“We belong to God and to God we are ever returning.”
Eternal rest grant unto him, O God
and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy God,
rest in peace…
…and may his memory be a blessing to us all.
Amen.

My beloved sisters and brothers of Hizmet:

Al-salāmu `alaykum wa raḥmat Allāh wa barakātuhū.

May peace, and the mercy and blessings of God, be with you.

I write to you today with a heavy heart.

In solidarity with you and your families, I grieve the passing into eternity of a fellow traveler whose sojourn in time has had such a transformative effect on millions of lives around the world—our beloved Hocaefendi, M. Fethullah Gülen, may God be pleased with him and grant him mercy.

In Sūrat al-Nūr, the Holy Qur’ān beckons us to ponder the mystery of God’s unfailing and ubiquitous presence in our lives. The famous “light verse” (āyat al-nūr) offers a sublime metaphor by which it invites us to imagine God as God really is: as “the light of the heavens and the earth.”

The verse suggests that, rather than conceive of the one, true God as existing within and bound by the limits of material being, we should think of our experience of God as akin to that of the sun which—no matter the condition of our own lives and hearts—unfailingly bathes the earth from the morning prayer to the evening prayer.

We are taught that, just as the sun unceasingly illumines the physical world, God graces all existence—both the seen and unseen—with a supernal light that dispels all obscurity and gloom, enabling us to witness the stunning beauty and magnificence of God’s handiwork and to discern, however indistinctly, our own place in it.

The verse goes on to lend greater texture and depth to the metaphor by striking a breathtaking simile, telling us that God’s light is mediated and diffused in the world in a way analogous to how light is diffused in the rooms of our own earthly dwellings: from a special corner or niche (mishkāt) in which hangs a multifaceted crystalline lamp (miṣbāḥ).

When I reflect on the deep sorrow and bewilderment many of us are experiencing at the loss of Hocaefendi, I cannot help but liken it to the extinction of a treasured lamp shining in the rooms of each of our lives.

I cannot help likening our collective experience of the passing of our beloved Hocaefendi to what the Gospel tradition tells us the disciples of Jesus, peace be upon him, felt when they thought death had ripped the Christ away from them forever, or to what the Sira portrays as the grief, anxiety, and even panic of the early Umma when it seemed as if that Lamp of lamps, may God bless him and grant him peace, had finally gone on a journey from which he would never return—a panic so profound that, as tradition reports, some of his closest Companions temporarily refused to believe the news of the Prophet’s passing.

And just as that grief and sense of panic threatens to overtake me, now that Hocaefendi has embarked on that same journey back to his Creator, I am reminded of the lesson of hope and resilience each of us is called to draw from the passing of all the Prophets and Messengers of God, peace be upon them, and indeed from the passing of all the friends of God, women and men such as Hocaefendi, whose example helps illumine the paths of our own life journeys.

The lesson is that, although the lamp may no longer be there for us to see, its light remains.

This light with which we have been blessed through Hocaefendi cannot help but remain. It remains because it is essentially the eternal light of the One to whom each of us belongs and to whom each of us is returning from the day we are conceived in our mother’s womb until we take our last breath.

Even though the lamp of our beloved teacher and brother is gone, the light that shone through him endures.

It endures in the hearts of each of us who received it while he was alive.

So let us take comfort in this and at the same time let us also tremble under the yoke of responsibility that has now been placed upon us.

If our desire is to honor the memory and precious legacy of Hocaefendi, let us do what I know he would want us to do.

Let us recognize and affirm that, although the lamp of his earthly life is no longer, the light of God endures.

And let us, at the same time, quake in humble and hopeful anticipation now that the responsibility lies with each of us to be lamps in the rooms of our fellow human beings.

Let us accept the blessed taklīf (obligation) to be these lamps of service to God Almighty by tirelessly serving humanity in ways that all people, especially the poor and oppressed, may experience God’s healing, life-giving, and liberating light in the obscurity and gloom of the endless rials and tribulations of this dunyā (world).

May God be pleased with you all – Allah razī olsun.

In faith, hope, and love.