Abstract
This paper examines the educational writings and practices of Sayyid Qutb and Fethullah Gülen, finding within both of them a communitarian emphasis on subject formation that will lead to a certain form of Islamic Utopia. While these scholars are extremely different in terms of time periods, explicit politics, and educational achievements, they are similar in noteworthy ways. Both men studied education extensively and have described themselves as teachers. Both viewed Islam as a necessary answer to the problems of modernity, putting Islamic subject formation, politics, and eschatology in direct contrast to the secular states in which they lived. Both were punished by the state for their commitments, and both gained a worldwide following for their academic work. While Qutb’s writings on education have not created the extensive network of schools that Gülen’s have, the former’s extremely influential intellectual work—particularly his emphasis on the relation between the individual and the community—is strikingly similar to the communitarian focus of the Gülen schools. Indeed, both men’s intellectual projects challenge the established relationship between the state and Islam by proposing (1) an Islamic counter-public that takes on characteristics of a nation (if not specifically a state) and (2) insisting that the utopian vision often accorded to a secular state can only be achieved within and through Islam on a communal level. It is this insistence on community that differentiates the secular commitment to individual faith that does not intrude upon others from both scholars’ focus on Islamic utopia via communal accountability. The paper ends by situating both Qutb and Gülen in the contemporary secularism debates, which—I argue—are basically continuations of the liberalism/communitarianism debates of the 1980’s and 1990’s. While Gülen’s work is demonstrably more “moderate” in terms of its relationship to other religions and secular governments, its implicit critique of the secular state as well as its communitarian focus on the nature of Islam as the primary means of education makes it much more similar to Qutb’s work than others might acknowledge. However, this also means that Qutb—far from being the “terrorist intellectual” others might accuse him of being—can be understood as a communitarian religious intellectual along the lines of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.
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