A speech by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who lives in Pennsylvania in self-imposed exile, was broadcast live on YouTube and a number of stations for the first time on Sunday, after Turkey’s state-controlled Internet watchdog blocked access to herkul.org, a website that previously was used to broadcast his speeches.
Nurullah Albayrak, the lawyer of prominent Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, has criticized the blocking of herkul.org, a website that regularly broadcasts speeches by Gülen, saying views that are different from the state ideology are considered a crime in Turkey today.
Renewing Islam by Service offers a theological account of the contemporary Turkish faith-based service movement started by Fethullah Gülen, and placed against the backdrop of changes in modern Turkish society. The life and works of Gülen are analyzed against the background of developments in Turkish society, and of spiritual Islamic tendencies in the transition from the Ottoman empire to the secular republic.
“Love is a Verb” is a film examining a social movement of Sufi-inspired Muslims that began in Turkey in the 1960s and now reaches across the globe. The group is called Hizmet – the Turkish word for service – or The Gulen Movement, after its inspiration, leader and beloved teacher Fethullah Gulen – a man Time Magazine named as one of the most influential leaders in the world in 2013.
Tosca Bruno-Van Vijfeijken, Director of Transnational NGO Initiative at Maxwell School of Syracuse University inteviewd Dr. Alp Aslandogan, President of the Alliance for Shared Values. This interview took place before Dr. Aslandogan’s lecture at Maxwell School on Hizmet Movement on September 22, 2015.
Attorneys for a reclusive Muslim cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania asked a federal judge late Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit that claims he orchestrated human rights abuses in his native Turkey, denouncing it as “pure political theater” by the Turkish government.
The majority of Muslims openly and loudly reject violent extremism regardless of the religious or ethnic identity of the perpetrator, but that is not what the Western media focuses on. If we closely look into a broad poll, we will see hundreds of Muslim leaders denouncing terrorism, and one of these Muslim voices that we don’t listen to is Fethullah Gülen.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan acknowledged during a speech on Tuesday that he has personally been pursuing a “fight” against the so-called “parallel structure,” adding that his administration is ready to cooperate with district governors to “clear” its members from state bureaucracy.
At a time when the faith-based Gülen movement, also known as the Hizmetmovement, is under heavy government pressure in Turkey, Lord Maclennan of Rogart, academics and scholars have praised the movement at a panel at the House of Lords for its efforts against the spread of radical Islamism and violence across the world.
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took office in 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the party’s commitment to democratization was promising. As many political scientists agreed, the first years of AKP rule were a success story, and that was why, with its secular multi-party democracy and its Muslim character, Turkey had emerged as a role model for the Muslim world.
Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen teaches real Islam to the world while bravely resisting the destruction of the religion by radical and barbaric Muslims, a world-renowned professor at Egypt’s al-Azhar University said during an interview on Wednesday.
Main opposition Republican People’s Democratic Party (CHP) İstanbul deputy Barış Yarkadaş has said the release of suspects in the historic Ergenekon trial and the government-initiated operations against the Hizmet movement were part of an agreement between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish military.