Fethullah Gulen included in the peace curriculum

(Video Duration: 3 mins. 14 secs.)

The Peace Learning Center in Eagle Creek, Illinois has been teaching thousands of young people about how to be a peacemaker using the examples of leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.

Now the Peace Center has added Fethullah Gulen to the curriculum and Executive Director Tim Nation says Gulen's work to promote interfaith dialogue and community service makes him an excellent peacemaker.

"By reading Fethullah Gulen’s work and seeing that he is been able to help start over fifteen hundred schools around the world that is so inspirational because I know and I am committed to education my self. If you can educate a child and I really love the theory that we need to is raise and enlighten generation of young people. Young people who are tolerant of difference and that is the muslim of peace learning center and that is who we thought Fethullah Gulen will made an excellent peacemaker" said Tim Nation.

The Peace Learning Center has taught some 10,000 young people in 40 partner schools how to live in peace by teaching them conflict resolution skills.

Educators from the Learning Center teach children about world leaders who have used non-violence to change the world.

Nation says he first learned about Gulen through the Turkish Friendship Center in Indianapolis and on a trip to Turkiye with the group he realized Gulen would be a great example of a Muslim peacemaker.

"Too often our leaders and our societies spend too much time focusing on 10% differences, not the 90% similarities. I appreciate about Fethullah Gulen is, he is trying to be leader in say to the Muslim World it is time for us to show to rest of the world the nice part of Muslim faith and what Muslim faith all about. We want to bring the peacemaking in the lives of children. We had when you talk to Americans you ask who is a Muslim peacemaker, it was hard for people to say right away who they see has a Muslim peacemaker."

Nation said he is glad that Gulen is already included in the center's peace workbook.

"I would like to thank Fethullah Gulen for inspiring on educating people to reach out to people of other faiths and other backgrounds because if we don’t go outside of our community and we don’t go outside of our religion that’s were the problems come. It is so much easier to have an enemy that you don’t know than enemy who you do know."