Is the Gülen Movement subversive?
No. What is common to all projects, services and institutions of the Gülen Movement is that they are entirely located within the limits of compatibility of the System. They are not oriented towards conflict or breach of those limits. Gülen-inspired institutions are never brought into a conflict with the state. None of the projects in which the Gülen Movement participants are involved ever break the rules of society, nor do they try to change “the rules of the game” no matter what field they are concerned with.
The Gülen Movement does not do anything which prevents the system from maintaining its set of elements and relations that identify the system as such. Since participants and their projects do not breach social limits, the system can acknowledge, or tolerate, them without altering its structure. In this sense, the Gülen Movement has order-maintaining orientations. However, it does not come into being through consensus over the rules governing the control of valued resources. The intention of the Gülen Movement is not to protect the status quo governing the control of valued resources; nor does it emerge to challenge the rules and procedures which protect that status quo.
The Gülen Movement is not marginal as it did not come into being to react to the control and legitimacy of the system or its established norms; it is not a consequence of the inadequate assimilation by some individuals of those established norms. Moreover, the Gülen Movement does not identify a social adversary and a set of contested resources or values. Within the Movement people express disapproval of actions or traits such as immorality, unbelief, injustice, provoking hostility and violence, and deviations, but disapproval or hatred is not expressed of the people who engage in them.
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