The Sacred and the Secular in the Hizmet World

Gülen’s conception of Islam-friendly democracy is key to understanding his approach to sacred and secular relations. He does not see a contradiction between Islam and democracy, and he reasons that Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government’s general character, leaving it to the people to choose the type and form of government according to time and circumstances. With regard to state/society/religion issues, he has argued, unlike the Islamists, that passive Anglo-Saxon secularism which guarantees human rights and freedoms, including freedom of religion, could provide a wider framework for Muslims to practice their religion comfortably where other religious minorities also benefit from human rights. In his view, the faithful can comfortably live in secular environments if secularism is religion-friendly and understood as the state not being founded on religion. Hence, it does not interfere with religion or religious life, and the state is equidistant to all religions in a neutral manner. It can be argued that Gülen’s approach to sacred/secular relations is similar to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) since he has highlighted that Islam does not need a state to survive and that civil society or the civilian realm in liberal-democratic settings is sufficient for its individual and social practice. Is understanding of “Islamic secularism” or “twin tolerations” resonates with Habermas’s “religion in the public sphere,” which argues that the faithful can have demands based on religion in the public sphere and that, in the final analysis, it is the legislators’ epistemic task to translate these demands into a secular language and enact them accordingly.