Sotirios S. Livas, Professor – Ionian University / Greece
What is our impression left of Fethullah Gülen upon his death? What does he leave behind him? How could we describe and understand his legacy? Did he just bequeath us a decaying empire – as some imply? Or could we be talking about a flourishing multimillion-dollar estate that will turn out to be the apple of discord between different factions and sects? Some journalists are talking about a rather muddy and dubious itinerary. And some others conspiratorially link his name to that of Turkish president Erdoĝan’s, to the latter’s rise to power, to his political course and the final “rift” in their relations with the failed (or fake) “coup” becoming the perfect excuse for the deepening of the roots of the Erdoğanist deep state and the consolidation of an absolutist regime, dressed up in the mantle of “democracy”.
The way we choose to answer these questions reveals a lot about our perspectives of Turkey, its recent history, its traumas, its predicament, and its dramas. For me, what is most interesting in Gülen’s personal story is his many changes, his breathtaking ascent from the status of a typical underdog in Turkey’s rural 1940s to a man revered and admired by millions all over the world. His metamorphosis from an imam hunted down for his ideas in 1960s Turkey to the focal point and the inspiration of a network of enterprises, schools, universities, nongovernmental organizations, dialogue forums, and relief centers that have changed the lives of many people in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America. How has he managed to achieve all of that?
The verb “managed” obviously has to do with Turkey’s social, political, and religious dynamics and with its history of the last 50 years – a history mostly unknown and/or misunderstood by many Greeks. And if we choose to connect the verb “managed” to the many conspiratorial theories, we will simply have accepted our impotence, our incapacity to understand in depth, to know Turkey, its inhabitants, its faith, and its mentality – but also the ideas and work of a great intellectual and religious leader who has shaped with his presence a multifaceted social movement that has touched the lives of millions.
Those influenced by Gülen’s teachings, those near Hizmet, prefer to view him as a “bridge builder”. It is a very interesting term to characterize a man who started his professional career as an imam in 1960s cosmopolitan Izmir – one of the main bastions of Kemalist secularism – by talking about God and the faith in the city cafes and lokandas (a very innovative idea about that era’s Turkey). Going against the current of blindly obeying a state that used Islam for its reasons, Gülen initiated a certain mode of sentimental sermon preaching that touched and moved the simple “black” Turks of Anatolia. The term “bridge builder” has a lot to do with the rifts and chasms that cross the country Anatolia against the coast, rural Turks against city dwellers, and the faithful against the secularists.
But what is even more interesting in the life and the work of Fethullah Gülen is that his effort to build bridges across differences and chasms, among various people and ideas, takes on, during the ‘90s, a new, unexpected, international dimension that led to the outspread of Hizmet and the creation of hundreds of educational institutions in Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. And all these institutions had as their starting point this mentality – yet again – of unifying, of bringing together, of bridging the differences between Islamic morality and Western rationality, between faith and science. The success of the experiment, with thousands of young boys and girls across the world being educated in these schools, training centers, and universities is evident in the need for exactly such a type of education.
And after the regional, national, and international there came the fourth stage of Gülen’s metamorphosis: the universal. It was at this terrain that Gülen tried to smooth the apparent differences between various religious traditions and between various ideological inclinations towards faith. And once more there was a need for just such an approach. Gülen became the first Muslim religious leader to condemn 9/11, the terrorist violence in the name of Islam, as well as all kinds of religious extremism and radicalism. He was the first to initiate Islamic platforms of interreligious dialogue, displaying a spirit of Muslim pacifism so much in need at those times.
I am not going to expand on the matter of the much-discussed “relations” of Fethullah Gülen with Erdoğan. One might just note at this point that the latter, the underdog from Kasimpaşa managed to foresee and to exploit the lacunae of the Western liberal model – implementing a strategy of power grabbing and of elimination of all of his opponents.
Education, entrepreneurship, democracy, progress, dialogue, tolerance, empathy – all of the above “Western” terms but, in Gülen’s work they have taken on a distinctly Turkish and Islamic aura. And this is for me his greatest success, his most astounding exploit: that he has managed to turn the regional and the topical into the national, the national into the international, and the international into the universal. And in the course of his life, he has colored the “Western” friendly, tolerant, and open to all Islam with Turkish hues.
