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society roles of the two movements and fill the gap they

left unattended, unintentionally or otherwise, particularly

in the area of intercultural and interreligious dialogue.

Turkey and the Turkic-speaking world

Of all the geocultural regions of the Islamic world, perhaps

Turkey and the Turkic-speaking world had the most conse-

quential Islamic resurgence of the 1970s. Turkish Islamic civil

society was then in the making. Turkish-Islamic spirituality,

intellectuality, education and politics manifested themselves

anew within the milieu of the country’s secularism.

The rise of political Islam in Turkey began in the 1970s

with the establishment of an Islamic-rooted political party,

the National Order Party or

Milli Nizam Partisi,

headed by

Necmettin Erbakan. Since then, Turkey’s political Islam

movement has grown steadily in strength to become its

most dominant political force.

Intellectually, the 1970s saw a national discourse on

issues related to the place of Islam in secular Turkish polity

and the relations between Islam, the West and modernity.

Individual scholars of Islam and intellectuals associated

with some religious movements or groups, such as the Nursi

movement founded by Said-i Nursi Bediuzzaman and the

National Outlook Movement led by Erbakan, debated on

these issues. Although Islamic intellectualism of the decade

was pluralistic and even volatile with the once-dominant

Nursi movement disintegrating as an intellectual force as a

result of its fragmentation, especially after Fethullah Gulen’s

faction broke away from it, as a whole it became increasingly

dynamic and interactive in the following decades. The 1980s

witnessed the rise of Gulen’s spiritual-educational move-

ment which later became global in its mission.

The 1970s also saw the resurgence of Turkish Sufi groups,

especially the Naqshbandi Order, who because of their

traditional influence in society were courted by leaders of

political Islam. The three major forces of Turkish Islam

that crystallized during these two decades – the democratic

political Islam spearheaded by Erbakan, the spiritually

rooted social movement of Gulen and the Naqshbandi Sufi

Order – helped pave the way for the empowerment of Islam

in modern Turkey. All three are pro intercultural and inter-

religious dialogue.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

The second significant event associated with the Islamic

resurgence of the 1970s was the institutionalization of the

collective voice of the global Muslim ummah. In 1969 heads

of state and government of 25 Muslim majority countries

attended a summit meeting in Rabat, Morocco where they

decided to establish the Organization of Islamic Conference

(OIC). The OIC was officially established in 1971 with its

permanent secretariat to be based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Now with a membership of 57 states, some of which are not

Muslim majority countries though having large Muslim popu-

lations, and renamed the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation,

the OIC is the second biggest intergovernmental organization

in the world after the United Nations.

The OIC’s spirit of openness and inclusiveness in its

membership and organizational programmes demonstrates

the commitment of the Muslim ummah to intercultural and

interreligious cooperation and dialogues at the interna-

tional and global levels.

New Islamic intellectual movements

The third significant event of the 1970s was the First World

Conference on Muslim Education held in Mecca in 1977,

which gathered the cream of the Muslim world’s scholars

of Islam and intelligentsia to discuss the core problems of

education in modern Muslim societies. This generated a

series of world conferences dealing with different facets of

education in the Muslim world, the last of which was held

in Cape Town, South Africa in 1996. Its global impact is

most visible in the emergence of the influential intellectual

movement popularly known as the Islamization of knowl-

edge, which sought to synthesize traditional and modern

thought over a wide range of academic disciplines, and in

the growth of intercultural and interfaith dialogue.

Both the idea of Islamization of knowledge and the educa-

tional institutions attempting to realize it invited reactions

from non-Muslims that necessitated intercultural rapproche-

ment and dialogue. Over two decades the series of world

conferences on Muslim education helped to inspire and

generate cross-cultural perspectives on education, includ-

ing science education that gained popularity in the 1990s,

particularly within Muslim minority communities. During

the decade regional workshops were held on cross-cultural

perspectives on education under the auspices of the United

Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Dialogue at the dawn of the twenty-first century

Muslim initiatives in intercultural understanding and inter-

faith dialogue in the 1990s at all levels – national, regional

and global – have had such an impact on other cultures and

religious communities that if it weren’t for that fateful event

of 11 September 2001 the dialogue momentum they had

generated could have charted a more promising course in the

twenty-first century. On the eve of the new century the OIC

affirmed its collective stand on the Huntingtonian thesis of

An intercultural and interreligious dialogue event in Malaysia: celebrating

United Nations Harmony Week

Image: SOASCIS

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