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For thousands of years humanity has been reading the same sacred texts; yet it still faces a fundamental problem concerning how these texts ought to be read.

The narratives in the Torah, the Gospels, and the Qur’an have largely been treated as though they belonged to a history book. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the other names have been taken as individuals who lived once in the past, and the events recounted around them as incidents that took place in a particular place at a particular time.

Over time this reading became so entrenched that the narrative itself and its interpretation became inseparable.

And so humanity found itself confronted with a strange picture.

On one side stand modern biology, genetics, paleontology, archaeology, history, and cosmology. On the other stands the word-for-word historical reading of narratives such as a first human depicted on a colossal scale, all of humanity descending from a single pair, Adam and Eve, the marriage of their children to one another, a flood covering the entire earth, people who lived for centuries, sacred lineages, chosen peoples, and communities regarded as divinely privileged.

Then, inevitably, two reactions emerge.

The first group tries to preserve the traditional historical narrative regardless of what the scientific evidence says.

The second group, unable to reconcile these narratives with scientific reality, begins to regard the sacred texts in their entirety as a collection of superstitions.

Perhaps the shared error of both sides is the same:

Reading the sacred text as the wrong kind of text.

I say six cross-sections. For the task of writing the history of science across all its ages is one that only all the research centers of the world together could accomplish. But these six sections, once well understood, cast light on all the sciences and all the ages of science. In our own age, which suffers a famine of meaning, a kind of enlightenment can then take place in the full sense of the word. I say in the full sensedeliberately. For the twentieth century has very nearly reached perfection in terms of discovery, data, and the sciences. There is not much left to add. Yet if these six links in the chain — missing or misread, and it is they that have cost this age its meaning and its beauty — were known, that is, read correctly, enlightenment would be realized in the full sense. Immanuel Kant himself said of the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, that this was only the beginning of enlightenment.

Ancient sages and the philosophers likened the universe, life, and existence—with everything in it, including the names and attributes of God—to a two-winged bird that contains all things within itself, that flies toward infinite perfections and unique beauties, and that possesses a perfect soul (i.e. software, as defined by modern science) and a marvelous intellect. They also gave it a name and called it the Simurgh (Anka Bird). Anka means long-necked, therefore seeing everything and drawing everything to itself. This bird has one soul, yet countless individual manifestations. Now, the part of this bird called the Islamic World has one wing broken and the other wing cancerous. Per means wing in Persian and Kurdish. The word şanmeans illness and cancerous. Together, by way of a genitive construction, the two words become perişan (i.e miserable in modern Turkish).

There are more than a hundred causes and real reasons for this wretchedness. For example, in ten thousand matters they cannot reconcile religion and science, which are their two indispensable wings. Therefore, the wing of science remains broken, and the wing of religion remains cancerous. And for example, in the hands of the religious people—especially Muslims—there are ten thousand miraculous items of knowledge and subjects which, if they were correctly reconciled with the sciences, would become manifest. Also, alongside this functional and miraculous structure, there are ten thousand concepts, each of which is a miracle if fully understood, but which have died through being misunderstood.

Yes, it can definitely be said that if these two important duties were fulfilled and properly lived out, one-winged ideas such as materialism, hedonism, selfishness, racism, and the like would be completely cleansed from the world, and both the Mahdi and the Messiah would, in effect, have come to the world.

I published forty-five books on these twenty subjects. But even that was not enough. This evening, I will touch only briefly on five subjects, one short issue and one concept each, so that existence and life may appear meaningful, blessed, and beautiful to our people as well. So that poisonous and meaningless wars and worthlessness on earth may come to an end. So that worldly life may also become a festival for us.

Both the universe and the biosphere, the realm of living beings, and the world of humanity, which is capable of understanding abstract concepts, have a dual foundation that Hegel (1770-1831) called transcendental dialectic. Materials such as positive-negative, hot-cold, abstract-concrete, good-evil, feminine-masculine, poor-rich, beautiful-ugly, mind-heart, faith-science fill this dual foundation. This dual structure is also an indispensable reality of the structure of religions themselves. For example:

The Quran states that Islam is the same as the religion of Prophet Abraham, which dates back 4,000 years (22:78). The name of this religion is Islam. Islam reconciles all contradictory opposites by balancing them, turning summer and winter into spring. The fact that Christianity emphasizes spirituality and Judaism emphasizes the state and sharia is a deviation stemming from historical necessity. Otherwise, they were also Islam. (3:84) Yes, Judaism was the unity of Moses and Aaron (sharia and authority). Christianity was the union of the Torah and the Gospel (reason and heart, science and spirituality). (Matthew 5) In the Gospel, Jesus also speaks of the sciences as the light that is with you alongside the Holy Spirit. (John 12:36)

Returning to the beginning, humanity maintained a balance between myth and logos for eight thousand years. However, in the 700s BCE, due to prosperity and freedom, logos and philosophy came to the fore. Hundreds of philosophical movements sprang up like mushrooms. These philosophies put forward so many different views that the sophist movement, which claimed that there is no truth or meaning in existence and life, and even if there is, we cannot know it, took over. Later, Socrates with his ethical principles, Plato with his principles of ideas and spirituality, and Aristotle with his power of logic and science broke the Sophist movement. However, it seems that these three branches of thought regained strength in 325 AD, and when Christianity came to power, it banned all philosophies. Everything turned into rote learning and imitation.

Unfortunately, with the loss of this sacred dialectic in the human world, the Byzantine Empire gradually weakened. The European states that emerged after the Roman Empire also failed to perform well. Fortunately, Muslims had translated the philosophical and scientific heritage of Greece, based on Logos and Mythos, into Arabic in the 9th century. This heritage was transmitted to the West through Andalusia and Sicily in the 11th and 12th centuries. Then, with the Conquest of Istanbul, the scientific classics of Greece, which had been stored in warehouses, were also taken to the West; Europe experienced the Renaissance in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, which marked the dawn of the light of science.

I say brothers and sisters because I share the same universe, the same planet, the same biology and genes, the same human values. I have only one difference. I perceive existence as infinite and in unity with its abstract and concrete. I believe in some abstract values. I believe: If my brothers and sisters perceived existence as fully and balanced as I do, they too would share my universal abstract values, and we would not only be brothers and sisters, but God-Humans. More than just brothers and sisters, we will be united as eight billion without any difference of race, religion or profession. We will build not just one world, but infinite worlds on the principles of humanism. Let me state immediately that rampant atheism and the dark materialism on which it is based is an attack on this perception and these values, a slander against humanity.

Look how beautifully Ahmed-i Ciziri, who had the same perception of existence and knew the same abstract values as me 600 years ago, when evolution and science had not yet emerged, expressed this God-Human truth in Kurdish. I swear: I have written five books on this subject, but I have not been able to express this universal truth with such clarity. Let the ears of those who insult the Kurdish language ring.