1 The AKP and Hizmet: Walking in Tandem?

The temporal axis around which the pivotal issues with which this chapter is concerned took new shape was that between the May 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul and the events of 15 July 2016 (see Sect. 4.4). Within that period, pre-existing tensions in the relationship between the AKP and Hizmet around a range of issues opened up into clear divergence, culminating in the government’s accusations that Hizmet and Fethullah Gülen were behind the 15 July events.

When the AKP first came to power in the Turkish General Election of 2002 there is no doubt that it did so with at least considerable passive support from among the ranks of people associated with Hizmet. This is perhaps not surprising because against the background of an ideologically dominant Kemalism which imposed a radically laicist interpretation of the separation between religion, state and society, the AKP government offered the first opportunity for pious Muslims to be able fully to participate more widely in society and especially in the authoritative branches of the state. At the same time, Keleş says that in relation to the first election in 2001, he does not recall any particular actively organised support for the AKP of the kind that happened later when numbers of Hizmet people were involved in circulating AKP election materials, and indeed:

In fact, it’s an odd one: the movement knew how to work with the secularists because it had been doing so for such a long time, and that was an easier equation to deal with. Somebody that’s coming from your own backyard, but actually isn’t from your own backyard, but appears to be so; that was more challenging for the movement and the movement wasn’t ready to deal with that. But then what happened is that AKP had no people within the state. I mean these are common things that you know – they were being challenged by the military, so what the movement was trying to do, it was not just because the love of the civilian government, but also because in part that was the same military establishment that was going after the movement.

Not only this but, as Keleş points out, it had appeared to many that the Abant meetings had effected a real influence on people in the AKP who were originally from an “Islamist” background, with Keleş noting that “although Tayyip wasn’t there, other founding AKP members took part such as Bulent Arinc” and that, because of this:

The AKP as a project comes out of, it realised the change in discourse, and the change in cultural approach, and the change in political landscape. And part of what helped them to realise that was obviously the parties that kept getting shut down and people were fed up of that, but also the antagonistic politics that had created such a mess at the time, but also the Abant meetings were useful.

Therefore, in Keleş’ evaluation, partly due to Abant Platform meetings, “there was a changing political discourse and the AKP changed entirely. It rejected identity politics and political Islam and embraced the accession to the EU; the separation of religion and state; free market economy; and alliance with ‘the West’ ”. Because of this, for a period, there was a commonality of perceived mutual benefit between the values of Hizmet and the declared strategic goals of the AKP to cement democracy in Turkey instead of the previously ever-present threat of military rule and also in the context of aiming for a closer alignment with the European Union. Arising from this, many Hizmet people actively supported the AKP as the party that appeared to be the best opportunity for the kind of society that Hizmet wished to see, while support from Hizmet remained electorally beneficial to the AKP. As Keleş noted in relation to these apparent strategic goals, “This was the position of the movement on these issues all along. The founders of the AKP seemed to adopt them, at least at first”.

However, there had also always been some concern within Hizmet about how sincere the AKP’s apparent change of strategy had been. In fact, as early as 2005, Erdoğan tried to pass a law that recognised “unarmed terrorism”. And this was the first time that Zaman newspaper started to publish some negative headlines in relation to the AKP government which, in Keleş’ opinion, was “because it saw this as an attempt to go after the movement” given that, with the exception of cyber-terrorism “unarmed non-violent terrorism” is a contradiction in itself, and was clearly not what the proposed law was aiming at. Thus, there were early signs of this mutually of interest changing.

Arising from this and other things, Keleş’ evaluation is that “All of this demonstrates that the relationship between Hizmet and the AKP was not rosy at the beginning as some seem to suggest. It was always somewhat challenging”. Indeed, as recounted by Keleş (see Sect. 3.4) of the complementary volume, there is a story of a dream that some people in Hizmet had experienced in 2006 about Erdoğan morphing into monstrous form, and concerning which Fethullah Gülen wrote to Erdoğan about as a warning. Keleş himself also notes that “I heard that anti-Hizmet profiling was ongoing in the state in 2008 or 2009. I heard this from colleagues”, and as things further developed “Erdoğan heard or suspected that there would be an attempt to split the party, and that Hizmet would open a party, so he apparently pre-emptively tried to say that, but apparently Gülen says that he has no interest in such things”. However, Keleş also said that “such is the pressure that he then relents and recommends two people. So, they do become AKP Party members, one whom was the author’s former doctoral student, Muhammed Çetin”.

In relation to these developments, Keleş noted that “there was a lot of these games going on at the time” which, from his perspective, he evaluated as having been problematic. This is because, as he noted: “we said we are civil society, grassroots movement, focused on education, dialogue, relief work, we are not trying to organise ourselves within the state, we are not about politics, and we are not trying to become politically governing” and that although “by and large, this is correct” through these and other later developments “we’ve lost the moral high ground”.

The opening up of the Turkish state to pious Muslims was especially noticeable in the police and judiciary and, as this occurred, numbers of people associated with Hizmet were in a position, for the first time, to enter the authoritative branches of the state. In doing so, they were inevitably faced with the question of the relationship between their work roles, their personal identities, and their broader identification with Hizmet. Indeed, this became the basis for accusations by Hanefi Avcı, a former chief of police in Turkey, who found himself in prison after publishing a book, Haliç’te Yaşayan Simonlar: Dün Devlet Bugün CemaatFootnote 1 (‘Devotee’ Residents of Haliç: Yesterday State, Today Religious Congregation). In this, Avcı (2010) claimed that Hizmet had infiltrated the police and Hizmet had used this access to secure wire taps useful to it.

When reflecting back more generally on the broader context of these kinds of issues, Keleş notes that, in comparison with other groups of Turkish society, which are actually minorities, “The problem with Hizmet is that it’s not a minority” and that it “was more successful”. And because of this, “you had a lot more people within the state structure and the ethical question gets really problematic then. It creates all kinds of conflicts of interest”. Overall Keleş concluded that:

It’s impossible, it’s like a casino – the house always wins. And the reason for that is that the institutional habitus and culture of these places is more domineering, both in terms of how it’s conveyed to you on a day to day basis, than your Gülenial, Hizmet identity. Because, as a police officer, you are in the police station, I mean, what am I going to do with Gülen’s teaching in the police station – it’s a police station, I’ve got a superior telling me to interrogate this person; I’ve got a friend who’s doing it a certain way; I am inculcated in that culture at that moment, where I am also hiding my Hizmet identity, right. So, I am not able to reflect on what it means to be a Hizmet-related police officer freely because I am hiding that from everyone, including myself sometimes. So, I become more of a Turkish police officer than a Hizmet-inspired person, do you see?

2 Mutual “Infiltration”?

With regard to the overall relationship between the AKP in power and Hizmet, Keleş argued that “it’s not just that there was these institutional challenges of being a movement with people in the state”; rather, “it’s also the state culture and mindset” can start to predominate. And it is this observation that led to Keleş’ rather startling way of summarising some of the issues that arise via the self-critical aphorism that “Hizmet did not infiltrate the state, the state infiltrated Hizmet”. In relation to this Keleş was not making a specific charge about the presence in Hizmet of undercover state security agents, although it would be surprising if such had not been deployed with an aim of deliberate covert disruption in the classical sense of infiltration. Rather, he was pointing to the much less dramatic, but no less real and eventually perhaps at least as problematic an incorporation of significant numbers of Hizmet people into not only the organs of the state, but also its fundamental mindset. Thus, with regard to the related growth of Hizmet’s standing and spheres of influence in Turkish society, Ercan Karakoyun from Germany made the historical reflection that:

Well, I think everybody liked it. I think because if I talk to people here now, and when I remember journeys to Turkey in these years, I think people enjoyed what they did; they enjoyed being big; they enjoyed working for the state; they enjoyed being diplomats. So, it is somehow human. If your family invests in building an education, if you study, if you work very hard and then the state comes and says, look there is a job, don’t you want to apply. OK, I apply. And then when you get it, of course you enjoy being there. It’s very human.

Similar issues have, of course, faced many religious and other movements when moving from the social margins into a more central position. If a movement starts small and is to some extent distinctive, and then achieves some success, standing and influence, it becomes more socially “acceptable”. After becoming acceptable, it has at least the potential for becoming instrumentalised even while those active within it continue to have the personal intention to work for the benefit of society. However, as Karakoyun notes, one consequence of this trajectory can be that “in the end you become an enemy of the state! – because you are now too powerful, too big, and you are in the end an external influence in the state”. In a different European context this is, for example, what happened historically to various Christian religious orders, such as the Jesuits, and concerns about similar dynamics influence how, on the other side of July 2016, many Hizmet asylum-seekers in Europe view their relationship with the state (see Sect. 5.5).

Whatever judgement one reaches on what occurred in Turkey itself, it is arguable that the first signal of at least some people either within Hizmet and/or who associated themselves with it perhaps beginning to overreach themselves was in the so-called Ergenekon affair. With this, in the overall context of Turkish society’s tendency towards conspiracy thinking, both imagined and real, and against the background of not unreasonable concerns about a possible coup attempt against the AKP government, the organs of state were deployed against a large number of people who were under suspicion. And at this time, Hizmet-related organisations—for example, Zaman newspaper—seemed generally to side with the state’s actions.

The point at which this also seemed to blur into Hizmet self-interest was around the publication of the journalist Ahmet Şık’s draft book, İmamın Ordusu (or, in English, The Imam’s Army) which claimed to be an exposé of the life and work of Gülen and the Hizmet movement. Şık was detained on 3 March 2011, before its publication. As he was arrested, he shouted (it was thought with reference to Hizmet) that “Whoever touches [them] burns”. The draft of the book was seized by the government and banned on the basis of a claim that it was an “illegal organizational document” of the secret organisation Ergenekon. Şık was detained but eventually was released pending trial in March 2012. On 23 March, a court ordered the confiscation of the draft book. In the meantime, and despite the threat of charges to anyone found in possession of a copy, on 1 April 2011, unknown persons made a copy of the book available on the internet. In November 2011, a version of the book edited by 125 journalists, activists and academics was published by Postacı Publishing House under the name 000Kitap: Dokunan Yanar (000Book). The website of the Democratic Turkey Forum provides some selected English translations,Footnote 2 while an English translation of the Epilogue can be found on the anti-Hizmet website tukishinvitations.com.Footnote 3

In The Imam’s Army, Ahmet Şık argued that “people started to talk more frequently about the existence of a ‘Fethullahçı’ (Fethullahist) organization in the bureaucracy, especially in the police force”. Indeed, it is claimed that “the police organization has almost become the armed unit of the parish (the word ‘parish’ being a poor English translation of the Turkish word cemaat, which is better rendered as ‘community’)”.Footnote 4 The Epilogue to the Imam’s Army argued that “Although there are people suggesting that these communities are religious NGOs, it is a controversial designation for the Gülen Movement”. Of course, as was already noted and discussed in some detail in Chap. 1, all the frames of reference that one uses to describe hotly contested phenomena are themselves as much interpretations as descriptions. And while, overall, the author of this book comes down on the side of primarily interpreting Hizmet in terms of its own publicly articulated self-understanding as a religiously inspired movement manifesting itself in a range of civil society ways, in the text of The Imam’s Army, a very different picture is painted.

Both the overall tone of The Imam’s Army, and its specific choice of words, convey some very clear negative signalling, as follows: “With the investments that began in the 1970s, especially in the education sector, the Golden Generation that was expected to become the administrator of the future occupied bureaucratic positions now, in the first decade of the 21st century, exactly as scheduled”. It then went on to speak of Hizmet educational initiatives in terms of “using their exponentially growing financial power to expand their market share”. In this kind of description, the use of words such as “investments” and “market share” already predisposes the reader towards a particular interpretive framework. Such words strongly imply, even while not quite explicitly charging that, regardless of how Hizmet might see and explain itself, that it is really “something else”. That “something else” is then presented in ways akin to that of a growing business empire having Mafia-like mediations between business, politics and self-interest, with the aim of gaining state control. That, in turn, leads back into the kind of conspiracy theory interpretation of the kinds that so deeply permeate all parts of Turkish society and politics. In the second to last paragraph of the Epilogue to the book, it is argued that “Today, victims of yesterday are getting even with their oppressors” and somewhat disturbingly in view of what did follow July 2016, it concludes that “we are yet to see whether there will be time when some start getting even for what is happening now”.Footnote 5

3 The MV Mavi Marmara Incident: A Sign of Things to Come

Among commentators who had previously spoken of an “alliance” between the AKP and Hizmet, quite a number cite what is known as either the MV Mavi Marmara or Gaza Flotilla incident as the first big sign of a break in that. An alternative perspective is put forward by İsmail Mesut Sezgin (2014) of the Centre for Hizmet Studies (see Sect. 3.5). He argued that “I don’t believe there was ever an alliance between Gülen and Erdoğan of the type imagined by some commentators” and also “far less that this incident was the cause of the split/separation of that alliance”. However, regardless of one’s evaluation of how far the notion of an “alliance” was an only construction or was more substantive, as Sezgin says, “The flotilla incident can, however, be useful in demonstrating the difference of Gülen’s mindset from political Islam” (see also Robinson 2017).

The incident turned around six ships, including one called the MV Mavi Mavi Marmara, that had been organised by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, to transport construction materials and other humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. However, this was organised in the context not only of a humanitarian goal, but also of the specific political intention of breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza, in the light of which Israel called for the mission to be aborted, seeing it as provocation. On 31 May 2010, Israeli forces carried out a naval commando operation during which, while the ships were still in international waters, they were boarded from helicopters and speedboats. Although activists on five of the ships carried out only passive resistance, on the Turkish ship, the MV Mavi Marmara, a group of passengers began to threaten and use violence. This resulted in nine activists, including eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish American, being killed, with another dying later, and many others being wounded. Ten Israeli soldiers were wounded, including one seriously. It was reported that five of the activists who were killed had previously declared their desire to become shaheeds (or martyrs).

The incident caused a major rupture in Turkish-Israeli relations and a number of commissions of enquiry followed until, finally, Israel offered Turkey $20 million compensation. That led, on 22 March 2013, to a telephone conversation in which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu apologised on behalf of Israel to Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan who accepted the apology. This, in turn, led to further discussions and, on 29 June 2019, an agreement that was approved by the Israeli government.

Gülen came under very strong criticism in relation to his public stance on these events because he did not uncritically join in with the strong national outpouring of anti-Israeli feeling which led to the Turkish government recalling its ambassador from Israel and to declaring the Israeli ambassador to Turkey as persona non grata. In this febrile atmosphere, Turkey had also threatened to send another flotilla, this time accompanied by Turkish warships. Therefore, the threat of potential war seemed very real.

In his first comment on the incident, Gülen said that “What I saw was not pretty. It was ugly”. However, what especially caused a critical reaction among some sectors of Turkish society was that he went on to criticise the organisers of the Flotilla because they had not sought some kind of agreement with Israel before trying to deliver the aid. Because of this, in Gülen’s view, the action was “a sign of defying authority and will not lead to fruitful matters”. Some critics have read this as Gülen defending the legitimacy of Israel’s Gaza blockade and, as Sezgin notes, this “created a lot of anger and disappointment among nationalists and Millî Görüş”. However, as in Gülen’s historical statements in relation to military authorities during periods of military rule, and which some interpreted (see Weller 2022, Sect. 3.4) as being supportive of such coups, it is important to read such statements in the light of Gülen’s overall theological and ethical approach in which social stability, even of a problematic kind, is preferable to chaos.

4 From Gezi Park to 15 July 2016

In a way similar to that of the Russian Federation’s Vladimir Putin, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan approached the maximum period the Turkish constitution allowed in the office of Prime Minister and that following his third election victory in June 2011 he started to press for what he called a “Turkish style” executive presidency. During this period, authoritarianism grew, and wider social tensions reached a peak around the so-called Gezi Park protests. These began on 28 May 2013 as protests initially undertaken by around fifty environmentalists camping in the park in protest against an urban development plan that threatened this park, and which was forcibly broken up by the police.

Sparked by the outrage about this violent eviction felt by many across Turkey’s social and political spectrum, an enormous wave of linked protests began, involving up to around three and a half million people, coalescing around such otherwise diverse issues as freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, curbs on alcohol and on kissing in public, as well as the war in Syria. As this wave of protests grew, Erdoğan saw this as a trial of strength. On 2 June, he dismissed the protesters as “a few looters”, following which many protesters called themselves çapulcu (looters), appropriating Erdoğan’s insult for themselves, leading to the coining of the new word chapulling, meaning of “fighting for your rights”.

During the period of these protests more than three thousand arrests were made; twenty-two people were killed; and more than eight thousand were injured, including many with critical injuries. Excessive use of force by police and the overall absence of government dialogue with the protesters were criticised by some foreign countries and international organisations. During the crisis, Gülen refused to take sides with Erdoğan in support of suppressing the protestors, while at this time Erdoğan also moved to shut down all tutorial centres for college admissions in the country, around a quarter of which were linked with Hizmet.

In December 2013, details of a corruption probe were made public involving members of Erdoğan’s cabinet; the Iranian-Turkish businessman Reza Zarrab; and the facilitation of payments for oil and gas to Iran. However, Erdoğan charged Hizmet with working with international co-conspirators to effect what he called a “judiciary coup” against his government. The original prosecutors who had been working on the corruption case were first removed, later dismissed and finally arrested, while the new prosecutors closed the case. A more systematic campaign against Hizmet began during which Erdoğan increasingly referred to Hizmet using the terminology of Paralel Devlet Yapılanması (or, Parallel State Structure), with Sunier and Landman (2015) noting that accusations of infiltration of state institutions became “the very essence of the conflict between the AKP and Hizmet” (p. 82). In speeches Erdoğan went on also to use ever more extreme, lurid and provocatively inciting rhetoric, including reference to Hizmet people by such epithets as “leeches”, “assassins” and “blood sucking vampires”.

On 31 January 2014, the author’s former doctoral student Muhammed Çetin, who, in 2011, had been elected as an AKP Party Deputy in the Turkish Parliament, resigned from the party stating to a press conference in the Parliament that “Unfortunately the AK Party has of today become blackened. It has become the architect of a process in which corruption is covered up, thieves are protected and the unlawful has become the law”.Footnote 6 In the wake of the scandal, many thousands of other members of the judiciary were dismissed and replaced with pro-Erdoğan appointees, while a programme of school closures began to be systematically enforced on Hizmet founded schools throughout Turkey. The attribution to Hizmet of the description “terrorist” was first officially deployed in April 2015, while on 28 October 2015, the Turkish Interior Ministry listed Gülen as one of the country’s most wanted terrorists. In May 2016, six weeks before July 2016 events, Turkey’s National Security Council first described Hizmet as the “Fethullah Terrorist Organization” (FETÖ).

The events of the 15 July and their aftermath became the latest in a long line of disruptions to democracy in Turkey. These had included, on 27 May 1960, the first militarycoup, in which the Turkish President, Prime Minister and others were arrested and tried for treason and other offences. On 12 March 1971, widespread unrest followed a major economic downturn, and the military intervened to “restore order”. On 12 September 1980, following violent clashes between left-wing and right-wing political groups, the military intervened again and, in the following years, thousands of people were arrested and dozens were executed. On 28 February 1997, in what became known as the “postmodern coup”, after the rise of the Welfare Party, the military put forward a series of “recommendations” which the government was expected to accept, and the Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, was forced to resign. The Welfare Party was dissolved in 1998, and Erbakan was banned from politics for five years. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, together with some other former members of the Welfare Party, went on to found the AKP.

On the evening of 15 July 2016, the author was on holiday in the UK, watching TV in a hotel room, when the events of that day began to unfold during which over 300 people were killed and more than 2000 were injured. Those who claimed responsibility for the events at least portrayed themselves as a faction from within the Armed Forces called the Peace at Home Council. As reasons for their actions they cited the erosion of secularism, the elimination of democratic rule, disregard for human rights and Turkey’s loss of international credibility. In terms of what actually took place much is not clear, and it is not the purpose of this book to arrive at an ultimate adjudication on this. For diverse perspectives one can consult the Intercultural Dialogue Platform’s (2016) report and/or Yavuz and Bayram Balcı’s edited collection of 2018, together with Greg Barton’s (2017) piece on “What on Earth Has Gone So Wrong in Turkey” which, together with some other sources, are briefly (but more extensively than here) discussed in Weller 2022, Sect. 2.8.

What is clear is that no sooner had the events of 15 July taken place than President Erdoğan very quickly appeared on television and in a way which, given the environment, could not credibly be identified with any kind of evidential certainty, charged Gülen and Hizmet with being behind what had happened. Gülen and those around him denied thisFootnote 7 and called for an international investigation. Some both within and outside Hizmet have even raised the question of whether the events of 15 July might even have been a “self-coup” initiated by Erdoğan to ensure his grip on power (Alliance for Shared Values 2019). Certainly, in comparison with a classical militarycoup, the facts of what actually happened inevitably lead to questions about it such as those posed by Norwegian investigative journalist Jørgen Lorentzen (2019) in his documentary film, A Gift from God?, picking up in its title on Erdoğan’s claim that the events provided him with “a God-given opportunity”.

Lorentzen’s documentary investigation, among other things, highlights that the troops who appeared on the bridge over the Bosphorus in Istanbul, and who were at the symbolic heart of what happened that night, were barely trained cadets who did not seem to have any clear idea of what they were doing there, rather than being the kind of elite force one would expect to be in place in any serious militarycoup attempt. However one might evaluate this, what is clear is that in the wake of this self-proclaimed “God-given opportunity” Erdoğan set about following through on the “cleansing” of society that he had previously threatened—a word with frighteningly inflammatory resonances even if one were to accept there might be any truth in the accusations of Hizmet involvement.

In relation to various international evaluations of what took place, in March 2017 the UK House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee (2017), informed by evidence from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, noted that:

While some of the individuals involved in the coup may have been Gülenists, given the large number of Gülenist supporters and organizations in Turkey, it does not necessarily follow that the Gülenists were responsible for the coup or that their leadership directed the coup. (p. 38)

The possibility that some individuals, including in the military, may have found Gülen and Hizmet attractive and might also have been involved in the events of 15 July 2016 is one that is acknowledged by some within Hizmet, including among some of the interviewees for the research project underlying this book and its complementary volume (Weller 2022, Sect. 2.8). But this is, of course, not at all the same thing as the event having been masterminded by Gülen, and/or Hizmet acting as a tightly organised subversive movement aiming for political power. The credibility of such a judgement would be dependent on a prior evaluation of Hizmet as being a highly structured cell organisation, rather than a much more diffuse network composed both of highly committed individuals, along with many people who had simply had personal connections with one or more Hizmet institutions and/or had been inspired by what they had read of Gülen’s books or heard sermons preached by him either in person and/or through other media.

Indeed, even in relation to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s claim that some Gülenist individuals may have been involved, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2017) itself noted that “the FCO seems unable to cite much evidence to prove that it is true”. Overall, the Committee summarised that “the Turkish government’s account of the Gülenists and of the coup … is not substantiated by hard, publicly available evidence” while, as in the style of Parliamentary reports, also saying it is “as yet uncontradicted by the same standard” (p. 3). In relation to the Turkish government’s description of those associated with Hizmet as “terrorists” and the possibility of Hizmet being added to the list of proscribed terrorist organisations in the UK, the Committee noted that “The FCO told us that it did not have evidence to justify the designation of the Gülenists as a terrorist organisation by the UK, and we agree with this assessment” (p. 36).

On the level of the EU, the European Commission publishes a Turkey report in relation to Turkey’s accession status, following which the European Parliament also does its own brief report. In relation to the Commission’s report HE1 says that “the Hizmet name was mentioned a lot of times objectively” while, in relation to the Parliament’s report, although the rapporteurs were open to comments on the draft, the source said that “We asked for some annexes to the report”. In response to that HE1 underlines that “All our proposals were accepted by the shadow rapporteurs and the MEPs but there is a negotiation process and the term ‘Hizmet movement’ was eliminated from the European Parliament report”. Thus, in the end, the European Parliament report does not refer specifically to Hizmet but mentions in more general terms the number of victims and of people who lost their jobs. Of course, Turkish government officials such as Permanent Delegation of Turkey to the European Union also play an active role on the negotiation procedure and in relation to the Rapporteur “when we asked why the definition was removed we didn’t get any clear answer from her”.

In the same month, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Bruno Kahl (2017), the head of Germany’s intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtungsdienst (BND), expressed the evaluation that “The coup attempt was not initiated by the government. Before July 15 the government had already started a big purge so parts of the military thought they should do a coup quickly before it hit them too” while in relation to Turkey’s charge that Fethullah Gülen was behind the coup, “Turkey tried to convince us of that at every level. But so far they have not succeeded”. With regard to the Hizmet movement, Kahl described it as “a civilian association that aims to provide further religious and seculareducation”.

In relation to the defining of Hizmet as terrorist, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights’ (2016) Memorandum on the Human Rights Implications of the Measures Taken Under the State of Emergency in Turkey has questioned the legal validity of the terrorist definition even in Turkey itself: “Furthermore, it [‘FETÖ’] has not yet been recognised as a terrorist organization in a final judgment of the Turkish Court of Cassation which, according to the Turkish authorities, is a crucial legal act in the Turkish legal system when it comes to the designation of an organisation as terrorist” (para 20).

However, what ensued was the final turning of the screw in the dismantling of Hizmet in Turkey. In the light of this it could credibly be argued that whatever actually happened in, or was behind July 2016, what might be called a “judicial coup” took place through what happened in the following days, with the introduction of emergency rule that suspended many human rights protections that, even within an imperfect legal system had previously existed, led to abuses such as babies being imprisoned along with their mothers in a way that Turkish law itself, in normal times, would not allow. This state of emergency then became “normalised” as a dehumanising thing, not only in relation to Hizmet, but also in relation to many other groups and people including journalists; people from Kurdish background; Alevis; secularists and many others who have nothing to do with Gülen, including some who have been critical of him and of Hizmet.

In the mass arrests that followed, many thousands of soldiers, judges and teachers—as well as of ordinary people outside of the professions—were detained based on claims about their connections with Gülen and Hizmet. What this in practice meant for many ordinary people is explained in vividly personal terms by some asylum-seekers interviewed for this book (see Sect. 4.5) and in its complementary volume (Weller 2022, Sect. 5.1). In very human stories they explain how, suddenly, they found themselves cut off from their previous lives, either literally in terms of imprisonment, or else through being dismissed from employment and then economically and socially isolated in a kind of Kafkaesque experience in which, at every turn, they were blocked from finding a means of existence independent of reliance on family and/or friends. More recently, aspects of this overall situation were eased for other groups, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic when many criminals were released from Turkish prisons because of concerns about the spread of infection, but prisoners associated with Hizmet were generally speaking still kept in jail. More recently, the Turkish government has tried to paint a picture of “normalisation”, in relation to which Abdulkerim (known as Kerim) Balcı (see Acknowledgements) says:

To a certain extent there is an attempt of “normalisation” with regards to the left wing opposition; less with regards to the Kurdish opposition; but when it comes to the Gülenists, there is no change in the policy, and in fact only yesterday there was a mass campaign of arrests on duty police officers. So, it is continuing, and it will continue on. I don’t see anything changing in the short or long run.

This is, says Balcı, because “Erdoğan managed to demonise members of this movement, not only his supporters, but the opposition groups also believe this”. But whatever view is taken of July 2016, what followed has been of massively damaging significance for Hizmet in its original homeland of Turkey. As a consequence, while prior to that Hizmet could already be found in most regions of the world, the events of July 2016 and their aftermath mean that one can truly refer to a pivotal time of what this book calls the “de-centring” of Hizmet from Turkey. A part of that “de-centring” is that its previous presence in Europe has been supplemented by the European destination of many Hizmet asylum-seekers and others who have fled Turkey in search of a more secure environment for themselves and their families.

5 Hizmet Trauma in Turkey and Europe

In terms of the inherited base of Hizmet in at least the western part of Europe, Yükleyen and Tunagür noted that, at the time of their writing, what they called Hizmet’s “activists” were “a mix of lower and middle-class, composed mainly of working-class, mid-size business owners, and students” (2013, p. 224). As reflected in many of the country summaries in the last chapter, Yükleyen and Tunagür also pointed out that, of the long-standing Hizmet people in Europe, as well as those who made direct connection with Gülen’s teaching there were some who came out of Diyanet mosques where they had been frustrated at the lack of opportunity for activism, while others came from nationalist backgrounds where they had become unhappy with internal splits and conflicts (2013, p. 230). The events of July 2016 meant that there was now also another and different grouping layer within Hizmet in Europe, composed of “new arrivals”. This, and the effect of it upon Hizmet people and organisations that were already within the various European countries, has brought new challenges and opportunities affecting both the composition and the balance of Hizmet activities and has also done so differentially across various European countries.

The “new arrivals”—whether they took whatever opportunity they could to exit from Turkey as people of independent resources and/or eventually needed to leave as asylum-seekers and refugees—found themselves suddenly uprooted and in a different country where it takes time, both to come to terms with the trauma of what happened in Turkey itself and to orientate oneself to the new environment of the host country. It is therefore hard to over-emphasise the multiple levels of trauma experienced in the wake of July 2016.

This was at its starkest for those coming from Turkey as asylum-seekers. As explained by the female Hizmet asylum-seeker AS4, “Nobody supported us in Turkey. Our neighbours and friends, they know us for years. But they changed their minds in one night”. Or, as her husband, AS3 (see Acknowledgements) suggested in partial qualification of that “It might not have been in that one night, but in a period”. He went on to describe the distress of this as follows: “We are trying to find the reason about these people, because last week they know us, they like so much, they are coming over to us, we are going there. We are in very good relationships. But sometimes people, they like still, but they don’t say, OK you are a good person. They don’t call us anything”. As added to by his wife: “Some friends of ours, for example, they are all working for the government so they are afraid of this. They can’t come to our houses because thought if I come to visit them, I can lose my job again”.

Escaping from the country has had a particularly harsh effect on children because, as AS4 says, “Nowadays we can’t go back to Turkey because we are ‘wanted’ together. The police came to our houses to take us – first me and then him. They came to our houses and checked our houses” searching for evidence. Of this time, she explains, “my little child was younger than two years old. So, I ran because I didn’t trust law system at this time, because pregnant women and all of us were in jails. So, I ran, and we ultimately ran. So, we can’t go back nowadays”. At the same time this asylum-seeker couple saw themselves as fortunate to be in Switzerland since, as AS4 put it:

We were lucky, because our parents supported us. Some of friends they didn’t have this support from their parents. We are lucky because of this. For example, when we were coming here and going to Evros River, for example, I thought my Dad would say, “No you can’t go, it’s very dangerous”. But he thought, and he said “No life for you here now, so go” [cries…].

In summary she says that “Turkey is a country of fear now. For example, when we are talking to our parents there, they are afraid still. We can’t talk … comfortably … Because we are afraid too”. In many ways this was all ironic because, as her husband explained, “In Turkey, even us, we are state loving people – in our background it is so important. But maybe with our history lessons, and in our teaching, that state is so important. The state, the government I mean, doesn’t do wrong. People do wrong. That is our background”.

Reflecting on all this politically, as AS2 (see Acknowledgements) put it, “It was because of the lack of education and not questioning beyond what is seen. Especially when someone in religion powerful, or in politics powerful, in government very powerful says something, most of the people in Asia, or in Turkey also, believe that and don’t examine that”. At the same time, those within Hizmet who have suffered such trauma also try to make sense of that not only in relation to socio-political reflection and analysis, but also in the light of faith. Therefore, as another of the Hizmet-related asylum-seekers from Turkey in Switzerland put it, reflecting on it theologically:

I am a believer and believe in God. And, of course, I believe he is testing us, I believe. And this is not the real life, this is just a place to change into another, eternal life. And I do my best here to please my God and my friends, and the whole humanity, actually. This is what we learned from Mr. Fethullah Gülen. I do my best as a human being and look positively for the future. Of course, some things happen bad in the life, but this is the life, it is not just a straight line. We will see together, all the friends, what will happen in the future.

Nevertheless, not all asylum-seekers are able to interpretively frame and come to terms with their experience in such a way. Summarising what, in practical terms, their trauma can mean for asylum-seekers in the Netherlands, Alasag notes that:

Some people they are so much traumatised that when they come to Holland and they are in the camp, they don’t want to engage with anybody. They don’t speak and we don’t know what they all went through. So, it’s difficult to know these people because they don’t contact us, we don’t know of their existence. But we know this from other asylum-seekers who say that they saw some people come into the camps and they think they are from Gülen movement, but they don’t talk with anyone etc. So, this is our guess – that they are so much traumatised they don’t want to engage with anybody for now.

In the UK, based on the numbers of those needing legal aid, Balcı suggests that “It’s about one thousand families that managed to come to the UK and apply for asylum”. At the time of the interview (7.8.2019), Balcı’s own case was still pending as the longest-standing case that had been going on for over two years. It has now been decided in his favour, in relation to which, however, he also said (referring to the attempt made by the Turkish Government to extradite the British-Turkish dual national Özcan Keleş on which see more at the end of this section) that “Most probably, just like Özcan’s case, I will have an extradition request waiting out there”. At the time of the interview conducted with him, Balcı says, “Up until now we have had about twenty cases of refusals. Half of the cases are not yet answered. So, this doesn’t mean nine hundred acceptances – half of them are continuing”.

In the UK, most Hizmet asylum-seekers have been based in London, although Balcı also comments that “to a certain extent, the Home Office is helping through dispersing people”. Because of this, Hizmet has now developed a presence in Glasgow in Scotland and in Cardiff in Wales, in both of which cities there had never previously been a Hizmet presence. Also within England, Balcı estimates that there are now more than thirty Hizmet families in a place like Ipswich which previously, as he put it, “never existed in our maps, mental maps”. Overall, Balcı says that:

When it comes to the court houses, we have had only two cases of complete failure where we are 100% sure that our friend is a friend, a member of the movement, and is at risk back in Turkey, but still we didn’t manage to convince the court. In one case the court didn’t believe they are Gülenist. In one case, it was a former army cadet – they didn’t believe that the guy was in great danger. They said you are very low profile and so on.

In relation to Spain, Nazari says of asylum-seekers in general, including those from Hizmet, that “Spain is generously accepting them”, although “the processes are very slow compared to Belgium, Germany and so on”. Therefore, many people have been waiting for over two years for a decision. But at the same time “Spain is like giving them a place to live, money to eat – its OK”. Naziri also commented that “Spain’s system is good for me because they are not all put in one place in one city”. As a by-product, Naziri notes that, whereas prior to 2016 Hizmet people had been concentrated in only three Spanish cities, they can now be found in thirty-three, which he evaluates positively, commenting that “living in different cities is avoiding the natural formation of a ghetto”. Of their experience of Spain, Naziri says:

Yeah, I would argue that it is an open society and many Turks talking about various countries love it, like it, and most of them that I saw, they are very thankful that they are in Spain. There could be other opportunities, like in Germany and other countries where economically they are better. Some of them – you know the Dublin process – came from the Dublin process into Spain and they say, “Well, thank God we are here in Spain, thank God it didn’t function” – I heard it from some of them.

At the same time “there are some difficulties: the economic question is important”. Nevertheless, in contrast to the situation in a lot of other European countries “I would say that most of them now found some kind of work, because even if you don’t get your status you are permitted to work after six months”. Thus, Naziri says that “I see that there is like a desire of starting from the beginning and starting a new life” while noting that there also “some cases that are really not happy with the slow process of not giving them the status. So, they don’t know whether they will be given or not and some of them are, you know, like small size entrepreneurs, businessmen, so they don’t know whether to invest or not”. Therefore, Naziri’s overall reflection is that “I think it’s a process now, a process of learning the language; getting to know the culture of Spain, OK; and the process of loving it”.

In Switzerland, the asylum system operates on a Federal basis, but with offices in the Cantons. So, as Özgü explains it, when asking for asylum one goes to one “one of six centres where you can apply”. Overall, Özgü comments that since 2019 “within three or four months the immigration office says if you can stay or not” but also that “The asylum-seekers in the French and Italian speaking areas they get recognised faster than the people in the German-speaking areas”.

In relation to France, Erkinbekov says that “In France we have the new asylum-seekers who came from Turkey and there are a lot of Hizmet sympathisers in African and in other countries as a teacher”. As with those in other European countries “it is a fact that some of them have a very big trauma: some who were in prison for a minimum of one and maximum of two or three years. And they came out of prison and had children who were separated from their parents”. However, rather than developing as a separate group, Erkinbekov comments that the newly developed French General Assembly of Hizmet supporters (noted in Sect. 3.7) is:

Working on a survey to get their opinion and approaches from all over France. And we are trying to make some, I’ll say, new organizations listening to their opinions, including the critics of the Hizmet supporters. So, now the newcomers of the Hizmet movement, the asylum-seekers, they are trying to integrate in the French society, they are learning French and also they are supporting actions of Hizmet.

But the trauma of July 2016 also extends to many Hizmet people who had been already living and working in Europe. As an example, interviewee Selma Ablak,Footnote 8 from the Netherlands (see Acknowledgements), said of the Hizmet women’s organisation in that country that “we had five Board members in Rosarium and they all quit” from such a role although they are “still involved with the movement”. As explained by Ablak, this was “Because we had the ‘click Turks’, Dutch Turks who were texting the Turkish consulate that ‘Those people are involved with Hizmet’. Because of this they were frightened of being followed or...” Underlying this “they were frightened about the Turkish Dutch people and the Turkish authorities in Turkey, because of their relatives, because of their belongings in Turkey, they were afraid”. As a consequence of this, in terms of Hizmet public representatives, in the Netherlands, they have only “a handful of persons” who are “standing in the front and are trying to represent the movement in the Netherlands”. As one of those, Ablak put herself in the firing line, testifying that, especially at the beginning of this period people texted her saying that they had given her name to the Turkish authorities:

Someone threatened me with killing me and saying that I needed to be raped, awful, awful things. So, I had a time in which I was afraid to go outside. But I was lucky because, until 2015 I lived … near Rotterdam. And then in May 2015, I got moved to Amsterdam. So, we moved to another city and nobody knew me here. And that was a relief.

Nevertheless, Ablak states that:

Each time when I went on television or the radio or in the newspapers there were people getting angry and saying awful things, and most of the time because I said clearly I won’t go back, this is who I am, and this is what I stand for, and nothing will change that. And then because they can’t reach me they got my mother. So – ‘Let your daughter keep silent, otherwise things will happen.’

At that time, Ablak explained that her mother was still living in Rotterdam and that “when I visited her, people were just angry with me and because of me they were also angry to mother and they yelled at her and they hit her. So, she had to move from where she lived in the city from her first moments in the Netherlands for almost forty years”. This was, she says, “because of those people who were seeing her as the mother of a terrorist”. Two years prior to her interview (which was conducted in August 2019) Ablak’s house was broken into and of which she explained that “They didn’t steal anything except a beamer and laptops and that kind of thing. They didn’t touch the money or any other valuable things. So, it wasn’t just a ‘normal’ break in” with regard to which she commented that “Those are suspicious things. We don’t know for sure what it was”. In addition, she explained that although “My son had nothing to do with Hizmet”, he also experienced “being yelled at and shouted at school” and being called “a terrorist, as the son of a terrorist. So, we are still trying to get over it”.

In France, Erkinbekov explained that although “the people who were in dialogue with us, some of them they were very supportive to us” quite a number of long-standing Hizmet people felt threatened by the likely reporting of their names to the Turkish embassy—of which Erkinbekov noted that “we heard that every month they renew the list” and that opponents of Hizmet also “shared the address of Hizmet movement volunteers in the media, saying I know he is in Hizmet, and here is his address”. There were also quite widespread incidents of violence against property in which what Erkinbekov identified as being effectively some militia arms of the Turkish government within the diaspora in France “attacked our centres which were known as Hizmet centres in France”. For example, in a downtown area in the city of Sens, a Hizmet centre was burned down. In Beziers, in the south of France “they tried to burn down, but the neighbours called the police and the firefighters”. In Moulhouse, their centre “was just stoned and hammered, and the person who was trying to break in with a hammer was caught on the camera, so he was in court and sentenced including a certain amount of money to compensate”. And there were also incidents in relation to centres in Valence and in Loos, near the German border where there was also “a gunshot”.

Overall, concerning the period immediately following July 2016, Erkinbekov summarised that “What we have lived through in France in that period in 2016, I think – the shock that we had – I think our friends in the other countries in Europe didn’t have as much pressure as we had in France, I think”. And because of what happened, there was a very big pressure on Hizmet volunteers and sympathisers throughout France. Since the majority of them have familial origins in Turkey, as Erkinbekov put it, “They said, so if they do such harm in France, we couldn’t imagine what they could do in Turkey”. As a result of this “most of them they decided not to show up publicly and they decided to retire from the official lists of our associations” with the impact of this being that “it stopped some of our activities and it was, I think, at that time very difficult”. However, by the time of the interview he was saying, “And now we get over this … So, we have started new projects and we started new actions”.

By some contrast, in Switzerland, Özgü reported that they had not really had any community-level threats. Rather, “We just had AKP trolls in the internet who were trying to do defamation, but not more than that. We didn’t have any blackmailings or things like that”.

As well as in relation to Hizmet individuals, the events of July 2016 also had a significant effect on a number of existing Hizmet organisations in Europe. Thus in Italy, the anonymous Hizmet interviewee HE2 explained that, in contrast with the situation in many other European countries, the Istituto Tevere was not physically attacked, although a small centre close to the Retreat Centre in Italy was attacked:

And the first night of 15-16 July 2016, what happened in Italy could be a very good indication about the truth of the coup d’etat. Nobody knew what was happening, you know, in Italy it was midnight and a gang of young Turkish guys came and tried to set fire to this place. It was shocking. Even the guys within the building, there were some students, they couldn’t understand what was going on actually. But it is sure, they knew and he prepared his organization to confront. Because then the Italian security forces found that these guys were motivated by imam of the Turkish mosque, that’s it. The General Consul came from Milan. We don’t know really what happened. He visited the police and these sort of guys. That happened, although in Italy people got some phone calls, horrible phone call, uneducated guys watching every day and saying, “You are a traitor” and then all sorts of offensive words.

In Spain, many of the European mobility programmes in which Hizmet had participated have finished because the Turkish government determines the conditions for different NGOs and organisations in Turkey in relation to entering into partnerships with various foreign Associations and organisations, including the need for approval by the Turkish embassy in the country concerned, “So this, yeah, it impacts you, yeah”.

In Belgium, Toğuşlu explained with regard to the Gülen Chair in Leuven University that:

When the first rift took place between the Gülen movement and the AKP government in Turkey in 2014 (it had already started before the coup attempt), there were at that time some discussions, discussions especially coming from Turkey to make a pressure to shut down the Chair, especially because the name of the Chair indicates directly, and is supported by the movement. So, within the University also they discussed whether they wanted to continue because in 2015 we started with the Chair again for the second term and they didn’t care what the state of Turkey said about the movement or about the Chair. But still with different channels – like the Turkish Embassy, like Diyanet, like the Maarif Foundation (the Foundation directly from the President of the Republic of Turkey).

And especially following the events of July 2016, Toğuşlu said of them that:

I heard that they wanted also to establish an Islamic Chair at the University. And I heard it said that, not directly, but that they also wanted the closure of the Chair. So, after the coup attempt, they pressed too much and portrayed Leuven University also as a terrorist organization. It was a little bit ridiculous, funny, as a decision coming from Turkey because the Leuven University had a Chair of this kind that they put Leuven University in the list of terrorist organizations. It was funny, but then they removed that.

Then the Turkish authorities threatened that they will not recognise the diplomas of the Turkish students who graduate from the university, in the light of which “there were some discussions between us, the Dean, the Vice-Directors and the Director. But then they removed again the threat and Turkey accepted again Leuven University’s Diploma, and they understood that such a kind of intimidation would never work”. But Toğuşlu also explained that some of the university’s students of Turkish origin became nervous and conflicted about applying to and being interviewed for Gülen Chair awards such that, even if they were offered anonymity (which, of course, can never be completely guaranteed), “I had two or three students who wanted to take my course and they approached me and said, ‘Hey Professor, I want to really do this and we don’t have such a kind of problem with you, but in many cases we will return back to Turkey and we don’t want trouble’ ”. Also, institutionally he explained that “it created some thoughts also in the University about whether they want to continue … and so they are questioning whether they want this in that sense or not. In that sense, OK, the pressure sometimes coming from Turkey, with different channels, with embassies, with Foreign Affairs, creates a problem within the Leuven community”.

Toğuşlu also highlighted the personal and professional cost involved in being associated with Hizmet even when having citizenship of an EU or similar country by explaining that “I cannot go to any academic symposium or conference if it takes place not only in Turkey, but outside Europe. In Africa I also got some invitations, but I am not going because I am not sure what will happen even though I have a Belgian citizenship”. As in the earlier briefly mentioned instance of Keleş in the UK, this underlines that, ironically, one’s status as a dual national is in many ways more vulnerable than that as an asylum-seeker from Turkey.

6 Three-Layered Hizmet: Challenges and Opportunities

From testimonies such as those in the previous section, one can see that in at least a number of European countries, Hizmet needs to be understood as a “three-layered” phenomenon, with the first “layer” composed of original migrants to Europe; the second “layer” of the second and third generations who grew up and have been educated in Europe; and the third “layer” of asylum-seekers and those who managed to get out of Turkey using such mechanisms as the Ankara Agreement for Turkish businesspeople before they were forced to become asylum-seekers. Where this “three-layered” Hizmet exists, it is both a challenge and an opportunity for all involved.

With regard to Belgium, HE1 gave an example of how issues arising from the events of July 2016 had impacted upon the normal work of the Intercultural Platform in that, the days before HE1 was interviewed, the Platform heard of a couple and four girls who faced being abducted from Malaysia in relation to which the Platform felt it important to get involved. In this context they “called the Malaysian Department of the European Commission, and also we sent letters to the Malaysian Mission in Brussels”. However, on the day of the interview it was learned that the family had been abducted to Turkey and that while the wife and girls had been released, the husband/father remained in prison. The anonymous Hizmet interviewee, HE1, says that:

So with these things we try to help, but when you see at the end you weren’t successful to protect these people, this process has a psychological effect … We try to do something, but one day later you hear the guy was extradited and we don’t know in which prison he is now. It has a big effect … that’s why I think a special team of people dealing with human rights violations, and other people work on their jobs, otherwise there are enough traumatised people in Hizmet right now, and more traumatised people will come from Turkey. So, I think we should try to keep the “normal” ones “normal” or less traumatised, I should say.

In terms of Hizmet asylum-seekers themselves, HE3 (see Acknowledgements) from the Netherlands claimed that “In the Netherlands, the number of people who came from Turkey after the coup is high – let me say if the movement has here, around a thousand people, and a thousand people came after the coup”. With regard to these, Alasag explains that the majority of the refugee camps are in rural areas in Holland, but that the concentration of numbers is in that they call the Randstad—meaning Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrecht. Alasag also notes that “in some places, when there are too many asylum-seekers and just a few people to help them, sometimes the pressure is just too big. Because people want to help them, but it’s too much sometimes”. This is partly because, as he explained it, “After the coup we became a little smaller, the amount has been decreasing for some time”. And there are considerable practical challenges because, as HE3 pointed out, “In Holland there is a policy for asylum-seekers (not only for Turkish, but for all of them): this policy’s name is Versobering. Versobering means making things basic, not cosy, not homely” and what this means in practice is that, for example, “they can put a family with two daughters in a room with two refugees, young boys from Syria, in the same room, basic, answering the basic need of you which is accommodation. But it’s not cosy, it’s not homely. It’s even not friendly”. Because of this there are real needs for support and, therefore, as Ablak explains:

The first thing is getting them mentally into a healthy position and then starting to learn the Dutch language, and then in the meantime helping them to integrate, helping them to build a normal life again. So, when they get their status, they get a home – just the main things, having furniture etc. So, we have teams of volunteers helping them with their homes. And then the paperwork. So, we are No. 1 for mailings with the government. That’s difficult. Personally, I have some three or four families who I try to mentor with their paperwork. So, if they get a letter they send me a Whatsapp message, so I can help them out with that. And, yeah, so everything is possible to teach them to build a new life.

They also try “to get them out of the camps and to invite them to our homes for a weekend. For example, my family and I went for a vacation in Croatia. So, our house was empty for two to three weeks and we invited a family from a refugee centre – ‘here are the keys, just use it as your own house’ ”. At the same time, Alasag has also highlighted that:

Asylum-seekers are all helping each other. And the refugees founded a foundation to help all these asylum-seekers and they have given them Dutch courses, books, apps. they are helping those who are new in Holland. I think they are helping because they are motivated, because they want to contribute. The connection is thus good here, but not for everybody as I explained.

Alasag’s overall evaluation of this is that these developments will therefore ultimately be good for the future of Hizmet in the Netherlands, since “The engagements and contribution and being a part of the Hizmet will be eventually more. The more they learn the Dutch language, the more the chance they’ll contribute in some way”. At the same time, of course “Just being willing to do this is not enough. These are highly educated people, so when they want to contribute they want to contribute on a good level, just as they did in Turkey, but sometimes the language is a barrier”.

In the meantime, there are real tensions. Thus, as HE3 notes in relation to the asylum-seekers, “This is a big dynamic now, and there are some conflicts in the sense that these people from Turkey, the new people, have another orientation, and they are traumatised and they have other priorities, and then there are the people who were born here and they have other ambitions and other things, and they think in another way”. Nevertheless, Alasag notes that “The motivation is very big. So, I think in a couple of years, the children will learn Dutch in half a year or a year’s time and many will go to universities soon. So, after a couple of years the parents and the children will be integrated, and I think the Hizmet here will grow very fast after that”. In addition, HE3 from the Netherlands notes that, alongside asylum-seekers from Turkey, there are also “expats” coming:

Some of them came to Holland and they found good jobs and they became expats. So, its not only refugees, you know, because the education level is high, some of them – even though they came maybe to seek asylum, they would contact with a company and they would find a good job – so instead of seeking asylum they became expats.

Taken in the round, Ablak’s assessment of the “third layer” is that “They are doing better than the people from the Hizmet movement who came before the coup. So, they are getting involved in the society much faster than the people who came via regular migration or who are born here, for example”.

In relation to the newcomers to Belgium, in terms of the future Tascioglu sees this as positive in the light of the fact of over the years there always having been a shortage of resources and of people: “So, these newcomers are actually a new energy for the organizations. But, of course, one needs time to get adapted to Belgium”. But as helpful to this process, he thought that around 90 per cent of asylum-seekers were granted asylum in Belgium.

With regard to Germany, Karakoyun observed in relation to what he called the “different approaches to Hizmet” as between people in Turkey and people in Germany, in relation to which, “in my opinion, this is the main challenge for Hizmet in Germany at the moment”:

There are three groups that are coming together now. On the one hand, the first people that came to Germany fifteen or twenty years ago with the idea of Hizmet were very much Turkey socialized but slowly becoming something like ‘German’. Then, the second group, children being born here, socialized here, and knowing Hizmet here, combining it with what they learned at school, in university, and in the German majority society. And the third group consists of people who are coming to Germany now, during the last three years. So, these three groups come together now, and you can’t imagine how different they are. So, there are now three big groups of people that, yeah, now come together and Hizmet has to overcome this challenge.

However, it should also be noted that this more pronounced “three-layering” of Hizmet is not completely uniform across all of Europe. Thus, in some contrast to countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, in relation to Italy, HE2 explains:

We don’t have any of these clear distinctions, because immigration to Italy, I mean with the whole immigration, Muslim immigration, Turkish immigration, Hizmet immigration, people who were born and raised here are still very young. So, we don’t have this category of that many who have grown up here.

In terms of Hizmet refugees, while “people started coming” generally speaking, “usually this was not the destination people from Turkey were opting for. They didn’t know Italian, and Italy was seen not as a country for immigrants, maybe”. In relation to Spain—which was also not a prior prime focus for Turkish migration—the new arrivals are actually the majority. As in other European countries, these new arrivals come with their own traumas and their own very immediate needs; one can also see that in terms of the medium- to longer-term future trajectories of Hizmet in Europe these new arrivals have brought new potential and, in some contexts, already a new refocusing of old activities. Thus, in Spain, Naziri explains that from among these new asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants, “the majority of them are voluntary members of Casa Turca” and “We have organized some activities already with them, so it’s like a good opportunity, like, fresh blood”, albeit he then goes on to correct himself to note that “And when I say ‘we’ are, it’s ‘they’ are organising, because ‘they’ have become ‘we’. They are organising it, like, it’s not like we and then they came”.

In Switzerland, in contrast to Germany and the Netherlands where, by comparison, Özgü says, “there are thousands of asylum-seekers” from Hizmet. “In Switzerland we have just not more than six hundred or seven hundred asylum-seekers” in relation to which he comments that “that is good for us, as we can handle them and there is not a need for a structure for new asylum-seekers in Switzerland. It’s an integrated part of hizmet Switzerland – for us that’s very important”. Overall, the work with asylum-seekers brings challenges and, from his legal background and professional role, as well as personally and pro bono, Özgü is very involved in this. He is active in Hizmet’s own Swiss association for this, but also for people from other countries. Hence, he explains that:

When I was a student I was also active in other associations like Amnesty International and Sans-Papier Anlaufstelle – that’s a law association for people who don’t have any permission in the country, and I was also active in an association for the people who get welfare benefits. So that’s why my work as a lawyer is not just hizmet, I have also other work. And for most of them I don’t do it professionally, I just help the people.

Özgü also comments that, as among those who had previously come from Turkey with the thinking that they could change everything about Hizmet in Switzerland, “among the asylum-seekers are also those people they think they will change everything, they will be very active in hizmet. Now they have time, they have enough time to be active, because they don’t have to go to work, but they just go to the German courses for half of the day”. At the same time, RO has observed that once these people have begun to work in the Swiss society, “they have no more time for Hizmet and they just come one or two days for Hizmet. And all the people who say we will change all these things just say that because they have enough time now”.

As the asylum-seeker, AS1 puts it:

We just concentrate on what was and what were our principles and what this good man, sir, Gülen, how to you call it, because he gave us as a goal for the life. This is our aim in this life. And we shall remember them and shall continue in our private life in this new society in Switzerland. Otherwise, psychologically, it is also not acceptable for the other people, “Do you know what happened to me in Turkey, blah, blah…” – all the negative things, and no-one wants to hear psychologically the negative things. Explain the good things, and then if they know you, accept you, and see you are a good person, after that they can ask you, “Ok, but why are you here”? – sometimes later when they want to connect with you. Then you can say what has happened.

As well as referencing the pragmatic human psychology in this, AS1 also cites religious exemplars for taking such an approach:

I don’t believe, for example, that our Prophet Muhammad said to the people in Medina “Do you know what happened to me in Mecca?” Or that Jesus Christ said to the people, “Do you know what happened to me or the other Prophets, may God be with them”, or others that followed them said, “Do you know what happened to me? Do you know that one?”

From an asylum-seeker’s perspective, as AS4 (see Acknowledgements) put it:

So, we have to use this country. We love this country! It’s OK. But it’s difficult to come here as a refugee because we were living as normal people in Turkey with good conditions: we had a car, we had houses, and we could give our children to private schools, for example. We had money. But now, we are refugees. So it’s difficult to use this condition. But we have to do it, and we want to learn German and we would like to do this and work again here because we are not used to having money without working ourselves. We want to work and earn our money ourselves. It’s better for us. It’s normal for us … We don’t like this. But it will take a long time, perhaps, we don’t know … it looks like that. But we have to stand strong.

This is not to say there are not a lot of questions, in relation to which AS1 says: “It is a hard time of life. Economically it is not good; psychologically we are not good; and this, of course, there is a saying, I like it also too: ‘sufferings build character’. Now, hopefully it is so for me and for all my friends. Now we are building good characters, hopefully”.

Balcı highlights a basic economic difference for the future of Hizmet in countries like the UK and those “like Germany, Netherlands, Denmark to a certain extent, Austria”, which “have a sizeable Hizmet diaspora already, and a sizeable Turkish-speaking diaspora who are not antithetical to Hizmet altogether” even though “those countries also do have quite big AKP support bases”. Indeed, in relation to the start of his own living in exile, Balcı shares that:

I was looking at Germany, only because of practical reasons and I was saying the new centre of Hizmet is going to be Germany, because they have money. They have support bases, there are schools there already. So, they will be to provide for, you know, creating a middle class of Hizmet that will be able to deal with philosophy, art and so on, whereas here we are largely, you know, lower middle class Hizmet people. But it is changing, as far as I can see, the United Kingdom is becoming a new hub.

In the UKBalcı says that there is only “a small window of opportunity for the newcomers” in which, in Balcı’s view, “the newcomers are largely going to be accepted not because of their previous roles in Hizmet, but because of their knowledge of religion, knowledge of Religious Education and so on”, some of the potentialities of which are, as articulated by Balcı, developed further in Sect. 6.2.