During the 1971 military junta when Fethullah Giilen
was an employee for the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), he spent
seven months in prison for allegations that he was the leader of a secret religious
community. He was released but was temporarily barred from public speaking. In the
1980 military coup, Gulen was again detained and questioned before being released.
In 1999, Giilen faced more serious charges that he was the leader of a clandestine
organization that directly threatened the integrity of the Turkish state. The primary
evidence in the case was a video excerpt leaked to the press, which Fethullah Gulen
instructed his community as follows:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your
existence, until you reach all the power centers... You must wait until such
time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your
side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey... Until that time,
any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the
full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work
to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings
and thoughts to you all - in confidence... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity
to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty
juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here. "n
When this aired on Turkish television in the spring of 1999, Fethullah Giilen had
already moved to the United States.
Who was Fethullah Gulen and what explained the contradictory presentation
of his followers and their impact? I used the opportunity presented by the call for
papers to draft an exploratory essay comparing my understanding of the Giilen
Movement (GM) to my understanding of global Islamic activism in general.1
However rudimentary, my hope was that by submitting a paper I might earn an
opportunity to meet with scholars conducting research on Muslim politics in Turkey,
and on the GM in particular. Three weeks after submitting my paper, I received a
phone call from a man who identified himself as Mehmet. Mehmet was an organizer
at Houston's Raindrop Foundation. He explained that while my paper was a late
submission, it was well received, and that while the conference program was already
fixed, the organizers wanted to fly me to Houston to participate in the conference as a
guest. Knowing that all conference participants had their expenses paid, I found this
invitation to be both gracious and curious. Why would I, a graduate student with only
second-hand knowledge of this movement, be invited to participate alongside
scholars who, I assumed, had spent months or years studying the movement as an
object of academic research?
Upon arriving in Houston, a Turkish man named Murat met me at the airport.
Murat spoke no English, but his card indicated that he was an "outreach coordinator"
at The Raindrop Foundation. We carried on a rudimentary conversation in Turkish. I
learned that he was from Istanbul and that he was in the US studying mathematics at
the University of Houston. When we arrived at the conference hotel, the welcoming
reception was about to start. At first I thought it was typical of a conference dinner
reception, fifteen or so tables with eight to ten seats at each, a large buffet, and a
small podium at the front of the room. I entered and was immediately greeted by
Mehmet, the man who initially invited me to the conference over the phone. We
shook hands and he introduced me to several other gentlemen in the room.
READ Dr. Joshua Hendricks dissertation here http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=1851762261&Fmt=14&VType=PQD&VInst=PROD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1282780320&clientId=79356
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