2013 quan điểm về phong trào gulen của gary wood và tugrul keskin xã hội học về hồi giáo

Sociology of Islam 1 (2013) 127–130

brill.com/soi

Perspectives on the Gülen Movement
Gary Wood and Tugrul Keskin
Editors

The world is changing—for better or worse depends on one’s social, political
and economic perspective. This change is variously amplified within
Islamic and Muslim societies, which are seemingly in constant flux in
the neoliberal era. The economic dynamics of this era shape and remake
our daily lives as they are expressed within the shifting theo-politics
that partially defines and certainly affects these regions. As daily life is
altered social movements respond by pivoting or anchoring themselves
in relation to over-arching changes emblematic of the neo-liberal state.
No movement is static and each must balance its relation to local communities as well as to the broader global currents of change. In this way,
seemingly localized movements are required to orient part of their vision
to more contemporary forms of expression of the state and its actors.
Among Islamic-framed movements, we can see this glaringly in the cases of
the Muslim Brotherhood, Jama’at, Hamas, and other such organizations.
In light of these challenges and our responses to them, the Turkish Gülen
or Hizmet (“service”) movement is no exception. Indeed, this movement
presents an empirical example of an extensive contemporary social movement mobilizing across social spheres within a decidedly Islamic and
global social context. This issue of Sociology of Islam turns its gaze toward
this movement in a number of global settings and socio-political contexts.
In recent years, particularly given Turkey’s resurgence as a powerful
economic player in the global economy, the Gülen movement has become
a salient player in the social, political and economic landscape of the
Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the United States. In the
1960s, Fethullah Gülen had a small group of followers in Kestanepazari,

in Izmir Turkey. By the 1970s, following population trends motivated by
economic liberalism, many in the movement community moved to Turkey’s
largest cities, organized study groups and established once-a-week meetings to collectively read the Risale-i Nur; risales written by Said Nursi
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2014

DOI 10.1163/22131418-00104001


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throughout the first half of the twentieth century and a foundational text
within the movement. This pattern of reading and interpreting this tafsir,
and the bonding of followers achieved through a more modern (and not
uncontroversial) exigesis of classical Islamic texts, strongly connected to
vibrations of a newfound twentieth century view of world connectedness.
Nursi wrote these risales through two major world wars and significant
militarized conflict in Asia. The Gülen movement, relying on these texts,
was then forming in the shadow of globally dividing wars in Asia, particularly the Southeast; wars that had their own roots in global divisions over
economic social policy pitting the Soviet socialist model against the liberal
market model of the u.s. and much of Europe. This collective social action
and tight bonding of the Gülen followers throughout the 1970s prepared the
movement to take advantage of the Turkish military coup of September
12th, 1980. Within Turkish politics, this event opened a new avenue for
Islamic groups and movements already at work in Turkey. The neoliberal
conditions of the military regime opened opportunities for those groups
whose view of the theo-secular balance across all spheres of social life
aligned with on-the-ground neo-liberal political conditions of the day.
The Gülen movement was ideally suited to take advantage of this opening

aided by economic transformations of the Turkish economy, which were
guided by a powerful subscriber of neo-liberal ideas, Turgut Ozal. First as
Prime Minister then as President, Ozal created economic and social opportunities for the movement through his policies of privatization and change
in the relations between the state and the economy, which necessarily,
in Turkey, intersected with expressions of Islam. These opportunities
grew exponentially under the conditions of economic liberalization of the
global economy of the 1980s and 1990s. Coincident to these developments,
and certainly exacerbated by the ongoing reconfiguration of the global
economy, the collapse of the Soviet Union generated unexpected economic
and political consequences for the Turkish-speaking world. The Gülen
movement and its followers were able to economically leverage the Central
Asian economic gap left by the collapse of the political center of the socialist economic model. Many followers of Gülen invested heavily in Central
Asian economies, particularly Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. In this era, they also extended their growing
network of schools from Turkey to the Central Asian republics. These
Gülen-inspired “Turkish schools” were openly welcomed by the bureaucratic elite of Central Asian states and were actively supported by Turkish
presidents Turgut Ozal and Suleyman Demirel.
The economic and social benefits obtained in Central Asia and Turkey
led the Gülen movement to seek more political power within the Turkish




Editorial / Sociology of Islam 1 (2013) 127–130 

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political system. This move, however, was pitted against a rising tide of
military opposition to Turkey’s first elected Islamist government. The
February 28, 1997, “post-modern coup” was conducted without resort to

militarized confrontation and led to the resignation of the pro-Islamist
president Necmettin Erbakan. This realignment forced the Gülen movement to seek further opportunities outside of Turkey. Amidst this backlash
against Islamic-based rule in Turkey, the charismatic leader Fethullah
Gülen self-exiled to a small town in Pennsylvania in the u.s. Meanwhile,
students of the pro-Islamists Erbakan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah
Gul sought to establish a new pro-Islamic political party in Turkey that
would in a few short years, in 2002, come to power with a majority vote in
national elections. Gülen and his followers once-again saw this opportunity
that linked their neo-liberal economic tendencies to their contemporary
interpretation of Islam and the movement threw its weight behind the new
pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (jdp/akp). This was more a
move of convenience than a tight alignment of the ultimate goals of the
party or of Gülen. Scholars seem to have mis-understood this collaboration
as an example of Islamists uniting against the secular Turkish state.
Few scholars paid attention to the specific differences and origins of these
two political movements and this oversight contributed to conflicts that
have ignited in recent years.
The Gülen movement today is a 25 billion dollar (us) business, including
a global network of charter schools in the us and of private schools that
stretch from the African continent to Vietnam. The movement’s network
also controls a media empire including newspapers, book publishing, and
tv stations throughout the u.s., Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In short,
the Gülen movement has become a truly corporatized transnational
network. Despite the proliferation of the movement and its undeniable
economic success, the religious origins and common roots seem to have, in
terms of political influence, weakened the movement and transformed into
something more like a policy-oriented economic network that challenges
the economic and political power of the state, and most recently, of
Erdogan’s jdp/akp vision for Turkey. The movement’s followers have played
major roles in significant, if localized, political conflicts in Turkey, including being implicated in a major role in the Ergenekon trials surrounding

what is conspiratorially called “the deep state” in Turkey. The future of the
Gülen movement will depend on internal and external factors in Turkey as
well as the global conditions of the neo-liberal world order.
Despite the significant role that the movement has played in contemporary Turkish-centered politics (and all that implies with Turkey’s role
as a u.s. partner at the gateway to the East) to date there have been few


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sufficient contextual analyses written on the Gülen movement. Many
scholars and activists have either glorified or demonized Fethullah Gülen
and the movement’s followers, and thus have failed to adequately address
its sociological impact. In this issue of Sociology of Islam we have attempted
to facilitate an examination of the movement from a variety of perspectives
and in a number of global contexts, including outside Turkey. We are thankful to associate editor Joshua D. Hendrick for his service in coordinating
this issue. His knowledge of the Gülen movement is on display throughout.
Surely we will not be able, in these pages, to share every story that could be
told about this powerful movement, but within the limitations of this
space our hope is to further a sociological analysis of the movement without the ideological biases so common in much of the public reading on the
subject.