Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 25, No.

2, August 2005

Book Reviews

Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement HAKAN YAVUZ AND JOHN ESPOSITO (eds), 2003 Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press 280 xxxiii pp., $24.95, ISBN: 0-815-63040-9 In recent years, particularly since the September 11 attacks on the US, scholars have once again turned their attention to Islam and Islamic movements. Today, academic and popular books about Islam and Islamic movements are available on the bestseller shelves of almost each and every bookstore. Despite this increasing number of publications on Islamic movements and political Islam, these studies have been limited in their focus on either political Islamist groups of the Arab World, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, or on more militant organizations in the Middle East. Studies that examine alternative movements in the Islamic world have remained exceptional. Among these understudied alternative religious movements, Fethullah Gulen and his Nur movement is one of the most signicant in terms of its organized structure and its activities around the world. Centered primarily in Turkey, the Gulen movement has reached other parts of the world through its schools and charities with its message of tolerance and interfaith dialogue. Today, it has become one of the most important social movements in the Islamic world. As early as the 1980s, Fethullah Gulen and his community caused intense debate among intellectuals and academics in Turkey. The nature of the movement, its goals, its national and transnational activities, and Fethullah Gulens attitude towards the regime in Turkey and Ataturk have been debated intensely among the Turkish literate and political elites. Yet most of these debates remained limited to the political underpinnings of the movement and usually resulted with secular vs. anti-secular discussions and mutual accusations among different groups. In addition, studies and publications about the community have been written by journalists who were against Gulen for political reasons or from the supporters of the Gulen movement from among his inner circle. Most of these studies were descriptive and had no explanatory dimension and usually lacked scientic and analytic understanding. In this sense, Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement lls an important gap in the literature on Islamic movements and provides a useful wealth of information about one of the most understudied and underutilized social movements. It is also the rst scholarly book published in English about the Fethullah Gulen movement. The book is edited by two very prominent scholars working on Islamic movements. John Esposito of Georgetown University is known for his studies on Islamic movements, and is also the author of dozens of books and articles on Islam in general and political Islam in particular, which includes one of the best introductory books on Islam called Islam: The Straight Path and Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality. Hakan Yavuz of the University of Utah is also known for his studies on Turkey and the Middle East, and he is also a leading expert on Islamic movements in Turkey. He is the author of Islamic Political Identity in Turkey published by Oxford University Press. A good number of articles were written by the leading experts in the eld, including John Voll, Elizabeth Ozdalga
ISSN 1360-2004 print=ISSN 1469-9591 online=05=020287-5 # 2005 Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs DOI: 10.1080=13602000500350777

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and Yasin Aktay and published in the book with a very informative introduction for uninformed readers. There are roughly three different but related issues raised by different authors. First, there are articles related to the educational dimension of the communitys activities. Other articles are more concentrated on the analysis of the personality of Fethullah Gulen. Finally, there are articles that are focused on the political attitudes of the community. In his historical analysis of the movement, Yavuz provides an informative historical sketch of the formation and evolution of the Nur movement. Yavuz discusses the roots of the movement dating back to Said Nursi. According to him, Nursis teachings have three interrelated goals: to raise Muslim consciousness; to refute the dominant intellectual discourses of materialism and positivism and to recover collective memory by revising the shared grammar of society, Islam (p. 5). The reading circles, which are formed by the people who want to understand and internalize the books of Nursi, helped the formation of the new mechanism of socialibility and of intellectual exchange for some of the alienated segments of the society and served as a stepping stone for the construction of a new counter public. As most of the other Islamic leaders of the period, Nursi encountered several problems during his lifetime with state authorities and was even imprisoned for some time. As we learn from Yavuzs analysis, Nursis life presents a microcosm for the relations between Islam and secularism in Turkey. His legacy, despite continuous state persecution, shows the ability of his movement to persist in every regime. After the death of Nursi and the split among the Nur community, Fethullah Gulen started to take the upper hand and transformed the community. According to Yavuz, Gulen was different from Nursi. His community used the exible ideas of Nursi to promote a nationalist, global and free market orientation. As a movement, Gulens faith inspired an educational movement, which was different from Nursis exclusively faith movement. Yavuz described Gulen as an inspirational leader of a transnational education movement, whereas he depicted Nursi as the formative giant of intellectual discourse (p. 19). In fact, the most important and visible aspect of the Fethullah Gulen community has been its educational activities, particularly its activities of establishing Turkish schools around the world. After Nursi, Fethullah Gulen transformed the Nur community by means of lighthouses and stressed the ethics of education, and worked for transforming Muslims and their environment. The articles of Bekim Agai, Thomas Michel, and Elizabeth Ozdalga deal particularly with the transnational education movement of Fethullah Gulen, which today has spread out to different parts of the world. Agai provides a systemic analysis of the movement and emphasizes the production of educational Islamism, which is opposed to political Islamism. Michels article analyses Fethullah Gulen as a main teacher in the community and discusses him as a role-model for the other members of the community. Finally, Ozdalga examines the teachers of the Fethullah Gulen movement by means of in-depth interviews with three female teachers in different schools that belong to the Gulen community. In fact, this rst part reveals how the Gulen communitys highly organized network of members from different occupations produced a kind of division of labour and provides continuous adherence and support to the schools and foundations of the community. The community manages the working of these endeavours by means of an executive procedure, which resembles transnational corporations. The most apparent result of these endeavours is the establishment of schools in different parts of the world.

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From the relevant articles, we can gure out the two fundamental pillars of these schools; the presence of a middle and upper-middle class which supports the schools nancially with their donations, and the existence of human capital in the community which maintains the presence of these schools by working in the schools for low wages with a missionary ideal. The articles in the second part of the book help the readers to understand the leader of the movement as a person. Among these articles, Kuru emphasizes Gulens search for an inclusive middle way between fundamental features of modernity and Muslim tradition, whereas Saritoprak looks into Gulens attitude towards Susm and his spirituality. Yasin Aktay contributes to the book with an article about the inuence of the idea of diaspora and stability on Gulens worldview. According to Aktay, the Islamic literary men employed the diasporic conditions as a metaphor to represent Turkish Islamic with the widespread usage of phrases such as stranger in ones own home and pariah in ones own country. Aktay shows the way Gulen inherited and shared such a metaphor and how it determined the formation of his body of knowledge (p. 154) This alienation from the new society and disengagement from the reform movement did not, however, hamper his loyalty to the state. This is apparent in another important aspect of Gulens personality which is very much related to the concern for security, survival and stability and the instrumentality of the state for these concerns. Both Yavuz and Aktay, emphasized the inuence of Fethullah Gulens hometown, Erzurum, and dadas culture of this city on his personality and worldview. This culture associates statism with conservatism and is usually characterized by the culture of frontier regions which stresses security over other concerns. According to Yavuz and Aktay, Gulens employment in Edirne, another frontier region, also played a crucial role in developing his deep convictions and shaped Gulens political stand. This security oriented outlook of Gulen is decisive in order to understand the articles dealing with the political and legal attitudes of the community towards the international environment, written by Hasan Kosebalaban, Ihsan Yilmaz and Berna Turam. Turam analyses the nationalistic ideology of the teachers and members of the community in central Asia. According to Turam, Gulens educational project indicates prioritization and politicization of the national afliation and in this sense Gulen represents a pragmatic Islam that is a product of the national culture, the culture of the nation. In fact, Turam points to an emerging Turkish Islam and ethnic politics which are actualizing a network at the international level on the basis of their primary loyalties to the nation (p. 190). Very much related to this nationalistic position of the movement, Kosebalaban examines the national security strategy of Fethullah Gulen and its attitude towards the others, including Iran, Europe and the Arab world. According to Kosebalaban, Gulens movement has a distinct security identity formed around a set of security perceptions and multiple others, which he summarizes as: (a) strong degree of common identication with the Turkic World; (b) lack of common identication with the West but a desire to integrate with Western institutions; (c) strong lack of common identication with Iran (p. 172). Hakan Yavuzs observation about the evolution in the world view of the community is important in this sense. It would be interesting to see how Turams and Kosebalabans ndings about the political stand of Gulens followers evolved after 27 February. In addition, it is signicant to look at the inuences of September 11on the community at large and their stand in the Islamic world. It is obvious that the Gulen community, and the other Turkish communities around the world, have a special emphasis to distinguish themselves from the Arab and South Asian Muslims. The role of Iran in Kosebalabans analysis may be associated with the role of the Arabs after September 11.

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Since September 11, the Turkish community has started to present the distinctiveness of their religious view in the Islamic world and to represent their uniqueness, which they claim to have similarities only with Rumis Susm. In fact, it is clear that the community is trying to integrate itself with the western world by means of the interfaith dialogue movements. However, it is still unclear what will be the outcome of this attempt. In this sense, there are many questions that remain about the future of the political position of the Gulen movement. It is distancing itself from both the nationalist and statist discourse after 27 February and from the other communities and groups in the Muslim world after September 11. So what will be the future stand of the community? Overall, Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement is a tremendously important and essential reading for those who are interested in social movements in the Islamic world. It also lls an important gap in the literature. The chapters in this work are very well edited and organized. In particular, its outstanding contributors present a very informative selection about the different aspects of one of the most understudied religious communities, and provide very useful insights to understand the alternative religious movements in the Islamic world. From the horizon that this book opened for the readers, one can have some further questions for the future studies about the movement. For instance, what is the relation between Fethullah Gulen and his community and can we assume the community as a true representative of Gulens ideas? In addition, how homogenous is the community within itself and what are the cleavages among the members of the community or what is the relation among the bystanders, adherents and constituents of the community? KILIC BUGRA KANAT

HindutvaTreason and Terror I.K. SHUKLA , 2005 New Delhi: Pharos Media 181 pp., Rs. 130 (E10, US$15), ISBN: 81-7221-026-4 Hindutva, the Indian version of fascism, has been much written about. This collection of essays entitled HindutvaTreason and Terror by I.K. Shukla focuses particularly on the politics of Hindutva, linking this to its underlying agenda of seeking to transform India into what the author calls a fascist theocracy. Shukla argues that the notion of a singular, homogenous majority Hindu community, which Hindutva organizations claim to represent, is nothing but ction. The word Hindu is itself absent in all the classical Hindu texts, which suggests that the ancient Hindus did not think of themselves as members of a single community. What is today regarded as the Hindu community is actually a motley collection of castes and sects, often mutually opposed to each other, hierarchically divided as they are on the basis of the principle of purity and pollution. Hence, they cannot be collectively referred to as a single community. Shukla opines that the construction of the notion of a single Hindu community was a project jointly undertaken by the Orientalists, British colonial ofcers and the upper caste elites. For the upper castes, a minority among the Hindus, the project helped bolster their own claims to authority, for it enabled them to assert their claims as the representatives of this imagined community. (The same could be said of the process of the construction of the notion of a single pan-Indian Muslim community that

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transcended sectarian, ethnic, linguistic and caste divisions.) Hinduism, as it came to be constructed as an organized religion, thus was inseparable from the interests of the upper caste minority. The same holds true in the case of Hindutva, which, Shukla tells us, essentially represents the interests of the dominant castes/classes. Preserving upper caste/class interests, rather than the interests of India as a whole, is the major agenda of the Hindutva project, Shukla argues. This is reected in the fact that the Hindutva organizations played no role in Indias freedom struggle, and, instead, actually collaborated with the British to oppose the joint Hindu Muslim movement for Indias independence. Indeed, Shukla notes, the Hindu Mahasabha, the progenitor of todays myriad Hindutva groups, came up with the theory of Hindus and Muslims being two separate and hostile nations even before the Muslim League did, and many years before Pakistan came into being on the basis of Muslim nationalism. Hindutvas indifference, if not hostility, to the interests of India as a whole, Shukla argues, is also amply evident from the fact that Hindutva organizations have no agenda for the poor (other than perpetuating their subordination), from their willingness to ransom Indias economy to foreign multinational corporations and from their close nexus with American neoconservative groups and with Israel. Violence is intrinsic to the Hindutva project. Indeed, Shukla shows, violence, as directed against low castes and dissenters, is deeply ingrained in the Brahminical Hindu texts themselves. In this sense, then, the large-scale violence perpetrated by Hindutva groups is not a new development, a deviation from a presumed non-violent Brahminical Hinduism. The Hindutva project is based on fortifying the myth of a Hindu monolith transcending caste and class divisions, for which purpose-organized massacres, particularly of Muslims, serve as a major mobilizational device. Dalits and Tribals, victims of upper caste/class Hindu oppression, are routinely instigated by Hindutva groups to launch anti-Muslim pogroms, as most recently evidenced in Gujarat. In Hindutva propaganda, Muslims are inevitably portrayed as enemies of the Hindus (including the lower castes) and as the principal cause of all their ills. Pitting the lower castes against the Muslims is, Shukla rightly points out, a well-thought-out strategy to prevent the former from challenging upper caste hegemony. While the books basic theses are valid, what it lacks is a well-thought-out strategy to counter the Hindutva challenge. Shukla does note the importance of a broad-based unity between various marginalized communities in Indiathe Bahujan Samajalthough he notes that this is easier said than done. But precisely how this unity can come about is something that Shukla fails to deal with. That, however, should not detract from the merits of this thought-provoking book. YOGINDER SIKAND