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This chapter explores peacebuilding resources in the Muslim tradition. Media attention has centered on the activities of a violent Muslim minority; larger Islamic movements, dedicated to the principle of nonviolence, have garnered much less of the spotlight. This chapter examines three such movements in detail—their historical origins, ethical commitments, and social and political practices. Two of the movements, centered around the teachings of Said Nursi and Fethullah Gülen, have emphasized the importance of education, dialogue, and service to the poor as imperatives in a modern, globalizing world. A third movement, the Asian Muslim Action Network, pools resources and expertise across a range of local and national partners in the region.

This chapter aims to examine the development of Asya Finans as an example of Islamic banking. Asya Finans is an Islamic bank in two respects: first, it avoids interest-based transactions and relies instead on profit-sharing; and second, it is affiliated to the Islamic Fethullah Gülen Community. The chapter addresses the following questions: 1) what is the difference between Asya Finans and conventional banks?; 2) what is the position of Asya Finans compared to other special finance houses; 3) what are the aims of Asya Finans; 4) does Asya Finans benefit from its association with the Fethullah Gülen Community; and 5) does the latter gain from having its own banking affiliate? Providing answers to these questions highlights the interaction between politics and and the Islamic sub-economy in Turkey.

This chapter focuses on M. Fethullah Gülen's charismatic leadership. It begins with an assessment of how Gülen was influenced by his predecessor, “Bediüzzaman” Said Nursi. It then presents Gülen from the perspective of his students and his influence on the collective consciousness of the cemaat. It also considers the Gülen Movement's (GM) use of ambiguity as a mobilizing strategy in Turkey, along with the GM's relationship to the Nur Movement in Anatolia. It shows how strategic ambiguity allows GM followers to claim that Gülen is at once the reason, motivator, and instigator behind the GM's transnational efforts, and that he leads no one and manages nothing.

Concluding Part 1, Chapter 3 provides an overview of the Gülen Movement’s intellectual development and growth, and how the negative narratives against it and Islam in Turkey have also been taken up abroad, which has stymied effective empirical research, as it has made it difficult to obtain interviews with graduates of the schools, leaving a major research gap.

This chapter focuses on a concrete case study in Turkey’s close neighborhood. It examines the exceptional role played by a social and religious organization that is unique in the Muslim world, namely the movement of Fethullah Gülen. The following questions are addressed: To what extent did the Gülen movement contribute to the development of Turkey’s soft power in both the South Caucasus and the Middle East?; reciprocally, how did the Gülen movement benefit from the government’s support and prestige to develop its own influence? Finally, the chapter questions the durability of the bond between Gülen and Turkey’s soft power through the lens of the clash between Gülen, the charismatic leader of the hizmet movement, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the Turkish executive power since 2002.

This chapter focuses on the Gülen Movement (GM) as a social organization that creates and reproduces a “community” of loyal and “self-sacrificing” individuals who seek to foster tolerance and dialogue in an increasingly interconnected world. It also examines Fethullah Gülen's mission to cultivate a “golden generation” under the guidance of “selfless volunteers” who constitute a twenty-first-century “army of light” of hizmet insanları, along with his rationalization of a composite of vertical, horizontal, diagonal patterns of authority via an articulated system of “applied Sufism” and its social capital. The chapter shows how the GM developed a complicated regime of affiliation that begins with a small and loyal community, extending outward to a once removed strata of “friends” and to a further removed strata of “sympathizers”.

This chapter focuses on the Gülen Movement's (GM) activities in the United States to illustrate how its reliance on strategic ambiguity seems to have reached its limits. The GM network is characterized by an ambiguous system of strong and weak social ties and client-patron relationships that extend throughout the global economy. When the GM fell victim to a state-led backlash against religious identity communities in Turkey in the late 1990s, Fethullah Gülen fled to the United States. In the United States, Gülen's followers were able to replicate their education and economic network. This chapter considers the GM's public relations efforts to promote Fethullah Gülen in the United States as well as its education initiatives in the country. It shows that the GM's U.S. experience is reflective of both the successes and the discontents of its strategically ambiguous “post-political” mobilization.

This book is a political ethnography that documents the emergence of the Gülen Movement (GM) as Turkey's most influential nonpartisan, nonmilitary social force and a primary player in the country's ongoing “passive revolution.” The GM was founded by M. Fethullah Gülen, the most widely known, and most controversial, religious personality in contemporary Turkey. Called “Hocaefendi” (esteemed teacher) by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Turks who devote themselves to his teachings, Fethullah Gülen began to attracted a following when he worked as a religious functionary in Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Drawing on fourteen months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the United States, this book explores the GM story to highlight the “post-political” turn in twenty-first-century Muslim politics as well as the compatibility between traditional Islam and liberal modernity.

This book concludes with a discussion of the Gülen Movement's (GM) role in the marketization of Muslim politics in Turkey. It explores the ambiguous politics of post-political, market Islam and how the development policies associated with Kemalist republicanism, institutional laicism, and limited democratization gave rise to a unique sociopolitical context in late twentieth-century Turkey. It then considers how Islam emerged as a cultural point of contention that pitted state against society in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people. It argues that Fethullah Gülen can be best defined as a collective voice of neoliberal social conservatism—free markets, pious nationalism, pluralist democracy, and civil dialogue. In other words, the GM is a collective mobilization whose actors seek to normalize neo-liberal wealth accumulation with aspirations for faith-based social change. In this way, the GM plays a central role in a grand effort to increase “the Muslim share” in Turkey's political economy and to rationalize (marketize) Turkish Islam.

Chapter 9 explores Islamic theology related to Jesus in light of its implications for Muslim-Christian cooperation, pluralism, and world peace. Saritoprak emphasizes the importance of dialogue and pluralism in Islamic tradition and discusses the place of dialogue and the concept of the “People of the Book” in the Qur’an. He builds on a consideration of Qur’anic and historical associations between Muslims and Christians to address their current relationships and the many practical, philosophical, and theological efforts at rapprochement now under way. Such efforts include those of Fethullah Gülen as well as the Islamic idea of a “common word” which is being used to advance Christian-Muslim fellowship and dialogue through the Common Word Initiative. Such initiatives, Saritoprak argues, hold out promise of possibilities for broader transreligious and transcultural dialogue.

In sharp contrast to most of the modern thinkers and activists we focused on in the previous chapter, the scholars and activists discussed in this chapter are distinguished by their inclination to engage the concept of jihād in a more diachronic and holistic manner and to emphasize its historically-conditioned multi-layered significations through time. The scholars discussed from this group include Muhammad ’Abdūh, Jamāl al-Banna, and Muhammad Sa’īd Ramadān al-Būtī from the pre-September 11 period. From after the September 11 period, the chapter goes on to survey a growing corpus of works in Muslim-majority societies which are vigorously arguing against contemporary militant and extremist understandings of jihād. Amog these works is an influential treatise written by the prominent Egyptian cleric and scholar ’Alī Jum’a. The chapter then proceeds to focus on three contemporary thinkers and writers who emphasize non-violent approaches to conflict resolution: Jawdat Sa’īd, Wahiduddin Khan, and Fethullah Gülen. This pacifist or near-pacifist strain is genuinely a modern development within Islamic thought and tradition and is grounded in a recuperation of the Qur’anic emphasis on ṣabr as the most important dimension of jihād broadly conceived.

This chapter examines why no coup has been staged by the Turkish military since November 2002. It first discusses the reasons behind the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) ascendancy in Turkish politics and evaluates its performance between 2002 and 2010. In particular, it considers how an Islamist-leaning party such as AKP achieved cultural hegemony in Turkey by focusing on the role played by Fethullah Gülen, founder of the Service Community (Hizmet Cemaat). It also analyzes how AKP altered Turkey's foreign policy that signaled a shift from Kemalist isolationism to what became known as “neo-Ottomanism.” Finally, it explains why the military expanded the Turkish security sector in 1980, along with the troubles faced by AKP that culminated in its loss of control on parliament in the 2015 national elections and the rise of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) led by Selahattin Demirtas. The chapter argues that the AKP not only curbed the military's political influence, but also resolved to punish officers for their past sins, and that the future of Turkish democracy remains uncertain.