Justice, Fairness and Hocaefendi

According to Islamic teachings, oneness of God (tawhid), prophethood, resurrection and justice (adl) are fundamental principles advocated not only by Islam, but also by all religions.

These form the essence of what all prophets from Prophet Adam to Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, offered to humanity as beliefs and deeds.

In this respect, protecting these principles essentially serves the protection of religion(s). The reason why Islam describes some divine religions as altered or modified is that these principles are modified or altered from their original state by their respective practitioners.

The subject matter of this article is to discuss justice as one of these essential principles, as well as fairness, which can be considered one aspect of justice, and how Hocaefendi [Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen], performs with respect to fairness. I have discussed with Hocaefendi my assessment of the conference on Gülen held in Germany which I attended, as well as the critical stances which were expressed and responses to these criticisms during this conference. He listened to me with extreme caution and interest. He voiced his own assessments. I will try to convey these assessments in three categories and with special emphasis on justice and fairness as I noted above.

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The Islamic case for a secular state

When Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promoted the secular state last week during his trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, many were surprised. Especially ultra-secularist Turks, who are used to calling Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, “Islamist,” could not believe their eyes.

I was much less surprised, though. Because I knew that what I call “the AKP’s transition from Islamism to post-Islamism” was real. I even tried to explain its reasoning in a series of pieces titled “The Islamic case for a secular state,” which appeared in this very column some four years ago.

Here is a long excerpt from one of those pieces:

“In June 1998, a very significant meeting took place at a hotel near Abant, which is a beautiful lake in the east of Istanbul. The participants included some of the most respected theologians and Islamic intellectuals in Turkey. For three days, the group of nearly 50 scholars discussed the concept of a secular state and its compatibility with Islam. At the end, they all agreed to sign a common declaration that drew some important conclusions

“The first of these was the rejection of theocracy. The participants emphasized the importance of individual reasoning in Islam and declared, ‘No one can claim a divine authority in the interpretation of religion.’ This was a clear rejection of the theocratic political doctrines — such as the one established in the neighboring Iran — which granted a divinely ordained right to a specific group of people for guiding society.

“The second important conclusion of the Abant participants was the harmony of the principles of divine sovereignty and popular sovereignty. (Some contemporary Islamists reject democracy by assuming a contradiction between the two.) ‘Of course God is sovereign over the whole universe,’ the participants said. ‘But this is a metaphysical concept that does not contradict with the idea of popular sovereignty, which allows societies to rule their own affairs.’

“The third argument in the declaration was the acceptance of a secular state that would ‘stand at the same distance from all beliefs and philosophies.’ The state, the participants noted, ‘is an institution that does not have any metaphysical or political sacredness,’ and Islam has no problem with such political entities as far as they value rights and freedoms.

“In sum, the ‘Abant Platform,’ as it became known, declared the compatibility of Islam with a secular state based on liberal democracy. This was a milestone not only because the participants included top Islamic thinkers, but also because the organizers were members of Turkey’s strongest Islamic community, the Fethullah Gülen movement.”

In the following years, some of the participants of this Abant Platform became ministers in AKP Cabinets, and the ideas they articulated guided the AKP on matters of religion and politics. (In that sense, both the Gülen Movement, and the Said Nursi tradition that it sprang from, deserve credit for helping create the AKP.)

So, you might ask, what was the big war over secularism that haunted Turkey in the past decade?

Well, it was a war between those wanted a secular state and those who wanted to preserve the secularist one, which was not based on neutrality but on hostility toward religion. In the same series of pieces on Islam and the secular state, I noted:

“Today the big question in Turkey is whether our republic will be a secular or a secularist one. Our homegrown secularists have never gone as far and radical as Mao, but some of them share a similar hostility toward religion. And they have every right to do so as far as they accept to be unprivileged players in civil society. But they don’t have the right to dominate the state and use the money of the religious taxpayers in order to offend and suppress their beliefs.”

Today, Turkey is more secular but less secularist. And that is why it is making more sense to Arabs and other Muslims.

Core Values of the Gülen Movement: Worship and Servanthood

Thomas Michel


1. Oğuz and Erol, typical members of the Gülen cemaat

Oğuz comes from a casually practicing Muslim family in Malatya, Central Anatolia.1 He first came to know the Gulen movement as a high school student in Ankara and shortly thereafter moved into a yurt, or residence, run by the community. He spent his last two years of high school there as he prepared for the dreaded Öğrenci Seçme Sınavı (ÖSS), the Student Selection Examination. The ÖSS is the college entrance and placement exam taken annually by over 1.5 million students in Turkey, which determines both the universities and programs that a student can enter. Oğuz placed within the top 1% of his examination year and was thus able to enter the Middle East Technical Institute in Ankara, one of the best universities in the country. There he took a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics and had a scholarship offer from a prestigious university in the United States. However, instead of pursuing this enviable career opportunity, Oğuz took up a job teaching physics in a high school in Kirghizstan. There he married a Kirghiz colleague and after eight years they are still living and teaching in that country.

Erol is a businessman, with his own plumbing supplies company in the southeast Turkish city of Gaziantep. He came to know the Gülen movement by way of his fellow business associates. For the past ten years, Erol has donated one million Turkish lire (about $600,000) annually to the activities of the community. He has “adopted” one of the movement’s schools in Cambodia, a project he has never seen but to which he feels personally connected and for which he provides funding. He has only met Hoca Effendi as Fethullah Gulen is affectionately called by those in the community, once. That meeting took place on a recent visit with other Turkish business leaders to Fethullah Gulen’s current residence in Pennsylvania. His knowledge of Gülen’s vision and teaching comes mainly from CDs, radio broadcasts, and magazine articles that reproduce Gülen’s sermons and discussions, often in question-answer form.

What are the values that have inspired Oğuz, Erol, and thousands of other Turks to sacrifice time, talents, funds, and career to a communitarian project they call the Hizmet, or “Service”?

Obviously, the Hizmet is not the only movement in today’s world that promotes and enables altruism and philanthropy. Other associations, both religious and secular, could be named. However, there are many reasons for generous and self-sacrificial behavior, and it would be simplistic to assume that each of these movements is motivated by the same set of values. It is the purpose of this paper to try to point out the core values of the Gulen movement, the ideals that make them tick and operate, and which distinguish them from other groups and organizations that are also doing good things in today’s world.

2. A movement inspired by Islamic ideals

First of all, the Gülen community is properly speaking an Islamic movement, not merely a movement composed mainly of Muslims, but a movement shaped and guided by Islamic ideals and principles, sustained by Islamic practice and devotion, and committed to a vision of the role that Islam can and should play in today’s world. For this reason, it is inevitable that the core values of the movement will derive from the Islamic tradition itself. In this paper, I will take a set of these central values and try to show how they influence and help to form the distinctive character of the Hizmet, or as it is popularly known, the Gülen community.

The Gülen community is inspired by the preaching and writing of the Turkish scholar Fethullah Gulen. It is Gülen’s particular understanding of the teaching of the Qur’an and hadith and his appropriation of the way this message has been understood, lived, and commented upon by Muslims down through the centuries that provide the intellectual content of the movement and the ideals pursued by the community.

Elsewhere, I have written of the concept of ikhlas (sincerity, purity of intention) as a key value that motivates the work of the community.2 In this paper, I would like to focus on another central notion that motivates and characterizes the activities of the Gülen cemaat. This is the important concept of ‘ibada (‘ibadat, ‘ibadah),3 which is broadly translated as worship, and the related concepts of ‘ubudiyya (servanthood) and ‘ubuda (devotion).

3. Worship, servanthood, devotion

The terms translated in English as “worship,” “servanthood,” and “devotion” are taken from Arabic and possess a long history in the Islamic tradition. In particular, they have been commented upon by Sufi teachers and theoreticians down through the ages. Fethullah Gulen has appropriated this traditional language and applied it to the practice of Islam in modern situations. A study of these concepts provides a key to understanding both the movement’s spiritual motivation as well as the success of its undertakings.

The term ‘ibada is derived from the Arabic root meaning slave or servant and carries the idea of enslaving oneself to God or of acting as God’s servant, with the consequent connotations of obedience, submission, devotion, faithfulness, service etc. The concept is not an innovation within the Abrahamic tradition, and is well known in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament. Moses was referred to as God’s servant and the idea of Israel as God’s faithful Servant was later developed by the prophets, especially Isaiah. Christian authors of the New Testament identified Jesus with the Suffering Servant of God spoken of by Isaiah. In the Qur’anic account of the Night Journey (Qr 17:1), Muhammad is referred to simply as “His servant” (“Glory to God Who did take His servant for a journey by night…”

In many treatments of Islamic belief and practice, and in the minds of many Muslim believers, ‘ibada is simply equated with ritual acts, specifically the ritual practices such as the daily salat prayers, the Ramadan fast, the pilgrimage to Mecca etc., that are obligatory for all Muslims. Particularly in works of fiqh (jurisprudence), ‘ibada as ritual activity is treated as a separate chapter distinct from mu'amalat (business affairs and contracts), munakahat (marriage regulations), jinaya (expiation), hudud (punishment), faraid (inheritance) etc.


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New Islamic movements and amodern networks

Gokhan Bacik * and Umit Kurt ** 


Abstract

The revival in Islamic studies of interest in explaining social transformation in Muslim societies has stimulated a need for new methodological inquiries. The deployment of informal institutions within daily life is also a rediscovery of the traditional Islamic networks, patterns, values and cognitive forms. The rise of daily life as the major unit of operation for the new Islamic movements directs them to a completely different position vis-a-vis modernity: to create an alternative Islamic civil society, that is indifferent to the existing modern one. The Gulen Movement, with its success at creating trans-national networks, is the perspicuous case for illustrating the amodern world view of new Islamic movements. Study of the Gulen Movement on the basis of its amodernity is a methodology that contributes also to the study of how Islam is reproduced in daily life despite modern challenges. Such a study makes a necessity, in any research agenda, of the acknowledgement of the amodern in the sociology of religion. The major contribution of this paper is to display how Islamic movements develop an irregular position towards modernity. Therefore, the validity of traditional binaries, such as ‘Islamic movements vs. modernity’, or ‘Islamic movements as products of modernity’, has to be questioned. Being indifferent to the state and operating through daily life, new Islamic movements gain the ability to connect with historical Islam, the roots of which had fixed well before those of modernity.
Keywords: Islam; amodernity; the Gulen movement; informalism

The revival in Islamic studies of interest in explaining social transformation in Muslim societies has stimulated a need for new methodological inquiries. The binary of Islam and civil society, a repeated thesis, has taken the study of Islam out of the civilian domain and juxtaposed Islamic movements and states (Gellner 1996). However, recent studies, Turkish ones especially, have concluded that Islamic movements are successful without any state agenda. Accordingly, new Islamic movements base their ‘mobilisation strategy on transforming everyday practices’ rather than following the former Islamist way of developing political agendas (Tuğal 2009). The focus on daily life reminds the strategic role of informal networks. New Islamic movements, as the agents of daily life, operate mainly through informal networks. This results in a perception of informal institutions as functional or problem solving and entails a recognition of their positive role in providing solutions to the various problems of social interaction (Halmke and Levitsky 2004). Indeed, the new Islamic movements’ informalism is a deviation from the hallmarks of modern society, such as calculability, formalism and the separation of the market and the state (Misztal 2000). The deployment of informal institutions within daily life is also a rediscovery of the traditional Islamic networks, patterns, values and cognitive forms. Thus, the rise of daily life as the major unit of operation for the new Islamic movements directs them to a completely different position vis-a-vismodernity: to create an alternative Islamic civil society, that is indifferent to the existing modern one. In the past, some radical Islamists had completely rejected modernity. Others, paradoxically, modernised part of their political agenda to sympathise with the state and nationalism. However, the new Islamic movements ply their mobilisation strategy in daily life contexts and situate themselves in an irregular position to modernity. Their amodern (neither modern nor anti-modern) position creates its own parallel sphere founded on the traditional patterns of Islam.

The Gülen Movement, with its success at creating trans-national networks, is the perspicuous case for illustrating the a modern world view of new Islamic movements. Fethullah Gülen is an influential Islamic scholar whose ideas activate millions not only in Turkey but also around the globe (Yavuz and Esposito 2003; Ünal 2000). His Movement is described as ‘the largest Islamic movement in Turkey and the most widely recognised and effective one internationally’ (Turam 2004, 265). This Movement is successful at deploying its discursive and material instruments in a number of countries, among them are the ones as different as Thailand and Macedonia (Sevindi and Abu-rabi’ 2008). How can this Movement activate large masses and realise complex trans-national projects, both of which require sophisticated discourse, persuasion, planning and other social and material procedures? The study of the social dynamics through which the Gülen Movement operates is the natural unit of analysis for any inquiry that seeks an answer to such questions.

‘Movement’ studies provide a wide of range of theories to explicate the successes of social movements, as well as their transformation and decay. This paper proposes that it is mainly the amodern trait of the Gülen Movement, particularly evident in its engagement with religion-based networks that makes this Movement globally successful. ‘Amodern’ refers to the traditional networks, symbols, values, institutions, patterns and cognitive forms that pre-date modernity, yet retain the capacity to be effective among people, and for that reason, the ability to transcend the separated forms of modernity.

Study of the Gülen Movement on the basis of its amodernity is a methodology that contributes also to the study of how Islam is reproduced in daily life despite modern challenges. Beyond the traditional debate about Islam and modernity, a critical point of analysis is how Islam preserves its traditional forms of identity, legitimacy and cognitive models in their traditional patterns. That is, study of the Gülen Movement reveals the details of how new Islamic movements operate in daily life and how they activate the traditional informal networks. Such a study makes a necessity, in any research agenda, of the acknowledgement of the amodern in the sociology of religion. The major contribution of this paper is to display how Islamic movements develop an irregular position towards modernity. Therefore, the validity of traditional binaries, such as ‘Islamic movements vs. modernity’, or ‘Islamic movements as products of modernity’, has to be questioned. Being indifferent to the state and operating through daily life, new Islamic movements gain the ability to connect with historical Islam, the roots of which had fixed well before those of modernity.


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