1 Evaluating Gülen Interactively with Hizmet

In trying to undertake an evaluation of Gülen’s life and teaching, there is a question about how far it might or might not be appropriate to attempt to do such in more ‘Western’ registers of what might for key figures in other religious (and especially Christian) traditions be called ‘theology’ and/or ‘theologising’. This question is pertinent partly because of the lack of direct equivalence that exists between ’Ilm al-kalam in Islamic traditions and wider understandings of theologising. But it is also important to bear in mind the implication that Gülen is not, in any generally accepted sense, a systematic theologian. Rather, as highlighted by Thomas Michel in Sect. 4.2, Gülen is more a figure who combines spiritual direction with also being a preacher, poet, and inspirer of a movement.

However, one can certainly enquire about what might be called the ‘formative anchors’ in Gülen’s teaching and discuss the relationships between his teaching and that of classical Muslim scholarship of Islamic sources and biography. In this, the challenge confronting a traditionally formed Islamic scholar is that of whether and, if so how, such a scholar can transcend repetition to achieve the creation of what might, if not a systematic theology, truly be called a ‘constructive theology.’ In relation to this, it is the argument of this book that the dynamic that enables such a ‘constructive theology’ to be found in Gülen’s reception, development and transmission of a living and authentic tradition rooted in Qur’an and Sunnah is precisely in its ongoing interaction with the reception and further development of his teaching in a hermeneutical circle of engagement with Hizmet that ultimately connects back to, and also challenges, Gülen himself.

Change has, in fact, been an important constant in Gülen’s life, thinking, and teaching, with Tekelan saying that, “As a medical doctor, as someone who likes psychology, psychiatry and observation, I’ve learned a lot from him, and I’m still learning. He regularly updates and develops himself according to where he lives, but also motivates people to integrate into the society in which they live.” Kurucan has also pointed to the changing nature of Gülen’s teaching and practice by explaining that:

The centre in Hojaefendi’s theology and practice of Islam is not one thing. It is something that is changing depending on time and space and conditions of the world. Take the example of the way he spoke about the issue of the women. If we go back like forty years ago, the way he approached the matter is never the same as he is now speaking today. The way he spoke in 1977 is never the same as he is speaking today. So, you can see the progress as he is interacting with the rest of the world, you can see that progress as he develops himself and his visions and perspectives in the way he approaches an issue. So, it’s not a constant.

On the one hand, “Certainly, there is constancy in the way that, like, all Muslims have to approach…The main principles, the Prophethood, the methodologies, so that’s there. But in the secondary issues you can see a huge progress.” Or, using another image often used by Gülen himself, Kurucan says:

Again, with the example of Rumi, there is analogy of him with one leg deeply settled in the centre, but with the other leg travelling seventy nations. Hojaefendi is the same Hojaefendi as he was 40 years ago in the fundamentals or essentials of faith, which are the uniqueness of the divine, the life after death, Prophethood and justice. These are four main principles of the Qur’anic message. But in the secondary social, political and cultural matters you can see his vision expanding since the 1970s.

One of the ways that Kurucan suggests one can frame an overall understanding of Gülen’s life and thought is by reference to different key personalities of Islamic history and how far he reflects these in different dimensions of his own life and activity, thus:

This actually came out probably twenty-two years ago, that he used for a book (Ufuk Turu) that was published in Turkish, but not in English. It was a lengthy interview by a journalist, Eyup Can, and I helped him with the editing of that book. There they came upon three identities for understanding Hojaefendi: like Imam Ghazzali; like Rumi; and then like Nizam al-Mulk.

As Kurucan explains this: “So, there were three different personalities who were prominent in three different qualities.” Working within this paradigm, Kurucan suggests that “Hojaefendi acts like Imam Ghazzali who was “a scholar and he taught generations of students. And this is how Hojaefendi really behaves when he teaches his students.” And then, “He becomes a Rumi when he delivers this wider sermon to a wider audience which is distributed not to his inner circle only, but through TV now (and before through audio cassettes) to people outside his circle. He really acts like Rumi and he speaks to history in those sermons. And finally, “He acts like Nizam ul-Mulk, who was a leader, a founder of all those madrassahs. Hodjaefendi acts like him, like a leader trying to find solutions to problems; and he usually does that when his friends come to visit him.” However, Kurucan also notes that one of the consequences of these different identities is that “people may misunderstand some of his messages in different settings.” Thus:

When he is trying to be a leader to the community and to discuss some of the problems that are being brought to him, if any persons who are not involved are not really aware of the context, they may again misunderstand. Again, he is concerned that even many people from the inner circle of his quarters there from the early years still probably misunderstand him or are not up to that level of accurately understanding him. So, I really wish those blocks were identified much more clearly so that people would know how they should contextualize what Hojaefendi said at that specific moment.

The thinking of Gülen and the approaches of those inspired by his teaching are sometimes referred to as “Gülenian” or by those with a less sympathetic approach as “Gülenism.” Whatever stances one may take on such usages, it is important to understand that Gülen would not himself be at all comfortable with either descriptor. As Tekalan explains it:

This is not Gülenism, he does not want something like that. Why? Because he tries to explain all the time the Qur’an and the Hadith, not his own ideology. Bediüzzaman Said Nursi who was a very famous scholar in Turkey, he said also similar thoughts: if you read my books and if you find out that these are a little bit opposite to the Qur’an and the others, you should take care all the time the Qur’an and the others instead of my books. Exactly, Fethullah Gülen says like Bediuzzaman. ‘Everybody will be responsible for what he/she did, said in hereafter personally, there is no guarantee that everybody in Hizmet movement will be safe in the hereafter.

Understood from his own perspective, Gülen is not advocating, and does not wish to be seen as advocating, a new or idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam. Rather, his work is concerned with trying to uncover, develop, and apply in a way appropriate to the contemporary context, aspects of Islamic tradition that are rooted in the sources of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. And while some observers such as Saritoprak (2003) have rightly identified a strongly Sufi flavour in Gülen’s approach, albeit in a distinctive way, Gülen himself is more generally at pains to stress that Sufism is the inner dimension of Islam itself and is therefore not to be separated from the shariah. At the same time, along with evaluating Gülen against a long and deep Islamic tradition inflected by a Sufi inheritance, EH1 argued that it will be important in the evaluation of both Gülen and Hizmet to be even more open to external academic voices in terms of engagement and critique:

I think it is also important that we hear some of the voices from people – like from academicians – which are not Hizmet participants, in which they observe externally. I think we didn’t hear enough yet. I think we should ask more the people who observe the Hizmet movement and who are academicians and who know the subject.

Over around two decades of engaging with Hizmet in both academic research and practical ways, it has always seemed to the present author that it is a phenomenon which—notwithstanding the internal voices of criticism from Keleş and others that it does not go far enough—in this author’s overall evaluation does, generally speaking, make space at least for external people to interpret and critique it in a way that many groups from within all religions are not so often ready to so. Therefore, while it is possible to critique Hizmet for not always being as fully transparent as it might in that interchange, its relative receptivity to such critique is something from which other religious groups and organisations might usefully learn. Secondly, the degree of transparency that it does achieve is rooted in Gülen’s general encouragement for Muslims to undertake self-criticism such that one does not have to depart from Islam to welcome the engagement of the critique of others. Indeed, it is Gülen’s approach that one should be open to embracing self-criticism precisely because of Islam.

With regard to the kind of questions that can be and are raised by external academics, the present author can give an example of critiques that he offered in the context of a Hizmet-organised event as long ago as 18 July 2008, but which, it will be seen, are arguably also still pertinent to the situation post-July 2016. Just prior to travelling with others to Turkey on a study trip organised by the Hizmet-related Dialogue Society in the UK, participants were encouraged to write down their thoughts, observations, and questions in relation to Hizmet. What this author wrote at the time was, as follows:

As a critical friend of the movement, what particularly inspires and encourages me about it and about Fethullah Gülen’s teaching which undergirds it, is:

  1. 1.]

    Its willingness, in thought and practice to engage with modernity, science and civil society

  2. 2.]

    Its members’ commitment and its organisations’ resources being devoted to dialogue

  3. 3.]

    For the Muslim world, Fethullah Gülen’s unusually clear teaching about religious liberty

However, in addition to the above positive points, and taking the opportunity offered to be critical, the author also raised the following issues:

Also as a critical friend of the movement, I would pose the following questions in a spirit of dialogue:

  1. 1.]

    The movement is involved in grassroots dialogue in the UK, Europe and beyond, where Muslims are in a minority. Fethullah Gülen has had some high profile national level meetings with Christian minority leaders in Turkey. But in the light of Gülen’s teaching on dialogue and religious freedom, to what extent does the movement engage with minority Christians (and not only those of Greek heritage, but also more Evangelical Christians) at a more grassroots level in Turkey, and support their rights to manifest their religious beliefs and identity in worship and other activities based on their religion? It is understood that this minority is only a very small minority in Turkey and therefore not with a widespread presence: but there have been reported difficulties, for example, for some Christian groups in gaining permission to open church buildings and also on occasion when individuals from a Muslim background (but who were perhaps not practising Muslims) have become Christians.

  2. 2.]

    In a lecture that I gave in Texas at one of the conferences on the movement, and since published as a (2006) book chapter on “Fethullah Gülen, Religions, Globalization and Dialogue”, I highlighted the question of how, in relation to Lerner’s (1958: 405) observation about there being dichotomous alternatives for Turkey of “Mecca or mechanization”, the movement might or might not be able, in the end, to: “…..navigate through the insistence on these alternatives that can often found among secularists, religioustraditionalists, and new Islamists alike is a central part of the challenge facing Gülen and the movement associated with him, and especially so in his homeland of Turkey…..It is arguable….that Gülen’s teaching represents an attempt to find an alternative path as reflected in the title of Ahmet Kuru’s (2003:115–130) essay “Fethullah Gülen’s Search for a Middle Way Between Modernity and Muslim Tradition.” Of course, steering a middle or third way is a project that is fraught with difficulty. In politics, third ways have often been viewed with a certain scepticism on the basis that, in the end, they have turned out not to have been third ways after all, but rather variants on one or other dominant ideology. There remains a possibility that this may become the fate of the movement initiated by Gülen. At this point in time the outcome cannot definitively be known.” The question is, therefore, what strategies the movement might have for avoiding, as far as possible, what appears generally to be the historical fate of “third way” movements, notwithstanding their “third way” intentions?

  3. 3.]

    While rejecting political “Islamism” as a blueprint for the transformation of society, does the movement sometimes at least give the impression of being relatively uncritical in relation to capitalism which, arguably, on a global scale, can be seen as an economic and political system that has brought immense suffering to large numbers of people, while offering possibilities of growth and development to others. Might an apparent reluctance robustly to criticise capitalism be one of the reasons that some are suspicious of the ideological orientation of the movement? – including of whether it may be being (either wittingly or unwittingly) “used” by political and economic forces whose main concern is to ensure the continued dominance of what is ultimately not a “natural state of being”, but is the product of a specific and historical configuration of a range of choices, forces and power.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems evident, in fact, that all of these questions asked at that time had both a pertinence then as well as one that has persisted beyond 2008. In many ways, post-July 2016, they may now also have a newly relevant intensity. The first question underlined how, at a level of granularity within Turkey, despite Gülen’s teaching on religious freedom and the courageous stances taken by Gülen himself and by organisations such as the Journalists and Writers’ Foundation on a number of issues that affected religious minorities in Turkey, Hizmet was perhaps still not at a grassroots level sufficiently engaged with such issues. And perhaps one of the consequences of this has been that, in its own time of need, Hizmet has found itself more isolated in Turkish society than it might otherwise have done had it managed to build stronger, deeper, and more organic relationships across the religions both internally and internationally.

The second question—which was concerned with the fate of movements which seek to chart a third way—is particularly poignant in retrospect and, given the context of the events of July 2016 and beyond, arguably needs no further explanation. In relation to the third question, Max Farrar, a sociologist and formerly of Leeds Metropolitan University (and which university, in 2010, awarded Fethullah Gülen an honorary doctorate, wrote about the same visit, in an Open Democracy article (Farrar 2008) on “Anatolian Muslimhood: Humanising Capitalism?”

In relation to critiques of Hizmet as being a sheep in wolf’s clothes, Farrar clearly stated that, “In my view, the movement is what it says it is.” However, he also went on to critique it for being what he called “yet another effort by spiritual people to humanise a monster. It is probably the best organised and most coherent effort yet; but, as with all the world’s religions, this movement seems unable fully to confront the massive injustices and inequalities that capitalism engenders.” This criticism is one that perhaps has some connection with the now emerging questions being articulated among some Hizmet people concerning the movement’s tendency not to have engaged with some of the political and economic roots of the injustice that has, in turn, led to what this author (Weller 2022, Sect. 6.4) has noted as a ‘development’ of one of the three keynotes of the movement—namely that concerned with the relief of poverty. Although Hizmet’s own post-July 2016 experience of social marginalisation and active persecution does seem to be leading many within it into a broader concern and engagement with injustice, at least in terms of individual human rights, Hizmet has not yet and, in fact might never, further develop into a fully systemic critique of capitalism of the kind referred to by Farrar.

Political scientists perhaps not surprisingly tend to argue that the main hermeneutical key for both understanding and evaluating Fethullah Gülen and Hizmet can be found through an analysis of their positioning within the interplay of socio-political forces. By contrast, while this book recognises that such forces play a part, its central argument is that the Hizmet inspired by Gülen comes out of a deep rooting in a “traditional” Islam, in the proper sense of the word, in terms of the distinctive inheritance which that religious tradition brings into the world and offers to it, and is the product of a dynamic interplay between the outward expression of service (hizmet) in the variety of activities focused on dialogue, education, the relief of poverty and the further development of that. Indeed, as Ergene argues, it is such a rooting that enables the resilience of Hizmet in the face of persecution:

What convinces our dedication, our commitment, is that we are right and whoever oppresses us like Tayyip Erdoğan is wrong because using the state resources and millions of dollars, and bribery and gifts and offerings and investments and the other things, he was unable to convince the world community to shut down these schools. Yes, he managed to shut down or stop our running institutions in a few countries, three or four countries in Africa, through bribery, you know, through personal offerings and other so-called ‘investment offers’, but then out of one hundred and seventy countries if we say that one hundred and sixty countries, you know, didn’t buy this, then it also shows that we are right and he is wrong. So, this makes us more hopeful that people of common sense and intellect and conscience will not buy into such cheap and empty offers.

Nevertheless, in relation to the inevitable ambiguities that affect historical and organisational forms of movements whatever their ideals, and with particular regard to the potential of mistakes having been made by Hizmet in Turkey, AS2 said:

When I see something nonsensical and illogical I can quit, I can finish the relation and connection. For now, it is also like that, I am of the same opinion 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.

Recognising that all human beings and organisations have their limits, their boundaries, their ambiguities, and their failings, the same interviewee also pointed out that but arguing that “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.”

2 Distinctive Normativity and Ordinary ‘Normality’

In the literature on the movement inspired by Gülen’s teaching one finds many and varied attempts to categorise it, such as in terms of “social movement theory” or as “Muslim puritans.” However, as emphasised earlier, Gülen himself and those closely associated with him and his teaching would not wish that teaching to be seen as anything other than Islam, or those associated with the movement as anything other than Muslims or other people of good will.

Within Islam, ‘innovation’ is often seen as being equated with departure from normativity and yet within Muslim tradition there is a legitimate form of ‘innovation’ which is not only a reform in the sense of ‘calling back’ to something seen as originally more pure, but also as a trajectory that is primarily about a contemporary and future ‘renewal’ of tradition. In such a renewal, it is arguable that what might be called ‘distinctive features,’ born of particular geographical and cultural receptions and temporally situated engagements, do not necessarily lead to a departure from normativity.

Thus, in Gülen’s teaching the Turkish, Ottoman, and Sufi heritages are all important, as is the context of globalisation and of Islam in the modern world of cultural and political pluralism, science, technology, and education. As Ergene in his foreword to Gülen’s book, Towards a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance, explains (in Gülen 2004c) Gülen’s model is “the essence of the synthesis created by the coming together of Turkish culture with Islam”; that “This tolerance was initiated by Muslim Turkish Sufis”; and that “Muslim Turks have practiced tolerance and concurrence, which are the essence of the contemporary democracy, over a vast geography for centuries. Islam has been interpreted in this geography with the same tolerance for thousand years.” (p. viii). In similar vein, it is the argument of this book that Gülen’s vision of Islam, rooted as it is in its fidelity to Qur’an and sunnah; drawing upon the rich synthesis developed in the Turkish appropriation of Islam; and translating that into action via a community of transformative action and a pattern of civil society initiatives, is an example of what can perhaps best be described as ‘distinctive normativity.’

Thus, Gülen’s vision of Islam is not that of a ‘modernist’ or ‘liberal’ project which could easily be dismissed as a betrayal of true Islam by Muslims who have a more traditionalistic approach. Rather, based on his wide and deep knowledge of Muslim, and especially of Ottoman, history, the approach that is taken by Gülen is one of a tajdid or ‘renewal’ of Islam that is rooted in the common Islamic sources of the Qur’an and sunnah. But it is one which also seeks positive engagement with the contemporary world and, within that, with people of religions and none. As Ergene (in Gülen 2004c) again, explains it, Gülen’s model is one that “re-generates this tolerant interpretation and understanding of Muslim-Turkish Sufism within contemporary circumstances, albeit highlighting a broader, more active, and more socially oriented vision…. Gülen opens up this framework and vision to all societies in the world, transforming and broadening it” (p. viii).

Coming back to Gülen himself, Ergene says that, “Hojaefendi’s thoughts, actions, the way he looks into the universe and the human, the plurality and diversity in existence should be better revealed, for the profile he displays is very much needed in the Islamic world,” although he also emphasises that “this is an opportunity for both the East and the West.” Expanding on this, Ergene argues that:

For the Islamic world to break through its constraints, it needs to adopt such a vision, which is represented in the ideas of Gülen, and this could be any other name; our focus here is on the ideas, not the name of a person. Otherwise, there is no way for the Islamic world to save itself from the reactionary mode, nor would it be possible for them to understand the age and modern times. Without such a vision they will continue to exist in the pit they have been buried and will remain in constant conflict with other countries. So, it is very significant, the role, the mission Mr. Gülen, and other scholars for it is not him only, who are following such a path where they still keep their values and approach the other to understand them rather than refusing them.

In relation to the Western World, Ergene argues that is “important to present his ideas and vision as bridge not to the Muslims as they are today, but to the real essential values of Islam which, he believes, could be great reconciliatory pathway.” Nevertheless, in relation to these opportunities, Ergene gave the stark summative evaluation of Hizmet that “we have failed in both directions.”

Looking both backwards and forwards, Alasag reflected that: “Gülen started this Hizmet. For us, in Turkey, growing up, when I was in Turkey, it was very unique what we were doing” and also “When we came to Holland, at first, I also felt we were very unique.” However, Alasag noted that Gülen’s own methodological approach has been to use many examples from history and that, in so doing, Gülen himself, through his own practice, underlined that what he has been contributing might not, after all, be so unique. Therefore, Alasag’s overall evaluation in relation to Hizmet is that: “In history there were many groups. The longer I am here, the more I see that in this country there are so many groups that are doing exactly the same things” and that “You see many of these kind of activities and organizations, voluntary movements, they are everywhere.” In the Turkish context, though, “which was under direct rule of the army, every ten years a coup, and no freedom or democracy” and where “as a child I was put in jail a couple of times – I thought this is so unusual, so big, or so important, whatever, I don’t know. Under those circumstances it was very big, very unique, very different.”

The question of uniqueness, distinctiveness, and normality strongly interplays with the question of the future with and without and/or beyond Gülen in the sense that, as Alasag says, “Whenever you have the idea that something is unique, this is the only movement doing this, the focus is on the leader.” However, because of Hizmet’s global spread and coming into contact with other similar initiatives “it makes you kind of ‘normal’, a very normal, very humble, a very small group which is trying to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.” This, in turn, opens up the question of wider connections between Hizmet and other initiatives, both in relation to Hizmet’s own experience and future trajectories, and also in terms of its positioning in relation to other religious (Muslim and other) and secular initiatives concerned with human challenges and human need. In connection with this, Ablak also points to an ongoing tension between the movement’s inner dynamic and its outward expression:

So, I think Hizmet is a way of living. We shouldn’t fit it in organizations or in formal things. And I think that in the last few decades that that was the problem within Hizmet: that we got more and more organizations and that shouldn’t be the main purpose of Hizmet. It is a way of living, or a way of being a good person. I don’t say about being a good Muslim because Hizmet is more than for Muslim people. It is about…the human…about what would be a good human and doing good for others. And so, about the universal human values. So, you don’t need to be a Muslim to be part of the Hizmet movement. It’s about my new way of living.

A particular challenge for Hizmet arising from its inheritance was expressed by Ablak in the following way: “The mindset with lots of abis and ablas was to build our own organization, but why? We could co-work with other organizations. We don’t need our own organizations.” As an example, Ablak says:

It is wider, and we are part of the Dutch women’s organization – which has been around for 125 years now. So that’s where the opportunities are, and so I didn’t agree with lots of organizations that were founded by Hizmet volunteers. And still they are setting up new organizations against the decision we made that we don’t want new organizations! – only if the Board would be diverse with non-Turkish or non-Hizmet people, with women and men. And still there are persons with Hizmet who found organizations and they say that those are Hizmet-inspired organizations. I don’t agree with that!

In relation to Hizmet’s own experiences, AS1—whose Turkish roots were in the Cappadocia region, and whose ancestors had come from the Ukraine and were Ukrainian/Crimean Tartars reflected in the following way on the recent fate of Hizmet in Turkey in relation to that of his ancestors: “At the end of the Ottoman time they had to flee from the Ukraine because of the Russian invasion. And now that history again repeats, having to flee from Turkey to other parts of the world.” So, because of this, he says:

I don’t believe everything is clear in this world. Hopefully, hopefully it will happen, but actually I don’t believe it, because what I saw from my father’s life, my grandparents life, these coup d’etats always happened, and the people had only their suffering and had only just themselves know it, and the other parts of the society had no idea about it. Because I didn’t know the sufferings of people before me. Now I can understand them – Alewites, Armenians, or you can say, the left side people. Maybe I saw them previously as “others”, as “the others.”

And now in the Turkish post-2016 context, he concludes that:

What is happening now is – many of my friends have said – that never in history has anything happened like this. But I don’t see it like that. It was every time in history. If you have a goal and idea, it is fighting of the good part and the bad part, or ugly how do you call it. Maybe we didn’t know, or the history didn’t write everything. Because of that we didn’t know or we couldn’t say. But I am sure the same things have happened to previous ones of our ancestors or your ancestors, doesn’t matter whether the Islam part or the Christian part, if you have a goal and especially if it is about religion, the people, especially the politicians, control the society using the religion very easily, especially in the eastern part. And no-one, no politician gives this power, this useful tool for them, to an NGO, if you can say, to a special society.

In relation to Hizmet’s ongoing work, close associate of Gülen, Muhammad Çetin (see Acknowledgements) explained that “Since July 1, almost one and a half years ago, a month before the coup d’état, I came to the USA for Ramazan. So over here I am with Hojaefendi,” and he underlined that, in contrast to any sense of exceptionalism, and especially in the light of what had happened in its Turkish land of origin, Gülen was heavily underlining the importance for Hizmet of its future outside of Turkey:

And he’s from that day on – he was saying before and then comes an urgency and immediacy now – he says that there are three things now: successful integration wherever you are. He is just insisting on this one. But he says that you should preserve your values which makes you this thing or proper Muslim, without losing your own true sense of identity but you should be in such a way integrated that people pick you up, choose you, elect you to head of institutions etc. He says I know that this is completely contradictory, and this is three ends of one paradigm or a stick, but you should manage, you should learn how to do this. In short, to be such a Muslim that you are truly sought after.

In saying this, Çetin also explained that Gülen acknowledged with regard to such matters that:

The older generations might be an hopeless case, but your children are being educated and being raised in this country so focus on that. Make them, for example, American-Muslim, make them British-Muslim, adored, looked up to and admired by the local people. Integrate as successful Muslims but not alienate or detach yourself from the main society because you are a Muslim…this is not only the US or the UK: it could be whichever country you settle in/wherever you live.

Reflecting on Hizmet in the context of Spain, Naziri noted that “Your activities should be do whatever it is normally, and if they ask, explain it, like who you are, because they are interested and ask you” and “There are many people who are very interested because they want to learn.” Reflecting on this in relation to his own engagement, Naziri said in relation to the nature of Hizmet that:

Like for me, being a Muslim, it’s something unusual, unique, like a movement from an Islamic – you know, in the Christian world, you have many of them, many denominations…. But in the Christian world you have some corfradia, or brotherhoods: Hizmet is somehow a jamaat, but it is more than that, it is different. I think being Muslim, having a Muslim identity, an Islamic identity, that’s why it is more interesting for me – the phenomenon of Hizmet, I mean.

And also that:

Well it has also some particularities that, probably, those Christian groups or corfradia don’t have, but we have to investigate what are they because I believe that every individual is different, is not similar. So, what you have to do is to discover that singularity, that uniqueness within it, and I believe the same thing happens within different groups. Whether it could be positive or negative, let’s see.

And indeed, both sociologically and theologically speaking, it is often the case that what is distinctive about an individual and a group can be a strengths that, on the ‘flip side’, can also become a weaknesses and vice versa. In the final analysis, this is to do with being human, whether on one’s own or in community with others. In Karakoyun’s evaluation, going forward:

There can be different models of Hizmet. If an aim of Hizmet is to serve humankind then, depending on the local situation, Hizmet can do different things in every country of the world. It can be in Egypt fighting for the human rights of the Coptic Christians; in Ethiopia it can be fighting against poverty; and, I don’t know, in Kyrgyzstan it can be different things; in Germany it can be different. So, this is what we have to learn: Hizmet can be different in every country of the world. But rooted in the principles that we stand for.

At the same time, if such a degree of localisation happens, then the question is posed of how, in the future, communication, mutual challenge, and the mutual sharing in different contexts can be maintained—both now and into the future, and especially when Gülen is no longer in the world, the potential issues and challenges arising from which are explored in the next section.

3 Gülen and Hizmet: Now and Beyond

The personal figure of Gülen continues to be important within Hizmet. As anonymous close associate of Gülen, CA1 expressed it as follows in terms of his own personal testimony: “When I don’t go and visit him for a few months I can feel something missing and need to see him so that I can see that connection is there, that possibility is there, that quietness is there.” In the period before Gülen settled in the USA, when there were disagreements, people within Hizmet travelled there to consult with him in person to find a way forward. When asked for examples of such disagreements in relation to which a way forward was found on the basis of consultation, Haylamaz responded that “There are many examples,” explaining that: “When I offer something to him for instance, he usually says, ‘it looks good. Go speak with friends, ask their opinion’.” Haylamaz also says that “Hojaefendi positions himself more like a consultant. There are other situations when he asks us to do something, but which we cannot do, simply because circumstances are not good for that thing to happen.” As a concrete example of such, Haylamaz recounted that:

For instance, I travelled all around Turkey for eight months for this Contest on the Prophet’s life, and with the exception of one place, everyone disagreed with the project. Only one person said “let’s try this at least in one place, maybe we will have a beautiful outcome out of this. Let’s not just say ‘no’ at the onset.” And then it became a very successful example thanks to that one person, although Hojaefendi had said that’s a very good idea, people did not want to do it. It depends on times and conditions and sometimes there are other priorities; there are economic constraints, there are many reasons. So when Hojaefendi gave an alright, gave a go to things, we were unable actually to do it because we not ready for it or did not want to do it. And he is also keeping himself, much more than before, especially these days, like a consultant, giving advice rather than ordering things. He might say, this looks like a good idea, go and speak with others and if you can materialise it, then go with it.

At the same time, the fact of looking to Gülen personally for guidance and advice raises practical issues and not only for the future and, but also in the present circumstances. Thus, Haylamaz acknowledged that:

This has become more difficult since he moved to the US. But those who are able to do it, has come on behalf of others to get his advice and prayers. And if not, they consulted among themselves. So, there was this network of consultation. Unless there are disputes, action to be taken is determined by consultation. Everything comes to fruition by people who are in the field; they learned together, they collaborated. Hojaefendi’s role is mostly to show a direction, to turn the lights onto a certain path.

Similarly, the anonymous interviewee HE1, said:

I think that in a more concrete or administration way, Fethullah Gülen doesn’t have executive power; he doesn’t forward the activities that are on the grassroots level, I think it is more symbolic right now because people like and respect him, and this is one of the most important things that the Hizmet movement or Hizmet community gather around – this is important. The second one is his principles, his ideology, his example that shows and this is, I think, almost all the Hizmet participants agree that we don’t completely understand him or we don’t completely, we cannot follow his example.

Out of all of this, of course, the question of what might happen following the eventual death of Fethullah Gülen is an important and a sensitive one, in relation to which Naziri asked the author, “Did any journalist ask him about this question, or did you know what he said?” Certainly, a number of people have asked Gülen this in interviews. In summary, one could describe his basic response as being that Hizmet is not even if individuals may have taken something from his teaching, Hizmet is not something that comes from him. In reflecting on the question of what comes after Gülen, Tekalan says that:

So many people ask this question at different times. All the time he has said, “I cannot speak for the future, but I am here now. I can speak about the issues of today. In the future, the people who will be present in the future will decide themselves.” I think that for the future after Fethullah Gülen, the Hizmet movement will continue. There are so many young people all over the world who didn’t even see Fethullah Gülen, but they know his ideas.

As commented on by Naziri, even though he acknowledged that Gülen might be described as “a charismatic leader,” nevertheless in his evaluation “I don’t even really have a time of thinking another name after Fethullah Gülen,” although “I don’t mean it doesn’t interest me.” In relation to what form or forms Hizmet might take when Gülen is no longer there, Naziri expressed the view that he thought it might go forward “in a somehow democratically” way, but in relation to within what precise organisational structures Naziri said, “that part doesn’t interest me.” But Naziri also emphasised that “What interests me, and what I am really concerned with” is “whether every and each participant of Hizmet is aware; is informed.” Even more so, Naziri asks “Did you incarnate it – I don’t know if I am using the good and correct word” or, “Embody it, embody it, embody it, that’s it! … Into your personal life and then if it is so, then no problem, there are many, many individuals who are working for the good and they will go on doing this, they will continue doing this, I suppose so.” For Naziri, then, it is this core service orientation of Hizmet that brings hope for its future beyond Fethullah Gülen’s earthly life:

The serving sometimes brings you pain, brings you discomfort, I don’t know, many, many other things that normal people do have, and could have, and they are having, but you are, like, dedicating yourself to the basic philosophy and what it should be. Whether we are doing it 100% or not, at least this is the philosophy and the way in which you have to work on. And so this is a good place. And if this consolidated, so I think even if Fethullah Gülen passes away, somehow this will work.

When trying to take into account Gülen’s own perspective on this matter, as Özcan explains, if you ask Gülen:

He uses the pen name ‘nothing’ – hiç – which means ‘nothing’ and he always introduce one kind of term, a jargon into Turkish: that is ‘zeroing of oneself’. And whenever he was asked he never assumes any kind of leadership or ownership of the services and he says I am just an ordinary guy, I am just the most sinful among you, and I have nothing done than trying to encourage you and I am not sure if I am sincere on this or not.

In relation to any achievements that may have occurred, Gülen says “Allah did it, because there is a verse in the Qur’an that says all your work and your handiwork is from God. You cannot assume any positive thing about yourself, but the negativity has come from you, that is the point, because we are interfering with all this, God’s progress system.”

One of the reasons that questions about the future of Hizmet without Gülen can be sensitive to pursue is because, while it is an important and appropriate question to ask in its own right, and particularly in the light of the historical and sociological analysis of other movements that have emerged around a charismatic figure, it is also important to understand that there are those who are actively using the question to attempt to disrupt Hizmet and to create internal dissention. Thus, in referring to what he explains Hizmet people call the ‘tarmac media’ in Turkey (meaning the media under the control of Erdoğan), Özcan says “So, in that, just to cause chaos within the community, they are saying that Hojaefendi is about to die and now a couple of his students are competing and fighting amongst themselves who would be the next person.”

Such a perspective is rooted in what this book argues is the mistaken, if not tendentious, critique that Hizmet is a kind of mafia like semi-business empire controlled by Gülen and that, once he is gone, there will inevitably be some kind of a fight for control of it. In contrast, as Özcan argues, “Hojaefendi is not inheriting any physical property or wealth to people. What he is handing over to us is a meaning, a message, a system of thought.” Because of this, “there is nothing to fight for this wealth like in the dynasties or, you know, rich families. What he is leaving to us is a proper relationship between God and his servants.” Therefore, also as Özcan says, “This is not an issue of a man, this is an issue of the message. So, the message will be conveyed to other people. So, the sincere followers, or the committees, or the, you know, group or people will take up and continue.”

With regard to Gülen’s close associates, Özcan states that “no one is aspiring to be Hojaefendi, because we cannot be,” and this is because, apart from anything else, Gülen has pointed out that, in the first place, “you are all married,” and therefore, as Özcan says, “So we lost the chance to be like him.” Overall, then Özcan underlines that “Hojaefendi never assumed any kind of leadership, ownership of, or any kind of status for himself and he teaches to people exactly the same.” Özcan also cited Nursi who held that “Eternal fruits cannot be built on a temporal, transient human beings” and that “Hojaefendi drew our attention to one fact that each and every action, and whatever we base our understanding should be Qur’anic and sunnah based. So, he referred us to the text again, the original and authentic text.” Overall, as Özcan says, “The truth is always eternal but the human beings are temporal and transient, finite. So, the infinite truths will prevail and if people pick up those truth in the principles, they will continue the service.” Nevertheless, while Gülen remains alive, as CA1 puts it:

I refer them also to Mr. Gülen. He has also, I think, too many questions in his head. He tries to motivate the people always during these last two years, always about the next world. But they also ask him questions about this world. People are still here because they couldn’t find an adequate alternative, I believe, and they also know this is the true one among others.

In relation to the limits on Gülen’s human life, EH1 says:

So, this is going to continue after, let’s say, his death. That Hizmet was gathered around him – this is not going to go for many years. He is an old man, so we know that after a certain time he is not going to be there, and so what happens then? I think I see all this trauma and this incident of 2016 as a good opportunity to be more sustainable in Europe, or in America, or in – I don’t know if we are going to see Hizmet in Turkey anymore, but let’s say in the West – so it’s really important that there is an opportunity for us to create sustainable institutions and sustainable models that this movement, Hizmet movement, can last long after Fethullah Gulen is passed away.

With regard to those who have been receiving teaching directly from Gülen, Kurucan explains that “There are more than 100 students, I don’t know the exact number who studied in his circle. But I don’t see any single one of them who could really have the authority really to continue this heritage as Hojaefendi has been doing to us.” At the same time, Kurucan notes that “there are certain individuals,” citing as an example that of Enes Ergene, who Kurucan says “has that really deep understanding and scholarship of those diverse disciplines of Islamic sciences – not to the degree of Hojaefendi, but as much as he could, but he has that capacity.” Kurucan also has noted that that while Gülen is alive:

Hojaefendi’s presence, for that matter, is an opportunity to be able to maintain that heritage because he is alive. And, if you have any deduction out of any argument you can correct yourself by going to him and asking him directly whether that’s how we should understand his message. But since he is also there as the authority, people do not really take one step forward to come to the front and deal with those matters individually on an authority that doesn’t really violate the presence of this teacher there, who is already there. You see there is that paradox.

Karakoyun, from Germany, offered the following assessment: “So, this is what I also think about Hojaefendi. Of course, everybody still benefits from what he is saying. He is still the one who with his teaching and what he says gives good ideas to the people. But the main activities, the institutions, the people, they are doing the job.” As Naziri has said, where people have taken an inspiration it has a value, and people continue to work with it. And, as Naziri emphasised “all the things he teaches, he says, is Islamic” and indeed “you probably can find it, and also other scholars saying that.” But, and significantly with Gülen and Hizmet, what has been at stake has been a combination of “the charisma, and the actions and the example, the life example.”

At the same time, as with many in Hizmet, there is a strong personal dimension to the question of the future loss of Gülen—as Özgü put it, “I would be very sad as a person, because he has been an authority for me.” But at the same time, Özgü realistically evaluates that “every person has to die and that is part of life and that’s why it’s a thing which is very normal.” Özgü says that “Now the people in Hizmet they talk about the situation of Fethullah Gülen, but after his death they will talk about it more. Many people will say, Fethullah Gülen was just a normal man, a human, a normal person. And I think there will be a discussion of this in Hizmet.” Overall, Özgü’s evaluation is that “I think he is a normal person who has good thinking and good ideas about Islam, and that’s very important for me.”

Interestingly, Özgü adds that “And he has done his job I think.” In other words, in relation to the question posed by Keleş towards the end of Sect. 5.4, Özgü does not expect particularly creative advances from Gülen himself, but at this time of great stress for, and debate in, the movement, Özgü says does see a special and unique role for Gülen in terms that:

I think now his most important job now is to keep the people in Hizmet together because many people had this thinking, now Hizmet is over and we have to go our own way. But because Fethullah Gülen is alive, he is our leader, he is the leader of this community and he is alive, and we will wait for what he says. Within the movement all these people who said we are going to have to go our own way, they say now we have to be active in Hizmet. That mission is to integrate the people together, to put them together, but after that I think he has done, in the case of the Hizmet ideas, he has done his job. Now we have his books. And if we want to start another project or found a school we don’t have to ask him. We have now his work and his books and we can also listen to preaching, and that is enough now for us.

However, although the role of a unifying figure is important, from the historical example of Said Nursi, it can be seen that there is no guarantee that such an influence can be maintained beyond the death of the individual concerned. As EH1 puts it:

So, when I asked the social scientists, they say that communities like Hizmet, eventually after when the leader dies, the community dissolves or it divides. So, this is like an extinction of a movement. But, I mean, we should really ask these social scientists how can we continue this movement without the leader? But I mean this is a transition for Hizmet.

As noted earlier, when Nursi died on 23 March 1960, the Nur community was uncertain about the way forward. Among the Nurcus, some wanted one leader to be identified, while others wanted a consultative council to be established, and still others wanted to set up a political organisation. A number of the longstanding members elected Zübeyir Gündüzalp as leader, but that did not end the debate. Already during the life of Nursi, there had been those known as the so-called writers and those as the so-called readers and, following the 27 May 1960 coup, the “writers”—who had copied the tractates (risale) of Nursi by hand—became an identifiably separate group under the leadership of Hüsrev Altınbaşak. The “readers” preferred the printed version in Latin letters. Others thought that an armed struggle was the way forward. Thus, reflecting on future possibilities, the anonymous Hizmet participant observer HE3 notes that:

One scenario could be similar to that of the Nursi movement – the fragmentations and the leading persons. It is one scenario. But when the leading persons in the movement, such as Abdullah Aymaz who is living in Germany, and some other people, if they have no more position in the movement because they are old and have no more energy.

Against such a background, and in the face of the uncertainties of the future beyond Gülen’s earthly life, Kurucan articulates the unanimous view of those interviewed: “May he long live and that’s what we pray for. But, that’s our faith, and everyone passes away.” And, in the end, Kurucan thinks that:

Afterwards I expect that certain people will choose their own way of understanding and interpreting his message and follow that path. So, there will, perhaps, be diversification in the way that his message is inherited by the following generations and that’s in the nature of human being anyway, and that’s in a way inevitable.

In the meantime, Kurucan invoked the relevance of a traditional Islamic model, as follows:

Well, I mean, the challenge is, first and foremost we cannot live up to the model, the friends of the Prophet actually portray. There is this very great example of when the Prophet was sending away as an envoy one of his companions – Muadh bin Jabal – as a governor to Yemen. And he asked him, how are you going to give your decisions? He said, well, I will look up in the Qur’an. If you cannot find it in the Qur’an what are you going to do? Well, I will look it up in your example. And if you don’t find anything in my example? Well, I will develop my own reasonings and come to my deductions out of it. And then the Prophet praised God and said I am grateful to God for giving me such friends who can use their own deductions.

At the same time, although this is the ideal, Kurucan acknowledges that:

We are not up to that model. We don’t have that courage to come forward with our own individual reasonings. That’s probably because of the ‘neighbourhood pressure’ (we have that concept in Turkish, probably ‘group pressure’). People may come forward and say, look, we still have Hojaefendi, the mighty teacher here, who are you to teach us what to do in a certain context, you go and ask him and that’s it. I don’t want to use the word ‘cult’ but for some people that may really be the case as they see him as the ultimate authority in all issues and just you go and ask him in all issues, as if you cannot come up with your own reasonings. So that may be a pressure on certain individuals not to be able to come forward courageously enough.

In a similar vein, Keleş also makes the following observation that:

It’s so unfair that we ask so much of Gülen. I’ve asked his students this: how are you going to avoid the pitfalls of Nursi’s students? Have you got some methodology in place for training? Look, Nursi was in the 50s/60s right?…Clearly Hizmet is far more advanced and has far more resources than they did, what’s your research man? Come on, you know we still expect Gülen to tell us everything, and you know what, I don’t care if that’s what Gülen prefers, because Gülen is open to be challenged, so long as you do it respectfully. I mean his notion of respect, I mean, we overdo it. He doesn’t want that and you can tell him.

Of course, how the death of Gülen might feed into the development of Hizmet itself in the future can only be responded to in a speculative way, although some idea might be gained from projecting forward things that are already happening in Hizmet. In relation to what will happen to Hizmet after Gulen’s death, interviewee Özgür Tascioglu (see Acknowledgements) from Belgium says “Nobody can answer this question,” while Özgü thinks that the challenge for Hizmet will be that:

I think that after his death, it’s like now we have to show we are not just a movement which is person-centred. And then we will have to show that Hizmet can also be without Fethullah Gülen. That will not be so easy, because the people in Turkey who are now coming to Europe as asylum-seekers, they are very connected to Fethullah Gülen, not just as an authority. So, people ask me if Hizmet is a cult, and there are people who for them Fethullah Gülen, and Hizmet is for them very person-centred. But for the people in Europe that’s not so. He is a very important person, that’s right. But we can also live without him. We can also have our associations, our foundations, our schools without him. I think it’s good to have him, yes….it will be a great shock for these people.

Özgü notes that, for many people:

After the death of Fethullah Gülen he would be for them a ‘holy person’ like Said Nursi. Right now when the people talk about Fethullah Gülen, he is a normal person who is an Islamic scholar, who is a really good authority, but he is not a holy person now for most of the people. But after his death he will be a holy person maybe.

Özgü also explained that, although “I know many people who are really very interested in the health of Fethullah Gülen and who say he should live longer than me and things like that, but I am not the kind of person who says things like that,” from his personal perspective, he underlined that, “For me I think that can be very dangerous because Hizmet should not be a person-oriented movement.”

Ablak, from the Netherlands, takes a similar position and, as she put it, says “Fethullah Gülen is important, but I don’t see him as THE important person in my life. So, lots of people of people don’t agree with me on that” and some say, “What are you talking about, and that you shouldn’t say that.” I think that isn’t the case. So, also after Hojaefendi I think that Hizmet will go on, and I don’t think then that some other abi will be in his place. I don’t think so.” At the same time, she acknowledged that:

Not everyone within the Hizmet movement have the same thoughts, and we have a free society! So, that’s my own opinion. And, as a person, I try to help, to yeah, change the mindset, so that’s why we talk about the Dutch Hizmet more. So, the Hizmet movement is, from my own understanding, it’s about education, it’s about being good people; it’s about charity; it’s about dialogue. So those are the pillars of the movement…

In thinking about the future, others draw attention to other possible framings for these matters beyond that of a more sociological analysis of potential change: namely, in terms of the traditional Islamic understanding of time and people of which HE3 explains that is a perspective in which:

There will come another person, and it was Said Nursi, and after him it is the person Fethullah Gülen, will come someone else, and he is born somewhere else in the world, I don’t know. And after him he will take the job to tell Islam to this age, and he will continue the activities of Gülen or the activities of the Hizmet movement. I don’t know what it will be. But this is another story.

Regardless of that wider question, with regard to the future of Hizmet itself, as Karakoyun expresses matters “It is difficult to speak about this issue at the moment because there is a lot going on at the moment.” Nevertheless, his own position is that “changes in civil society movements are not possible from one day to the next. It needs time.” But Karakoyun also thinks there are some points of consensus, such as that Hizmet has to become on the one hand, local, and on the other hand, transnational, and that the issue is of finding “something like a balance” in that.

4 Linguistic Deposits, Interpretive Processing, and Informed Application

Sunier and Landman (2015) identify tolerance, love, and compassion; dialogue, peace-building, and co-existence; and responsibility, civility, and citizenship as being at the heart of Hizmet. While noting that such concepts can be found in “the standard discourse of many global organizations,” Gülen’s achievement has been that he “integrates them in his theological worldview and explains them as Islamic principles.” Finally, and significantly, they point out that “The clusters of concepts are connected to one another through Hizmet” (p. 92). But as Çetin says about the actual current position of Hizmet USA as distinct from the integration emphasis of Gülen that was previously mentioned “Unfortunately, the message is not taken yet properly/adequately. But each and every few days he reiterates this message: successful integration without losing your true essence and the values, and the message should be taken to people in the best way they can understand.” And for going into the future Çetin underlined with regard to Gülen that, “The issue is not him, but what needs/ought to be done. It is not the man, but it is his intention and action,” and that Gülen himself insists, “It’s not my word, it’s not my work.”

With regard to the splits into which the Nur community fell after Said Nursi’s death through the formation of what are now up around 20 different Nur groups, there is the perhaps equal but different issue that also emerged following the death of Nursi in terms of his followers becoming ‘guardians’ of his writings as a kind of ‘fixed deposit’ rather than taking his inheritance forward as contextualised appliers of it. As Çetin expressed it, “The Nur Cemaat unfortunately failed in this. They said we can only read from the original, we can only interpret, we should interpret, no new versions, no abridged versions.”

In reflecting on Nursi and the Risale-Nur, Keleş points out the irony that, in contrast with such an approach, what Nursi wrote was “not passive book, it is an active book, it’s not a textbook. It is a book written on horseback. It is not an academic text. It’s a wonderful, it’s a wonderful thing, but they have now solidified that dynamism by refusing to have an abridged simplified Turkish version” also highlighting that: “Nursi’s tafsir, religious commentary, is actually a break from the classical religious commentary that was written at the time and prior, and many of the Nursi followers credit their faith to Nursi’s extraordinary style, and his name is Bediuzzaman, ‘extraordinary’, his nickname.” And as Keleş summarised it:

Nursi was a phenomenal thinker, and a phenomenal person for his time – in every respect, extraordinary. I mean he said things that were just downright weird, in the sense he would say this ‘bu sarik bu bas ile cikar’, that is, ‘this turban, would come off with this head’ [in response to The Law on Headdress and the regulations on dressing at the time] but he was clean-shaven. So, you think why do you say that? What’s the logic of refusing to abandon one sunnah (the turban) but abandoning another (the beard)?

In contrast with the reification of this extraordinary text written on horseback that has occurred among Nursi’s immediate followers, Çetin emphasised that “Hojaefendi is encouraging – take the message and you yourself do something: it’s not my work, you process it.” Çetin also explained that one of the reasons for this is that Gülen says of himself and his teaching that “I know that the younger generations will not understand me, will not understand my books, will not have that language capacity. So then, make simple versions or the versions they will understand so that they can follow the message.” Once again, this contrasts with what has occurred in relation to Nursi’s writing, with Çetin pointing out in relation to his Nursi’s followers that: “For years they simply cannot simplify the language there was always a conflict within the Nur community. We understand and we read, but the younger generations cannot read and speak the same language, they do not have the same vocabulary.”

In interview, Gülen himself recognised something of the challenges involved with human linguistic diversity when he spoke about how coming generations of Hizmet in the USA are not likely fully understand his words. And, indeed, one of the challenges for Hizmet people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and even more modern Turkish background is that Gülen himself writes in a style of Turkish which even Turkish first language speakers can find challenging and this is one of the reasons why English translations of his work can sometimes feel rather ‘flowery’ or ‘circumlocutory.’

Hojaefendi speaks, delivers sermons once every week, and that’s broadcast on the web. But especially younger generations since he uses this very sophisticated classical Turkish language, younger Turkish generations, especially if they are in the West are really unable to understand, even if they think they understand it is deficient in many ways. Some of his students said if one could please come forward and annotate and interpret Hojaefendi’s intention or meaning in his sermon, that would be very useful, but you cannot have any certain person coming forward and taking that initiative on his own to interpret Hojaefendi’s message.

As already noted, asked if it would be possible in principle to play back one’s interpretation to him and say have we got that right, Kurucan ruefully commented “We are not as courageous.” Similarly, when asked about the responsibility of taking forward Gülen’s teaching Ergene answered that, “Our heads are down unfortunately.”

Of course, apart from the question of generational vocabulary, it is the case that the Hizmet movement has to wrestle with the relationship between the Arabic language of the Qur’an, the particular Turkish style of Gülen, and the indigenous language or languages of the countries in which Hizmet has taken root. As Ablak from the Netherlands explains, the hermeneutical challenge involved:

So I see the work of Gülen as that we have the Qur’an, the Sunnah, the Hadith, and the Risale-i-Nur, and those are important things. And the work of Gülen is important to understand these. I don’t speak Arabic, I don’t understand that. I can read the Qur’an, but I don’t understand what’s in it. So, Gülen helps me to understand what’s in the Qur’an and in the Hadith. So, I am thankful for that. But my main source must be, and is, and will be the Qur’an.

But although Gülen’s work has achieved a global spread into translations into many languages, Ablak highlights that:

There isn’t much translated into Dutch, so I helped translating two or three books, and that’s a big problem. So, I was reading them in Turkish and also listening to the weekly sermons on You Tube. And we also had on Monday mornings lessons, and we read the Risale-i-Nur, and also the Qur’an, and new sermons were put online, and you took one on one day in particular. That was when we came together and talked about the sermon and together with others read the books, and then discussed how we could reflect that to the society, and to our jobs etc. But that was very, yeah, it wasn’t deep. At the Dialogue Institute Platform INS, all our work was about Hizmet, was about dialogue. So, I needed to get more information about that, and I then stopped working for the Erasmus University so I got more time to read the books, to listen to the sermons and so on. So, it wasn’t easy but I have a background of working in a large organization so I was used to come on time and that kind of stuff, which Hizmet people aren’t.

Interviewee HE3 says that, “It tells you something about the situation at this moment – what they want to say, and I also support the literal translation of what he says in the Dutch here is not always the best way. You have to adapt it to the cultural understanding level of the people here.” And, of course, the more global and transnational a movement like Hizmet becomes, the more challenging becomes the issue of faithful translation while retaining intended meaning and, as HE3 also points out:

Most of Gülen’s published thoughts are translations and I have given this to some text writers here, in Dutch. And they don’t understand some of the parts of Gülen’s thoughts about Islam. And I say “Why?” And they do not have the basic knowledge here, about Islam and Islamic culture. And I gave them the task to rewrite the texts so that the Dutch people here understand what he said and says in his books. And they have changed lots of things, not the meaning, the content of the text but the way of saying in the Dutch language and Dutch culture. And I have asked people in the US, to people there, can I do this? can I change the sentences of Fethullah Gülen so that the people here can understand what he says? – and people (young people especially) who do not have Turkish proficiency and they think in Dutch, they are not able to understand Fethullah Gülen very well. So some ideas of Fethullah Gülen, it could be a problem within the Netherlands, if we translate it as he said. But I understand him, and what he wants to say.

In relation to his own approach as a scholar, Gülen (2002) himself explains that, while “Taking the Qur’an and Sunnah as our main sources and respecting the great people of the past,” one should also proceed “in the consciousness that we are all children of time” and that, because of this “we must question the past and the present” (p. 118). Put simply, Gülen summarises the challenge thus: “We must review our understanding of Islam.” And as he then went on to further explain his aim to be that “I’m looking for laborers of thought and researchers to establish the necessary balance between the unchanging and changing aspects of Islam and, considering such jurisprudential rules as abrogation, particularization, generalization and restriction, can present Islam to the modern understanding” (p. 118). With regard to the question of how and what to take from all of this to inform Hizmet developments in the future, Kurucan said of Öztürk and Ergene that “They actually have started a bit the first steps for formulating how to maintain that heritage of Hojaefendi’s scholarship, and there were some, you know, steps back in Istanbul as I remember, but that was again very immature” but also that although there were “very big ideals”:

I think it didn’t really move forward to anywhere other than perhaps training a group of students in the same way that Hojaefendi taught the Islamic disciplines, but that’s another issue. But here I hope they will come forward with a certain technique that can develop that scholarship of Hojaefendi’s teaching.

Here Kurucan’s use of the word “technique” is of particular interest and relevant, relating as it does to the overall notion of ‘methodology.’ As one example of the kind of development that has occurred from the applicability of Gülen’s methodology, Kurucan cited Gülen’s (Gülen 2004a, 2004b, 2009, 2010) four volumes on Sufism, the Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism: Emerald Hills of the Heart collection, “which I believe and argue is very unique in the Sufism literature from the very early beginning onwards until now.” And this is, he says, in ways that are worth quoting at length here:

Because, you can see Hojaefendi – it’s a big compendium or glossary that Hojaefendi has done with Sufi concepts – where you can see him taking a concept like zuhd (asceticism) and he basically compares and contrasts the way this concept is being presented in the Qur’anic scripture; and then in the way the Prophet taught us and practised it; and then how it was implemented and understood throughout the tradition of Islamic Sufism; and then, finally, how he understands the concept as a scholar himself; and how we can enact that concept in our lives in the modern times. So that Sufism collection is a good example of it.

But, also, the way he introduced those concepts to us in his specific way of teaching is the methodology, but we are not yet there how to understand his teaching. For example, Imam Azam (Abu Hanifa) and Imam Shafi, who were among the four pioneers of the schools of jurisprudence in Islam, but actually their students perhaps two hundred years later, developed a methodology of how Imam Azam brought out solutions to some of the issues in that scholarship. Their schools of thought have actually developed later on. But it’s a responsibility on our shoulders not to make that a hundred years later, but now, in how Hojaefendi is teaching us and handling those concepts.

Methodology is perhaps a longer-term project, but we have perhaps the means to do it in our lifetimes and it’s a responsibility on our shoulders. Also, that we need to recognise the fact that as time passes, new conditions arise and however we may develop, Hizmet theology will certainly be affected by the time. The analyses will be done on his methodology.

…when we can hopefully formulate Hojaefendi’s methodology of teaching we may also come forward with new concepts and additions on how we should understand his teaching.

As another example of methodological application this book has already noted (see Sect. 4.3) that Kurucan cited the addition of ‘freedom’ to the classical formulation of the five purposes of Islam being related to the protection of one’s faith, life, family, property and mind. But Kurucan suggests that one way in which it may be possible to work within Gülen’s trajectory but go beyond it will be “when we will develop a certain methodology,” then within that “just as Hojaefendi added a sixth principle,” then also “we should add a seventh one, which Hojefendi does not focus too much on, which would be on the protection of nature and environment. So, perhaps not now, but as we are working on those, or formulating that methodology we should have that liberty to add the seventh which I consider very significant.”

5 The Methodology of Learning by Doing

It is the understanding of Gülen as a person of action as well as being someone who is clearly located in the classical scholarship traditions of Sunni Islam that is so important in understanding both him and his relationship with Hizmet. HE3 emphasises in comparison with Nursi that “Nursi focused on writing some religious books and texts, but Gülen is also a man of action. And I think that people will continue developing many many projects and programmes for the societies in which they live” and that this will be “With or without Gülen himself as a guiding leader.” Unpacking this in more detail, HE3 went on to say additionally of Gülen and of his relationship with Hizmet that:

He is a man of action, he is an entrepreneur, he is a writer, a teacher, but fore and foremost he is man of action. He is a person who initiated this whole. It is good that at this moment he is alive. And after him, the movement is now in an actualisation process, if the current political pressure finishes in a healthy way, the movement will not need him maybe any more as a leader and will act in the societies with his philosophy. The movement can exist from now on without Gülen and continue its existence without him.

To the extent that one takes such evaluations and judgements seriously, they point to the possibility that the most appropriate way of understanding Gülen’s inheritance might not be so much to do with the substance of a body of his teaching that then gets passed on. Rather, it could be something which, despite its rather ‘clinical’ sounding tone, might be closer to that of a methodology, a way of understanding, developing, living out the impulses from Islam in the world, and therefore, as something which is more to be inducted as a way of living, being, and acting rather than simply received in the sense of something that is “passed on.” As Keleş neatly expresses it, this is: “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.” Gezen from Denmark says of Gülen that he is “a man of action, and most of the initial activities of the Hizmet has been initiated by Gülen himself. I really respect and like this part of Gülen.”

He’s not an academic as we know academics are. The way he lives, the way his environment has formed, the way the movement has grown certainly are not allowing him to pursue such a lifestyle where he can sit down, write, formulate and produce work that can easily be transmitted to other people. But he’s a man much more engaged with the people who are visiting him, he’s much more engaged with his prayers, he speaks, but he’s not a person like an academic.

In other words Gülen, is in the full sense of the word fully ‘inter-active’ with the sources, with himself, with those from within Hizmet who seek his advice, and with the challenges of how to ‘do hizmet’ in the specific times and geographies of the world than abstractly systematic in his thinking and teaching. As Gezen goes on to say of Gülen:

And also if not personally and perhaps as a mission too, he perhaps cannot constrain himself to that academic systematism anyway, and perhaps it’s not fair to expect from him. That’s perhaps like expecting the Prophet or Jesus or any other great leaders of our history to be following a certain academic discipline. People like Gülen take Prophets as their role models.

And, indeed, what is striking in relation to Gülen is that there is a sense of this dynamic of being rooted in the sources, but also always of contextualengagement with new things that present themselves. At the same time, this is not a methodological approach that is completely abstracted from substantive content, but rather a methodology that itself reflects and embodies a core content that is in one way or another to do with the primacy of divinelove and of the human within what is believed to be the revelation of the Qur’an and the example of the sunnah. Therefore, at the heart of this is a vision of Islam and a methodology in which people are called upon to manifest the revelation of God in the world in a way in which theological ethics is at its heart. Thus, Gülen (in Ünal and Williams 2000) teaches that:

An Islamic goal can be achieved only through Islamic means and methods. Muslims must pursue Islamic goals and adopt Islamic methods to attain them. As God’s approval cannot be obtained without sincerity and a pure intention, Islam cannot be served and Muslims cannot be directed toward their real targets through diabolic means and methods. (p. 99).

Practice based on the foundations of the Qur’an and the Sunnah is central to the understanding of Gülen and of Hizmet in which there is a practical call to a ‘doing of the truth’ which leads to transformative understanding that in turn can inform new ‘doings of the truth.’ Indeed, this is why Balcı makes so bold to argue that “I believe that Hojaefendi has a duty, to a certain extent he has done, but it is not yet completed, to start writing a liberation theology that not only gives lip service to human rights issues and so on, not only says the Farewell sermon is the thing.” As an example of the kind of thing that might be developed, Balcı cites a You Tube video which he and İsmail Sezgin and developed and which worked with the story of Moses as a leader of peaceful resistance. Concerning this, he said that many Hizmet theologians responded that “this is a unique commentary of the Qur’an, we never thought of Moses as a leader of resistance and so on.” Drawing a wider lesson from that Balcı says:

And I realised that there is a still a potential of re-reading the Qur’an from within your own experience. And in fact, this is the whole uniqueness of Said Nursi and Hojaefendi. They have not written full commentaries about the Qur’an. They are always referring to the Qur’an from within everyday life situations. And that makes the Qur’an living. And now we are passing through something that we have never passed through and that is an invitation of, if you say, faith, to look back to our own holy sources from a different perspective, to read the Qur’an and the life story of our Prophet from the perspective of oppressed peoples.

In this one can see echoes of the kind of liberation theology approach developed by a number of Christians some decades ago in Latin and Central American countries in which they were going behind the inherited interpretations of the scriptures and bringing together in a circle of action and reflection in which the scriptures and the everyday experience of poor people were brought into a new hermeneutical interaction. In doing so, the pioneers of that approach were sometimes criticised for the lack of balance or otherwise in the conclusions that they reached and the actions that they undertook in comparison with the overall history of textual interpretation within Christian tradition. But what they tried to do was at least grounded and rooted in experience and gave rise to concrete actions.

As another concrete example of the kind of thing approach to the Qur’an of which he is thinking, Balcı cited the Qur’anic verse that advises Muslims not to go to war all together, but to leave somebody behind to study the religion. In relation to this, Balcı says:

It does say to take care of the elderly or the children. But it does also say leave some behind. And it says why. It says so that when those who go to war come back, they are going to advise them. So classical commentaries always deal with the human resources dimensions of it and say many people would be killed, so if you all people of the religion go to the front then you would lose all the people, the scholars and so on. So, they look at the human resources perspective. I’m looking at from the human nature perspective: fighting – whether it is war on the frontiers or it is a political struggle it changes human nature. And the Qur’an says there has to be somebody back who will drag your natures back to the normalcy, back to the ideal nature. But if you all go to the frontiers you will all become the same.

Linking this with his personal experience, Balcı explains that when he was in Israel/ Palestine and used to write about that conflict, he criticised suicide bombing operations. But he used to receive messages from many Turkish readers who argued that if his mother or sisters had been raped, he would do the same in relation to which, however, he had responded:

Yes, yes, that is precisely the reason why I am writing this. That is precisely the reason. I am out of the ring. I always gave the example of these boxers in the ring – when they receive the first blow, it usually turns into animal instincts, they forget the rules. Somebody outside has to say, keep aside, keep aside, otherwise you will have the second or third one. He will lose. Somebody has to take us back.

In offering their views on what they see as the main hermeneutical keys for appropriately interpreting the teaching of Gülen and the practices of Hizmet, Hizmet interviewees have consistently highlighted one or both of two key themes. One is that of love as explained in Gülen’s own teaching and embodied in the actions of Hizmet. The other is that of the human. A connection between the two can be found in the Sufi concept of the Perfect Human. This is not perfection in the sense of an ‘impossibilist’ interpretation of the Christian tradition which human beings other than Jesus can achieve. Rather, it is meant in the sense of a more open and dynamic trajectory. As an interpreter with Özcan explained it, “A true human being as God wants and wills … means that keeping the ‘truth’ and being a human, and preserving that one and expanding, enhancing your skills and abilities with the physical, with the spiritual, as God wills. It is this being a true human being.” Enes Ergene further explained this as:

When we started the discussion you asked about Gülen’s theology I said ‘human’ is the centre of his theology. The human being is the centre of everything. Although Hojaefendi is saying this by looking at the Qur’an, his reference is the Qur’an, some people, radicals are not happy with this teaching. At some point he was accused of creating a new religion, a new faith, by bringing in different parts of the religions and faith: they used the term of ‘soup’. No, it is not a new religion. The essence of all religions are the same. Of course, world views have changed, and there are nuances, but what he points at is the spine, the main core of all these traditions. Over time, other components like art, science, politics, etc. intervene, but that main core remains the same.

An illustrative example of how this hermeneutical circle between Gülen’s teaching and example with regard to the primacy of the human and of love as it works out in ‘inter-action’ with Hizmet is the back story to an invitation the author received, while on a visit to Australia, to speak in Sydney at the 2018 launch of an initiative called Advocates for Dignity.Footnote 1 In the initial correspondence about speaking at this event, the provisional title for both the event and for the organisation was to have been “Victims of Turkey.” But ahead of the event itself, the name was changed. This was significant in at least two ways. First of all, there was no evidence, as some have charged, about the relationship between Gülen and Hizmet being that of a ‘cult-like’ organisation or a paramilitary-type command structure in which somebody makes a decision which is then transmitted to everybody else and has to be implemented. Rather, as consistent with the author’s general knowledge and experience of Hizmet over many years, and notwithstanding the critiques of Keleş, relative to many organisations of a religious character, Hizmet is more often than not a space of genuine and lively debate. And, therefore, the name of the initiative changed to the one actually used at the launch.

In addition, the substance of that changed name is important because it does not contain the passive word “victims” but instead settled on the active word “advocates.” This is, of course, not to gloss over the very real victimisation that thousands of people connected with Hizmet have experienced. Rather, the name “advocates” was chosen so that, in terms of both its substantive focus and its external projection, it would be more consistent with the positive ideals and teaching of Gülen. This is because, as already noted, in Gülen’s teaching, what comes first is not that one is a part of Hizmet, or even that one is a Muslim, but rather that one is first and foremost a human being, and from that humanity one then works out what it is to be a Muslim in the contemporary world in engagement with the Qura’nic sources and all that makes for that.

Therefore, the focus was not on “victims,” but on “advocates,” not focusing only on “Muslimness” or “Hizmetness,” but on dignity—human dignity. In addition, the original country focus of the title on “Turkey” would not have been quite right because, although there are shared responsibilities for what occurs in each individual society, it would not be correct in any undifferentiated way to put at the doorstep of an entire country or people what is being perpetrated by a particular power structure and its active supporters, even when many others are passively complicit.

In addition, a geographical focus on “Turkey” alone would also not be quite right because people have also been suffering outside of Turkey by virtue of their association with Hizmet. And furthermore, by calling the initiative Advocates for Dignity, the new name universalises the aim of the initiative. That is to say it is not only focused on (which would, of course, be entirely legitimate in socio-political and legal terms alone) the self-interest of a group of people who are suffering greatly at this time. Rather, this initiative had both a proper focus on the injustices to Hizmet occurring in Turkey and linked with Turkish developments but was also seeking to connect those experiences with other injustices in other contexts.

As connected with what has happened to Hizmet in Turkey and responses to that of the kind just described, Kerim Balcı has outlined a series of examples of how a methodological commitment to learning by doing through the embodiment of love as a verb into concrete actions—including into things that have sometimes diverged from and/or conflicted with more ‘normal’ understandings, stances, and approaches found within Hizmet—came about, and has discussed what has been learned from this, in the following ways. The first example was of what began to happen among Hizmet in Turkey itself in response to the growing sense of authoritarianism in the country, even before it began so directly and seriously to impact upon Hizmet itself beyond the 2013 closure of many of its educational initiatives. As Balcı recounted this:

Actually, it didn’t start with our own people, but we already realised it was going to come to us. So, we started to join sitting protests in front of what became the infamous Silivri prison where I think that more than 5,000 members of our movement are in jail now. At that time there was none, but left-wing journalists were being jailed. So, we started to go and sit in front of the prison as a show a solidarity.

But the authoritarian developments did start to affect Hizmet directly, and especially in December 2014, when both the editor-in-chief of Zamanmedia group, Ekrem Dumanlı, and the Samanyolu TV Manager, Hidayet Karaca, were arrested. Balcı explains that initially the protest involvements of Hizmet people were not co-ordinated, but advisory messages were being sent on What’s App. But when the above arrests happened, “Everyone was in front of Çağlayan – the Palace of Justice in Istanbul, protesting about their arrests. Eventually, Ekrem was released, but Hidayet Karaca is still in jail. He will, if this continues like that, he will die in jail.” Later, when in the USA, Balcı was involved in organising a small protest of around 40 people involving friends from the dialogue activities in the Chicago square. This was small in number and with every speaker needed to speak to agreed printed texts, in order to minimise the risks of negative spin-offs in Turkey.

These protest actions were not one that were centrally co-ordinated with leaders in Hizmet and had not been discussed with Fethullah Gülen before they were carried out. In relation to the action in Chicago, Balcı explained that he later account took advice from people who are close to Fethullah Gülen, acknowledging that he and others had taken this action “without asking him” and that “if he didn’t like it, we shouldn’t continue.” However, following that it was reported back to them that when Gülen had seen in on TV he had asked, “Do we have only forty people in Chicago?”. Encouraged by this, Balcı organised another event with 2000 people in front of the United Nations, where he was also one of the speakers.

Of that event, Balcı said “When I returned back to Turkey, Ekrem Dumanlı said to him, ‘Kerim you were speaking as an opposition leader, there, I assume, there?’ and I said, ‘And you were speaking in front of Çağlayan as the leader of the country, actually.’ ” Explaining what he meant by this is Balcı said, “Well, the point is, that when we started these moves, we didn’t realise that people outside Hizmet were looking at us as possible political actors of Turkey.” In relation to this, he went on to say that:

Many people from the CHP and the MHP – these are radically different, but both nationalist parties, one is a left wing and one is a right wing nationalist party – both of them wrote letters to Ekrem Dumanlı inviting him to come and become the leader of their parties. This said a lot of things. First of all, this said that Turkey had a lack of opposition leaders. Second, at that stage, we were not seen as enemies of the public, you know. Many people, from CHP for example, you know – this is a Kemalist, secularist party – invited me to their meetings to give a speech and so on after that event. This was 2014, a year after the graft investigation. So already Erdoğan had decided to seal our fate, exterminate the movement and so on. But the left, and even nationalist right, was able to stand with us, invite us to join their ranks – actually not to join their ranks, but to become their leaders – but this also says a lot about the movement.

Nevertheless, Balcı said that “None of us took this seduction. None of us said, ‘Why not do politics, people are leaning to us, people are inviting us,’ and Ekrem is a tall guy, handsome, not like me, so if he wanted he would be quite a successful politician. He didn’t.” Because of this, Balcı thinks there will need, in the future, to be some retrospective reflection on what might and might not have been done, with contributions from Hizmet, before matters had gone too far:

A generation later that question has to be asked also. It’s not only that we are suffering from a persecution. It’s that we, also, rejected an opportunity, a political opportunity. Now, when people ask me questions like, were you involved in this coup attempt and so on, I am saying, “Why don’t you ask me, why this movement didn’t try this in a political way? Why – you had the opportunity. You had the largest circulating newspaper of Turkey, best watched TV channels of Turkey and the support of almost all opposition groups, and yet you didn’t appeal to power?”

And even though in relation to politics Balcı says that, “I still believe in the motto of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, ‘Şeytandan ve siyasetten Allah’a sığınırım’ (‘I seek refuge with Allah from Satan and from politics’),” he insists that there is a real question to be answered. Of himself, he explained that “Even in countries like the UK – I am a member of the Labour Party, I always felt myself a Fabian – but, I am not interested in making politics, or appealing to power positions. I’m a student, I’m learning, and I want to contribute to my society, to my new home, yes, but not as being a leader.” In relation to civic society protest, it was still that, “at that stage, we started to learn how to protest, how to write slogans, how to chose slogans and so on. I remember, I don’t know who said this, but this was a left wing person who knew protesting and said ‘These Gülenists are newcomers but they are learning fast’.”

However, Balcı thought they made the mistake of believing too much in social media, commenting that “Twitter particularly, might really be a good place to promote an idea, but ‘likes’ do not count, you know.” So, what they were not able to do was “how to turn that public protest energy into change in society.” They were unsure of how to move from ‘likes’ to real engagement and “At that stage I can say we put eighty per cent of our energy into social media activism. Street activism was only twenty per cent.”

In relation to such actions, Balcı says that “many people, even here, are still critical of my activism,” citing the example of when he first organised a protest in front of the Pakistani Embassy in connection with when a Hizmet-related family were seized by Pakistani police officers and deported to Turkey without any due process, but in relation to the invitation to protest, “Many said no way, we are not going to do that, this is not Hizmet, and so on.” Balcı acknowledges that such critics “might be right.” However, he explained, “I asked myself the simple question, ‘What can I do?’ ” because, although a journalist, in practice, he could not get into The Guardian newspaper or the BBC to be interviewed which he might otherwise have done, similarly with the politicians, but…What was ready to listen was Amnesty International “so I have spoken in several Amnesty events all around the United Kingdom,” but also “the streets were open, so I did that.” In other words, in Hizmet tradition, Balcı was identifying what was “the opportunity space,” and of which he commented that “This is true for all kinds of new areas of activity in which Hizmet is being pushed towards.”

As expressed by Keleş when reflecting on the past, present, and future of Hizmet in relation to the teaching and practice of Gülen, there is an important “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.” Or, as Kerakoyun has expressed it, reflecting on the more traditional forms of Hizmet initiatives in Europe “If you ‘copy and paste’ and if you don’t have people who are brave enough to start something new, it won’t work. So, I think also Hojaefendi is very open, but many people in Hizmet are not brave enough to start something new.”

6 Love, the Human, and Ecumenical Ijtihads in Action

In the process of coming to terms with the impact of its own recent trauma and suffering and with what might be learned from this, it is at least possible that a new opportunity could be opening up through a shared human experience of suffering and injustice, to focus more clearly than ever before on the centrality of love and the human, and in working together with people of all religions and none in the development of inclusive ecumenicalitjihads in action.

For example, despite his previously noted critique in relation to Turkish nationalism and its impact, including within Hizmet, Naziri agrees that Hizmet is “in my opinion one of the, if not the most open-minded society or group in Turkey” and that as a consequence of what has happened to it post-2016, Hizmet has become “more open to know other societies, other languages etc etc….to make an empathy, to learn to make an empathy in relation to many aspects – in language aspect, in ethnic aspect, in religious aspect.” As Naziri says:

What I think is that I am now evidencing the huge transformation, the huge transformation, yeah, of the Hizmet, like, in different ways and in different modes. Now, every problem is bad, but it could be again a good opportunity. Like the Hizmet was not anti-democratic, never ever I suppose, I guess and I believe. It was not anti-human rights, but yes, after these events it has become more pro- these values and embracing many, many other values and, you know, like, sticking it or putting it in a very solid way, like, this is mine, this is what I want, these are my values. If these bad things are happening and I am still who I was, even you know like, despite all of these bad things, I think that these things are happening are helping in consolidating, let’s say, the Hizmet attitude and philosophy.

Reflecting more broadly on this, Naziri opines that “what happens to us should, at least, give us some lessons, and you have to…they give us the lessons and the question is whether we learn from it or not.” And, interestingly, in echo of what other interviewees and informants have said, this is also now beginning to be extended from within Hizmet to “every group which was persecuted, no matter what ideology they had” with Naziri, for example, arguing that this is extending not only to ethnic Armenians, and to include the suffering of politicalleftists, but also that “it could be LGBT, it could be everything, you know.”

As Naziri describes this process he says that “generally speaking, I think that many, many Turkish citizens who are Hizmet participants and are subjected to these problems are learning positively and, like you know, it is affecting them positively, this part at least. They are being able to convert it into an opportunity.” To some extent, regardless of whatever position is taken by individuals in relation to internal Hizmet debates on how to interpret these events and what their implication is for the future, in many and various ways, Hizmet people are all having to learn:

All of these things are teaching us all Hizmet participants whether we are persecuted or not directly or indirectly, to accept, to learn, and to embrace many values which we find, let’s say, implemented and working here in the European societies and the western countries, and which are, probably all of them, or most of them, Islamically-based. To believe on them, to embrace them, to receive them, to accept them, again and again thinking and making a permanent compromise, doing good and serving the people, in order to please God, if this is the main point of Hizmet, and it is, if everyone really believes on it. So this is the time to consolidate this philosophy and to put it into practice, instead of talking like me, showing it in action!

One of the things about which there does seem to be agreement in principle within Hizmet is that Hizmet can no longer simply be Turkish. As Ercan Karakoyun from Germany puts it, “Hizmet is not Turkish anymore. I am not Turkish like the Turks in Turkey. And the people who finish our schools in Pakistan, in Ethiopia, and in Tanzania, there are also not Turkish.” Indeed, “We everywhere we have to have different local approaches to Hizmet and a transnational aspect is, of course, well, although we are German Hizmet, Ethiopian Hizmet and they are Pakistani Hizmet, we have the same ideas. Our ideas are transnational, we have the same values that we stand for all round the world.”

When he was himself asked about what he saw as being at the heart of Islam, Gülen said, “I think if you are going to name one thing that lies at the heart of Islam I would say that is love. Yes, there have been circumstances which necessitated conflicts and sometimes violent conflicts. But that is exceptional, that is not what is at the heart of Islam.” Indeed, he went on to say that “You can see this love-centred spirit of Islam in the writing of some of the famous scholars of the past. For instance, one said don’t hurt or harm a single life. It is equivalent to demolishing the high seat of God” (by which Gülen was referring the Throne of God, or the authority of God). Gülen went on to say that, “In the writings of Rumi you can find similar verses,” and in reference to one of Gulen’s early and very influential spiritual teachers, the Anatolian-based Sufi Muhammed Lutfi of Alvar (also known as Alvarlı Efe), who was also based in Erzerum and who said what in English translation might be approximated as: “The lover with a pearl-like skin says: Don’t be offended by the offender. The one who allows himself to be offended is lesser in maturity than the offender.”

The emphasis here on the universality of love in combination with the emphasis on the human both allows for, and can also actively facilitate, the emergence of what one might call ecumenicalijtihads in action—in other words, ijtihads that, in practice, are not done by Muslims or Hizmet people alone but by them in dialogue with others. As a concrete example of this, for example, in relation to the challenge of dealing with trauma in Hizmet, Balcı says that “I am very much open to the idea of involving Jews and Christians into an ijtihad body” and also argues that ecumenicalitjihads between Hizmet Muslims and Jews would be able to draw on the Jewish experience in Europe where many Jewish people have been burdened with trauma that has gone through generations and has arguably, at least in part, hindered the potential of the Jewish people to offer the gift that is in the Jewish tradition to the benefit of the wider humanity. But as also in Jewish experience, out of trauma can come learning of theological depth.

Even more broadly, Balcı explicitly argues that it is necessary for Hizmet to take up the challenge of ‘ecumenicalijtihad’ in action for the future because the nature of the main human challenges of the future are global in scope, and have impact not only on Muslims and Hizmet but also on people of all religious traditions, and indeed on all humanity. As an illustrative example of this challenge from beyond Hizmet, Balcı referred to a talk that he recently gave in a liberalJewishsynagogue, noting that “when it comes to Judaism many of the people think that, you know, theology, it’s done, you can’t add anything, it’s already a complete book,” and Balcı says that because of this:

I spoke about the challenge of artificial intelligence and genome editing. I said you might think religion is altogether finished, you know, written, we have the Mishnah, Talmud, and you know, what do you need further, but I am going to ask you a few questions. All these driverless cars, they are not learning from the code. They are learning from themselves, from observations, and in critical situations they are making decisions to kill this person and not this person. And they are actors: for the first time in human history, somebody other than a human being is an actor [agent]. We don’t have theology for non-human actors [agents], you know.

In Islam, especially, we don’t have much place for non-human actors, we altogether erased everything other than human being and jinn, from theological discussion, you know. We simply say that animals do not go to heaven or hell, finished. I have problems with that. But robots – is there a place in Paradise for robots, or hell? Or if a driverless car kills somebody, who is going to pay for it. Do we just switch it off and that’s it? How many people were involved in writing of the code? Are we going to go back to the coders and so on? People buy code from a code library and use code from there. Are we going to go back to the code library? It’s a challenge.

And already in China, people started to play with the human genome. What if we have – and we will eventually have that – human beings that can live under water, then what will we do with ablution, you know, if they are living under water? And, you know, in Judaism, a bit in Christianity, but in Islam, spiritual ablution is so much so important, and so on.

These observations by Balcı have echoes of, and resonances with, Kurucan’s references to the discussions with Gülen’s close associates concerning how, in two very different times and contexts, one should assess the appropriateness of the sources of water for ritual ablutions. But these examples take those intra-Muslim discussions even further in underlining the need for inter-religious and inter-human dialogical engagement if such issues are going to be engaged with in a creative and productive way. In relation to such opportunities and challenges, what Gülen’s methodology offers can perhaps be characterised as an ethical theology or a theological ethics that bears witness to the revelatory truth that it claims to have received and which translates that into a style of Muslim living in a religiously plural world in which modesty and integrity are combined with realism and distinctiveness. Such living gives Muslims, but also people of all religions and none, the social and theological space to witness their own understanding of truth as well as to be free to make their response to what is shared with them by others, within which the praxis of ecumenicalitjihads in action can be engaged with as part of a better understanding of truth as well as a means of effecting positive change. In relation to the challenge of doing such ecumenicalijtihad, Balcı quite startlingly and challengingly says:

This challenge is a huge challenge – only Muslims, or only Christians or only Jews cannot deal with this issue, particular ethics of genome editing which will happen, you cannot, you cannot just say, we are against it, that’s it. Yeah, we are against homosexuality says the Catholic Church, but how many Catholic priests are homosexual? You cannot undo things by just saying this is non-Christian or non-Muslim, and so on. It is a fact. It is a fact. So, we have to deal with that, and I believe that Hizmet is uniquely positioned to deal with those challenges. And that is one area that is going to give us an opportunity in Europe, in the West.

7 Going Beyond Gülen?

When asked about the future of Gülen’s heritage after Gülen’s death, Ergene said, referring to his 2008 book Tradition Witnessing the Modern Age, “I wrote one book, but we could have written five books. But I am a lazy student. I was to about to finish a second book, but these new bandits of Turkey confiscated everything. All I wrote are gone. We had to leave everything behind.” Reflecting on the challenge of how this heritage might nevertheless be taken forward, Ergene confessed that, “Our heads are down on this,” while noting the scope of the kind of challenge that this presented given that Gülen is, as Ergene expressed it:

He is a person with so many dimensions. It is hard to convey all of those dimensions and provide a framework for this. In the past there was a tradition of annotation where students used to write notes and expanded on the literature that they had inherited from their teacher, systematized his ideas, and if that has become a school that was thanks to the efforts of the students. In this case, then, this responsibility really falls on us here and several others and surely there is a need for that. Perhaps in the last twenty years, I have working on him as a spiritual person, as a scholar, as a thinker, as a renewer, as an authority in law. But I have to say it is a very difficult job to refer to all of these personalities. We need to start first perhaps by systematizing his way of thinking. For his discourse is pretty much encyclopaedic. You would find him speaking about ethics at one point, but then moving from there to kalam, to Sufism, to philosophy, to current affairs and then connecting them to social realities. He makes very rapid transitions in between disciplines. This is usually how founding personalities are; they have things to say in every domain. His discourse has to be processed in an intellectual analysis.

In the light of the impact upon him as a person and his teaching of changing social, political, geographical, temporal, and religious contexts, Gülen acknowledges that his own perspective has now broadened to such an extent that, as he put it in an interview with the present author:

I’ve always believed that Islam, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, you name it, members of all these religions can live in harmony, and people in Hizmet believe this. And you can say that the schools that were established around the world were the first steps toward our contribution toward this goal. And now with this push these further steps are taken. In a sense some seeds are placed in different parts of the world. At some point these seeds will bear, produce, trees. So, they will represent the bright face of Islam and Muslims in a more beautiful way, and these people in their localities recognise the same thing that I believed all along that yes we can live in harmony and embrace each other. This embracing of all humans around the world, each other, has been my dream throughout my life. It is so strong, so fundamental for me that it is almost a prejudice that I certainly believe that this will happen one day.

In adding to the question of the future of Hizmet beyond Gülen, HE3 also notes one of the key differences between Hizmet and the Nursi movement is “the international perspective of the Hizmet compared to the Nursi movement,” as a result of which HE3 speculates that:

This dynamism can make it that the movement will be managed with a group of people, internationally but also locally in each country. After Gülen, I see such a kind of managerial leadership structure in the movement in which everyone, in whichever country is free, and this is the collective of the movement. And they will listen to each other, they will look at each other’s activities, but the ideal view of the ideas of Gülen will be at the centre. They will still be the main guiding ideas and principles.

Gülen himself has even talked about a wider shura, or consultative council, although Gezen thinks that “a big shura of European Hizmet or worldwide Hizmet that is giving directions to a local Hizmet” is unlikely to happen since it “would be utopian, if you ask me.” But apart from the question of its likely viability, Gezen expressed his own personal position about this as being that “I don’t think I would want to be a part of a thing like that – simply because the purpose is not to establish something, but to establish life after.” Noting that Gülen is over eighty and that when he will not be here anymore, “it’s only his work that will stay, through his books and speeches, in which there is a lot to take from,” Gezen went on to say that:

Gülen is a very, very influential figure. He has inspired a lot of people. So, for me, if I still am alive the next twenty or thirty years, my main resource and inspiration will be Gülen’s writings. So, I will be talking about Gülen as an inspirer, and because I am able to write and read probably I will write things inspired by Gülen. And the idea, the vision is the same. It does not die when Gülen dies. That is the philosophy. It’s totally misinterpreted if someone feels that, if Gülen dies, then the Hizmet will die although some people will stick with the ideas. That’s not the case. The issue is pretty straightforward. It is that while you are alive you try to get God’s acceptance, which is a life-long endeavour. It being a life-long endeavour does not change with Gülen dying. So I think the vision will continue.

But in addition, Gezen commented that he also thought it would be “inevitable that there will be Hizmet people in Denmark in the future that are inspired by new scholars, maybe scholars who are developing Gülen’s works and are saying that the ideas and the vision are still there.” Thus, Gezen’s evaluation is that it is more likely that no one person or group will emerge, but rather there will what he called “local trajectories” and therefore “local Hizmet.” Indeed, Gezen’s own preference is that “I would focus on local issues, with a group of people who are having the same vision. So, local associations will continue and in twenty or thirty years from now.”

Karakoyun explained that it is difficult at the moment to come together because “everybody has a lot to do with their own problems.” However, Karakoyun also says that, in terms of the ‘Western’ world at least, there nevertheless remains “good co-ordination with Berlin, Brussels, Rotterdam, Paris, London, and New York” because many of the problems and issues are still similar. But unlike Gezen, although he also thinks that “globally it’s not possible at the moment,” Karakoyun is still of the view that “I think Hizmet has to work on this shuraissue” on the basis that:

If you have circles and decision-makers that come together and discuss properly; share their ideas properly; then going on from then, decide which way to go, then I think that Hizmet will do very well in the future because this is, by the way something that Hojaefendi always says: instead of having one genius, it is better to have three average ladies coming together and discussing and working on a consensus, because there are then better solutions. So, if we can establish these shura circles, there are democratic consensus-finding bodies in different countries, then we can have a future. Otherwise, I think I fear that we will have a lot of different hizmets, maybe as many as there are countries. So, the transnational idea will maybe get a little lost.

Keleş links the question of the future of Hizmet with what he identifies as having been a key characteristic of the movement since its inception, which is that:

One of the things that defines Hizmet is “momentum”. This is the idea of helmin mezit in Hizmet (is there not more I can do in Hizmet)? This is like, to never be satisfied with what one has done, but also always to look beyond, which is why it became so expansive, both geographically but also sectorally.

Nevertheless, Keleş he also evaluates the present position of Hizmet as being one within which:

It’s almost as if we are experiencing the clash of two Hizmets. Hizmet (values, ideals, and principles) versus movement (reality, interests, practicalities). Will the movement allow us to practice Hizmet’s values. And it’s not just “us” verses “them”, it’s inside everyone, you know. It’s fascinating from an organizational studies, sociological, social movement, religious movement point of view – it’s quite interesting whether or not that will happen.

Pressing this further, Keleş makes the observation that “I mean you have a very sophisticated, educated movement with doctors and so forth in it” before, and from his perspective somewhat rhetorically asking “Can we not see this? Can we not take part in it?” before providing his own rather downbeat response “I guess we can’t?” albeit with inclusive of a question mark. But as with the previously discussed question of the application of post-fact causality thinking to a hermeneutic of Hizmet’s trauma, once again, Keleş links and broadens the questions that he poses to Hizmet with ones that are wider and deeper than those that he poses to the movement alone, as when he asks: “Can the Islamic culture and civilisation achieve a form of social responsibility and accountability and independent institutions? Can we institutionalize this? So now I am questioning this?” Citing examples of others who have sought to be creative in this regard, such as Hamza Yusuf, as an indigenous Muslim leader in the USA, Keleş comments that he and his group of people “have failed spectacularly in the face of what is happening in Turkey and other parts of the world and their inability to stand up to it”; and Tariq Ramadan, of whom he says that is “an intellectual, but not much more in terms of that.”

These wider observations and questions therefore also led Keleş on to a question that connects both Hizmet and Islam more broadly which he framed as follows: “If Hizmet is one of the most sophisticated, widespread, culturally enriched Islamic movements in the world, if it can’t do this, who is going to do it?” For all his critiques of Hizmet in recent practice, the in principle still positive evaluation of Hizmet’s creativity expressed here by Keleş was also echoed by Balcı who expressed his conviction that, “I believe our Hizmet people are the most open and well-attuned to open the gates of ijtihad and the Muslim world, the whole world needs this.” This is because, as he says, “Hizmet might not be extremely original for Christian or western civilisation, but it is so much so unique for the East, for ‘the Muslim world’: unique in the sense that it never happened in the fifteen hundred years of our history.”

Balcı says that “maybe at the Prophet’s time there was this level of openness,” although he quickly also acknowledged that perhaps this is “only because I don’t know his time very well.” However, he is clear that since Muhammad’s time “it never happened again.” As illustrative of this, Balcı recounted that, on the day before the interview, a friend and he had been speaking about the situation of ‘the Muslim world’ but that he had pressed upon his Muslim friend the position of “Don’t call this ‘the Muslim world’. We are in the age of Jahiliyyah, you know. We have turned back to this Age of Ignorance, pre-Muhammadan ignorance.” In relation to this, Balcı went on to explain:

My benchmark is not the west. I am not looking at the Western civilisation and saying – yeah, we are backward compared to the West – but I’m not happy with where the West is going. My benchmark is the Prophet, and we are backward compared to our own Prophet. We are not four hundred years back, we are more than fifteen hundred years back because I am looking at the farewell sermon of my Prophet, and we have failed him in every single advice he gave to us. Every single one of them, and this is his last will, you know. So ‘the Muslim world’ is a complete failure.

Balcı testifies that he learned much on these matters from a respected non-Hizmet Muslim in the UK who he acknowledges “is a bit critical of Hizmet these days” but from whom Balcı sought consultative advice when first came to the UK in 1993 with the task of establishing dialogue institutions all around Europe and was uncertain about how to proceed. Balcı recounted that this respected Muslim initially did not seem particularly interested in what he was talking about until, just before the conversation was drawing to a close, Balcı mentioned that Hizmet was being quite harshly criticised in Turkey for its dialogue activities, to which the response came, “What, Muslims are criticising you?!” to which Balcı answered “Yes…imams and so on.” And it was this which evoked the further response, “Write me, I am going to be your volunteer.” When Balcı expressed his surprise at this outcome and that he had not even been asked about the basis for the criticisms made in Turkey, the reply was:

Look at the ‘Muslim world’, and if someone is criticising what you are doing you might be doing something right, there is a chance you might be doing something right because ‘the Muslim world’ is altogether a failure and I thought you might be one of those Muslim organizations that are repeating what you have been doing for fourteen hundred years.

In many ways, this interaction was, as Balcı said, “a critical point where I have realised the value of being criticised. He said, we have to be criticised.” And, of course, one is only criticised if one does something to be criticised for!—in relation to which, Balcı says:

And that is a challenge for Hizmet nowadays, because some of us have entered into – you used the term paralysed – into a ‘survival mode’ because, even if they have the capacity or even the view to do something, they are keeping silent because this is an animal instinct: if you are hunted, you behave as if you are dead. But we have to stop it, you know.

Quite startlingly, in reflecting further on the implications of this challenge not only for the wider Hizmet and the circle of those around Fethullah Gülen, but also possibly for Gülen himself, Balcı says “maybe Hojaefendi may behave like that” and perhaps even more startlingly that, if that is so, “we shouldn’t listen to it” because the reality is that “you can stop breathing only for some time. You will die otherwise.” In another image, Balcı says:

Hizmet is a bicycle. We have to move. We have to do something. It might be a mistake. It has to be something very different. That’s precisely why I started the protests: it was something that we never did here, it was something different. And it also gave a sense of living, that we are alive. I think we have to continue with that. And it might be something different, you know, a Madrassah, you can say.

In relation to such an approach, Balcı thinks that what he calls the “beautiful expression” of İhsan Yılmaz’s concept of “ijtihad by conduct” (Yilmaz 2003). In relation to this, Balcı notes that:

There are some dogmas in the Muslim world that, when you pronounce them, it is a dead end, it doesn’t work. If you say I’m doing an ijtihad, it is a dead end. Many people will come out and declare you an infidel and so on. But if you do it without saying so, everybody does it! Hizmet has been doing it; we are doing it in our daily lives, as Ihsan says, ‘micro ijtihad’. So, this is a new phenomenon that never existed in the Muslim history. Action precedes the ruling. We do, we do it, and we do it. And in the end it becomes doable.

As an illustrative example of this in practice, Balcı recalled that a number of years ago some Deobandi leaders were brought to Turkey and they visited various Hizmet institutions including “our university where boys and girls are trained together.” Although he noted that this gender mixing was “against Deobandi theology,” after they had visited, “they started to do that. And they asked for advice, they said, let us build a school and why don’t you come and manage it and so on.” Balcı summarises the lessons that derive from examples as being that “largely, the revolution is an action, it is not a theory” and that “I think that Hizmet has taken this from Hojaefendi: action.” And on this, he referred to Gülen’s 1994 Zaman interview (“Reaching to the Horizon with Fethullah Gülen”) with Eyup Can in which “there he said that for us, action is the fundamental. Only after a brief thought” but of which Balcı also noted that “This is completely non-Western” because “Here you think about something for six months before you are doing anything.” But in terms of the ‘Muslim world’ context out of which Hizmet comes, Balçi says that, “we have passed through three hundred years of intensive waste of thought without any action,” and that especially against such a background Gülen’s impulse to action is truly revolutionary: “Hojaefendi brings action and says, you might have done wrong, but the fact you have done something is going to be the basis that next time you might do the right thing. If you do nothing, there is nothing to step on. So, that also gives a lot of courage to the Hizmet people, to do something.”

Balcı therefore locates something of Hizmet’s creativity as being rooted in Gülen’s encouragement to Hizmet in effect to be willing to make mistakes as distinct from doing nothing. Reflecting on this, Balcı says that they “did grave mistakes back in Turkey” but also, “this might be paradoxical,” since he says:

Maybe we made those mistakes also because of the same reasons, maybe because Hojaefendi made us so open, so courageous to act. Maybe if we had come together and said let us speak this for six months whether we should support the AKP party or not in the elections, and then do it, maybe we would then have done it differently. And it might have cost us a lot, but in the end we did it. So, I believe this readiness to act comes with its own price. We have paid a lot of price about that, so we have to gather the fruits also. So, I feel Hizmet is quite ready to deal with the challenges of the Western world. But of, course, there is this question of whether we will be able to, you know, leave our baggage. All of us are carrying Turkey on our shoulders.

Balcı does see real opportunities for the future but cautions that “We still need time. It’s like a divorce, you know: you cannot get married the next day you are divorced, you know. The pain is still there. The anger is still there. Also, the possibility of the reunion is still there.” In this last sentence, Balcı was touching on what for some in Hizmet is still a live potential of the “myth of return” since “Some of us still believe in that, you know, returning back to Turkey” and “That hope is still there,” before adding from his own perspective that “I don’t believe in that, but some of us do.”

Returning from these considerations of what has been and could in future still be in motion as produced out of the interaction between Gülen, Hizmet, and their respective historical and geographical contexts to attempt an overall evaluation of the role and place of Fethullah Gülen within this, Gülen’s close associate and interviewee Enes Ergene (see Acknowledgements) summarises that “Well, certainly, the space, the environment, the place he was born, the place like Erzurum, certainly does have an influence on him,” given that it “was a very, and still is, a very conservative part of Turkey…. where people are, you know, by definition, very conservative. So that has had a lot of influence on him, obviously. Yes, he was born into that environment, and some parts of his life reflect that conservative culture.” And, as Ergene put it in reflecting a common perception in Turkey about the context of Gülen’s origins, which is that “from that part of our Turkey, one really does not expect much of a person who grew up there to break through and have an understanding of a world where he is welcoming any other person.” Therefore:

We have to give credit to the way he was formed. Many people can become leaders, even in mystical terms or social terms, by changes in the dynamics of the environment, by economic and other factors that are involved, by the support that comes from society, by the push that comes from his family, one may become a leader.

But in addition to exploring the interplay between life and thought that is the more standard fare of a book that would aspire to be understood primarily as a biography, this book has also been concerned to identify and explore how a traditionally formed and rooted Islamic scholar, while remaining faithful to what he believes is revealed truth, has also found other ways of transcending the closed circle of sterile repetition in order to achieve what might be called a ‘constructive theology.’ And it is the argument of this book that this ‘constructive theology’ has been generated in and through what is the still ongoing hermeneutical circle of mutually interactive development between Gülen and Hizmet.

What is always affirmed by Gülen and those inspired by him is that he is not advocating a new and idiosyncratic form of Islam, but rather that what he sets forth finds its origins in what is believed to be the Islamic revelation in Qur’an and Sunnah; through its geographically, temporally, and existentially situated reception, translation, and onward communication through the life, teaching, and practice of Gülen; via the dynamic learning achieved and questions posed through the attempt to put those inspirational impulses into personal and corporate practice; and back again into a reflective engagement with the originally believed revelation in a way that brings about a richer illuminative and wider communicative possibility than would be possible without the operation of this hermeneutical circle, which this book argues is central to understanding Gülen’s life and teaching.

The multi-faceted complexity of this kind of hermeneutic interaction has been evidenced and demonstrated through a recent examination by Keleş (2021) of the “interplay within and between Hizmet’s doings and Gülen’s sayings over an expansive temporospatial axis against a range of issues” (p. 141) in an as yet unpublished but important doctoral thesis that focused particularly on Gülen and Hizmet’s handling of, and engagement with, human rights questions and issues around apostasy and of the role and place of women. As expressed by Keleş in theoretical terms, “this form of knowledge production ensues through two basic movements.” As described by Keleş these two “movements” are those of “internalization and externalization” with an organic linkage between the two being posited as occurring through “cognitive compromise and cognitive dissonance,” which Keleş then conceptualised in terms of a “symbiotic relationship between the internalized-tacit and the externalized-explicit form of knowledge” within this hermeneutic circle.

In more narrative terms, Haylamaz describes the relationship between Gülen and Hizmet in terms of what Gülen himself calls a “coming together around what makes sense,” the concretisation of the varied expressions of which has, as Haylamaz put, enabled “many people from different backgrounds to find a place in this Hizmet.” What, however, is not visible in Haylamaz’s formulation are the notes of “dissonance” and “compromise” through which, in different combinations according to the issue being examined, Keleş’ thesis argues are at the heart of the complex way in which new developments take place within Hizmet.

In summatively evaluating Fethullah Gülen’s person, practice, and teaching, as Ergene points out, according to the influence of external environments alone one would expect a person who is more constrained within his inherited culture, but “What you notice in Gülen’s life is that he was able to ‘break through’, and he did that with unbelievable measures.” However, Ergene is also of the view that the interaction between Gülen and his changing environments cannot provide a fully adequate explanation of the phenomenon that he became because:

However, there is so much in his life that you cannot relate to the environment he was born into. The way he behaves, the way he speaks, the things he did. I mean he was an imam, he became a preacher. What can you expect most from an imam other than telling the history of Islam, worshiping God, the Prophet’s companions? But he is not saying “mosque”; he says “school.” From late in mid-1970s onwards he starts speaking to his congregation and trying to have an influence on them for education, in a time when education was perceived as something out of religion by religious circles, you know: that’s very secular, that’s what the state wants, that’s not within the domain of religion. And you have this imam who constantly insists on education, schools. Because you would expect an imam to speak about almsgiving, about charity, about prayer, you know, and nothing else.

Therefore, Ergene also seeks to interpret this via theological reflection and Islamic perspective through invoking the example of Mecca:

There is a verse in the Qur’an, God chose Mecca as the place where he sent his last Messenger. Why? That’s a place in the middle of the desert. So there is certainly a relation with the divine message and the place and space God is choosing for his specific person that he assigns – in this case a Prophet, but it’s a very barren place, nothing living there, it’s a rocky place, a desert, so why? So, there is certainly a relationship with the place a person is born into and where he grew up and the inner aspirations he’s having inside.

In terms of this, Ergene commented of Gülen that “searching for the divine was perhaps always in his nature, or certainly very early in his age,” and that “when you look into the life of Hojaefendi, you know in his early ages in his youth that he didn’t really belong there, you know, he always had a similar aspiration to go beyond the boundaries of that village.”

Overall, this author and this book concurs with Ergene’s summary evaluative judgement that what is particularly remarkable about Fethullah Gülen’s life and teaching is indeed that “he was able to ‘break through’,” and furthermore that “he did that with unbelievable measures” as illustrated and explored in this book especially with regard to secular-political taboos, national-cultural taboos, and religious boundary taboos. In addition, given this book’s emphasis that, fundamentally speaking Gülen and Hizmet cannot be properly understood without taking into account their fundamentally religious self-understanding, in concert with Ergene it is also important at the least to leave open explanatory space for the possibility of the unexpected being at work in ways that cannot be completely accounted for in humanly and historically reductionist terms.

At the same time, with regard to what it is possible to analyse with the tools of scientific academic disciplines, it is the argument of this book that Ergene’s evaluation of the remarkable thing about Gülen being that he has been able to ‘break through,’ and “he did that with unbelievable measures,” is that this was possible not only because of the interaction between Gülen’s person, practice, teaching, and life contexts—even if one were to add to these that religious dimension referred to above. Rather, the extent that to which this ‘breaking through’ was able to happen in the past was also because of the contribution made to Gülen’s life, practice, thinking, and teaching of the varied and now also globalised expressions of Hizmet that are themselves also increasingly ‘breaking through’ the cultural and historical constraints of Hizmet’s Turkish origins, a concrete and specific case study of which can be found in this book’s companion volume on Hizmet in Europe (Weller 2022).

The extent to which such ‘breaking through’ might be able to continue to happen in future remains an open question. This is especially the case given the traumatic impact of the events of July 2016 and their aftermath on both Hizmet and Fethullah Gülen himself in terms of the ambiguity and unpredictability of the outcomes arising from woundedness that has impacted both. In the light of this, it is uncertain how far their shared condition of woundedness might impair the possibility of renewal through the application of the degree of “dissonance” in terms of historical and contemporary self-criticism that might be necessary for facilitating a full renewal of Hizmet in truly global terms; and/or how far that shared woundedness might be a basis on which “compromise” can be found, out of which a new shared commitment to ecumenicalijtihad in action might in turn emerge for addressing the pressing global and human issues of our time.

Evaluated according to sociological or anthropological criteria alone, the impact of the trauma has been severe and, if assessed purely in temporal terms, the prospects at present remain uncertain. But, once again, as this book has continually suggested, and now emphasises again in closing: in order properly to understand either Hizmet or Fethullah Gülen, it is necessary to apply to an understanding of them, what is also at the core of their understanding of themselves. And that is the need to keep also in view what is the, at least in principle, unboundedness of a religious vision which, because of its rooting in a conviction about the infinite creativity of the divine, can offer to those who allow themselves to be shaped by it, a horizon of creativity that can generate the courage and vision to risk the development of new itjihads in action.

This book has argued that, in the final analysis, the creative inheritance of Gülen will not be found so much in the substantive body of his 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, but rather is that of a dynamic methodological call to continuously renewed and contextualised engagement with religious and spiritual sources centred on love and the human. If this argument is correct, then Gülen’s and Hizmet’s interactive contribution to the emergence of new ecumenicalitjihads in action which, importantly, can only be undertaken in collaboration with others beyond Hizmet, could yet offer something important and still distinctive, to addressing the shared global human problems of our time, as a by-product of which further internal renewal might also be found.