Islam, ambiguity, and social change in Turkey: The organizational practices of the Fethullah Gulen movement

Turkey's "Gülen Movement” (GM) is the country's largest and most influential Islamic identity community. Loyalists to the retired preacher and writer M. Fethullah Gülen, control one of Turkey’s largest media conglomerates, a number of the country’s most globally linked companies, and over 700 privately owned or privately managed schools throughout the world.  Since 1998, Gülen has lived in self-imposed exile in the US, where GM loyalists are now very active in intercultural outreach, commerce, political lobbying, and charter school education. The GM’s growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey is highly significant in regard to Turkey’s emergence as a regional power in a transforming Middle East. This paper assesses the GM's transnational impact by focusing specifically on its organizational strategies as a “flexible” network of people and institutions. Comprised by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal patterns of authority and belonging, the GM has rationalized a system of “applied Sufism” that is anchored upon a foundation of patrimonial respect, duty, and service. Gülen’s employment of Sufi categories, however, does not indicate that either he or his followers are representative of Islamic mysticism.  Quite the contrary, the GM's application of Sufi metaphors serves a variety of non-spiritual, non-mystical purposes, and thus signifies the ways in which the teachings of a charismatic Islamic community leader have become rationalized to meet the demands of a competitive market economy.  Based on fourteen months of fieldwork conducted in Turkey and in the US, this paper argues that the GM’s reliance upon social, financial, service, and ideational networks constitutes connectivity in a complicated system of partial, fragmentary, ambiguous relationships.  Relying upon maximum efficiency through the “flexible production” of these networks, the GM cultivates collective identity through extensive social ties, shared practice, and communal loyalty on the one hand; and through market competition on the other.