Two deaths: one a resurrection, the other a cautionary end

Every soul shall taste death. Death is an inevitable event that God has decreed for living beings. Fethullah Gülen, who for the last 12 years took part in every kind of betrayal, plot, coup, murder, terrorist activity, lie, trickery and theft against Turkey, also dies. The reactions that everyone immediately gave about him upon his death, indeed upon all the death reports before he died, present a truly instructive scene in terms of his end.

People die, and those left behind bear witness about them. Although these testimonies are not absolute, they are preliminary judgments about the goodness and badness of the deceased. Had Gülen died just before 17-25 December, he would probably have been treated as a saint by everyone; but the perception of him that began with the 17-25 December process and reached a verdict with 15 July reversed the earlier positive perceptions and incorporated them into the sum of a story of evil.

Gülen's story, which began in the sixties and ended on 20 October in a hospital in the US, under the protection of the Zionist US that has declared war on Islam, on Muslims, indeed on all humanity, is an instructive story from beginning to end. It is an instructive story of how far a lost compass concerning to whom and with whom a Muslim's allegiance and loyalty should be can fling a person. It is also an instructive scene of how empty and illusory the gain obtainable in return for putting up for sale the knowledge and means God has given is, and what a loss it ends in.

When I think of Gülen and the word "death" together, what stays in my mind each time is how entirely death was left out of his fine calculations, his deep strategies. Personally too he loved life very much, was very attached to his health, and could turn even the slightest health problem into a drama in his own discourse. He had taken refuge in the US on health grounds, for example. With his diabetes, his blood pressure, his heart ailment, throughout a life that reached 85 he could make his own health problems the problem of the whole world. It was less a sickness than a sickness-obsession that he lived and made others live; an interesting manifestation of an obsessive attachment to life. It was said that he began taking dozens of vitamin pills a day already in his youth. Judging by his own discourse, this could not be the attitude of someone yearning to meet God. An attachment to life such as to want to live a thousand years shows a personality that by its nature sidelines the hereafter and God as well.

Because it was a movement that never included death in its life, he belittled the struggle of the Palestinians. He feared the powerful, the world's powers, and by constantly showing his fear he in effect elaborated the worship of power as a moral maxim, through the language of his condition. For the sake of surviving a little longer, he bent and bowed before power, sold the honorable positions God and this nation had bestowed upon him for a small price, and Gülen kept seeking acceptance, in place of dignity (izzet), in abasement (zillet), and in place of honor, before the powers he supposed to be the highest of this world.

He always sought acceptance before the arrogant powerful (müstekbir) rather than before Muslims. He feared the arrogant of the world, who are enemies of God, more than he feared God. For that reason, neither in Turkey nor anywhere in the world where his organization operated were his relations with Islamic movements ever good, and he never established closeness with them. In Turkey he always kept a distance from Erbakan and the Millî Görüş movement. On 28 February he openly placed his stance on the side of the coup-makers. In fact, the moves he made there were so strategic that they turned even the plans of the 28 February people into a part of his own plan. But the ultimate aim of all this strategy was not the development and strengthening of Islam in Turkey, nor the manifestation of Islam's message with its justice, its truth, its beauty; on the contrary, it was the maximum realization of his own desire for power.

Even with Erdoğan, he tried to establish good relations only from the moment Erdoğan was de facto in power and a long-term horizon of power came into view. But even in this relationship he was never sincere. He approached Erdoğan because Erdoğan was strong. What he approached was neither Erdoğan nor the political movement or program Erdoğan represents. Mark the coincidence: the real parting of his ways with Erdoğan began around the same time as Erdoğan started to take up the Palestinian cause strongly against Israel. The grumblings had begun at Davos. And at the Mavi Marmara incident, by saying openly "it was wrong to embark on such an action without permission from the authority," he declared to the powers he so feared or represented that he was categorically separate from Erdoğan.

Again mark the coincidence: on the day he breathed his last in a fully equipped, perfect hospital in the US, which he supposed to be strong and to be his savior, the images of another death were being broadcast to the world. The difference between the two deaths was as clear as the difference between black and white.

We are speaking of the martyrdom of Commander Yahya Sinwar, one of the valiant men of Gaza, who believed that we have no life other than the life God has given and that we do not command even a minute or a second of that life. Sinwar was a man of struggle who spent 23 years of his life under torture in the dungeons of the "state in the South," that is, Israel, which Gülen dreaded in his reverence. When Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of Hamas's political wing, fell as a martyr, he knew very well that martyrdom was at the end of the leadership he took over. That post is not a bird of fortune, in the sense people who are put at the head of people in this world understand. That post was a queue for martyrdom, and Yahya Sinwar accepted this post knowingly, willingly and wholeheartedly.

Sinwar knew like his own name that there was nothing to fear in Zionist Israel, which Gülen and those like him feared as if fearing God, indeed more than Him, and that only God governs human life and death. Because he knew this very well, he advanced without hesitation on a path of struggle that included death. For that reason his death was like the resurrection of an ummah, like a spring coming after winter, a morale that cooled the hearts of the oppressed of the whole world.

We would have asked whether such a death could be, had we not seen such a thing and had we only heard of it. But this is exactly how it happened. God showed this scene to all humanity, and moreover through Israel's own camera. While fighting the enemy until his last breath, the stick that he, wounded, with his right hand finally severed, hurled at the enemy drone perhaps did not touch the drone, but it has already struck all the hypocrites, the sham leaders of two faces, and the hearts of those who fear death, of the oppressors.

Sinwar said "I fear death," yes, but he feared dying on his bed, as old camels await their deaths, or of corona or an illness. He never feared dying while fighting the enemy who was supposed to be sooo powerful; indeed, he sought that death all his life and finally attained it. Both died in the way they themselves desired.

But without doubt, at the end of Sinwar's death there are honor and pride in this world and life in the hereafter, while at the end of the other's death there are manifest abasement and wretchedness in this world and loss in the other.