“I am not this hair, I am not this skin,
I am the soul that lives within.”
Rumi
In The Statue of Our Souls, Fethullah Gulen lays out a broad vision for a society and world, led by individuals of spiritual, moral, and intellectual excellence, whom he calls “inheritors of the Earth”. One of their central characteristics and attributes, as Gulen identifies, is “being able to think freely and being respectful to freedom of thought”. He puts freedom of thought as being central to humanity itself. According to Gulen, without freedom of thought, one cannot really be called a human being, nor can he reach human capacity. Gulen also champions freedom for its usefulness to society and for its humanistic value. He thinks that freedom is beneficial to society because of the “work” it does in creating and developing human beings as individuals. As a result, he concludes that developing human capacity is of the highest value (1).
Gulen defines freedom with regard to human dignity and capacity. Throughout his work, Gulen draws a distinction between life lived as in human freedom and life wasted as in animal freedom, putting emphasis on a larger philosophy of human flourishing. He elaborates on freedom that provides the ground for the fullest development and expression of the highest and best human capacities, the fulfillment of which provides intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and ethical pleasures for people (1).
Gulen also speaks of freedom from tyranny by referring to the oppressions of many rulers when they have ignored or distorted the ethical, filial, social, and legal fundamentals of faith, which are expected to be fully observed by the believers. He emphasizes that these persecutors interrupted when believers wanted to practice their faith, and tyrannized people’s consciences, making it impossible for them to live in accordance with their beliefs. As a Muslim scholar, he believes that worldly order and balance, as well as individual and domestic peace and prosperity, depend upon these principles. He mentioned that throughout history, many communities have suffered from violence and discrimination at the hands of their racist leaders. In disappointment, he says: “Divinely inspired faiths, which promise peace and security, have been turned into means of conflict and oppression by these leaders.” And he warns that such a distortion of faith always resulted in the eventual destruction of the oppressors (2).
I thought about these concepts from Gulen while I spent a few days in a “yarning” retreat with the Ansari Institute, followed by a multi-faith symposium, around Tyson Yunkaporta`s, an Indigenous Australian scholar and the author, Nasr Book Prize winner book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.
“We are all refugees, severed from the land, disconnected from the genius that comes by being in a symbiotic relationship with it,” Yunkaporta says. “Yet rarely do we see the sustainability of our world analyzed by the Indigenous peoples whose patterns still flow with the movement of the earth.” He then talks about a few simple operating guidelines, like diversify, connect, interact and adapt, as sustainability agents, where (3):
- Diversity is not about tolerating differences or treating others equally and without prejudice,
- Connectedness balances the excess of individualism in the diversity principle,
- Interaction provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system, and
- Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system.
Yunkaporta emphasizes that these principles are visibly embedded throughout the Aboriginal culture, in which the perspective is we need to be a “custodian” rather than an “owner” of lands, communities, or knowledge. I think a resonance exists with Gulen where Yunkaporta says, we need to be on the “lookout” for “reasonable obligations and activities” within our wider networks that will leave us “free to be different from others, receive and transfer knowledge, and transform in response to shifting contexts while acting as a custodian and defender of these things (3)”.
(2) Fethullah Gulen, Freedom of Faith and Conscience, The Fountain Magazine, Issue 111, 2016
(3) Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, HarperOne, 2021