Date posted: August 30, 2014
Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish scholar, thinker, social entrepreneur and opinion leader known as founder of Gulen Movement. He stances for democracy, interfaith dialogue, peaceful coexistence, and secular education where universal values are embodied by altruistic teachers.
Tags: Fethullah Gulen | Peacebuilding |

since 2010 the movement and Fethullah Gülen himself have been critical of the authoritarian tendencies in Turkey. It was noticeable during the Gezi Park protests in 2013. The movement began to belong to the increasingly long list of state enemies, according to Erdoğan and the AKP politicians. Different kinds of actions have been directed since then against a so called “parallel state.”

In addition to his admirers, Gülen has enemies who have obliged him to live in the United States far away from his beloved country since 1999. It is clear that the animosity towards Gülen stems from Kemalist hard-line secularism, which sees in any manifestation of Islam the worst enemy of modernization and wants to exclude religion from all spheres of society.

Speaking at a conference titled “The Hizmet Movement and Peacebuilding” in Washington, D.C., at the weekend, prominent professors praised peace initiatives inspired by Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen as a great contribution to world peace. Numerous academics and scientists from more than 20 countries delivered speeches on various topics covering the impact of the Hizmet movement on society and its contributions to it as a whole.

The extracts in this booklet have been selected according to the current volume’s theme from among Gülen’s books already published in Turkish. Some of them have been translated into English before but most of the extracts have been translated into English and arranged into different chapters in the present volume. Some of the texts are revised and altered by Fethullah Gülen himself.

The statement in the headline belongs to Bülent Arınç, deputy prime minister and spokesperson for the Turkish government. Moreover, he is responsible for the government’s media policy. For Western readers, I should clarify that he was not joking when he said, “A journalist might win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, but he should face the consequence of five years in prison.”

The U.S. has stated that the country does not consider the movement of U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen a terror organization, a position which stands in contrast with the latest decision taken during a Turkish National Security Council (MGK) meeting on the movement.
