Faith-Based Conservative Activism in Turkey: Fethullah Gulen as a Social Movement
Panel 064, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 18 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
This session addresses Turkey's on-going intra-elite power struggle by analyzing the collective mobilization and impact of Turkey's "Hizmet" (service) Movement of Fethullah Gulen. Now Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community, the significance of the Gulen Movement (GM) extends well beyond Turkey's borders. Its activities in education, media, and business span over 100 countries. Loyalists to the movement's leader, the retired Islamic preacher and writer M. Fethullah Gulen, control one of Turkey's largest media conglomerates, a number of the country's most globally linked companies, and approximately 1000 math and science focused schools throughout the world. Since 1998, Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg. Pennsylvania (USA). Since that time, GM loyalists have expanded their operations in the US where they are now very active in intercultural/interfaith outreach, commerce/trade, political lobbying, and charter school education. The GM's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey is highly significant for Turkey's emergence as a regional power in the 21st century. Considering its emergence as a source of social power in Turkey, the GM is not without its critics. Since the early 1980s, many news columnists and some politicians in Turkey have regularly declared that Gulen's aims are to slowly and patiently initiate an Islamic overall in the Turkish Republic. Fears about "Fethullahcilar" ("Fethullah-ists") infiltrating Turkey's civilian and military bureaucracies are common. In response, GM actors in Turkey, and increasingly more often throughout the world, have strategically presented themselves as "selfless," "service oriented" democrats, and headstrong advocates for interfaith and intercultural dialogue. To this end, GM loyalists have actively sought to publicize Gilen's teachings and the activities of those inspired by them to eager foreign audiences. Their primary strategy has been to lobby people of influence in politics, academia, and media, and to sponsor a number of pseudo-academic conferences that have all led to book publications. These publications have, in turn, saturated the academic marketplace on the topic of the GM's growth and impact. In an attempt to fill a glaring void in the literature on the GM's collective mobilization as a faith-based social movement, this session aspires to present well-researched scholarship whose author's intent is neither to promote/praise the activities of actors inspired by Gulen, nor to demonize them. Rather, the intent of those participating in this session is to begin a long overdue conversation about the GM's impact from a perspective that foregrounds academic skepticism, critical sociology, and social movements studies.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Political Science
Sociology
Participants
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Dr. Howard Eissenstat
-- Discussant
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Dr. Joshua Hendrick
-- Organizer, Chair
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Dr. David Tittensor
-- Presenter
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Dr. Alexander Arifianto
-- Presenter
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Dr. Husnul Amin
-- Presenter
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Dr. Fulya Apaydin
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Alexander Arifianto
Much of the current scholarships on globalization and Islam in Muslim-majority countries focus on the political discourses of conservative/fundamentalist Islamic groups such as Al Qaeda and Hamas. Fewer scholarships have examined the role of globalization of ideas in influencing the political discourse of progressive/liberal leaning Islamic groups such as the Gulen Movement (GM) from Turkey and the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) from Indonesia. Virtually none of the scholarships on these two movements have examined them from a comparative historical perspective. Utilizing constructivist international relations theory, this study attempts to make a theoretically informed cross-regional comparison between these two groups. It analyzes similar and different strategies utilize by these groups to promote and institutionalize progressive Islamic ideas - defined in this study as theological support toward democracy, state-religion separation, and religious tolerance/pluralism -- within their respective societies.
By conducting comparative historical, cross-regional study of these two Islamic movements, I hope that my project can serve as a theory development exercise of the role of moral authority leadership and its role in disseminating new theological ideas beyond the artificial regional boundaries that has historically made scholarship on political Islam and Islamic social movements in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to exist largely separately, with little dialogue and collaboration with one another. I hope this study will bring together existing knowledge about Islamic social movements from these two regions in order to develop a new theory on the role of theological change within Islamic social movements that is generalizable across the Islamic world. The data of this research consist of historical documents, secondary studies, and in-depth interviews with officials and activists from these movements.
My study argues that that the success of these Islamic organizations to promote progressive Islamic ideas within their respective societies can be explained by the role of charismatic moral authority leaders within these movements: Fethullah Gulen from the GM and the late Abdurrahman Wahid from the NU who personified and institutionalized these ideas within their respective communities. In addition to moral authority leadership, reform’s success within these Islamic groups also depend on the internal culture of the organizations that either tolerates or discourages new and unorthodox theological ideas, and the historical relationship between these organizations and the state.
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Dr. David Tittensor
The Gülen Movement is a Turkish Muslim Educational Activist network with more than 1000 educational facilities across five continents. The schools, while staffed by pious movement members, purport to provide only secular education with an emphasis on math and the sciences. Despite the movement’s global success, its careful guarding of its internal operations has rendered it somewhat opaque and enigmatic. In tandem with the unusual mix of personal piety and the secular sciences, allegations have been made that the teachers are hiding behind a secular façade, and are teaching Islam in secret classes. As a result of these allegations there have been a number of inquiries, such as those in Russia and the Netherlands. However, these have yielded no evidence to support such claims and till date little is known about how the teacher-student dynamics unfold in the Gülen schools. In this paper, I present seminal empirical data to argue that the movement is a missionary organization – though not in the traditional sense. Drawing on interviews with teachers (19) and graduates from movement schools (20) from Turkey, Central Asia, Russia, Indonesia and Africa, I show that the movement is not interested in converting non-Muslims, and should be regarded as a revivalist movement, similar to Tablighi Jamaat. There is a complex web of relations between the students and the teachers, wherein the teachers are not the main agents of transmitting the message of Islam. Rather, this is undertaken by a select group of religiously inclined Muslim students that are identified and groomed in their formative years into belletmenler (study aides) that assist junior students in the dormitories and share houses, and act as proxies for the teachers; a process that allows the teachers to remain largely removed from the recruitment process, and maintain the outwardly secular appearance of their institutions. In other words, the schools are ostensibly secular in that they do not actively teach religion, but rather function as a staging ground for recruitment into the movement.
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Dr. Fulya Apaydin
According to some critics, a civil society initiative founded by an Islamic preacher in Turkey named Gulen movement allied with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 to advance its interests at home and abroad. While this alliance created new economic and political opportunities for Turkish involvement in sub-Saharan Africa, the strength of the partnership to create new political opportunities was surprisingly restricted in Central Asia. What explains this divergent performance? This paper shows that an interaction between at least two factors explains this variation: 1) electoral interests of the ruling political party (AKP), and 2) political regime type of target countries.
More specifically, the paper argues that while an electoral coalition between a party and a social movement is necessary to reformulate foreign policy priorities, it is not a sufficient condition to explain the divergent performance of this alliance in providing development aid overseas. In fact, the varying political regimes of host countries that interact with AKP and Gulen followers lead to contrasting degrees of Turkish involvement. While personalistic authoritarian regimes with weak institutions welcomed Turkish actors through bilateral agreements in sub-Saharan Africa, their counterparts in Central Asia, often governed by clan-based authoritarian systems that rely on robust coercive institutions, adamantly resisted greater Turkish political involvement pushed through overseas development assistance programs.
To develop these points further, the paper is divided into three parts. First, I discuss the strengths and limitations of existing approaches, and show that none of these perspectives is able to explain the variation in Turkish foreign policy across distinct geographic contexts. In order to account for this puzzle, I provide an alternative framework that highlights the role of domestic political dynamics in foreign relations. The following debate lays out the dynamics of an electoral alliance between the AKP and Gulen followers, and highlights the conditions under which AKP politicians resorted to different tactics overseas. The next section builds on this discussion with comparative evidence from Sudan and Kazakhstan, and shows that the political regime of the host country is a critical factor in the ability of the Turkish government to create new spheres of influence. The conclusion puts the findings in perspective, and highlights the implications of Turkey’s new foreign policy agenda in transformation.
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Dr. Husnul Amin
The Pak-Turk school and college network, a project of Hizmet movement, has witnessed tremendous growth in the recent past in Pakistan. Gender segregated Pak-Turk schools have been established in various cities such as Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Peshawar. A dawah center, the Rumi forum, is engaged in preaching activism through various activities such as suhbat-e-janan, public lectures as well as organizing study tours of Pakistani intellectuals and columnists to Turkey. The partially funded study tourists then build a positive and an impressive image of the Gullen movement in Pakistan. The activists of the movement attempt to pretend a more liberal and tolerant face of movement culture as well as Islam. In a number of interactions at various social settings, the current researcher had critical reflections on the ambivalent nature of their commitment to gender equality and freedom of expression. This research aims to explore if and how the activists of the movement promote gender equality as well as freedom of expression? In dealing with such issues, how and in what respect (and why), the Gullen movement in Pakistan is different from its Turkish counterpart? In other words, how difference in social and political context (Turkey and Pakistan in this case) determine movement’s approach to gender equality and freedom of expression?
