When I saw children from 120 different countries calmly but sincerely sing the song that includes these lyrics with a stunning purity and sincerity that recalls a fantasy world, I had no doubt left that a new world was truly being established. Yes, a new world is quietly but ambitiously being established. The young generation that self-sacrificing educators, who left Anatolia and traveled to various countries around the world, worked day and night to teach are establishing a brand new world.This song, which was adapted from a poem written by Fethullah Gülen, who from his modest room far away from his home country gives light to everyone in the world whose heart beats for love, peace and brotherhood, like a lighthouse that shows the way with his ideas, discourse and actions, says a lot to us when we hear it from children who have different languages, religions and ethnicities. It gives hope to our world where conflicts and fights hang over us like an incubus.
In the poem that was turned into the closing song of the 8th International Turkish Language Olympiads, Gülen, who has sacrificed his own life to make love and brotherhood prevail in the world, says: “I saw the bright future in my dream one night / Lights were quietly showering down everywhere.” We see that those lights that adorned Gülen’s dreams are now raining down everywhere. Those lights, a reflection of which we were able to see in the magnificent festivals that were organized as part of the International Turkish Language Olympiads in different cities such as İstanbul, Ankara and Konya, are now showering down in the tundra of Siberia where the temperature is 50 degrees below zero and in hot regions where the temperature is above 50 degrees.
The excitement generated by the 8th International Turkish Language Olympiads this year led to the huge venues being oversubscribed. We were fortunate that the beams of light were not only on raining down on the cities that hosted these festivals but also radiating from our living rooms through TV screens. The shimmer of the light was reflected in the eyes of housewives who attentively watched the festival on television with tears in their eyes, the eyes of state leaders sitting in the protocol row in the hall, the eyes of an African boy with pearl white teeth, the eyes of an almond-eyed Asian, and the eyes of the pure and innocent girl who came from Kirkuk.
We rejoiced when children who came from Kazakhstan, Moldova and Georgia performed folk dances and then felt sad when the young Tajikistani boy named İsmoil, who has an amazing voice, sang his song. We forgot who is Turkish, who is Bangladeshi, who is black, who is white, who is Muslim, who is Christian, who is Asian and who is American when Farzana from Bangladesh sang in Turkish and the Turkish girl named Sevdenur sang in Bangla a traditional Turkish song. As the rays of light “as bright as the skies” rained down on us from everywhere, we realized how instead of remembering differences and divisions, forgetting them so as never to remember them again was a great blessing that gave us a sense of peace.
This new generation that is being brought up under the guidance of teachers who lose their sense of self in the reality that the person across from them is a human being, without paying any regard to the differences between a Muslim and a Christian, a Christian and a Jew or a Hindu and a Buddhist, and who are so colorblind that they don’t see the color difference between the white race and the black race, are establishing the new world mentioned in the song.
After watching the wonderful festival on television on Saturday I concluded that the period of speaking in the future tense is long gone. The phrase “a new world will be established” which contains a pledge for the future is actually no longer valid. That is because I saw and I believe that a world filled with love as seen in luminous dreams is being built right now. Even if our eyes, which are used to seeing evil, fights, conflicts, blood and tears, cannot perceive this right now, soon we will all realize that “Everywhere is sparkling like the skies.”
With gratitude and gratefulness I bow before those who have established this new world, who work day and night for world peace and serenity without complaining about the heat or cold, who make all kinds of sacrifices without hesitation and who have shown the generosity of shedding light on us from this established world from now on.
