Coming to the Canadian experience, which has no doubt been hovering in the backs of our minds, with a nation requiring so much intellectual mediation, we may well worry that as the memory of the parties who fought on the Plains of Abraham fades into the background of the national consciousness, only homo economicus may survive, who looks to the nation only to optimize consumerism in the quest for status, rationalized as the summa of self actualization.

And we may justifiably worry that the universals of human nature which have obstructed utopian visions will continue to haunt the national dream, among them nepotism, inequality of intellectual and social potential, and the quest for dominance through violence, which is also embedded in our genes. And by the way, on the score of economic man, you’ll be amused to know that the most sophisticated instrument for the study of national identity, called the National Identity Scale, is not the work of academics or Statistics Canada, but of marketing agents. You can google it. Their goal is to profile all of our nationalist sentiments, loyalties, and proclivities in order to target our purchasing inclinations. How ironic is it that interested parties are seeking to brand us as consumers by profiling our diversities of national feeling?

There are other obstacles to national experience and identity worthy of mention. The word itself is derived from “natio” which essentially means birthplace, taken from “nasci,” to be born. We may well wonder whether our place of birth is our life’s destiny. He or she who swears an oath to the Queen in a citizenship court is making a vow that is tantamount to a religious conversion. Yet where people are born remains a huge part of their identity. A group of Canadian nationalist academics back in the 1970s, in a narrow spirit of mind, confirmed that very belief by stating that anyone not born in Canada lacked a true national experience and should therefore be barred from all positions of influence within our university systems. What a doctrine to impose upon an essentially immigrant nation, eager to recruit talent from abroad to maintain its national dream!

Yet that issue will never ultimately die, because we will never ultimately agree about how we construct identity and fashion allegiances, who is really in and who is not. How malleable are we, and how much baggage from our pasts is too much when it comes to forming a new national community? And how much superiority can the native born claim for themselves?

Something once said by George Bernard Shaw cuts both ways: “There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.” The gist of it is that we are indeed malleable, but only when we are young. Each of us here is as apt to speak Japanese as any child born in Japan, had we been born there. Yet nothing makes learning Japanese more difficult than first speaking English, because we were born here. So is birth tantamount to the only nation we can experience? How much plasticity do we have? Can a second language ever equal a first? That debate is likewise yours to discover.

The topic of memory in this context is also significant. It is not possible to dwell on all its complexities here, for memory is both key to the construction of t he self and key to those common experiences that define national identity. But self and nation entail different kinds of memory. A self is a point of view concerning its own lived history. National memories are preserved through books, paintings and pictures, letters, and journals housed in national archives and libraries. A nation emerges only when historical memory becomes personal memory, when the story of a people is internalized, inviting us to feel for and with those who created our national past.

Can a nation shed this component and still be a nation? I ask in innocence. Perhaps we can thrive together on current events. But if we require a deeper historical memory, how is it to be framed and disseminated? It is a real challenge for educators, who must referee among the embarrassing facts, the touchy opinions, and political correctness. Can we even afford an embattled Canadian history? Or do we beat our breasts and construct it as one long trail of colonializing abuse and ethnic misunderstanding? After all, two of our three founding peoples are conquered nations, and much of the history of Canada has been devoted to assuaging the loss of those former identities.

The Quebecois have a dearly-held sense of themselves as a first experience quality of nation centered on birth, language, a common history and culture, and at one time a common religion, yet they too must seek to embrace the contractual, legal, and secular components of a modern pluralistic society. The most intense intellectual debates within Quebec today are concerned with this very question. There is a lot of nostalgia in la belle province, and who can blame them? At some level, we all crave the kind of oneness they hope to find in a society still tenuously held together by a common language and traditions, made urgent by a history of perceived subjugation and collective hope.

Meanwhile, it is easy to imagine how irrelevant those confrontations must seem to newer Canadians who have no stakes in that conversation and can only hope for a second order gesellschaft nation or retreat into former national feelings; our historical solitudes go in many directions. Yet this part of our national experience cannot and should not be pretended away. And thus, how do we shape the collective memory of Canada? An attempt will be made in the transformation of our National Museum of Civilization into a Museum of National History, which I think we all recognize as an effort in nation building, in selectively representing the Canadian past in ways which will instill national pride in all its citizens. But whether this new institution will represent a faithful and comprehensive history or a cheerleading version of it remains to be seen. Behind it all is an admirable goal, to give our national memory a monument or shrine to make visible who we are, and to make it accessible to all the people.

I have thrown up a lot of obstacles to the realization of national identity in modern diversified societies. Unfortunately, I cannot resolve all the stressors and dilemmas which I have raised. I would be bigger than God if I had a band-aid for all our national divisions, and I would be a menacing tyrant if I had the power to imprint nationalist universals by fiat in the mind of every citizen.

What I would venture is that we all desire to be members of a national community—to participate personally in that cluster of ideas which not only holds us together but distinguishes us from all other nations, and to experience it as part of our extended personal identity. It is a level of the self that is big, but not too big, and still within imagining. National sentiments are strong when Canada does well in international ratings concerning our financial fundamentals. We are justifiably proud of our social welfare net, our peacekeeping objectives, or when planes fly overhead in formation, or when we take Olympic medals or win the World Series.

But we sense there is even more pro patria to be felt through education, historical consciousness, generous feelings toward our fellow citizens, and openness to dialogue and exchange. Emotions cannot be coerced, but when we feel them, they can help form the bonds that hold us together. In Canada, a dialogue among cultures has replaced the monolithic orientations of older and more traditional societies, which is now as it must be, but it is an ongoing experiment all the same, with an uncertain outcome. That brings us back to the intercultural and interfaith dialogues sponsored by such organizations as the IDI (Intercultural Dialogue Institute), which are vital to the shaping of our national ethos; we become one in sharing our differences and in understanding just how those differences still pertain both to our common humanity and to our national aspirations. In that regard, we can champion Fethullah Gulen’s great commission when he urges that “Each person who loves his or her country has to be a proper representative of that nation. Every member should invest in its values and put energy and aid into its development, and follow this pathway throughout life.” It is a great reciprocity conducted by granting identity to others and assuming an informed identity for ourselves.

A nation is dialogic. It is made by thinking it together. My purpose has been to think about the self and its experience in the context of nation, and how buying in cognitively adds to our experiencing of the self as a thinking participant. I can’t imagine a working nation without conditions like respect for law and the rights of others, respect for democratic institutions, and fiscal integrity. And here we get into the hard points for discussion. We need working languages to avoid our own Tower of Babel; thus it seems reasonable that we foster the two official languages of Canada as efficient vehicles of communication. We need citizens with religious sensibilities, even if they are confirmed atheists, but we must be wary of guiding ourselves in matters of the collective secular nation by religious principles more specific than generic ethics and civic morality; the French Revolution got that right. We need residents who imagine the common good and respect the dignity of life by instinct. And I would add my support for extending the historical consciousness of the nation, because Canada has had a rich history in its scant 400 hundred years of urban settlement. Canada has been pluralistic from its inception, yet we have forged a sense of a single dominion historically grounded and tied to a precious social and political formula based on reason and the spirit of order and cooperation. Yet I think we can remain true to our inspiring cultural diversity through discussion and sharing. Upon such a heritage, minds can build a nation.

I seem to recall that it was a beer company that branded us with a bit of national self-affirmation through its “I am Canadian” campaign. It was a “good feeling” ad. But Gulen said it more eloquently: “It is vital for citizens of a nation to say, ‘this is my country.’ The altruism of today will lead to the happiness of tomorrow’s generations.” And all this we do with our brains and minds in the most remarkable and mysterious of ways are, as a cognitive philosopher, are matters of eternal fascination to me. Nation-building we accomplish only by synchronizing our minds. We build an invisible yet compellingly real national community just by thinking in a collective way. Nation, in that sense, is a cognitive and emotional opportunity for the construction of the self, and clearly as a collective idea, nation has its adaptive value as a point of view from which we exercise our interests in the world. That alone gives grounds for the instauration of national bonds.

Donald A. Beecher is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Editor’s note: The first part was published in the previous issue #99.

Indeed, the world has once again stepped into a zone of spiritual crisis—and this in itself is a historical recurrence. Before delving into the details of the topic, it would be more useful to expound on the meaning and nature of historical recurrences.

Yes, history is filled with recurrences. These recurrences are not identical to the past, but show some form of resemblance. If they had been identical, then lessons would have been learned and the same mistakes would not have been made. Thus we need to approach history not hoping to arrive at decisive conclusions, as if it would recur identically, but rather to draw wisdom from it, for we will encounter events that will resemble similar moments in the past. Let us now try and view our current crisis from this perspective.

It has often been observed that the periods in history when God burdened and pressured people the most have inspired humanity to sail towards new horizons. This is the case for individuals as well as communities. That is, just as when an individual’s burdens reaching their zenith indicates the moment of salvation is near, excessive social burdens have always refined the community and guided them in new directions. The following saintly words on the night’s darkness reflect what we are trying to say here: “Get as dark as you can. For the last phase of darkness is the moment light begins to shine forth.”

Furthermore, the macro-universe and the human being (the eminent sultan of the normo-universe) are so similar that they are almost identical. Due to this fact, let us start the discussion with the individual, by way of comparison. The relief and contentment experienced by individuals are sometimes followed by spiritual and conscientious expansions. In some other instances, the opposite may happen. Contraction, or qabdh in Islamic Sufi terminology, means being pressed or put under pressure. The handle of the sword that is interlocked with fingers and pressed is also called “qabdha.” Qabdh can also be defined as being held extremely tightly by an unknown hand. This term, indeed, has been added to Sufi terminology with this particular connotation.

The state of contraction may sometimes originate from certain individual sins, or from individual heedlessness. At first, a person unleashes himself into an effervescent climate, and lives, for some time, in a light-headed state. Immediately after, as a form of punishment, a person becomes exposed to contraction. Maybe, it is the soul that wishes to experience this state, for the redundancy of comfort and lethargy annoys the soul. Consequently, the soul often gets annoyed by the exuberance of the material world, because it wishes to be, and to stay, in a state of spiritual alertness and vibrancy regarding its longing for eternity.

In this regard, contraction results when a person lets go of himself, and is consequently cautioned by the Hand of Power. God exposes a person to contraction in order for that person to re-direct themself to Him. This is very similar to when a mother lightly slaps her child to prevent her baby from doing something wrong, or going somewhere bad, and then embraces her baby mercifully and lovingly.

In such a state, roads narrow and do not give way; causes gradually start to vanish. Here, just at this moment, one removes all causes from his memory and directs himself to the One who holds all causes in His Mighty Hand. Essentially, the aim of the Almighty is to direct a person to Himself. In these cases, if a person comprehends the real cause of what befell him, and returns to the Almighty, it means that the goal has been achieved. However, reaching this point requires an astute consciousness and perception to comprehend the fact that no single incident in the universe occurs due to blind or arbitrary coincidence. In his commentary on the Qur’an, Nursi portrays the position of two people who have fallen into a well in light of the current issue: One of the two is deprived of his ability to inquire about the hidden aspect of matters. The other person is a man of wisdom. And through the window of wisdom, this second man speaks to himself as follows (Eighth Word):

“These matters do not actually seem to be coincidental. A lion suddenly starts chasing me while I have been running in the desert; then I fall into a well and hold a tree; two mice, a black one and a white one, on the root of the tree have been gnawing at the tree; and, a dragon down below has been waiting for the moment of my fall, with a mouth wide open. Up above, the lion threatens me with his scary behavior. Standing shoulder to shoulder, these incidents can in no way take place coincidentally or by chance. Apparently, all these have been preplanned by Someone who knows me; and all these are represented through my existence.”

You see, every person who has experienced the state of contraction should view incidents in a similar way, and say to themselves: “all these incidents embracing me so tightly are directed by a superior might exceeding myself, and I am a mere extra in this play.” Of course, this should not be considered sufficient, and right away, one should take refuge in the sovereignty of the One who holds the entirety of existence in His Holy Hand.

This situation is valid for communities, too. A community is sometimes held and pressed by an iron claw, and this can be said to be that community’s contraction . Reasons for such contraction include living in idleness, being unaware of their return to Him, knocking on the wrong doors, or seeking cures in the wrong places.

Today, we can see, through the contraction of individuals and communities, that history repeats itself. This repetition has shown that troubles and turmoil can mark the beginnings of new exaltations. The crisis we are experiencing today shall become a bridge to new energy and exuberance. Indeed, is it not our mission to prepare a new era of exaltation for humanity?

At the onset of the twenty-first century, a new relationship is being forged between my own Greek Orthodox Christian community and the Turkish Muslim community of the United States. That such a dialogue occurs at all surprises some within and beyond these communities, not understanding that such a dialogue has a long and complicated history in Turkey itself. Still, the stereotyped, traditional conflict between the Greeks and Turks has always been more complicated than what is portrayed outside of Greece and Turkey. The fact that the nascent American version of this dialogue between two communities has developed largely following the events of September 11, 2001, is therefore somewhat coincidental; that it has evolved in a society coming to terms with cultural and religious realities largely ignored by the majority prior to those events has only created an atmosphere where our work is increasingly perceived as necessary within both communities.

When coming “face to face” in dialogue, it is always an honor to be with so many people of like mind, who, for the sake of peace and justice and the higher ideals of their individual professions of faith and spiritual law, seek what St. Paul calls “a more excellent way.” Surely we “religious types” and others whose intellectual currency is the exchange of ideas between cultures, are in our day and age (a tense time of fear and resentment) unique stewards of a special and exceptional place in history. As representatives of our respective cultures and faiths, as representatives of what our individual culture’s legacy has shaped each of us to be, we are the inheritors of a vast wealth of knowledge, beauty, and pain. Surely, even though we are inheritors of history’s conflicts-which admittedly, sometimes color our more noble attempts to turn mere tolerance into understanding-we should be able to find some purpose and encouragement in that same history. This is not an easy thing in our time, in this age of constant media noise and lack of historical context.

The Greek Orthodox Christian and Turkish Muslim communities share a unique past; hence, our dialogue emerges from a complex, and, at times, painful history that Orthodox Christianity and Islam, Greece and Turkey have suffered and shared.

Yet we have come a long way. We have traveled a difficult road filled with many obstacles, physical violence, and the metaphorical obstacles of our intellectual insecurities that have perhaps hampered our higher aspirations even more than the former darkness of our historical conflicts. The influential and intellectually challenging Muslim thinker Fethullah Gülen puts it in another way, in broader terms, when he writes:

Negative feelings and attributes often defeat people, pulling them under their domination to such an extent that even the religions that guide people to goodness and kindness are abused, as well as the feelings and attributes that are sources of absolute good.

How truly these words reflect the experience for so many of us and for our ancestors. And struggling with religion’s truths-perhaps too weighty for us to comprehend fully and therefore abused by all of us, each of us misapplying our own ideals to baser human endeavors-we have suffered. What we did not understand was that we were suffering together. In retrospect, our shared history contains hope for our shared destiny.

Allow me to depict an image from our shared past, to recount an event shared by Greek Orthodox Christians and Turkish Muslims that is often overlooked. However, it has silently brought a message to us through the ages. In Istanbul, there are two images in the Patriarchate at the Phanar, two mosaics. They grace the foyer at the entrance of the main office building. On the one side is a depiction of St. Andrew, the First Called of Jesus’ Apostles and the first Bishop of Byzantium. With him is Stachys, Andrew’s successor (from 38-54 CE) in a long line of bishops who have made Byzantium, Constantinople, and Istanbul their home to the present. On the other side of that foyer at the Phanar is a mosaic that depicts the Patriarch Gennadios. He stands with his hand open, receiving a document being handed to him by Sultan Mehmet II in 1453. It is the Firman, the legal document guaranteeing that the Orthodox Church would continue its traditions and mission among its people during Muslim Ottoman rule.

The first image depicts the beginning of one of our peoples’ faith traditions. The next image depicts the inherent understanding of tradition that the progenitors of the Turkish nation had and would continue to keep. Our shared history is, obviously, something less than perfect. It is a human story about human people. Nevertheless, time and the tides of numerous historical fortunes have brought us to this moment in the United States. And we are together at this moment, in yet another time, in ways that could have only occurred because of this culture’s strengths. Imagine what this dialogue might mean to our ancestors if they were to see us now-Turks and Greeks together, sharing freedom, sharing meals at banquets, working together in a common cause and, most importantly, hoping for a still better future.

I, a Greek Orthodox bishop, one born in the United States, whose spiritual ties are to that great city on the shores of the Bosphorus, have stood before Turkish audiences and the people of America’s multi-cultural, multi-ethnic faith traditions, as an honored guest. We have been together at a table laden with the true food of human being-of human existence: understanding, mutual respect and hope.

Our future is contingent upon our acknowledgment of the past. History is always the greatest teacher. And after the long, difficult history of our interactions, we have something else that can and must help us become even greater witnesses: each of our own cultures and of the shared experiences we still remember. It is perhaps a difficult truth to embrace, but those who have been enemies quite often understand each other better than those who have never been part of their conflict. In the film, The Matrix Reloaded, one character says to another, whom he has just fought: “You never really know who someone is until you fight him.”

At this point in our history, when the need to fight has long passed, we have an opportunity to look at each other in a unique and intense way, and seeing one another in truth and love, we may yet see ourselves in the other. And this then may become the key to our common future and works of righteousness done in shared hope for a better world.

So, perhaps we have even managed to give goodness to the world together, to save what was the best of our respective histories, and allow the future to be a mirror, worthy of the deepest truths of our faiths, in which to see the truest reflection of our humanity. Turan Oflazoðlu says, “What we need is to enrich ourselves with those aspects of foreign culture which are not congenial to our nature.” We must seek the “other” amongst us and invite them into our lives. We must share our hopes our fears, our joys, and our sorrows. We must find ways of transcending our conflicts, both historical and intellectual, and create a new future together. My reflection on this dialogue is that, “We are the world in small.” May we may now truly praise the Creator’s gift of life in all its diversity, and walk together into the future in a new way. I hope that we will take the second step with the same sense of warmth and respect that we have experienced the first step. To quote the late, great prophet of reconciliation, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras- ἐλάτε νά κοιτταχOούμε – “come, let us look into one another’s eyes.”

The Example of Greek-Turkish Dialogue in Post-9/11 America
Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

In Heroes and Hero Worship Thomas Carlyle attempts to draw a picture of the development of the human intellect by using historical figures as coordinates. Some scholars take a perspective of history in terms of “the environment” or “the times” and “causes,” while others, like Carlyle, have the view that human advancement was not continuous, discrete and rather being made up of a series of jumps; these jumps were caused for the most part by specific individuals whom Carlyle calls “Heroes.” This is like the wave/particle duality of the “nature of light.” In some phenomena light behaves like a wave, while in others it behaves like a particle. One can write a history based on the ideas, cultures, and mediums in which people lived; or the same history can be written by focusing on certain individuals and following them and their actions.

The writings of Carlyle and those of many other authors of that time, of course, are very perceptive. Carlyle is not really trying to be objective on the matter. He has an idea, and he wants to tell us about this idea; while telling you what this idea is about he uses whatever his hands and mind can take hold of. Being so passionate about what is being said is probably a good thing. But if one is over-passionate, there cannot help but be wild swings in the appreciation of the historical person in question. If we use an analogy of a drawing, the historical person is no longer a point on the painting, but rather a hair of the brush. But that should not prevent us from benefiting from writing of Thomas Carlyle.

Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, has a special place in the book under the chapter title “Hero as a Prophet.” In the book, Carlyle declares his admiration of God’s Messenger, “… The word of such a man (Muhammad) is a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart. Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else; all else is wind in comparison.” Carlyle’s answers to pointed questions on Islam and the Prophet show interesting similarities to Said Nursi’s line of answers to similar questions. “…For a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Imposter without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess of pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot take him” reads very much like Said Nursi’s “The Addendum to the Fifteenth Word,” where he makes a long imaginary discussion with Satan and shows how people are inclined to unbelief, thinking that they are evaluating divine revelation from a neutral perspective “…O Satan! Objective reasoning means impartial judgment or not taking sides, but the objective reasoning which you and your disciples suggest is, in fact, taking the part of those in opposition to the Qur’an; not impartiality but an attitude of temporary unbelief. This is really so because to suppose the Qur’an the work of a human being and to build an argument on this supposition is to side with unbelief or falsehood…”

Considering the fact that at that time the West and the East were at odds with one another, and that the means of communications were quite inferior to our times, Carlyle having such an open mind to the “other” puts him in a category of his own with thinkers like Swedenborg, Emerson and Thoreau. I think when we are trying to build bridges between the peoples of the West and the East we should not overlook these early historical representatives of dialogue; this is something that Nursi has foreseen in his writings.