A Skeptic's Wiew on the Gülen Conference in London
I had a chance to attend to the last day sessions of the Gülen conference at the London School of Economics (LSE) and wanted to share my impressions.
Let me first talk about the participants. Yaşar Yakiş, Mehmet Altan, Eser Karakaş, Fehmi Koru, Doğu Ergil and Mustafa Akyol were among the first I could recognize. But in general, aside from paper presenters, journalists and a few nosy parkers like myself, there was no one except those present, out of their ties with the community. As for the topics discussed; well nothing new, actually. Gülen and his movement's commitment to peace and fraternity, the joy of democracy, secularism and modernity, the significance of dialogue and tolerance as the basics of the movement, centrality of (with their wording) the "service" in education, promotion of civil society, trans-culturization and "conflict resolution" for the members of the movement were the main topics of discussion at the last day of the conference. I do not need to mention the paeans to Fethullah Gülen himself and his writings and activities. In fact what they do is to live in a world they have built for themselves. Within their perception of the world, they try to show how excellent and how useful they are. It is as if they are saying to someone "come and use us!"
An example is in order. In the first session, Professor Richard Penaskovich recounted that Gülen accused Huntington of drawing new lines of enmity and planting new seeds of enmity, in his paper titled "Gülen's answer to Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis." At this I told him that in my view, while Gülen is running after inter-religious dialogue (how similar to initiative for the Dialogue of Civilizations!) he implicitly accepts Huntington's lines of enmity and played in Huntington's game field and asked his opinion on this. The only answer I got was that what must be said was said during the presentation. It was not quite an answer as he kept repeating what he said before.
The second session I attended was on Gülen movement's contribution to peace-building. Mehmet Kalyoncu, one of the panelists, delivered a speech on how the Gülen movement's efforts, like invigorating the civil society and opening schools and classrooms, softened if not totally erased ethnic and religious conflicts in Mardin. If I was a person unacquainted with Mardin, I could think that ethnic and religious groups in Mardin were in some sort of a quagmire, before the city reaped the fruits of the Gülen community's actions. During the discussions, I told him that I personally witnessed the fact that Mardin is a leading example of peaceful co-existence in Turkey. There are no high walls between ethnic-religious communities and Gülen community's efforts, while arguably bringing a positive value, had no effect of "mitigating conflict" (his own term) as suggested. I went on asking whether we have a chance to see similar (as alleged by them) results if the same actions of Gülen movement were carried out in Lebanon, where walls between ethnic and religious communities are high and have caused civil wars in the past. His answer was that if preparations were to be started today, he believed that in fifteen years the problem in Lebanon could be "mitigated." I do not think this is quite an answer neither!
A three-day advertising campaign
Consequently, London witnessed an advertising campaign for three days, just like the launch of a new product, or a premiere of a film that is about to hit the theaters. But we have only speculations and not precise information on the fresh product - a bid for the moderate Islam model is concluded, the winner is the "Golden Generation" of the Gülen movement, educated with an indoctrination resembling protestant ethics and claiming to be tied strongly to democracy, globalization, multi-culturalism, liberalism and secular modernism.
The community held similar conferences in the United States for the last few of years, now it opened the gates to Europe. It seems that they intend to leave behind their tactic of operating by keeping a low posture, and leave their trace on the snow by increasing their activities in Europe, the first of which is a conference in Rotterdam with a similar topic in November.
* Eyüp Can Dervisoglu is a MA student at the University of Essex, UK
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