
Ankara-based journalist Mesut Çevikalp has written a book about the little-known stories of Turkish schools opened by Turkish entrepreneurs in various parts of the world, including the moving and hardship-laden stories of education volunteers working at these schools, most of whom left a better life in Turkey with the hope of promoting universal values of peace, dialogue and peaceful coexistence with others.

Hizmet Movement is, in my view, an Islamically-inspired, Islamically-grounded movement, or Islamically-rooted movement, founded on the universal and fundamental principle of peace and—the essential values of Islam—peace, mercy and compassion, as normative, moral objectives and which seeks to translate these principles into—through the dynamic of ta’aruf, the dynamic of coming to know one another, especially coming to know the other—into a reality, into a living sociological and anthropological reality.

Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen has strongly condemned an attack on a French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and a series of shootings in Paris suburbs last week that left 17 dead, extending condolences to the families of the victims.

As an educator I may be a bit biased, but I think the focus on education that we see in Hizmet, that we see in Gulen and his teachings and his being, that focus on education which is critical to the work of Hizmet is itself the most critical work that can be done in this age.

Seval Yıldırım, a professor of law at Whittier Law School, said in a statement to Today’s Zaman on Wednesday that for the US to extradite Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen without a formal case against him would be an infringement of US law.

Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen has strongly criticized abusive language and remarks within pro-government circles insulting members of the Hizmet movement, saying this kind of behavior is hypocritical and is being employed to cover up their own sins.

The leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, rightly called it “a coup against democracy” when Zaman Editor-in-Chief Ekrem Dumanlı and STV network executive Hidayet Karaca, together with a number of screenwriters and television producers, were detained on Dec. 14 on the incredible charges of founding or belonging to “an armed terrorist organization aiming to seize the sovereignty of the state.”

It is a well-known fact that then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had sent Bülent Arınç to Mr. Fethullah Gülen to give him the message, “We are ready to do anything you want us to do,” and that he had called on Mr. Gülen to return to the country to “put an end to homesickness” in the witness of tens of thousands of spectators in a stadium.