Interviewe: Prof. Dr. İbrahim Özdemir (İÖ)
His most recent publications include The Ethical Dimension of Human Attitude Towards Nature, 2nd edition, Insan Publications: Istanbul, 2008, 2. Jalaluddin Rumî and Confucius on Meaning of Life, Amazon KDP, 2020, and Globalization, Ethics and Islam, editors: Ian Markham and İbrahim Özdemir, Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. He has travelled widely in the Muslim world and the West. He was visiting professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford University (1998) and Hartford Seminary (2001-2003). He was a visiting professor at Abu Akadmi University (Turku-Finland) for two years (2018-2020). He gives many scholarly and public lectures in Turkey, Europe, the United States, and other countries.
After returning from the USA, he was appointed Director-General for International Relations, Ministry of National Education. He represented Turkey at EU, UNESCO, and OECD educational programs. (2003-2010).
Dr. Özdemir addresses different audiences about topics related to environmental philosophy, Muslim environmental thought, sustainable development, religion and the environment, interreligious and intercultural dialogue, Higher Education, and School Leadership.” (Profile: Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Özdemir )
Interviewer: Prof. Dr. Paul Ade Silva (PAS)
PAS: We begin the interview with questions relating to your paper, A COMMON CARE FOR CREATION: SAID NURSI AND POPE FRANCIS ON ENVIRONMENT (Özdemir, 2020) that was published in October last year. Given the inter-faith framework for your comparison between Said NURSI and Pope Francis, what would you consider to be your deeper sensibility when you were writing the article?
İÖ: Thank you very much for interviewing me on an important topic, well, I have been working on environmental thought for more than three decades. Earlier, I also attended a panel discussion on “Pope John Paul II’s Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue” at Parliament of the World’s Religions, Barcelona, Spain, July 10, 2004”. (Özdemir, 2012)
As you know, we are not living in a monolithic world anymore. Moreover, Jews, Christians, and Muslims together make up more than half of the world’s population today. Better understanding, communication, and peaceful relations between our communities are not only good but they are essential for our well-being and for the well-being of the world at large.
Moreover, environmental, social, and economic threats are aimed at everyone without discrimination, whether Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and secular. Therefore, we must cooperate and join our energies for a better future. As the threat is common, the response must be common. This will empower the spirit of solidarity and cooperation in our respective societies.
In this spirit, I have been working on the Qur’anic environmental ethics and also consult the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) teachings (Sunnah), and Islamic culture on positive attitudes and behaviours to the environment, climate change, and sustainable development. (Özdemir, 2003)
In the same spirit, I wanted to study and understand the major characteristics of Said Nursi’s philosophy on the environment and try to compare and contrast it with Pope Francis’ views on the environment. Nursi contemplated both the manifest and hidden wonders of nature, and linked nature’s secrets to the omnipotence and omnipresence of the Divine. (Özdemir, 2020) Recently, Pope Francis, as the leader of the world’s largest faith community, who is according to polls, one of the most trusted, popular, and retweeted people on the planet, laid out the argument for a new partnership between science and religion to combat human-driven climate change. (ibid) Therefore, to compare and contrast Nursi and Pope Francis’ views on the deep meaning of creation and its implication for the environment would be very relevant for us and for the rest of creation.
I do believe that it is time for true believers in God of Abraham to learn to come together as partners in peace and then we can move our societies and our world from “combatibility to compatibility; from intolerance to tolerance, seeking justice, mercy and compassion for all.” (Findley, 2000; Baker, 1998).
Today, we’re facing some major challenges in our history at global level. Just to mention a few: COVID-19, poverty, illiteracy, racism, climate change, and environmental problems, chronic instability of the international economy, continent-wide pandemics of TB, AIDS, war, and terror.
Rev. Robert H. Schuller, founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral once has a call for us:
“True believers in God must learn to come together as partners in peace; we must move our society and our world from combatibility to compatibility; from intolerance to tolerance, seeking justice, mercy and compassion for all. For the sake of all the unborn generations to come, we, here and now, must begin the task of working together as partners for peace”. (ibid)
As a Muslim scholar, I join Rev. Robert H. Schuller, founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral dream that “Christians and Muslims once finding each other, caring for each other, and helping each other, can and will write a new history, a new legacy for the world: from collision to coalition”. (ibid)
Today, all concerned humans, – Jewish, Christians, Muslims, Buddhist, and humanists- have a responsibility to create a common future for us and our unborn generations.
PAS: After delineating the essentials of the philosophy of Said Nursi and Pope Francis on the environment in tandem with their environmental activism, what can we take away from your comparative analysis as to their great contributions to environmental protection or is the matter simply laying a theoretical framework for environmental protection?
İÖ: The great leaders pave the way for us and point their fingers to a brighter future of hope even in darkest times. Therefore, the vision of Nursi and Pope Francis is very important for us. As Pope Francis underlined, re-interpreting our Abrahamic tradition can allow us to propose and develop a new paradigm of understanding and sustainability, which includes all human fellows as well as all creation. (Pope Francis, 2015) Said Nursi also articulates an environmentally friendly understanding of human-nature relationship which was formed and shaped by the Qur’an. According to this understanding, the universe was created and sustained by God with a particular order, balance, measure, beauty, and aesthetic structure.
Nursi, while emphasizing the cosmological and metaphysical dimension of the Qur’an, also
underlines the ecological messages of this teaching for us: the purpose of the universe’s creation is not solely anthropocentric; before everything, the universe is a missive, a book, showing its Maker. It therefore has a dimension, which transcends human. (Özdemir, 2003)
Their shared vision that there are certain aims in the creation of all living beings; human’s prime obligation is to understand these, and act in conformity with them. Since there is no wastefulness and prodigality in the universe, humans should not be wasteful in their life. The models of unlimited growth and unlimited consumption are opposed to the spirit of the Qur’an. (Özdemir, 2003). We have to discover and develop sustainable economic model and consumption. As the ecological balances and systems have been placed and sustained in the universe, it is up to us to respect and protect them. Their vision can be a wakeup call for us to understand the importance of the problem and then produce responses with a spirit of care and responsibility.
I do believe that it is possible to find a table of universal and shared values among religions. As you know, religious traditions develop unique narratives, symbols, and rituals to express their relationships with the cosmos as well as with various local landscapes. Therefore, we have been working on common values among different religions and faith traditions for a while as environmentalism teaches us that we are on the same boat, which is the Planet Earth. To our surprise, we find out that we have more in common than we initially think. In the past, I attended several meetings of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago (1997), Cape Town (1999), and Barcelona (2004). Nelson Mandela also joined us in Cape Town and delivered an unforgettable speech to us.
We also revised the document Towards a Global Ethic (An Initial Declaration) in 2019 which has been officially expanded to include a language calling for commitment to a culture of sustainability and care for the Earth. The common values that most of the world’s religions hold in relation to the natural world might be summarized as reverence, respect, restraint, redistribution, and responsibility. (Tucker, 2020)
While there are clearly variations of interpretation within and between religions regarding these five reference cosmological orientations and ethical obligations, these principles have been previously understood primarily with regard to relations toward other humans, (Tucker and Grim, 2001) the challenge now is to extend them to the natural world. As this shift occurs -and there are signs it is already happening- religions can advocate reverence for the earth and its profound cosmological processes, respect for the earth’s myriad species, an extension of ethics to include all life forms, restraint in the use of natural resources combined with support for effective alternative technologies, equitable redistribution of wealth, and the acknowledgement of human responsibility in regard to the continuity of life and the ecosystems that support life. (ibid)
