Vernacular Muslim Education: The Gülen Movement In 2013 Time magazine named Fethullah Gülen among the one hundred most influential people in the world, yet hardly anyone in the United States or Europe knows his name. This is a shame, and the worry, since much of the rest of the world is very familiar with Gülen and his Turkish and international efforts. The head of the so-called Gülen Movement known only as Hizmet (the Service) or Cemaat (the Community/Assembly) in his native Turkey which operates schools and universities in more than 140 countries, Gülen has been characterized by Ehsan Masood (2008) as a modern Ottoman, with the emphasis on modern. Mahsood writes that he promotes an open brand of Islamic thought and is preoccupied with modern science (he publishes an English-language science magazine called The Fountain). Further, he and his movement are at home with technology, markets, and multinational business, and especially with modern communications and public relations which, like a modern televangelist, he uses to attract converts. But his crowning glory is his system of schools, which according to the website A Guide to the Gulen Movement s Activities in the US (turkishinvitations. weebly.com/list-of-us-schools.html) includes 139 charter schools in twenty-six American states. In Turkish Islam and the Secular State two accomplished scholars of Islam, Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito, present a series of essays on Fethullah Gülen and his movement. As they explain in the introduction, The Turkish state s conception of Islam is informed by its understanding of secularism as the only path to modernity, progress, and state power (2003: xiii). Based largely on the politics of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who ushered in the modern secular state of Turkey in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey of course derives much of its attitude about secularism from the West, particularly France. The Turkish term for secularism, laiklik, even echoes the French concept of laïcité, a particularly muscular kind of neutralization or exclusion of religion from public life. As Yavuz and
Esposito explicitly state, Turkish secularism is based on the radical Jacobin laicism that aimed to transform society through the power of the state and eliminate religion from the public sphere (xvi). However, their historical survey of Turkish politics and religion reveals that Islam was re-emerging by late century and that this return of religious activism and religiously framed movements is not a fearsome return of the repressed, but rather an attempt to vernacularize modernity (xxiii) which meant both to Turkicize and Islamicize modernity. Accordingly, Turkey and Gülen show that (a) not all religious expressions are conservative; (b) the domain of religion is not a permanent fixed site of particularism and exclusiveness; and (c) the deprivatization of religion is the dominant trend in some countries (xxvii). The essays in the edited volume investigate various angles of the Gülen movement and Turkish Islam inside Turkey (and, crucially, outside Turkey as well). Yavuz begins with a description of the Nur movement, of which Gülen s activities are generally considered to be a subset or manifestation. In the Nur movement and its Gülen offshoot, one can see the formation of a new Muslim consciousness alongside a powerful network community. The case of the Nur movement challenges the argument that Islam and modernity are inherently conflictual and antagonistic (2). A study of the life and thought of Said Nursi (1873-1960) reveals how the movement sought to mobilize rationality and modern organizational and technical resources in the service of Islam. Perhaps Nursi s most effective innovation (adopted and expanded by Gülen), was the establishment of dershanes or reading circles which aimed to raise religious consciousness through education and reason (13) and to create a new modern Islamic public. However, like all movements, it also eventually fragmented, leading to the distinctive Gülen movement. One essential thing to remember and it is stressed throughout the volume is that Gülen is first and foremost a Turko-Ottoman nationalist
whose nationalism is an inclusive one that is not based on blood or race, but rather on shared historical experiences and the agreement to live together within one polity (24). Gülen is thus engaged in a kind of nation-building or social contract-drafting of which Islam remains the basic criterion of national identity and loyalty (24). What Gülen offers, then, is Islamic modernity and modern Islam, a religion that serves the state and, more fundamentally, the nation since the Turkish nation is not entirely coterminous with the Turkish state. As with Nursi, Gülen developed a system of institutions including lighthouses or domiciles for urban children, summer camps, and ultimately schools. In these schools, Islamic citizenship is taught, involving not so much religious instruction as the inculcation of values of tolerance, patience, dignity, self-esteem, and self-sacrifice (34) all buttressed by Islamic teachings. Perhaps most interestingly and consequentially, Gülen s work has been most appealing to the Turks of Central Asia and is dominant in that religion, where...central Asian Turks view the Gülen movement as a national Turkish understanding of Islam (39). Bekim Agai s chapter in the volume elucidates the nature of Gülen-based education. According to Agai, Gülen s educational program pursues three goals (1) to raise Muslims consciousness; (2) to reexamine the connection between science and religion in order to refute the dominant discourses of materialism and positivism; and (3) to recover collective memory by revising the shared grammar of society (57). The picture emerges of a vernacularized Islam but also of an Islamized vernacular world. Ahmet Kuru s chapter turns toward Gülen s social and political ideas and implications, crediting him with offering a middle way between Islamic tradition and secular modernity; in a word, the Gülen movement sees the alleged incompatibility of Islam and the modern world as a false dichotomy and tries to take a moderate position (117). On issues from progress and traditionalism to free will and destiny, Gülen
tries to chart a course between the two poles or extremes. In another chapter, Yasin Aktay relates the movement to the Turkish diaspora, arguing that fear of anarchy and civil war and their threat to the existence of even the simplest Islamic body politic leads Gülen to favor stability over complete justice, just as the Sunni ulema did for centuries (153). Gülen comes to appear as a realist and an accommodationist, one who sometimes irritates traditionalist Muslims for his modernist pragmatism while alarming secularist Turks (including the government and military) for his Islamic rhetoric. Zeki Saritoprak applies a very different lens to Gülen, exploring the Sufism in the man and his movement. In fact, Saritoprak even quotes Gülen on the Sufi way, which he characterized as the path followed by an individual who, having been able to free himself or herself from human vices and weaknesses in order to acquire angelic qualities and [conducting himself in a manner] pleasing to God, lives in accordance with the requirements of God s knowledge and love and in the resulting spiritual delight that ensues (161). On the more worldly and political side, Hasan Kosebalan gives an overview of Gülen s ideas on issues central to Turkish foreign policy, such as European Union (EU) membership, the hegemonic position of the United States, the relationship with Iran and the Arab world, and the status of the Balkans and Central Asia (170). All of these issues are of critical importance for the West, as well as for Islam generally and the Gülen movement specifically, as seen in Berna Turam s chapter on Gülen ideas and institutions in Kazakhstan. As noted earlier, Gülen s efforts have been especially influential among Turks outside of Turkey, across that wide swath of central Asia little understood by the West but largely populated by Turkic peoples. In places like Kazakhstan, Gülen s modernist Islam is particularly welcome for a number of reasons, including the prestige of modernism, the unifying possibilities of global Turkism, and the civil society role that Gülen institutions like schools can play. Outside Turkey, the Gülen movement is seen valued at least as much for being Turkish as for being Islamic.
The final two chapters return to central issues of tradition, interpretation, and modernity. Ihsan Yilmaz considers the Gülen movement in terms of Islamic traditions of ijtihad or reasoning and tajdid or renewal. These practices have allowed Islam to adapt and to vernacularize for centuries. Today, throughout the Islamic world, people are engaging in new forms of reasoning and interpretation, resulting in what Yilmaz calls neo-ijtihads and micro-mujtahids, a mujtahid being a thinker or scholar or jurist who interprets scripture and precedent and generates reasoning or ijtihad. In this light, Gülen represents the modern tendency to fragment into multiple interpretations, all vying for authority and legitimacy. The ultimate problem is not which doctrines or policies to implement but rather why to adopt and implement any particular doctrine or policy, and the Gülen movement serves as a repository of discourse and practices for the evolution of a just and ethical society (225), one based partly but not wholly on Islamic principles. Of course, old ijtihads, new ijtihads, and non-ijtihads must all compete in the marketplace of interpretation and legitimation. For, as John Voll asserts in his concluding essay, Secularism is increasingly recognized as one of a number of competing visions of modern society rather than an axiomatic part of modernity (243). On that valid ground, Voll characterizes the man and his movement as neither fundamentalist nor secularist and contends that Gülen s positions provide a vision that transcends the modern in a context of glocalization and relicularization. The new world is one of both interfaith competition and interfaith dialogue (245). As such, Gülen the man and Gülen the movement represent a trend of modernity perhaps the trend of modernity which is less secularization or anti-secularization (the revival of religion ) than clever, original, and media- and institution-enabled vernacularization.
References Mahsood, Ehsan. 2008. A Modern Ottoman. Prospect (July). Http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ features/amodernottoman, accessed August 12, 2014. Yavuz, M. Hakan and John L. Esposito, eds. 2003. Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.