Toward an Islamic Movement: The Gulen Movement.

• Author: Ozcan, Can
• Position: Book review

Toward an Islamic Movement: The Gulen Movement

By M. Hakan Yavuz

New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 300 pages, ISBN 9780199927999.

Is it possible to fuse Islamic theology and political Islam with the discourses and practices of the Enlightenment? To what extent are Islam and democracy reconcilable in the current age of secularism? How does an Islamic social movement democratize and liberalize a predominantly Muslim country? How did a small piety-based movement in Turkey evolve into a transnational societal movement across the world, with the exception of the Islamic world? M. Hakan Yavuz deals with those questions through the examination of the Gulen Movement's evolution in Turkey. He argues that the faith-based Gulen Movement exemplifies a quasi-protestant version of Islam in which secularism and Islamism inextricably intertwined. Gulen's understanding of Islam does not contradict the premises of modernity and rather has potential to thicken the weak civic culture by promoting the ideas of toleration, pluralism, science, and political participation. According to Yavuz, the interaction between the Islamic discourses of the Gulen Movement and Turkey's secular state structure results in paradoxical outcome: an Islamization of secular society and an internal secularization of Islamic thought. In this regard, the conditions under which the modernized interpretations and practices of Islam emerge do not signal an inevitable historical trend but rather an outcome of social, political and economic contingencies in Turkey. The success of the movement has been mainly from the institutional spaces that have been provided by the Turkey's founding elites and the neo-liberal policies of Turgut Ozal in the 1980s and early 90s.

The book is the first comprehensive and theoretical attempt that utilizes the works of the Western philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas and Max Weber to explain the theology of Fethullan Gulen, a theology which often includes heavy rhetoric grounded in Sufi traditions of Islam. To understand the complex dynamics of the Gulen Movement, Yavuz not only deals with the mobilization and institutionalization of the movement but also examines the interaction between Gulen's thoughts on Islam and the forces of the modernity. Yavuz underscores that the Gulen Movement is not only an agent of contentious politics but also a repository of societal transformation and self-aggrandizement for its members, even though he has certain...