Cropped Videos and Distorted Statements
The "They Act According to Dreams" Claim
Unfounded
Claim
Fact
The starting point of the debate is the press statement made in Ankara on 10 April 2016. When the hall, which had been rented and paid for, was cancelled two days before the conference, those who had come gathered in front of it. At one point in the twenty-minute speech Kuytul briefly related a dream seen by two people. The excerpt put into circulation is only that section.
This is where the claim falls apart: the one who says that a dream is not acted upon is Kuytul himself. His answer to the objection "a dream is not evidence" does not refute that objection but confirms it: "True. Did we say otherwise?"
Nor is there any decision resting on a dream. The journey to Ankara was not made because a dream had been seen; it was made because the hall had been cancelled. In his own words: "We did not act according to that dream."
The movement's criterion he explains with a comparison he drew twenty years ago:
"A ship whose compass is the sun does not err, it does not stray from its destination; in the same way, if the compass of a religious community is the Qur'an and the Sunnah, that community does not stray."
Only one question is left: what was it that was related? There is no ruling, no call and no decision; there is a sentence of encouragement said to a tense crowd. In Kuytul's own description: "There are glad tidings here, there is no question of acting on it."
The claim "you objected when others did the same thing" is dealt with in the detailed section. The twenty minutes of the speech that were cut out, and the claim "he used the Prophet for his own benefit", are under a separate heading: What was said in the Ankara statement?
The objection is one that has already been accepted
The sentence "dreams are not acted upon, a dream is not offered as evidence" is correct in terms of Islamic jurisprudence. Kuytul does not dispute it either:
"We are not people who fail to know that a dream is not acted upon."
This is where the real difficulty of the claim begins. Someone is told that they have broken a rule they themselves defend; but no instance of that rule being broken is shown. There is no difference of opinion here, and no decision on record either.
Acting on something and glad tidings are not the same
To act on a dream is to make a decision by looking at a dream, to derive a ruling from it, or to call people to some course of action. None of these happened on 10 April 2016. The journey to Ankara was not made because of a dream; it was made because the hall, already paid for, was cancelled two days before the conference. The dream was related at the end of the speech and in a single sentence; not even the whole of it was told.
Kuytul also describes separately the kind of thing that was related: there is no juristic question here concerning faith, worship, morals or dealings between people. Giving glad tidings in hard moments he counts as part of the Sunnah, and he gives as an example the Prophet's announcing of future conquests on the most pressed day of the Siege of the Trench.
Nor does he turn this into a claim of privilege. He says that similar dreams may be being seen in Palestine, in Syria, everywhere people are in distress — because the point is not to grant the dreamer some rank, but that a person under pressure needs encouragement.
Is relating a dream in itself a fault?
The existence of the truthful dream is established by the Qur'an; the chapter of Yusuf is woven from beginning to end with dreams and their interpretation. But Kuytul asks no one to accept this dream. He finds it entirely reasonable to say "I do not know this person, and I do not believe the dream they saw". What he himself does amounts to looking into whether those who related the dream are people known for years and of steady character; and he says that most of the dreams told to him he has never passed on at all.
Can a movement be run on dreams?
The claim jumps from a single sentence to the workings of an entire structure. Yet thirty-five years of recordings of talks and conferences are available, and one would expect them to show by what criterion those words were spoken. Kuytul's answer points here as well: if this movement lived by dreams, there would be no movement at all.
The criterion is the comparison he drew twenty years ago: a ship whose compass is the sun does not stray from its destination; nor does a religious community whose compass is the Qur'an and the Sunnah. Where a movement is going is determined not by dreams but by that compass.
"You had rejected the Gülen community's dream, and then did the same thing"
This is a claim of a double standard, and it assumes that the two events are the same thing. To see the difference it is enough to look at what the objection was directed against.
Kuytul's objection years ago was directed not at a dream being related, but at a practice he regarded as religiously objectionable being defended with a dream: young girls being brought onto the stage to sing at the Turkish Olympiads held in stadiums. The sentence he formed was not "dreams are not to be related" but "a practice held to be forbidden cannot be made legitimate by pointing to a dream".
In the Ankara event there is no practice being made legitimate. There is a statement made against the breaking of a promise that had been given, and a sentence of encouragement said to a tense crowd. To count the two situations as equal, one has to assume that the objection was framed in a way it never was framed — as "whoever relates a dream is mistaken".
What is left
In the excerpt under discussion, the event on which the speech was made is not visible. Whoever passes judgement on the basis of a half-minute excerpt instead of the twenty-minute recording has spoken not about a subject, but about the thing that was shown to them.
What was in the part that was cut out: What was said in the Ankara statement? · A step-by-step account of the method: how are cropped videos produced?