The city of Kaolack in Senegal is a major destination in Africa for those seeking a spiritual path. Inspired by the mystical teachings of the Tijani order, hundreds of thousands of followers come to Kaolack to learn lessons (wird), and especially to join the annual Mawlid celebrations to honor the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, peace be upon him. I cannot forget the day when I visited this city with a group of friends in February 2013. As we were getting out of our van we were welcomed by a group of young men singing for us what is famously known as “The Poem of the Cloak” (Qasida al-Burda), an exceptionally beautiful poem written by Imam al-Busiri, a 13th century North African scholar and poet. This qasida, or hymn, is one of the rare examples of poetry that has been globally adopted, translated, and memorized by Muslims from the far east to the West Africa to honor the Prophet’s memory.

Five years later, in February 2018, when I heard the same hymn being sung live to welcome guests, I was in Washington, D.C., at the nation’s one and only synagogue established by a special act from the Congress: Washington Hebrew Congregation (WHC). Muslim boys and girls of the ADAMS Center youth choir, who were singing the hymn, were welcoming Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, the respected Mauritanian scholar (dob 1935) from Abu Dhabi. Indeed, it was a rare scene of a turban-wearing imam entering a Jewish temple to address a Jewish audience.

Shaykh bin Bayyah was hosted by Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig, who led the service, “A Sabbath of Peace.” It proved to be a remarkable interfaith event among members of different faith communities who prayed together and sang songs of peace.

In his introduction, Rabbi Lustig told about their visit to the Shaykh in his home in Abu Dhabi where the Shaykh spoke about the story of Joseph and his reconciliation with his brothers. Rabbi remembered he said to the Shaykh, “I am Joseph, your brother.” Rabbi Lustig invited the Shaykh to the podium with the following words: “We are the only congregation created by an Act of Congress so that all the children of Abraham would be able to have their appropriate voice in this nation’s capital.”

Over 25 religious leaders from around the Washington area, including Cardinal McCarrick, Pastor Bob Roberts, Professor Akbar Ahmed, and Imam Magid were present during the service. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, the President of Zaytuna Institute, was also a part of the event to translate the words of his teacher bin Bayyah. Shaykh Yusuf, himself a scholar, eloquent speaker, and, as Rabbi Lustig described him, “the west-most, influential, promising, and powerful scholar of Islam, great friend, great teacher,” respectfully stood at the podium throughout the address, and did not say anything other than translating the words of the honorable teacher. What we saw in the way Shaykh Yusuf treated his teacher was a live reenactment of what used to be a teacher-pupil relationship in premodern times, one that acknowledged the true value of knowledge and their respective personal value vis-à-vis the infinite scale of our spiritual journey to the divine; a relationship marked by an appreciation of true knowledge, and in which teachers were not only the vessels of conveying theory, but also the role models of good character traits and virtues. One can manifest this behavior only when he or she has duly digested divine knowledge and made it a part of their nature.

After offering his greetings to Prophet Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus (peace be upon them), Shaykh bin Bayyah said he had not been able to visit a mosque yet during this trip, meaning that he had been to other places of worship to foster what he called the Alliance of Virtue amongst the Abrahamic peoples. Here are some of the highlights from his short speech:

“Despite all the things we are witnessing in our world, animosities and wars, there should always be a voice that calls to peace, even if in times it might sound like a weak voice. We believe that the power of peace is actually stronger than the power of war. A lot of people feel exhausted [by] these conflicts. Can the Abrahamic family once again bring the hope of peace in a conflicted world? The first thing that we are attempting to do is to remove the legitimacy of religion from the advocates of hatred and war. It is not just with our words, but also with our relationships with others, with the love that we show one another, also with sincere friendship and integrity….

“I am not going to conceal from you the fact that there are people out there that don’t want to see people come together, especially the religious leadership coming together for this cause. In many parts of the world, the masses can be divided into two types: the group that is victorious in war, and the other group that feels like they have failed. Neither of them, the victorious and the defeated, like the people that are calling to peace. The defeated group like those who are calling to war, because they are seeking revenge. We are firefighters. We are not asking who started the fire, people can ask that after. But now we are just saying, ‘let’s put out the fire.’…

“It is undeniable there is a lot of oppression in the world. We can’t set that aside. There is no doubt that justice is the foundation of perpetual peace. Despite that we are seeking peace even if it is a temporary peace. We want people just to set their weapons aside. God gave us ability to speak in order to communicate. God spoke to messengers. Our Qur’an says, God spoke to Moses. Speech is actually an instrument for seeking peace. This is the why Plato said the purpose of speech is persuasion, and the purpose of persuasion is to find an alternative to fighting. Our religions, we want them for development, human flourishing, human wellbeing. We don’t want them for destructive devices… Religion is a power, and like all power, it can be used for good or for evil. These people are going to be the peacemakers. They will restore our religious traditions to their first priority, which is the spreading of peace…”

The Shaykh’s words are reminiscent of what Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (d. 1960) said in 1952 to Eşref Edip: “There is a massive fire in front me and its flames are rising high up to the sky. My child is burning inside; my faith is in flames. I am rushing to put out that fire and to save my faith. Who cares if someone wants to intercept me and I trip over? Does this little thing really matter when there is such a wild fire?”

The Shaykh’s trip to Washington was not only to attend this service. During the week he joined a conference with 400 faith leaders to foster ties of interfaith dialogue. Called the “Alliance of Virtue,” the conference “was viewed as a follow-up. In 2016, Muslim scholars and leaders from dozens of Muslim-majority countries met in Morocco to sign the Marrakesh Declaration, which called the oppression of religious minorities contrary to Islam.” Religious leaders signed a broader document, the Washington Declaration, which is an overall call to freedom of speech, religious liberty and tolerance. ^[1] A dear friend, Rabbi Paul Jacobson from Temple Avodat Shalom in New Jersey participated in the conference and he shares his observations below.

The gathering at the Washington Hebrew Congregation was surely a touching one, filled with prayers and music by Dan Nichols who was accompanied by Jewish and Muslim youth choirs. My friend Sadiq Ansari, a PhD candidate in Islamic studies, was also present during the event, and he explains below what has remained in his heart after the event.

Conclusion: to be healed from our paralysis

Imam al-Busiri wrote Burda when one morning he woke up but could not rise; he was paralyzed and could not move one half of his body. The story goes that Busiri wrote this poem when he was bedridden with pain, and he hoped his praises for the Prophet would please God and he could perhaps be healed. Then one day, he saw the Prophet in his dream. The Prophet covered him with his cloak, and when he woke up he could move. My encounter with this poem was in Senegal in 2013 where I was a participant to an international conference titled “Diversity and Cohesion in a Globalized World: Contributions of the Gülen Movement.” A number of international scholars and leaders had delivered messages of dialogue to over eight hundred participants from thirty different countries in that beautiful country which was once a major port of slave trade, “the door with no return,” as written over the door of slave houses in the Gorée island off the Dakar. Just as I was filled in that conference with hopes that our world could really be saved from its sufferings, I believe efforts like the American Peace Caravan, Sabbath of Peace, Alliance of Virtue, and welcoming each other in each other’s temples should inspire in us hopes for a healing from our current paralysis.

[1] Michelle Boorstein, “How the National Prayer Breakfast sparked an unusual meeting between Muslims and evangelicals,” in The Washington Post, February 8, 2018.

Despite this, some of these stories are both real, and as legendary as could only be imagined in an epic tale. What happened fifty years ago in Selma, Alabama, features these qualities, both as a national marker and a real story of heroism. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of what was to be remembered as “Bloody Sunday” – March 7, 1965. The achievements that came from that day – and the whole Civil Rights Movement – helped to move the US, and the world, closer to racial equality.

As remarkable as the achievements that ensued have been, it is equally heartbreaking to witness, in many countries across the globe, that discrimination – based not only on racism but also on religious convictions, social affiliations, and political positions – still exist, and often under the guise of legal justifications. In this article, I will stretch the story of Selma to relate it to a unique drama of discrimination ongoing in modern day Turkey, a strategically located country in the Middle East.

Bridge-crossing from Selma

A young John Lewis, today a Congressional Representative (since 1987), led his SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and a crowd of around 600 on a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were planning to leave the city of Selma on a march to Montgomery, the state capital 54 miles east, to demonstrate their desire for equal citizenship rights. At the other end of the bridge, however, waited a line of state troopers. The non-violent marchers were violently attacked, leaving many heavily injured.

After re-grouping, another march was held, led by Martin Luther King Jr. This march and other demonstrations resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act which ensured every American citizen the right to vote regardless of race. Selma is an important threshold in the history of the Civil Rights Movement and it did not happen at the cost of nothing: thousands were arrested, many killed, and many more heavily wounded. Famously, the murder of an activist and deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, inspired the marchers. Yet despite frustration at the violence and discrimination, non-violence was a defining character of Civil Rights’ activism, and the followers would not compromise on this.

First march, March 7: Bloody Sunday. Around 600 marchers were heavily beaten and dispersed.

Second march, March 9: Turnaround Tuesday. Around 2500 marchers joined by hundreds of people from around the country to support the demonstration. Minister James Reeb who came from Boston was beaten by Ku Klux Klan that night and he could not survive. Dr. King turned marchers back from the bridge to wait for a judicial order to proceed.

Third march, March 21-25: To Montgomery. Started with 8 thousand and culminated with 25 thousand marchers and they were able to deliver a petition to the Governor’s office.

With endurance, patience, diplomacy, and stamina, activists were finally able to cross the Pettus Bridge, making their suffering known nationwide, and were able to make themselves heard in D.C. The commemoration of this event on its 50th anniversary was led, incredibly enough, by the first African American president of the United States. President Obama said on the site of the march and massacre, “In one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history — the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war; the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow; the death of four little girls in Birmingham; and the dream of a Baptist preacher — all that history met on this bridge.”

But one description Obama made that day portrayed the true character of the Civil Rights Movement:

“It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America.”

This was an accurate description; for the followers of the Civil Rights Movement were not using violence. Instead, they constantly trained to restrain themselves when challenged by violence and curses. And after they were able to sharpen their wills to the highest point of resilience, they won over their oppressors. They did not tarnish their rightful cause with the filthiness of violence, and this mustered sympathizers across the nation, both black and white. The Minister James Reeb, who was killed after the second march, was a white man. In fact, three of the four martyrs who answered SCLC’s (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) call and came to Selma, were white (Unitarian Minister James Reeb, Unitarian laywoman Viola Liuzzo, the Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels).¹

Fast forward to 2015. The United States still suffers from racism. The recent killings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and a few other places² are sad evidence that racist violence is still with us and has not yet yielded, and that the march begun in Selma is not yet over. Still, however, these attacks, which have been earnestly denounced by the American nation as a whole and perpetrators are facing trials, cannot undermine the accomplishments of the non-violent civil rights movement and their white supporters.

What is happening in Turkey?

The movie Selma, which was about the marches to Montgomery, was released around the same time when the trailers of a Turkish movie called Selam: Bahara Yolculuk (Peace: Journey to Spring) was being screened across Turkey. The two movies are related not only due to the extremely similar names, but because they feature the uniqueness of two epic tales of struggle for basic human rights and peaceful coexistence. They are the stories of two communities seemingly distant in location, time, and color, but mutual in goals and methods, in many respects.

Whereas Selma conveys the heroism of African-Americans striving non-violently as a part of civil rights movement, Selam reflects an episode of the Hizmet Movement’s expansion to the world. The volunteers involved in this movement are professionals – teachers, business people, physicians, and people from all walks of life who cherish the peacebuilding ideas of Fethullah Gülen, a retired Turkish preacher, who promotes education and honors every human being with compassion and respect. Hundreds of schools, relief organizations, healthcare centers, and dialogue institutions have been established by the participants of this movement across the globe. The movie is about the successful opening of one of the schools in Central Asia and the self-sacrificial work of their teachers.

Yet, what is not featured in the movie is the discrimination the Movement is suffering in its home base, Turkey, where it also originated. There is a systematic oppression underway against the schools, media outlets and journalists, corporations, public servants, and individuals who are affiliated with the Movement. This has been ongoing since the outbreak of the enormous corruption scandal against the government in December 2013.

The government, which has been in a position of un-checked power since 2002, responded to the claims of corruption with incredible vitriol, reassigning “thousands of police and prosecutors … and the prosecutors who initiated the investigation were suspended. The government closed the investigation and destroyed evidence that was gathered.”³ Heavily injured by these probes that included “claims of bribery, irregular gold exports worth billions of dollars and stashes of cash,”⁴ the government, which was trying to win upcoming local, presidential, and parliamentary elections, needed a scapegoat to lay all the sins on, in the public’s view. The Hizmet Movement, the largest social mass movement in Turkey, with sympathizers and volunteers from all spheres of society, was a tailor-made candidate for this position. And thanks to the overwhelming majority of the media, which the government directly and indirectly controls, as well as the overhaul of the entire state structure through reassignments and undermining the separation of powers, they have succeeded, to a certain extent, in manipulating public perception. Today, there are many public servants and journalists jailed on no legal grounds, but solely because of an alleged affiliation with Hizmet. Among the constituents of the ruling party’s supporters, a considerable portion believes Fethullah Gülen is an American spy secretly serving US interests by trying to overthrow the Turkish government! Accusations of similar sorts were alleged against the civil rights movement too. Robert Welch wrote in JBS Bulletin (John Birch Society Bulletin, June 1965): “Our task must be simply to make clear that the movement known as ‘civil rights’ is Communist-plotted, Communist-controlled, and in fact…serves only Communist purposes.”

People are afraid to send their kids to Hizmet schools, and they don’t want to work with sympathetic business owners. The signs of the schools are being torn down by municipalities, their companies are being raided by police, defamations of all sorts are being circulated through a paid-off propaganda machine, and witch-hunts of all sorts are being conducted.

Discrimination and segregation based on race as experienced in the US cannot be compared to the current political controversy in Turkey. Turkey has its own extremely weak record on human rights based on ethnicity and sectarian differences with Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds. Ironically, fellow sunni Turks who did not conform to the uncompromising definition of the new citizen under the ultra-secularist Kemalist regime have been subjected to state violence and defamation arguably no less than the previous groups. Yet, it is very disappointing to see a country which was once considered in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a potential model in the Middle East to have turned into a regime with only minor differences, if any, from its authoritarian neighbors.

One thing that Hizmet shares with the Civil Rights Movement is an approach to countering oppression: using non-violence and positive action. Through this policy, Dr. King and his supporters were able to gather much support from the rest of the nation and eventually acquired their rights. Non-violence and positive action are the essence of the faith-inspired Hizmet Movement, too, and thankfully, there is a growing support for them in many of the 170 countries where they operate.

Tyranny cannot last long, and Turkey will certainly wake up soon to once again realize the importance of this mass movement of education and dialogue. Retaliation in kind is not in Hizmet’s nature, so they will not slander back, they will not curse back, and they will never hurt back – these are against who they are. Those who support the oppressors against Hizmet are doing so either because of their envy for the achievements of Hizmet, because they cannot really believe their government could be this corrupt, or because it is in their best interest to continue to work closely with the government for their personal and/or institutional survival; this is the most accurate definition of slavery, where perhaps not the physical bodies, but their wills, values, and virtues are being compromised.

Conclusion

I have been writing this article at the time when Mr. Obama was preparing himself for a eulogy to be read at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina. The reverend was allegedly killed by a white supremacist. Despite many achievements that were earned during the Civil Rights Movement and despite the many obstacles the US has surpassed, such mass violence shows the US still has a long ways to go to true equality.

The word Selma is considered to have descended from either a Germanic root – the shortening of Anselma, from Germanic “ans,” which means god, and “helm,” which means helmet – or from an Arabic root of “salam,” which means peace. Thus, Selma stands for a Godly protection in peace. Selma, as in the Turkish movie, is a journey to spring. It is a one-way road for innocent victims to leave behind all discrimination and maltreatment. Challenged by these ongoing discriminations, we hope both Turks and Americans will be victorious in this “clash of wills.”

References

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/07/selma-people-who-died_n_6810430.html
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/from-ferguson-to-charleston-and-beyond-anguish-about-race-keeps-building.html
3. http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport
4. Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, October 18, 2014.

The human condition is one with many challenges and blessings, concurrent and successive. To believers, both hardship and abundance are a matter of perspective, at least in most occasions; everything we face is a test on the path to our perfection. Poverty and wealth are two of these tests – while the former comes in the guise of hardship and deficiency, the latter is cloaked in material abundance and outward comfort.

Wealth does not guarantee peace in one’s heart, in this life or in the hereafter, for it usually comes with a heavy bill – compromising one’s time and health, responsibilities to family and the larger community, a self-struggle between fully claiming the wealth or attributing it to God’s grace, and the question of how to best use this abundance.

Poverty, on the other hand, is not an easier challenge, as one is required to keep his or her patience in the face of hunger and lack of sufficient means for a life of self-sustainable dignity. Despite these difficulties, however, poverty comes with much less to be accountable for.

The story goes that one day, the famous Sultan Harun Rashid asked Bahl al-Dana, a Sufi mystic of his time, what would happen on the Day of Judgment. Bahl told him to order his servants to set a metal sheet with fire under it. After it became really hot, Bahl jumped on it barefoot and said, “I ate cheese and bread, wore a robe and underwear,” and then immediately jumped off.

“Now, it’s your turn,” he told the Sultan, who then had already realized that wealth in this world was quite a responsibility to answer for in the hereafter.

This conference aims to explore what the three Abrahamic religions have to teach us with regard to this human condition from a wide spectrum of themes, including philanthropy, globalization, gender, business, ethics, and mysticism. The Fountain is proud to be a contributor to this event, which we wholeheartedly believe reflects the worldview we strive to emphasize in our pages: a meaningful understanding of this life drawing on faith and reason.

We are grateful to Peace Islands Institute for making The Fountain a part of this event. We wish you an enjoyable stay in Istanbul and a successful conference.

Hakan Yeşilova
Editor
The Fountain