Last Updated on Thursday, 22 June 2006 16:04 by Eyüp Can Wednesday, 11 June 2003 05:00
Sociologist Elisabeth Ozdalga seeks the answer to a paradoxical question in her article entitled, 'Secularizing Trends in the Fethullah Gulen Movement'. Can a movement carrying religious values has a worldling function?
Seeking a detailed answer to this question in the spring edition of "Critique: Critical Middle-Eastern Studies", Ozdalga offers a short-cut answer in her interview with Nuriye Akman on Sunday: "According to the general opinion in official circles, the Gulen Movement represents religious reactionarism. I say no; this movement has accepted laicism in principle and it even contributes to secularization by expanding school activities... (Even) In order to get along with the present system, while religious values are kept in the background, mostly humanistic values are brough out to the forefront. For example, educating students to be good human beings is more important in the schools than bringing them up as good Muslims. Is the Islamic foundation not weakened in this case? Is a contradiction not produced in this regard? In my opinion, these are questions that need to be considered carefully.
Let me say up-front what I will end up saying ultimately. I (conditionally) agree with Ozdalga's view that a movement embracing religious values is functioning as a worldling (agent), under the conditions that it is a function "that works in both directions" and (she) separate secularization from the ideological interpretation of secularism. Ozdalga also emphasizes this separation very carefully in her article, "Secularizing Trends in Fethullah Gulen's Movement". However, I don't think that such a situation produces an unsurmountable contradiction or causes a definite weakening of the fundamentals.
Everywhere there is mutual interaction, inevitable corrosion and some contradictory situations occur. However, these corrosions and contradictions do not necessarily weaken one's foundation, in some cases, they may even reinforce them. The determining factor here is how the elements of interacting religious and worldly aspects, define and position themselves versus each other.
In order to better understand the Islamic movements in Turkey, Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" study has been very influential. Weber's approach has dealt a big blow to an era's 'modern' approach, which has viewed social facts and social phenomena from the perspective of "progressivism-reactionarism" although, (Weber) himself could not save the concept of 'modernization' from a similar equation of reactionarism-progressivism!
Therefore, one has to observe that the Weberian analysis is useful in understanding Islamic movements in Turkey in terms of presenting both an opportunity to make comparisons and overcoming the classical dogmatic approaches; but , it can be a fetter, in itself, beyond a certain point. "What that certain point may be", to which I will attempt to find clues in this article, requires expansive debates.
In her previously published article entitled 'the Islamic Reflection of Worldly Piety', Ozdalga had tried to explain the Gulen Movement's conception of the world and ethical understanding with the concept of 'worldly piety', which Weber regards as the dynamic of the Protestant ethic that triggered the Capitalism. In summary, she had concluded that the Gulen Movement, rather than cherishing political ambitions, has developed/promoted an ethical understanding that social interactions are to be based on wisdom. This situation; which, in the final analysis of Protestanism-capitalism relations, was viewed as an alienation from the other world (life after death) and even from religion itself, has produced a different result generally in Islam, and in particular, in the Gulen Movement. Because Islam's concept of religion and world differs from Christianity including Protestanism and Judaism in this regard.
Islam, which regards 'the world as the field of the lifeafter', and says (to mankind) 'we have sent the book to you to rescue your world and the lifeafter' and advises (mankind) to 'work for this world as if you will never die and work for the lifeafter as if you will die tomorrow', has not theologically had as much of a problem with becoming worldly, as Christianity or Judaism has had. The Sunni (Orthodox) tradition, which constitutes Islam's artery, has set up its pronouncements on the world-lifeafter balance. The Gulen Movement, which is nourished from this tradition, symbolically has developed its service based religious understanding on the trivet of dervishes' convent (pertaining to the other world), schools (science)-barracks(discipline). Although the Protestant interpretation has similarities to this understanding, fundamental differences do exist.
I would like to give an example by starting from the activities of the 19th century Protestant missionaries' which Ozdalga takes as a basis for her article. Yes, 'the Gulen Movement carries an education mission just like the 19th century Protestant missionaries'. However, instead of doing this as missionary or religious propaganda, it does this with an understanding of "qualification in representation". It (the Gulen Movement) does not fall into the Puritanism trap, which Protestants have fallen into in the beginning, and subsequently into the contradiction of being alienated from the fundamentals. The Gulen Movement, even at the beginning, in response to the whirlpool of being worldly, offers a metaphysical ethical understanding, and against the blinding effect of the hereafter, it proposes an intelligent judgment. Therefore, (in the Gulen Movement) the inevitable corrosions and contradictions do not yield traumatic results, and this situation does not bother me personally...
ZAMAN
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