Joshua D. Hendrick
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814770986
- eISBN:
- 9780814760475
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814770986.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
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 ...
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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”.Less
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”.