September 11, 2001, Remembered

Commemoration of September 11, 2001, English Reformed Church of Amsterdam, Thursday, September 11, 2008, 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. 

Dr. Bülent Şenay, Professor of History of Religion & Counsellor for Religious Affairs for Turkey, In the Netherlands

Dear Friends:

We live in a unique century. Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. Young people with back packs are everywhere, and those who remain at home are treated to an endless parade of books, documentaries, and visitors from abroad. We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another, hurled with the force of atoms, the speed of jets, the restlessness of minds impatient to learn the ways of others. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously. I speak here today as a Muslim who was born in a Turkish Muslim family Turkey a country with a rich civilisational/multireligious heritage, grew up with Turkish culture and values, also shared the civilisational and cultural heritage of nearly 1.8 billion Muslims all over the world, yet as someone who spent nearly 10 years of life in the West. I have always taken the values of the East and the values of the West equally seriously. My life bears witness to the merging point where the East meets the West. September 11 was an attack to all of us those who take one another seriously.

We seem to have reached to a century that seems to be going through particularly intractable problems with a deep spiritual/moral crisis masked by many of our difficulties. Despite all the developments in every sphere of life, the brilliant achievements of modern culture, and the extraordinary economic and scientific progress, we still seem to lack the wisdom to hold our differences and disagreements in check and keep within safe and appropriate boundaries. We not only risk environmental catastrophe (halaak - shoah) because we see the earth as a resource to consume not as holy, we also have lost our sense of the sacred inviolability of every single human being. The darkest epiphanies of our century such as Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, Karabagh, the World Trade Center, Iraq, Palestine, and so on reveal that our ability to harm and  mutilate one another has kept pace with our `development` revealing a threatening sense of self-destruction. We therefore need some kind of ethics of `living together` beyond political & theological disagreements.

Religion is believed to cultivate the wisdom and the sense of the sacred inviolability of human being. All the major wisdom traditions provided a spiritual anthropology that would and did allow human beings to overcome exclusivity, cruelty, and atrocity. All the prophets, Abraham to Moses, from Jesus to Muhammad (pbut) all preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion by which people must abandon their egotism, self-centeredness, and violence. Kindness was the key to the future in Jewish wisdom, love in the message of Jesus, and `Afw` (loving forgiveness) in Muhammad`s Qur`ân and Sunnah. This is why the Muslim say `peace be upon them` (`alaihem as-salaam) everytime they hear the names of all the prophets mentioned. The golden rule of this spiritual anthropology was `do not do others what you would not have done to yourself.` This ethics will work, if we can only rediscover it. Without departing from our own tradition, we can learn from others how to enhance our particular pursuit of the ethical life. The scriptures have been and are still being used in such a way to create some of the darkest episodes of our recent history. Our response to this should be `self-criticism` and `humble listening`, not revenge, or discrimination against any group or a community.

We all know that Islam condemns terrorism and the killing of innocent lives. The word terrorism and Islam are contradictory.  One cannot be a true Muslim and terrorist at the same time. The Qur’an states, “Who so ever kills a human being…it shall be as if he has killed all mankind and who so ever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind” (The Qur’an 5:32). In the words of Scripture We all chant “O you who believe! stand out firmly for God, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you turn to wrongdoing and depart from justice.”(The Qur’an 5: 8-9)  
Today the survival of the self depends on the survival of the other as much as the survival of the human race depends on the survival of the eco-system. We sink or swim together. We have gone beyond “no man is an island unto himself” to “no entity is an island unto itself”. A vague and sentimental sense of attachment to the “clan” is not going to see us through the turbulent future of a world threatened by the gradual re-emergence of Nazism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, environmental devastation, a triumphalist New World Order based on the economic exploitation of the Two-Third World, a world where women continue to just survive on the margins of dignity. Conflict not only between but within the adherents of religions –all Hindu, Jewish, Christian Islam- will remain a feature of the contemporary religious scene into the new century. No chance of Utopia here. Borders are still there. In order to keep the two or many sides of the border together, what we need to do is `to listen to the other`.

Today so many years after the 9/11 tragedy, we all gathered to share our prayers not only in remembrance of those who passed away in this vicious attack –including nearly 400 Muslim men and women who died in the Towers, and we seem to forget this detail- but also to wish that we share a future in peace and living together. We also pray that our global society will develop a better culture of understanding.  Understanding means `standing under` something one wants to understand. Understanding can lead to love. But the reverse is also true. Love brings understanding; the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand, but we must also listen to put into play the compassion that the wisdom traditions all enjoin, for it is impossible to love another without hearing that other.

Today is 11th day of the Ramadhan, the month of Fasting & Purification for millions of Muslims in the World. The Ramadhan is a time for self-reflection on understanding, love, compassion and care. The word Ramadhan is derived from the root word AR-RAMAD which, in one definition, means autumn rain, so this blessed month is called Ramadan because it washes away sins from the heart like rainwater washes away dust from the streets. Let us pray that Ramadhan brings us love and compassion as the rain drops bring blessings.

Thank you.