Doğu Ergil The Gülen Movement provides educational opportunities to youth, who otherwise could not attend higher educational institutions. What inspires them to eventually volunteer as educators themselves throughout the world? Since they were raised within the movement and since they were extended hands during their education by the movement, many youth internalized Gülen’s teachings regarding [...]
Helen Rose Ebaugh Establishing the First Educational Projects Mr. Gülen, together with administrators of the Kestanepazari institution and with the support of local businessmen organized summer camps for middle and high school students, as well as university students. These camps taught secular education courses in areas such as history and biology but also provided religious [...]
Below is an interview by Nuriye Akman with sociologist Elisabeth Ozdalga about Fethullah Gulen and religion/secularism issues in Turkey. Akman interviewed Ozdalga in June 2003. Akman: Why are you more interested in sociology of religion? Ozdalga*: During the first half of the 1970s, there were important developments for the left in Turkey, and people had [...]
Yetkin Yildirim and Suphan Kirmizialtin* Gülen differentiates between teachers, who simply pass on information and training, and educators (Gülen 1996a, 36). Educators communicate information, but also help students to build their characters and learn self-discipline and a sense of direction, as well as tolerance (Michel 2003, 75). Gülen describes the ineffectiveness of those teachers who [...]
Yetkin Yildirim and Suphan Kirmizialtin* Turkey is a crucible in which Eastern and Western civilizations, secular ideas, and Islamic tradition merge. Using ideas born in the Turkish context, Fethullah Gülen and his followers have developed and put into practice an educational system that combines the strengths of both European and Islamic cultures, cultivating students of [...]
Fabio Vicini* The members of the movement I met and frequented in Istanbul during my brief fieldwork in summer/autumn 2005, are all teachers in a school linked to the movement. There they prepared high school graduates to the entrance exam to Turkish state university. All of them live in a dormitory not very far from [...]
Fabio Vicini* When Gülen criticizes traditional forms of Islamic education for not having been able to adapt to modern conditions, he expresses something more than a simple dissatisfaction with old methods of teaching. Instead he blames other Islamic scholars because they had not understood that the decline of Islam was not solely due to its [...]
Members of the Hizmet community hope to change society through a new type of education that draws from and integrates disparate strands of previous pedagogic systems. Gülen’s starting point was his recognition of the need for a new kind of school, a system of education that would draw what was best from the existing alternatives [...]
Education according to Gulen, is a key tool in the development of society. For Gülen, education is an all-encompassing lifelong process. As an educationalist, Gülen does not confine his understanding of education to one particular facet of life. A proper education includes religion. “If [a thing] is a fundamental principle of religion, then [he believes] [...]
Questions regarding the financing of numerous and expensive projects of the Gülen movement are periodically raised by both critics of the movement and newcomers to the movement who are invited to Gülen related events. Because of the large amounts of money involved in these projects, on occasion people have raised the possibility of collusion between [...]
From Hizmet News