1 Changing Contexts

To understand Hizmet in different parts of the world, including in Europe, one needs to pay attention to the dynamic interplay in the development of expressions of Hizmet between the elements arising from its Turkish origins; the changes and developments in Gülen’s understandings and teachings; and the further dynamics in both of these that are related to Hizmet’s need for, and practice in terms of, local adaptations. In addition, this takes place in a wider world in which how Muslims are seen; how Muslims are treated by others by others; as well as how Muslims behave and project themselves.

In Europe, Islam is the largest minority religion and, with that, Muslims of Turkish ethnic and national heritage and origin have a very substantial numerical and political importance. Turkey itself is also of great significance as a Eurasian cultural, political and economic bridge that poses important questions for the future of how Europe might in future see itself and its role in the wider world. Therefore, the trajectories being taken by Hizmet in Europe are of significance not only for Hizmet itself, and of wider religious significance, but are also of wider policy importance.

As a part of the de-centring of Hizmet from Turkey that has followed from the post-July 2016 persecution, imprisonment, asset-stripping and civic deprivation of individuals and organisations associated with Hizmet in Turkey as well as the Turkish Government’s attempts to curtail Hizmet activities in other parts of the world (including some attempts also within Europe), a greater range of self-questioning and at least some degree of self-criticism have begun to emerge within Hizmet. This is, in turn, feeding into a re-assessment by those associated with Hizmet about the future trajectory or trajectories of Hizmet and the implications for it of its centre of gravity now increasingly operating outside the historical inheritance of the Turkish social, religious and political environment. In the case of Europe, this also relates specifically to the opportunities and challenges posed by European western liberal democratic environments. Many of the issues identified and discussed in this chapter are not themselves new, but after July 2016, they are arguably both intensified and accelerated as pivotal issues in what are also now pivotal times for Hizmet.

2 Seen as Terrorists and Challenging Terrorism

Hizmet operates in a European context where underlying Islamophobia has been stoked both since and through 9/11, the 2004 Madrid rail bombings, the 7/72005 attacks on London Transport and later attacks in France, Germany and Austria including by shooting and the weaponised use of vehicles. While similar atrocities have been carried out in the name of Islam in other parts of the world, an aspect of these events that particularly shocked governmental authorities across Europe is that many of the perpetrators did not come externally into Europe but, rather, had either been born in or grown up in European countries, thus giving rise to questions about the presence of violent extremism among European Muslim groups and organisations.

Even prior to the heightening of suspicions arising from the seismic shock of 9/11 and what has followed it, and before the additional impetus given by the concerted efforts of the Turkish authorities to present Hizmet under the guise of an alleged terrorist identity of FETÖ, and as having responsibility for the events of July 2016 in Turkey, in at least some parts of Europe Hizmet has for some time experienced a considerable pressure from those who have portrayed it as being at the least ‘extremist’. Both in Turkey itself and in some European countries Hizmet has long faced accusations of having had a double agenda. While Andrews (2011) has argued that, in Germany, overall Hizmet’s loose organisational structure has seemed to work in its favour, Sunier and Landman (2015) say that “In the Netherlands and Belgium Hizmet is regularly portrayed in the media as an organization with a double agenda and a strong aura of secrecy” (p. 82). In the Netherlands, in particular, from 2008 onwards, there were a succession of investigations into Hizmet. In relation to the original emergence of this, Alasag recalled, “Suddenly there was a TV programme, a news programme, in which some young people, with blacked-out faces, were telling how afraid they were of us etc.” This was a NOVA TV programme with the title Kamermeerderheid eist onderzoek naar Turkse beweging (or, “Parliamentary Majority Demands Investigation into Turkish Movement”).Footnote 1 As a result of this, Alasag said, “We were kind of put down as a terrorist organization, almost”. The impact of this led Hizmet in the Netherlands into considerable self-questioning:

So, we were shocked and we thought what did we do wrong? We didn’t know where it came from. As it was on Dutch TV, we thought is it maybe the Dutch Government that wants something? Did we maybe do something wrong? Or is it an initiative of a group and if so which group? So, we were panicked in 2008.

During this period individuals in the Netherlands who were publicly associated as leading various Hizmet organisations and initiatives began to be individually targeted. Thus, Alasag recalls that the Leefbaar Rotterdam party (in English, Livable Rotterdam), founded in 2001, and widely seen as the Rotterdam expression of Pim Fortuyn List (after Fortuyn was in 2002 removed from his role as leading candidate of the Leefbaar Nederlands party), “put on their website a dossier about Hizmet” (Fähmel 2009) in which “they had written the names of the organizations founded by the Hizmet people, and also the names of the people who were active, accusing us about how dangerous we are etc.” On examining this website, Hizmet people noticed that “about half of the information they put on the website was in Turkish”. And, because of that, “we understood where it came from: that it wasn’t that we had done something wrong in Dutch society, but it was a Turkish leftist, Communist, Kemalist, nationalist, group was initiating this attack” and “almost every year there was a request to make a research about Hizmet”.

In relation to these investigations, Alasag said, “The first one was not public. An academician I know shared with me that the government had approached him and asked him to write a report about the Gülen movement and he said that he wrote only what he knew and it was really positive”. The second was after another NOVA TV news programme, this one entitled Turkse beweging fundamentale sekte? (or, in English “Turkish Movement a Fundamentalist Sect?) which was broadcast on 4 July 2008, following which Alasag noted that “the intelligence service AIVD in Holland said they are not a threat for the Netherlands, and they are not busy with any disturbing activities”. The third was “the Minister who made a research and said that they are not radical and said further that the Intelligence service didn’t think they were not helping the integration”. The fourth was “the municipality of Rotterdam, and they also came and they said we researched them and they are OK, we can keep on funding their initiatives”. And the fifth, “after a couple of years the new Minister responsible for integration said with all these questions and accusations they have to do something like an open enquiry, open research”.

For this research the Dutch Parliament’s House of Representatives appointed Professor Martin van Bruinissen, an anthropologist from Utrecht University with expertise in both Turkey and Islamic groups, with a remit to report on the question of whether and, if so, how far, Hizmet in the Netherlands did or did not promote integration. Alasag says of van Bruinissen’s work that “in the end he wrote a big research document, after making enquiries on every level and talking to hundreds of people”. The outcome of this was that, as summarised by Alasag, van Bruinissen said that “among all the groups, and not only Turkish, this group is the most integrated one and the only issue is that they are not as transparent as you would like”.

Despite this thoroughly conducted and positively concluded open research, a sixth enquiry also eventually took place. This happened, says Alasag, because when the Minister responsible for integration presented van Bruinissen’s report “the right wing and some leftist Members of Parliament who are originally from Turkey … came with other questions, and then another, and then another”. Although the Minister initially responded that those pursuing these matters should not import Turkish ideological issues into the Netherlands “a couple of years later” there was yet another request from a Member of Parliament with Turkish familial origins who had previously been pressing these issues together with some other Members of Parliament, and this led to the sixth enquiry – this time on the question of “if we are forming a parallel society”. Two professors specialising in Turkey and Islam undertook this enquiry and again concluded that what was being charged was not, in fact, the case and that, rather, to the contrary, Hizmet people are well integrated in the Netherlands.

When, following the events of July 2016, formal Parliamentary questions were posed to the Dutch Foreign Minister of the time, A.G. Koenders, concerning the government’s view of the Turkish Government’s position that Hizmet people are terrorists, his answer was: “This is not in line with cabinet policy as the Gülen movement has not been classified as a terrorist organisation by the European Union or the Netherlands. Associated organizations and/or individuals are therefore not considered terrorists”.Footnote 2 By this time, while there continued to be considerable pressure from within the sections of the Turkish community, Alasag noted that, ironically, even Pim Fortuyn’s party argued that Rotterdam and its Mayor should “help people from Hizmet who under pressure of Turkey lost their jobs, had to move to other parts of the cities to flee their own friends and family”, and that it should offer support to “people with psychological trauma, with money if they lost their jobs, or with accommodation, in finding houses in other areas of the town”. In the end, as concluded by Alasag, “They cared for us! And the reason is that they were following us all these years”.

Following July 2016, the charge of having a double agenda and of being an extremist and/or potentially terrorist entity gained new credibility for some, in Europe and beyond, especially through the concerted efforts of the Turkish state, and allied organisations portray it in this way. In some parts of the world this portrayal, when combined either with appeals to solidarity among Muslim majority states, and/or the use of economic leverage, has had significantly negative effects on Hizmet institutions. For example, in Pakistan, with the support and intervention of the Pakistani authorities, the once extensive network of Hizmet schools was taken over by a Turkish-related foundation. In Europe, such discreditation campaigns have been markedly less successful—at least at the level of state authorities. Thus, as noted earlier, the German intelligence service (see Sect. 4.4) is fairly clear on the matter of Hizmet being a religiously inspired civil society movement, stating that while Turkey has continued to try to convince it about Hizmet being a terrorist group, it has not so far done so.

The position in the UK is perhaps not so clear-cut, not least perhaps because the economic upheaval of Brexit means that the UK needs trading friends wherever in the world it can find them. In addition, apart from any other trading relationships, Turkey is an important arms market. Indeed, not only for the UK, but as interviewee HE3 from the Netherlands notes, Turkey is also economically important for the Netherlands too:

Interesting to note that after the coup there is a lot of money that comes from Turkey to Europe. But we see that foreign direct investment – the money Turkey gets from other countries – comes most from the Netherlands in the last three years. Approximately twenty per cent of foreign direct investment in Turkey comes from the Netherlands. There is a good trade relationship between Turkey and the Netherlands. In England, it is not so big, the economic relationship. No country wants to disturb such a mutual economic relationship.

In contrast with these interests, interviewee HE3 notes that “The movement is a small one. It has several thousand supporters in the Netherlands, not members, supporters. It is a small movement. And in the Netherlands, approximately four hundred thousand people with Turkish origin live, and the movement is a small one within that Turkish context” and also that, in the Netherlands as in almost every European country:

There is a group of ‘White Turks’, and especially since the coup in the 1980s they came here, and their children were educated people and they have some positions in the society. And in the Dutch Parliament. There are some people who are linked with these persons of Turkish, Kurdish or some other groups originating from such kinds of ideologies as Kemalists. And some ideological groups in the Dutch government and the Dutch state, they listen also to them. And the discussion, the public debate in Turkey, we see similar discussions also here. They transfer the political atmosphere from Turkey to the Dutch context here, want to judge the movement here because of the coup in Turkey.

The importance of Turkish politics has worked itself out on two levels. At the level of popular and economic pressure, as Alasag said:

Some of the businesspeople lost their business because the Turkish government, asking Turkish people to tell on Hizmet people through a special phone number, and further to boycott the companies run by Hizmet people. People got scared that if they’d engage with Hizmet people they will have issues when they went to Turkey. So, there were lists.

In relation to the question of Gülen and/or Hizmet’s responsibility for the coup attempt, HE3 says that whenever he is asked about Gülen he says, “I don’t know, ask himself, but as far as I know he said he didn’t, but you can interview him”. HE3 then went on to say, “But there are some people, I don’t know, and the intelligence services – I think they know who the people were in Turkey who did the coup, but I don’t think Gülen did it. That would mean tossing the people who followed him to hell. This is in complete contrast to his beliefs”. Indeed, overall, in the light of both its own practical initiatives and all the investigations to which it has been subject, HE3 summarises that “The movement is known by the Dutch state, it is OK. It is a movement and its aims and objectives and activities are well known by the intelligence services, and by the governmental agencies, and there is a good relationship”, and that this is because:

The schools are Dutch schools; the people are Dutch citizens and they have Dutch nationality: they think in a Dutch way, with a Dutch mentality, especially the people who participate in the Dutch society, they do not look at Turkey. But we look at the activities which are done – educational activities, dialogue activities, gatherings to bring people together and these are the things we appreciate here.

As Alasag further developed this, in contrast to the initial reaction of the wider society in some other countries, “when there was the so-called coup, in Holland nothing happened. I feel they trust us. The people said, ‘we know you’”. At the same time, some of the issues faced by Hizmet have nevertheless continued because, as noted by HE3:

“White Turks” who are mostly anti-religious, they think all Muslims are bad and dangerous. This is their standpoint. They say publicly – and I hear and read it in the last weeks – that the movement is a “sect”, and some politicians echo this in the debates about integration in the Dutch Parliament. And then the Parliament members ask the Minister, would you investigate this? And then begins another research for the movement. If a project is successful here, that means that this can also be successful in Germany. In other countries. Furthermore, there are some anti-Muslim groups, who will denounce the movement, it seems that they have job to do that and they use everything, and I can imagine how some such lobby groups and structures work. There are lobby groups, there are ideological structures which are not transparent – not only for the movement, but also for other groups.

One of the consequences of this has been that the latest enquiry in the Netherlands has been focused not on Hizmet alone but the question of how any and all of the Islamic groups – the Diyanet, Millî Görüş and Süleymanli’s and Hizmet movement in the Netherlands—might be controlled by the Turkish government. But ironically, because of the coupAlasag noted that:

It was very clear that whatever they thought about the co-operation or the mixing or becoming one, the anxiety was all gone. And it was not merely on the level of the government but also on the level of the society. So they made a big distinction between what is now the Government, what is Turkey and what is AKP and what is the place of Hizmet of the Hizmet movement in this triangle or whatever.

And this was important because until then “The Dutch government etc were very happy with what the Hizmet movement achieved in Holland but they were kind of afraid that the Hizmet was too much involved in the politics in Turkey and the Hizmet movement here was functioning as the long arm of the Turkish government”. Alasag explained that until July 2016 and its aftermath “they still had question marks” but “For them the happenings with the coup and after that putting people in jail, arresting etc, it made it very clear and they became convinced”.

In relation to the French authorities and media, Erkinbekov commented “That depends on the source they get”. In the media “they said that there are some few questions that have to be answered”. At the same time, Erkinbekov said that “for the events that happened on 15 July we say we don’t have any information about that” and they referred enquirers to the Alliance for Shared Values’ statement.Footnote 3 By contrast with what over the years happened in the Netherlands, in France there never were such systematic and repeated investigations, which Erkinbekov suggested might be because “We stay very small … that’s why, I think”. Specifically in connection with the events of July 2016 Erkinbekov explained that in relation to the representatives of the state with whom they were in contact that “we explained our standpoint and version of the events and it was clear that they were supportive to us”.

In Denmark, Gezen explained that initially the Dialog Forum received a lot of requests for media interviews to which they responded to the best of their ability. However, “early on in Denmark, already within a year the focus was away”. Since then, it has only recurred when something specific has happened in Turkey. Overall, generally speaking, with regard to the Danish media, Gezen commented that:

Very early in Denmark the majority of media outlets and public knew that there was something wrong in relation to the coup and the Erdoğan government. And now the focus is more and more on the populist, the Islamist agenda, and on the undemocratic developments in Turkey. So, the questions are now more related to what will happen in Turkey with these undemocratic movements. The questions to Hizmet participants in relation to the coup are finished. The media is not covering the coup as much as before because for them the focus is Erdoğan – the Hizmet movement is not being blamed. The case is very clear. I have spoken to many of my friends in Hizmet about this and I believe the coup discussion in Denmark is closed and more people believe the coup attempt has been too favourable for Erdoğan.

With regard to Spain, Naziri commented that “I had to give an interview and two days after the coup it was published in one of the important, let’s say, digital newspapers”.Footnote 4 He was also interviewed on radio and TV programmes, but in terms of the level of attention he acknowledged that “It’s not like Germany” in the sense that, because the community of Turkish origins in Spain is not so large, “there is not so much interest about Turkey in general terms in the Spanish media”. Indeed, in summary, Naziri commented that “I think, the Spanish society is quite mature”. Of course, Spain has its own still relatively recent experience of authoritarian government under Franco and Naziri says that many people in Spain who know him and talked with him about these matters were saying in relation to Erdoğan that “this was like organised by him, ‘auto-coup’”.

In relation to Belgium the anonymous interviewee, HE1, said that post-July 2016, “There was a lot of interest in that issue. But I think that after one or two years the interest is not there anymore”. In Switzerland, Özgü says that “the police and other security staff, they are really open to us, because we are not a security issue in Switzerland”. As with France and Spain, Özgü thinks this may also partly be the case because “we don’t have so many Turks here, and AKP people are not so evident”. As in the UK, the Turkish authorities have made some attempts at extradition, but Özgü says of such attempts that “the Swiss state gave them a strong answer, a strong response” informed by the international law principle of “non-refoulement” which applies when there is torture in a country, and in relation to Turkey, Özgü states that “Switzerland says there is torture in your country which is why we don’t send them to you”.

Overall, Hizmet has had to position itself not only in relation to specific charges from the Turkish government, but also in relation to an overall context in which a number of European governments have, since 9/11, as a policy goal, tried to support and promote a “moderate Islam” in order to marginalise by association with terrorism what can be seen as “radical”, “fundamentalist” or “extremist” Islam. Such an approach on the part of the European “powers that be” runs the risk of eliding the condemnation of terror crimes against humanity conducted on religious grounds into the criminalisation, or at least social marginalisation, of religious conservatism and/or radicalism by legitimating simplistic distinctions between “good” (understood as “liberal” or “modernist”) and “bad” or “suspect” (understood as “traditionalist”, “radical” or “fundamentalist”) Muslims and forms of Islam. But because Hizmet has been actively concerned to project a different face of Islam and Muslims in Europe than the one which dominates Western media headlines and much public perception, it can fit into what Caroline Tee calls the construction of a “good Islam” (2018).

In the UK, perhaps surprisingly, Keleş says of 9/11 that it did “not really impact” the Dialogue Society’s work. However, the 7/7 London Transport bombings were different. At that time policy-makers had experienced what the present author (Weller 2009) elsewhere calls the “social policy shock” (pp. 146–207) of suicide bombings having been carried out by young Muslim men who had been brought up in British society and to all intents and purposes appeared to be integrated members of it. Therefore, in the period immediately following that, government and policy-makers were looking for partners from within the Muslim community who would clearly reject not only the bombings themselves but would also offer an alternative to the Jihadist ideology that had inspired them. In this environment, the Dialogue Society questioned itself about whether it was doing enough in relation to these issues, with Keleş commenting that “since no policy-maker really knew we existed, it made us think that in addition to doing all the grassroot work we were at the time, we needed to communicate that to the people responsible for shaping social policy”. One important product of this development was the publication of the Dialogue Society’s (2009) booklet Deradicalization by Default: The ‘Dialogue’ Approach to Rooting out Violent Extremism.

As its name suggests, this was an attempt to engage with policy concerns about “radicalisation” by arguing that, instead of attempting to tackle Jihadist and similar ideologies on grounds external to the Islamic tradition, it was important to do so by reference to an alternative logic and grammar from within Islam itself and in relation to which the teaching and practice of Gülen offered a creative and helpful resource. With regard to these ongoing issues, perhaps not surprisingly as an academic, Toğuşlu from Belgium, stated that “My perspective is let’s start with the term ‘radicalization’! – it’s a kind of concept where you can get everything!” But in reality:

It’s a very complex issue, it’s a multi-layered problem. It’s not only directly related to theological issues, but there are theological issues in it; it’s an economic issue, but we cannot reduce it to only economic disadvantage. It’s not a matter of age, from fourteen years old to fifty or sixty years old are being involved. It’s not either a matter of education because it goes from a Diploma to early drop out students. It’s not only about the converts. It’s not only about the migration because these converts take part. So, from this multi-layered perspective, in that sense the governments, the NGOs, the theologians, the intellectuals should all come together to work together. You can’t have a unique perspective to solve in one day. It’s a generational matter, I think. You have to tackle this issue for another fifteen or twenty years again, because it doesn’t pop up in one day, this problem.

As Toğuşlu expressed Hizmet’s approach in his own words:

By the way, it’s not directly part of it to deradicalize people, but with its activities, aims, principles – especially with its Islamic interpretation, I think it provides some elements to “prevent”, not deradicalize I think. Some alternative narratives, some alternative discourses, some alternative experiences, models, OK, for this young generation who are frustrated; who have lost their moderation; who cannot follow, for example, a kind of Islamic process since if you go the website you may find everything there, from the radical, the modernist and the progressive sides, but most of the time these are the Salafi teachings who are not contextualised. So, these are some things you have to look at.

The UK Dialogue Society’s publication Violent Extremism: Naming, Framing and Challenging (Harris et al. 2015) points out that extremism is not always or only a by-product of those who respond reactively to disadvantage and discrimination, but also attracts people who have, in principle, positive ideals; who want to create a new world and for whom an ideal of (re)creating the Caliphate can seem to offer a way to do that. Options for channelling such a positive motivation are not straightforward when many young people identify the great suffering and injustice in the world that Muslims and others are experiencing, and the only alternative option to “radicalisation” seems to be acceptance of the global status quo alongside the practice of a traditionalist form of Islam that is concerned with just performing the rituals.

Informed by a more complex analysis of this kind and the question of what Hizmet should do, Toğuşlu suggests that Hizmet should “maybe continue all its activities”—in other words, that there is perhaps no need for Hizmet to take special initiatives, but simply to carry on with its alternative way of being Muslim. This is not least because, in terms of a clear Muslim differentiation of Islam from terrorism, Hizmet has been able to cite and deploy Gülen’s clear condemnation of terror and suicide attacks in the name of religion to the effect that: “No one can be a suicide bomber. No one can rush into crowds with bombs tied to his or her body. Regardless of the religion of these crowds this is not religiously permissible” (Gülen in Çapan ed. 2016: 1).

Of course, Hizmet and Gülen have, of course, not been alone among Muslim voices in such condemnation. What has arguably been more less straightforward for Muslims to tackle has been the challenge of questioning and confronting the legitimacy of the kind of Qur’anic hermeneutics that undergird not only the specific organisational forms of Al-Qeda and ISIS, but also the general trends of “radicalisation” and “Islamism” that have been of special attraction to numbers of young Muslims towards understanding the world in highly dichotomised ways. In this context what Hizmet has, arguably, been able to bring is a more sophisticated and grounded understanding of the tendencies present among Muslims that goes beyond the ephemera of political rhetoric and media reportage. And this is that it has been able to promote a form of Islamic teaching and, even more so of an embodied practice, that challenges terror in the name of Islam and promotes Muslim engagement with civil society within which it offers an alternative and positive vision of a struggle, informed by Islam, that can offer a resource for civility and also a challenge to the powers for Muslims and the wider society alike in terms of overcoming the challenges of ignorance, conflictand poverty.

Prior to July 2016 in Turkey, a considerable amount of this kind of “indirect” work was done by many Hizmet organisations across Europe focusing on radicalisation, extremism and similar topics. For example, Tascioglu explained in relation to Hizmet schools in Europe that:

So, with these problems of radicalisation, extremism and terrorism in Europe, specifically for people with Muslim backgrounds, they try to educate these role models for the new generation in order not to get involved in these activities: radicalism, extremism and terrorism. So, they don’t try to tackle the problems directly, but to work through the education system of the country. So, the people who graduate from these schools have generally very tolerant mind-sets and are open to different ideas and ideologies.

On a broad European level, there was also a lot of contact and dialogue with relevant European institutions, with these efforts culminating in a big International Symposium on Countering Violent Extremism: Mujahada and Muslims’ Responsibility, held on 15–16 March 2016 in Brussels.Footnote 5 By 2019, much of the work of the Intercultural Dialogue Platform was focusing on “countering extremism”; “countering discrimination, antisemitism and Islamophobia”; and “working in Inter-culturaldialogue”. Whereas previously a lot of such work had been financially supported by Turkish businessmen, after July 2016 it was necessary to apply to the European Commission calls for various projects in these areas because, as Tascioglu said, “You cannot, for example, add more people to your team because some people might start to complain about people in Turkey who need financial assistance and is this the right time to employ more people, and to have that much of a budget at this time”. Therefore, overall this fed into the reflection by HE1 that:

So, I think these things allow us to face the reality. I saw this: that all the other societies, all the other associations are writing projects, applying for them and organizing activities according to their budgets. For us it was always the other way around: we always made our activities and then asked for support from our volunteers and, of course, it was unsustainable.

All these things showed us that we are not exactly facing the reality of Europe. I think for my organization we faced the reality and for us it is that the only through for more sustainable and professional work is writing European projects with local partners, with European partners. And in that we are creating more concrete outputs in our interests in terms of dialogue, countering extremism and countering discrimination in the society, like promoting social cohesion.

An important part of all these approaches is that they are consistent with Hizmet’s self-understanding as an educative movement within its internal logics rather than it becoming externally instrumentalised by the state. Bearing all this in mind, what Toğuşlu proposed was that:

What the movement should bring out within the European context is a new kind of interpretation, based not only the rituals. Rituals are maybe important, but what is the sense of Islam in terms of its teachings in the European context. For example, what should it be? – climate crisis? Globalisation and global issues? These are, to some extent what, to some extent we have to renew our work about Islam, not only for the radicalization issue, but also for the next generation coming now who want to learn something about Islam, about the Muslim faith.

This also connects with Keleş, Sezgin and Yılmaz’s (2019) argument that, of course, “The Hizmet Movement did not generate and grow to address the perils of Islamophobia or Puritanical Islamic Extremism” (p. 278). Rather it had its own much more directly religious inspiration in what they called “the practice-focused teachings of Fethullah Gülen which sought to articulate an authentic expression of faith and religion in the light of contemporary challenges predicated on the notion of service to God and humanity”. Nevertheless, it is clear that “the underlying teachings and practice of that self-declared aim have direct and indirect implications for the ground upon which Puritanical Islamic Extremist ideology and Islamophobia flourishes and connects with potential recruits”. At the same time, this kind of thinking and the kind of initiatives following from it represent an evolution and adaptation of Hizmet’s more traditional role because, in interaction with the wider societies of which they have become a part, Hizmet organisations (as distinct from Gülen himself and his teaching) have not been so much—if at all—on educating about religion.

Where this has taken place, it has been primarily in the arena of extra-curricular activity supplementary to the main formal education system. As Tascioglu explained, “We do have cultural centres where, during the holiday periods, families voluntarily send their children to them and they have Qur’an lessons. It is completely voluntary and it is for kids: kind of summer schools”. And as Toğuşlu notes, “I think this is one of the aspects in which the movement is maybe still related to the Turkish identity – why, because Turkey has a hard line secular Kemalist ideology exists there, and this has prevented showing this Muslim identity in a clear way”.

However, in Europe now, particularly because of Hizmet’s asylum and refugee situation but also, as argued by Balcı, in relation to its overall minority context, Hizmet is becoming concerned with the meeting of educational needs a fresh way (see Sect. 6.2). This entails seeing oneself and one’s world in terms of Islam, but also in a way that is not closed either to the constraints of a minority sub-culture or trapped within a potentially inter-generational trauma relating to Turkey, but can open up Muslims working within such a vision to make the maximum possible contribution to European societies in a way fully informed by, and not apologetic about, their Islam. As AS2, says of radicals:

So, in Europe, the Hizmet movement will be better, and it will be a chance to live peacefully because, as you know, now in the world when you call “terrorist” most of the youth, or Christians or Jewish people think “Muslim” terrorists. We have to make something for this. We have to show that a Muslim can’t be a terrorist. We have to show all the world the real Islam, so they think, the Muslims are not terrorists, but good guys and in their inner life, they are good. But radicalism is always bad, even if it is in Christianity or Judaism, it is always bad. So, in Europe, the Hizmet movement will be better, I think so.

3 Turkishness and Beyond

It is arguable that a phenomenon such as Hizmet could only have emerged and developed in the special conditions of Turkey’s geopolitical situation and history (see Weller 2022, Sect. 3.1). The rich Islamic heritage of the country combined with its emergence as an independent modern state embracing aspects of secularism contrasts with the experience of nearly all other Muslim majority societies where secularism was externally imposed as part of a package including colonialism and imperialism. However, a consequence of that specificity is also the question of how far, in practice, might Hizmet have become “ghettoised” within its inherited Turkishness. In relation to this, Keleş poses the issues involved quite starkly:

I always said that the Turks were for Hizmet like the “oil curse” for Saudi Arabia. When Hizmet encounters a Turkish enclave of people in ‘foreign land’, it simply ploughs into them, serving them. This helps Hizmet to take root among and within the immigrant Turkish community quickly but it also “curses” them in a way in that, like the Saudi oil, it inhibits them from branching out to other cultures and communities.

This position was also reflected in that HE2, who said with regard to Italy that, in contrast to the situation in Germany and Austria, “thank God, we didn’t have any type of big Turkish community, so people have been forced to engage”. Such matters are very much under internal, including inter-generational debate and, indeed, were already so before July 2016. But, despite the relatively long history of some awareness and review of these issues, Toğuşlu reflected that “We are still somehow organising in a Turkish way” and that as a consequence “we cannot adopt or integrate fully into a local identity where we are”. As a result, in relation to non-Turkish people in Hizmet while, “They are present in our community here in Belgium” nevertheless, in reality “they are not representing Fedactio, for example” and that therefore “in the leadership I never really see an Albanian, a Senegalese, a Turkmen – most of the people are coming from Turkey: ninety to ninety-nine per cent”. And therefore while “it’s not a long history I know, but for almost fifty years now, it is still a little bit surprising that in the decision-making process we see only the people coming from Turkey, if we have only the Turkish experience”. So, the challenge is that “We are always working together, but the problem is integrating these people as fully members”. Drawing on his comparative experience in France and in Belgium, Toğuşlu notes that:

In the beginning I did not understand, OK – I am from the movement and they are from the movement, but we sometimes cannot communicate very well! We cannot understand each other very well. But when I stayed about eight years in France and now I am eight years in Belgium, now I understand more correctly what they mean, what they want, what kind of pedagogical preference we have to use in the movement. In the beginning we just used what we brought from Turkey with us and in the early eighties imagine. So, I think it never worked.

Toğuşlu says this is an ongoing debate among Hizmet people: “should they keep this Turkish identity or not?” and “What is the relationship between this Turkish descent and a Muslim identity?” In relation to this question he says, “Especially the younger generation coming from different European countries – from France, from Germany, from Denmark – the younger generation who were raised and schooled here, they don’t want to carry this Turkish identity as far as I can see”.

At the same time, there are significant differences in terms of the presence of Hizmet in various European countries. Thus, as Keleş puts it, those of Turkish background in Germany “are the ‘majority minority’ whereas in the UK, they are the ‘minority minority’ ”. Related to this Keleş argues that, generally speaking:

Most of the Hizmet workforce in any geography that has a sufficient Turkish presence, ninety per cent of it will focus on the Turks which is a minority in the country, and the ten per cent Hizmet workforce (if that at all) will focus on the majority of the country. And that’s a problem, whereas if there are no, or a small number of Turks there, then all of Hizmet participants and supporters in that locality will focus their energies on activities that are inclusive of all communities.

As illustrative of this, interviewee Sadik Çinar (see Acknowledgements), from the UK, notes that initially almost all Hizmet activities were focused in London and that even after he moved to the UK’s second city of Birmingham in October 2013, “Again, we started by doing community-building activities among the Turkish community in Birmingham, but numbers were so limited … The Turkish numbers were only a couple of hundred”. And in that context Cinar noted that “Because we have limited Turkish people in numbers, actually: the less Turkish people, the more we have to reach out to the wider community”. In the UK, in order to mark out its identity as a British organisation, in due course the Dialogue Society developed a Green Paper on Towards a British Hizmet.

In the Netherlands, Alasag explained that in order to move beyond the kind of cultural misunderstandings or assumptions he and others were making, they needed several years to learn the quite different Dutch majority cultural codes. As interviewee HE3 notes, there was a cultural tension:

The problem we experienced was sometimes that people grew up here who had Dutch roots and were focusing on the Dutch society, they had a clear vision of how Hizmet could engage with the society, with the government, whatever Hizmet is doing in the Dutch society. But it was sometimes clashing with the people who came from Turkey and were involved here and who had a Turkish mindset and worked in a Turkish way.

Of course, part of the reason for the initial close alignment between Hizmet and Turkishness was also due to the continuing and important channels of communication and support within Hizmet between Turkey and the relevant European countries, with HE3 noting that, of course, Turkey still had influence “because people were coming from Turkey and going to Turkey. I was going to Turkey and visiting Turkey and we were talking with the Journalists and Writers Foundation and following their initiatives”. Historically, “we were not always able to develop something very Dutch” and when visitors from Turkey asked why we did things in a certain way “we were hesitating – is it correct what we are doing?” and this “caused sometimes tensions within the Hizmet”. But he said at the time this was:

Because Hizmet in Turkey was so well organized, and Hizmet in Holland was so small when we went to Turkey, we looked up to the Hizmet initiatives in Turkey. There were many schools, universities, dialogue centres and when they organized dialogue activities everybody came. It was so big.

Taking the example of a Turkish Hizmet visitor to the UK who organised the Rumi programmes with the whirling dervishes in London, interviewee HE3 said that “So, we organised them here as well. It was kind of, we didn’t know what to do to reach out and he was our kind of guru, or whatever. We had visited him and in time we had regular meetings. He developed something and we put it into practice”. Overall, HE3 evaluated this in terms of “So, it was kind of copying a lot”, although “he was also copying from us. So, if one country had developed a concept, other countries were trying to put it into practice in their own countries”. Similarly, in relation to the example of the people who first started Hizmet in the UK, Keleş said of them that:

They depended on Turkish people that had come from Turkey that were temporary and they would go back. So, these were people who did not have any roots. But they were able to support the movement, I mean, they knew the ideas; they knew the Hizmet modus operandi, if you like. So, they didn’t need to be recruited into Hizmet, so to speak. And as a result, they were ready to support the movement here.

However, in the longer term, Keleş identified this as detrimental “because it meant that the movement didn’t develop its roots, it didn’t do enough community-building here”. And Keleş noted that when these people left “we didn’t have sufficient base for other people to carry the movement forward and we overestimated our capacity to do things because it was based on temporary resources”. In addition, in relation to the substance of what they were doing, Keleş said:

It didn’t reflect the needs of the people, of the Turkish people, or the needs of British Muslim communities here. It was more about replicating what we had seen Hizmet do in Turkey here, without necessarily refining it and changing it, and asking the question as to whether or not the same methodology needed to be applied, or the same products needed to be produced. So, because Hizmet opened schools in Turkey, so we should open schools here rather than, well, why do we open schools here and what is the nature of those schools going to be?

In 2001 and 2002, Keleş claimed that “things started to pick up again”, which he attributed to the fact that “Hizmet went back to doing what it should have been doing which was about building community support and not relying on people from abroad. Sadly, that created a second problem. Community support meant Turkish community support”. Nevertheless “you had the flourishing of various organizations. Education and dialogue were, if you like, the main two Hizmet-related activities in the UK, and the creation of various charities”. But in the light of the impact of July 2016, Keleş underlines that “we’ve also seen now how that can be temporary – when they pull back their support, then Hizmet again gets left in the open”.

Of course, even before July 2016 there were key Hizmet people in Europe who already had a different understanding of, and approach to, the relationship between Turkishness and Hizmet stemming, at least in part, from their own different ethnic and national origins. As Erkinbekov put it: “Me, personally, I am from Krygstan. I got to know Hizmet in University when I was a University student. So, I have a different perspective on Hizmet compared with others”. And the question of the relationship between Turkishness and Hizmet has also always at the least been differently inflected in different European countries. In some countries, what had been a previous awareness and already a matter of some debate for some time was brought into sharper focus through July 2016. HE3, from the Netherlands, noted in relation to Turkey itself that:

Since the coup, I haven’t been there. I had some emotional relationship with my country of origin. I am a first generation migrant here, according to the definition in the academic literature. I was born in Turkey. But I think now at this moment, when I listen to people, they come from Turkey, their emotional relationship with Turkey is almost over. It is a country which is Turkey, I was born there. But this is the only relationship I have with it, it is over for myself.

Or, as HE1 from Belgium put it, “I think that, as an identity, I already lost the Turkish identity. I don’t attach myself to Turkey anymore” while going on to explain that:

All these events after the coup bring a test emotionally, and don’t reinforce any positive things between the Turkish identity and what we are doing right now. Of course, all the Turkish culture, all the background is used a lot of the time, and we should all give thanks and use them in our action. But it is more important to be a main element in our own countries. So, I don’t see any value to be Turkish again. Maybe it’s more emotional, because I feel I have already emotionally detached myself from Turkey so when a form asks me nationality, I just write “Belgian”.

In the light of this, HE1 concludes that, for those who have been in Europe already, “I think it is a bigger advantage for us to improve the cultural integration in the European culture, because we are not attached to Turkey anymore”. At the same time, HE1 recognised the greater complexity of this for those who had more recently arrived in Europe as asylum-seekers when he said that, in comparison with himself:

I mean, I am someone who was working and being in Belgium since 2010. So, I am not affected this much, so I cannot imagine someone who lost their job, who sometimes lost their family members, or their families are in prison and they had to come here. I think they are in deep trauma, and that trauma is not a small thing. I think it will continue for a while.

Karakoyun also highlights the contrast between the understanding of Hizmet that has been developing in Europe that which newcomers from Turkey were bringing with them:

I think Hizmet in Germany is quite different from Hizmet in Turkey … it has to do with the political system in Turkey and also has to do with the mentality of the people in Turkey; of the education system; of the patriarchal system; of the way of living; of experiencing; the Ottoman Empire; and all these things that you see everywhere – the statues of Atatürk, the flags. So Hizmet in Turkey was very much Turkey-oriented, not to say nationalistic, but patriotic maybe, and very much oriented on bringing to the world the Turkish culture, the benefits of Turkish language.

However, because of its history Germany has basically “another approach to nationalism, to nation state, to what makes Germany ‘German’, what makes the Germans ‘German’. So, you have a very different discussion here and we found ourselves here rather in a country that is also very self-critical of their past”. The question of what might be called “operational style” has also historically affected the relationship between Hizmet in Turkey and Hizmet in Europe and elsewhere with Karakoyun noting that, historically, because something has been done in Turkey “yes you do it now as well, there is nothing to question about it. It’s perfect, this is what they have told us”. However, in Germany the culture (as informed by the education system) is based on democratic consensus-building through the contribution of open opinions and that, therefore, “In Germany all circles, institutions, groups, initiatives, on the one hand are democratic and they are based on building a consensus. And in Turkey it is, rather, ‘obedience’ – you have to obey”.

As an example, Karakoyun suggested to imagine someone coming from Turkey and saying, “On Wednesday we have the children’s feast of Atatürk here and we should also bring flowers to the children”, but that the response of Hizmet in Germany is that “No, we won’t because in Germany we don’t have this day, but we can give flowers to the people on the day the two Germanies were united, but not on Atatürk’s children’s festival!” In summary, Karakoyun argues that:

Of course, two mentalities are confronted: because, on the one hand, the mentality in which everyone is critical and should always speak openly, never hiding his opinion (German mentality) and on the other hand, the patriarchy, the strong man, the obedience and the “I say what you have to do”, from the Turkish context. And, of course, this was not always easy.

Unlike in Germany and Belgium, however, in Switzerland (as in the UK), the Turkish community is neither the biggest “foreign” community nor the biggest Muslim community. This is because in Switzerland there are roughly as many Bosniaks as Turks and Albanian Muslims are the biggest Muslim group. Nevertheless, initially in Switzerland, SERA (see Sect. 3.6), for example, was very much a Turkish association, having in its statutes that it would do things like assisting Turkish students. However, with the emergence of the second generation of Hizmet in Switzerland came the realisation that, as Özgü put it, “we are not just Turks … but we are also Albanian and Bosniaks, and also connected them. We also had many members in the Advisory Boards and Board members in the associations who were not Turks, who were Albanians or were Bosniaks”. Therefore “in the early 2000s we began also to talk about our sobhets and the meetings being Turkish” and the question of “is this topic Turkey important for us?” and by “the early 2010s we decided that Turkey is not the most important country because we were no longer only Turkish associations”.

Despite this, as Özgü says, about ten years prior to when he was interviewed in August 2019, he cited the example of a group of “people from Turkey who came to Switzerland, about forty people. They were well educated and they were very active, and they thought they could change Switzerland, but Switzerland changed them”. However, as Özgü puts it, “now when you look globally, most of the Hizmet authorities are from Turkey. They were socialised in Turkey. And they also have this Turkish understanding and thinking of things”. But, overall, now, as Özgü succinctly summarises it “we try to emancipate from Turkey”, which relates to what this book calls the process of the “de-centring” of Hizmet from Turkey and which process is still ongoing.

In Denmark, Gezen says that, the majority of Hizmet youth in Denmark “want the language to become Danish and this is, I think, a natural sociological development. It’s difficult and it’s challenging. But it is inevitable”. Over the past five years, discussions and developments in both the Dialog Forum and in the wider Hizmet have centred more on contributing towards solutions for local problems rather than using energy on problems that are outside Denmark. Nevertheless, Gezen notes of Hizmet that due to “the origins of the people” and “until the association receives more members with backgrounds who are not from Turkey” it is inevitably the case that “It will still have an attachment to Turkey”. In relation to this Gezen notes that “Right now, in Europe, the Turkish Kurdish communities are those who are moving the movement. So, you don’t find many Moroccan people, Pakistani people. You won’t find many Arab people as such in Hizmet”. But Gezen’s opinion is that this will change more and more in future “especially through marriages. There are more mixed marriages”. This is also a theme which HE3 from the Netherlands picked up and commented on as follows: “From my ideas that I shared with young people here – that when they are not married, I say marry with a Dutch girl or a Dutch man, and you will see that this will change your life within ten or twenty years” and further:

And people have babies here and they sometimes ask my opinion and ask, “Do you have some good names”? And I tell them, and I will continue over the next years if they ask me, say: don’t take the Turkish name which is problematic in the Dutch pronunciation here – not Ayesha, not Davut, or Abdullah – no, give them a name, another name, which sounds good within the Dutch language. And one of them is Ferdi – Ferdi is Fedinand and Ferdi is also a Turkish name. And one of them gave this name to his son. And Sara is also a Turkish-Arabic name, the wife of Abraham – and that people think in that way which is also a process. And I think I have heard it, but not properly from Gülen, that he thinks also in that way. But he can’t say this. If he says this, it will be a problem, especially in Turkish politics and Turkish people will think that he is a person who promotes assimilation. The recent years, Gülen increasingly and publicly resonates more and more: NO for assimilation and YES for integration.

At the same time, as Keleş from the UK notes:

There are some people who believe that Hizmet will return to Turkey; believe that the Erdoğan government will be toppled; people will realise the mistake and will call Hizmet back, and will ask for forgiveness. And Gülen refers to this as well, and he says that when they ask for forgiveness you need to prepare yourself to be ready to forgive. And that’s fine, I guess, but there is the idea that Hizmet has now come to a realisation that Turkey is no longer viable, I’m not sure it has come to that. There are some people that still look at well, we will return.

From the Netherlands, interviewee HE3 sees a contrast with previous Hizmet migrants in terms of the “newcomers”, that:

They came sometimes with their children, ten years, fifteen years old, and twenty years old, and they all have a better self-confidence when I compare them to the children who were born here in the Netherlands, with Turkish origin. So, if these groups from Turkey, the parents, if they will not be a barrier or an obstacle for their children, I think that in about ten years, twenty years, in about one generation, their children is a great asset to the movement and will generate a lot of ideas for the movement, for Hizmet here in the Netherlands.

Indeed, noting that there is already a new generation of leadership in the Netherlands, this interviewee argues that:

I think if their children and a new generation here can find a way to come together, this will also create a big dynamism for the movement, and a rebirth of the movement, maybe, with new ideas, the old generation leaders, you can’t change them much. But if they make place for these new generations then I think the movement with these ideas can contribute to the Dutch society more.

The one matter that quite a number of interviewees noted could have a further and potentially unpredictable impact on these processes is that of the question of any possible return to Turkey consequent upon any change in the political situation there. In relation to this from the UK, Sadik Çinar reports that “The idea of returning to Turkey is diminishing day by day, but still people predominantly believe they will return to Turkey, but that is diminishing”. Of the asylum-seekers in the Netherlands, Alasag says that, as compared to the past when Hizmet people from Turkey and those from the Netherlands had quite different ideas: “So the difference now is that we are all – even the asylum-seekers, even the refugees, even the expats who came last year and all these people who came from Turkey five years ago, for them Turkey is finished. They only see their future here in Holland”. In terms of the “dream of return”, he says that there are “maybe a few”. However, he also said that in relation to “ninety-nine per cent” that “They came here to live here forever. So, the focus is also that they opened themselves up one hundred per cent for the Dutch society”, which he attributed to the fact that:

They left the country under very difficult circumstances, escaping without friends or family etc. and in the end they came here and it was a struggle and it was very difficult. And it was a long process of two years or three years, of hiding in Turkey, then coming into Greece, and then coming here. It took for some of them, it took three years. So, when they are here, all these things that they lived through on their way, it made it very clear for them.

And he contrasts this with the previous situation of five years or so previously, of which he says, “when they came they brought Turkey with them” and “it took them ten years to learn Dutch and some of them never learned Dutch”. However, under the present conditions for, and circumstances of, arrival “now everybody learns Dutch” and “It is also the psychological difference” in that:

Now, they left Turkey behind one hundred per cent. And they talk about, for example, what shall we do; with whom we will do; and if we do this, what will change in the society; is it good; are we then helping something or supporting something; or being a part of something? The focus is only that they are looking and trying to orientate themselves in this society and trying to be helpful.

In Switzerland, Özgü says:

I talk about this issue with many people, and most of them say, no, we don’t want to go back, but in a few years when they will work here – you must understand people who were in Turkey professionals or academicians, or teachers – Turkish teachers or religion teachers – they will not find good work in Europe. They will work in a factory in a Doner Kebab shop and things like that and they might want to go back because they might want to get all this teacher and academician stuff back. But the people who will be well integrated in the professional world, I think they will stay in Switzerland.

From Germany, Karakoyun says:

Well, of course, people hope that things will change in Turkey. But, well, I am – many people say in Germany say it like that “I’m a pessimist optimist”. Well, the people are hoping, of course. But I think when looking to Turkey that it is difficult to say things will change, I think it will take years, because there is a deep mentality that exists there now, a deep hatred, and it will not change from today to tomorrow, I think. It will take years.

As a result of this, he says that:

So, people that are now living here and that are fleeing to Germany, they should realise, I think, that they have to become part of the German society, that they have to integrate. Nothing else will work. It won’t be possible to return to Turkey within the next few years, I think. And it is also important that they realise that they can’t change Turkey from Germany. Because no matter what you do and however intensely you do it, things won’t change, because Turkey has its own dynamics.

At the same time, Karakoyun notes that, for some “it is a situation in which people can find themselves again, in the idea of Gülen, of the movement, they know each other” but also that “it is a big dynamic at the moment and I do not know how this will develop. And the future depends on the developments around Gülen himself, and the young generations”.

Summarising the issues involved around Turkey having been what might be called the “centre of gravity” of the movement, Keleş says: “For me it’s finished”, but he also asks “Has the movement come to that realisation?” to which he himself gives the answer, “No, it hasn’t”, which for Keleş this links with the issue of transparency and his whole argument for self-criticism in the movement (see Sect. 6.6) because:

If we can question the centrality of Turkey to Hizmet’s project and the possible return of Hizmet to Turkey, if that is something we can question and doubt, then we can start questioning and doubting a lot more. So, even the fact of questioning this, and disagreeing with Hizmet’s and Gülen’s views on this, is actually more significant than just disagreeing on that particular point. But it is a bit of a litmus test in that sense. It’s more indicative of wider issues.

4 Charisma, Structures and Transparency

A number of authors writing on Hizmet pick up on the issue that, whether or not it is seen as being potentially terrorist in nature as charged by the current Turkish authorities, Hizmet nevertheless faces charges of a lack of transparency. In relation to this, Sunier and Landman (2015) accurately note that “The loose organizational structure of the movement causes different reactions in different political contexts” (p. 82). Some degree of organisation is, of course, necessary in any movement however informally it operates because, in order to achieve a reach beyond that of individuals acting alone, structure is needed and structure entails the transfer of resources. At least within modern societies such transfer of resources also entails a readiness to accept quite a lot of transparency and with it a considerable degree of external accountability.

When addressing issues in relation to which Hizmet needed to improve, interviewee HE3 from the Netherlands highlighted “more transparency, about financial issues” as a key example of this, the reason for which being that “Money is a big issue here. If you can’t explain how you use that money and how you get that money, that will be a big problem not only for the movement, but also for the big companies here. Thus, the movement can be more transparent in such a kind of things”.

It is also, of course, the case that organisational forms can become constraining upon an inspiration as a source of action and should therefore be carefully evolved. In broad terms, organisational transparency is necessary to give confidence to the wider society that it is possible to work co-operatively with groups that do not necessarily do everything in a bureaucratised way, but which can make an enormous contribution to the common good, partly because their mode of operating sometimes allows them to do things which more formalised bodies are not able to do.

In some contexts, including those which originally pertained to Hizmet in Turkey, it is entirely understandable that certain expressions of religious life have felt it necessary to be less visible. In connection with this, the illegality of Sufi Orders within Kemalist Turkey, and the direct experience of many of those inspired by Gülen’s teaching, play a continuing role as can be seen when Alasag explained from his own biography that:

Before I came to Holland in 1989, I was put into prison in Turkey a couple of times. First time was when I was fifteen, just because I was reading the books of Said Nursi at the time, and listening to the sermons of Gülen and that was then enough to put you in prison. And it was not a problem of Gülen people, many other groups had the same problem. Because of this some Alevites for example were also kind of reluctant to be open in the Turkish society about their identity. Some leftist groups in the past also had the same fear. So, the more open you are, the bigger is the chance that maybe not now, but in the future, you may pay the price. So, it was for us also this fear.

When initially faced with the kind of investigations outlined in Sect. 5.2 of this chapter, Alasag says that Hizmet in the Netherlands consulted with their advisory groups which included many people from the wider society: “We asked all of them what is this about what should we do?” Their advice was “To tell about Hizmet and to be more, how you call it, transparent”. In the first instance, they thought that meant “to tell more about Gülen”. As a result, part of their response to this was to organise conferences focused around Gülen and his teaching. In addition, they published in Dutch a fairly substantial book called What Is Hizmet?, of which Alasag says: “We also put in that book everything, including also all the accusations, and all the positive things people in say in Turkey, outside Turkey. So, we tried to give a really neutral, objective information”. However, somewhat ironically:

When we organised a conference and also published this book, and also tried to give this information to people, some people reacted like “why so much effort”?! – they interpreted this as if we were trying to hide something by giving all the answers to all those accusations etc. They said if you are not guilty, you would just laugh about this and get on with your life. That you are trying too much it means that it is all true – that was the interpretation! We did it because people advised us to do it. For us it was very puzzling.

On reflection, Alasag sees this as all having been part of a necessary learning process that Hizmet in the Netherlands underwent in connection with the process of becoming more fully integrated into Dutch society and cultural ways of doing things. In relation to this he explained that “Although we were so long in dialogue, although we built so big a network, although we had so many friends, it took many years to understand what’s the dynamic and how to engage in this dynamic with the society, with the media” and of this he said that, in the end they arrived at the understanding that “It’s kind of, in Holland, the dynamic, the society pushes, and then looks at the reaction. And the way of Dutch to engage and trying to communicate their fears, their questions, their hopes. It’s the way Dutch people deal with things”.

As a consequence of this, in due course they also came to understand about the issue of transparency that “It wasn’t a kind of transparency in the sense of just telling everything, but trusting the society, not defending, but being open about yourself”. In addition, and very importantly, it meant “being critical to your own position, accepting all these questions as a critique and trying to not ‘answer’ it, or kind of defend yourself, but try to understand and try to do something about it”. Alasag said, “we were very relieved when we understood this”, in the light of which they set about trying to establish an overall “platform” for the organisations founded by Hizmet people.

Referring to the Voices initiative in the UK (see Sect. 3.5), Alasag explained that, from around 2012, “We had a kind of a similar platform with fifty-three different organizations in Holland”. But again somewhat puzzlingly for them at the time “some of our Dutch friends (although we had asked some of them beforehand) reacted very negatively”. The explanation their friends gave for this was that some individuals from the wider Dutch society who had been supportive explained that they could justify that supportiveness to others on the basis that through engaging with Hizmet on a local level they were able to have a significant influence. However, the formation of the national initiative meant that “it was suddenly a very big platform with a very strong identity. So, they said if you continue with this, I stop, I quit. So, they said they told us they will quit our boards; they will quit our advisory boards; they will quit whatever and however they were engaged with Hizmet”. Alasag also confided that there were people from the government who had, in the informal terms, also urged caution about this wider development, citing the right-wing reaction there had previously been to the otherwise small initiative of opening a school for a couple of hundred students and therefore warned that “if you open such a platform which is so huge, so big, those groups will see it as a threat, so they will engage with you on another level”.

In many ways what is recounted here as having happened in the Netherlands underscores how seriously Hizmet organisations take the advice they are given by these external people whom they trust, because Alasag explained that, as a result of this advice “we stopped this initiative before even we were able to send a newsletter. So, it was opened and within a couple of months, we stopped”. Instead, they decided to approach the challenge of transparency by being more transparent on their website:

So we translated Istishare (in Dutch translated as overleg), we said we had overleg, and we put every information about our Hizmet, how we are active, what is our position, and the names of the Istishare group, all this information on the website. And we said you are welcome if you have questions, if you want to engage or contact with Hizmet, just send us an email or call this number.

In the UK, according to Keleş the 2007 international conference organised on the movement and held in London under the title of Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Gülen MovementFootnote 6 also generated internal discussions “about what we were and how we were” which fed into a small follow-up event (in which the author participated) held in Istanbul in 2008, and which included more in-depth panel discussions to which the current author contributed a number of critical questions (for the detail of this, see Weller 2022, Sect. 6.1). On the other side of that, in 2009, the ‘About Us’ page of the Dialogue Society’s website for the first time acknowledged in written ways what the Society has previously started acknowledging verbally—namely that it was an organisation founded by people inspired by Gülen’s teachings and example on dialogue. Earlier this was not explicitly stated because of concerns that the nature of such inspiration could either be misunderstood, or any reference to it misused, by those who wish to assert a “conspiratorial” view of the Hizmet. Therefore, Keleş claims that, for the UK, this website acknowledgement:

Begins the process of a wider transparency around Hizmet – not just the Dialogue Society, but also all the other Hizmet organizations. And we were sort of leading that conversation because of the type of activity that we were doing because the question of transparency kept coming to us as the Dialogue Society because we were doing things that brought us into contact with people who had very little knowledge about who we were, and also we were doing this on a basis that required an understanding of where we came from, you know. So, we were talking about, doing events around dialogue, and part of dialogue is, well, who are you?

And Keleş went on to say that eventually “we were pushing all the Hizmet-related organizations and activities in the UK to become transparent and to make that open. We were doing that in discussion with our Advisors”.Footnote 7 However, Keleş also acknowledged that “while everyone agreed in theory that this is what we should do, when it came to doing it in practice, habits kicked in, cultural mindsets, if you like, and ways of thinking about this kicked in, and it was a challenge”. When the scholar Caroline Tee talks about “hidden hierarchies”, and the ablas of the various houses of the movement, Keleş explained that she was referring to bölgecilik. In providing their religious mentoring, bolgecis, however, work more closely with adults, professionals, workers and businesspeople. But another less visible aspect of Hizmet has been what David Tittensor has talked about when referring to religious mentoring in Hizmet schools and in other contexts which is rehberlik which, in general Turkish means “counselling” or “mentoring”. In the Hizmet lexicon it more specifically refers to the religious mentoring of younger people undertaken by rehbers who operate within these particular parts of Hizmet. While such rehbers work closely with the bolgecis, they are themselves not bolgecis.

In the UK, this is now all much more transparent in organisational terms: thus the Sobhet Society and Mentor Wise are limited by guarantee companies and within Voices all the organisations active within it also now have on their websites an acknowledgement of their Gülen inspiration and, when talking about Hizmet structure, organisation and activity in the UK. But Keleş explained that there were, historically, two elements of Hizmet activity that have not been so transparent, in relation to which he claimed, “We’ve now convinced the people engaged in this part of Hizmet that what they are doing is not something to be upset about or worried about. I mean it’s a great thing they are doing – it’s just that the way they are doing it in this cannot be sustained, so we’ve asked them to ‘come out’ ”.

The first of these relates to the sohbets in which Hizmet people gather to study, learn, mutually encourage and challenge. In relation to this now, in the UK, the Sohbet Society’s website’s section “How we do it” transparently explains to “outsiders” some of what it calls “pre-existing and well-established practices and roles” that are known to insiders by their Turkish names, such as abi, abla, bölgecilik and istishare which, to outsiders without a knowledge of the Turkish language, can sometimes seem opaque and/or mysterious. Furthermore, the “Sohbet Plus” section of the website also gives access to some of the religious resources, in both Turkish and in English, with which people in Hizmet work in theirsohbets.

The second area that had historically not been so transparent concerns what is covered by the Turkish word bölgecilik, and which Keleş explains as being “constituency-based grass roots religious activity”. Indeed, it is this informal network that is precisely what makes it possible to speak about Hizmet as a social movement. Thus, although there are lots of organisations, bölgecilik is what Keleş describes as the “bit that you can’t see” which, as in his evidence to the UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, Keleş was transparent about in terms of its activities in organising sohbets (religious circles), “camps” (religious retreats), mutevelis (meetings with donors).

Before these developments, whereas in the Turkic countries of Central Asia, Hizmet had very largely developed around schools and teachers, in western Europe the bolgecis had acted more as community organisers to build up a community base within which they collected Qurbani donations for slaughtering animals for Eid celebrations; opened and ran dershanes or student houses; collected subscriptions for the Zaman newspaper and facilitated the religioussobhets, doing all of this within what Keleş calls “a very clear structure of hierarchy”.

Keleş claims of the UK approach to this that “As far as I know, no other Hizmet in the world has done this”, although he does acknowledge that in other parts of Europe what are perhaps similar attempts are underway even if in a more “indirect” manner. For example, in Belgium, Fedactio is now choosing its regional co-ordinators from the people that are bölgecis, although Keleş has questions about this on that basis that “that’s not really transparent because you are not really making this line of work clear and obvious … not making it transparent in itself: we are trying to make it transparent by reference to something else and that doesn’t really help”.

In Denmark, however, in contrast with the history of this in the UK, Gezen says that right from its beginning, the Forum has been “proud to say that we are inspired by Gülen, but we have a couple of members and friends, like ethnic Danes, who want to support us, and are not inspired by Gülen. But we are openly inspired by Gülen and that is how people know us”. In Switzerland, in the immediate aftermath of the events of 2016, when only a few journalists asked about Turkey, according to Özgü, the way in which July 2016 had an impact was that “we began to talk in Hizmet about the transparency thing”. While prior to this they did already have a small working group founded in 2015 and had also “talked about things like that” after 2016 “all the people in Hizmet started to talk about this transparency and we began to ask ourselves, how can we make ourselves more transparent, how can we be in the media”. In pursuit of this they held three big assemblies in Switzerland to which all Hizmet active people in the country (described by Özgü in terms of “hundreds of people”) were invited “to discuss what can we change, what do we need” and among the questions with which they were concerned, “We asked the question about gender in Hizmet and dialogue in Hizmet”.

Reflecting overall on the transparency issue, as Kerakoyun from Germany explained it, “In Turkey nobody said, ‘Look, I am from Hizmet’. There was a big lack of transparency in all institutions”, and not only in Turkey, “It was a problem everywhere in the world”. As an example Kerakoyun explained that, if one visited a school in Turkey founded by Hizmet people and asked the head of the school, the head would say something like, “No we are not a Hizmet school, we are a school of the Turkish people for the world”. In contrast to this, the attitude of Kerakoyun and his generation of Hizmet leaders in Germany has always been that of “we are German Turks. We are born here. We are socialized here. There is nothing wrong with Hizmet. There is nothing that is wrong with the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, Hojaefendi. So why should we hide something? We spoke very openly”.

What Kerakoyun describes perhaps to some degree reflects the more “direct” nature of German culture. But Kerakoyun also states this as a matter of principle on the basis that “If the state funds our school and if we have German parents sending their children to us, we have to be honest – not only because we are Hizmet, but even as human beings, we have to be honest”. As a consequence we need to explain about our schools that:

We don’t have Islamic or Qur’an lessons; we don’t teach or read the books of Gülen in the class, but we are schools whose founding has been motivated by the teachings of this Turkish Islamic preacher, and we are doing very good education with (a), (b), (c), (d), (e) criteria, and this is our education. So not hiding and then catching the children should be the strategy, but showing the qualities and benefits and being open and saying, yes, we are Muslims, but we don’t teach Islam.

Therefore, “If you feel that your child is being missionized, or that we are trying to put on him Islamic values, then you can protest against us”. In Germany there is partial state funding of religious-based schools and, although in the UK, this has also been the case in relation to the voluntary aided sector, that has only relatively recently in practice extended to include Muslim-based schools. Hizmet’s Wisdom School initiative in the UK has already been noted, and Keleş explained that when the new Academies initiative came in they also tried to take advantage of the new forms of publicly funded schools “but you had to put £2 million down” and then “when the Free Schools came in, we tried that again. Six applications were put in”.

Keleş cited these examples self-critically as “One of the battles where we lost the transparency battle within ourselves”. This was because the applications were put in under such titles as North London, South London, West London and East London, but without acknowledging the connections between them: “For some reason they did not disclose, and did not realise that titling in that way would actually disclose, the co-ordination between these applications”. In relation to this, Keleş recounts that a few years later when he was speaking at a seminar on religious movements and education and he made the broad point that, on the one hand the British state apparatus seemed to be saying to Hizmet that it welcomed Hizmet’s form of religious interpretation and practice and wanted to see it influencing the wider Muslim community, but on the other hand “when we attempted to open a free school in Walthamstow, with a large Muslim presence, we were rejected, even when we were open about our links to Gülen’s views”. In relation to this, Keleş recounts that:

During the lunch break two people in civilian clothes approached me, and they said, “We are the due diligence people” (AKA MI5) who rejected your applications. And the reason we rejected your applications was because the people you have put their names on the applications, we do not actually believe they are the decision-makers; we believe that there is second layer of decision-makers.

Within Hizmet itself, then, there has been an ongoing debate and there have been what Keleş called “competing interests”. As he explained: “So, the people within the education side would say to us, ‘Look, we’ve got Gülen’s name on our website, but we’ve got prospective teachers and parents who don’t know anything about anything and they’re coming up to us and saying what’s all this Gülen thing, it’s just muddying the waters’ ”.Footnote 8 And, indeed, as Keleş noted from their perspective it is factually the case that, in operational terms, “Gülen’s philosophy in practice makes no difference at least in the UK context, and actually in many other places, in relation to the type of curriculum that is being presented – there isn’t that type of religious mentoring, there isn’t any underlying religious ethos”. Thus, many of those in Hizmet whose primary involvement has been with education had a stance along the lines that, since there is no direct translation from Gülen’s philosophy into the day-to-day running of the school, “all that we are telling them is something at the beginning of our story, of how it came about, and the cost of doing that is, well, it upsets people, it puts some people off, and is it worth it? So, they were looking at it from that point of view”.

However, Keleş and other colleagues associated with him in the Dialogue Society refer also to wider debates on this as they have developed, especially in the USA, where both Hizmet and Gülen himself have come under criticism for erstwhile supporters such as in Pervez Ahmed’s Open Letter to Fethullah Gülen, Founder of Hizmet Movement,Footnote 9 of 31 July 2019 concerning the effects that arise when charter schools that are clearly Hizmet-founded schools and are founded by Hizmet-related people are not acknowledged to be such. And in relation to this Keleş has been arguing that “But we, I think, had a broader perspective to consider because clearly these schools and institutions were considered, and were, and are a part of the movement”.

As things currently stand, whereas the Wisdom School did not mention Gülen or Hizmet, once it had transitioned into the North London Grammar School, the FAQsFootnote 10 on its website, while not mentioning the name of Gülen, do nevertheless acknowledge that the school’s founders (who are described as business people and educators of Turkish background) were “personally inspired by the teachings of Hizmet”. This is explained as “a Turkish word which means ‘service’ ”, and it is described as “a civil societyeducation movement” which “emphasises the importance of inclusive and nondenominational education to help children achieve their true potential”. In relation to “the nature and character of the school” among other things, it is stated that it is an “independent school” run by its Board of Governors and School Management Team; that it “follows the national curriculum”; and that it is “registered with and inspected by Oftsed and all other relevant stakeholder bodies”; and finally that it is “nondenominational and inclusive in terms of student background, ethnicity and religion” and “does not promote or teach a particular religion or philosophy including that of Hizmet”.

Post-2016 new challenges have emerged in relation to transparency, both for those who have been in Europe already for a long time and for those who have suddenly found themselves in Europe as asylum-seekers. Thus, in relation to the new ‘three-layeredness’ of Hizmet in Europe, Keleş notes, “we’ve also now got a new influx of people that are coming with this mindset that they were used to in Turkey”, and this creates a significant challenge for Hizmet in Europe in terms of its efforts over the past twenty years or so to integrate Hizmet into more European ways of doing things. And there are, of course, also great challenges for the asylum-seekers themselves among whom many were one day normal civil servants and the next day found themselves being treated as fugitives. And for them Keleş understands how challenging these matters are “Because the moment they concede that, actually, it’s over – their whole purpose then, and the meaning that they have attached to their very careers and lives and work is gone”. On the other hand, alongside these understandable reactions Keleş also argues that:

There are some people that want to continue that because they also want to continue other practices in relation to the movement – such as not being very open about your identity; such as not being very critical about certain things; such as continuing a certain form of decision-making that is closed. Because of the way they have worked they have a vested interest in continuing the package.

And it is in relation to these that Keleş says that “When we question the decision-making processes; when we ask for greater transparency; when we question why certain types of activities are not being put into the open, these certain types of people feel threatened because it then exposes them”. He goes on to explain that, of course, “None of this is to suggest that what they are doing is illegal or criminal. But it goes against the grain of what they have got used to doing, and a certain culture in which that was embedded”. And in addition, Keleş acknowledges of such Hizmet people that “in some ways, they feel vindicated” since, for example, the Hizmet transparency of having in Turkey created a Trade Union for teachers unwittingly became one of the mechanisms through which people could be rounded up, “So, there you go, they say”.

This irony was also acknowledged by Alasag when he explained that “in the end we became in the Netherlands very transparent as I explained, and we put the names and other information about the movement on a website”. But having reached this point a year or two prior to the events of July 2016, one of the consequences of that transparency became that “Now we are paying the price as we cannot go to Turkey. Our names are known and if we go to Turkey we know what awaits us”. Despite this, and in the context also of the quite unique level of scrutiny experienced by Hizmet in the Netherlands, and their continuing frustrations, Alasag’s overall evaluation was that “it cleansed our name”.

In relation to the overall European future, Keleş says, “I think that if the movement can be transparent and open about its identity and what it wants to do, then it can do that more comfortably in the public and private sector because it will be clear as to where its limits are”. As part of this, and as will be discussed further in some detail in the next two sections, Karakoyun argues for “a transparent approach towards our Islamic identity”. He explains why he thinks this important by saying:

I think that by saying that we are a social movement and by sometimes even neglecting that we are Islamic, we lose a lot of potential. Because I think the Hizmet movement with its Islamic values and ideas is important for countries like Germany because it is an Islam that is democratic; it is based on human rights; it brings people together; it is open to dialogue; it is tolerant. And now we have a lot of people coming to Germany we different understandings of Islam. And so, we as the Hizmet movement that is not part of a state like Diyanet can serve as a partner in terms of Islam for the state and for local bodies, and so we have to take more responsibility with this and not to hide our identity. I don’t know if it means to open mosques, or it means to open Islamic academies, but we have to do something in this direction.

5 Relating to Civil Society, Politics and the State

As noted at the beginning of the previous section, in Turkey the impact of the “secular” did not, as in so many other Muslim majority countries, come hand in hand with the external imposition of imperial and colonial power but through social and political developments adopted internally, even if primarily by elites, in support of the country’s independence. This also had an impact on the forms that political Islamism has taken in Turkey. Thus, as Sunier and Landman (2015) put it, in Turkish history, “Erbakan pursued the transformation of the secular state through democratic political empowerment”, while by contrast “Gülen argued that a strong civil society and an open public sphere were much more important” (p. 85).

Through the inheritance of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk and Kemalism, Hizmet has always had to engage with the interplay between the religious and secular. In principle this has given it some advantages compared with other Islamically inspired movements which found themselves, through migration, in what they often experienced as a “secular” Europe, in relation to which they did not have the historic preparation of the Turkish of history of engaging with secularism. In addition, Hizmet has always had a concern to be integrated with the wider society, even though as discussed in the previous section this has sometimes been in tension with transparency in relation to its origins as Islamically inspired and also its relationship between its organisational forms and the person and teaching of Gülen.

In terms of its activities in Europe, Hizmet has very strongly projected an image of itself as being “apolitical”. Yükleyan and Tunagür (2013) argue bluntly that “The goal of the Gülen movement in Europe is to raise well-educated and observant Turkish Muslims who can reconcile their religious identity with their lives in Europe” (p. 229). In fact, in the very strength of its orientation towards “integration”, there is a question of how far Hizmet organisations in Europe might have adopted political concepts such as “social cohesion” in a relatively uncritical way to the possible extent of what Yükleyen and Tunagür (2013) identify as the potential for “unintended consequences” such as “inner secularization” (p. 226).

With regard to BelgiumTascioglu explained that “We are always making good contacts with Belgian politicians. Because of elections and electoral reasons, politicians do not participate as much as they would do in our projects and activities. But personal contacts are still maintained. So, they understand the situation”. Citing what has happened with Hizmet asylum-seekers in the country, Tascioglu stated that “And there are hundreds of families that migrated from Belgium to Turkey because of problems in Turkey, and almost one hundred percent of those people got asylum. So, this means that the contacts with the Belgian government are good”.

In relation to political engagements, the majority of those associated with Hizmet in Europe seek positive engagement with political authorities. In Switzerland, where most of the Ministry of Interior staff are based at Cantonal rather than Federal level, Özgü says that “for them it is very important to talk with the people who are behind these associations”. So Özgü also underlines that, broadly speaking, “Turks in Switzerland, they are not really like in the other countries: the foreigners in Switzerland are very well integrated – they don’t really live in, like, a parallel society, which was also very important in this context”. With regard to Hizmet specifically Özgü says that “at Cantonal level the relationships with the authorities are very positive” and that “We have had many projects which many Cantons help us to fund. They are open to us, and when we want to talk to them they are well connected with us. We don’t have any problems to get in touch with them”. In relation to Turkey, “We say Erdoğan is a dictator” but “We are also not active against AKP in Switzerland” and that “we have to talk about the problems in Switzerland, and that’s why we don’t really have any problems with the state, and the state in Switzerland is also very open to us”.

However, the overall idea of being a-political may be more complex than at first sight portrayed. Traditionally, as argued by Turam (2007), Hizmet had in Turkey been involved in a “politics of engagement” (p. 10) or what Hendrick (2013) called “the conservative democratic turn” (p. 52), or what some of the Hizmet people themselves refer to a “civil Islam”. Thus, in relation to Hizmet’s history (including in Turkey) and stance with regard to political participation, Keleş argues that “the movement’s position, the discourse on this is misleading”. Indeed, on this point Keleş goes so far as to criticise what he says is Gülen’s articulation that “we are of equal distance to all political parties”, saying of this that “That’s not true”. However, the reason that he gives for this is not what some might expect in relation to what has been identified by some critics as a general tendency of Hizmet people and of Gülen himself as having been towards the right of the political spectrum. Indeed, as Alasag said reflecting on Hizmet in the Netherlands:

There were many people who had a history in other groups and became involved in Hizmet. For example, some people from leftists, for example, my parents are from the leftist, Communist side. Others for example from Millî Görüş etc. So there are many different ideas within the Hizmet because of the variety of different backgrounds.

In relation to these issues and how they worked out in the Netherlands, Alasag says:

As far as Holland is concerned, the impact of this 2016 coup was that they see the difference between the AKP and Hizmet. This had started in 2013 and it was growing, but they didn’t see the difference between AKP and Hizmet. For many, it was a kind of a co-operation, and for many it was a kind of the same type of Islamic groups working together for the same aim: to bring Islam to the country, or whatever. And because of that there were also anxieties: they had question marks about Hizmet in Holland. They didn’t know where Hizmet was ending and where the AKP was starting. They saw two different beings coming into one in a mixed whatever.

With regard to those who came from the background of Millî Görüş or political Islam, Alasag says that from 2013 onwards as difficult things started to happen, “So as long as Gülen was supporting the democratisation of the country, they didn’t see any distinction between Hizmet and the AKP and when the Government turned against Hizmet, they left” and this was “because they couldn’t understand that we are a different entity and that we have our own agenda of helping people, dialogue etc. It wasn’t about AKP but about democracy”. In relation to this Alasag says: “If there is a government that is working for democratising Turkey, Hizmet in Turkey tries to help when positive things are happening on that level. Turkey is so far from democracy that anything going in a good direction, you have to support”. In the end, overall, Alasag thought this differentiation within Hizmet in the Netherlands was a good thing because “Dutch government, the Dutch society know that this is Hizmet, pro-education, pro-dialogue and pro-helping people to overcome some problems in a societal setting” and this had to do with organisational maturity in the Netherlands.

Thus, in contrast to Hakan Yavuz (2018) who frames the tension and conflict that emerged between the AKP and Hizmet as an “Intra-Islamist Conflict”, Keleş argues that “the movement has always been antagonistic to political Islam and parties that represent political Islam from the very beginning” and that has been a consistent position. Therefore, Keleş says that it is clear that one point the movement rejected supporting the Welfare Party and, because of that “it can say, if it wants to, that it wasn’t supportive of political parties as an entity, and I can see how that is true”. However, “that doesn’t mean that the movement has no political implications, or that the work of the movement doesn’t have political implications, or the movement doesn’t have political positions”. Because of this “To say we are equal distance would suggest that we are of equal affinity or proximity to the left, the right, the ultra-nationalists and political Islam” whereas “Gülen has a clear rejection of political Islam”. There is also the matter of the multiple-layered meaning of “politics” in relation to which Keleş says that “I think, in Turkish the word siyaset was conflated with being ‘political partisan’. So, to be politically partisan is one thing; to be politically involved or to have a political position is another”. This is, of course, also an issue in the English language where the same word is used for party political activity and for other forms of organising to effect change in the public sphere, although Keleş adds the footnote that “it’s clearer in Europe”. Nevertheless, and also in Turkey, Keleş recognises that the movement’s wish to open schools has been connected with particular political opportunity structures:

We can see where the schools do better, right: where there is the Charter school and the state allows for private entities to take part in public education, that is a political position. So, if we had it our way, we would prefer to have a political position that allowed – not everyone, you know, with certain checks and balances – but we would to be able to have the ability to contribute to education if, indeed, the educational contribution was needed in the country. That’s a political position.

As other examples of at least being advantaged within particular political frameworks, Keleş cites:

Supporting the EU, as Gülen did against Erbakan, that’s a political position; a small state; a civilian constitution – a political position; non-discrimination, all of these are actually political positions. But I think it’s not because the movement was being disingenuous about this, genuinely, in Turkey there’s big distinctions being created about this, so it wasn’t clear about that. But as it came out into Europe and the United States, it’s actually clearer that we have political positions. So, at that level, the movement does.

At the same time, how Hizmet people who have been used to dealing with the Turkish system now engage with politics and civil society in Europe is not straightforward. For example, Karakoyun highlighted that “especially the experience of what happened in Turkey makes them also afraid of consequences in Germany, because once you experience the state as an enemy, you think every state is an enemy. So, the people are also very afraid of co-operating and working together with Germany”. And especially in the post-July 2016 context, when looking back at the “mutual infiltration” discussed in Sect. 4.2 of this book, Karakoyun says that many Hizmet newcomers are particularly nervous of entanglement with the state: “Many people say, don’t do that, we did this mistake”. These issues are not, of course, unique to Germany and, reflecting on the relationship between Hizmet and political participation from an asylum-seeker’s perspective in broad terms similarly expressed by others who were interviewed, AS2 put it in the following way:

I am not interested in politics, because I have a lot of troubles in Turkey because of politicians. So I hate politics. From now on, I believe that, I know that I will never be interested in politics. You know, politics means to be the fan of something. If you are the fan of something you put your logic here, always supporting something. So it is not the true. And I will never look at parties or politics as a “fan”. For example, I don’t think I am a ‘fan’ of the Hizmet movement. This is something different. So, politically, Hizmet will do something in Europe, I don’t believe so. I think they will never go into politics. They will be, I think they will try to be close to all the people and all the parties. They are equal, all the parties. They have to be like that.

As AS2 put it, “I don’t think they will be in politics”, at the same time going on to say that “But they will always help to be connected with politics of course”. And this is the difference between “politics” in the narrow sense, and public life in relation to which AS2 stated: “It’s very important for me”. And therefore as AS2 says:

No problem if it is right wing or left wing. We have to be equal with them. We have to see them as people, as human beings. Because, for example, it was my fault: I was in Turkey ten years ago. I supported the right wing of politics, and yes I voted for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, also, but I regret it now. But, at first he was always talking about the integration to European Union, democracy and human rights and so I supported accordingly. But right wing or left wing is not very important – the human is the main point I think.

And indeed these kinds of responses highlight one of the further risks for at least sections of Hizmet in Europe—which is that of potentially over-reacting to the experience of Hizmet in Turkey. In Turkey the seduction by the possibilities of social and institutional influence led in directions that were to become problematic. But in Europe this could result in a wish to avoid that by adopting what might be called “pietistic” withdrawal from social and political engagement, and especially from involvement in any form of governance, on the basis that the wisest course of action is to concentrate on the religious life of the individual, the family and among like-minded religious people. From Karakoyun’s perspective, though “what they don’t understand is that the Turkish experience is not ordinary – it is extraordinary, and this is not something that can happen to people twice in their life I think” and “Well, we live in Germany but of course we have to go to the German state, and bodies and governments, and somehow have to co-operate” and to, “keep on keeping up the dialogue especially with the politicians”.

Finally, not all who came from Turkey bring with them the reactions previously highlighted among asylum-seekers. Engagement with civil society and the wider political system is clearly something from which at least some Hizmet asylum-seekers are open to learning and to making a connection with Islam. Thus, as AS1 put it in relation to experience of their new Swiss context:

What I am seeing in Switzerland it was very surprising for me, this Confederation. It was like the first state ruled by our Prophet: in Medina they declare an agreement that we are all together, Muslims, Christians, Jewish. They said if someone attacks us, we are always together to defend. And everyone accepted this. At those times, if I remember truly, maybe only fifteen per cent is Muslim.

Similarly, despite the fact that many people of Turkish origin, including also Gülen, sometimes evoke the Ottoman heritage in relation to positive diversity, there is also a recognition, shared by many in Hizmet, that there is much to learn from western societies as also expressed by AS1:

They also have this tolerance. And for instance, this lady who opens her restaurant and gives a chance for that little society in her region to live together, to understand each other, to try to be a mosaic. These things, actually, they are our little worlds. And what I am seeing is that we were very, very – I can’t find the exact word – “primitive”, the Europeans are so advanced … They saw these things many, many years ago, and they succeed to be a good country together with their neighbour countries, they could build a not micro but a macro climate. But we are so at the beginning of this kind of life.

Speaking on behalf of himself and his wife, AS3 said that “We came here thanks to the Swiss people and support from the government and we will learn many things from them by talking with them and speaking with them. That’s the main thing that we can do here maybe” and so “We will learn many things from them, because they are ahead of us on the road and we are behind them”.

Overall, in discussing the relationship between Hizmet, the state, politics and civil society it is, however, important to keep in mind the experience of those countries where Hizmet is present but where the wider community of Turkish background is neither the largest ethnic/national minority nor the largest component of Hizmet itself. More common in Europe so far has been the kind of political engagement that Gezen explains, in Denmark, took place over a number of years in relation to the wider authorities:

Already from the beginning there was an interest, having contact with the officials, politicians, ministers and mayors. But that grew bigger, I think, after a couple of years. And then, you know, we started arranging European Union election panels where we would invite candidates for the European Union elections; candidates were invited for national election panels that we arranged. So, there were those kind of contexts. We wanted to get in touch with the politicians and bring some awareness of being active in elections and also, of course, through these events to be in touch with politicians and hence try to engage them and so on in engaging them in the kinds of activities we were doing. Being in touch with politicians, of course, led to other things.

In relation to such social and political engagement and participation, Gezen explained that the Dialog Forum went on “to arrange role model events where we invited politicians, journalists, artists and so on to talk with university students about how their journey was to success”. In 2012 it established the Dialogue Awards. Many politicians engaged with this and came to the ceremony every year, with the award being made by a committee of which one of the members was a former Danish Foreign Minister. In fact, although Denmark has at times proved to be a quite hostile environment for Muslim organisations—as during the so-called Cartoon Controversy (Kublitz 2010)—relationships with the Danish authorities have not been anything like Hizmet in the Netherlands experienced in terms of investigations, Parliamentary enquiries and the like, including also not following July 2016. Therefore in Denmark, in contrast to the Netherlands, Hizmet has not had to “push back” on the political level. On the contrary, Gezen says: “We have no issues getting in touch with the officials. There is no sense that they don’t want to meet with us. So, that’s why I can say that everyone who knows the Dialog Forum as an association would know that we are inspired by Gülen”. However, at the same time, Gezen explains that the Dialog Forum and others are now not so focused as they once might have been on “getting in touch with politicians, making big events, getting keynote speakers, and so on, that’s not the aim. Maybe it wasn’t the aim from the beginning. But that’s not our focus today” which is now moving in a more “grassroots” direction.

Taking the example of Spain, Naziri says that, even after July 2016, in relation to Casa Tura and the Arco Forum that, even though their work (including their resource base) has been impacted, fundamentally speaking “our projection is that nothing changed and we have our objectives and goals in our constitution and we are working towards it”. And in terms of the future, Naziri’s evaluation is that “I think it is going ahead quite good, with many, many partnerships in the local, here in Spain, with many, many NGOs, both with religious backgrounds, academic backgrounds and, like, state organizations etc etc of all kinds”.

In terms of overall learning about how to engage with social and political life, when reflecting on the political opportunities Hizmet had in Turkey, Balcı thinks that in the future there is likely to be a real question to answer about why at a certain point in political developments in Turkey Hizmet did not seize the democratic opportunity through the deployment of a more campaigning mode of activity. But in doing so he noted that “the very first protests that took place in Turkey were also alien to us” and that it required what he called a “retraining of our characters” to participate in them. Furthermore Balcı acknowledged that “I still believe in the motto of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, ‘Şeytandan ve siyasetten Allah’a sığınırım’ (‘I seek refuge with Allah from Satan and from politics’)”, thus making it clear that this orientation was not only a guide for him in the more divided society and politics of Turkey but, rather, that “even in countries like the UK – I am a member of the Labour Party, I always felt myself a Fabian – but, I am not interested in making politics, or appealing to power positions. I’m a student, I’m learning, and I want to contribute to my society, to my new home, yes, but not as being a leader”.

But as Balcı explained it, “the level of persecution back in Turkey had pushed us to something that we not only didn’t know how to do, but also we were unsympathetic about”. Therefore, because of the extremity of what was happening there “we had to go to the streets, to the squares, in front of court houses, to raise our voices”. A concrete example of this was when the newspaper Zaman was taken over (see Sect. 2.6) and “the police did not make any distinction between who is protesting and why they were protesting, and whether they have a right or not. So, people were beaten there, ladies had their heads wounded and bleeding and so on”.

So this development of a more campaigning mode of expressing Hizmet is, in itself, an interesting and unusual development relative to the historic pattern of Hizmet activities up to more recently with which Balcı was also involved in Chicago and New York in the USA (see Weller 2022, Sect. 6.5). After his arrival in the UK, as an example activity in Europe, Balcı reports that he worked with others to “set up a prison cell, made out of pipes in the Trafalgar Square”, concerning which he noted that “And of course, the Dialogue Society was completely alien to the idea of protesting. So, it became something new to them”. And in relation to this protest, he explains that:

We, of course, brought all kinds of Turkish cultural reflexes with us. So, when the police came, to ask us questions I thought I had to guarantee them that we wouldn’t be making nonsense, noise and so on. So, I tried to explain to the police officers that we are good guys, we are not going to shout, we are not going to make a noise. We are just going to make the installation and tell people that there are children, babies, back in Turkey in jail with their incarcerated mothers. But the police said, look, you have the right to shout. Shout! Make all kinds of noises! It’s obvious that you have to shout, there is a problem. But I am here only because of health and safety. Normally the police in Turkey or in many parts of the ‘Muslim world’ wouldn’t come caring about health and safety, particularly not my health and safety!

Therefore despite his experiences with these kinds of activism now in Turkey, the USA and most recently in the UK, Balcı still said of himself that “I never was able to shout still, but this was a learning experience”. This was, as he explained, because “As Hizmet people we usually prefer a low profile ‘passive activism’, passive in the sense of non-confrontational activism. As Hojefendi would say, ‘active patience’ ”. So more “activist” modes of activity still remain a relatively new departure, including in Europe, and to develop further will likely need the development of new thinking in the light of both Hizmet’s inheritance and the actions themselves, some of which thinking Balcı is beginning to do and is set out and discussed in Weller 2022, Sects. 6.5 and 6.6.

6 Relating to Other Muslims

The question of the relationship between Hizmet and Muslims from other identifiable groups has always been a complicated one not only in Turkey itself, or only because of the extension of tensions from the Turkish Muslim scene into Europe, but also in terms of the ethnically and religiously diverse composition of Muslim groups across Europe. In relation to this, HE3 from the Netherlands notes that:

The movement is weak, is not strong, in connection with other migrant groups in the Netherlands, or in Belgium, and in Germany also. So, the movement has focused on the Turkish people. But within the Turkish society here, also in Turkey, there are other groups, Kemalists, Millî Görüş and Süleymanli movement, Alevis, and other groups and this is something that the people of the movement have to pay more attention to, to make it open to other Turkish/Islamic groups.

On the other hand, to engage more with other Muslim inspired groups can be challenging “because of a strong ideological stance that they all on their own think that they have the best ideology”. And while, as discussed in Sect. 5.3 of this chapter, the question of the Turkishness or otherwise of Hizmet is pertinent to this issue, so also is the question among Hizmet people in Europe of how far one should or should not emphasise an Islamic identity for Hizmet. And Toğuşlu from Belgium summarised some of these key questions as follows:

What should be our identity? – Muslim, Turkishness, Belgian, what should be our identity? Or European identity? We came to the conclusion that, OK, the Turkish identity is somehow a part of our identity but we should also pay attention to the Belgian and European side, but mostly the Islamic side, that the Muslim identity is the most important identity, that we have to change and we have to make this is a little bit more visible. Because most of the people when we discussed this – and we did not discuss only with people from the movement but also with people from outside, OK. And they said, “OK, we know that you are a Muslim, but we need some ‘good Muslims’, so please make it visible. When we went to your website, your activities, we cannot see that they are, unless we know that.”

Since July 2016, especially in European countries where organisational forms of Islam strongly linked with Turkishness and Turkey are strong, the marginalisation of Hizmet by the Turkish government authorities and by the Diyanet has made some wider Muslim relations even more difficult. Thus, while noting the strength of Dutch Hizmet’s engagement in both inter-religious and inter-culturaldialogue, Selma Ablak acknowledged “the problem is that since 2016 we don’t anymore have contact with Dutch Turkish Muslim society”. Indeed, more recently, there has been the additional difficulty of the Turkish authorities being actively involved in cultivating Muslim groups in Europe positively to view the form of Muslimness associated with Erdoğan and the AKP party in Turkey through the activities of bodies such as the Maarif FoundationFootnote 11 which, among other things, is engaged in replacing Hizmet schools with Turkish government–approved governing bodies.

The kind of challenge this poses for organisations such as London Advocacy is that while such Hizmet people as Balcı want to affirm that “Hizmet is not only a Turkish movement”, and that, as he says, in relation to its future in the UK “the Pakistani population in this country is a natural expansion zone for us” it was necessary for Balcı to add the cautionary note that “We don’t want them to have that stigma already in their minds about Hizmet”. Over the years in the UK a number of the members of the Dialogue Society’s Board of Advisors have challenged it to work more closely with other Muslim groups. Generally speaking, on balance, the Society originally felt it potentially more problematic than beneficial to undertake such collaboration. This was because, on the one hand, it ran counter to the Society’s historic wish to avoid conveying an organisational profile defined by having a Muslim membership and ethos and, on the other, it could raise questions for others about Hizmet’s alignment in relation to some of the tensions and fissures within the Muslim scene, both globally and in the UK.

While asylum-seeker AS2 acknowledged that “There are a lot of good groups, kind groups, of course”, just as Toğuşlu acknowledged that, within the overall Muslim scene “there are some good institutions run by other Muslim communities”. But AS2 also expressed a nervousness about entanglement in association with potentially problematic other Muslim groups when commenting that “These kind of groups, I don’t want to integrate with them or touch that kind of group. I couldn’t tell anything to them of course. They are very, very radicalised, so you couldn’t teach or tell anything to them”.

Despite all these challenges, there are positive examples of Hizmet organisations working in a broader way within the Muslim scene, including in the UK where, for example, the Dialogue Society published the important book Dialogue in Islam (Kurucan and Erol 2012). This, on the one hand, sets out what aspires to be an Islamic and Qur’anic rationale for engaging in dialogue, including inter-religious dialogue. On the other hand, it attempted a serious exegetical and hermeneutical engagement with texts in the Qur’an which, through either aspects of their traditional or more recent interpretation, have presented difficulties and stumbling blocks to dialogue, both for Muslims and for other than Muslims. In more directly practical terms, three of the Society’s ten Community Dialogue Manuals (Dialogue Society, The 2011a, b, c) series specifically address Muslims in relation to dialogue, while beyond publications, in 2012, the Dialogue Society convened a sensitive and significant “roundtable” discussion between the Royal Air Force Marshall and Muslim communities while in 2013, all the Society’s Connecting Communities Circle activities were with non-Turkish Muslim community groups (from the Somali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab communities).

In some countries, the issues posed in terms of working with broader Muslim groups were never so acute as they were in countries with a stronger Turkish community and/or overall Muslim community presence. Thus, in relation to Spain, Naziri noted that:

This may be partly because in Spain, unlike in some other European countries, there is no single strong alignment between an ethnic group (for example Turks or Moroccans) and a Muslim population in the way that might be in some other countries and which then leads, in the perception of the general public and/or perhaps in the thinking of these organizations themselves into thinking: “We are the Muslims” of whichever country.

As result, with regard to other Muslim groups, Naziri’s summary evaluation was that “we have quite a good relations” and that “There is a good, I think, atmosphere and sometimes they sponsor our activities, and sometimes they are sponsoring institutionally, giving the institutional support”. Indeed, as already noted in Sect. 3.8 the lack of dominance on the part of one religio-ethnic Muslim group in Spain was probably a significant factor in creating the conditions that allowed the relatively early formation of the Comisión Islámica de España (Spanish Islamic Commission). At the same time, in relation to this Commission Naziri explains with regard to Turca Casa and the Arco Forum that “We don’t join, because our Association is a cultural one, not a religious one”. However, he went on to comment that “if it were a religious one, we would have an option to be part of this system too. But it’s not the case, so we are like, knowing them, getting into contact with them, their programmes, co-operation etc.” Here too, Naziri says that “You have to have some kind of caution, be a little bit cautious with some of them”, giving as the reason for this being that “there are some Islamist-minded ones and so mostly probably they are like pro-Erdoğan by default”, although as Naziri also said, “I think it’s not the case here, at least I hope not, but I can’t know it”.

In Denmark, however, which is another country in which the Turkish presence and/or wider Muslim presence are not so dominant as in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, as early as in 2008, Hizmet was, specifically on the basis of its Islamic identity, involved in an intra-Muslim dialogue initiated at an individual level with a Muslim convert and Imam, Abdulwahid PetersenFootnote 12 about whom Gezen said, “We had good relations with him from the beginning because he was already doing dialogue activities”. In its early years, Petersen became Vice President of Muslims in Dialogue and Gezen said that “we came to know him through our dialogue”. In 2008, following the so-called Cartoon Controversy in Denmark when “some Muslim organizations and some Muslim personalities got in touch with the Chairman at that time”, the Dialog Forum became one of the founding members of the Muslim Council of Denmark (of which Abdulwahid Petersen later became Vice Chair).

In fact, the membership of such a Council makes Denmark fairly distinctive among Hizmet organisations across Europe because, as noted by Sunier and Landman (2015) in Germany, “Hizmet did not take part in national advisory boards” but “Also in other countries Hizmet operates a low profile in this respect” (p. 88). Gezen’s comment on Danish distinctiveness in this regard is that it was perhaps having been very much connected with the above noted Danish context of the time, in that:

The context triggered a necessity I think to take this action at that time. If the context hadn’t been there, maybe it wouldn’t have, it’s difficult to measure that – whether it would have happened or not. But in the context, the association’s Chairman and the Board decided that it was a good idea. We do dialogue already so why not?

In relation to Muslim diversity and inclusion more broadly the anonymous Hizmet participant in Italy, HE2, argues that the challenge of relating to wider groups which identify themselves as Muslims is one that should also extend to include also engagement with “Ahmadiyyas and other Muslims whatever within the community” citing Gülen as saying that “You should have a chair for everyone else in your heart”. In summary, Balcı identifies this area of relations with the wider Muslim scene as one of the key challenges for Hizmet in the future:

I believe that Hizmet has to come out of its own shelter, and become relevant for the general Muslim world, well general humanity, yes, but I feel myself more at ease speaking to you, or to a pastor, or speaking to a monk, rather than in speaking to an Imam because you look at me and say you are a different religion and you respect my religious understanding. But when an Imam, a Salafi imam for example, when he or she looks at me he says you are wrong, I have to fix you! So, it’s not easy and there’s a legitimate criticism about Hizmet which is that we are not in intra-faith dialogue, because it’s harder.

7 Gender in Transition

In the Introduction to this book it was acknowledged that the primary research behind this volume will, in future, need at least complementing and potentially correcting due to a gender deficit in the interviews conducted. Across most European societies, issues around gender, Muslims and Islam have become a big central focus of public debate especially, but not only, in France and Belgium and in relation to question of head covering in public jobs and in public spaces. Some aspects of gender-related debates, such as that of gender violence, tend to get focused on Muslims alone when in reality that issue is far from being restricted to community or group however constructed.

Generally speaking, though, Hizmet has historically reflected the gender balance and profile of traditional Turkish society. There is also evidence that aspects of Gülen’s teaching both reflected and reinforced that reality in terms of general male-female relationships, but especially with regard to public role holders in Hizmet. Indeed, in English translations of some of Gülen’s teachings, gender-related matters are sometimes referred to as “details” which makes it sound as if these issues are not given the kind of centrality of importance that feminists would accord to them, although the English of this translation can sound more dismissive than the Turkish that it translates is intended to be.

Nevertheless, arguably, the area of gender and gender relations is one of those areas where it is possible to identify the effects of the contextual interaction between Hizmet in other (especially non-Turkish and non-Turkic contexts) and the development of Gülen’s own teaching and practice. Indeed, in relation to this, close associate of Fethullah Gülen and interviewee Ahmet Kurucan (see Acknowledgements) specifically suggests that Gülen’s encounter with the Netherlands had a “reverse engineering” effect on the emerging Hizmet engagement with education in Turkey and beyond (Weller 2022, Sect. 2.7). As Kurucan put it, in Gülen’s visits to Europe:

He saw how there was this hugely reliable system in the West where there is huge communitarian work, independent with each other, where there are also ladies and different people from different walks of life involved in that, and that I think Hojaefendi was deeply impressed by that.

And growing out of that, especially in relation to the opportunities for women and girls within Hizmet-related initiatives, Kurucan says:

Especially our schools for girls actually started and expanded after 1992 because of his trip in the Netherlands when he saw our sisters, our ladies, the second generation there, that they had already started their own tuition centres, perhaps schools, their dialogue facilities, and Hojaefendi was deeply impressed and influenced by that. He also said we have not been fair to our girls, to our women. So, you see from that point onwards schools starting to open for girls and women. That’s a huge change in his discourse from that year also, because he visited them so frequently that he could see that progress in first-hand experience.

However, this remains an area in which a lot of debate is still under way. As HE3 from the Netherlands, puts it, “We have also a lot of discussions with Dutch politicians here and government organizations, that the women’s groups, the women’s participation in the society is an issue. It is a cultural issue in the Dutch society”. The question of how quickly or slowly these changes are taking place and how far they are likely to go can be illustrated by the trajectory of Selma Ablak notes that she became involved with the Hizmet movement in 2002 when she married her husband. From this, she recalls that she moved from general helping, through women’s organising, and then into overall Hizmet leadership noting that “At the beginning I volunteered with just paperwork or things like this”.

Then, in a new stage, Ablak says that “From 2013 onwards I got a major role as being the head of a woman’s organization, based in Rotterdam”. This was Rosarium, that in 2007 had been “the first women’s organization set up by Hizmet volunteers”. Ablak recounts that when Rosarium was set up “we had Pim Fortuyn and all the right-wing extremists telling that migrants don’t belong to Holland, especially Muslims”, in which context she explained about the founders of Rosarium that “they wanted to make a difference”. This was a context in which “You could stand on the border and say ‘They are talking that about us’ – but that can be a case of with one hand one finger is pointing to the other and three are pointing to yourself. So, with that in mind they started the women’s organization”.

At the beginning they started with modest steps and “celebrated Mother’s Day, organized Tea Tables, Breakfast Mornings and those kind of basic activities in order to get women outside their homes. And it wasn’t especially meant to get Hizmet women involved with Hizmet, but it was for all women in Rotterdam”. When Ablak and her friends first became involved, while affirming this they also thought: “We could do more than that, because there were highly educated women there. Some of them were highly educated but still not working and not having any contacts in society: they were just at home” and in the light of that “We tried to get them out of their comfort zone to do volunteering jobs, to be in the middle of the society, but we needed to be trustworthy to get those women outside their homes”. Therefore:

we organized political evenings because there was a huge gap between politicians and just people. And then we organized language conversation lessons to learn the Dutch language for the women who weren’t educated and were just housewives. And then we also organized some projects in which we tried to solve problems in the society.

However, Ablak explained that many of the women who were coming to the organisation had a low self-esteem and self-perception which they wanted to challenge: “So, we just brainstormed and then said, ‘We could cook’, and then thought there’s a home there so, ‘What if we go to there and ask if we could arrange a meal for them, just once a month’ ”. As a result of that a “project called ‘Generations at the Table’ started in 2011. And so we involved socially isolated women with elderly people who were also isolated, and we solved two problems!”

In 2013 this project received a prize from the King of the Netherlands. Importantly, through these activities the women learned that there are people who were in as bad or worse situation than they were, and therefore to look out for even the smallest things that they might be able to contribute to the society and with that also to contribute to their own development. Of this initiative, Ablak said that “it was the first organization and then we saw that women can make the difference. And then it spread out, like all over. So, there was another new organization founded in the Hague and in other cities in the Netherlands. And then women got involved in the society”.

After Rosarium “I made a switch to Platform INS, first in the Hague and then in Amsterdam. And now from 2015 until now I am the General Representative of all the women’s organizations in the Netherlands. We have nine regions in Holland and most them have or had women’s organizations”. Since 2015, Ablak has been working as General Representative of all Hizmet women’s organisations in the Netherlands with new “umbrella” organization for women called ZijN (meaning ‘To be’) which she says works across nine regions:

Some with formal organizations and some not. My main job is to help them go on with new activities – with how to get into contact with politicians and get your voice heard. So the activities themselves, they are responsible for themselves, but we come together in order to think about in what way we can, as women, contribute to this society.

Commenting on this she says that “So, to bring those organizations to a higher level has been the main aim” but “you have to work with persons who only know Hizmet and nothing outside Hizmet. That’s very hard to do”. As she then went on to put it:

And you have got a bunch of Abis – because they fund some of the activities, because they have the money, then you want to do a certain activity, and then there is no money, so … you have to find ways to raise money to do your activities. Well, most of the women’s organizations achieved to be independent from the abis and we didn’t need their money, and we saw that the activities flourished – but not the same in all regions and some of the abis said “We don’t need women’s organizations.” So, in those regions it was difficult to keep the organizations going.

Some kinds of organisation don’t need much or any money, but as analysed by Ablak, “you need the support of the locals to be successful. If you don’t have the support, if most people don’t believe in why gender equality is important and why we need more women at that the table, then that is a struggle which you are not going to win”. As a result of this “I tried, I tried to find new people, young people, who have the same outlook on the world in relation to gender equality. But they weren’t there”. In addition, others who in principle might have been ready and interested to participate had other initiatives which they judged it as being more important to get involved with. Therefore, because of this, Ablak made an explanation which is worth quoting from at length, that:

So, then I found another way to be the voice of those local women – in particular women of colour, to be politicians. We have the stigma here in the Netherlands that Muslim women are just housewives, just cooking and caring. And about coloured women that they aren’t able to work in high positions, that they are not highly educated. But I am the living example that isn’t true. So when I attend conferences, Dutch feminists in their fifties and sixties come to me and say “Do you speak Dutch?” and “You must be isolated and you must be a housewife” and I said “No, I have a job at the University and, in the meantime, I am the chairwoman of a women’s organization” and they are then like, “Oh, so you aren’t a Muslim woman who is beaten by your husband and not allowed to get outside?!” and I am, like, “No I am not.” Those conversations I still have them. So, to show the politicians who are making laws about Muslim women, about coloured women, giving them input about the struggles that we have. Because they are just sitting on their chairs and they are just implementing laws and regulations which affect us. And no-one comes to us and asks “What are your problems in real life? What do you need from us?” So, I am trying to be that between that key role between women of colour, Muslim women, and the local and national governments. You can call it lobbying, although I don’t see it as lobbying because it isn’t to gain a personal interest.

Since a couple of years ago we have joined the CSW– the Commission on the Status of Women, including a two weeks programme with the United Nations in New York. So, we have been organizing two or three meetings and have been trying to get involved. The first year we joined and attended there were only white women from a particular age – above fifty – who were representing Dutch women. But Dutch women are not all white and not all old. So, we ask “How can you represent Dutch women?” So that was a huge step for us, and we had good contact with the politicians, and with the Dutch minister of education. So, then, by little steps we have been trying to change the mindset about our kind of women. That’s my main goal right now. One the one side I am still trying to achieve a better position for women in the Netherlands and also to advocate for those women and that is successful.

More generally in relation to Hizmet in Europe, taking the example of Fedactio in Belgium, Tascioglu noted that “It’s throughout the years that it has gradually changed” and that “The situation is changing more and more in the way that women become more flexible. For example, in Fedactio we have six co-ordinators and another six co-co-ordinators which are all couples of men and women. And also the platforms have female platform representatives”. In the UK, for a number of years the co-Director of the Hizmet-related organisation, the Dialogue Society, was a woman, and—even more innovatively—a female organiser was appointed to the north London Rumi mosque associated with Hizmet. At the same time, neither of these initiatives was undertaken without challenges being involved. Indeed, as Tascioglu more broadly underlined, “you have to understand that we come from an oriental tradition where it is not that easy to change things very quickly. It will take time before this equality between men and women will be achieved”.

Thus, HE3 from the Netherlands, while speaking with more general reference than to the Netherlands alone, said very clearly of Hizmet that “It is still a male dominated movement” and that “in leadership especially they are the decision makers and they decide about the activities and projects”, although “the female group in the movement they do the job – they are the hard workers, dedicated persons! They spend a lot of time on the movement activities”. In order to action this, HE3 noted that “Just before the coup we had decided, we had advised here, that we have to change – and the Netherlands is actually one of the first countries in Europe that did that change, and two women here that participated also from that time in the gatherings, meetings, talks at a national level”.

Even so, reflecting on this from her own experience, Ablak noted that when she first got involved in the “monthly meetings where we discuss the Dutch Hizmet” the fact is that “I got involved as the second woman in a group of thirty males!” And indeed, HE3 also went on to note that note of Hizmet women that “in such kinds of workshops and meetings that I have moderated, they are taking their places after the males in the meeting rooms. I said to them, you have to come here and invited them to come and sit next to the real persons who have a position”. He also adds that “there is something from their religious belief or their cultural orientation that it is not accepted that I sit there”, although of “Especially the generation who have been educated here, they sit next to the men, they talk straight, they say what they want to say”. Of the younger generation, HE3 says, “They are almost feminist, they think differently, they act differently, and they will change the movement in that way if they gain that position in the movement”. However, ultimately he thinks that “it depends on the women themselves that they have to take this responsibility. Some of them will do this well and some of them not. And the women will learn here that they can have a role as change agents in that process. I am hopeful. I think it will change”.

With regard to Hizmet and gender issues in Germany, Kerakoyun’s summary comment was, “Well, it is starting” although he believes that it still has a long way to go primarily because, since Hizmet was originally developed in Turkey “everything was very patriarchally oriented, male and abi-based. So, this has to change, otherwise we can’t cope with the future because the reality in Germany is gendered and so we also have to be gendered or else it won’t work”.

With regard to Switzerland, as Özgü notes, “Swiss people are very conservative”, to the extent that it must be borne in mind that it is only after a long struggle that, since 1971, Swiss women were able to vote in federal elections. So, as Özgü puts it in relation to Hizmet, “We need also women who fight for their rights”. Historically, in Switzerland, there was an association called Rosarium and another called Lotus, which were specifically women’s organisations. But as Özgü observed:

These are flower names and reflected women just as flowers and mothers and things like that and I was not sure that was correct as I didn’t want to be thinking of women just as flowers, or family mothers, or things like that, but that they should be part of the overall hizmet associations and that it would be better to have them in the associations as Board members rather than them just talking about their children and their family because that is not all that we think about women participating in the community.

Unlike in the Netherlands, in Switzerland there are no longer any specific formal women’s organisations, but instead there are “platforms for women” within broader organisations and, overall, Özgü summarises the situation as being, “The second generation in Switzerland they want that women should be very active and participate in Hizmet structures, but I think there is now a fight between conservatives and progressives in Hizmet about that”. In analysing the current situation in Hizmet, Özgü contrasts the formal and the informal dimensions by saying that in many associations “we find women who are active or are in the Board, but when we look at the informal networks of Hizmet, there are two worlds: on the one side, you have the men – they have their own meetings; and on the other side there are the women who have their own meetings”. Complicating this, however, is that of the recent “third layer” of Hizmet in Switzerland, “especially people from Turkey they are not really open-minded, and there is also this Anatolian thinking about women”.

In relation to Belgium, Toğuşlu says in echo of what was also reported by Ablak in relation to the Netherlands that “There was a period in which there were some developments, really especially in France and Belgium, for example, in which the women created their own associations in which they not only wanted to be visible, but they wanted to take some decisions for themselves”. However, he acknowledged that “on the decision-making process, the decision-making side, almost only men are taking the decisions”. And Toğuşlu acknowledged that this applied to both the visible and structured organisations and also beyond that because “in the visible and formal organizations and institutions, there are very few female members there and even if their names are there they don’t very often participate in the discussions and in the meetings. So, it is very male dominated, what I see in the movement. So, we have to tackle it”.

Nevertheless, recognising the issue in principle and developing concrete strategies and steps to tackle it in practice can be two different, although related, things. Therefore, along with HE3 from the Netherlands, Toğuşlu noted of the Hizmet women in Belgium that, overall, “maybe, they don’t always want to take the positions from us”. But notwithstanding this, in locating the primary responsibility for the difference between men and women in Hizmet leadership positions, Toğuşlu did not hesitate, as a male, to engage in sharp self-criticism to the effect that “I think we failed”. And in reaching for an explanation for this he suggested that “Maybe as male participants in the movement, as male followers in the movement, we did not create a suitable environment for these ladies and we maybe dominated the discussions as men”. Even though post-2016 there are the very real added external pressures arising, such as those experienced by Ablak, when one moves into a public Hizmet role, Toğuşlu says that one should not accept that as an excuse and that referring to Hizmet more broadly that “I think problem is not visibility – the problem is they have not really changed the rules. This is the problem”.

Asked about what “concrete steps” might be taken to address such an issue, Toğuşlu stated: “Quota, I think. I am in a favour of a quota in the Hizmet meetings etc.” This is being actively discussed in Belgium, with one of the proposals being, for example, that if less than 20 or 25 per cent of women were involved then a decision should not be taken forward. Although this was not yet the practice, Toğuşlu said, “I think there should be strong decision saying that without the quota, we cannot do. So just encourage not only women, but also the men to share their position”.