Niagara Annual Board of Advisors Meeting

      
November 11, 2008

Niagara Foundation becomes an even greater resource to cultivate friendship, celebrate diversity, strengthen civic dialogue and society and deepen inter-cultural awareness and understanding among the many diverse ethnic and civil communities in the Greater Chicago Area by the driving force of its Board of Directors.

Board members attend an annual meeting and serve on the various committees based on interest and expertise. This year, Niagara Annual Board of Advisors meeting will be held at Niagara Foundation.

Date:
Tuesday- November 11, 2008

Time:
2:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M.

Venue:
Niagara Foundation

Niagara Board of Advisors

The Dean's Interfaith Dinner and Dialogue
Wednesday- September 10th 2008

Theme:
A Celebration of Diversity and Dialogue

Place:

Prospect Room, Frick Center

ELMHURST COLLEGE

190 Prospect Avenue

Elmhurst, Illinois 60126

Date:
Wednesday- September 10th 2008

Niagara Peace & Dialogue Awards 2008
Wednesday - June 4 ^th , 2008

Place:
University Club of Chicago
76 East Monroe Street Chicago, IL 60603

Time:

5:30 pm  Reception - The Library - 8th Floor

6:30 - 9:00 pm  Dinner & Awards Ceremony - Cathedrall Hall - 9th Floor

Our Honorees

Event Emcee

Honorary Chair

Co-Chair

Media Advisory

Program Agenda

Recognitions

Patrons

Invitation

Niagara Foundation awards individuals and organizations who have contributed their time, energy, leadership, and dedication to the cause of dialog, peace, tolerance, community service and understanding here in Chicago.

- Please click to see "2007 Annual Peace & Dialogue Awards" website

Fund-Raiser for China Earthquake Victims

Niagara Foundation and Turkish community living in Greater Chicago area, believe the earthquake in China on May 12th, 2008 affected so many people and the area and we feel that we have an obligation to do our part.

Niagara Foundation and First Congregational Church of Crystal Lake are starting a relief effort for those affected by the earthquake in China.

To help those in need Niagara Foundation and First Congregational Church of Crystal Lake organizes a huge “Bake Sale’ and “Yard Sale” together on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 to bring awareness and accept donations for the Chinese people.

All donations will be given to the Chinese Consulate General in Chicago to get it reached to the Chinese government.

If you would like to donate to the victims of the earthquake in China:

Make your checks payable to:

NIAGARA FOUNDATION
(Please note "for Earthquake Relief in China" on your check)

You can mail your donation to:
Niagara Foundation
203 N Wabash Ave Suite 1700
Chicago, IL 60601

Date:

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Time:

11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.

Venue:

Niagara Intercultural Friendship & Dialogue Reception at the Illinois Executive Mansion
May 14th, 2008

Date:
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 5:30 to 8:00 pm

Venue:
Executive Mansion
410 East Jackson
Springfield, IL 62701

Kindly RSVP by Monday, May 5th, 2008
to Mr. M. Hilmi Cinar at (312) 701 0086 ext 107 or 
hilmi@niagarafoundation.org

Program Schedule

Remarks

Keynote Speaker:

Pat Quinn, Lt. Governor for the State of Illinois

Opening Speech by:

Hon. Neil Hartigan, CEO and President, World Trade Center Illinois

Hosting Comittee:

Chair: Senator John J. Millner (R)

Co-Chair: Pat Quinn, Lt. Governor for the State of Illinois

Members:

Senator Frank C. Watson (R)

Senator Michael Bond (D)

Senator Kirk W. Dillard (R) 

Senator Matt Murphy (R)

Senator Michael Noland (D)

Senator Dave Syverson (R)

Senator Dan Rutherford (R)

Senator J. Bradley Burzynski (R)

Senator A. J. Wilhelmi (D)

Senator Kwame Raoul (D)

Senator Pamela J. Althoff (R)

Senator Randall M. Hultgren (R)

Representative Harry R. Ramey Jr. (R)

Representative Renée Kosel (R)

Representative Monique D. Davis (D)

Representative Elaine Nekritz (D)

Representative Fred Crespo (D)

Representative Paul D. Froehlich (D)

Shots from the event:

EARTH DAY CELEBRATION WITH MAYOR RICHARD M. DALEY
April 26, 2008

Earth Week, April 26th was a special day here at the Niagara Foundation. It was a day in which our volunteers donated their time, along with other professionals of Gateway Green, United Airlines, McGraw-Hill, and the John Buck Company to help make Chicago communities a little brighter. With the help of over 150 volunteers, Niagara Foundation was a major asset in the collaboration of a new ground breaking program TreeCago.

Many volunteers helped to transform an overgrown lot of weeds into a beautiful Garden in Chicago’s south side Englewood neighborhood. Over 50 trees were planted, rubbish removed and many beautiful plants now replace the broken down lot in front of the St. Bernard Hospital.

Mayor Richard M. Daley arrived with television stations CBS 2, NBC 5 and ABC channel 7. He took a few pictures with volunteers and then planted the first flower in Niagara Foundation’s cleared patch of the lot. It was an amazing day and wonderful opportunity for the volunteers of Niagara foundation to work side by side with other compassionate community volunteers. We thank Gateway green for the opportunity to be a part of such a worthy event.

Shots from the event:

Video from the event :

Lecture and Book Signing with Dr. Jill Carroll

" A Dialogue of Civilizations: Gulen’s Islamic Ideals and Humanistic Discourse "

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

::: WE DO NOT NEED TO BE THE SAME, BUT WE CAN HOLD HANDS AS FELLOW TRAVELERS IN THIS LIFE :::

DATE:   Saturday, March 15th, 2008

TIME: 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

PLACE:

University of Chicago, Gleacher Center

450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive, 6th Floor
Chicago, IL 60611

Admission: Free

Event Open to Public - RSVP Required.

Please RSVP by Wednesday, March 12th at info@niagarafoundation.org or at (312) 701 -0086 ext 107

The book will be available for purchase at signing for $15

*** Refreshments will be served.

Amazon.com Bestseller

http://www.gulenindialogue.com

In A Dialogue of Civilizations, Dr. Jill Carroll provides a forum for interfaith dialogue through the progressive Islamic ideals of Turkish intellectual and philosopher Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, who is renowned worldwide for his work promoting education, cross-cultural dialogue and the reconciliation of science and faith, has spent his life striving to solve societal and spiritual ills.
Gulen’s theories are presented alongside those of well-known philosophers—Kant, Confucius, Plato, Sartre and John Stuart Mill—creating a discussion on basic humanistic subjects, such as freedom, education and inherent human dignity. Through this open conversation across time and culture, Dr. Carroll reveals the essential principles and deeply-held convictions that bind us all together, no matter what our religious beliefs.

Foreword is written by Akbar Ahmed of American University, Washington, DC.

Dr. Jill Carroll is the executive director for the Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice University, as well as an associate adjunct professor in religious studies. Well-respected for her work promoting religious tolerance and for her thorough understanding of Gulen’s ideals, Carroll wrote A Dialogue of Civilizations following her numerous trips to Turkey where she had the opportunity to visit schools and institutions founded by the people in the Gulen movement. She currently resides in Houston, Texas..

Shots from the event:

Jill Carol's Speech

Good afternoon and welcome. It is a great privilege for me to welcome you all on behalf of Niagara Foundation. We are truly honored to see such a wonderful audience here at one of the greatest places in the city of Chicago. As dedicated people of Niagara Foundation we believe that in a world where even the furthest point is within arms reach. It is impossible to live anywhere without experiencing diversity. In order for anyone to live peacefully, it is important for individuals to rise above differences that drive us apart or against each other. Our organization and supporters envision a community in which people from all walks of life interact with each other and cooperate to serve their communities, thereby strengthening civil society and promoting the development of human values. Niagara Foundation serves societal peace, love, and friendship, wisely and compassionately, in support of human dignity and common good by striving to bring forth the common values of humanity, values such as understanding, respect, and compassion. In order to build a better society, Niagara Foundation works together with people and organizations that foster excellence in public service by acknowledging the importance of spreading these most significant common values within the global Chicago community hoping for all to take them on as a common virtue. Today we have a distinguished speaker among us, the author of the book Dialogue of Civilizations: Gulen’s Islamic Ideals and Humanistic Discourse. Mr. Gulen’s name is pronounced each day more than the other day, but by not just the eastern countries but also the western world. Our Honorary President Mr. Fethullah Gulen is a world renown Muslim scholar and leader whose messages of love, tolerance and peaceable coexistence inspires Niagara Foundation in contributing something meaningful to this great message. The world probably first heard Mr. Gulen’s name when he met Pope John Paul the 2nd in 1998. His visit came at a time when Samuel Huntington’s idea of the so called clash of civilizations was gaining prominence. He saw the need to further efforts to establish dialogues to stave of conflicts. Since then his efforts and strong supports influenced many such as us to engage in educational activities and interfaith and intercultural dialogue in many countries which received a great deal of interest and resulted in the building of strong bridges between individuals, families, and communities. People of different religions realized that they can work together regardless of their religious background for one common goal, namely global peace. Especially now when hatred is widespread and the clash of civilizations is predicted Mr. Gulens efforts are of vital importance for modern humanity. Now ladies and gentlemen, let’s watch the introductory video followed by the welcoming of today’s guest to the podium. In addition to teaching at Rice, she has taught widely in the Houston area including at all campuses of the University of Houston system, the Women’s Institute of Houston, the Young Center of Houston, and in the Texas State Prison System. She is the author of three books and has been a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Through her own company and in collaboration with other organizational consultants, she has done religious diversity training for corporations, groups, and individuals. Ladies and gentlemen pleas welcome Dr. Jill Carrol. Jill Carrol: Thank you all for coming today and thank you for having me here. I never take it for granted you know that people come out to hear anything I have to say, especially on a Saturday, when the water’s green. And I want to thank Niagara Foundation for inviting me to come up here to Chicago. I wanted to speak for maybe 45 minutes if I can keep myself on track. And then I want to get some questions and comments from you, because I inevitably in the last year since this book came out, and I’ve been traveling around and speaking about these ideas and sharing my own thoughts and my perspective. For myself, the most fruitful part comes when I get to hear your perspective and you get to ask questions and it challenges me, and it sharpens my own thinking and my own wisdom about these things and so I very much look forward to that. What I would like to begin by doing is telling you a little about who I am. And its not because I’m important, or I’m someone special. Its because I feel this way, that when you read a book that someone has written, it is important to know who that person is, like what are their commitments and what’s their background and what perspective are they bringing to that book. And what’s the context in which they write that because you need to know that. As a reader, when I read books I want to know that about the author so that I can understand more clearly. I want to share that with you so that you know who it is standing in front of you a little bit and you know who it is that has written this little book that some of you might chose to reed. The book really is. It comes at an intersection of three different elements I would say of my life some of them are professional and some of them are very personal, although I have to say that the boundary for me between the professional and the personal is pretty much not there really. It’s blurred because I’m one of the very fortunate individuals who gets to work and make my living in my career doing something that’s very aligned with who I am as a person and what my values are and what my understanding of what life is, and that’s a gift and I feel very blessed to live that way. But there are three components that come together at an intersection and it’s in that intersection that you find the context for the ideas that I’ve shared in this book and the ideas that frankly, I’m obsessed with. That’s as good a reason as any to write a book. The first component is my work at the Bonyak Center. I was going to mention in the introduction that I am the executive director of the Bonyak Center for religious tolerance at Rice University. We are a new, relatively new center. Just over 3 years of existence. And our mission is to understand and to facilitate the conditions that lead to peaceful coexistence among people of different religions. Peaceful coexistence among people of different religions that’s who we are, that’s what we do every day. All of our projects and initiatives whether they are research projects whether they’re teacher training, student initiatives, community outreach programs. All of this stuff that we do is aligned under that one goal. To understand and try to facilitate the conditions that lead to peaceful coexistence. I believe that finding a way to live together amidst radical difference is the central challenge of our era. Every era has its challenges. Some are natural in nature, natural disasters, or illnesses. Others are social in nature and are brought about by our communal lives together. This era I believe the challenge is peaceful coexistence. How will we live together as ourselves with others who are different from us? And so at the center that is our mission and that is what we try to learn about and expose ourselves to. And the mission very much drives what I do and how I think about things. And the lens through which I encounter the world. I walk around in life and in the world – it’s almost like I have a pair of glasses that’s what that mission is – peaceful coexistence, how can we achieve it. And I see things through that lens. And so I’m on the look out for that all of the time. And that’s very much a part of who I am as I stand here in front of you and as I write this book. And in case you’re wondering, Bonyak the name of our center – people always say, “is that some obscure language’s word for peace?” Or something like Klingon for peace? No its not it’s the name of the person who gave the money. The second component is the that really forms the background for me on this is 15-18 years of teaching that I’ve done at the university level. Like so many of you here who have academic backgrounds and have areas of specialty, advanced degrees in your areas of specialty. You know we’ve all got our niche. And the more you go, the more letters you get after your name, the more specialized you become. So by the time you get the PHD in whatever it is. You’re a PHD in this tiny little area and about 8 other people can read your book because it has become so narrow and so specialized. And that is true for me as well. My PHD has me specialized in something very narrow. My background is in religious studies in philosophy of religion in particular in continental philosophy of religion and in particular in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy of religion in particular the French phenomenologist Emanuel Levynas. I could just go on for ever and ever. And so the thing that happens, at least in the humanities and social sciences, when you get out and begin to teach, you mostly are thrown in to teaching classes that have nothing to do with your specialty. And I was thrown into that same kind of situation and immediately thrown into teaching what we in the university affectionately call the Plato to Nato courses where you read the great books, world intellectual history, world philosophy, world religions, world literature from the ancient period starting with something like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey from Homer, some of the most ancient stuff that’s ever been done in the human race. And if you’re lucky you have 2 semesters in which to run rush shot over all of it until you end with WWII and you read something like Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham jail, or you may read a holocaust memoir or something. And so you cover this huge span of world philosophy, intellectual history, covering all sorts of genres, all over the continents, every where in just 2 semesters. Nobody has a PHD in this; nobody has a specialty in this. You have to develop competencies in areas outside your specialty in order even to teach these classes. And I taught these classes and still when I do teach now, I still teach these kinds of classes now for about 18 years. And the reason why I’m telling this story is because I have found that this has been one of the most blessed gifts of my life as a scholar and as a person, because it has taught me to be able to see connections across vast spaces of time and geography, and culture, and world view. When I’m teaching 6th century B.C.E. Chinese philosophy and I’m going over with my students Confucianism, and Taoism and the period of the philosophers there. I immediately can see connections between what Confucius argues and what Plato is arguing. Socrates and Plato at almost the same time roughly contemporaries of each other in ancient Greece. In a very different culture, in a very different language. Across a chasm really. And so I think, actually its is a very specialized way of looking at things. I guess if I could say it now, I guess I could say that I’ve become a specialist at being a generalist. Because this is a certain way of thinking. It’s a way of seeing the forest and not only the trees. I mean there is something of value to be able to see the trees and to be able to see the branches on the trees and the leaves on the branches, and the little grooves on the leaves – to see the minute detail. There’s tremendous value in that. But there is also tremendous value in being able to back out and see the entire forest, and see what is over that next horizon, and see the larger picture. Because then you have a larger context. Your frame becomes bigger, and you begin to see that we are not lost in the details. And so this is of interest to me, because when bring myself back to the question of how will we live together as ourselves in the midst of radical difference. I’m inclined to say that even if we’re very different, even if we’re coming from vastly different perspectives, vastly different cultures, and languages and religions, and world views. That if we looked hard enough and are committed to find it, we can find a point of connection. It is there to be found. We have to be willing to find it though. And I’ve done it in academic work and in teaching and the point is not to do it in just that realm but to do it in a larger realm. So that’s very much in the background of the task that I set myself for in this book and really in life. Is to be on the lookout for those points of connection where they can be had. A third component is much more personal although as I said all of this stuff is very personal to me. But the third component is very personal and it has to do with my own encounter with the community of people inspired by the ideals of Fethullah Gulen. I first traveled to Turkey as a guest of the Gulen community, the particular branch of the Gulen community that’s based in Houston. I first traveled in December of 2004. And have since been back, I’ve been to Turkey 5 times in the last 3 years – 2 of the times as a guest of the Gulen community, and the other times as not. And it’s an interesting thing because I’m sitting in my office on Rice University campus and I hear this knock on my door, and I open the door and these young Turkish men are standing there and they’re Rice students and they say “can we come in and see you Dr. Carroll.” I said “absolutely”, so they come in and say “hello my name is Jamal, my name is Osman and I’m here to see you” And I said “Hi, nice to see you, how can I help you?” They say,” well we’re PHD students in bio nano (something I don’t remember)” So they’re PHD students in that and they told me a little bit about themselves. And I said “that sounds very wonderful, how can I help you?” and they said “well we’re very concerned with interfaith dialogue.” And I said “very good so am I. How can I help you?” And finally they just blurted it out, they said, “would you like to come to Turkey?” Just like that. And I looked at them and said “who are you?” And they began the story again, “well my name is Osman and my name is Jamal…” and so I visited them and I met with others of the representatives of the equivalent, well not the equivalent, because nothing can be as great as Niagara, but the one in Houston which is called IID, the Institute for Interfaith Dialog. And I met with them and they had invited some of my other colleagues at the University to go to Turkey and on that one trip, I was the only one who ended up going. And I tell you it was the first time they had done a Turkey trip and so the organization was a little loose. They were new doing it, and so a lot of the details kind of got dropped to the point where I didn’t know who I was visiting in Turkey. I didn’t know where I was staying. I didn’t have my tickets till two days before. I had no contact phone numbers. I had nothing. I didn’t even know who I was traveling with – nothing. And my parents and my colleagues were like, “what are you doing?” “well I’m going to Turkey with these people” And they said, “and who are these people?” ‘“well they’re really nice.” And I got on the surface of it how weird it seemed and how risky it seemed. But I had a sense in my spirit that this was something to say yes to. And so I said yes to it. And there’s something about this. I’ve reflected on this so deeply over the last few years. Sometimes we have to say yes to things when we don’t have all the answers. You know we say yes to being parents when we have no clue how to raise kids. We say yes to being married when we have no clue on how to be a spouse. I mean life demands that of us sometimes. And it takes something for us to do that – to say yes to an invitation, when it’s risky. It may not work out well, but it might. And this is the challenge. I mean this is related to the challenge before us in our era. There’s an invitation in the air for us to reach across boundaries and say yes to something maybe we’ve not done before. To say yes to a way of being that we’ve not been before. And it’s risky, and it may not always work out well. But the invitation is there. And I think it’s important for us to say yes to it. And I am so grateful to God or whoever gave the grace for me to be able to say yes to that invitation. So I went to Turkey, and I visited the educational institutions, the schools, the exam preparation institutions, and all the dozens and dozens of kinds of civil society projects that the people of the Gulen Community what they give themselves to. And I saw this in Turkey and we traveled all around the country and five or six or seven major cities. And I visited a few dozen of these schools, and other kinds of projects. And I have to tell you, that I was deeply confronted by my own cynicism. And I didn’t realize that I had become cynical until I went there and was on that trip because you know I’m a pretty optimistic person. I tend to see the glass as half full. I am not a negative sort of sour person. But on some level I think at some point – I can’t say when it happened. Its just a gradual process, I somehow had become cynical – where I doubted that good people with good intentions could give themselves to good projects, devote themselves wholly and good things could happen as a result. Somehow I just stopped believing that – or stopped believing that it could just happen as a matter of course. Or that when I saw it in the world, as I did when I visited Turkey and all my subsequent interactions with the Gulen community around this country and around in Europe and in other places, when I see it repeatedly again and again initially I was suspicious – the must be a catch. People can’t be this good. People can’t be this committed. It can’t be this simple. And I would ask the people the same questions. “Tell me your story of how you learned about Mr. Gulen’s ideas and what about the ideas grabbed you, and why do you give of yourself in the way that you do either through your financial resources or through your time and energies and your other resources, why do you give of your selves? “ The answer was the same all across Turkey, all across the United States, the places in Europe every place I’ve been in the last 3 and a half years or I’ve intersected with the Gulen community. The answers are always the same. “We believe this is important. We believe that these are human values that we all must advance in the world. And we believe that we have to give ourselves to this as much as we can.” And it’s just that simple. And at first I was asking “okay, where’s the Kool-ade, I know you’re drinking.” I’m a religious studies person, I study cults. This can’t be right. But it is. It’s very simple. It’s a vast trans-national civil society movement, inspired by the ideas of one imam, Turkish, Sunni, coming from the largest interpretive school in Sunni Islam, the Hanafi school – hundreds of thousands, millions of people, 3 generations now of people inspired by these ideas – inspired to do good things, to contribute in a good way to society. And so I’m forever changed because not only of that first trip, but because of my sustained – that continues to this very moment – interaction with the Gulen community and the people inspired by these ideas. Because it shook me out of a fog, I think I was headed toward a deep fog of cynicism. And I’ll be forever grateful for being snapped out of it. So these are the things – my experience in my teaching, my commitment to peaceful coexistence, and my own personal experience. These things come together and they form the background for why I write what I write, why I do what I do, and who I am here with you. We each of us here have our own distinct backgrounds and my story is different from yours. But I feel we are aligned here in this room on many of these points even though we’ve come to this point through different paths, through as many as are sitting here in these seats and so I acknowledge that in you, because even though I’ve never met most of you until today – I feel that there is a common commitment that we share to creating a culture of tolerance and respect and compassion and peaceful coexistence among people of different religions and among just people in general. I deal in world religions, that’s my area of specialty and my discipline and I mostly deal with religious world views. But I think that what I’m about to say and suggest to you is true for world views in general. But I’ll limit it to religious world views because that is what I deal with mostly. There are 2 very common ideas that show up a lot in interfaith dialogue circles. And I know that many of you spend a lot of time in those kinds of activities as I do. But there are 2 very common ideas that show up that I think are both problematic. And I want to just say a couple words about that. One common belief that comes up in interfaith dialogues is this. All the worlds religions and the religious world views and that’s exactly what they are. They’re not just a list of beliefs – but full blown world views. I mean when you’re a religious person, and that’s something more than just a word in your life. You encounter the world through the framework of that religion. That’s a world view to you. Common belief says all the worlds religions are really all the same. They’re all basically the same. You know they have different names for God and they have different rituals and they have different histories, and yeah there are some differences but those differences are largely cosmetic. They’re just on the surface. And people stay up at this surface level of the cosmetic differences and they end up clashing with one another. But if they would just ignore those differences and go deeper, they would see that they’re all the same. They would see that we really all basically worship the same God. And if we could just forget those differences and push to that basic sameness that’s there, then we could do away with conflict rooted in religion. So that’s one belief, very commonly expressed in interfaith dialogue. The other one is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It says the religious world views especially the oldest and biggest ones. They are so completely different from each other – so fundamentally different that they will never ever really understand each other. It may look like they’re connecting – it may look like they’re really trying to speak the same language, but really they’re just talking past each other because they are so profoundly different that inevitably there will be conflict and disagreement and perhaps outright clash – a clash of world views. What most commonly is called a clash of civilizations. A clash of civilizational identities. And of course Samuel Huntington is the most famous purveyor of this type of argument. So these are very commonly expressed ideas and I find both of them problematic. The idea that all religions are basically the same, as someone who specializes in world religions, I cannot agree with that statement. They are not all the same, in fact, they’re very different. We cannot say that they all worship the same God. Not all the world religions worship a God at all. Taoism, Confucianism, the two indigenous religions of China, they don’t worship a God. It’s not about worshiping a god. There’s no god. There’s no one god, or even a god at all really in those religious philosophies. In Buddhism the 3rd largest religion in the world, there is no god really. In its philosophic heart, the way Buddha himself taught it. It is an atheistic philosophy. Atheistic = no god. Now some Buddhists in popular practice will treat the Buddha like he is a god, but Buddha himself said that I am not a god. I am a man who has achieved enlightenment and you can do the same thing. Exactly as I have done it. There’s nothing special about me I’ve just achieved further progress on the path. So even the 3rd religion in the world, we can’t say is worshiping the same god. It doesn’t worship a god at all. Even the ones that do worship gods, can we say that it’s the same god? Are the practitioners of those faiths comfortable saying that? Are they comfortable? For example: if we take contemporary Hindus today. Hinduism in the modern period for the last several hundred years has been a monotheism – one god many faces. One god but that god has many different dimensions and aspects and facets and they all go by different names. Which are sometimes personified into the different gods that you see in Hinduism. But it’s really all just different facets of the one primal divine reality – that’s often maybe called Krishna or may be called Vishnu which ever name you choose to call that one god. Is Krishna the same as Allah? We all worship the same god – supposedly. Are we comfortable saying that? Some people are, some people are not. Can we say it’s the same god? Can we say in the Abrahamic traditions? Yes we have the same god but is Krishna the Christ spirit? Do you see what I’m saying? It’s hard to make the transition. If we’re insisting we’re really all worshiping the same god. What if we’re not? What if we’re not all worshiping the same god? What if we don’t all have the same conception of god at all? What are we going to do then? So I’m concerned about this because I don’t think it’s very fruitful as we proceed and try to find a way to live together – to insist upon some sort of primary sameness. We have to develop a capacity in ourselves to relate with people who are very different from us – who pray to different gods than us who will never believe in the same god that we believe. They may never believe in a god at all. And so insisting on the sameness I don’t think is a fruitful path. Now the other view which says they’re so completely different they can never talk and inevitably end up in conflict and clash. I think that goes too far. Yes they’re profoundly different some times. Yes, completely different world views. But the inevitability of clash? The inevitability the necessity of conflict? No. I myself can not say that. Mainly because, and I think that Mr. Gulen can agree with me on this. If I’m blessed enough to get to meet him again then I’ll ask him. But I’m not a determinist. Whatever will happen in the future with regard to clash or conflict of civilizations will happen because you and I have chosen it. If we have a clash of civilizations it will be because we chose that or because we failed to choose otherwise. The world is what it is why? Because we chose to make it the way it is. I spend time with this in the fifth chapter of the book where I put Mr. Gulen and John Paul Sarte the French atheist existentialist in a sort of textual dialogue on this issue of responsibility – where they both from their own perspectives are arguing that you and I are 100 percent responsible for the world. From an Islamic perspective of Mr. Gulen, yes Allah has created the world, Allah governs the world with a great providential power, has infinite knowledge of everything that happened in the past and what’s going to happen in the future and we are Allah’s deputies. Vicegerents – that’s the English translation of the Turkish word that he uses there. We are the actors, we are the agents through which Allah’s plans get actualized in the world. It doesn’t happen without us choosing, and deciding what is right to choose, and deliberating with each other and committing ourselves and our deepest hearts to go forward and achieve whatever there is to achieve. We are 100 percent responsible for the world. So if there’s a clash that comes. It won’t have come because it is inevitable or fate has declared it, or there’s just no way to avoid it. It will be because we did not choose otherwise. And so the opportunity that’s there for us, is to choose otherwise – is to choose to say, “yes there are differences, and we can acknowledge those, and we can be with each other in the midst of those, and we can make deliberate intentional choice to find connection.” So that when the differences are very present for us, we have those handle holds with each other. We have those bonds of relationship with each other on the points we can connect on that can sustain us in times when the differences seem very profound. So this little book, I didn’t write it for a specialist in my field, I wrote it for a more general audience, and so if you choose to read it, it’s a little modest contribution. But it’s an attempt to find a middle path between these two extreme views. That say they’re all the same, or they’re all different. The metaphor, the central metaphor that I use – its not a metaphor its an action word is resonance. I try to find resonance. Between the ideas of Mr. Gulen and the others who I put him into dialogue with—Confucius, Plato, John Stewart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and John Paul Sarte. On particular issues, I put Mr. Gulen in a conversation with Kant on the issue of moral value – inherent human moral dignity. That human beings have inherent value – not market value like chairs and table and screens and computers, but inherent value. As human beings we have inherent worth and that’s the seed of our morality and that our morality is generated from acknowledging that profound inherent value of all human beings. You say in that little promotional video, several quotes from Mr. Gulen are about humanity – that love for humanity. And that human values are the grounding and starting point. I find him very resonant with Immanuel Kant on this. Now Immanuel Kant personally is a Christian. But he doesn’t do his philosophy as a Christian philosopher. He does it in a purely secular rationalist way. And so the challenge there was to find a point of resonance between an Islamic philosopher and theologian on one hand and a enlightenment era continental philosopher on the other who’s writing from a secular rationalist perspective. I put Mr. Gulen and John Stewart Mill in a conversation on an issue of freedom – particularly the issue of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. That somehow we’re not really fully human unless we are allowed to be free in our thinking and in our inquiry and in our reflection—and in our deliberations about things that our humanity becomes fully actualized through that. I put Gulen and Plato and Confucius in a trialogue together on issues of the ideal human being – what is the ideal human being? What’s our model, what’s our profile of the ideal human being that we would like to be, or that we would like to create in the world. What is that? And how do we get that person. Do people like that just come down from the heavens? Fully formed and ready made? No! How do we get them? We give birth to them, and we raise them. Which means we have to educate them. So I have two chapters: one on the ideal human being, and education. If the Gulen community is know for anything in the world it’s the educational activities and the commitment to education and the cultivation of the human spirit through education. And finally in that 5th chapter I’ve already mentioned it to you. I put Gulen and Sarte into a conversation about responsibility. This is a Challenging chapter not just because Sarte is difficult to read – they all are but – Sarte is an atheist. Gulen is an Islamic scholar, an imam, a preacher. And Sarte’s an atheist. And both of them are on record blasting the beliefs of each other. Not by name, Sarte never knew Gulen. Gulen doesn’t blast Sarte personally, but he does blast the philosophy expounded by Sarte – existentialism, atheism, he has very harsh words for that as a philosophy, as a world view. And Sarte is very hard on religious belief. So what do you do there? How can you find any point of connection there when these two representatives of these perspectives even have sharp words on record for each other? It’s there. You have to look but you can find it -- it’s there. There’s resonance on this issue of responsibility. When I use the word resonance, it’s a musical term; some of you are musicians. So if you’re playing a keyboard and you hit a three note chord you have 3 distinct notes and they’re not the same – they’re distinct, but if you play them together in a certain way they can resonate beautifully together. And sometimes you can play them in a way where there’s dissonance. But even that dissonance can be contained in a larger work that can be beautiful – that can be pleasing – that is workable as a work of music, as a composition. So I like the term resonance. I don’t say Gulen and Kant are the same. They’re not! They’re absolutely not the same. They’re generations removed from each other. They’re coming from completely different cultures. You take someone like Gulen and Plato? Gulen and Confucius? They’re so not the same. We cannot say they are the same. They’re maybe not even similar. But there’s resonance. We can find resonance right there. So I like the term resonance because it acknowledges the fact that there is profound difference but still willing to find a connection. Huntington’s work is of course in the background. He’s become a whipping boy I think in many ways for those of us who care about interfaith dialogue. And I do think that he takes his argument too far. I think he goes too far in some instances in talking about the inevitability of clash. That there just is no way around it. But I also think that some people who have criticized him harshly for his views have also failed to see some very insightful things that Huntington argues about civilizational identity. And I think there are a couple valuable little gems in his work that this little book tries to live in a little bit and I just want to briefly point to those. One thing that Huntington does is that he points out a mentality that he calls west versus the rest. How so many of our security and international economic systems and all kinds of things are dominated by the west. The west is being aggressive sometimes and pushing that on other cultures and other countries. And they’re rightfully rejecting it and pushing it back. And sometimes doing so, via, insisting on their own civilizational identity as opposed to the western identity. And that’s a conflict in the making. And it’s a clash in the making that could be very deadly. I think that is definitely true. I mean its not hard to see how the west has become aggressive in many ways. It has become culturally imperialistic in many ways. These are just obvious sort of socio political lessons that anyone reading history can see. Where I think he goes wrong is in saying things like the rule of law, respect for human dignity, free markets, fair economic systems, notions of liberty and equality, notions of human dignity, that these are exclusively western concepts. He says they’re western concepts and its almost like the West has a monopoly on it. I think that’s not true at all. And I think its dangerous for us to begin to say that because it kind of shows its own kind of myopia. You know that the west has a monopoly on these values. I think that even in my little book you can see that these types of ideas show up across the civilizations. – across centuries of civilizations. That the west has a particular take on these issues but that these ideas have been working themselves out and burbling beneath the surface for generations and in many different cultures. And to say that the west has a monopoly on them is wrong, historically, it’s wrong and it’s dangerous and it’s arrogant and its aggressive. So I think we have to move away from that western myopia and begin to see the tremendous contributions that the other kinds of cultures that long predate the west, the modern west. That these offer us tremendous values, humanistic values, not in a secularistic kind of way. But human based values that we can gleam from all sorts of different traditions. And bring them together and begin to have a conversation across these divisions. A second thing very briefly, he talks about the us versus them mentality that can develop when we exclusively identify ourselves in religious or ethnic terms. And some of you know exactly what I mean by this not because you’ve done it but because you’ve seen it. And we all can see it in the newspaper every day where people groups of people, because of some sort of threa, perceived or real, feel the need to identify themselves in singular monolithic ways. And mostly it is religious or ethnic terms. For example: I am Muslim, you are Jewish, we are Kurdish, we are Turkish et cetera. And we forget all the other things that we are. We’re just that one thing, and if you don’t look like that thing that we are, you are them. There’s us (who look like us, who act like us), and then there’s them. And it ignores the complexity of life. It ignores the complexity of the human experience. No one of us is any one thing. No one of us is only our religious identity, only our racial identity, or gender identity, our national identity. We are mothers and fathers and spouses and sisters and brothers and neighbors… there’s so many different hats that we all wear in terms of our identity. But sometimes when we feel threatened, we will retreat into those deep planks of identity called religious and ethnic identity. A world of people walking around in monolithic identities is a world primed for conflict, probably violent conflict because in that kind of mindset there is no point of connection between us and people who don’t look or be like us. So we have to give that up. We have to give up an us versus them mentality – as tempting as it is sometimes to have it. This is the deep problem with the conflict that we hear so much now since 9-11. Islam versus the west. That’s just a problematic formulation in the first place. There is no inherent conflict between Islam and the west. That’s a false dichotomy in the first place. But if you buy into it creates the very thing that really has no grounding in the first place. So we have to beware this; as tempting as it is. And as scary as it can be at times we have to resist the us versus them mentality. As I said a few moments ago and I’ve spoken too long already, this is the central challenge of our era, I believe. I would invite you to consider that as well. That this is the central challenge of our era. And it will require us to be bigger than we’ve ever been as human beings. One of my favorite quotes and its in the video that we saw. Be as tall and as wide as the ocean. Imagine that as an inner capacity. To be as wide as open and as tolerant as the ocean. Almost like an infinity… ever expanding – ever renewing itself, ever transcending itself. I love the metaphor of the ocean. Its no accident that it shows up in so many of the world’s traditions. I live on the gulf coast its not an ocean but it’s a gulf but you have hurricanes blowing blowing – 60 -100 foot waves. Winds and winds. Complete chaos But what’s at the bottom of the gulf? What’s at the bottom of the ocean even when there’s a hurricane? Stillness, calm, peacefulness, equanimity. That’s who we have to be.

Questions and Answers

At this time we’re going to open the floor for some questions you’d like to ask Dr. Carroll: Q: I come from a community of scientists and I wonder if you or perhaps others in the audience could comment on what some women in particular in science see as a difficult role for women to play in a more traditional Muslim community; and if you could give people like me who are interested in debunking the notion that it is hard for women to excel in what the west sees as traditionally male scientific professions. Some fodder for those future arguments. A: Well I think that maybe your experience is different but my experience is when I hear these types of arguments from people, they’re coming from a place of criticism of Islam and suspicion of Islam, and often ignorance of Islam. They’re not bad people, its not coming from any kind of evil spiritedness. But from just a general ignorance and there’s this vast generalization of the world of Islam and the role that women play in it. And Islam is the second largest religion in the world. It’s a culture, it’s a civilization. And it’s not one thing. It’s multi-dimensional. And one thing myself, I always say to someone who brings this up. When you speak about women in Islam, “which women, and where?” In Turkey? In Saudi Arabia? In Indonesia? In Africa? Where? And they’re like “well I just mean in general.” And I’m like “no, you can’t just say in general. Where?” Islam is different everywhere. It’s a world religion with hundreds and hundreds of years of history. It’s not one thing any one place. So to just push them a little on that and often a light bulb will come and they’ll say … “I guess what I really mean is…”. Then they’ll begin to narrow, and then a more constructive conversation can happen. I think another context in which I’ve experienced this question is here in this country; because the United States is an immigrant nation. And we have immigrants from all over the world coming to live here and that’s a difficult transition. Many here in the audience are immigrants to this country. And this is the strength of this nation it always has been and it’s a difficult transition. I think the United States is kind of a hard country. I don’t know personally because I’m from here. But it looks like to me like it’s a difficult country to come in to as an immigrant to figure out and its hard. Hard to make your way. And there’s always that transition period where if you’re coming from a culture that’s a more traditional culture with regard to women. And then your coming into this one … there’s that period of transition and there may be some misfires here and there in negotiating that. But I think we see all over the various dozens and dozens of Muslim communities even in this country. There’s no one form of Islam in this country. We’ve got so many branches and faces of Islam in the United States that even within the Islamic communities in this country you see great variability and change and growth and adjustment in the communities to the American way of doing things because there are immigrants living here so I think that there is more complexity and nuance there that mostly meets the eye. It’s always good to point to the complexity. We don’t like it because it’s easier to stay simple. Because sometimes simplified things give us a handle hold but once you get that handle hold, you got to go a little deeper and see the complexity. Q: Thank you Dr. Carroll, your talk was delightful. Very informative. Couple questions for you. How do you reconcile the fact that although Gulen espouses peace, tolerance, and human rights. I’ve noticed and all do respect to the ladies here. Many of the organizations that are associated with him, the women are covered in head scarves. And the men don’t have that same constriction. I believe that the head scarf is a way to show “modesty” As a woman and it’s a patriarchal religion. How do you reconcile: the women are not necessarily required, it’s my understanding that they choose this on their own. But I don’t believe a 5 year old girl makes that choice. In this respect and also just recently that the headscarf ban being overruled in Turkey and now women can wear headscarves in universities and public institutions. We just found out recently that a woman was not allowed into a restaurant because she was not escorted by a man. And girls are not being given certain scholarships in certain schools if they don’t wear headscarves. And this is something happening now in Turkey. And we’re wondering if its going to go the way of Iran. What are your thoughts on this? A: Okay there are a lot of ridges in that so. A lot of things to cover there so I’m sure I’m not going to be able to cover all of that. The issue first about the Gulen community, and women in the community. My own experience and my own understanding is what I’ll share here. It’s as you said; women chose this or not. There are many women who chose not to cover; there are many women who do. It’s up to them. What we see uniformly across the Gulen community with regard to women is that the women are highly educated, have equal access. Women are equally educated; Masters, PHDs, professionals in their disciplines if the want. So there’s tremendous equality on those types of opportunities. I think it’s an interesting thing because in the West. You know we get hung about this head scarf. And I think we need to get over it. Because it’s a scarf; what? And there are regulations for modest for Muslim men as well. You don’t see Muslim men wearing short pants. You don’t see them wearing tank tops. You don’t see them exposing certain parts of their body. There are modesty regulations for men as well. The understand in Islam and in Judaism. Islam doesn’t just make it up. Islam has two religions that precede it, from which it comes. And the exhortation for modest for women with regard to their hair comes from Judaism and from Christianity; and Islam picks it up in its own distinct way. And its because a woman’s hair is understood as part of her sexuality, and that needs to be guarded. And so Islam doesn’t come to this conversation completely virginal; it has a history with it. And so from a purely religious perspective, someone standing here as an American – as someone who believes that with all of its faults, the United States has come up with one good thing in the constitution – and that’s the first amendment; which allows freedom of religious expression. And it constitutionally guarantees it – for everyone. And if women want to cover, they get to cover. And if they don’t want to cover, they get to not do that. With regard to children, parents routinely enforce their family’s religion on their children. That’s what parents do. That’s what we all do. If we’re liberal atheists, we push that on our kids too; it’s just not as visible. It’s not a scarf. So I guess I want to defend a little bit. Because I think we make too much of this scarf. It’s just a scarf. It’s a head covering. What? I know you don’t agree. You asked me my opinion and so I’m telling you. Now there are places where it’s not just a scarf. And as you rightly point out, there are places where it is abused. There are places where it’s made to mean certain things about devotion, about belongingness, and there’s discrimination based on it. And I absolutely see no room for that. And I myself would question that seriously, where ever I see it – whether its here, whether it’s in Turkey – anywhere. Now with regard to – and I don’t think anybody should be forced or required or denied employment because they cover or they don’t cover. I think it should be completely be up to the private individual. And there should be equanimity across the board. With regard to Turkey, I myself, I very much read some of the columnists that write in Turkey. And I keep up with that quite a bit. Myself, I am encouraged by the lifting of the head scarf ban mainly because – not because there’s potential for abuse. There clearly is potential for abuse, and my understanding is not the types of things that you mention are just widespread and going unchecked in Turkey. My own experience does not show that. And I go to Turkey quite a bit. But the reason why I’m encouraged by it is because I take the lifting of the head scarf ban as a moving away from the radical potentially oppressive form of secularism that Turkey has been under for more than a generation now. And its very different than the secularism that we practice here in this country. It’s laicism, it’s laisite and Kamal Ataturk borrowed laicism from France and from other places and applied it in the formation of the modern state of Turkey. And it is a form of secularism that is hostile to religion and suspicious of religion. France is having this exact same conversation. And it’s not to say that the laicicistic understanding is out of bounds. I mean France comes to its position on this after hundreds of years of religious wars where the body count was very high and so they very much felt that they had to adopt a form of secularism that protected the state and the people from the ravages of religion. Because those ravages were very clear. And that’s understandable. I don’t think that model of secularism works in the long hall. It works maybe as a corrective for a time – which I think is the case in Turkey. I don’t think anybody can deny that as much as we may question Ataturk’s policies, modern Turkey is strong because of so many of the things he put in place. But I think that form of secularism has run its course, and it’s time for a renewed conversation around that because it is a big oppressive. You have people denied employment, because they’re devoutly Islamic. They can’t attend universities, they can’t pray in the space of the public universities and in public employment. That’s oppression. That’s oppression of religion. And so I’m hardened because I think the party in power now in Turkey sees that. And the EU process, whether or not Turkey ever makes it into the EU – I ‘m doubtful about that, I think the process is pushing those kinds of conversations; pushing the party in power to consider ways in which religious freedom needs to be more encouraged – ways in which human rights needs to be more firmly committed to; ways in which the democracy in Turkey needs to be more and more purified and redone and made better. So I’m optimistic. I’m not scared of the party in Turkey that’s in power. Q: As of last night… The constitution says you can not wear a head scarf and go to public school, and university. A: Right this is a conversation in Turkey. In general, I want to say that, I think we have to be very careful in not making the mistake of seeing Turkey going down the road to being Saudi Arabia. I just think there’s no Sharia law and it’s going to be… I think those are very premature and very ahistorical actually. Q: Thank you very much for the information. When you visited Turkey – the schools and other places – what have you seen different from the United States and other places? Can you compare that? A: What have I seen different? Well the food is better in Turkey. The schools are very inspiring. What I like about the schools is that… they are what I would call, and I am not saying the Gulen community schools would use this term for themselves but what we would classic, liberal arts, humanistic education, where you’re learning classic math science, reading, history, language, music, in a context of what in this country now is called virtue education. Not religious education. The Gulen schools are not religious schools at all. They do not teach religion. It teaches students how to be good citizens, good neighbors, good people. That’s a distinction. In this country we’ve done it in our public schools. I think we’ve gotten away from it in a lot of ways. And I think we’ve lost our way in some respects. And so I think the model of the education that you see in the Gulen community schools bring something to the table. Not that it’ll work everywhere, but it brings something to the table. I like that very much. Q: I really liked what you had to say about the us versus them narrative, and you see it very much in the media as you pointed out. My question is how do you see the future of that narrative? And what can we do here in order to help overcome that narrative so that it’s no longer us versus them but us with them? I don’t mind identifying myself as a Muslim. I’m raising my children as such, but I also teach them that it’s not us versus them but it’s us with our neighbors. A: I think there are a lot of things we can do. And we have to do it on every level. Each of us lives on many levels at once. We live as citizens or residents of the country that we’re living in – of the area of the country that we’re living in. We live as citizens of our community, in this case Chicago area. And we have neighbors and so we have that identity. And then there’s with our family and friends. And there are things that can be done at every one of those levels. At the biggest level of national and international. I think something like citizen diplomacy this is a term that we’ve used in this country for many decades but I think it very much works. The more we travel to visit each other – the more we explore the world beyond our own comfort zone, the world opens up and we begin to see that those people we called “them” they don’t actually live the way we thought they lived. They don’t actually think the way we said they think. And we can only know that through encounter. So I think those types of programs. And it’s the same kind of thing. My center works with another organization and the mayor in Houston and we’re promoting this across the country actually – where strangers, we group them up together in groups of 8 and 10. They’re strangers to each other. They’re different religions and they have a dinner together in a private person’s home. And they have a facilitated conversation using dialogue cards about the role of spirituality or faith or whatever in their life. And its for people of all faiths and no faith. And the first time we did it we had 20 host homes with about 250 people. The second time we did it, 9 months later, we had 75 host homes with about 850 people and 3 other cities joined us. And now we’re doing it again in November and we’re on line to have 10 cities around the country to join us. We’d love to have Chicago. And about 5,000 people. And what we hear from that, in the feed back from people when they write on the evaluations. We had no idea. We had no idea we had so much in common with people of different faiths. We had no idea about Muslims. Because in a post 9-11 world, people are scared and suspicious. For many it was the first time they ever shared a meal with a Muslim. For many it was the first time they ever met a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Jain, or a Sikh, or a Wiccan, or a Zorastrian. We had everybody participate in this thing. And so it’s a very grassroots personal one on one kind of encounter. And it makes a difference. And it jolts people. So this kind of thing. And I know the Niagara Foundation and every other interfaith organizations in this city supports that kind of stuff. It’s not flashy. It’s not sexy. It’s hard slogging work sometimes, to set that stuff up. And the difference that it makes can’t always be readily measured, because it’s differences of the heart. But man does it make a difference. And we have the perfect situation to do it here in this country because we’re an immigrant nation. We’ve got people from all over the world living here. Everyone of the worlds living religions is alive and well in the United States. And all of them are alive and here in Chicago. So you’ve got the perfect laboratory to do this kind of thing. We have to give ourselves to this kind of stuff. We have to make it a priority. Q: Dr. Carroll thank you so much for the speech. I have 2 quick questions. The first is, as far as I know you had an opportunity, before writing this book, to meet Mr. Gulen – even though he was sick. I’m very curious about your experience by meeting such a person. What kind of questions did you ask simply and what were you expecting before you went there to meet him? The second question is why an American academician would choose such a person to research on? I mean after 9-11, everybody is curious about Islam. The Qur’an is one of the best selling books in Amazon.com. People are still suspicious about Islam if it’s promoting terrorism or promoting peace. But at the same time people would like to know about Islam. That is why Islam is very popular lately. So why would an American academician go for Mr. Gulen but not any other – because he’s getting so popular as far as we know in the western society. A lot of PHD dissertations, a lot of sociologists are working on him. So what is … Is he sacrificing on Islam or what is he doing than many western academician … because people are suspicious. People say ,”hey! A lot of American academicians are going after him or doing researches on him. That must be something suspicious, right? A: Okay. Thank you Hakan. My meeting with Mr. Gulen. I was about 85% finished with the book when I had the opportunity to go and visit with him in the retreat center where he lives in Pennsylvania. And so he was very gracious. He was not feeling well. And our plane was 3 hours late because of a storm. And then it was pouring rain and wind. I felt like I was in a hurricane in Texas. And it took us long to get there. So we were 5 hours late for dinner. And we kept calling and telling him to go to bed. But he waited up for us until almost midnight to eat – even though he was sick. And we felt so awful, but it was a delightful thing to meet him. I really had no expectations in particular. I expected him to be someone who is knowledgeable, and generous, and gracious – because of everything I heard about him. And he was all that and more. And we had a dinner meal, and then breakfast next morning. It just so happened that the timing of it was right after the Pope had said those horrible things about Islam. In one of those early speeches that he gave where frankly I think he forgot that he was the Pope. And that you can’t just say – I mean he can say that when he’s a university professor. You can’t say that stuff when you’re the Pope. It’s a different level of accountability. So that was very much on people’s minds and he had spent the day contacting his Catholic friends in the Vatican and in various other places in the world – just extending friendship to them because you know they’re in a difficult position. I mean they are Catholics, they very much respect their Pope; but yet they’ve made friends with Muslims. And it was a difficult thing for them. So he had spent the day doing that so we had a lot of conversation around that. I didn’t so much ask him questions about the book—about what I was writing, maybe because I’m a western scholar – I’m a secular western scholar. I do my work. It’s the second book I’ve written on someone who’s living – which is a tricky thing because they change. They change their views in the middle of you writing a book, and you have to throw out the whole chapter. It’s a tricky thing. I ask him a couple questions. There’s one place in one of his books where he says. “But I’m going to stop here because I don’t think the community is ready to hear this just yet.” I interpreted it to be the Muslim community and the people inspired by his ideas. So I put a big star on that and took the book with me. So at the meal I said “you say here that I don’t think the community is ready to hear these ideas; well I’m not a Muslim I’m not part of the community – I’m ready. Tell me what it is.” And he laughed and said what do you think it is? And so I told him. He said, “that’s in the ball park” So we had a nice conversation. He was very generous. Okay. Why Gulen? I wanted Islam in the mix because of this post 9-11 mentality that we’re in. And I feel that it is important to bring Islam into the conversation in a very direct and intentional and maybe even in kind of a heavier way. Gulen is in every chapter. It’s Gulen in conversation through his text with these different thinkers. He’s featured in every chapter. And so he gets more page time than the others. I wanted to give that to Islam because I feel that people need to know that these great humanistic values are there in Islam. Now why him? I wanted someone contemporary. It’s easy to go back to some of the greats like Ibn Sina, or Al-Ghazzali, or any of the great Islamic scholars from previous generations and find all kinds of stuff. I mean they’re just giants of scholarship. And I studied them in my training and I could find them. But its too easy for those who are suspicious of Islam to say okay, that’s true. Al-Ghazzali had that view, but not Islam today. No Muslims today. No Muslim scholars today are saying these things. I did not want that argument to be opened, so I want someone whose living, alive, current – has a body of work that is readily verifiable. That’s there – you can listen to the sermons. You can listen to the tapes. You can read the books. You can check the translations. You can follow the stuff – he’s there. He’s living. He’s got a huge body of work. Plus I wanted someone who was not what we might call peripheral to larger Islam. It’s always easy to find some mystic off somewhere or some sort of person off on the side of a tradition that really is not standing at the heart of a tradition. I wanted someone who in their training and in their speaking about Islam speaks for the heart of a tradition. So I wanted someone Sunni and I wanted someone from the Hanafi school because that’s one of the largest schools in Islam. And 85% of all Islam is Sunni. Nothing bad about the Shiites. I didn’t want a Shiite I wanted Sunni scholar. And so for all those reasons and my own experience with Gulen. He seemed to fit that. And there’s this immediate impact of his ideas where you see all the thousands and thousands of projects and initiatives that are going on right now practically applying these ideas that he is generating from Islam. So that’s why I chose him. Because I had these criteria and he seemed to fit it perfectly.

Niagara Foundation Celebrates Black History Month
February 28th, 2008

Niagara Foundation convenes a reception in honor of Black History Month on Thursday February 28th 2008. The Keynote speaker is Warner Saunders, Anchor, NBC5 Chicago.

The reception will feature exhibitions, speech, and furthermore..

Venue :

Niagara Foundation

203 N. Wabash ave. #1700

Chicago, IL 60601

Time:

12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M

Shots from the event:

ASHURA (Noah’s Pudding)
February , 2008

Niagara Foundation celebrates the Ashura (Noah's Pudding) tradition with the neighbors of Greater Chicago Area. To celebrate the diversity and intercultural partnership in the Greater Chicago Area, we share Ashura (Noah's Pudding) tradition with our friends at local religious temples, community centers, universities, colleges, shelters, hospitals and more...

What is Ashure ?

The Story of Ashure

Historical Significance

The Tradition Still Continues Today

The Recipe

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Annual Dinner of Abrahamic Traditions

Time:
Thursday, January 10, 2008

Place:

Bristol Court Banquete Hall
828 East Rand Road

Mount Prospect, IL 60056

Theme:

Hospitality in the Abrahamic Traditions

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