Fethullah Gulen Movement as a Transnational Phenomenon (1)

Bill Park*

This paper investigates the apparent paradox thrown up by the distinctively Turkish roots and contents of Fethullah Gülen’s philosophy on the one hand, and the Gulen movement’s educational activities beyond Turkey and its promotion of interfaith dialogue on the other. It considers how far the movement has been able to transcend its "Turkishness".

…When considering the Gülen movement’s transnational activities, or indeed those of any comparable phenomena, we must also guard against the risk of slipping into an unexamined assumption that transnational activities are necessarily welcome, especially in ‘receiving’ countries, or that they invariably produce positive outcomes - at least not in an unambiguous and unmitigated way. Transnational phenomena might be simultaneously transcending in their impact, and perceived as competitive and threatening by receiving states and societies.

A state can and might choose to mediate between its citizens and external influences, and existing social values and structures might generate defensive reactions to unwelcome externally-derived intrusions and challenges. ‘Receiving’ societies should not be assumed to resemble ‘blank pages’ on which anything can be written, or pliable material out of which we can construct anything we wish. The more transnational phenomena are seen as intrusive, as imports from one state, society or value-system into another, the more they might generate nationalist or otherwise culturally-protective forms of resistance. Transnational interactions can as easily highlight differences, and attachments to such differences, as they can create new, transformative and shared social formations. They might generate negative reactions, in other words. They might also be broadly neutral in impact. In our exploration of the Gülen movement’s impact, we must open our minds to the possibility of reactions, outcomes and consequences such as these.

…The Fethullah Gülen movement, named after its Turkish founder and inspiration, is actively engaged in disseminating to a world beyond Turkey’s state boundaries, as well as within them, an approach to Islam and to its relationship to politics and other faiths quite at odds with that propagated by Islamic fundamentalism. Although the Gülen movement is far from being the only source of moderate Islamic ideas actively engaged in the competition for influence in today’s globalised Islamic space, it is one of the largest and most active. It is a major participant in a global contestation over what Islam is and what role it should play, and its message could hardly be more at odds with that brand of Islam typically dubbed ‘fundamentalist’. Specifically, it qualifies to be considered as a transnational phenomenon, and as contributing to and manifesting the spirit of globalization, via both its geographically dispersed educational activities and its commitment to dialogue with other faiths. Each of these areas of activity will be discussed below.

The Gülen Movement’s ‘Turkishness’

…The Gülen movement offers an example of a transnational phenomenon that nevertheless retains and indeed lauds its national flavour. Although the purpose here is to explore the transnationalism of the movement rather than the ideas of its founder, so powerful is Fethullah Gülen’s inspiration that mention must be made of him. He began his career in Turkish fashion as a state-appointed religious preacher in 1953, and began to acquire a serious following, sometimes referred to as the Fethullahci, in the wake of his appointment to Izmir in 1966, where a loose network of students, teachers, professionals, businessmen and the like took on his name. The movement’s first venture into the wider propagation of its philosophy came in the form of summer schools in and around Izmir. It soon established teaching centres (dershane), largely to prepare religious students for university admission. As its activities blossomed, so it attracted the attention of Turkey’s secularist state establishment. Gülen himself served a 7-month spell in prison in the early 1970s for propagating religion, and again attracted uncomfortable attention both during the1980s and in the late 1990s, in the wake of the ‘soft coup’ of 1997. Gülen and his followers are regarded with suspicion by Turkey’s secular establishment to this day, and this partly explains his preference for domicile in the US.

…Although the thinking of Fethullah Gülen has continued to evolve, with an intensified emphasis on the philosophy’s more universalistic, pluralistic, liberal, and democratic qualities in recent years (Yavuz, 2005 p45), it remains rooted in Turkish-Ottoman experience. His belief is that, as Turkish society is overwhelmingly Muslim in faith, the state and its citizens should not have become as alienated from each other as he insists has been the case in Republican Turkey. The ‘top-down’ imposition of the sometimes anti-religious secular dogma associated with Turkey’s Kemalist state has served to distance its citizens from the governing elite. As the Turkish novelist Rasim Ozdenoren expressed it, modern Turkey is ‘like a transgendered body with the soul of one gender in the body of another’. Gülen draws inspiration from the
Ottoman rather than the Republican model of state-society relationships. Although the empire’s rulers were guided by their faith, and indeed held custody of the Caliphate, the leadership of the Muslim world, the Ottoman system of governance was not theocratic. Public laws were formulated on the basis of the state’s needs rather than in accordance with Islamic law (Shari’a). Indeed, Gülen’s thinking is quite distinctly state-centric, and this too gives a quite Turkish flavour to Gülen’s ideas. This statism might be thought to overlap with Atatürk’s, but again Gülen prefers to look back beyond the Republic to the Ottoman era. The state has a functionally secular role to provide internal and external security and stability for its citizens. It would be preferable if a state’s rulers are people of faith, but they should not use their secular authority to implement religious dogma. Gülen is not in favour of the political implementation of Shari’ a, which in any case is mostly concerned with private and personal faith-inspired behavioral expectations.

...According to Gülen, Turkish Islam’s more flexible, adaptable, spiritual and less doctrinal traditions have enabled Republican Turkey and Turkish society more broadly, with its democratization, free market economy, and secular political system, to incorporate aspects of modernity to an extent barely found elsewhere in the Muslim world. All this very much accords with Gülen’s vision of an Islamic, but modern and progressive, Turkey of the future. The movement has itself profited from Turkey’s post-1980 economic, social and political liberalization, of course, which has created a space for its media, educational and financial activities free from the control of the statist secular establishment. In this sense, we might argue that the movement is in large measure a by-product of the impact of globalization on the wider evolution of Turkish politics and economic management.

Thus, Gülen sees no contradiction between Islam and modernity. Indeed, he insists on the desirability of Islam’s embrace of science, reason, democratization, and tolerance. Although Gülen shares Atatürk’s assessment that the relative economic and moral poverty of the Islamic world is explained by its spiritual and intellectual decline, for Gülen the problem is not Islam per se. His assessment of the Turkish and Ottoman experience of Islam is that religion should not become a dogma, but can be adaptive, open, flexible, rational, and tolerant, and not closed and shielded from other faiths, other ideas, and from scientific and technological progress…

* Senior Lecturer in the Defense Studies Department, King's College, London University

Excerpted from the author’s paper "The Fethullah Gülen Movement as a Transnational Phenomenon” presented at the international conference “Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Gülen Movement” University of London, House of Lords and London School of Economics on 25-27 October, 2007