What is the message of Gülen’s sense of responsibility to the pop culture generation?
I think the message to this pop culture world has to be one of being awakened. Wake up! To wake up to your humanity and in pop culture, it involves becoming awake to how we’re manipulated by advertising, by targeted marketing, by music, by art, by all these fashion trends; how we are reduced, especially in the West, to being consumers. We are walking wallets and we are manipulated and we don’t realize that we are being manipulated. So, the message of Gülen is “Be awake.” In Gülen, we find a sense of responsibility that is actually surpassing the self. Don’t you find this caring about the other to the extent of forgetting the self a utopian one? It can be utopian, but I don’t see them in contradiction. I don’t see a contradiction because Gülen is in the language of altruism, service, voluntary servicing and self-giving. There can be no self-giving if there is no self to give. The self to give must be a self worth giving, a self that when given, blesses the world. So there actually is a
