From time immemorial and as we read from various literatures, good deeds have lived behind their departed performers, and the opposite likewise. From the days of Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden, the paradise, we get the narrative of Cain and Abel’s sacrifices to God. At about 500 BC, we, for example, read about a Greek philosopher in the name of Pythagoras, remembered for his religious, educational, and scientific quests – revolving on the axis of the famed Pythagorean Theorem, in particular. And the particulars remain alive today.
Very lately in October 2024, the world was moved by the death of Turkish Muslim cleric, academic, philosopher, messenger of peace, and interfaith dialogue (my own emphasis), Muhammad Fethullah Gülen, in self-exile in the United States of America, where he had lived for about 25 years, and is expressed in a book on the Hizmet Movement as a “Muslim scholar who matters to (the rest of) the world.”
In all these circumstances, we observe Allah immediately granting pleasure or inflicting pain consequent to the good and evil done in the world. At the individual level, after a good job, one feels the immediate satisfaction and reward in one’s heart and conscience. After a bad job, one sees the immediate result in the form of disgust. From the afterlife perspective, all these are manifested in many and different ways, the likes of charity activities, whose beauty, love, and enthusiasm are reflected on the faces of the providers as it is on those of the receivers.
A clear manifestation of all this lies bare among friends working at the Ishik Charity and beneficiaries in the United Republic of Tanzania’s Bagamoyo humble area in East Africa, on the western rim of the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometers away from Gülen’s native land, Turkey, and his last befitting resting place in the US.
On a historical note, through its well-known social responsibility project involving the provision of clean water in Africa, the Ishik Charity Organization has dug more than four hundred wells to date, directly benefiting almost half a million people and indirectly facilitating their income-generating activities of crop growing through irrigation and animal husbandry by establishing water points. The modus operandi has been to locate the wells in a school garden, clinic, or mosque grounds for ease of management and longer sustainable use. And it has created the miracle.
All along, as part of their contribution to the Ishik Charity Organization’s social responsibility component, the Feza Schools network and friends in Tanzania have been involved in the establishment of school libraries and provision of books. There could be no better reward or befitting empathy than to learn that hardly within two months of the death of Gülen, the Hizmet Movement-oriented Ishik Charity service had scored wonders.
The following is what I collected from one Turkish person living in exile in Tanzania and close to the Ishik Charity (his name withheld because the Turkish government conducts forced abductions even as near as in the neighboring Kenyan city of Nairobi in East Africa).
That person told me: “A story I heard the other day made me very happy. Friends are building a library for a school near Bagamoyo city. They also buy books for the children to read. For the first time in their history, the children (the school has) have become the first in their region among 45 schools in the NECTA (Inter-school placement test throughout Tanzania) exams in their region within a year. My friend told me (this story) with an expression of astonishment on his face.
“We went to the school. Faces were smiling. The headmaster thanked us. There is another crowded school in the neighborhood. I wanted to know something about their relationship. I asked him (the headmaster) how it was doing? They emerged second, he responded with a smile because they had access to the library.
“What a beauty, I felt, that went unmentioned.”
The words of this exiled Turkish father sent me back to my old school days in the late fifties and early sixties when we studied and read about Greek myths and legends, the likes of the Trojan Horse, on top of contemporary famous philosophers and their effect on the world to the present day. My mind settled on Pythagoras. About 500 BC, he set his eyes on how issues like science, mathematics, religion, and philosophy intertwined. With Aristotle and Plato’s works in mind, it is easy to trek the Pythagoras lines of philosophy, religion, and, in particular, mathematics, recognizing its association more with the love of wisdom (philosophy) than with the demands of life as it was at the time.
To the present day, there can be no school worth the name under the Sun that does not teach the Pythagorean Theorem to the effect that “in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse (a²) is equal to the sum of the squares of the two perpendicular sides (b² + c²).”
Pythagoras and Gülen have interestingly surprising different birth backgrounds to end up parting with anybody they classified as a tyrant. The former was a product of an aristocratic family in 570 BC, while the latter emerged from humble surroundings more than 2,500 years later in 1941. Oracles had it that Pythagoras would tell the truth and benefit humanity. History has it that in 530 BC, Pythagoras opened a school shrouded in secrecy but whose members led communal life. He did not admit anybody from the wealthy class or aristocratic family to be his student because he considered their upbringing did not produce a noble but rather a violent and difficult character, behaving like a tyrant. He was very much influenced by Plato and Aristotle.
Gülen, on the other hand, established dormitories preparing resident pupils, irrespective of their parents’ social status, faith, and political inclination, for performing well in national examinations and contributing towards the attainment of the national needs of the day. He was influenced by Said Nursi who set contemporary challenges of the new Turkish Republic as ignorance, poverty, and disunity. Gülen used social capital to address these pertinent issues. Said Nursi emphasized: “Moral laws are absolute. They are not relative. Efforts spent on spicing our actions in the interest of our desires point in the wrong direction. This is why, as it is noted, we substitute legal and illegal, right and wrong with attributes. And a State is created along these lines.”
A dip into the affairs of both philosophers reveals Pythagoras as the most probably wide-traveled being initiated in all sanctuaries he visited in Crete, Egypt, Persia, Syria, and Sparta of his day, while Gülen is visibly the least among the modern ones, but having a wider presence and imprint on today’s world through the Hizmet Movement. Besides his native land, Turkey, Gülen has been active in Asia, Europe, and Africa where he had never personally been until his death in October 2024 at the age of 83.
In the process, both Pythagoras and Gülen respectively made enemies with those in possession of wealth and political power. One account of Pythagoras’ death reveals him dying at around 495 BC from self-starvation in protest against the persecution and the killing of the majority of his followers. Another says he was killed for political reasons by followers of his opponents, Cylon and Ninon. Gülen was accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of masterminding the July 15, 2016 coup that never was. He lived in US exile since 1999 and the Erdogan regime has, since then, embarked on persecuting those deemed members of the Hizmet Movement wherever they are on earth.
Concerning their private life, Pythagoras is on record for having married one of his students in his late age when Gülen did not even dream of having a family.
To belong to Pythagoras, one had to practice wisdom, justice, and bravery from the angle of the quest for “absolute knowledge” while in the eyes of Gülen these qualities fell short of delivery in the absence of empathy, rendering sympathy a lacking humanity service approach level. We see both dying in tears for love, justice, unity, and total emancipation of humanity at the hands of their enemies bent on holding on to wealth and political power at whatever costs. Indeed, more than 2,500 years apart, Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen, who died in US exile in October 2024, in tears, emerges as Turkish Pythagoras with a difference and the effect of whose vision, like that of other famous past philosophers, will ever live on.
