Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 February 2009 09:34 by İhsan Yılmaz, Sunday's Zaman Sunday, 08 February 2009 12:00
The Gülen movement has been studied well. There are several academic books and journal articles on the movement. About 10 international conferences have specifically focused on the movement, and more than 200 papers were presented at these conferences. Many more Western academics have referred to the movement in their works. Thus, it is wrong to argue that the movement is largely an unfamiliar entity to the West, and factual mistakes by an analysis on the movement cannot easily be ignored.
Several objective analyses of the movement have suggested that the movement challenges the stereotypical Oriental misperceptions on Islam-secularism, Islam-politics, Islam-democracy and Islam-this worldliness. Jane's analysis fails on all these counts and gives the impression that it follows an Orientalist and essentially flawed paradigm of Islam. I appreciate that the sophisticated discourse of Gülen and the movement associated with his name make life difficult for armchair Orientalist and neo-Orientalist analysts. But even an armchair analyst could find sufficient literature on the above-mentioned issues, the Turkish interpretation of Islam, Sufism, Ottoman secularism and Islamic discourses on democracy. It would then be easier to understand how Gülen offers an Islamic paradigm to the Muslim self to accommodate him/herself in secular and democratic settings as argued by several Western academics as well. Moreover, anyone familiar with Max Weber's work on the Protestant ethic would not find it puzzling to see an Islamic scholar asking his audience to not ignore this world but to endeavor for success as long as the intention is attaining God's pleasure.
The Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst calls the movement a "tariqah" (which is mostly assumed to be secretive and clandestine, especially in the Turkish context) several times, but any undergraduate student of Turkish Islam knows that the Gülen movement originated from the Gülen community but is completely different from a Sufi tariqah. The analyst falsely claims that Said Nursi - a prolific Islamic scholar - also established a tariqah, but quite the opposite is true. He repeatedly stated that "it is not time for a tariqah." In any academic work on Nursi, this fact is repeated and only his staunch enemies claim - without evidence - that he belonged to a tariqah. Furthermore, in contrast to the ultra-secularist rhetoric, tariqahs are not dark organizations. For instance, Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi was not only a member of a tariqah, he was also the founder of one: the Mevlevi tariqah, known widely as the whirling dervishes.
The report also falsely claims that Gülen started his inter-religious dialogue activities after he moved to the US and was transformed. As repeated by Father Thomas Michel several times, it was Nursi who in the 1950s visited the Greek patriarch in İstanbul and spoke with the pope. The history of Islam could also be read as a history of inter-religious dialogue (and also intelligent polemics). Gülen started his inter-religious activities well before he moved to the US and met with several non-Muslim religious leaders in Turkey and the pope in the early 1990s, at a time when he was "liked" by the elite members of the (deep) state, who saw him as a balancing force against the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, a former prime minister of Turkey and leader of the now-closed Welfare Party (RP). Some analysts even suggested that the Turkish deep state became a staunch enemy of Gülen because of his inter-religious activities and that he had to flee to avoid a deep state-engineered assassination, similar to what happened to Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. The evidence we have heard so far in the ultranationalist and militarist Ergenekon - a clandestine terrorist organization charged with scores of unsolved murders and other atrocities conducted for the purpose of ruling the country from behind the scenes - case strengthens this view.
I will continue tomorrow, but let me finish today by saying that Jane's analysis is completely unaware of the intrinsic qualities that helped the movement get bigger and more influential: a pro-democracy stance, an understanding stressing cosmopolitan and peaceful coexistence, a pro-EU position and a firmly apolitical stance. The analysis omits the fact that many millions who sympathize with the movement like it because of these qualities and that the movement also has many enemies because of these qualities.
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