooperate with Muslims and therefore with the members of the Intercultural Society in every way possible”.
It now appears that the AIS, which is connected to the Fethullah Gülen and Said Nursi group, is also linked to the equally innocuously named but more up-front Turkish Muslim Affinity Intercultural Federation. The Executive Officer of Affinity, Mehmet Ozalp, and its Vice-President, Zuleyha Keskin, are regularly featured as speakers or representatives at ecumenical, inter-faith and intercultural/multicultural functions. In 2005 Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, received an award from Affinity for his support of inter-faith activities.
Affinity regularly describes itself as “an organisation founded in 2001 by a group of young Australian Muslims specifically to promote cultural and religious awareness and understanding across the entire Australian community”. On occasion it adds that it is a “Muslim Organisation for Religious Education and Interfaith Dialogue”.
On September 11, 2005, Affinity and the Feza Foundation sponsored a National Security and Harmony Summit entitled “Muslims in Australia”, at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. The AIS and Affinity were represented among the speakers by board members.
Irfan Yusuf, a Sydney-based lawyer, revealed in 2005 that Affinity is in fact the “Interfaith wing” of:
“a Turkey-based religious congregation (or ‘cemat’) linked to [the] Turkish Islamic scholar Muhammad Fethullah Gülen. That cemat’s interests are represented in Australia by the Feza Foundation Limited which runs two schools, including Sule College, in Sydney. These schools claim to be non-denominational, though [they] are modelled on other Islamic schools run under the auspices of the Gülen-led cemat.”
Yusuf mentions that he “acted for the Feza Foundation Limited and for Sule College for some five years”, and that he has “close friends from university who are heavily involved” in the Affinity Foundation.
Bediüz-zaman Said Nursi
AS SAID NURSI (originally known as Said Kurdi, “Said the Kurd”) and Fethullah Gülen figure prominently in the official designation of the Chair and in references to it, it may be useful to examine their background and teachings. It is proposed that “future leaders in the humanities, business, health sciences, social sciences and theological sciences” at the ACU are going to be educated in Islam as expounded in their writings. As Said Nursi is the master, and Gülen the disciple, I see some advantage in dealing more fully with Nursi’s background and teachings.
What follows needs to be read in tandem with an article I had published in Quadrant (June 2007): “Ignoring Signposts on the Road: Da‘wa—Jihad with a Velvet Glove”. Concerning da‘wa I wrote:
“The shadow of da‘wa—the public face of the understated, more subtle promotion of Islamist ideology … hangs like a pall over much of the information about Islam disseminated in the West by fundamentalists and their gullible supporters.
“Lenin and subsequent Soviet governments talked up peace with capitalist nations, while at the same time encouraging workers of these countries, through organisations like the Communist International, to overthrow these same capitalist governments. Radical Islam has opened up a second Jihadist front. Through da‘wa it hopes to achieve by sleight of hand what will ultimately prove to be unattainable by brute force ...
“Some Western politicians, academics, clergy and media, oblivious of the currents surging through modern-day Islamist circles ... appear to be unfazed by the often reciprocal relationship between various Islamic da‘wist NGOs and terrorist organisations. Many others simply pretend nothing is happening or when confronted by irrefutable proof of links between Islamic da‘wist charities and suicide-bombers, terrorist cells, revolutionary agendas and the enlisting and training of mujahidun, rarely go beyond impotent gestures and wrist-slapping. In the case of some particularly ill-informed people—religious people among them—they go into denial mode and accuse critics of prejudice and worse.”
The largest da‘wa organisation in the world is the Tabligh-i-Jamaat, based in Pakistan. Tabligh, like da‘wa, means “propagation” and “propaganda”. Tabligh-i-Jamaat was founded in 1927 by a prominent Deobandi cleric and scholar, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi (1885–1944).
According to Alex Alexiev, the extremist attitudes that characterise Deobandism permeate Tabligh philosophy. Ilyas’s followers are intolerant of other Muslims and especially of Shi’ites, as well as of adherents of other faiths:
“The West’s misreading of Tablighi Jamaat actions and motives has serious implications for the war on terrorism. Tablighi Jamaat has always adopted an extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam, but in the past two decades, it has radicalized to the point where it is now a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide. For a majority of young Muslim extremists, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the ‘antechamber of fundamentalism’.”
The largest da‘wa organization in Turkey and throughout Central Asia is the Nur (light) Movement (Nurcu Hareketi) founded just before Tabligh-i-Jamaat, in 1926, by Bediüz-zaman Said Nursi (1876–1960).
Nursi is an enigmatic figure, part spiritualist and part political eminence grise. In his early years, mainly through attending a Nakshibendi seminary in the Kurdish region of Turkey, he became devoted to the teaching of Mêvlana Halid, the Nakshibendi Sufi leader from Saleymaniye in Kurdish Iraq.
It should be noted that as a Nakshibendi, Nursi was in distinguished company: former Prime Minister and President Turgut Ozal (died 1993); former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan (1996-97); present Islamist Prime Minister (since 2003) Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Parliamentary Speaker Bulent Arinc (2002–07); former Foreign Minister (2003–07) and now President (sworn in August 29, 2007) Abdullah Gul—all either come from, or are much influenced by, the Nakshibendi Sufi sect.
A point seldom noted, however, but germane to our enquiry, is that the Nakshibendi Sufi order, according to Serif Mardin, is “a Turkish variant of modern Islamic fundamentalism”. It originated in the twelfth century.
Sufism is usually regarded by non-Muslim journalists and politicians as a “mystical” form of Islam that corresponds more or less to monasticism in Christianity —but this is to ignore Muhammad’s own warning that “the monasticism of this community is jihad”. Historian Christopher Dawson comments:
“Nothing could be less mystical than [Muhammad’s] religious teaching. It was a religion of fear rather than of love, and the goal of its striving was not the vision of God but the sensible delights of the shady gardens of paradise … the duty of man was not the transformation of his interior life but the objective establishment of the reign of God on earth by the sword and submission to the law of Islam … it is a militant Puritanism of the same type as the modern Wahhabite movement. But it was never a purely external system. Its Puritanism was not only that of the warrior, it was also that of the unworldly ascetic who spends his time in prayer and fasting.”
Sufism was a return to the early puritanism of the Kharijites, who reacted against the growing worldliness of Islam. Its founder, Abu Sa‘id Hasan, lived in Basra (643–728 AD). Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abd Allah (1844–85) the self-styled Mahdi whose dervish army killed Gordon and took Khartoum in 1885, was a Sufi.
Current Prime Minister Erdogan is on record as stating “We are Sharia-ists”; “We will turn Istanbul into Medina”; “I am the Imam of Istanbul”; “Our only goal is an Islamic State”.
Topic: Islam's Trojan Horse? (Read 3249 times)