1 Contextual Transitions

At a 2010 internationalconference held at Felix Meritis, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and organised by the Dialog Academie and VISOR (Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture and Society) on the topic of “Mapping the Gülen Movement: A Multidimensional Approach”, an opening keynote presentation by Doğu Ergil (2010) summarised the overall emergence and development of Hizmet in what this author judges to be a succinct and insightful evaluation of the movement’s trajectory. Beginning in Turkey and then spreading out through the world including Europe, Ergil identified the main trajectory as having been that of what he called “a group of listeners” who:

Have become followers; have transformed into being a local congregation; a congregation growing into a national community; a community expanding to be a comprehensive international organisation of volunteers and stakeholders, that can neither be defined as a religious sect, or denomination, although it is religiously informed. (p. 19)

The above quotation does not explicitly name Fethullah Gülen as the one whose teachings have shaped this “group of listeners” who “have become followers”. But it is a central argument of this book that any evaluation of Hizmet’s future trajectory or trajectories in Europe (as elsewhere in the world) needs to be undertaken in profound interaction with reflection on and issues around the preservation, interpretation, reinterpretation of Gülen’s teaching and practice inheritance (as discussed also Weller 2022, Sects. 6.3 and 6.4).

At this pivotal time for both Hizmet and for Gülen, it remains clear that the movement originated in Turkey and in many ways (see Sect. 5.3) has continued to have a quite strongly Turkish flavour. In Turkey itself, of course, Hizmet’s previous profile and ways of operating have effectively been strangulated. Globally, it has experienced wider political and economic pressures from the agencies of the Turkish state. At the same time, because of Hizmet people’s voluntary migration especially, but not only, to teach, Hizmet has become present across all continents. In each continent, it found itself in interaction with different national, regional and local cultures and diverse religion and belief groups and communities. Therefore, even if July 2016 had not occurred, it is arguably the case that Hizmet was already and increasingly needing to address an increasingly insistent set of questions that arise for any religiously inspired movement that starts in one place, one time and one culture and then attempts to translate itself into other places, times and cultures.

Writing in broad terms, but also with specific regard to Hizmet in the USA and in Europe, Yükleyen and Tunagür (2013) argue that “localization is not a one-time occurrence, but, rather, an ongoing process which goes through multiple changes and shifts in action and in the way individuals reflect upon them” (p. 227) and also that such a process is not mere one-way “adaptation”. In discussing Hizmet, they speak about what they call the “malleability” of Hizmet’s principles that needs to be understood in terms of transitions that manifest themselves in an “ever-shifting and processual fashion”, in which as well as engaging with their contexts, they are also in turn “shaped and transformed as a result of these interactions” (p. 240). Nevertheless, as AS1 put it from the perspective of an asylum-seeker:

Because of this coup d’etat that happened in 2016, accelerates something in Europe also too. And they understand what is our country. Previously we were thinking so emotionally about our country. But what I am thinking, so I am sure the Turkish diaspora in Europe also they saw it, we had too much of a nationalistic feel. And this was a barrier to us to come together for the other part of the world, actually.

And, as Ablak formulated it from the perspective of one already fully located within Europe:

So, way before that we ourselves had a wrong view about the society. Of course, it is a warm burrow, it is your comfort zone to be with Turkish people, to be with people with whom you can talk the same language. I understand that fully, but that isn’t the main purpose about Gülen and the Hizmet movement. So, 2016 was a shake up – OK look at yourselves, look at the mirror and learn from your mistakes. So, it was an important moment and since then volunteers who didn’t speak the Dutch language started with Dutch courses and people who said that they were a part of Hizmet movement are starting to get involved with their non-Turkish neighbours, and started organising activities with them and getting into volunteering jobs outside of Hizmet too. So, the coup attempt is negative. It brought horrible things. But if you look at the positive side, it also brought something in terms of opportunities because we become more critical about ourselves about how it could change, how we could do it better. So, we lost our comfort zone.

As discussed in more scholarly terms, aspects of this process have been explored in Watmough and (Ahmet) Öztürk’s (2018) journal article on “The Future of the Gülen Movement in Transnational Political Exile: Introduction to the Special Issue”, and their article in the same special issue on “From ‘Diaspora by Design’ to Transnational Political Exile: the Gülen Movement in Transition”. Concerning Europe in particular, it is the argument of this book that, within the overall context of an acceleration of what this book calls a “de-centring” of the Hizmet from Turkey, including in the most recent and traumatic ways following July 2016, two main things have occurred. On the one hand, as Toğuşlu has put it, the profound shock of what happened in Turkey had a substantial impact resulting in his challenging observation that “I think we are now a little bit stuck”. But in addition to this, there is also evidence that a more open self-criticism has emerged within at least parts of Hizmet relative to its recent experiences particularly in Turkey and that has, in turn, been starting to feed into a growing re-assessment by those associated with Hizmet about its overall future trajectory or trajectories. Of course, as Toğuşlu says: “It’s not unique for Hizmet” because for all “transnational, faith-based communities or other non-believer communities as well, this transnational in terms of being global but also being local at the same time is always a challenge. It brings some questions that you have to face and maybe you don’t have some solutions”.

What does, however, seem to be the case in relation to Hizmet in particular, and especially in Europe, is that a number of questions, issues and challenges which have in principle always been present have been both accelerated and underlined by the impact of July 2016 in what are ways that are now unavoidable. As Ablak articulated it arising out of reflection on what had happened in the Netherlands:

It gave another view on what Hizmet should be. I mentioned the problem that mostly Hizmet was focused on Turkish people and that was their comfort zone. But I said, “We are in Holland, and why are we focusing mainly on Turkish people?” And if you talk about dialogue activities and so on, most of the Hizmet people saw that activities done by Platform INS or the women’s organizations wasn’t important for the volunteers. But with the failed coup attempt we got another view on society – because all the Turkish people who had eagerly helped all those previous years, they closed the doors and told us we were terrorists. So, we had no other choice. But if we had better listened to Hocaefendi to Fethullah Gülen, if we had seen it from his view about what Hizmet should be, we didn’t need a coup to change those views.

Arising from this, Ablak argued that “the main thing is that we need within Europe and the main thing we need in Europe is the European Islam. And I can’t say that Hizmet is the role model for European Islam. But we should try, and we should give more effort in contributing to that. So that’s a point of attention”. Similarly, HE1 says, “I think it should be first step in the countries and having a consensus maybe at the European level. Maybe this will be the way for it to go through”. However, it is not obvious that this can be done structurally, or at least not necessarily through the existing Intercultural Dialogue Platform based in Brussels. This is because, as also noted by interviewee HE1:

The Inter-Cultural Dialogue Platform normally claims that it should represent the other eight European countries, and at times it also included the UK … So it brought another challenge. We are all the same. We all reject hierarchy among the institutions. So there is no hierarchy and I think more than six countries – like Italy, Spain, Poland, France, Belgium. So, we get together every month and try to co-ordinate with each other. So there is no, like, “Big Brother”.

Therefore, in terms of a European-level development of Hizmet, while up to a certain point this is possible, there is also arguably also a potentially prior task to undertake at an individual national level. This is because, for example, in France, the impact of the country’s model of laicité means that how one goes about being active as a religiously inspired (even if not confined to religion) group will necessarily be reflective of that national context. As HE2 from Italy expressed this more broadly:

The international system (based on the nation state system of course) is very much affecting how Hizmet people are operating, because that is depending on the church and state relations; issues about citizenship; how institutions see the presence of people from different cultures and backgrounds etc etc. And that’s why I don’t know what will really happen in general, because it’s very complicated. But for each case, I will say, of course, that should be the general principles, whatever we can call them, list them, will be the main, I will say, platform or background for Hizmet activities, that seems more convincing to me because in each case, in each country, you have a different activity, different connections.

In the Netherlands, a process of localising Hizmet is continuing, at local, regional and national levels, as set out on the website on the nationwide consultation,Footnote 1 in which both Ablak and Alasag have been involved. As Ablak explains:

We started to work in that way before the coup attempt. And then with the coup attempt it got accelerated. We needed to publish the documents on which we were working. And we got all kinds of Hizmet people involved – including the young ones, the housewives, and everyone who wanted to say something were invited in groups. And we got a document – we called it a Vision Document, and we had a press release, and we accelerated that process of change and of more transparency about what is the Dutch Hizmet, how we work, and how our decisions are made and so on. And we published that much more quickly than we originally wanted to. But then we have the document, but it is important to implement that. In terms of fully implementing that, we aren’t there yet. We still try, each day, to get a step further in implementing that document, but it is a beginning.

According to the document de Nederlandse Hizmet: een beweging in beweging. Visiedocument (in English, The Dutch Hizmet: a Movement in Motion. Vision Document), overall “Our mission is to stimulate personal, spiritual and professional development. In cooperation with others, we want to contribute to an inclusive and peaceful society”. It states that the “Dutch Hizmet movement” has values that are focused on “freedom, justice, equality, commitment and respect” and that it is committed to achieving the following four goals: “1. Self-development; 2. Connection; 3. Contributing to solutions to social issues; 4. Develop and share knowledge about Hizmet”.Footnote 2Ablak goes on to explain:

So, when we developed our Vision document, it was seen as “best practice”, and copied by Belgium. And we went to Germany to talk about how we coped with the aftermath of the coup attempt and how we got into that transition with more transparency. So, we had, yeah, lots of meetings about how we copy the “best practices” from other countries within Europe.

So, we try to learn from each other, but the main thing is, within the context of the country we live in. So, the Dutch context is very different from the German context and the Belgian context. And then we see that it isn’t possible that Gülen says, “Do this, and do that” and we copy it to our activities in the Netherlands. It is impossible. The whole story of a cult or sect … we don’t work that professionally!

According to Toğuşlu, Fedactio in Belgium had always kept under review the question of “what should be our aims in this society, but always with connection to the Hizmet ideas and principles and how these principles can be translated and adapted in our context”. Therefore even “two years after the establishment of the Federation, then we started again” and this was done by means of “some workshops with different people from different groups in the movement, including students; from movement women. We made some quotas, so we had some women”. In due course, Fedactio also began work on a “principles statement”, although Toğuşlu acknowledges that “we did not focus our energy on these principles, why? – because we wanted to do something especially in a practical way to open eyes and to bring people together”. At the same time, reflecting on his own country of Belgium, and against the background of a strong relationship Toğuşlu also argued that many of the transitional developments flagged in this book were, in fact, already in process in terms of having “identified as what the next steps should be, but then came the Turkish coup attempt”. Tascioglu spoke of post-July 2016 as follows:

Hizmet always held universal values and worked on global projects and didn’t mean to only work within the Turkish community. Nowadays, there is no connection with the Turkish communities more broadly because, unfortunately, most of the people here in Belgium are politically oriented towards Erdoğan politics, therefore if the politics in Turkey do not change I don’t see how we could form a community with the Turkish community here in Belgium? Because of these politics of Erdoğan there is a very strong polarisation within the Turkish communities in Belgium, and it has become worse.

In relation to different national contexts one can see differential developments within Hizmet in Europe. Thus, while the UK Dialogue Society was founded in 1999 with the name The Dialogue Society, it did not specifically link that name with religion, whereas what was called in the Netherlands Islam and Dialogue was founded in 1998. At the same time, Keleş says that:

And then they changed it, and then they changed it again, I don’t know why. So they have gone through – I don’t know why it is – it might be to do with the pressure they have been under as part of being a significant majority there, I mean when people say Muslim in the Netherlands, they think of Turks and Algerians. And they have been investigated by Parliamentary commissions there, and so on. So, they have felt that kind of pressure and you certainly have that there.

From Keleş’ perspective, “I mean it definitely has something to do with the kind of socio-cultural context in which these kinds of organizations are created. So we didn’t feel under pressure one way or another”. But, as Keleş put it: “religion doesn’t ‘do it’ for the Brits, as far as we can tell. It’s not a great conversation opener”, although it is also the case that “There’s definitely need for religiously-based conversations and we thought we could do that in the Dialogue Society, and we can be open. And we spent the first ten years doing inter-faith. But we always thought that it’s going to evolve beyond this”. Indeed, Keleş set this within a wider view of the movement’s evolution:

So, it began as a religious congregation in the 1970s/1980s, it turned into an education movement, and it turned into dialogue. And we were watching this from the UK, especially the last few years, and so we could see the transition. So, we felt that even though we are here now, if we do the whole inter-faith thing, its going to move on from there, so let’s do something sufficiently expansive. And I remember having that conversation – it’s maybe to do with the people who were involved at the very beginning. But I also think that if we were in Rome, we may have been a bit more selective in that.

At the same time, Keleş notes that interplay between structure and agency is more complex than the context being simply determinative, when he notes that:

I also think it’s the geography that attracts a certain kind of individual. So, my colleague, my counterpart in Rome, he is all about inter-faith, and I love him for it, and it’s great. But I can’t see how he would have been here and I would have been there, being how I am – either I would have changed or moved on.

That there is debate between emergent national models for Hizmet is clear. Thus, Keleş from the Dialogue Society in the UK has a critique of the German “federation” model of which he said, “I have issues with their operational model, because Federations create pyramids”, even though “In the sense that they’ve understood it, Federation has a representational value”. But, of course, German society has very particular ways of doing things, of acknowledging or making space for organisational initiatives in which, overall, it can tend to be more bureaucratic and pyramidical. And there is always a strong push from government and the public to ask: What is your representation? What is your legitimacy? Where, in terms of structure? While there are echoes of this also in the UK, in Germany it is very strong. Keleş also has a critique of Fedactio’s somewhat looser federative model that “they’re actually retracting from that, they are going back. And the people that I speak to, at least, have said this to me in person” and his preference, at least for carrying through transparency, is “to make things transparent and clear at the smallest entity and then work on bringing things together, rather than trying to do it all in one go”.

In terms of self-reflection on the future of Hizmet in Germany Karakoyun said: “I think there are some internal challenges that we have to overcome now, Hizmet especially in Germany”. Among these he lists the need for “emancipation from the discussions in Turkey” and “When say what we are, which we are – German Turks”, “we have to focus on our issues and we have to focus on our issues on which we have been working from before 2016 as well”. Thus, beginning with these organisational developments “Hizmet more and more started to become something German” and “Especially with the third generation German Turks like me, something like a German Turkish Hizmet began to develop”.

Speaking out of the perspective arising from his role in Switzerland, Özgü also sees the events of 2016 as pivotal, arguing that “after this 2016, after this coup event, Hizmet did begin to change. The main change has been after that”. Özgü’s projections of future Hizmet trajectories are based not only on what he says is already happening as a by-product of interaction with the wider social and political environment, but also as conscious construction. Therefore, notwithstanding what may be the orientations of some among the new wave of Turkish asylum-seekers, Özgü says:

Now we try to develop a Hizmet with Swiss structures, but now because of Turkey, I am active for fifteen years in Hizmet, but I didn’t know much about Hizmet in Turkey. But I think Hizmet Switzerland is not like Hizmet Turkey. There is also a clash of values, in Europe and also in Switzerland with these people, because people in Turkey they have all these Turkish reactions, and all this understanding of culture, and I think this will clash with this understanding of democracy. But in Switzerland I am sure that the people who are here, also as asylum-seekers, they will also understand the meaning of democracy.

At the same time, despite this emphasis on the national, in relation to the interchange between Switzerland, Hizmet globally, and Gülen in Pennsylvania, Özgü acknowledges that “We have our global connections, that’s true. I was also there. I went there, but just as a dialogue responsible person and as an abi I was also there”, and Özgü’s observation on this is that “What I have seen there is that we don’t really talk about the countries, about things like what shall we do in Switzerland, but Hizmet global issues”. In other words, “we don’t really talk about education, dialogue and things like that with the other countries – or our education things – in Pennsylvania, but to talk about international things”. Such international things include “about how can we help the people in Turkey because we have to help them financially, to support them financially in Turkey, and that’s also a global issue. And these global issues they talk about in Pennsylvania”.

In fact, the issue of national Hizmet emancipation is, for Özgü, articulated not only in relation to Turkey, but also that “another difficult thing was to emancipate ourselves from Germany”. This is because originally Hizmet people from Switzerland went to Germany to share experience because “Germany is very huge and there is a very big Turkish Hizmet community there and they are very active”. Therefore, as Özgü says, “most of the initiatives in Switzerland, we copied them from Germany”. But as Özgü says, “Switzerland is not like Germany”. As a concrete example, Özgü cited that:

To open a private school in Switzerland was not the best idea, because also state schools they are very good, and those private schools in Switzerland they are very expensive. You have just forty students in those private schools. But we copied that from Germany because in Germany they founded schools and that’s why we ‘needed’ also private schoolsin Switzerland.

As Özgü says, “We are Hizmet Switzerland. We don’t want to be just part of Hizmet Europe, or Hizmet Germany” because “Switzerland is its own nation and has its own history. They are not just German”. And this is not only a matter of the French- and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland because, as Özgü explains: “we have another understanding of democracy here in Switzerland that’s different from in Germany”. And such developments across the board are important for the integration of Hizmet in the wider Swiss society for whom, even though it is part of “an international network” at the same time, “Hizmet Switzerland is part of a known entity … we have our own meetings; our own thinktanks; and our own associations”. As an example of this, Özgü cited the foundation they founded in 2018 for asylum-seekers, in relation to which he said:

It has a very good structure and we have our own activities, and we didn’t copy the same thing from Germany. They have their own associations with their own structures and we in Switzerland, we have our own activities and structures. And of course it is very important to found these things as Swiss associations and with Swiss culture, with Swiss thinking, understanding and everything.

In relation to the future of Hizmet, Özgü in Switzerland stated that, although he was many times in other countries, “I prefer to talk about Switzerland, not about Hizmet globally or in Europe, because I don’t really know Hizmet in the other countries”. And here, in line with also the broader culture, Özgü thinks that in the future “Hizmet will be more democratic, it will have more democratic structures, because the people who grew up in Switzerland, they grew up with this thinking of democracy – to vote about a referendum issue. Brexit is in each two or three years here! It’s not new for us!” And people of Özgü’s generation are socialised within this. So, he says: “I think that people in Hizmet who grew up in Switzerland they want more democracy in Switzerland, they want more participation in Hizmet, they want to have the authority”.

If Hizmet is indeed becoming “de-centred” from Turkey, Gezen says that “I hope the Danish Hizmet volunteers will largely focus on their local issues. So, integration issues; radicalization issues; you know, young Danish Muslim kids/boys who are not well educated, solving those kind of problems”. He acknowledges that “This may be wishful thinking”. However, if Hizmet does manage to do this “Then there is a huge potential for Hizmet in general, not just in Europe, but also globally to contribute to solving local issues”. In relation to links across Europe, he thinks, “It’s going to be difficult to find a big European Hizmet that gets together like maybe happened before”. What he thinks likely more to emerge in three to five years’ time is a loose linkage across Europe when “there will probably be a local Danish Hizmet in contact with other local Hizmets in other European countries where they will probably arrange, once or twice every second year gatherings or meetings where they can share ideas and projects inspired by Gülen” and, in the meantime, one can make informal bilateral contacts as needed.

In relation to a move back to Turkey, he says that “I can’t say that for sure. I really hope it will happen – also if you listen to Gülen he is still saying the same”, although Gülen is also saying that “This has forced … people in Hizmet to move out of Turkey and to really go out to work and create peace in the world”. In fact, Gezen went so far as to say that “I am hoping, and if something is going to be foreseen, that it will stay ‘de-centred’, that it’s going to be more and more local focusing on Danish issues. That’s why there were critiques of the informal structure after the coup that I am definitely reading with interest to see how things are moving”. Although there are serious human rights issues in relation to Turkey which should not be overlooked, an out-of-balance concentration on these and on the issues arising from them would, in Gezen’s evaluation, mean that “we would not be what the vision was about in terms of spreading peace around the world. We would become a group that was focused upon a really small area of what matters right now”. In contrast to a focus on Turkey, Gezen argues that what is needed is a broad vision:

I think rising nationalism, populism, you know, the issue of what is truth and what is not truth in the sense of media coverage is our major issue, and our major issue is not only what is happening in Turkey. What Erdoğan is doing, like what Trump is doing, and other populist leaders is what we should, you know, work against. I don’t think that the major focus for the Hizmet right now is Turkey alone.

In relation to options about how one might frame the future self-understanding and external projection of Hizmet, some have started to characterise its presence and activities in countries outside of Turkey as a “diaspora”, although Gülen himself has questioned this. Others argue that Hizmet should simply think of itself as being where it is, in relation to which Toğuşlu affirms that he thinks “This is the idea”, while also noting that “If you say this in a one hour speech, if you say it in a few words, everyone understands”. But the challenge is how to work it out specifically and concretely and, as Toğuşlu says, the challenge at the moment is that there is “a kind of struggle for survival because people are trying to escape not only from Turkey but also from other countries in order to get asylum. So, with this survival, even though you cannot recognize yourself as a diaspora, but as a kind of ‘diasporization’ ”.

In summary, in relation to these pivotal transitions, Toğuşlu expressed the sense of disorientation felt by many Hizmet people when he said that “I think there is a rupture with what is going on now at the local level, and what is going on now at the global level. At the local level I think we lost a little bit, at the global I don’t know exactly what is going on”.

What Toğuşlu was highlighting here was the issues that of what he called a “translation of words” which has already happened in comparison with “the translation of the whole vision of the movement” which has not yet seriously happened—in other words, the hermeneutic challenge as explored in more detail in Weller 2022, Sect. 5.3. In the light of this, Toğuşlu explained that “I think we need something new, coming from the Hizmet principles, but we should put it within the European context, and within the European context every country has different historical dynamics and legacies, we have to adopt, and with these Hizmet principles to make a kind of mix”. On the one hand there are “so many universal values that we can share” but there are also “many values distinctive to the history of the country” and therefore “Hizmet will more and more get the new approaches and values from cultures and values from the cultures and countries in which it is operating. Then, maybe, it will create a new synthesis or something like that”.

In Sects. 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 of this book it was noted how the vast majority of Hizmet activities emerged with an organisational focus around the meeting of needs in relation to the overcoming of ignorance through education; of divisive conflict through dialogue and of poverty through relief. The pedigree of this lies, as previously noted, within a broader Islamic inheritance mediated through Turkish and Kurdish culture via the teaching of Nursi who identified the three evils or three enemies which are not to be seen in terms of people, but rather as things that undermine humanity around education, relief of povertyand dialogue.

One of the historical dangers identified by many Hizmet interviewees has been that of adopting what might be called a “copy-paste” approach in a too simplistic attempt to transplant into Europe what worked in Turkey because the balance in such needs varies across both space and time. And similarly, when looking at the future of Hizmet across Europe, it is arguably also important to avoid falling into such a “copy-paste” trap when considering what might, in the end, be quite varied nationally focused translations of the key Hizmet themes and recognising that what might emerge might not be a single European developmental trajectory, but potentially trajectories of multiple Hizmets.

2 Education to Tackle Ignorance

As discussed in Sect. 2.2 (and also in Weller 2022, Sect. 2.6), a commitment to education has been one of the key characteristics of Hizmet, including within its development in Europe. Speaking about Hizmet as an international movement, HE3 from the Netherlands went so far as to argue that “This educational factor or feature” is “one of the pillars of the movement” which “functions as a means of social and cultural engineering of the movement”. And Keleş explained the way in which Hizmet originally fulfilled an educational need in Turkey:

You had the state Kemalist school system that was ideologically anti-religion, or you had a state Imam Hattip school that was religious, but detrimental in terms of the Diploma and everything else that it gave you. Hizmet created a school system that was ideologically in line with the secular laws; that taught the national curriculum; that had a religious ethos, so it wasn’t anti-religious in its ethos, but also gave them a great Diploma. It provided a great service – a “third way” so to speak between the state secular and state religious (Imam Hatip) schools, tapping into a genuine need. And that’s why it was appreciated.

With specific regard to Europe, Yükleyen and Tunagür (2013) argue that “At its inception, the Gülen movement in Europe did not specialize in education” and that “The emerging religious field when his [Gülen’s] followers first arrived in Europe was based on mosques”, in relation to which Yükleyen and Tunagür’s comment was that “religious communities begin with activities for which Muslims have a demand” (p. 228). Indeed, generally and Islamically speaking, the establishment of a mosque in places to which Muslims migrate has traditionally also been seen as something of an Islamic duty. But Yükleyen and Tunagür’s argued that because, in Europe, there was already more competition in that regard “the Gülen movement specialized in education, where there were no competitors” (p. 228). In the first instance, this was concerned with focusing on the needs of the children and young people from the original Turkish migrant diaspora. However, as HE3 notes:

In the field of education, compared to Africa, Central Asia, and Turkey also, in the Netherlands and in other European countries, the educational system is at a good level. What is your niche in that environment? – this is the point, I think. There are schools initiated from the Gülen movement here – for example, the Cosmicus school, although they have another name at the moment. After the coup the board of the schools has changed the names of the schools.

And, indeed, as time went on, the educational offer of Hizmet extended beyond that of Turkish children so that HE3 noted, “I think that this is the niche that the movement participates in within the Netherlands, and in Belgium also, to have the children of Moroccan, Turkish and other cultural and ethnic backgrounds”. In addition, things are also already extending and developing beyond that so that HE3 now notes that “I see the mix of some Dutch children are also participating in the schools, because the teachers are partly Dutch teachers of origin, and the schools have a Dutch name, not a Turkish name. And this is the transformation the movement’s schools, educational activities have now”. As HE3 says:

Schools are supported, and fairly successful here. They are part of the local Dutch school communities: the schools are not of the movement. The schools are a part, formally, of the local Dutch school communities. In Rotterdam, it is one of the twenty-nine schools of that community. In Amsterdam, it is a part of the Montessori School Community. The movement supports and helps the school to be successful. But formally it is a Dutch school, not a Gülen school, and this made the school successful.

Therefore, while in the field of education the focus in the Netherlands has until very recently been on migrant children and migrant groups, “in the last year we see an opening to the other groups – also the Dutch groups – it is a process”. Once again this underlines the need for clearly contextual developments rather than for “copy-paste” approaches of any sort.

In Belgium, as in the Netherlands, Hizmet educational initiatives were initially focused on meeting the needs of Turkish migrant children and their families. A flavour of the historic context for this is summarised in the following interviewee testimony from EH1 who first came to Belgium from Turkey as a teacher:

When I came to Belgium in 2010, in Ghent, I was a teacher in one of the Hizmet weekend courses for small kids, I think the ages were between twelve and fifteen. In Turkey, all people, not only the Hizmet part, know the importance of education very well. And every parent wants their kid to be well educated and to have a good education. But in Belgium it was not the case. So I had, like twenty kids in the room, and I just asked all of them, “What do you want to be? What do you want to study? And what do you want to be in your life?” And nobody responded to me that I want to be teacher, a want to be an engineer, or a want to be architect … One response was I want to open my own kebab shop and the other was to be a worker in the factory. And all the answers were similar to that. And also like the workers who work in a specific factory earn more than a teacher, let’s say.

EH1 recognised of these young people that, overall, then “they had their arguments. So, the context in Belgium was completely different from the context in Turkey”. Nevertheless, in this context, EH1 says:

I see the positive value of Hizmet in Belgium, in a country where Turkish people are the second biggest minority (and the Moroccan people are the biggest minority), I think just giving that vision, of what is the only chance to be successful or make good out of your life, you need good education, you need a better education. I think Hizmet people gave these people of Turkish background the sense that education is the most important thing you can do in your life … There are, I think, ten schools which were opened by the Hizmet participants in Belgium. I think this is the most concrete and obvious added value by Hizmet to Belgium. And Belgium is a special case, like people who had migrant backgrounds don’t have a good educational level in Belgium … And this is a big failure for Belgium. And I guess when some people – in this case Hizmet participants – explain their projects to the Belgian authorities, one can see why they allow Hizmet to open schoolsin Belgium.

As Tascioglu acknowledges: “So, it’s an advantage in Belgium that the state system organises and supports cultural and educational activities as well. If it’s like a good project and it speaks to an audience, to the public, it gets help from the state and that’s the same for the Netherlands and for Germany”. In contrast to this, the events of July 2016 in Turkey have not been without their impact on perceptions of Hizmet schools, especially among the wider Turkish population which historically have been the main source of students. In relation to the schools in Belgium, interviewee HE1 noted, referring to 2018, that:

Yes, last year, in the first few months, it was the same thing – that Turkish people withdrew their children from the schools. But in Belgium there are always waiting lists for schools, and within a few months they got the other kids (mostly Belgian with Moroccan origins): like around 30% of people were Belgian with Turkish origins and seventy per cent is mixed. So, they didn’t suffer a lot in Belgium. I know some places where some families withdrew their children from the schools and within a few months they wanted to enrol back again because their kids were not happy in the new schools. The conditions were not the same and, unfortunately it was not possible to re-enrol these families because the schools are in full capacity in Belgium.

However, following that initial withdrawal, Tascioglu noted that “Because the schools were so popular, there were already waiting lists and after this year, all the people on the waiting lists for these schools could be in the schools”, but also that one of the consequences of the immediate hiatus was that “Most of the kids in the schools right now are Belgians of Moroccan origins, but there are also a wider diversity of ethnic backgrounds”.

In Switzerland, whereas some years ago, Hizmet’s provision of supplementary education addressed similar migrant-related issues as to those in Belgium, Özgü now comments that “Hizmet also now has no more supplementary schools and is no more active in education in Switzerland”. For him very personally “that’s the worst thing I think” because such initiatives had been Özgü’s personal route into higher education and ultimately to a career in law. But as noted earlier in Sect. 3.6, the events of July 2016 and following undermined the economic models of these schools. Similarly, in Germany, as Karakoyun explained it:

We have the problem that many Turkish people who were engaged in our schools, our teachers, parents, pupils left the schools since 2016. So, you have to deal with it. So, you first of all have to deal with this, with the big problems that you have. Of course, there are big financial problems; there are big leadership problems at the moment; there are big discussions going on because of the Turkish heritage of Hizmet and because many people are in the crisis situation and with their trauma, not everything is going healthily. Not all discussions are healthy because everyone has a problem. Because someone had to quit his job, someone lost his institution, and so on.

In some other parts of Europe, things to do with education have continued in a more “traditional” Hizmet way, albeit with educational services being offered now more to asylum-seekers and refugees rather than to labour migrants. Thus, in Spain Hizmet newcomers have been active in educational initiatives and have self-organised an online education platform called Academy Vision which holds classes that engage nearly ninety students in all, supported by around thirty volunteer teachers (largely from among the parents of the students, although also including some from Japan, Germany and Belgium) in studying mathematics, English, Turkish, Spanish and universal values. With logistical support from Casa Turca, they also organise seminars for adults on topics as varied as entrepreneurship, dialogue concepts, health issues, child education and psychological sessions. Naziri comments on this that, on the one hand, “This example and initiative, for me, is, once again, a good proof of Hizmet as a group dedicated to education and values”, although noting that once those running this initiative find a more settled existence with regular employment, “There is a risk that this project … is not sustainable” as in due course the people concerned will not be as available as they had previously been. At the same time, out of its awareness of this potential issue, Casa Turca is “now working on writing some projects so that we may find funds to maintain it and even to expand it”.

In the UK, Hizmet was not so exposed to this particular issue because it had previously only developed one school—the North London Grammar School (formerly known as Wisdom School). In comparing the situation with regard to schools with that in Germany, while noting that there was only one Hizmet school in the UK, Keleş also observed that “But the reason for that is more straightforward, I think, it’s money! So, in Germany as far as I know, they have more money, they have more donors, they have more Turks. So that’s one thing. They can outspend us, the Germans!” However, even though many Hizmet schools have been founded in Germany, Karakoyun from Germany is critical of the use of what he calls a “copy-paste” approach of which he also says that “I think it is very Turkish” and that:

I think the European way is a little bit different. If you sent someone here, they would say what kind of problems does this society have; what is the biggest problem; and what can I help in terms of it being solved? Is it a school or starting an inter-religious dialogue by bringing together the naturalists, the humanists, the Christians, the Muslims of this country, by teaching them in conflict management and in inter-religious and inter-culturaldialogue, what has to be my job here? And not “copy-paste”. I think many Turkish initiatives were based on “copy-paste”: this is why we have twenty-five schools in Germany. But, well, you said it, in Turkey it was the right thing because there was not good education; in Ethiopia it was also the right thing because there was not good education. But in Germany you have a state that is one of the richest in the world and that is organising education at its best, everywhere in the country for free, absolutely free, and you will say, I will also do!

In relation to the creation of the North London Grammar School in the UK, Keleş says that, in many ways, it is “more reflective of Hizmet schools in Turkey and in Central Asia, which were schools providing excellent education”. However, while “it was easy to do that in that context” because “you had the workforce, and the rest of the educational system wasn’t so great”, with regard to the UK setting, as Keleş puts it:

Who are we going to compete with – Eton? The Prime Minister already comes from Eton? Are we going to provide a school to compete with Eton? Do we think that people who send their children to Eton would ever consider sending their children to North London Grammar school, even if your education was on a par with them?

Therefore, there are issues with replication in itself, but also in terms of how to demonstrate success since, as Keleş asks, if this is what one projects “what does it say about who you are?” Overall Keleş cites this as a concrete example of what he calls “the difference between internalizing the methodology of your teacher, or the methodology of a particular line of thought, versus reproducing the product of that methodology that is time bound”. In interview discussion about this, the idea emerged that a radically contextualised application of the basic Hizmet commitment to education could be a translation into the education of kids on the street in a knife crime context, in relation to which Keleş reacted:

That’s it, that’s a need. Now you provide that, right, you provide a community centre that deals with knife crime in any London borough, now, do that, and then you become you are delivering a service that people appreciate. Do it authentically, do it from your heart, do it from your values, and then that becomes something that people then want: that’s a service you provide.

From these accounts one can see that, while the notion of educational initiatives remains an important one for Hizmet in Europe, how to give concrete and appropriately contextual expression to this continuing Hizmet value is leading to new, interesting and challenging questions. Indeed, these questions are also now being framed in relation to Hizmet’s own educational needs in Europe, not just in terms of educated citizens of migrant background, but precisely as Muslims and Hizmet participants in Europe. Thus, for example, whereas in the past, Hizmet has on the whole not been involved in educating children in relation to Islam, there are signs of this beginning to change. For example, Balcı confided in interview that “I have never spoken to anybody about this – but I am always thinking that Hizmet is going to start for the first time in the West, Religious Education for our own children. Hizmet has never opened Religious Education facilities, but the need is there”. In illustrating this need Balcı spoke about his own challenges as a parent of a seven-year-old daughter attending a Church school and coming home with all kinds of questions in relation to which “I feel myself challenged”. Thus:

Let me tell you a beautiful story. This was two years ago. She was in the Reception, only the first year, and then she was going to a secularschool and not a Church school, presumably no Religious Education. So, I was carrying her on my shoulders, and we passed by a church. And she said, “Daddy what is this building?” and I said. “This is a church, honey”… “Wow, I love churches” she said. So, I was shocked and said “Why”? And she said, “cross bun!”. And I didn’t know what is “cross bun”. And she said, “cross bun, they’re in churches, cross bun”. So, I said well I am going to see what this is, so I Googled and realised it was “hot cross bun”. This is what they teach in the school about hot cross bun, and I assume she asked her teachers what is this? – and they said this is distributed in the churches. I said, we can do “cross bun” because they sell it in Tesco. But I then realised that I had never brought her to a mosque. She wouldn’t say I love the mosque. So, I said there is a challenge here that I had to deal with, you know. So, I looked for a beautiful mosque – and our mosques are not always the best places to visit, and so on, and as Hizmet people we do not always go into mosques. But there was a beautiful mosque, a Pakistani mosque in Wimbledon, and I had heard something about what is this place and so on, and thank God people were happy with children because in Turkish mosques they don’t like children. But then I realised, you know, that the coming generation is going to have a huge challenge with these issues.

In reflecting on this Balcı notes that “Inter-faithdialogue is something that we know, but whether through only dialogue we can teach our young children about our own religious identity, it’s a question mark”. And if it is a question now when his daughter is seven, he notes that with teenagers there will be “another huge challenge out there” and then “what will I do, what will I do?” in relation to which he concludes that “we need communal support bases, which we lack”. This is potentially significant for the future of Hizmet in the UK and in Europe more broadly because what Hizmet was doing in its original Turkish context was meeting an educational need and what Balcı identified through the story about his daughter was about identifying a newly emergent need for Hizmet in an environment such as the UK. What is more, such a need is also reinforced by the arrival of Hizmet asylum-seekers. Thus, Balcı shared that:

We are going to open nurseries, particularly for Muslim children, because a lot of new families came who knew nothing about how to cope with the challenge of living in a predominantly non-Muslim, secular environment. So, they will need guidance, and when they look for guidance, they will most probably prefer people who came from Turkey, because they will say these are still keeping the ideal and authenticity.

And this is being planned even though up to now “That is something we have never done” citing Manchester in the UK as an example of where some newly arriving businessmen are being advised to invest in nurseries. Therefore, if it is the case that a focus on education has been one of the orientating things for Hizmet and has been reproduced throughout the world, these new initiatives signal yet another potential evolution of that basic orientation. In Turkey the need was for schools with an emphasis on, especially, scientific excellence so that pious Muslims could fully participate in, rather than finding themselves in practice often excluded from, modern society. Hizmet schools did not offer religious education, albeit they were informed by a particular ethos in terms of being influenced through Hizmet teachers. So, in relation to this newly identified need for religious education, Balcı identifies what he calls “an opportunity space” arising from the fact that due to the impact of July 2016, there is a “trend of highly skilled Hizmet population coming to the United Kingdom” and in relation to whom Balcı says, “We don’t know what to do with them, because it’s largely non-English speaking, but very highly qualified” including about twenty graduates from what he calls Gülen’s “own university” out of perhaps a total overall of one hundred and twenty graduates, whereas “Five years ago, we had none”. Therefore:

This is an opportunity, but they need to learn English and they need to start dealing with the real challenges of the Western world, instead of third century, fourth century theological discussions. There is a huge human potential here, but we have to be able to mobilise them, financially also support some of them in publishing, for example. Books do not make a living, do not make money. They have to be supported. In the long run we will be, but then we might have, we might be late.

In fact, Balcı went on to identify a special aspect of both this broader Hizmet educational need and the potential opportunities to address it in terms of the traumatic impact of July 2016 on the lives of the children of Hizmet asylum-seekers and refugees, and the seriously challenging question arising of how far these children might be at risk of inheriting an inter-generational trauma from which they cannot escape. Thus, Balcı entertains what is, perhaps, counter-intuitive thinking around education as compared with how Hizmet education developed in Turkey, in which he says, “I foresee – and it has already started in this country also – that some of us who are coming from Turkey are going to become tutors of Qur’anic education”.

Balcı also refers to emerging challenges at the other end of the age range from that on which Hizmet’s educational initiatives have traditionally focused. Scholars of what sociologists of religion often call New Religious Movements (Barker 1989) point out that, typically speaking, such movements engage young adults more than any other age group. What then often becomes challenging for such movements is when those within them have to start thinking more about generational transmission to their young, as well as about generationaltransition from older original leaderships to newer ones. In relation to this, too, Balcı shows awareness when he states that:

I am looking to the growing age of Hizmet also. The point is this: we have never worked on retirement schemes because we never believed in retiring because as long as Hizmet was able to continue and financially able to support its volunteering population, we didn’t actually need retirement schemes. We did have hospitals, we did have dorms where people, even at the age seventy, could do something. So, we were actually providing jobs. Now Hizmet is not doing that and won’t be able to do that in the western context for at least two more generations. But Hizmet has a huge growing older population who are not going to be learning local languages easily, who won’t be able to work other than, you know, simple jobs like distributing pizza and so on, which need no qualification. But you cannot do that at the age of seventy.

Creatively, in relation to this challenge Balcı makes the connection with the challenge of children’s needs and the possible foundation of mosques because:

You can teach in a mosque at the age of seventy, where the students will be also speaking your language. And that is quite a satisfactory profession because, by way of your religious beliefs you believe you are going to meet your God, and at the age of seventy, or even sixty to sixty-five it will be the best of, you know, occupations to deal with divine issues.

At the same time, in relation to this Balcı comments that “But we don’t have mosques”—although more precisely, as noted in Sect. 3.2, in the UK there is one mosque in north London that, as previously noted, is identified with Hizmet, and so Balcı goes on to say:

So, I have been lobbying here, the leadership of Hizmet in the United Kingdom to think about opening more, you know, mosques because our children will need it, and looking at Pakistani – particularly Bangladeshi and Somali people – they need it. Their kind of mosques and most probably you have heard the last survey, you know fifty percent more than fifty per cent of the society believes that Islam is incompatible with British values. I’m not sure when you ask them what are British values, what they would say. But still there is a perception out there that needs to be changed.

Commenting on what Balcı had suggested concerning Islamic education, Karakoyun from his own perspective in Germany said, “I think that’s true”. Indeed, he went on to say that “And not only we need it” but “also Muslims who are not organised in Germany (and who are perhaps eighty per cent of the Muslims in Germany) need it”. This is because, especially in Germany:

The Turkish mosques are Turkish. They are even the long arm of Erdoğan, and who can better integrate the newcoming people into Germany than people like us who were born in Germany and sharing Islamic values, and bringing together Islamic values with the German Grundgesetz. I think we have to take more responsibility in this issue.

Thus, Karakoyun notes in relation to Germany also that “We are now in active discussion about whether Hizmet should launch something like an Islamic academy. So maybe within the next one or two years we will see steps there. So it is rather concrete even”. Taking similar ideas further, Balcı confided that is his own personal “retirement project” is that “I am planning to open a madrassah, an online madrassah, because off-line is off!” and in relation to which he explains that:

I’m getting prepared, I’m just making readings. I’m trying to learn what has failed, why the madrassahs particularly in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan etc are failing so gravely our religion. So, I am making readings about their curricula, and why they are failing people, why it’s taking so long to be knowledgeable about religious issues and so on. In the long run, in five to ten years I’m hoping to establish a small digital Madrassa where I can teach people on challenging issues.

In relation to such a madrassah, Balcı underlines that he wants it to be dialogic in that “I need Christians, Buddhists, Jews, you know, I need them to come and teach in the Madrassah”. And it is the significance of this affirmation that leads into the next section’s discussion of Hizmet future trajectories in relation to dialogue.

3 Dialogue to Tackle Conflict and Promote Inclusive Integration

Whenever and wherever one encounters Hizmet organisations throughout the world, dialogue has always been one of Hizmet’s three key themes. Such dialogue is intended to address disunity and division. As Keleş explains it historically:

When Hizmet came out with dialogue … it provided a platform and it brought the secularists and the religious, the Sunnis, and the left and the right: it provided a great service that was needed. Now dialogue they didn’t know that they needed it, which is why they were so surprised at what came about through it. But, actually, they realised that and as a result they appreciated it, and the state started to copy what you were doing which showed there was an appreciation there at some level of Hizmet.

Comparing a country like Belgium where education has remained a central and probably primary Hizmet activity, interviewee HE1 noted that “Of course, the countries like Spain, Italy, Poland, like where there is almost no Turkish background or community existing, these are active in dialogue activities”. Or, comparing Belgium and Italy, as Tascioglu noted “the inter-religious dialogue that we do here in Belgium is completely different from that in Italy because of the presence of the Vatican”. In relation to such national contextual factors, Toğuşlu, who has lived and worked in both France and Belgium, cites the contrasting example of these two countries.

So, I think this structure coming from two different countries it changes what Hizmet does in these countries, I think. So, for example, in France, religion is less visible in Hizmet activities, but in Belgium although it is very neutral it is a little bit neutral. Dialogue activities – especially inter-faith activities – are there and Hizmet people organise many inter-faith activities in France, but not like in Belgium, it is a country where this does not really create a problem, even though it is a secular country, and especially in education. So, these sorts of differences, I think, affect directly the movement’s existence in these countries. We have to contextualise where Hizmet is involved and its activities. It is important, I think.

Spain, of course, has a particular history of Christian-Muslim and Jewish relations, including both negative periods such as that of the Inquisition and some more positive ones such as the so-called Convivencia. Although Naziri commented that there are a lot of Spanish people today who are sceptical about such a period in their history, the idea of it can at least in principle still be quite evocative as, for example, in relation to the role that it played in the United Nations’ initiative on “The Dialogue of Civilizations” of which, as Naziri pointed out, “It was interestingly promoted in 2005 by Zapatero, the Socialist Party here in Spain, and Erdoğan”. However, although himself citing this, Naziri was also keen to underline that “we are not comparing it to these standards of the 21st century”. Therefore, in and of itself Naziri reflects that “It doesn’t say anything. It was just an historical fact, and that’s all right”. So “It was like, good” but “I just focus on today” because the “historical reality that we are facing today is completely different”.

Coming back to the distinctive kind of focus on dialogue adopted by the Dialogue Society in the UK, Keleş (in Weller 2015) recalls that when it was being set up: “I specifically remember discussing issue of identity and where we wanted the Dialogue Society to be. We wanted to give it an identity that could accommodate different types and forms of dialogue about different themes and topics” (p. 245). In relation to this, he went on that “We knew that our work would include interfaith dialogue but also that corporate identity needed to be wider than that as a time would come when form of dialogue may be more extensive or would need to be more extensively or differently framed” and that therefore “We were very conscious of the dynamic nature of Hizmet’s mode (not aims) and the dynamic or unsettled nature of dialogue itself: hence the name and logo”. As Keleş said “Because ‘dialogue’ is so elastic a term, defining and clarifying the work of a dialogue organization is all the more important for establishing corporate identity and achieving targets” (in Weller 2015 p. 246).

Indeed, the Dialogue Society has been concerned to make a useful contribution in regard not only for itself and its own immediate work but also with the aim of clarifying (and perhaps also making more measurable) the wider field of dialogue by initiating a number of projects aimed at establishing dialogue studies as a distinctive field under the banner of an Institute of Dialogue Studies. These include the founding of a Dialogue School; the establishment of an MA in Dialogue Studies with the University of Keele that was run between 2011 and 2017Footnote 3; the publication of books on Dialogue Theories (Sleap and Sener ed. Weller 2013); Dialogue Theories 2 (Sleap, Sener and Weller Eds. 2016); the 2013 founding of The Journal of Dialogue StudiesFootnote 4; along with, as previously noted, the important publication of its book on Islam and Dialogue (Kurucan and Erol 2012).

This kind of emphasis on dialogue in the wider societal sense contrasted with the Netherlands, where, from the beginning, Hizmet organisations and groups were engaging much more specifically in inter-religious dialogue, including textual dialogue around the Bible, the Qur’an and so on. Inter-faith dialogue was also very much a focus in Denmark, where Gezen says of its Dialog Forum that it “has mostly been known as a Muslim association” and that, overall, its orientation has been that “we want to be in dialogue with Christians, Jews and other denominations, where we have to be together to build this society together, we have to be in peaceful coexistence. So, it was inspired a lot by what Gülen started to do in Istanbul when he initiated dialog activities”. Indeed, in Denmark, the Dialog Forum built on its pioneering dialogue work by engaging in what Gezen cites as being “highly successful” joint grassroots developmental work together with the Jewish community in Denmark.

This Muslim-Jewish initiative now exists as an association in its own right called De Nye Stemmer (or New Voices). It encourages and supports young Jews and young Muslims to visit schools and communicate around “what it means to be a minority, and what it means to live in a country where you are a minority, and showing that Muslims and Jews can live together”. As a joint initiative this contrasts with some of the traditional approaches taken by Hizmet to engaging in dialogue in Europe where, historically, as Karakoyun said in relation to Germany: “For example, when I started Hizmet, when I said ‘look there is such an institution and they want us to co-operate’, the former abis said ‘We only sit at the table if we have prepared it ourselves’”—an approach that he summarised as being informed by an understanding that “We don’t sit at a table that was prepared by someone else because we don’t want to be instrumentalized” with Karakoyun commenting on this that “Well this is a very Turkish way of thinking and I didn’t care about these fears”. By contrast, Karakoyun thought it important for Hizmet to recognise that:

We are not inventing inter-religious dialogue. It has been running in Germany now for fifteen or twenty years. Let us join in activities that are already running. Let us make them better and richer and more influential. Of course, we can also do our own, but let us not do as if we have invented dialogue. Hojaefendi also says dialogue is important, but he didn’t invent it. So, we have to be humble. And if there are local institutions that are already doing it why shouldn’t we sit at their table and participate and be part of it. And this is what I did.

Therefore, as in Denmark, in Germany Hizmet participation in broader collaborative initiatives in dialogue have become more common, with Karakoyun explaining that “And this is why in Berlin we are part of The House of One” (see Sect. 3.3). In relation to the Netherlands, too, Ablak acknowledged that, arising from collaborative work with people of other religions in inter-religious dialogue that “We had lots of support from those dialogue friends” during the post-July 2016 reactions and threats she experienced and “That helped me a lot in that hard time”. Thus, while in the Netherlands the Turkish diaspora mostly supports Erdoğan, Ablak celebrated the fact that:

We got a lot of support from our Jewish and Christian friends in this hard time. Especially our Jewish friends understand the best about what we are looking to do. So, my friend who was just a child when the Holocaust happened said “It’s very hard for you. It’s harder than what we went through in the Second World War because our enemy it was Hitler. Everyone knew our enemy was not one of us. But now, your problem is that Turkish Muslims, and Erdoğan, he is willing to destroy you although he is one of yours. So, you have a bigger problem than we had in the Second World War. I thought, “You can’t be serious about that?!” But then, you know, I can’t trust Turkish people. Someone talks to me and it flashes in my mind: is he or she an Erdoğan supporter, and what will he or she think or me when he or she knows.

In Switzerland, each individual Canton very much has its own culture and tradition, in relation to which Özgü comments that those “like Zurich, Geneva, Berne, and Basel are very open-minded”. In nearly all the Cantons Özgü says of the Hizmet-related asylum-seekers that “Most of all they have got well connected with the Church, the Catholic and Protestant Churches and all the other Churches which are really open to the asylum-seekers”. This was confirmed by the asylum-seeker AS1 who, in a 26 February 2020 written interviewee update subsequently sent to the author explained: “Firstly we immediately established a working group to contact local people and introduce ourselves, at the same time to determine as a non-governmental organization our shortcomings”. But interestingly, from this beginning, rather than trying to establish their own institutions, asylum-seeker AS1 explained that “I was able to join some Intercultural and Interreligious Working Groups which are esteemed institutions in the eyes of local people in Bern”.

Among other examples of engagement in inter-religious activities given by AS1 were those of an OffeneKirche (Heilliggeist Kirche) event on climate change that included climate-related prayers in accordance with Islamic rituals “which was wonderful and attracted great attention from locals and also from official media SRF”. There was also a common Ashura-Day celebration with the Christcatholics/Old Catholics in which “We made the Sunday Church Service together and after that had the Ashure Dessert with the Church Community. They were fascinated and made note of their agenda to do it again in coming year”. With Jewish people there is an initiative called Respect through which “We try to be together in each other’s special days”. Finally, there is a discussion group of Swiss Christians and Hizmet participants in their premises at the Culture Centrum in Bern where “We try to meet regularly every month and held a discussion about different religious themes to understand each other better and closely”.

But they have also included trying to educate other asylum-seekers by, as AS1 explains it, asking “local intellectuals to introduce Swiss opinion leaders and important characters” such as Karl Barth and Nicholas of Flüe (Bruder Klaus)—of whom AS1 said they had “a very similar mindset with Bediüzzaman Said Nursi and Yunus Emre” in order “to encourage them to adapt to the Swiss society more willingly”. At the time of writing, AFS1 said that “Next week Swiss Reformed theologian Leonard Ragaz, one of the founder of religious socialism in Switzerland, together with his wife Clara Ragaz, will be introduced”. From within Switzerland itself, and interestingly, given the historic tendency of perhaps the majority of people associated with Hizmet in Turkey towards at least the centre-right, Özgü adds that, in terms of dialogue “the other thing is that maybe one can get well connected to the left-wing movements”.

Overall for Hizmet in Europe, HE2 from Italy was of the opinion that “For different contexts, I think that for every country and every national or regional context we need people, or maybe institutions, who will be working or interesting in ‘re-innovating’ Hizmet”. As an example, he cited Tevere in Rome, as:

A distinctive institution. I am not saying this, but the Japanese Ambassador said this. At that time he said a “unique” institution, because at that time in a Catholic city, Muslims decided to invest into inter-faith dialogue because we are here and we would like to give a response. And as the Journalists and Writers Foundation was an important inspiration connecting to a Catholic minority in Turkey, now as a Muslim minority we are trying to reach out to Catholics who are in dialogue – Jesuits, Franciscans, Focolare. The document Nostra Aetate in 1965 invites Muslims and Christians to promote together social justice, peace, freedom and moral values. And to some extent Tevere tried to give a response to this.

Given the relationship of Hizmet initiatives to the values that underlie and inspire them, but also the commitment to engage with local contexts, just as in the case of Hizmet, in approaching its dialogue initiatives one can expect to find similar patterns albeit as Tascioglu suggests, with its forms being specifically inflected according to each national context:

Maybe I can say that the work of Hizmet changes according to the context. According to each country there are different realities, different political realities, different democracies, different institutions. It’s very flexible because in the centre we focus on the human being and we then try to find a way to work within the context of a country. So, it is normal that for every country there is a different outworking of Hizmet.

4 Helping to Relieve Poverty Developing into Supporting Human Rights

As has also been noted, the relief of poverty has, together with education and dialogue, been the other one of the triad of foci for Hizmet’s work, as originally inspired by Nursi but also as further developed via the teaching and call to practice of Fethullah Gülen. In working this field, Hizmet has, both historically and generally speaking, tended to focus more on direct response to the concrete presentation of human need rather than on the kind of structural and systemic injustices which give rise to much of the poverty that presents itself. Overall, of the three historic and characteristic foci for Hizmet activity, it is perhaps fair to say that the relief of poverty has probably been the one that has received the least attention in Europe. This might in part be because, while poverty of a real kind certainly exists in Europe, it is generally more of the relative than absolute kind as can be found in the Two Thirds World. What has, however, perhaps also been observable in Europe has been what one might call a “stretching” of this original focus on poverty in terms of its injustice and the human suffering that it brings, into a more inclusive understanding of human social rights that also encompasses other matters, and in relation to which there is evidence that the impact of July 2016 throughout the world has fed into a greater sensitivity among Hizmet participants.

For example, in Denmark, a new Hizmet development is Ius Humainum which explicitly focuses on Human Rights and within which, as Gezen explains, “Young lawyers and university students studying law are planning projects that focus on human rights including a long term focus on certain projects”. In Switzerland, based on Geneva being a recognised centre for international organisations and activities, Özgü cites the International Human Rights Advocacy (IHRA),Footnote 5 of which he says:

And this focuses on global issues. For example, if someone is getting kidnapped by the Turkish authorities in Azerbaijan, we apply for them at the United Nations or the Committee Against Torture, and other human rights things. And that’s a global issue. We can’t just talk about it in Geneva. We have an association, we have there our advisory board. We talk with them, but we need also an international global meeting to talk about issues there. And there are now many global issues, and human rights is a global issue, and the thing with asylum-seekers is also an international thing, because the people from Turkey they go to Greece and then want to come to Europe. That is also a global issue for us to talk about.

In relation to migration issues, Toğuşlu says:

We discuss many times, should we raise our concerns for the topic. Most of the time, we don’t. I have found it a little bit problematic, if it is against our principles. I saw many of my Belgian friends, they are against what the Belgian state does in terms of migration policies. Why can’t the Hizmet people do the same thing?

Toğuşlu argues that “this political participation: our understanding of politics is, I think, again related to the identity issue”. In challenging Hizmet about this he acknowledges that with local integration and indigenisation can also come dangers:

What I mean is that we try to make the movement a French movement, or a Dutch movement, or a Belgian movement. Up to some point, it’s OK, but as a person coming from Turkey, I am not defending a Turkish position, I’m not defending a Turkish identity. But we have a bit of experience with this being anchored to a local identity, a state identity especially – it creates very, very problematic issues. So, I would prefer a kind of maybe a set of principles we hope to follow, whether in China, or Tajikistan, whether in London or in other countries we have to follow. We have to give our focus on these principles, and not on these local identities. We have to be careful: for example, if it is against my principles.

And in fact, recognition of this tension led Toğuşlu to pose the sharply self-critical question for Hizmet of “if I am against my principles then why do I remain in the movement to struggle with these kind of issues rather than to find something else and follow my principles there?” This is quite a radical (in the proper sense of dealing with the roots) questioning and is perhaps a reminder that a movement that is no longer in “movement” in effective becomes dead. So, even where issues are still in process—as with the place of women—as long as a movement actively continues to wrestle with issues, at the least it is still alive. In conclusion, in relation to the challenging nature of these issues Toğuşlu added the comment: “The people have hope also. Without hope I think you cannot live”.

5 Meeting Needs and Keeping the Balance

In reverting to the situation of Hizmet overall, Keleş poses the fundamental question of: “What are we about? What is our project about? And that was a problem anyway, because, you know, the things that you said at the beginning: education, dialogue and unity to overcome the three ailments and so on, all of this made sense”. The three Hizmet value foci remain relatively constant even if differently expressed apart from perhaps in the case of the relief of poverty which, as argued in the section above, might well have been the most radically further developed through a gradual transformation into what seems to have become a broader concern with what might broadly be described as human rights. In the end all three of these foci are shared human concerns, and religions (including Islam), are fundamentally concerned with the human. But because these needs take different shape in different places and at different times, what Keleş argues has to be avoided (when stated negatively) is the danger of providing a service/hizmet that people do not want or need. This not only in principle important but also because the danger of a disconnect in this can negatively impact on the motivation of volunteers. People start questioning what is being done, and if one cannot make sense of it, motivation is lost.

There is, as Keleş puts it in relation to the future roles of Hizmet in the UK: “So the question of whether Hizmet will be able to grow out of this, is actually about if this process helps us to break away from these unnecessary sensitivities and question our values in relation to the need of this country” in which, in summary, “The values and the principles are still very relevant. It’s the how we now interpret them”. In the light of this, Keleş advocated that:

We have to make two lists: what does this society need, without us? What are we going to do, what can we do? We need to compare these two lists, and when you look at that, that’s where Prevent comes out, you know – integration, religious literacy, religious absolutism, you know, minorities, ethnic minorities … that’s one list … extremism, and so forth. And there’s other things on that list such as climate change, and various other issues. Brexit now is on that list. Now, what can we do?

In further reflection on this, Keleş accentuates what might in future need to be done more collaboratively:

Well, there seems to be very little that we can do uniquely about the environment. There is, but not at the top of the list – based on our characteristics, our abilities, who we are, there’s other things that we can do. Religious literacy is one of them: religious absolutism is one of them and teaching a religious curriculum that deals with this issue about absolutism and belief versus religious knowledge and the uncertainty of religious knowledge. And things around Prevent, we can do a lot, and things around mentoring we can do that type of thing. And we can do that by our educational model, making it more open in terms of its identity, and perhaps a more diverse ethnic audience. So, you are not now looking to be a grammar school, which is more elitist. Do you see?

But while in all these matters there was already a dynamic of development that was in play before the events of July 2016, Gezen highlights that “How much researchers are aware, I am not sure, but the coup attempt has really affected the Hizmet movement a lot, to a very high extent” and that, with this impact, there is a danger not only of imbalance between the three foci, but also of between European and Turkish foci. It is not that Gezen thinks what is happening in Turkey should be ignored because he says: “What is happening in Turkey is heart breaking” and that “Hizmet participants shouldn’t forget what is happening in Turkey and all the unjustly imprisoned people; especially women and infants”. But nevertheless:

I am just saying that if you have a portion of work – if you have ten balls – and you have to use this some way, I’m saying that maybe eight or nine of them should be for the local community, and one ball should be used to address the issues in Turkey. Right now, that’s my perception. Right now, I feel that it’s the reverse. I feel that nine of the balls are being used for looking at the issues of Turkey and only one of the balls is focusing on local issues.

As Karakoyun expresses it, since the arrival of Hizmet asylum-seekers “we have people who permanently talk about the developments in Turkey, about what is going on there, and want to help the people there and say that Hizmet now should have the only aim to rescue the friends in Turkey”. But in contrast to that Karakoyun says:

the second group are people like me who say, yes, of course, it is sad what is happening in Turkey, we have to work on it. But we also have to care for Hizmet in Germany and what has been developed here for over twenty years because there are schools, federations, cultural centres, Islamic centres, business institutions. So, there is a lot of what Hizmet is doing here for Germany. So, you can’t now say to people born here, now make your education institution into an institution that is working for human rights in Turkey.

Toğuşlu also expressed the view that, especially in the post-July 2016 period, “we missed a little bit of the balance … we put too much for the people coming from Turkey. I know there is a huge problem there, but there is also an awareness that the movement should continue its activities in dialogue, in education, and this shouldn’t be stopped”. Because overall there are only finite resources, this creates an uncomfortable tension in terms of the realistic prioritisation of resources which after July 2016 have become even more limited. In relation to this, Toğuşlu affirms:

Yeah, exactly. So, it creates huge amount of problems within the movement. The people coming from Turkey feel alone here, and the people from here ask why aren’t continuing our activities like dialogue, like education, and that we are killing ourselves if we put our only emphasis and focus on these people who are refugees.

What is more, this has occurred in the context of what might be called a relative “deprofessionalisation” of Hizmet in these same countries arising from a sharp reduction in the financial and human resources previously coming from Turkey coupled with a growth in need in terms of meeting immediate asylum-seeker needs of Hizmet in Europe. As illustrated by Özgü, in relation to Switzerland:

before the coup attempt we had around fifty people who were professional Hizmet, and after that we just had five, because financially we couldn’t handle that. And now in Hizmet, non-professional people are more active than before 2016. In our meetings most of the people are no longer professional. They work in another thing outside of Hizmet. It is no more a professional thing, Hizmet in Switzerland.

At the same time, Toğuşlu’s overall judgement is that “It is not about resources, but we have lost this motivation, I think, within the movement. So, maybe it is about our energy: you have to go back and forth between the newcomers in Turkey and you have to look at what you can do for the community here in Belgium”. Overall, in concrete terms, as Karakoyun says:

There is a limit to time, money and people, because, for example, just as an example in a small city in Germany, there are maybe ten or twenty people of Hizmet who are active there. They are all active in the education institution, for example. And now there are people coming from Turkey, asylum-seekers, and they want to work on Turkey issues.

And, therefore, all in all, “So, on the one hand they have to help, because it’s our duty. They are our friends, they are not guilty, they are innocent. And on the other hand, but we are for twenty years now in Germany saying we are German Turkish, not something that is based in Turkey. We are a German Hizmet movement”. And in the face of this, Karakoyun says “it’s not easy for us. But we try to keep a balance”.

In DenmarkGezen said that the context following July 2016 has additionally underlined the importance of “discussions and some debates about what the main focus is and what the second focus is, and what should we be focused on”. In Gezen’s view, “there is a focus on issues related to Denmark but not enough, since the major focus is still on Turkey” in relation to which perspective, he explained that “I have a relationship with Turkey due to my parents, my ancestors. Yes. But I am highly concerned with what is happening in Denmark” and went on to say:

I am born and raised in Denmark, because I am concerned with my own country, Denmark. And I think this is something that is going to grow and it’s a big issue within Hizmet. People like me – I’m almost forty, but I was born in Denmark, a have three kids, and I am going to probably be in a cemetery in Denmark until my resurrection one day – and I don’t see Turkey in the same way.

At the same time, Gezen says, “This doesn’t mean, we are not concerned with the undemocratically and unhuman purge and witch-hunt on Hizmet participant around the world”; rather: “it means the Hizmet participants around the world are becoming more and more concerned with their local issues too”.

As a result of these tensions between the trajectory towards greater localisation, but also the trauma caused to Hizmet by what happened in Turkey and has been brought to Europe in very direct human form by Hizmet asylum-seekers, in practical terms a kind of “division of labour” has been established in a number of European countries. Thus, in Spain, as distinct from the work of the Arco Forum, the Casa Turca has moved to “have a contract with another NGO, association, lawyer who are very specialist, let’s say, on these issues, on the asylum-seeker issues”. Naziri explained that this was necessary because: “we are seeing that there were many huge errors, mistakes, in the first interviews that they had in the airport (an enclosed space resembling a jail)”. This is partly, as Naziri says, because there is a lack of appropriate translators in which sometimes the government or an agency working on this for the government sends people who are from an Arabic background thinking that they can communicate via Arabic, or sometimes someone who has only Level 1 Turkish. There is also the issue that, while the majority of asylum-seekers are from Turkey, and there are already some difficulties for people external to that context understanding it, overall it is even more difficult to understand the situation of a Hizmet person from, for example, Senegal. Also, sometimes, a few pro-Erdoğan Turks are sent and who, “instead of doing their jobs ask, ‘Why did you do that, the coup?’ ” But there is also the overall problem that, in Spain, “very few people are familiar with the Turkish case” and “silly things are happening in Turkey that you are sometimes unable to understand it from sitting and living in the liberal European countries. You can’t understand this and what it will take in this persecution”.

In a number of European countries, the pressures arising from this multi-layered situation risk distorting Hizmet’s historic and ongoing work. Therefore, there is now an additional and new organisation called Solidarity with Others, which aims to work on the level of the European institutions and focuses only on human rights violations in Turkey and the victims among Hizmet. In the UK there is a similar differentiation of roles between the Dialogue Society and London Advocacy, the latter of which has a special remit following July 2016. Headed up by Balcı who explains that the London Advocacy initiative is one of “the large family which Özcan established in the past as a network of organizations” and of which Balcı explains that:

London Advocacy was established, I assume because of my background in Turkey, and my nature or character. I wanted to raise awareness about the human rights violations, the persecution of Hizmet people back in Turkey, and also the spill over effect of that persecution also in other countries, not only Muslim countries, but also European countries. So, I wanted to raise awareness here in this country on a public level.

In relation to London Advocacy in the UK, Balcı says that it has “two wings”. One is focused on legal cases in Turkey because:

There are lots of ex-judiciary members of the Gülen movement who managed to flee the country: these are lawyers, former prosecutors, and in some cases bureaucrats from the Justice Ministry and so on. They have come together, using a loose network of What’s App links and so on. They are doing a good job by means of guiding people back in Turkey how to apply for review of their decisions and so on.

There is also the opportunity to connect with the “potential of former bureaucrats” who are “much better educated compared to the general Hizmet population” and “Some of them speak English also”. But Balcı also notes the challenge that some of these newcomers have brought with them “some Turkish bureaucratic manners” which are not appropriate in the UK. Some came from very high positions in Turkey: “So, from time to time, I am meeting a former lawyer, a judge and so on”.

However, many of them also have relatives in prison in Turkey and Balcı spoke of an example of only the day previously when he was trying to persuade someone to testify when Amnesty International was asking for a speaker: “But she is afraid that if she spoke, it would influence her husband’s case back in Turkey and so on. So, we need about five years to mobilise those people”. He also cites some police officers who have doctorates, for example, and who, at present “are not actively involved in Hizmet. They’re just trying to make a living”, although in relation not which Balcı said, “I told them why don’t you establish a school, you know a security training school (they have their asylum, you know) why don’t you do something you know, rather than working in a fish and chip shop?”

6 Hizmet in Europe With and/or Without Fethullah Gülen

In the context of comparison between Western Europe and the USA, Yükleyen and Tunagür argue (2013) that “The activities of the movement are highly adaptive to local socio-politico-economic contexts” and thus “Gülen activists address these contextual differences at local level, and are in turn shaped by them” (p. 224). However, this “adaptation” is not merely something in terms of sociological observation. Rather, the principle of contextualisation is something that has been strongly articulated in the teaching of Fethullah Gülen himself and has been actualised by Hizmet’s forms of presence and activity across the globe, including in Europe, and in the various countries within it. In relation to this, Alasag explained of Gülen’s perspectives that he had always recommended:

Act according to your own context and have friends there and ask their advice, and if you want to develop something and take an initiative, never do it alone, do it together with Dutch people as they know this society. And if you want to develop something to help people, such as an educational initiative or whatever, do it together, do it in dialogue with others, cooperate. And that you can achieve dialogue if you organise it in dialogue, therefore find partners. For example, if you want to develop a something that will help the society, you have to do it together with other groups. If you do it only for the Hizmet community or taking an initiative alone, by yourself, you can only answer your own need.

In the light of this and reflecting on the future of Hizmet in the Netherlands, Alasag said: “At this moment we are only focusing on Holland there are some meetings on European level through which a couple of times a year I see people in Belgium and we discuss some issues, because we have also common challenges and sometimes we need advice from other people”. With regard to the situation as it is now, he says, “We have now much more experience. We are now twenty years later and have organised so many things and developed a kind of a Dutch Hizmet” and, as a consequence, “the things we need advice about have been much reduced”.

At the same time, when there is need they have contact globally: “So, for example we need to help the people in Turkey. For this we need to co-operate and we find each other easily, no problem. But I sense there is a difference on the level of co-operation”. Therefore Alasag also says that “I think Hizmet will be local but will also stay global in a way, but it will be very much different from how it is today. For example, it is global in the sense that we are a big network and we know each other” and that “it will stay global in the sense that there is Skype, there is social media, people are moving, people are co-operating, people are meeting”. Thus, Hizmet in Europe and internationally is increasingly becoming what might be called a “networking of experience” rather than a differentiated programme of common things. Nevertheless, when looking further into the future, Alasag also acknowledges that “After twenty years I don’t know what will happen”.

Of course, one of the big questions asked of Hizmet, including in Europe, including already from before the events of July 2016, but with increased urgency since, has been that of the future(s) of Hizmet without Gülen’s physical and living presence. This is explored more generally, and in more detail in relation to the inheritance of his teaching in this book’s complementary volume (Weller 2022, Sects. 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4). But it is also a question that has some specific and particular relevance to the European context. To attempt to answer the question in an appropriate and accurate way requires an understanding of the relationship between Fethullah Gülen as a person and Hizmet as a movement in terms of how best to articulate, both for themselves and for others, the nature of relationship between these initiatives and the person and/or example and teaching of Gülen without such articulations leading to potential misunderstandings about the nature of these. It is a sensitive and debated issue at the moment, and is also connected with the question of critical reflection on the past and especially on Turkey—both in terms of general change within Hizmet—but also then the question of where Gülen positions himself in relation to these debates.

In relation to this, as external observers and analysts, Sunier and Landman (2015) note that “It should be emphasized that even Fethullah Gülen has himself has no statutory power of decision in matters concerning the movement at local level. Gülen’s influence manifests mainly through his charisma and stature as an important Islamic scholar” (p. 90). In order to try and reflect something of this kind of understanding, the present author has sometimes previously used such formulations as “Gülen-inspired initiatives”. However, as critiqued by Keleş even such a formulation can be misleading in that “it can give the impression that a person reads a book by Gülen and becomes inspired” (in Weller 2015, p. 250). For example, the Dutch author Gürkan Çelik, in a number of places, calls Gülen a “servant leader” (Çelik and Alan 2007) and HE3 says that: “I think there is a change at the moment: Gülen was never in a position that he tells things from the U.S. and from Turkey that the people here had to do what he says and said. He is the leader and his ideas are always dominant in the things that the movement do/have done.” However, HE3 also underlined that “His position is more an inspirational one, he was/is guiding and sharing his ideas.....He is not a command and control leader.”Rather than providing an answer to this conundrum that would itself also likely be simplistic, Keleş points to a number of dimensions of how inspiration can work, as follows, as:

As impetus: in other words to that one should get up and do something, being responsible as a human being; as a general framework – that what one does should be of value to the society in which one lives; in terms of general principles – that work that one does should be based on certain inclusive positive and proactive principles.

From this, Keleş argues that while there is no single way of being inspired, example and practice is key: whether it is the teachings infused with the example of commitment and emotion as demonstrated in Gülen’s sermons; or the example and practice demonstrated by Hizmet collectively; or a Hizmet participant individually. While many people may first have connected with Gülen’s “practice infused teachings,” many others may have come into touch with Gülen’s example and with Hizmet practice before recognising the source of the teaching behind it. Nevertheless, what is clear from what has been described and discussed in this book is that the varied manifestations of Hizmet across Europe have formed part of what could be called a patterned but also a differentiated picture: patterned because of the typical focus of these initiatives and organisations on matters of either education, dialogue or relief from poverty (now developing into a broader concern with human rights); but also differentiated because from the descriptions and discussions of Hizmet in each of the European countries examined where it is clear that there is no single absolute organisational blueprint that exists to be rolled out.

Critical to the future is the reference to the question of the nature of the connection, the interaction and the dynamic between the local in Europe and to the person and teaching of Gülen. Of this, HE3 says that “The people here, they bring some reports of their activities, and they tell what they do here in the Netherlands, and the same in England, in Belgium and in Germany, to Gülen”. From within the Danish context where, as previously noted, right from its beginnings, the Dialog Forum was acknowledging its inspiration from Gülen, Gezen nevertheless explained that:

Other associations around Europe were interested in having Gülen as Honorary Chairman, but we didn’t want that because it doesn’t go with the Danish context. I would personally be against it, because you can be inspired by Gülen but having him as honorary president is more than that. So, from the beginning we said you can be inspired by Gülen, but you can also be inspired by other people.

In relation to the question of Gülen’s role with regard to these pivotal times and future trajectories of Hizmet in Europe, Toğuşlu offers the respectful, but cautiously critical, observation that “I think that Fethullah Gülen also lost a little bit these debates, is what I see”. In addition, within these important debates within Hizmet “we lost a little bit of ‘balance’ because people got upset. So, this is what I feel as a problem”. Of course, in recognising the collective trauma of Hizmet, it is also important to recognise that Gülen himself is likely also traumatised, which is something the present author observed from interviews with Gülen and the time spent in the Golden Generation Retreat Centre in Saylorsburg and is discussed in Weller 2022, Sect. 5.1. This is because it would appear that, while in other historical episodes in which he and his close associates had become wanted people things had happened to him and to a small number of close associates, but now they are happening to a very large number of other people in some senses because of their very distant or even only assumed connection with him.

As Toğuşlu noted, “This is maybe the first time that Fethullah Gülen and his students or his friends experience such a kind of feeling. There was state brutality, OK, but it never before came in such a massive and general way. So, in this sense, it’s a first experience”. Such a reality is a very big burden to carry and it affects how one looks at things, in relation to which Toğuşlu observed of Gülen that “He feels still a little bit guilty and blames himself for what is happening nowadays. And so I think he lost a little bit his orientation and guiding for the people”, one of the consequences of which is that “Now in the last four or five years, the Turkish speeches coming from Gülen, his focus was on Turkey. This debate, this discussion with the AKP, with the Turkish government, with the Turkish state. He probably felt he should moderate the people to stay strong in the movement”.

In relation to this, Toğuşlu observed that “the people living in Turkey need such a kind of thing, which is understandable” but of himself that “I don’t need that in the same way because I am living in Belgium”. However, a consequence of what has happened in Turkey is that “you have lost your focus from what you are doing, onto Turkey” and that this has affected not only Hizmet people in Europe, but also Gülen himself, of whom Toğuşlu says that “In that sense I think he lost a little bit also”. At the same time, Toğuşlu quickly went on to say that “Maybe he is misguided by the people from his environment. So, this is another option”.

Despite this, Tascioglu approaches these matters from the perspective of a theodicy of testing the faithfulness of Hizmet people:

I have a lot of confidence in these new generations. The Hizmet movement has a very profound basis in Europe. So, all the sponsors, the establishments and the businessmen who support, even with the coup they kept on supporting. It was like a very difficult test for them. So, for most of us we were successful in our tests.

And that:

So even after he is gone, every country has an applied system that economically and theoretically now works independently. We have different contacts in our countries and also with the states and if we continue in this way, I don’t see a reason why things should change or go back. So, the ball is on our court and we just have to play a good game!

Referring to research into the development of religious groups more generally, interviewee HE2 also says that:

There is a period of charismatic leadership. And then there is a crisis, and out of that they reach out and ask how can we organise the community so we are good for the future. And this I see is independent from the religious, the metaphysical or anything, I will not say secular, because for me it is very religious. But it is a very human dynamic.

In relation to the need for ongoing learning informed by self-criticism, HE2 noted: “But I ask myself the question, about the future, or survival, or sustainability of the institution, what can we ‘re-invent’ now, based on our experience, what we have been learning and what will be the future needs of the city and society, and for this there are too many things to do!” In conclusion, Toğuşlu argues that such a renewal can be based on a continued recognition that “what Gülen says is important, but at the same time he taught with these issues in the nineties and eighties” and so also very clearly that now “we need new relevance in terms especially of the Islamic faith in a European context”.

7 Confident Engagement, Islamic Self-Criticism and Human Focus

Hizmet across the world and in Europe finds itself situated in an overall context where “Islamist” movements aspire to be “modern” in the sense of using science and technology, but generally do so out of a relatively simplistic and shallow engagement with Islamic tradition, with many key Islamist figures never having been trained in classical Islamic scholarship but seeking rather to engage direct with their understanding of the Qu’ran. But contrast, in its engagement with the contemporary world, Hizmet draws upon Gülen’s formation as a trained and properly “traditional” (rather than “traditionalist”) Islamic scholar who has especially championed education as a liberative opportunity to be embraced by Muslims. As a result of such an approach, individuals engaged in Hizmet organisations have, in general, been empowered to negotiate tradition and modernity in a balanced and creative way. Indeed, in many ways one might evaluate one of the most significant contributions made by the teaching of Gülen and the practice of Hizmet is that, generally speaking, in the contexts of modernity and pluralism, it has enabled individuals to be Muslims on the one hand without apology, but on the other hand also without heavy insistence on “Muslimness” over against “humanness”.

Such liberative pathways can be identified in the personal biographical stories told by a number of the Hizmet interviewees. For example, looking back, Ablag summarised that “More than once I felt ashamed at the low quality of the ideas of our preachers when I visited the mosques” but then “A friend invited me. I felt that they could be an intellectual, a modern person and a Muslim”. Such considerations are also underlined in the biography of Karakoyun who first came into contact with Hizmet in Germany when he was fifteen or sixteen years old. His parents had always been believing people but he explained that, as a teenager, he had a lot of questions such as “Who am I? Where am I going? at is my belief? Where do I belong to?” In his searching around and through these questions he connected with a lot of different Islamic movements. Until he was fourteen, Karakoyun recounts that he had visited the Qu’ran schools of the Süleymanci movement, but he felt that these concentrated on only formal things such as reciting the Qur’an properly, and although he recognised the importance of that, he also thought, “yeah, I am always reading the Qur’an, reciting it, but I want to understand it, and what can I take from it to our days”. Then he visited some sobhets of the Millî Görüş movement. But in that context it seemed that he was “always listening to someone who is seeing the ‘other’, the German, the West, the Christian, the Jew, the American as an enemy”. This was very problematic for him in relation to his day-to-day experience because he had grown up in a little town in Germany where his family had been the only Turkish family, and in his school he was the only Turkish boy, and therefore he had a lot of very good German friends.

Overall, because what he was hearing seemed to be in contradiction with his personal experience he reports that he thought “something is going wrong there”. Against that background, he was invited by a neighbour to a sohbet of the Hizmet movement that was organised by an engineer who came from Turkey. And Karakoyun noted that in Germany at the end of the nineties, there were not so many Turkish people with an academic background. Therefore, “He was the first Turkish person I met with an academic background and he had very interesting things that he said at his sohbets” which included “about dialogue, about integration, about Muslims in a modern world; about learning, reading and then practising; and then even teaching to others; taking responsibility – so all the things you know about what makes Hizmet Hizmet”. It was, though, only “later I realised these came from Fethullah Gülen and his teachings”. Following this, Karakoyun explained that in 1998, “We organised a journey to Turkey and there we visited the institutions and spoke to a lot of people, and from there on you can say I was part, was engaged in the Hizmet movement”. Thus when Karakoyun finished university in 2005, he took on a job in a Hizmet dialogue institution, and in 2008 he was tasked with founding a new institution in Berlin.

At the same time, while the individual journey to a living and personally appropriated Islam is something one can find in many Hizmet stories, Hizmet organisations and groups in Europe were, for a variety of reasons, not always so transparent either about their connection with Fethullah Gülen and the wider Hizmet or even about their fundamental inspiration from Islam. Ongoing discussion about this and evolution in relation to it has been initially discussed in Sect. 5.4 on transparency in general; Sect. 5.5 on relationships with the state and civil society; and Sect. 5.6 on relationships with other Muslims. As interviewee HE3 from the Netherlands puts it:

The characteristics of the movement here in the Netherlands and I know also in other European countries, the movement has a religious, an Islamic background, and almost everyone confirms this, also academics inside the movement. The movement is a religious one. But, inspired from Islamic religious elements – like love, tolerance, moderation, forgiveness, and Sufism – identifying the Islam in Anatolia.

However, at the same time, “When we look at the activities of the movement here they are all social – education projects, and projects for aid, and to help poor people here and lots of activities for women, for participation and for integration”. Thus, the connection between the religious inspiration and social engagement is not always evident and, in relation to the question of how, especially in organisational terms, to actualise its Islamic identity in an appropriate way, Toğuşlu says, “We are still thinking about how to make it really, really visible. But it shouldn’t be a kind of Islamic organization giving Qur’anic courses, but some Islamic something should be there”.

Significantly, Toğuşlu linked this discussion with the need for a contextualised self-criticism, prompted especially by a more widespread and greater degree of reflection on the questions arising from what happened to Hizmet in Turkey and the associated ones of whether some things could have been done differently and/or better there and also as discussed in relation to the limits of this in Weller 2022, Sect. 5.5. In relation to this, AS2 acknowledged: “There are a lot of things we could have done better. Maybe we made a lot of mistakes – not a lot of, but it is possible. And we are criticising ourselves, what did we do? And when the Turkish people don’t believe us, we ask, ‘Why don’t you stand with us, what are our mistakes?’ ” In relation to this, AS2 explained that “one of the criticisms is that we have not integrated enough with other people” and that because of this “the Hizmet movement got a very big kick”. AS1 also expressed reflective questions about what happened in Turkey that have not gone away and can leave at least some Hizmet people in quite a conflicted inner struggle:

But, of course, we need answers about how these things happened. But whether or not we find an answer, we have to continue again with our thoughts. But it’s disturbing – if someone did that, I am also thinking we shouldn’t walk together with these guys whoever they are, whether these were close to Mr. Gülen, or not, they were just close to the government in Turkey, or they were some agents from the government. People are looking for answers, and I can just say they have had hesitations.

At the same time, within the generality of Hizmet there remains the feeling that “they know this is a good movement, doing very good things for the public, for the people who need help, and this goodness should continue, to feel themselves spiritually better”. Because of this, in a spirit of Islamic self-criticism, AS2 sought to find a new balance between a realism about all temporal organisational forms, combined with a positive focus on what these forms are at least trying to bring about, with the option identified either critically to continue to engage in such or not, as the case may be, which he expressed as follows:

When I see something illogical, I can finish, or can try to correct them. If I cannot correct them, then I sit and watch. But for an organization, there will always be some problems. There is no organization without problems. For me the most important thing is to minimize the problems and to be transparent. So you have to look at the, how can I say it, the main idea. You have to look what can be done for humanity, for education, for good things. And you can continue after that.

All of this is very important for the future possible trajectories of Hizmet in Europe. This is because although Islamophobia is a reality in the European context and needs to be challenged at every level (and especially by those who are not Muslims), for Muslims themselves to focus only on the injustices done to Muslims whether in Turkey, Europe or elsewhere is dangerous. In his teaching Gülen has tried to emphasise that being Muslim in reaction to something is at best limiting, can also at the least become distorting and at the worst turn into something that then becomes combative towards others. By contrast, to be able to be properly confident in being Muslim one needs to be shaped not by reaction but by the sources of Islam, by an emphasis on that which can be universally shared with people of other religions and none, and a willingness to engage in practical projects together, all of which entails a readiness to undertake self-criticism and to be challenged mutually and to learn from one another.

Such an approach is identified as a way of living that can both give strength to Muslims, while also offering much to the wider European society the nature of which is identified by many Hizmet people as having a greater spirit of openness to evidence than is the case in the more authoritarian and conspiracy laden nature of Turkish society. Thus, AS2 observes:

Of course, not all of the people in Europe are the same, but most of them, especially Switzerland are questioning, looking, searching, reading. They don’t believe the things in the television unconditionally. So that is very important. So, in Europe, the Hizmet movement will shape, I think, from now on if we can evaluate this chance. We can do more good things and more people can have a chance to know us – Hizmet. There are a lot of people coming from Turkey to Europe in Hizmet. So, they can touch someone. They can go and say something. For example, in Germany, can go to a church and tell something. We are a Muslim, we love you also. We like and respect to all people for the sake of God. God create you, so, you are honourable as an art of the God. No matter what is your belief, religion or nationality. Christians are very kind to us. Because their religion is kind in its origin. It is like that. We love you really! Our belief is like that.

Kerakoyun underlines that “In Turkey this is very different. There is nobody who is self-critical, who is reflecting on itself. Everything was great; we were always the best; nothing went wrong; we never made a mistake. So, nothing has to change – we have to go on like we did always”. And while this was something that Kerakoyun was identifying primarily as a Turkish mentality, he also said, “you could find it in Hizmet as well”. But, by contrast, as AS2 put it, if Hizmet is ready to embrace self-criticism then the European context also provides a great opportunity for it:

The Europeans or Canadians or Americans can see us directly and search us: what are they doing?! What kind of people are they? Do they have a secret agenda? And they will see there is no secret agenda, that is the way they live their life. So, I think, they will be more friendly to us after that. So, in Europe, our future, Hizmet’s future will be better, I hope so. It is not very clear, it is not certain, but I think so and hope so. If we are good at representing ourselves and Hizmet then it will be better. But if we are not good at representing and if we don’t integrate into the country we live and if we don’t introduce ourselves then most probably they will hate us. There is a Turkish proverb … “man is the enemy of the unknown”.

In parallel with the actuality of, and arguably growing need for, a more explicit actualisation of Islamic identity, is a re-emphasis in the contextual realities of Europe on the centrality and priority of the human, as also discussed more generally in Weller 2022, Sect. 6.6. As Naziri put it:

In Islam, before being a Muslim, to be a human is very important. If you are a human, you are very, very important in Islam, because God created you as a human. No problem whether you are Muslim or not. It is the connection between you and God. It doesn’t interest me. You want to be another religion, it’s not important. I couldn’t say bad things about you. But I am Muslim: I love my religion, I love my God, I love my Prophet Muhammad very much. But maybe you are a Christian, I don’t know … Your image doesn’t change … accordingly whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish or any other religions. I respect the man for his honesty, diligence and good character, but not for his beliefs. Religion is something between God and man.

Perhaps also partly reflective of the laic tradition, with which Tascioglu has engaged in Belgium, he says: “I don’t want to focus on different religions or different backgrounds. I just want to approach people as human beings”. Taking another example, when explaining the history of Hizmet in Denmark, Gezen in fact notes that its Dialog Society was built on the idea of “human first” which he said was also in line with the approach of the Danish Christian pastor, educator and philosopher Grundtvig, who said: “Human first, then Christian”. This emphasis—which Gezen points out can also be found in the Danish philosopher Løgstrup—resonates with Gülen’s similar approach that one is “first human, then Muslim”, and of which Gezen says that it is such an approach that “makes it possible to live as a Muslim in Denmark, because of the interpretation I get from Gülen”. At the same time, it was Gezen’s opinion that “we have to make new plans, new projects, and this position must be a new chance for Hizmet to represent itself truly, and more widely”, learning the lessons from a relative lack of integration with others in Turkey to the situation now in Europe, so that “We have to connect with them and we have to tell Hizmet logic and Hizmet way more and more, because I think before that we have not been very good at telling about ourselves, Hizmet”.

Concurrently, in internal Hizmet discussions, Gezen explains that “When I meet people I try to remind them that we should use our resources to do what is said in the Qur’an and hadith, and in the sunnah, that we should contribute to the countries we live in, and that people should find solutions”. One of the consequences of trying to find a perhaps better dynamic between a more explicit acknowledgement of Islamic roots and inspiration, combined with a strong emphasis on the human, is perhaps a new readiness, rather than to claim uniqueness, to identify shared values that can exist within various societies and to learn from these other experiences of trying to translate values into concrete actions. As the interview HE2 from Italy said:

We are constantly learning from the Italian society and I am very happy it because, you know, if you are willing to learn and if you open up your channels to get something in. But in some cases, sometimes I see people, here or there, even though it is very contradictory to Islam, even though it is very contradictory to the teaching of Said Nursi, I see unnamed, implicit pride: “Hizmet is a very good thing, and we have so many things to teach and people should find out and we teach them”. I mean they don’t pronounce it, it wouldn’t be rational, but I simply construct some attitudes, some grammar they use, some socially constructed language.

By contrast, HE2 points out that, including in relation to some of what are seen as the core characteristics of Hizmet, “There are so many things that we are learning from the society including some things that could be celebrated as being like Hizmet – for example, volunteering. In Italy, five or six million people volunteer regularly” but that in order to benefit from this, “the dialogue of life, dialogue of collaboration means give and take all the time”. In relation to the wider learning that is taking place within Hizmet, AS1 said, “we always said this movement is very good on principle and thoughts. Yes, it is true. But we are not alone. This does not only belong to us. This does not belong alone to the Islam people or in Turkey”, which theme is also discussed further in Weller 2022, Sect. 6.6. In summary, the interviewee AS1 says that:

What I am saying for my people here is that we are just at the beginning. Maybe at the end we can say, “Ah, this was it” when we hopefully integrate in this society or otherwise. And anyway this whole western part is very far away from Turkey in the way of living together in society. Of course, there are some criticisms about other parts but, if you look at it, you can see the results here. We are refugees here. Not the British people are refugees in Turkey, or Germany in Iran or in other parts of the world. Hopefully this education will be very good for us and we will graduate in these countries, and hopefully our sons and daughters and children will grow with these goodnesses, principles of the Hizmet movement – plus, this is not enough for us – and the western mindset. And hopefully a good model for the country where they are living plus dreaming further in the world.

8 From Copy-Paste into Contextual Reinvention

Although—or perhaps precisely because—this is the first monograph written taking an overview of Hizmet across Europe since the events in Turkey of July 2016, this book can make only a preliminary contribution to a story that, first of all, is continuing; and second, even in relation to its past four or five years, remains to be told in a fuller and more detailed way, both by those who seek to live it out in practice and by those who seek to analyse and understand it whether as “insiders” or as “outsiders”. In terms of where Hizmet in Europe has come from and is possibly going to, Keleş makes the summative observation that:

It’s like a PhD thesis, you know, there is that idea of it being circular. It makes sense. It made sense in Turkey and outside of Turkey in the 1990s. At the level of ethics and principles, it still has a lot of attraction, and it still makes sense. But it needs to be re-invented and re-produced and re-understood at the European level, to understand what we mean for Europe – because Hizmet ultimately did something that was needed, and it was something that society knew that it needed.

Over the around two decades in which this author has had some experience of engaging with Hizmet, it has always struck the author that it is a phenomenon that does, first of all, make space for others to interpret and critique it in a way that a lot of groups of all religions would not really be willing to do. Therefore, while it is possible to critique Hizmet for not always being fully transparent in that interchange, its relativetransparency in this regard is something from which other religious groups and organisations might usefully learn.

Secondly, the degree of transparency that it achieves comes from its Muslim and Islamic roots. One does not have to depart from these things in order to welcome the engagement of the critique of others; indeed, it is part of the teaching emphases of Fethullah Gülen that it is precisely because of what should be learned from Islam that one should be open to embracing such critiques. And for those of us who are outside Islam or Hizmet, the fact that we do not always take the opportunities afforded to us and the invitations made to make our honest (including properly critical) input is not the fault of Hizmet, but is rather a matter of our scholarly and/or religious/ethical responsibility and/or failings.

One of the by-products of engaging with and researching Hizmet over a couple of decades is that the present author is sometimes asked by Hizmet people or groups for future recommendations. Generally speaking, this is an invitation that the role of a scholar makes one reluctant to accept—not least in this instance where personally and/or professionally one does not have then personally to live with the consequences of such recommendations, in the same way as do people who are within Hizmet. However, as noted earlier, as part of a distinct role as part of the Dialogue Society’s Advisory Board the present author has, on occasion, either individually and/or as part of the wider Board, made recommendations that have impacted upon the development of Hizmet in the UK.

In relation to any wider recommendations based directly on scholarly and research work, there are among scholars a variety of positions on the legitimacy or otherwise of that. Whatever position might be taken in this regard, as Chryssides (2004) notes when reflecting on questions arising even from the fact of engagement in the field of study:

Am I disturbing the “ecological balance” of the religions I study? I think the answer must be yes. Does it matter? Yes, it probably does, but to ask the question, “Should I help to effect change in the religions I study?” is really to ask, “Should I be studying these religions at all?” The only live question is, “How much should I be changing them”, for changing a religious community by one’s presence and one’s study is inevitable, even though the change may be small.

Whether such a perspective would be contested or not what would, however, likely be seen by the vast majority of scholars to be legitimate is for a scholar to try as fully as possible understand what is going on within a movement (in this case Hizmet) that is being researched; and, when setting that within a broader analytical framework, as far as possible to be in a position, in a responsible way to hold up an “informed mirror” of the movement to people both within it and to those beyond it.

Having lost Turkey—according to one’s approach as a starting point, a power base and/or a reference point—a fundamental evaluative question arises from that fact as to what Hizmet in Europe might thereby be losing and what it may also be gaining. To some extent this is also something that still cannot fully be answered because it is still in process and it will take some more time of accompanying this process in order more fully to be able to see and evaluate the trajectories of what is happening. This is especially because of the presence of the “third layer” of arrivals from Turkey, although of these HE3 says: “I think if the political pressure in Turkey will continue for a few years, the new people here from Turkey after the coup, they or their children have time to think better and to decide that they are from here, part of the Dutch society. This is a process of ten or twenty years”.

What perhaps can be said summatively is that, while clearly having strongly Turkish roots and having continued for many years to have had a very strong Turkish inheritance, for many years prior to July 2016, Hizmet had already been at least as strongly engaged in Europe as in Turkey especially through its initiatives in education and dialogue. At the same time, although there have been clear commonalities of foci rooted in common values and of themes through which those values are historicised, there have also been distinctive developments in terms of varied inflections within which Hizmet has been trying, with varied degrees of success, to take seriously its diverse national and local contexts in Europe. In any diasporic and/or minority situation there is both opportunity and/or threat. As a minority, in terms of “threat”, it is possible either to become so “rigid” that one risks becoming an island in the wider society; or, by contrast, one can become so “permeable” with the risk of losing all distinctiveness. In terms of opportunity, there are the learnings that can be achieved from new environments and the possibility to make properly distinctive contributions.

The post-July 2016 travails and debates within Hizmet in Europe accentuate and bring to a head what are not new issues and questions concerning how far Hizmet is a Turkish movement; or how far is it an Islamic movement; or how far is it a civil society movement, and/or in what combinations and how all of this is to be understood and articulated. These issues and questions have been there in at least incipient form from when Hizmet started spreading into various parts of the world. But Hizmet’s crisis in Turkey and the overall consequences and reverberations of that into other parts of the world have sharpened those pre-existing questions and issues and made them more insistent.

Gülen’s close associate Haylamaz explained the dynamic of Hizmet from its beginning that “Only perhaps the major principles were taken from Hojaefendi. For instance, one of those principle was to establish contact with other people. People took on this principle and put it into practice in their own way. It was an ongoing interaction”. El-Banna (2013) refers to what she calls the Hizmet’s “strategic adaptavism” (p. 66), in relation to which Sunier and Landman (2015) have argued that this transformation has gone so far that, even following Gülen’s earlier settlement in the USA, “Hizmet transformed into a typical NGO” (p. 87). The events of July 2016 and what followed have arguably, at the very least, been disruptive of any more evolutionary “strategic adaptavism” through the collective trauma that it has brought to Hizmet and the effects that flow from that now, but also (as discussed in Sect. 4.5 and in Weller 2022, Sect. 5.2) potentially into the coming generations of Hizmet.

However, each of these kinds of understandings of what occurs in Hizmet process of change and transition tends, as one can see from the way in which they are structured and expressed, to assume a conscious and relatively linear process, including in the relationship between Gülen and the various expressions of Hizmet. By contrast, and in critique of such understandings as being too one-dimensional, is an argument made in a recent important doctoral thesis by Keleş (2021). By tracing the dynamics of change in relation to Hizmet and Gülen’s handling of, and engagement with, human rights questions and issues particularly around apostasy and around women, Keleş has, by detailed reference to these two specific examples, evidentially and analytically demonstrated the necessity of a complexified understanding of the inter-relationship between Hizmet and Gülen. And he has done this by “reversing (or flattening) the leader/follower, producer/consumer, originator/disseminator and mind/body paradigm” that pervades much of the literature in which, among both what he calls “critical” and “sympathetic” scholars, “Gülen is conceptualized as the producing-mind and Hizmet as the disseminating-body” (p. 146).

In relation to these overall dynamics, it nevertheless seems that, at this point in time, at least while he continues to live, the person and teaching of Fethullah Gülen will remain an important and likely a continuingly key point of reference for Hizmet in Europe. Whether and how far new impulses will come from him and his teaching on the other side of his more “passive” role of being a point of relative unity around which Hizmet can still coalesce, and his more “active” role in providing advice to Hizmet people on how to overcome their trauma is as yet to be resolved (and is discussed in more detail Weller 2022, Chaps. 5 and 6).

But in relation to Hizmet in Europe’s possible further future trajectories, the multi-level impact of the trauma of the events of July 2016, combined with the need to deal internally with what this book has called a “three-layered” Hizmet, in context where lines of wider communication and consultation both with Gülen and with various national foci for Hizmet have at the least experienced some disruption, means that the diverse national socio-religious contexts in Europe, and the responses of Hizmet to them, are likely to play a still more important role in shaping the future of Hizmet in Europe, while that of Turkey, relatively speaking, continues gradually to recede more and more into the background.

In such a context, however, Toğuşlu identifies two fundamentally possible trajectories. The first he calls “A kind of disaporization, withdrawn totally in itself”. The second is one in which:

The movement is maybe ready to become a transnational identity, moving away from its Turkish identity – I am not saying totally its Turkish identity for me – but somehow it becomes one of the identities and not the dominant identity. It becomes one identity, whether Spanish Turkish or Italian Turkish, but maybe eighty-five per cent should be Belgian, Dutch or American or whatever. So in that sense that movement becomes transnational: that means that the people from Senegal to the Congo, from Egypt to Turkmenistan, from Australia to Brazil, they become really a part of the movement

Of this latter trajectory, Toğuşlu says, “in that sense maybe this is really a renewal, like a phoenix becoming again from its ashes: that we die, but at the same time we begin a new kind of identity in which maybe we renew again our principles as well, I don’t know. We change everything”. At the same time, although he places some emphasis on what lies within the agency of Hizmet, Toğuşlu recognises concerning such possible future trajectories that “It does not depend only on the movement”—in other words which trajectory is more likely to happen is not something that is only down to the agency of Hizmet. Rather,

If this state pressure continued, for example, for another ten years, with this alienation from the Turkish society and maybe from the Muslim communities as well because the movement is struggling with the state. So, in that sense, this is a bad scenario in which the movement becomes weaker and weaker – and at the same time it could offer new opportunities, becoming smaller, and maybe rethink again.

As things currently stand, Toğuşlu thinks that Hizmet is poised between these two basic trajectories and that “I think the movement is in between now and in the next five years we will see clearly where it is going”. When echoed back to him in interview that his overall position might be described as being that “one should try to focus on wherever one is, but that, actually, quite a lot does depend on what happens or does not happen in Turkey”, Toğuşlu affirmed, “Yes, exactly”. Indeed, when it was put to him in a stronger version that it almost depends on that, and that this is not something that Hizmet itself can necessarily influence, he responded: “Definitely … imagine two weeks later everything is finished, OK, and then people who want to can go back to Turkey” but that following on from that would be “Again, two options – not that kind of disaporazation but Turkishness again will be very, very strong: it will be dominant and will dominate the whole of Hizmet people around the world”.

In such an evaluative judgement on the interplay between structure and agency, it might be that Toğuşlu’s own discipline of sociology is playing a particularly strong role. However, he also makes clear his own normative position through the clear and, for some, perhaps startling statement that “The Turkish experience is only one experience of Hizmet” or, as interviewee HE3 put it even more pithily, “A Hizmet without Turkey is OK!” and that because of that, if Hizmet did refocus on Turkey, then in Toğuşlu’s evaluation, “I think that the movement would miss something in terms of becoming really, really transnational”. In relation to this current period, Toğuşlu says: “Even the Turkish state pressures, if the decision-makers, especially Mr. Gülen says we become really transnational, and the decision-making processes, all of these structural changes should be adopted in a mutual consensus. In this sense I am optimistic”. On the other hand, “if this polarization, if this Turkishness still holds sway, I am not very optimistic, I am a little bit in this sense pessimistic”.

In summary, the tendency expressed here by Toğuşlu, and as broadly found among many of the other Hizmet interviewees in Europe, is that, somewhat ironically, and also very painfully, it may be precisely through what has happened in July 2016 and its aftermath that there may now be the possibility of current initial trajectories in due course arriving at something that could in future also “from the outside” be more truly be described as “transnational” than is currently the case, as well as more genuinely experienced as such from the “inside”. At the very least, if it is true that such a development might already have been in process, as a more purely evolutionary one it would likely have taken a lot longer to come about. However, this has now accelerated because of July 2016 and its aftermath.

At present, overall, the situation in Europe is one that the present author would find it hard to express more clearly and accurately than in the words of Tascioglu with which this chapter and book will now draw towards a conclusion, namely that “We are trying to start new projects”; that in trying to draw upon the additional personnel and experience brought by Hizmet asylum-seekers “we still need a couple of years to get those emigrants adapted”; and that, overall, as things stand at the moment, “it is clear that we are still not fully back to our game yet, that we still have wounds”. While taking this woundedness very seriously, it is also the case that because, as this book has shown, Hizmet continues to wrestle with many issues concerning itself and with changes and continuities in the human needs in relation to which it aspires to offer service rooted in a religious and spiritual vision, Hizmet remains alive. And because it is still alive, there are ways for it potentially to reinvent itself for the future. As HE3 says of when Erdoğan goes, “The dynamism in the movement will come back in the future, I think”. But also:

The movement has to be proactive to show that it is not only the religiously-oriented movement, not only the Turkish-oriented movement. The projects and programmes that they did are mostly good, and people here appreciated almost all the activities. And they will come back, I think, and the movement, its people, need some time, some several years and it will be OK, I think. It will be such a kind of process that movement’s people have some feedback from the society, from the people inside and outside the movement – it needed that.

For any continued distinctiveness and vitality of Hizmet in Europe, the creative way forward will likely not be one based on any combination of the receipt, preservation and transmission of the substantive body of Gulen’s inherited teaching, pregnant though that remains with matters that will remain important into the future; the veneration of his person and/or practice, inevitable as that is likely to be given the inspiration that he has brought to so many lives; or the “copy-pasting” of historical Hizmet initiatives, as valid and important as they have been for their contexts and times. Rather, it will be a case of working with what this book and its companion volume (Weller 2022) argue is at the very heart of what Gülen’s person, practice and teaching have offered to the world which, at its heart, is to be understood as a dynamic methodological call to continuously renewed and contextualised engagement with religious and spiritual sources that are centred on love and on the human.