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Fethullah Gülen: His Life, Beliefs and the Movement That He Inspires

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The Gülen Movement

Abstract

Fethullah Gülen’s early upbringing in a small village in southeastern Turkey, his early education and exposure to the ideas of Said Nursi, his later participation in Nursi reading circles and his increasing fame as a preacher in Turkey occurred within the context of Turkish history described in the previous chapter. In addition to his training in classical Islamic sciences, he is very much a product of his Turkish nationality and the political events that influenced his six or so decades as a Turkish citizen. In this chapter, I first introduce the reader to those aspects of Mr. Gülen’s early life that formed his later ideas and plans of action. Secondly, I discuss the major beliefs, convictions and priorities that guided both his early and later teachings. Thirdly, I trace the origins of the Gülen movement in Turkey and then its spread to the former Soviet Union countries and ultimately world-wide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An imam is an Islamic leader, often the leader of a mosque and/or Islamic community, who leads the prayer during Islamic gatherings. Imams are assigned to specific mosques by the state.

  2. 2.

    Fethullah Gülen. Kucuk Dunyam (My Small World). Interviewed by Latif Erdogan, Zaman.

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

  4. 4.

    Although mosques and public prayer were allowed to continue in “secularist” Turkey, at this time all other forms of religious instruction and practice had been banned, including Qur’anic schools.

  5. 5.

    During the first half of his life, Nursi participated in political life in various forms. During the second half of his life, after 1920, which he calls “the new Said,” he retreated to a remote corner in the province of Van and dedicated himself to the writing of what would later become the “Treatise of Light,” a 6,000+ pages of thematic commentary on the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet. Until 1950 he consistently rejected involvement in politics. During the last ten years of his life he supported the Democratic Party and NATO membership of Turkey against what he saw as a grave threat of atheism and philosophical materialism from the Soviet Union and the representatives of its ideology in Turkey, the CHP.

  6. 6.

    Yavuz (2003a).

  7. 7.

    Eyup Can, “Fethullah Gülen Ile Ufuk Turu” (A Tour of Horizon with Fethullah Gülen) Zaman. August, 1995.

  8. 8.

    Agai (2005).

  9. 9.

    Mardin (1989).

  10. 10.

    Agai (2005).

  11. 11.

    Cetin (2010).

  12. 12.

    Aktay (2003).

  13. 13.

    Kestanepazari is a dormitory and Qur’anic school where students attended regular public schools and received additional tutoring in Qur’anic recitation and Islamic sciences.

  14. 14.

    Yavuz (2003b).

  15. 15.

    Kalyoncu (2008).

  16. 16.

    Cetin (2009).

  17. 17.

    Bacik and Aras (2002).

  18. 18.

    Agai (2005).

  19. 19.

    Cetin (2010).

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Weller (2006).

  22. 22.

    Much of the material in this section is based on interviews that Nevval Sevindi conducted with Mr. Gülen in 1997 and again in 2001, after the September ll attacks in New York and Washington. They are published in Sevendi (2008).

  23. 23.

    Abu-Rabi (2008).

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Sevendi (2008).

  26. 26.

    Gülen, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, p. 202.

  27. 27.

    Carroll (2007).

  28. 28.

    Gülen (1998) pp. 99-100.

  29. 29.

    Michel (2005).

  30. 30.

    Kuru (2003).

  31. 31.

    Aslandogan and Cetin (2006).

  32. 32.

    Cetin (2010).

  33. 33.

    Gülen (2005).

  34. 34.

    Sevendi (2008).

  35. 35.

    Yavuz (2003).

  36. 36.

    Sevendi (2008).

  37. 37.

    Cetin (2010).

  38. 38.

    Woodhall (2005).

  39. 39.

    Unal and Williams (2000).

  40. 40.

    Saritoprak and Griffith (2005).

  41. 41.

    Saritoprak and Griffith (2005).

  42. 42.

    Ibid., p. 337.

  43. 43.

    The Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922 was launched because the Western Allies had promised Greece territorial gains in the Ottoman Empire. It was fought between Greece and the Turkish revolutionaries that would later establish the Republic of Turkey and ended with Greece returning to its pre-war borders and engaging in a population exchange with Turkey under provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne.

  44. 44.

    Relationships between Turkey and its neighboring country of Armenia have been strained since the end of WWI (1915) when intense fighting occurred between the two countries. Armenians maintain that Turkey effected a “genocide” of over one million people; Turks maintain that similar numbers of Turks died in the conflicts that ended the war and that the war deaths on both sides were outcomes of fighting on both sides.

  45. 45.

    Fethullah Gülen (1993).

  46. 46.

    Gülen (2004) pp. 249-250.

  47. 47.

    Gülen (2004) p. 23.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., p. 262.

  49. 49.

    Interview with Gülen, Saritoprak (2005) p. 466.

  50. 50.

    Gülen (2005).

  51. 51.

    Akyol (2008).

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    Yavuz (1999).

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    Gülen interview in Sabah, January 27, 1995.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Komecoglu (1997); Della Porta and Diani (1999); Melucci (1999).

  58. 58.

    Komecoglu (1997).

  59. 59.

    Cetin (2010).

  60. 60.

    Kalyoncu (2008).

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Ibid.

  63. 63.

    Kuru (2005).

  64. 64.

    Fuller (2008).

  65. 65.

    Fuller (2008).

  66. 66.

    Komecoglu (1997); Yilmaz (2005); Weller (2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Helen Rose Ebaugh

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Helen Rose Ebaugh

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Ebaugh, H.R. (2010). Fethullah Gülen: His Life, Beliefs and the Movement That He Inspires. In: Ebaugh, H.R. (eds) The Gülen Movement. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9894-9_3

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