A Visit With Turkey’s Controversial Religious Movement
It is Monday evening in Diyarbakir, a city in Turkey’s southeast, and a weekly meeting of several local members of the so-called Gulen movement has begun with a book reading. One of the eight men present — this is an all-boys affair — picks up a paperback by Fethullah Gulen, the charismatic Islamic preacher after whom the movement is named, and reads out a few paragraphs. The subject is one of the central tenets of Gulen’s philosophy: hizmet, service to others. Once the reading ends, a few of the other members — smiling beneath cropped mustaches — begin to extemporize on the difficulties and rewards of teaching and the challenges of shaping young minds.
Many Turks view the Gulen Movement with suspicion. The group has drawn comparisons among the conspiracy-minded to the freemasons; it has been accused of being a shadow government and more than once of trying to engineer an Islamist takeover of Turkey; and in recent years, some of its opponents have found themselves snared in legal proceedings. There’s little reason to expect such issues to come up during an informal gathering of local Gulenists in a place like Diyarbakir. The movement not only forswears any role in politics, but is also said to discourage discussion of political issues among its followers. (A student who stayed at one of the movement’s dormitories in Istanbul told me that he, an international relations major, was asked not to read or discuss books on politics in his room.) Still, the next item on the Diyarbakir meeting’s agenda comes as something of a surprise.
It involves the day before, Sunday May 13: “What did you do for Mother’s Day?”
The question comes from Bilgi Ozdemir, a public school teacher who is presiding over the gathering. A tour de table follows. One of the men reports that he and a group of friends cooked dinner for a group of women. All the time they are the ones cooking, he says, but on Mother’s Day “we told them to sit still and let us prepare the food.” Another man took a group of moms to a picnic outside Diyarbakir. Yet another organized a sightseeing tour of the city, including visits to a mosque and a reading hall — the local equivalent of a Boys and Girls Club — run by fellow Gulen supporters.