By Ehsan Masood
Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time
enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover, can
you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?
Fethullah Gülen, a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and
theoretician, has dedicated much of his life to resolving these
questions. From his sick bed in exile just outside Philadelphia, he
leads a global movement inspired by Sufi ideas. He promotes an open
brand of Islamic thought and, like the Iran-born Islamic philosophers
Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush, he is preoccupied with
modern science (he publishes an English-language science magazine called
the Fountain). But Gülen, unlike these western-trained Iranians, has
spent most of his life within the religious and political institutions
of Turkey, a Muslim country, albeit a secular one since the foundation
of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s republic after the first world war.
Unusually for a pious intellectual, 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. Like a western celebrity, he
carefully manages his public exposure—mostly by restricting interviews
to those he can trust.
Many of his converts come from Turkey’s aspirational middle class. As
religious freedom comes, falteringly, to Turkey, Gülen reassures his
followers that they can combine the statist-nationalist beliefs of
Atatürk’s republic with a traditional but flexible Islamic faith. He
also reconnects the provincial middle class with the Ottoman traditions
that had been caricatured as theocratic by Atatürk and his “Kemalist”
heirs. Oliver Leaman, a leading scholar of Islamic philosophy, says that
Gülen’s ideas are a product of Turkish history, especially the end of
the Ottoman empire and the birth of the republic. He calls Gülen’s
approach “Islam-lite.”
Millions of people inside and outside Turkey have been inspired by
Gülen’s more than 60 books and the tapes and videos of his talks. Why? A
combination of charisma, good organisation and an attractive message.
What Gülen says is that you can be at home in the modern world while
also embracing traditional values like faith in God and community
responsibility—a message which resonates strongly in Turkey.
Gülen insists that he is not a Sufi leader, but his
thinking is certainly influenced by Sufi ideas: he says, for example,
that a reader who wants to truly understand the Koran needs to invest
his heart as well as his intellect. Another belief he shares with Sufism
is the idea that God, humanity and the natural world are all linked,
and might even be part of a single entity, a sort of cosmic trinity.
This idea has practical consequences. For example, it suggests that a
believer will love and respect humanity and the natural world as they
would God. It also means that no one should be seen as an outsider.
Hence Gülen’s insistence on friendship among people of all faiths and
none.
Hakan Yavuz, co-editor of Turkish Islam and the Secular State: the
Gülen Movement (Syracuse), describes the Gülen movement as comprising a
small inner cabinet along with a network of perhaps 5m like-minded
volunteers and sympathisers, rather than an organisation with a
hierarchy or formal membership. Others say it is more like a cult, with
no deviation from Gülen’s word allowed. The network’s largesse has meant
that the movement now boasts newspapers and magazines, television and
radio stations, private hospitals and, by some estimates, more than 500
fee-paying elite schools in dozens of countries. These schools are
mostly in Turkey and the Turkic-speaking ex-Soviet republics like
Azerbaijan, but a few can also be found in Africa, China and the US.
The Gülen movement sponsors international conferences to debate his
ideas. (The most recent one in Britain was held at the House of Lords.)
These ideas cover three main areas: Gülen’s attempts to marry science
and religion; his large body of work on interpreting Islam for the
modern age; and his role in Turkish politics through his influence on
the governing Justice and Development (AK) party.
***
Fethullah Gülen was born in 1941 in a village near Erzurum in eastern Anatolia, near the border with Iran and Armenia. After a period of Islamic education, in 1959 he began work for the religious ministry as an imam—imams in Turkey are public servants—a post he held until 1981 when, shortly after a military coup, he struck out on his own. The life of a government imam will not have suited someone with his creativity and charisma—those who have heard his sermons say he frequently reduces audiences to tears—and Gülen did well to last over 20 years.
While still an imam, Gülen joined the Light movement, a Sufi-inspired
network for followers of the Turkish thinker Said Nursi, who died in
1960. Gülen later broke away, but continued to be influenced by Nursi’s
ideas on accommodating Islam to modernity and finding harmony between
scientific reason and religious revelation.
Science and technology are important to Gülen for two reasons. First,
he attributes the underdevelopment of many Muslim nations to a neglect
of modern knowledge. For Gülen, a failure to study science is a
dereliction of Islamic duty, as learning is repeatedly emphasised in the
Koran. More controversially, he says there can be no conflict between
reason and revelation, and that science should be used as a tool to
understand the miracle of the Koran.
Gülen does not follow those Muslims who believe the Koran contains
all that is necessary for scientific understanding. He knows that
scientific discoveries are mostly provisional and that science is an
incremental business. But he also believes that as researchers refine
their understanding of physics or biology, they get closer to revealed
Koranic truths, such as the existence of a creator. His approach has a
parallel in the west in the Templeton Foundation, with its generous
grants and prizes to scientists sympathetic to religion.
***
Sufism is integral to Ottoman as well as wider Islamic history, and in spite of attempts at repression, it remains popular and powerful in many Muslim countries. In its most traditional sense, it is marked by a master-disciple relationship in which a Sufi master is linked through a chain of living and dead Sufi masters to Muhammad himself. These days, however, Sufi leaders are more mentors than svengalis, particularly in the west.
Two of Turkey’s leading Sufi networks are the Mevlevis and the
Naqshbandis. The Mevlevis were founded by the 13th-century Persian poet
Rumi, and they include among their network the famous whirling
dervishes. The Naqshbandis, founded in 1389 in central Asia, retain
Sufism’s hierarchical structure but adhere to a more orthodox brand of
Islam. The Naqshbandis were the leading Sufi order in the Ottoman
empire’s last years. Many in the ruling AK party are members of
Naqshbandi lodges. Some, however, have a higher regard for Gülen than
for their Naqshbandi co-religionists.
Gülen has not involved himself directly in Turkish politics, and has
always set his face against political Islam. Religion for him is about
private piety, not political ideology. He was a stern and public critic
of Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Welfare party—the forerunner to
AK—who in the late 1990s briefly led a coalition government with the
conservative True Path party. Gülen even backed the army’s “soft coup”
of 28th February 1997, which forced Erbakan to resign.
After the tense period of the 1980s and 1990s, Gülen and the AK
leaders have now become closer, although they have different social
bases: AK’s base is the urban poor, Gülen’s the provincial middle class.
Encouraged by Gülen, the AK party has softened its Koranic literalism,
embraced the idea of human rights and given up dreams of introducing
sharia or re-establishing the Ottoman caliphate. Its abandonment of
Islamism has in turn emboldened Gülen to become more critical of the
Turkish military. Gülen’s media outlets, above all the popular newspaper
Zaman, give their backing to the AK government.
***
And the government needs all the backing it can get. Despite winning a landslide election victory last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, President Abdullah Gül and many AK parliamentarians are fighting for their political lives in a battle with the Kemalists over, among other things, the wearing of headscarves in universities.
About 32 per cent of Turkish boys and 43 per cent of girls leave
education after primary school. Polls indicate that five in ten women
cover their hair, and the government argues that girls are put off
staying on in education by hijab bans. In February, parliament voted by a
large majority to amend the constitution and repeal the headscarf ban
in universities, which had been in place since 1989. Yet on 5th June,
this decision was annulled by Turkey’s constitutional court. (Turkey has
a grand tradition of legislating for headwear: the turban was outlawed
in 1829 and the fez introduced, only to be banned in turn by Atatürk in
1925).
Separate, but related, is the recent decision by the constitutional
court to hear an application from the chief prosecutor to have AK shut
down on the grounds that party members have violated the constitutional
principles of secularism. The case could last eight months, during which
time what little progress has been made on EU accession will
effectively grind to a halt.
The banning of political parties is not new in Turkey—26 have been
dissolved since 1960. AK was created from the embers of the Virtue party
(banned in 2001), which itself was formed by former members of the
Welfare party (banned 1998). Anticipating such a move for the third
time, the chief prosecutor has asked for any AK members found guilty to
be banned from politics for five years. If that happens, Turkey is
headed for years of political unrest.
Many Kemalists see the repeal of the headscarf ban as just the first
step towards an Iranian-style revolution. “Khomeini is alive and well in
Ankara and being supported by the EU,” a senior member of the
nationalist Republican People’s party told me. (And Michael Rubin, a
leading American neoconservative, recently predicted that as political
tensions in the country become unbearable, Gülen would make a triumphant
return to Turkey, Khomeini-style, and trigger an Islamic coup.)
Yet Gülen himself is in favour of compromise on the headscarf ban.
And outside the Ankara political village, the issue is not such a big
deal. One poll found that in 2006, proportionately fewer women were
wearing headscarves than in 1999. And just 3.7 per cent of respondents
said it was one of Turkey’s most pressing issues.
***
The AK party is a sophisticated organisation surrounded by a cluster of think tanks and thinkers—men such as Ibrahim Kalin, a philosopher of science who heads the SETA think tank, and Ahmet Davutoglu, a former international relations professor, now Erdogan’s chief foreign policy strategist.
AK leaders, and Gülen too, have been pushing hard for EU membership
for Turkey, partly to entrench religious freedom. (The Kemalists want
membership for the opposite reason—to put a secular brake on the
religious parties.) But now that Turkey’s prospects of accession are
receding, some AK thinkers are downplaying the economic benefits of
membership, and Davutoglu talks about a global, rather than just a
European, role for Turkey.
Even in the event of EU-enthusiasm returning in Turkey, there remain
many objections in Brussels to Turkey’s political norms. One of them, of
course, is the continuing involvement of the military in politics.
There is also the issue of minority rights, only now being tackled. The
republic has hitherto functioned on the basis that all Turks are
Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims. All other expressions of faith, language
and culture have been suppressed. Even AK, in favour of more religious
freedom, has been slow to promote the rights of Turkey’s Kurdish and
Alevi minorities.
Gülen has always publicly supported the establishment and its organs
of state, including the National Security Council. He has had the
backing of both former centre-right president Süleyman Demirel and
Bülent Ecevit, hero of the Turkish left in the 1970s. However, many
Kemalists do not trust him, and see his support for the AK government as
vindication of their stance that he is a Trojan horse for political
Islam. Gülen has been indicted on anti-secularism charges, but was
acquitted in 2006.
For the past several years, he has lived in self-exile in the US,
where he has not been in good health. Rumours persist that he is ready
to return to Turkey, though in the current climate, with talk of
political bans in the air, this seems unlikely. Meanwhile, he has used
his time abroad to build his overseas support and his network of schools—the latest has just opened in Pakistan.
Traditional Sufi leaders anoint a successor before they die. Gülen
has not done so. Perhaps there is no need, as his ideas will live on
through his books, DVDs, MP3 recordings and websites in 21 languages.
Whether or not he returns to the country of his birth, Gülen’s legacy as
a thoroughly modern Sufi is secure.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
