A MODERN OTTOMAN THE TURKISH CLERIC FETHULLA
Ehsan Masood
Prospect Magazine
June 25 2008
UK
The Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, winner of our intellectuals
poll, is the modern face of the Sufi Ottoman tradition. At home with
globalisation and PR, and fascinated by science, he also influences
Turkish politics through links to the ruling AK party
Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time
enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover,
can you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?
Fethullah Gulen, a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and
theoretician, has dedicated much of his life to resolving these
questions. From his sick bed in exile just outside Philadelphia,
he leads a global movement inspired by Sufi ideas. He promotes
an open brand of Islamic thought and, like the Iran-born Islamic
philosophers Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush, he is
preoccupied with modern science (he publishes an English-language
science magazine called the Fountain). But Gulen, unlike these
western-trained Iranians, has spent most of his life within the
religious and political institutions of Turkey, a Muslim country,
albeit a secular one since the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s
republic after the first world war.
Unusually for a pious intellectual, he and his movement are at home
with technology, markets and multinational business, and especially
with modern communications and public relations–which, like a modern
televangelist, he uses to attract converts. Like a western celebrity,
he carefully manages his public exposure–mostly by restricting
interviews to those he can trust.
Many of his converts come from Turkey’s aspirational middle class. As
religious freedom comes, falteringly, to Turkey, Gulen reassures his
followers that they can combine the statist-nationalist beliefs of
Ataturk’s republic with a traditional but flexible Islamic faith. He
also reconnects the provincial middle class with the Ottoman traditions
that had been caricatured as theocratic by Ataturk and his "Kemalist"
heirs. Oliver Leaman, a leading scholar of Islamic philosophy, says
that Gulen’s ideas are a product of Turkish history, especially the
end of the Ottoman empire and the birth of the republic. He calls
Gulen’s approach "Islam-lite."
Millions of people inside and outside Turkey have been inspired
by Gulen’s more than 60 books and the tapes and videos of his
talks. Why? A combination of charisma, good organisation and an
attractive message. What Gulen says is that you can be at home in the
modern world while also embracing traditional values like faith in
God and community responsibility–a message which resonates strongly
in Turkey.
Gulen (pictured, right) insists that he is not a Sufi leader, but his
thinking is certainly influenced by Sufi ideas: he says, for example,
that a reader who wants to truly understand the Koran needs to invest
his heart as well as his intellect. Another belief he shares with
Sufism is the idea that God, humanity and the natural world are
all linked, and might even be part of a single entity, a sort of
cosmic trinity. This idea has practical consequences. For example,
it suggests that a believer will love and respect humanity and the
natural world as they would God. It also means that no one should
be seen as an outsider. Hence Gulen’s insistence on friendship among
people of all faiths and none.
Hakan Yavuz, co-editor of Turkish Islam and the Secular State: the
Gulen Movement (Syracuse), describes the Gulen movement as comprising
a small inner cabinet along with a network of perhaps 5m like-minded
volunteers and sympathisers, rather than an organisation with a
hierarchy or formal membership. Others say it is more like a cult,
with no deviation from Gulen’s word allowed. The network’s largesse has
meant that the movement now boasts newspapers and magazines, television
and radio stations, private hospitals and, by some estimates, more
than 500 fee-paying elite schools in dozens of countries. These schools
are mostly in Turkey and the Turkic-speaking ex-Soviet republics like
Azerbaijan, but a few can also be found in Africa, China and the US.
The Gulen movement sponsors international conferences to debate
his ideas. (The most recent one in Britain was held at the House
of Lords.) These ideas cover three main areas: Gulen’s attempts to
marry science and religion; his large body of work on interpreting
Islam for the modern age; and his role in Turkish politics through
his influence on the governing Justice and Development (AK) party.
***
Fethullah Gulen was born in 1941 in a village near Erzurum in eastern
Anatolia, near the border with Iran and Armenia. After a period of
Islamic education, in 1959 he began work for the religious ministry as
an imam–imams in Turkey are public servants–a post he held until 1981
when, shortly after a military coup, he struck out on his own. The life
of a government imam will not have suited someone with his creativity
and charisma–those who have heard his sermons say he frequently
reduces audiences to tears–and Gulen did well to last over 20 years.
While still an imam, Gulen joined the Light movement, a Sufi-inspired
network for followers of the Turkish thinker Said Nursi, who died
in 1960. Gulen later broke away, but continued to be influenced by
Nursi’s ideas on accommodating Islam to modernity and finding harmony
between scientific reason and religious revelation.
Science and technology are important to Gulen for two reasons. First,
he attributes the underdevelopment of many Muslim nations to a
neglect of modern knowledge. For Gulen, a failure to study science is
a dereliction of Islamic duty, as learning is repeatedly emphasised
in the Koran. More controversially, he says there can be no conflict
between reason and revelation, and that science should be used as a
tool to understand the miracle of the Koran.
Gulen does not follow those Muslims who believe the Koran contains
all that is necessary for scientific understanding. He knows that
scientific discoveries are mostly provisional and that science is
an incremental business. But he also believes that as researchers
refine their understanding of physics or biology, they get closer
to revealed Koranic truths, such as the existence of a creator. His
approach has a parallel in the west in the Templeton Foundation, with
its generous grants and prizes to scientists sympathetic to religion.
***
Sufism is integral to Ottoman as well as wider Islamic history, and
in spite of attempts at repression, it remains popular and powerful in
many Muslim countries. In its most traditional sense, it is marked by a
master-disciple relationship in which a Sufi master is linked through a
chain of living and dead Sufi masters to Muhammad himself. These days,
however, Sufi leaders are more mentors than svengalis, particularly
in the west.
Two of Turkey’s leading Sufi networks are the Mevlevis and the
Naqshbandis. The Mevlevis were founded by the 13th-century Persian
poet Rumi, and they include among their network the famous whirling
dervishes. The Naqshbandis, founded in 1389 in central Asia, retain
Sufism’s hierarchical structure but adhere to a more orthodox brand
of Islam. The Naqshbandis were the leading Sufi order in the Ottoman
empire’s last years. Many in the ruling AK party are members of
Naqshbandi lodges. Some, however, have a higher regard for Gulen than
for their Naqshbandi co-religionists.
Gulen has not involved himself directly in Turkish politics, and has
always set his face against political Islam. Religion for him is about
private piety, not political ideology. He was a stern and public critic
of Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Welfare party–the forerunner
to AK–who in the late 1990s briefly led a coalition government with
the conservative True Path party. Gulen even backed the army’s "soft
coup" of 28th February 1997, which forced Erbakan to resign.
After the tense period of the 1980s and 1990s, Gulen and the AK
leaders have now become closer, although they have different social
bases: AK’s base is the urban poor, Gulen’s the provincial middle
class. Encouraged by Gulen, the AK party has softened its Koranic
literalism, embraced the idea of human rights and given up dreams
of introducing sharia or re-establishing the Ottoman caliphate. Its
abandonment of Islamism has in turn emboldened Gulen to become more
critical of the Turkish military. Gulen’s media outlets, above all
the popular newspaper Zaman, give their backing to the AK government.
***
And the government needs all the backing it can get. Despite winning
a landslide election victory last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the
prime minister, President Abdullah Gul and many AK parliamentarians
are fighting for their political lives in a battle with the Kemalists
over, among other things, the wearing of headscarves in universities.
About 32 per cent of Turkish boys and 43 per cent of girls leave
education after primary school. Polls indicate that five in ten
women cover their hair, and the government argues that girls are put
off staying on in education by hijab bans. In February, parliament
voted by a large majority to amend the constitution and repeal the
headscarf ban in universities, which had been in place since 1989. Yet
on 5th June, this decision was annulled by Turkey’s constitutional
court. (Turkey has a grand tradition of legislating for headwear:
the turban was outlawed in 1829 and the fez introduced, only to be
banned in turn by Ataturk in 1925).
Separate, but related, is the recent decision by the constitutional
court to hear an application from the chief prosecutor to have
AK shut down on the grounds that party members have violated the
constitutional principles of secularism. The case could last eight
months, during which time what little progress has been made on EU
accession will effectively grind to a halt.
The banning of political parties is not new in Turkey–26 have been
dissolved since 1960. AK was created from the embers of the Virtue
party (banned in 2001), which itself was formed by former members
of the Welfare party (banned 1998). Anticipating such a move for the
third time, the chief prosecutor has asked for any AK members found
guilty to be banned from politics for five years. If that happens,
Turkey is headed for years of political unrest.
Many Kemalists see the repeal of the headscarf ban as just the
first step towards an Iranian-style revolution. "Khomeini is alive
and well in Ankara and being supported by the EU," a senior member
of the nationalist Republican People’s party told me. (And Michael
Rubin, a leading American neoconservative, recently predicted that
as political tensions in the country become unbearable, Gulen would
make a triumphant return to Turkey, Khomeini-style, and trigger an
Islamic coup.)
Yet Gulen himself is in favour of compromise on the headscarf ban. And
outside the Ankara political village, the issue is not such a big
deal. One poll found that in 2006, proportionately fewer women were
wearing headscarves than in 1999. And just 3.7 per cent of respondents
said it was one of Turkey’s most pressing issues.
***
The AK party is a sophisticated organisation surrounded by a cluster of
think tanks and thinkers–men such as Ibrahim Kalin, a philosopher of
science who heads the SETA think tank, and Ahmet Davutoglu, a former
international relations professor, now Erdogan’s chief foreign policy
strategist.
AK leaders, and Gulen too, have been pushing hard for EU membership
for Turkey, partly to entrench religious freedom. (The Kemalists
want membership for the opposite reason–to put a secular brake on
the religious parties.) But now that Turkey’s prospects of accession
are receding, some AK thinkers are downplaying the economic benefits
of membership, and Davutoglu talks about a global, rather than just
a European, role for Turkey.
Even in the event of EU-enthusiasm returning in Turkey, there remain
many objections in Brussels to Turkey’s political norms. One of
them, of course, is the continuing involvement of the military in
politics. There is also the issue of minority rights, only now being
tackled. The republic has hitherto functioned on the basis that all
Turks are Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims. All other expressions of
faith, language and culture have been suppressed. Even AK, in favour
of more religious freedom, has been slow to promote the rights of
Turkey’s Kurdish and Alevi minorities.
Gulen has always publicly supported the establishment and its organs
of state, including the National Security Council. He has had the
backing of both former centre-right president Suleyman Demirel and
Bulent Ecevit, hero of the Turkish left in the 1970s. However, many
Kemalists do not trust him, and see his support for the AK government
as vindication of their stance that he is a Trojan horse for political
Islam. Gulen has been indicted on anti-secularism charges, but was
acquitted in 2006.
For the past several years, he has lived in self-exile in the US,
where he has not been in good health. Rumours persist that he is
ready to return to Turkey, though in the current climate, with talk
of political bans in the air, this seems unlikely. Meanwhile, he has
used his time abroad to build his overseas support and his network
of schools–the latest has just opened in Pakistan.
Traditional Sufi leaders anoint a successor before they die. Gulen
has not done so. Perhaps there is no need, as his ideas will live
on through his books, DVDs, MP3 recordings and websites in 21
languages. Whether or not he returns to the country of his birth,
Gulen’s legacy as a thoroughly modern Sufi is secure.