Fethullah Gülen on ABC Radio National's Encounter

Who is Fethullah Gülen? He's been described as Turkish Islam's Billy Graham - and you may not know it, but he is the inspiration behind much of the Muslim involvement in inter faith dialogue in Australia. And now a Chair in Islamic Studies at Australian Catholic University is to be named after him - and supported by his followers.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Margaret Coffey: Hello, welcome to Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Margaret Coffey. The year 2007 has been declared UNESCO's year of Rumi, the great 13th century Sufi poet, and that's enough of a prompt to look at one of the forms Sufism takes today. It's a hugely influential neo-Sufi movement that was born in Turkey - and at its helm is a preacher who has been described as contemporary Islam's Billy Graham.

Music:

Sound of Victoria Police Iftar

Margaret Coffey: It's Ramadan - another week or so to go - and the Victoria Police are hosting Iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast. It's the third year in a row they have done this, following an approach from a local Muslim organisation, the Australian Intercultural Society. There are several hundred people in the room, a goodly number of them blue uniformed police.

Policeman: Yeh I just feel strongly about issues with Muslim people. I believe they are sort of on the back foot in our country because of these stereotypes. There is nothing better than to connect with people over a plate of food I believe, yeh.

Police spokesperson:...like to thank individuals and groups who made this possible, AIS, Emre Celik and Orhan Cecic, old friends of Victoria Police and pioneers in bringing Iftar dinners to the Australian community.

Margaret Coffey: Thanks, he says, on behalf of Victoria Police to the individuals and groups who made this possible - notably the Australian Intercultural Society and its leaders Emre Celik and Orhan Cicek.

Police spokesperson: ....pioneers in bringing Iftar dinners to the wider Australian community.

Margaret Coffey: Along with their counterparts in NSW, and similar groups elsewhere, AIS is very much at the forefront of Muslim engagement in interfaith activities, quite often as the instigator. It's all inspired by a guiding genius - a United States based Turkish preacher by the name of Fethullah Gülen. If, for example, as a non-Muslim, you have visited the Auburn Gallipoli Mosque in Sydney, or been to a gathering of Jews, Christians and Muslims called an Abrahamic Conference, or shared an Iftar in a Muslim home, then you have seen some of the fruit of Gülen's inspiration.

Woman: He's the great mentor I guess, he's the leader, and it's a great movement for tolerance and understanding, for peace for the world.

Ibrahim Dellal: I'm one of his admirers. I was fortunate enough to meet him twice. He is a man of compassion, caring and sharing, he loves human beings and he loves to see all human beings unite and accept each other as equals.

Margaret Coffey: Up to this point Fethullah Gülen's name has been invoked almost solely in Turkish circles. The organisations that act under his inspiration don't tend to declare this, at least up front. But Australians are about to become a little more familiar with Fethullah Gülen's name. The Australian Catholic University based across the eastern States has entered into an agreement with the AIS to establish the Fethullah Gülen Chair in Islamic Studies and Muslim-Catholic Relations, with funding support from Gülen admirers in Turkey. It's an extraordinary achievement for what is described as a community organisation only seven years old. The ACU has refused Encounter's request for comment on either the Chair or the appointment process - it won't be making a comment, I'm told, until the Chair's occupant is announced, and that announcement is expected within a week or two. The University's reticence is understandable: the funding of Islamic studies in Australian universities recently became a matter of controversy with the decision of Griffith University to accept up to $1 million from Saudi Arabia for its Islamic Research Unit. We'll hear more on the relationship between the Gülen movement and universities later in the program.

But first, who is Fethullah Gülen? What is the scope of the movement that has built up around him? Stay tuned to Encounter on ABC Radio National, via podcast, on-line, or direct broadcast, for some interesting answers to these questions.

Music:

Sound of crowd at Dallas Brooks Hall Whirling Dervishes Event

Margaret Coffey: The Whirling Dervishes are in town, courtesy of Turkey's Ministry of Culture - and the Gülen inspired Australian Intercultural Society. It's an event that concentrates aspects of the Gülen movement - like its Sufi influences, its Turkish origins and its links to the new Turkish elite...an elite drawn into the middle classes from rural and religious origins, people who are emerging at home and abroad to assume new positions of power, displacing even in the Turkish government the old secular elite.

Emre Celik: Hi, I'm Emre Celik. I'm the general coordinator of the Australian Intercultural Society and I look after the projects that the organisation runs in regards to interfaith dialogue in the hope of building bridges between the various communities.

Margaret Coffey: Emre Celik is a busy person. As AIS' full time coordinator, he's been involved in the negotiations around the ACU Chair, in the AIS sponsored Ramadan events, and in the visit of the Whirling Dervishes.

Sound Whirling Dervishes event (Applause) Now let's watch the video clip prepared by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey...

Emre Celik: I believe this to be the first time that we have organised something with the Ministry of Culture or any Ministry from Turkey. We have got a good relationship here with the Consul General of the Turkish Republic and [it was] with their assistance that we were able to make ties with the Ministry of Culture and to be able to organise what was a very successful event.

Sound of Whirling Dervishes event "That's my country - Turkey".

Margaret Coffey: The event is more tourism promotion and identity affirming than religious. I turn to the woman sitting next to me and discover the complexity of Turkish identity and its Australian connections. She's secular she says, even given her antecedents.

Woman: I'm the descendant of the last Mevlevi Sheikh of Gallipoli.

Margaret Coffey: That means the last Sufi Sheikh - the Sufi orders were abolished in 1920 as part of Ataturk's secularisation drive.

Woman: I live in Sydney. There is another descendant that I know, directly from Mevlana, and he lives in Sydney, he lives approximately half an hour to Sydney.

Margaret Coffey: That means there is a descendant of the revered Rumi living in Sydney.

Margaret Coffey: What does that mean in your life? How do you think of it? How do you tell your son?

Woman: It makes me look at religion a much larger way. I believe that in the philosophy of Mevlana Rumi there are no set rules to follow the philosophy.

Music:

Margaret Coffey: As we'll hear, Sufism suffuses differently the quite traditional and conservative Islamic thinking of Fethullah Gülen.

But first its Australian manifestations. Back in the 1990s, when he was still based in Turkey, Gülen visited Australia to urge the Turkish community to educate their children - and today up to sixteen 'Turkish' schools throughout the country are the fruit of that visit. In the last seven years, Gülen's emphasis has shifted and his admirers have been energised to follow suit. Emre Celik explains the emergence in Melbourne of the Gülen inspired Australian Intercultural Society this way.

Emre Celik: The Australian Intercultural Society was founded in the year 2000 by a group of second generation Muslims - people about my age, in their late twenties, early thirties - who were concerned about the difficulties that the Muslim community was going through, and this is pre 9/11 so you know it was really a preventive measure. And this was really an important role for second generation Muslims to take up particularly because of having overcome the language barriers of the first generation, professionals, so in terms of their socio-economic situation they didn't have the concerns that the first generation had, so they were able to branch out and to reach out to other communities in the hope of overcoming the stereotype that is so much associated with who Muslims are and what Islam is about.

Margaret Coffey: It's not necessarily the natural step for all groups within the Muslim community. What was there specific to you people that made you interested in taking this particular next step?

Emre Celik:The Turkish community and Turkey really has a strong historic background in regards to Sufism and Mevlana, better known in the West as simply Rumi, and there are important figures really in Turkish history that have espoused these virtues, and of course these all relate in origin to the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, the Hadith. So it is important figures like that - one of them Fethullah Gülen. You know, as some people have described him, a modern Rumi of sorts.

Margaret Coffey: Emre Celik, tells the story in terms of a distinctive and powerful Turkish Sufi tradition, which has permeated his own life.

Emre Celik: The Sufi tradition is really ingrained in the Turkish psyche. Of course I keep referring to Rumi but there are great other thinkers you know: Yunus Emre. I was named after a very important Sufi thinker and poet as well.

Margaret Coffey: Have you ever learned any one of his poems off by heart?

Margaret Coffey: Well yes he had.

Emre Celik: Owner of goods, owner of wealth, who is the true owner of everything? That is a lie, this is a lie and you waste some time.

Margaret Coffey: Some things are a delusion then?

Emre Celik: Yes, the true owner of what we possess is in actual fact not ourselves. It comes from one source and eventually goes to that same source. We are in actual fact trustees while we walk the face of the earth and one day it will be taken away.

Music:

Mehmet Saral: Mehmet Saral and I am president of Affinity Intercultural Foundation. I am also one of the founding members of the organisation.

Margaret Coffey: This is AIS' counterpart organisation in NSW - set up in 2001 with the explicit purpose - following Gülen - of engaging in interfaith dialogue.

Mehmet Saral says he has gained a spiritual purpose through his encounter with Fethullah Gülen.

Mehmet Saral: Prior to knowing about Fethullah Gülen or his ideas, or reading about them, I really did not have a clear purpose in life. I worked as an engineer and you know had a nine to five job, going to work, coming home, going out with the boys etc but there was no clear perspective as what is my purpose in this world, you know how do I serve God in this world. His ideas enabled me to have a vision and to see that there is a lot to be done. Helping humanity in all forms of life is the best thing that a human being can enjoy. So Fethullah Gülen through his books has given me that: that attachment to God and thinking of God and serving humanity while thinking of him in your actions.

Margaret Coffey: Running through the story Mehmet Saral tells there is another powerful conventional Islamic theme - of a bifurcated world, with Islam on one side and Western materialism and secularism on the other.

Mehmet Saral: He has told us that we should engage with non-Muslims. So this is very important for Muslims because no other Muslim scholar has told us that. The Ottomans and beyond engaged with non-Muslims a lot, all the way back to the Prophet. But in the 20th century, when the Muslim world was split into many different nationalities and secularism set in, a lot of fear and hatred towards the West occurred and a lot of Muslims kept isolated from any contact with non-Muslims. So in a way Fethullah Gülen has opened that door, saying we should engage with non-Muslims, we can learn a lot from non-Muslims and they can learn the spirituality of the East and we can learn the technology and everything from the West.

There is a lot of ignorance and education problems in the East and the West is full of education. The two must meet and balance each other in those two areas, spirituality and education.

Margaret Coffey: Mehmet Saral, of Affinity Intercultural Foundation in NSW.

You're listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National, an encounter with the Turkish Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen and his admirers. This is the sound of Gülen preaching.

Audio of Fethullah Gülen preaching

Margaret Coffey: The vision shows him seated, on a raised chair in front of a large group of men who are gathered closely around him; they're kneeling, responding to his words and to his gestures.

Audio of Fethullah Gülen preaching

Margaret Coffey: He's an older man, rather decorous in style, clean shaven, apart from a neat moustache.

Zeki Saritoprak: My name is Zeki Saritoprak. I am Professor of Islamic Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Zeki Saritoprak: Yes I met him, you are right, he has a moustache and he doesn't have beard.

Margaret Coffey: And he dresses in a suit doesn't he?

Zeki Saritoprak: Yes he dresses in suit, he's like regular style like we have. His shirts are special. He is very much careful about his dress, and clean and always ironed. He is very careful as far as I see. As you said he is coming from Ottoman culture.

Margaret Coffey: You'll get the idea if you look at some of the photographs in Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's book Istanbul.

Audio of Fethullah Gülen preaching

Margaret Coffey: Zeki Saritoprak is familiar with Gülen's sermons.

Zeki Saritoprak: I think he is a very good speaker. In his earlier sermons he would always speak from his heart, without looking at any writing before him, and very straightforward, very strong, very powerful. These days he doesn't preach but he gives certain short speeches to his I think small circle and it is published on some websites, broadcast on some websites, when he speaks as if he is reading from a book - so straight, so fluent. He is very powerful speaker.

Margaret Coffey: It is language that doesn't translate easily or perhaps sympathetically into English does it because it is rather flowery and rhetorical?

Zeki Saritoprak: You are right. I had that experience when I had an interview with him and I needed to translate that interview into English. I had a really hard time to translate some words, and some statements, because sometimes the statements are very long and sometimes the words are very Ottoman - even I couldn't find in some dictionaries. It is Turkish but old Turkish.

Margaret Coffey: Why is Gülen living in America?

Zeki Saritoprak: Gülen had heart problem. Still I think he has heart problem. He went to Cleveland Clinic. He didn't have surgery, but what they call angioplasty. Later he was able to go to Turkey I think but he didn't prefer to go, because the situation in Turkey became worse. Gülen became like a target for some organisations, some nationalist organisations, some extreme secularist organisations. But now he can go and he doesn't go. I think he likes the United States probably. He may go to Turkey but that is you know his decision.

Margaret Coffey: Zeki Saritoprak, Professor of Islamic Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The story of Fethullah Gülen's presence in the United States is a thread in the complex tale of contemporary Turkey's dilemma about its future shape. At risk in this tale, depending on the protagonist, are on the one hand Turkey's secular character and the country's European integration, or on the other hand its unique identity and territorial integrity. The threats to secular Turkey come not just from within, but from powerful outside forces, including the United States, perceived as supporting Turkey's current Islamist government out of the strategic hope that the country will model for other Islamic nations a desirable kind of moderate Muslim state. United States' sanctuary for Gülen is seen as part of this strategy. And Gülen himself and his followers, in this account, hide a double agenda.

Fethullah Gülen has been in the States since 1999, when a warrant for his arrest was issued - basically on charges under then existing penal laws of building of an Islamic groundswell. The charges were dropped, but he has yet to return to Turkey.

Dale Eickelman: I'm Dale Eickelman. I'm a professor of anthropology and human relations at Dartmouth College in the United States.

Margaret Coffey: Dale Eickelman has been familiar with the Gülen movement since the nineties, when he first met its leader in Turkey.

Dale Eickelman:I'm not a medical doctor. He has had a heart condition and he is better here. I do think that what has happened is that coming here has meant that he has continued to have a strong influence in Turkey. In the brief times when I have been able to go down to where he is I would see people coming in and the people I am with - as I said I don't speak Turkish - would explain to me who was coming to visit him, people flying over from Turkey. He is somebody who I think inspires others to work for a common good and it doesn't hurt to see that a number of people who believe strongly in him also run first rate transnational businesses.

Margaret Coffey: The relationship of those trans national businesses raises an interesting question. People associated with Gülen routinely deny that he leads an organised movement with specific assets or that there is any hierarchical structure or system of accountability. Yet, a 2006 article posted on the Gülen website speaks of the Gülen movement's growth during the years since he left Turkey. Its worth, for want of a better description, is estimated at $25 billion American dollars. It runs Zaman, one of Turkey's major daily newspapers, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals in various languages, television stations, an important Turkish bank, unions, more than 600 schools, and six universities, including Virginia International University in Fairfax, Virginia. Just how these various Gülen influenced enterprises connect with one another is unclear. Spokespeople evidently find it difficult to describe the connections explicitly. The explanation is always in terms of individuals acting autonomously or coming together with like-minded people, equally inspired by Gülen's writings. This opaqueness is simply the way things are.

Dale Eickelman first met Fethullah Gülen in 1996.

Dale Eickelman: I work primarily on the Arab world but by the late 80s I just made the decision based on everything that I was doing and everyone that I was meeting that you couldn't very well talk about the Muslim world without talking about Islam in Turkey, because of the really hot issue amongst the Turks of whether they were European or whether they were not. You had a game almost of cat and mouse in the 1990s and continuing to the present of the military and other militant secularists saying that nothing religious or even nothing inspired by religion should have any place in the public or political life of this country. But what you were finding in elections - here's the bottom line - there was a learning curve in which people inspired by what they saw as the potential for Islam to be inclusive increasingly caught the public imagination. I think a lot of the quote secularists discovered that there was a lot of common space that they could share or perhaps had to share in public with those inspired by Islam.

Margaret Coffey: Dale Eickelman argues that Fethullah Gülen's popularity is one of the counter arguments to modernisation theories that sideline religion. He points also to Gülen's origins, and his capacity to speak to multiple audiences.

Dale Eickelman: You can be modern and religious, I believe, at the same time. Vaclav Havel in the 90s was making this point.

When you see Gülen operating he is a person who has a very charismatic personality. He did several things to set him apart from other religious leaders or people who emerged to the fore as serious interlocutors. He has strong rural provincial roots - he knows how to talk the talk that engages both the people who are not very highly educated but very pious and those who are educated, speaking in a rich metaphorical language, and what he could do much better than others was to take advantage of the new media. He made the transition to television.

Margaret Coffey: That's one of the reasons Professor Eickelman links Gülen to Billy Graham. He subsequently paid several visits to Fethullah Gülen at his Pennsylvania retreat.

Dale Eickelman: It is as far as I can tell a former summer camp in a very nice area of eastern United States that's been kind of dossed up. There is a big meeting lodge and there's nice spare things. If anything the quality of the furnishings and everything else would remind me of Quaker retreats - you know, very clean, very spartan sorts of things that would help you focus on things that matter a lot more that anything else. Certainly not luxury in any way, shape or form. But, the interesting part to me is very sophisticated apparatuses where one could do webcasting and simulcasts and when he would give a weekly public religious lesson, part of the public would be there but the other part of the public is you know using the best of modern technology to follow webcasts.

Audio of Fethullah Gülen preaching

Margaret Coffey: The sound of Fethullah Gülen, in a more recent recording. Gülen's story is told by Zeki Saritoprak.

Zeki Saritoprak: He was born in the city of Erzurum. Erzurum is in the north east of Turkey.

Margaret Coffey: High up!

Zeki Saritoprak: High up, very, very cold place. It's sometimes in winter I think 25 degrees below zero.

Margaret Coffey: People who have read Orhan Pamuk's novel "Snow" will have some sense of the landscape because that is where the bus leaves for Kar.

Zeki Saritoprak: Probably, you are right. I think you are right. The city is beautiful - it is very cold. I had an interview with him three years ago, and I asked him about his knowledge of poetry because I realised that he was always saying poems from his memory. Once he said that there are more than 1000 couplets in his memory made me to memorise all these poems. And he said, actually I did not spend efforts for this, it was just the environment. The environment that I lived in made me to memorise all these poems. So this suggests that he was very much involved in intellectual life. Because it was also close to Persian culture, he would know Farsi and Turkish poems at the same time - so you can see something from Hafiz Shirazi from him, some from Rumi in Persian and therefore he lived in a very rich intellectual environment.

Margaret Coffey: At the age of sixteen, Gülen left the city of Erzerum and began his career as a government appointed preacher near Turkey's border with Greece . This was a time, Zeki Saritoprak says, when Gülen's reading began to widen, and he encountered the writings of Said Nursi - an important figure 20th century critic of the imposition of Western values in the Islamic world. Said Nursi moved from belief in political action, to the conviction that the most important struggle was to influence the way Muslims thought - it was necessary to convince Muslims that being modern did not mean rejecting religion.

Zeki Saritoprak: He met with some of students of Nursi and he said that "I realised that they were living examples of the companions of the Prophet." So they were very pious in their life, they were very compassionate towards people, they were trying to reach everyone to give them what they called the message of light and they were very kind in their behaviours, in their prayers, like when they were worshipping the five daily prayers they were very calm, very...you could feel the tranquillity in their actions. These behaviours affected him strongly and then he started reading Nursi's writings. He was very much influenced by the writings of Nursi. It became like a ground - a ground for his knowledge in fact.

Margaret Coffey: So far you have spoken about literary, or intellectual influences, and religious influences. But I wonder about the role of experience because that city he grew up in had some very dramatic things happen within living memory of his young adulthood, his childhood?

Zeki Saritoprak: I think there is definitely a place for experience as well. His city is on the border so it is very much sensitive. There is a kind of nationalism in the city, although we don't have any sense of nationalism in Gülen's ideas.

Margaret Coffey: The kind of experience I was thinking of specifically there was the massacres of Armenians and by Armenians in Erzerum in the early part of the 20th century - the memories of that would still be alive in Gülen's youth in the city - the sense that identity is vulnerable - it is also a porous place isn't it, as you say, people coming and going so those tensions must have informed him in some sense.

Zeki Saritoprak: I think you are right. Gülen was born in 1941, which is much later, but he had heard these memories. That's why nationalism was stronger in this city and as you said, there were probably some killings, some huge devastation. One thing I remember from writings of Gülen - Gülen suggests that no one should be accused because of his or her origin and he mentions that there was an Armenian woman in his village who became a Muslim and he said she was probably the most important person who served the Quran in the village. So, she was Armenian but she was a very kind person and that is why he would always suggest that you should not charge people, you should not judge people, according to their ethnic origin.

Margaret Coffey: Zeki Saritoprak, Professor of Islamic Studies at John Carroll University.

Music bridge Sufi music

Margaret Coffey: On ABC Radio National you're listening to an Encounter - an encounter with the Turkish Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen - whose followers number it is said in their millions.

Gülen's admirers in Australia were recently involved in hosting a concert tour of Turkey's Whirling Dervishes - the dervishes performed their Sama ceremony on stage in front of audiences in Melbourne and Sydney - emulating the practice 800 years ago by the poet and mystic Mawlana Jalaladdin Rumi. It's said that Rumi began this practice - of contemplation in action, to music.

Fethullah Gülen grew up in a city with a strong mystical tradition but by the time he himself was born, the Sufi orders or tariqas had been shut down, including the Naqshbandi order to which his father had belonged. This is one of the points, Zeki Saritoprak says, where Said Nursi influenced Gülen's view:

Zeki Saritoprak: Gülen officially to my knowledge never related himself to a tariqa. He loved them, he respected them and I think most probably because when he studied Nursi, he realised that Nursi did not belong to any tariqa but Nursi also was a mystic at the same time. So he found a way that you can be a mystic and not be affiliated with any tariqa. But Gülen did not affiliate himself with any tariqa as well as any political party. And I think it comes from the teaching of Nursi when he said "I take refuge in God from Satan and politics." He would say it is very hard for a politician, even a Muslim politician to be a pious person.

It will be fair I think to say that Gülen's understanding of Islam is much more spiritual oriented rather than political oriented. He focuses on the personality of people, not on the systems. Individual is important for Gülen, individual because the Quran actually speaks of individuals as a universe: so important in the sight of God, every human being.

Margaret Coffey: And it's this spiritual character of Gülen's teaching that provides such an attractive opening for would be dialogue partners, religious and otherwise, eager to find a point of contact with Islam, in the face of Islamic radicalism.

Zeki Saritoprak: Islam is a way of life but it is not an ideology. It is your heart and your actions, not only your words. He always avoid slogans. Gülen would be against these slogans - or sloganic Islam, if we can use this term. Islam is a civilisation. It is not like a cheap issue. It is very strong, it's very powerful. It is really a very important large concept. The problem of today - Islamism is to put Islam only within the limit of a political order and that is actually not Islam. It is limiting Islam. Islam is a civilisation.

Margaret Coffey: This Encounter began with a description of Fethullah Gülen's admirers as a neo-Sufi movement within Islam, focusing on the spiritual transformation of individuals as a way of transforming society. That is not to say it is not politically adept. It is clearly adept at inserting itself - and Gülen's ideas - in the contemporary discussion about Islam, and at creating important institutional partnerships. How it goes about this insertion points to significant questions - for the movement and its partners.

Jill Carroll: Jill Carroll, I'm the Executive Director of the Boniuk Centre for Religious Tolerance.

Margaret Coffey: And that's at Rice University.

Jill Carroll: That's at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and I'm also an adjunct associate professor in Religious Studies.

Margaret Coffey: Jill Carroll has recently published a book in which she hypothetically engages Fethullah Gülen in conversation with eight great thinkers from non-Muslim traditions. The idea is to seek out "resonances". Effectively, the book cross references Gülen with thinkers ranging from Confucius to Plato to Kant to Sartre. Thus, Fethullah Gülen in conversation with John Stuart Mill:

Jill Carroll: There is really no society that I know of on the earth that lives - that politically and socially lives the kind of freedom that Mill talks about. So you think OK what could these two say to each other on this issue of freedom and when you really look at it you begin to see that both of them have this deep conviction that freedom of thought and freedom of conscience is absolutely central to being human and that our very humanity is undermined if we do not have freedom to think and freedom of conscience. And so both of them end up supporting social and political structures that give that freedom room to exist. Now Mill would support certain political structures that Gülen would not. But nevertheless they are coming from this very powerful conviction that they both adhere to, coming from very different perspectives.

Margaret Coffey: Which leaves the conversation precisely at the point where it might become challenging, for each of the protagonists, and for the readers! Jill Carroll is clearly moved by Gülen's teaching and happy to facilitate the Gülen movement's desire to disseminate his ideas.

Jill Carroll: It really kinds of calls you into a really exalted way of being. It makes you want to be a good person and create the world in a way that is worth living in it and so I think that's what it is. I think there are people who are hungry for that and he has inspired you know three generations of people now.

Margaret Coffey: Jill Carroll became aware of Gülen about four years ago.

Jill Carroll: Well you know I didn't really know anything about him. I was approached by some Turkish graduate students. They came to my office and they said you know we're part of an interfaith dialogue movement and you know we're Muslims and we're taking these trips to Turkey and would you like to come. I was a little suspicious you know and so my colleagues and I we kind of looked into it and checked it out and it turned out that you know everything seemed on the up and up. So we went ahead and went on the trip and that's when I saw the schools, the hospitals, the community organisations, all the stuff that people are doing that are inspired by the ideas of Gülen and I didn't even know about him. You know I went back to Turkey a few more times as guests of this community and visited with more people and interviewed more people and learned a lot more about the movement and they asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about it. And I said well sure, you know...

Margaret Coffey: So the book was in fact commissioned by the movement?

Jill Carroll: I guess you could say commissioned - they asked me to write a book, they asked me like three times and I kind of put them off but they kept pushing me and I said well look let me give you a proposal of a book I would be willing to write. And they said no this is great, we've never thought about this, will you do it. And I said sure, I'll do it. They had no control over the content of it.

Margaret Coffey: Did they publish it?

Jill Carroll: They have a publishing arm that mostly publishes Gülen's work - it is Light Publishing which is based in New Jersey. It is a stateside version of a Turkish publisher in Istanbul. So yeh, they published it.

Margaret Coffey: Dr Jill Carroll from Rice University. In November 2005 Rice University hosted a conference described in these terms: "a conference on the contributions of Fethullah Gülen to interfaith dialogue, tolerance, and education. The conference aims to explore the appeal, meaning, and impact of Fethullah Gülen and the Gülen movement on Turkish, regional, and - increasingly - global societies over the two days of sessions." My quick web search produced a series of conferences on Gülen in this calendar year. I put this phenomenon to Professor Dale Eickelman:

I'm interested in the other kinds of strategies that the movement uses. It seems to me very clever in the way that it inserts itself in institutions, in universities in Australia, the US, in European countries. It has around it, it seems to me, when I look through the website, a retinue of scholars who are happy to participate in a series of conferences. There is almost a caravan of conferences at particular times of the year.

Dale Eickelman: I was going to say this last year I have seen a number where if I gave up my university position I could probably go from conference to conference. There seem to be quite a number in the United States and elsewhere. Part of this is you know a series of efforts by various supporters of the movement. What they are trying to do is to communicate. They want to reach out and to say who they are and invite people to come in.

Margaret Coffey: I understand that but I want to get back to this academic strategy, the strategy of insertion, if I may use that description. I am interested in what it says about academic objectivity. The movement - well it sponsors university chairs, it encourages academics to write books that endow Gülen with intellectual status. I'm thinking of the book by Jill Carroll for example which inserts him into the great tradition, by comparing him to people like Kant and so on. So, there is something that is at work here that evades really serious intellectual consideration and challenge perhaps to Gülen's ideas.

Dale Eickelman: I appreciate your question a lot. There is two things you can do. A lot of universities of the United States and Europe are very happy to sponsor various events that look benign especially where outsiders pay the bills. There's a price one pays for a little bit too much of that and your question already has embedded the answer, so I won't develop that too much. I was approached at one point by the movement - where I have taken the initiative to interview people at various times, I am quite interested in the movement - and at one point they approached me and said look we are having a lot of conferences and we are concerned that we don't know how to do things with a sense of academic objectivity, can you help us out. And it was a fascinating way to kind of be the only non-Turk involved in helping to organise a conference at one point - this was an event at Rice University that I helped organise which as you know is one of our very distinguished schools but they were paying the bills entirely - and there was a certain tension between whom they wanted to invite - they're people ready to do what I would call hagiography - and then having people who would be critical of the movement and standing back and doing what academics should do. But it is not remarkably different from the sort of thing I have seen in organising conferences as I have in the past with let's say my former Soviet counterparts, something I did in the late 80s. Academic objectivity is not something that just exists out there. It is something that you - it requires a real passionate professional commitment to do. But I find the attempt to learn how to reach out something rather positive even if it is rather awkwardly done. It is certainly not the sort of thing we have seen from our brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia, for example.

Margaret Coffey: I'm interested in the material that is not looked at - the kinds of contradictions that reformist Islamic thinkers face into like you know the tensions between Islamic and secular law and so on, they don't attract Gülen's attention. I'm interested in the fact that he doesn't really deal with the challenge that science presents to traditional forms of Islamic explanation. That sort of intellectual challenge is outside the frame of reference.

Dale Eickelman: Please inform me when the last American President dealt with creationism or other things.

Margaret Coffey: Can I say that you are using a strategy of avoidance there too! These are legitimate questions about the Gülen movement.

Dale Eickelman: My answer would be that if you are inspiring people to think in terms of homilies and other things, it in a sense would get off message for Gülen suddenly to really get into the detail in the homilies about him. If I were let's say the media management consultant for Gülen I would say the last thing you ought to be doing is getting into a question of science versus creation. His metaphors are open and they look like they are unresolved on those things, but when you see the product of the schools, or the product of what Zaman does for instance, you don't see homilies about creationism, you see pretty hard nosed reporting on a number of things.

Margaret Coffey: Zaman being the Gülen associated Turkish daily newspaper. For the record, this is how Zeki Saritoprak explains Gülen's view on the place of evolutionary theory in the discussion about the relationship between science and religion.

Zeki Saritoprak: I think Gülen greatly respects sciences because in the Islamic tradition always science and religion are compatible - always - because science is the book of God and the Quran also another book of God. Science is a search in the book of God. But science is always, in order to accept 100 per cent, they have to be sure 100 per cent. So any scientific view, in order to be accepted, it should not contradict the Quran. Now the Quran clearly says that humanity was created from Adam - and Eve. So I think because of this clear Quranic verse, Gülen supports creationism, if we can use the term creationism - he never uses this term I think. I think he considers the idea of evolution as theory and theory means is not proven yet. It's just a theory. Here we have a very strong statement of the Quran and we have a theory. So strong statement of the Quran would be accepted and preferred to a theory.

Margaret Coffey: Professor Zeki Saritoprak from John Carroll University. Fethullah Gülen has experienced many intellectual influences, from his early formation in the town of Erzurum, to his discovery of the teachings of Said Nursi, and then the exigencies of his encounters with the secular Turkish state. For seven years now he has lived in the United States. We've heard about the opportunities this has created, and the ways they have been used. We've heard about the implicit questions concerning the Gülen movement's structure and hierarchy, its intellectual credentials, its approach to issues about religion in the social sphere and the relationship between secularism and religion. What kind of influence has the experience of living in the United States exerted on Fethullah Gülen's thinking. Jill Carroll.

Jill Carroll: He certainly is critical of the West in many ways. He is critical of the raging secularism that he associates with the West. We have a different kind of secularism that is very celebratory and protective of religion, which is why all the world's religions are alive and well in the United States and thriving. And you can track in his writing: when he moved to the United States you can begin to see a little bit of a shift in his thinking about Western secularism, because he comes over here and he realises that it is more nuanced than he thought. And he admits it. He says it in his writing that even his thoughts about democracy and Western democracy have shifted and become more complicated. So what he says is that Islam has something really powerful to offer to the world that is absolutely dying from all the materialist philosophies that promise great things but in the end can't deliver. In his most recent stuff I mean what he argues is that we need a powerful synthesis of the best of the West, the best of knowledge and technology and science and progress, all of those things, with the wonderful spiritual traditions of the East, that we bring those together and that we take the whole thing to the next level.

Margaret Coffey: This has been Encounter, looking at the neo-Sufi movement within Islam led by Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen, who is at present based in the United States. You can find information about Gülen and about all the participants in this program at Encounter's website: abc.net.au/rn/encounter - and there you can download a transcript or a podcast version of the program. Thanks to Tim Symonds for technical production. I'm Margaret Coffey.

Further Information

Fethullah Gülen and his Liberal "Turkish Islam" Movement, by Bulent Aras and Omer Caha
Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal Volume 4, No 4 - December 2000

Producer

Margaret Coffey

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