Come the day, I, again, through the parents, wanted to get Ayşe’s reaction to Gülen’s death. “Grandpa has passed away,” she “broke” or “shared” the sad news with me. There are lots of questions lying behind all this: What has been the real difference between Erdoğan, Gülen and their followers? If Erdoğan has all along scared his people and the world of “Gülenists,” could there be “Erdoğanists” for the Turks and the universe to be scared of as well? What does Gülen’s death mean on the ground to Turkey and the world? Who was this Gülen that the world should be moved about his death?

Now the African perspective.

Indigenous knowledge has it that “Enyama mbi tew’aluti ” – literally meaning “bad meat takes long to clear from the barbecue stick.” Why? Nobody rushes for it. Similarly, in the world of organized procedures, it is held: “It’s the exception that proves the rule.” Thus, in the practice of Mathematics: “Any number to power zero is equal to one, except zero itself.” In Chemistry, ions with the same charge repel. In music, non-rhyming sounds subject listeners to cacophony. A frontline rebellion in a battle is a war lost in the making. Examples are inexhaustible.

In Africa we also say: “Alikukumanya niwe akwita” – meaning “it is he who knows you who kills you.” In the biblical Paradise of Eden narrative, the target of the Snake must have been Adam. But to reach him, Eve was the most promising and appropriate tool. She knew him very well and he knew her well as well. When it came to a money trap module to betray Jesus, his disciple, Judas Iscariot, who was the treasurer, was the best choice. After being paid the fee, he assured them: “The one I kiss….”

In the most immediate Turkish history, circumstances crossed the paths of President-to-be Erdoğan and the Muslim cleric and scholar Fethullah Gülen on the promise of a more democratic country and freedoms based on universal standardsWhat could make them part ways unto the grave of one of them and even beyond? Why did Erdoğan go to the extent of demonizing the life ofGülen, when the whole world was mourning the death of a living saint rather than someone who had lived a “dishonorable life and like a demon in human form,” according to Erdoğan? Who was this Gülen that he should be at the base of the controversy in Turkey when humanity ceases to be a factor in the affairs of those in political power? Why should a political leader, and considered believer in one God, for that matter, be inhuman? He jails babies with their Gülen-linked mothers and conducts strip searches on the country’s daughters, mothers and grandmothers?

Here one has to go further, if not dig farther or both. A dip into the Turkish history reveals stories of scholars who stood firmly against oppression until Gülen appears on the stage. These noble individuals go beyond time, becoming travelers who foresee the future, much like Fethullah Gülen has. It’s as if Gülen stood on the watchtower of history, envisioning the future and leaving his notes. His vision heralded a renaissance after a period of darkness, testing both the loyalty of friends and the mercy of foes.

Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, a disciple of Imam al-Shafi’i, contributed a lot to the expansion of the territories where Muslims ruled. He was tortured and imprisoned for over two years for rejecting the idea, imposed by Abbasid caliphs al-Ma’mun, al-Mu’tasim, and al-Wathiq, that the Quran was created. He continued to pursue knowledge even in prison. Imam Abu Hanifa was imprisoned and tortured for refusing an offer to be a judge for the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur. Relentless pressure notwithstanding, he never bowed to the caliphates of the Umayyads or Abbasids. He died from poisoning. Imam al-Ghazali was also subjected to pressure from the authorities, who ordered his books burned. For criticizing a ruler of the Kara-Khanid dynasty, Imam Sarakhsi was thrown into a well in Özkent, from where he dictated his famous work, al-Mabsut. Ibn Taymiyyah was persecuted for his views, repeatedly imprisoned, and died in captivity, completely dispossessed.

In modern times, Fethullah Gülen walked this same path. After the July 15th 2016 “cooked coup,” which he condemned and denied any connection, he declared: “If they were to pass a death sentence, I would go smiling to the noose, but I would never apologize to an oppressor, even if they killed me fifty times over.” This statement underscores his resolve in pursuing truth and justice. Gülen’s words reflect the breadth and depth of his vision for humanity. In his work The Messenger of Humanity, he wrote: “Humanity can only draw closer through love, tolerance, and dialogue.”

Gülen consistently advocated for dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths and once brought together leaders of major religions around the same table in Istanbul. He believed that “those who are confident in their beliefs respect others’ faiths. One’s own values are best understood by recognizing others’. Everyone’s faith belongs to them, and no one can impose their beliefs on others.” Gülen reminded us of the shared values of humanity, saying: “Differences among people exist not to divide us but to complete each other.” This perspective is more essential today than ever.

The schools inspired by Gülen’s vision across the world embodied his dream that “Knowledge should flow from Turkey to the world.” These institutions have fostered bonds between diverse cultures and planted seeds of peace and fraternity. His legacy is not just in his written works or founded institutions, but in the indelible mark he left on the conscience of humanity—a bright path for generations to follow.

To come to grips with Gülen’s life, one has to read Said Nursi (1877-1960) a lot. Typical of his life of sincerity, Said Nursi, who is also known as Bediüzzaman – the miracle of time – examined the political life of his day, critically subjecting it to his moral weights and measures standards, leaving the rest of the world countries to find their individual morals index slots. Said Nursi, as a child, was conceived in the womb of the Ottoman Empire to which he was consequently born and on whose milk he subsequently breastfed. Only a few years senior to the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), he went through an experience that must have had a bearing on his way of life as a great thinker, author and what I can dare call “genuine Muslim.”

He was around when his age mate Mustafa got the Kemal nickname – meaning “the perfect one.” He saw Kemal and his supporters establish a new Turkish government and capital at Ankara. He witnessed the national assembly abolishing the Ottoman sultanate and Greek forces being driven out, opening doors to the Republic of Turkey to come into formal existence. He bore witness to Kemal assuming the presidency and turning tables on everything, including traditional Islamic religious schools and courts. The president grew more reserved, solitary and remote, moved into the Sultan’s Palace in body and spirit, leading a luxurious life until his death.

To this, Africa indigenous knowledge has many observations. Among them: “You can make a monkey put on a golden ring but that can’t kill its habit of stealing maize from people’s farms. You can boil water to any temperature, but it will never forget its origins (coldness). You can expose an elephant to urban life, but you cannot prevent it from littering streets”.

Gülen never met Said Nursi. He only met his disciples. He understood his mission and took it upon himself to put it into practice. And, like him, he did not harbor political ambitions. Dr. Jon Pahl summarizes the situation rightly in his book on Gülen and the life of Hizmet when he says: “… to focus on events in Turkey in recent years, and Fethullah Gülen’s role as cause, effect, villain, hero, winner or loser would be to reduce the meaning and significance of his life to something like wax; ephemeral relations with a paltry kind of power…”

Said Nursi had all along said it categorically that the real enemies of the Turkish (in fact any) people are none other than ignorance, poverty and disunity. Gülen took it upon himself that the solution revolved on the axis of molding a cohesive and disciplined community through education, mass media and financial networks targeting the establishment of a new power balance of justice, love, respect and equality among people. For which, an environment had to be built whereby one has to see all others as God sees them with the eyes of mercy and compassion. People must be revived; not killed. Today, however, about a quarter of the Turkish people have come to a stage where they wish it were possible for them to live somewhere else rather than under the Erdoğan regime.

Said Nursi warned: “Moral laws are absolute. They are not relative. Effort spent on spicing our actions in the interest of our desires points in the wrong direction. This is why we substitute legal and illegal, right and wrong with attributes. And a State is created along these lines.” In the Seedbed of the Light, Fourth Treatise, Third Part of the Spark, he said: “Happiness and real pleasure lies in forsaking everything, including existence for His (God’s) sake. A drop of water has the same nature as an ocean (both are water) and a river (both are from clouds).

“Whatever is suffered for God is good. It is sweet even if apparently bitter, for it makes you taste the pleasure of supplicating and praying to Him. Every speech unconcerned with Him is idle talk.” Giving us a sort of cardinal self-observation point, he said: “Human beings are usually susceptible to shedding positive knowledge as they go down the learning lane. Instead, we pick and treasure meaningless and sometimes wrong convictions, which eventually lead us astray.”

This was with Gülen until his last breath, enabling him to leave behind a legacy not of material wealth but many shelves filled with the books he authored. His simple lifestyle demonstrates the transitory nature of worldly riches, elevating the significance of spiritual values and the blossoming hopes. I have read his works and works about him by others and reviewed some of them. Following his passing, Tushar Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, could not have put it better when he expressed his sorrow on social media, saying, “Another voice of peace has fallen silent. A great loss for humanity.”

All said, Gülen was more than the son of Turkey. He belonged to the whole world. From the African perspective, Gülen was “mithili ya zawadi ya sauti ya Mungu iliyozimika” – the symbol of God’s voice gift which has suddenly gone silent.

There are seven chapters in the book. The first chapter summarizes the basic tenets of the classical narrative, then criticizes it listing many questions which the classical narrative cannot satisfactorily answer. Islamic civilization’s contribution to the development of modern science is so immense that it is impossible to completely ignore this part of the history in any serious discussion of the general history of science or civilization. The problem arises in assessing the importance and the nature of Islamic science. Generally accepted views of the classical narrative go something along these lines: Islamic civilization was a desert civilization and began to develop scientific thought only when it came in contact with more advanced civilizations (Persian, Indian and Greek and most importantly Greek). A vital component of the rise of science in Islamic civilization was the remarkable translation movement that took place during the early period of Abbasid times (750–900 CE), in which many important scientific books of other civilizations, particularly those of ancient Greeks, were translated into Arabic. The classical narrative says by learning Greek science through this translation activity, Islamic science reached its golden age while Greek science was neglected under Byzantine rule. Adherents of the classical narrative generally assume that Islamic civilization did not go much beyond translation, did not make original contributions to scientific knowledge or produced any new science of its own. They also assume this period of the golden age did not last long and came to an end with Ghazali’s “attack” on philosophers in his major work Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of Philosophers). They assume that Islamic science began to decline with Ghazali while there was an awaking in Europe, sometimes called the Renaissance of the twelfth century, when Europeans began to translate major Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Latin. Some of these texts had already been translated from much earlier Greek and Sanskrit texts into Arabic. So, they reconnected with their Greco-Roman legacy. The classical narrative says from that point on Europe had no need for Islamic science, hence the role of Islamic civilization was to simply translate and preserve the ancient Greek science and make it available to Europeans later. Thus, according to this view all the roots of modern science were European. The classical theory also attempts to explain the process by which the acquisition of Greek science by the Muslim world occurred. There are a few versions of this proposal which are called “contact theory,” “pocket transmission theory,” and “translation through Syriac medium first.”

In this first chapter of the book, Saliba argues that the classical narrative is an oversimplification of what actually happened in reality and fails to answer many fundamental questions. The first problem is about origins. He argues none of the proposed methods of translation is convincing to explain the reasons why, how, and when Muslims acquired Greek science. In terms of the nature and quality of translations, Saliba gives examples of sophistication and maturity exhibited by the Muslim scientists that is well beyond what would be expected from an early generation of translators who are struggling to understand a foreign science. Moreover, already in the early period of the translation movement Muslim scientists produced original new science such as algebra by al-Khwarizmi (830 CE), remarkable advances by Habash a-Hasib (850 CE) in the field of trigonometry and mathematical projections that go far beyond what was known from Indian and Greek sources, and developed decimal fractions. He argues such advances could not happen suddenly. There must be a longer tradition of scientific activity in the Islamic world and real motivations for the rise of science which cannot be explained by the classical narrative.

Not only does the classical narrative fail to explain beginnings but also more recent developments as well. Saliba gives many examples from various scientific disciplines to show that the Islamic science did not decline after Ghazali. Astronomy is a perfect counterexample to this thesis of the classical narrative, and it is not the only one. In fact, there were so many advances in astronomy in the Islamic world after Ghazali that Saliba calls the post-Ghazali period as the golden age of Islamic astronomy. Recent research in the second half of the twentieth century shows that astronomy has particularly interesting connections to the European Renaissance. Saliba comments that post-Ghazali works by the Muslim scientists were not sufficiently considered by the adherents of the classical narrative because of their pre-supposition that no significant science of any interest could have been produced in this period. This caused unfortunate damage in terms of understanding the post-Ghazali period in the Islamic world as well as the European Renaissance itself.

In the second chapter, Saliba proposes an alternative thesis/narrative to the classical narrative in terms of the beginnings of the rise of scientific activities in the Islamic world. His thesis is based on the writings of Al-Nadim (full name Abu al-Faraj Muhammad b. Abi Ya’qub Ishaq al-Nadim) who wrote about intellectual history of the early Islamic period. Saliba also supports his thesis with well known historical facts. In summary, the alternative narrative proposes that there was already a significant amount of interest and activity in the nascent Islamic civilization before the translation movement began. Rather than learning science from others (Greeks) just because they came into contact with them, the Islamic world actively sought those sciences because of a keen interest to advance their own scientific knowledge. Unlike the classical narrative, the alternative thesis argues that Muslim scientists already had a high level of knowledge and maturity when the translation activities began. This is evidenced by the high quality of translations of highly technical materials, and corrections of errors in the original sources. The main societal factors for the rise of science in the new civilization are listed as a) the need for people (bureaucrats) with a high level of scientific knowledge in administrations, and b) competition between those people to acquire higher levels of scientific knowledge to be able to advance in the ranks of governments.

In the next chapter, Saliba gives detailed examples, mostly from astronomy, to show how critically Muslim scientists received and reacted to the Greek science. They noticed observational errors and internal inconsistencies in Greek texts. They also pointed out more philosophical and foundational errors and contradictions. Muslim scientists showed a high level of sophistication, maturity and critical spirit. They had a comprehensive look at the Greek texts they translated and studied them in relation to one another. Saliba argues that it is not possible to explain these phenomena with the classical narrative. Moreover, Muslim scholars went beyond just criticizing these errors and made many novel contributions to exact sciences. In the process, they realized the proper place of mathematics in the natural sciences. Saliba also comments that Muslim scientists continued to make original contributions to astronomy and other mathematical sciences long after Ghazali, when the classical narrative would preach the death of Islamic science.

In chapter four, Saliba gives examples of critical innovations by Muslim astronomers. He remarks that the interest of the Islamic society in astronomy was very strong due to many religious requirements that need to be answered by astronomy, such as visibility of the moon, daily prayer times, and qibla (direction of worship) etc. Such problems were not considered by Greeks before. Muslim astronomers could not ignore absurdities in Ptolemaic astronomy where mathematical models in Almagest violated the fundamental cosmological assumptions in Planetary Hypotheses. Although Ptolemy’s mathematical models usually made good predictions computationally, it was not satisfactory for the scientists in the new civilization to allow those models to violate the physical properties of the celestial bodies. They took it upon themselves to propose alternative mathematical models that satisfied both requirements. They were highly successful in that quest. The solution of this problem required some new mathematical theorems. Two of the most important of such theorems were Urdi’s Lemma and Tusi couple invented by Urdi and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in the thirteenth century. Both of these were fecund and fundamental theorems that were used repeatedly by many astronomers who followed them for a long time. Renaissance astronomer Copernicus was among those who made use of these theorems. Also noted in this chapter is Shams al-Din al-Khafri’s understanding of the role of mathematics in describing the physical phenomena.

The title of chapter five is “Science between Philosophy and Religion: the Case of Astronomy,” wherein Saliba considers the relationship between the religion of Islam and scientific developments in astronomy. He explains that religious motivations led to the creation of new disciplines such as ilm al-hay’a (science of configuration) and advances in trigonometry. He states that astronomy and trigonometry are the best examples which demonstrate the intersecting interest between the practice of a religion and scientific thinking that need to be developed as a result of that practice. Many important scientists in medieval Islam were at the same time religious authorities. A few examples among such scholars are Ibn al-Nafis, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and Ibn al-Shatir. Saliba also notes that the European paradigm of conflict between science and religion does not exist in the Islamic world.

“Islamic Science and Renaissance Europe: The Copernican Connections” is the title of chapter six. Researchers in the second half of twentieth century first realized that many of the astronomical models of Copernicus were identical to that of Ibn al-Shatir from three centuries earlier. This surprising discovery, which contradicted the view that Renaissance science was a European self-contained creation, opened the door for further investigations which revealed more surprising outcomes. The mathematical theorem called the Tusi couple that is mentioned above plays an important role in Copernicus’s model. Copernicus stated the theorem and proved it in 1543 without mentioning that he invented a new theorem or saw it in any other source. The theorem was first invented and proved by Tusi in the middle of the thirteenth century. By comparing the two proofs, W. Hartner noticed in 1973 that Copernicus’s proof was identical to Tusi’s. He even used the same letters for essential geometric points. That is where Tusi used the Arabic letters “alif,” “ba” etc. Copernicus used the corresponding Latin letters “A,” “B” etc. This discovery makes it pretty certain that Copernicus knew about Tusi’s work.

Saliba shows Copernicus’s case is not an isolated instance and gives more evidence in this chapter of the phenomenon that “there are much too many coincidences of ideas appearing first in Arabic texts usually written between the 12th and 15th centuries, which reappear, without much explanation, in Latin sources of the 16th and 17th centuries.” Saliba’s explanation of this phenomenon is that by the Renaissance time men of science themselves learned Arabic and no longer needed translations. There are many examples that show European reliance on Arabic sciences in the post-Copernicus period when the whole worldview was supposed to have been changed by him. Renaissance men of science had a high regard for the Islamic sciences and were looking to the Islamic world for the latest in scientific activities rather than the classical Greek sources.

In the last chapter Saliba discusses the age of decline in Islamic science. He starts by rejecting the two main reasons proposed by the advocates of the classical narrative and argues that it did not start after Ghazali (eleventh century) or the destruction of Baghdad by Mongols in 1258. Saliba says that those who believe the first reason look at the Islamic civilization as a source of religious thought only and operate under the assumption that the European paradigm of conflict between religion and science applies to Islamic world as well. Saliba argues that this assumption is not true for the Islamic world and that scientific activities did not decline after Ghazali. Those who think the main reason was the destruction of Baghdad by Mongols saw the Islamic civilization mostly in political terms and paid little attention to its intellectual history. Saliba gives many examples of high quality and sophisticated scientific production in the Islamic world, mostly in astronomy but in other areas as well, well after both of these events. He says those examples were ignored or not properly read by the adherents of the classical view who did not expect to find any important scientific production in the Islamic world after the thirteenth century.

There still remains the problem and timing of decline of science in the Islamic world. When did it happen? Saliba notes that decline is a relative concept. What actually happened was the European science advanced more rapidly than the rest of the world after the sixteenth century. Hence it looked like science declined elsewhere, including the Islamic world. According to Saliba the main reason for these rapid developments in science in Europe was related to the discovery of the “new world.” He argues that the wealth and resources obtained by Europeans as a result of discovery of new lands helped them fund scientific activities. Europe witnessed the rise of royal and scientific academies where most educated men of the time were assembled and engaged in scientific research without having to worry about financial needs. Healthy competition among these institutions led to new scientific discoveries. Western superiority in science continues to this day and the constant brain drain that feeds the West at the expense of the developing and third worlds does not help to change the balance.

In summary, this book presents fundamental challenges to many of the commonly held views about the intellectual and scientific history of the Islamic world and proposes alternative explanations. The science of astronomy is used as a template to test and justify these claims. The author invites researchers to subject his proposals to the test of historical data in other disciplines as well. This book is highly recommended to all interested in the general history of science, and that of the Islamic world and the Renaissance period in particular.

Nuh Aydin is an associate professor of Mathematics at Kenyon College, Ohio, USA.