The Future of the Gülen Movement in Transnational Political Exile: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a collection of articles that explore the altered conditions and future trajectory of the Gülen movement (GM) in the wake of the 15 July 2016 attempted coup in Turkey and the subsequent crackdown by the Turkish state. The question of survival has been thrown in to sharp relief by these events, which constitute nothing short of an existential crisis for the movement and have left members stranded in transnational political exile. How have the movement’s civil society, education, and business networks fared in transnational space under the new dispensation? Does the severing of the transnational Gülenist diaspora from its Turkish base portend ruin for the GM or are there sources of resilience? What are the likely contours of ongoing conflict between the Turkish state and the GM in transnational space? The article sets these questions in historical context, looking at the causes and consequences of the GM’s rise and spectacular fall. It then summarizes the approach and some of the main findings of the articles in the Special Issue, offering an outline of the broader lessons that emerge from them.

Introduction

Turkey’s 15 July 2016 attempted coup was a watershed event in the country’s recent history. While the exact details of the plot remain murky it is nevertheless widely accepted that the Gülen movement (GM)¹—or at least elements of it—were involved. In the wake of the coup, the country has born witness to the most extensive purge in the history of the Turkish Republic, a crackdown that has seen the assets and organizational capacity of the GM in Turkey comprehensively dismantled. The intimidation, arrest and purges of those accused of ties to the movement has been widely reported. Even the most fleeting or tenuous connection to the movement has been sufficient to force a person from a public-sector job. By the end of 2016, more than 42,000 military personnel (including 147 generals and admirals), police and judicial authorities had either been detained or dismissed. More than 23,400 employees in the educational bureaucracy have been suspended; the licences of teachers, doctors and lawyers have been revoked. The last big wave of suspensions and arrests—in late April 2017—brought the total number of civil servants and military purged to around 160,000. The Turkish state has shuttered all Gulen schools and taken over its media and business enterprises, all in all absorbing more than US$13 billion worth of GM assets in Turkey.²

Moreover, and as the contributions in the Special Issue detail, this conflict has moved into transnational space, with the Turkish state and the GM playing a global ‘cat and mouse game’, as the former seeks to replicate its decimation of the movement at home abroad. Today, nearly two years after the coup attempt, the GM is in disarray. The movement is, in effect, a community in transnational political exile.

The period since the July 2016 putsch in Turkey and the subsequent state of emergency and government crackdown thus clearly constitute a critical juncture for the GM, both at home and also abroad. The question therefore arises: where to now for the Gulen movement? In a sense, events over the last two years have simply reframed a question that was pertinent well before the coup attempt, especially given Gülen’s advancing age and increasingly fragile health. On the one hand, some have argued that the network and Gülen are virtually synonymous and that the movement could never survive his passing in any event. Others, in contrast, contend that Gülen is merely a symbolic leader and that the network will naturally endure long after he is gone, even despite the current state of affairs.

This Special Issue focuses on future of the GM in transnational political exile. It brings together a group of the world’s leading experts, all of whom have conducted extensive fieldwork on the movement and have taken a keen scholarly interest on the profound impact that Fethullah Gülen and his followers have had in Turkey and abroad in the last three decades, the full extent of which scholars and analysts are only now beginning to appreciate. Specifically, the collection of contributions in the issue address the following questions from an uncompromisingly critical standpoint:

1. How have the movement’s civil society, education, and business networks fared in transnational space under the new dispensation?

2. Does the severing of the transnational Gülenist diaspora from its Turkish base portend ruin for the GM or are there sources of resilience? If so, what are they?

3. What are the likely contours of ongoing conflict between the Turkish state and the GM in transnational space?

The strength of the contributions we have gathered in the Special Issue lie first and foremost in their grounding in extensive field research and close empirical work. The contributions of Liza Dumovich and Gabrielle Angey, in particular, offer insights from multi-year, multi-sited ethnographies, based on the authors’ doctoral research. Beyond this, we have assembled articles that cover a broad geographical scope, with comprehensive overviews of the GM’s situation in a range of countries and regions: France, Italy, Australia, the UK, Africa and Latin America. In addition, three contributions—those of Angey (Senegal), Dumovich (Brazil) and Luca Ozzano (Italy), present brand-new research on the movement in countries that have as yet attracted little scholarly attention.

The article proceeds as follows. It first briefly contextualizes the contributions in the Special Issue within the existing literatures, setting the research questions in historical context, and looking at the causes and consequences of the GM’s rise and spectacular fall. It then sketches a framework for thinking about the future of the movement, drawing on insights from social movement theory. The article concludes by briefly summarizing the contributions to the Special Issue.

High-minded Islamic ‘civic movement’ or ‘Trojan horse’?

The July 15 abortive coup exposed in the starkest terms not only how far the break between the movement and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) had grown but also, for the first time and in the most public way possible, the true extent of its political ambitions. As Hakan Yavuz details in his article in the Issue, the two had developed a powerful—if fragile—‘marriage of convenience’ after the AKP rose to power in 2002. However, once the alliance had served its principal purpose of neutralizing military influence in Turkish politics, however, cracks began to appear. Largely behind-the-scenes quarrelling burst into public view in December 2013, when a corruption scandal led to a bitter divorce between Gülen and Erdoğan; the Turkish government launched a crackdown on GM institutions in Turkey, first targeting its schools and later taking control of its media assets. Its involvement in the 2016 putsch is now increasingly seen as last-ditch effort by of the leading followers of the movement to strike a blow against the President Erdogan before the Turkish government moved to cleanse the armed forces of Gülenist influence.³

Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci’s recently published edited volume, Turkey’s July 15th Coup and the Gülen Movement, has been, in this context, a timely contribution in broaching the question of how this ostensibly faith-based voluntary network that has so publicly emphasized a humanitarian mission and commitment to peaceful dialogue by referring to itself as a community of Hizmet (service) could wind up implicated in a violent attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government, with the loss of some 270 lives.⁴ How could a supposedly high-minded religiously inspired ‘civic movement’ bring about such a putsch?

At the same time, it bears noting that the coup attempt was simply the latest and most dramatic in a series of high-profile political events in which the GM has been implicated, including the collapse of the Kurdish peace process in 2014,⁵ the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials, and the 2007 assassination of the well-known Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink.⁶

Existing literature on the GM both reflects and reinforces the highly divisive nature of Fethullah Gülen and his following. In Turkey itself, the movement was said at its peak to encompass millions of adherents and yet the group polarized public opinion long before the breakdown between the AKP and the movement burst into public view in 2013–2014.⁷ Moreover, the organization has for decades been accused of harbouring a secret agenda and of ‘engaging in elaborate deception’.⁸ İştar Gözaydın’s⁹ analysis of the movement captures this polarizing dynamic nicely, posing the question of whether the movement was a vehicle for ‘liberal democratization’ or a ‘Trojan horse’.

Over the years before the coup, a significant scholarly literature built up that contended that the movement was in fact nothing more than a religiously inspired, high-minded civic movement grounded in a commitment to education, interfaith dialogue, voluntarism and humanitarian service. Much—albeit not all—of this work is what has been referred to as ‘insider literature’. It is hardly surprisingly that a movement predicated on education, dialogue and publishing has produced generations of writers who have flourished in academia and publishing. The most prominent examples of these include works by Muhammet Çetin,¹⁰ Doğan Koç,¹¹ and Ali Bulaç,¹² all of whom have very close organic relations with the Movement. These works focus exclusively on the educational and dialogue arms of the GM, reinforcing the view that these formed its main line of ‘business’. While ostensibly ‘scholarly’, these ‘insider literatures’ were always deeply compromised by their lack of critical objectivity. Indeed, as several contributions in this Special Issue contend, they have formed a crucial part of the movement’s vast ‘public relations’ machine and its capacity to exercise what David Tittensor labels ‘knowledge capture’ in Western countries, ‘through production of insider research and the co-optation of independent researchers that has enabled it to present itself as the modern face of Islam, whilst overlooking its more problematic aspects’.¹³

Another body of scholarly work emerges from collaborations between the GM and academics from ‘outside’ the movement, of which Helen Rose Ebaugh’s¹⁴ extensive but uncritical sociological analysis of the movement is but the most notable example. These scholars have—no doubt unwittingly—essentially traded ‘access’ for critical objectivity. Generously subsidized and supported fieldwork, access to the ‘right’ members of the network, and opportunities to present work at GM-sponsored academic conferences and to publish with GM publishers perhaps make it inevitable that the movement’s ‘line’ is adopted and/or a great deal of critical perspective is lost.

Of course, not all scholarship from outside the movement is so compromised. The extensive and intensively well-researched collection of articles and monographs by Hakan Yavuz—arguably the world’s leading scholar on the movement—have provided the basis for a generation of scholars to frame and think about the contours of Gülen’s sprawling network.¹⁵ Several studies—often ethnographic work of the highest calibre emerging from the author’s doctoral research—are academically rigorous and retain a clear critical objectivity. Joshua Hendrick’s 2013 study Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World,¹⁶ David Tittensor’s The House of Service ¹⁷ fall into this category. This category of rigorous ‘outsider literatures’ also includes work by, Berna Turam,¹⁸ Bayram Balcı,¹⁹ Filiz Başkan,²⁰ Ahmet Erdi Öztürk and Semiha Sözeri,²¹ and Jeremy Walton.²²

Among the ‘outsider literatures’, however, comprehensive analyses of the GM’s organizational structure and financial operations are few and far between. While Başkan and Tittensor touch on these elements, their work is necessarily partial and focused on either a single dimension (e.g. schools) or region (e.g. Central Asia). The networks of financial and corporate activities and their influence within the movement are largely overlooked. Moreover, journalistic accounts, while often providing much-needed insight into certain aspects of the movement’s developments or activities, are typically impressionistic and partial (focusing, say, on Gülen’s biography or a limited historical period of the movement’s development) and do not provide a comprehensive overview of the organizational structure per se. None are conducted in a scholarly manner or with any academic rigour.

Additionally, several scholars have sought to systematically map out the contours or structure of the network. Hendrick’s²³ claim that the organization consists in four concentric circles that exist as ‘an ambiguous organization of graduated affiliation’ to Gülen—the cemaat (or inner core), arkadaşlar (friends), yandaşlar (sympathizers), and, finally, the outer ring of ‘unaware consumers’’ is one prominent example. Yavuz’s assertion that the ‘movement is based on three coordinated tiers: businessmen, journalists, and teachers and students’ is another. A more recent piece by Kahraman Şakul defines the GM as an example of Gerlach and Hine’s Segmented Polycentric Ideological Integrated Network.²⁴ In Şakul’s telling, Gülen’s ‘SPIN’ organization essentially has two structural elements—a ‘hidden’ one within the state and a ‘public’ one consisting of dialogue platforms and schools—that are essentially linked in the person of Fethullah Gülen. While no doubt telling us something, each of these conceptualizations is partial and limited in that it either misses crucial aspects of ‘coordination’ between the elements identified or only partially addresses the relationship between the ‘public’ face of the movement and its ‘inner’ or ‘hidden’ dimensions.

In summary, each of these approaches has captured a distinct aspect of the GM. In other words, the existing research—taken as a whole—bears all the hallmarks of the proverbial blind men and the elephant. As the story goes, each explores a different part of the elephant (claiming this part represents its ‘true’ nature), only to find when they compare notes that they are in furious disagreement. In seeking to address this—and to present some context for thinking about the future of the movement—in their contribution to the Special Issue, Simon P. Watmough and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk endeavour to present the different parts of the GM as elements of a combined whole, in order to ‘see’ the ‘entire elephant’ as it really existed up to 2016. Their core contention is that the Gulen movement at that time was best conceived as a transnational parapolitical network ²⁵ dedicated not to the service of humanity—as the GM’s favoured term for itself, Hizmet, implies—but to the service of power; namely, that of Fethullah Gülen.²⁶

None of us has a crystal ball. This Special Issue does not try to chart a definitive course for the future of the GM. What it does attempt—particularly in the country case studies—is to outline the key issues that will inform likely future trajectories for the movement over time.

Ruin or resilience? The future of the GM in political exile

In situating how the different contributions in the Issue approach thinking about the future of the GM in political exile, we sketch in brief here a framework that we elaborate in greater detail in our article in the Issue.²⁷ This is grounded in Martin Sökefeld’s observation that insights from social movement theory—namely, the analytical framework of opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and ideational structures—offers significant purchase in theorizing about diasporas in formation.²⁸

The deft negotiation of political opportunity structures has long been crucial to the success of the GM, which originated in Turkey in the late 1960s under the charismatic leadership of Fethullah Gülen. Over the decades, the GM expanded—seemingly exponentially—the number and influence of its affiliated schools, companies and trade associations, media and publishing holdings, and cultural centres dedicated to inter-faith dialogue across the world, seizing the opportunities offered by neo-liberal globalization and—as Caroline Tee and David Tittensor’s articles in the Issue discuss in detail—the yearning in the West for a model of ‘moderate’ Islam compatible with both capitalist market economics and liberal democracy. According to one count, at its peak there were around 300 affiliated schools in Turkey and over 1,000 of them in as many as 160 countries across the globe, including 120 charter schools in the United States. By 2008, The Economist would proclaim that the GM was ‘vying to be recognized as the world’s leading Muslim network’.²⁹

As scholars of political exile and conflict-generated diasporas have noted, the patterns in which conflicts are transported from the home country into transnational space are highly dependent on conditions in countries of settlement. We see tremendous variation in the opportunities present in different countries of settlement of the movement and in the pattern of the cat and mouse game being played by the Turkish state against it, especially in relation to the closure of schools. In the West, as Tittensor notes in his article in the Special Issue, Turkey’s efforts have redounded to little success—with Australia, the UK and Sweden likely to emerge as key ‘outposts of resistance’—whereas in other parts of the world they have, as in Central Asia but also in Africa, which is taken up in detail in Angey’s contribution in the Issue, focusing on Senegal. As Ozzano and Dumovich’s analyses also show, where the movement was relatively late to the party or had little footprint before 2016 (e.g. Italy and Brazil), there has been a real retrenchment as financial resources have dried up or members have moved on. There is, in short, a high likelihood of what Bayram Balcı refers to in his article as intensifying ‘localization’ of the movement in the various countries of settlement.

A far as ideational and mobilizing structures are concerned, GM public outreach and media enterprises are ‘playing to their strengths’ in using the network’s long-established PR skills and cultural diplomacy efforts to both lobby host publics and governments and launch a coordinated campaign of opposition to the President Erdogan and the ruling AKP government in Turkey, as a number of the contributions in the Issue point out.

At the same time, at the micro level there is evidence that ‘ordinary’ cemaat members are turning to a renewed emphasis on their religious faith in mobilizing to overcome the crisis, as the article by Liza Dumovich in the Issue maps out. As she notes, ‘The ubiquitous narrative among my interlocutors is that “Everything we are going through now happened to our Prophet, it happened to many prophets in the history of mankind. There is no problem, we know we are in the righteous path, and that is all that matters”’.³⁰

Contributions

M. Hakan Yavuz’s wide-ranging historical survey of the socio-cultural ground of the movement in a society governed by the Ottoman-Turkish ‘cemaat tradition’ provides much needed context for understanding both the rise of the GM and its tremendous impact on Turkish politics over the decades. The framework for understanding the intra-Islamist clash between the AKP and the GM he lays down is both detailed and comprehensive, casting the current crisis into its proper historical perspective and also placing it within the long evolution of relations between state and society that stands as the signal obstacle to enduring democratization in Turkey. His recounting of the movement’s development and his closely researched work on the AKP–Gülen war provide the basis for understanding the implications for the future, not only of the movement, but of the Turkish state more generally.

Based on interviews with over 70 key members of the movement, Simon P. Watmough and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk map the transition of the pre-coup GM to its ‘future present’ as a community in transnational political exile through an analysis of its organizational and financial structure. They contend that the GM as it stood in 2016 is best conceived as a transnational parapolitical network—a ‘diaspora by design’—dedicated principally to the service, not of humanity, but of power. They show how, to that end, Gülen and his supporters from the late 1990s crafted a complex transnational structure that combined extensive financial operations with a distinctive organizational morphology. They map out the contours of this structure and show how it emerged over time via instrumentalisation of Gülen’s parapolitical ideology and the steady accretion of politically directed educational, media publishing and corporate projects. They also offer a framework for thinking about how the movement may evolve in future as it transitions to a fragmented transnational community in political exile.

Gabrielle Angey focuses on the collapse of the longstanding collaboration between the Turkish state and the GM in extending Turkey’s presence in Africa, through the case study of Senegal. She tracks how, after the 15 July 2016 crisis, the Turkish government has sought to apply the domestic model of state takeover of Gülen schools to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Turkish state has used a semi-public agency, the Maarif Foundation, in this strategy. Emphasizing the varying political opportunity structures across the continent, she suggests that countries that are politically weakest and most dependent economically are more likely to follow Turkey’s recommendations. Through an analysis of the Senegal case—where movement schools were closed—Angey contends that transnational social movements based on secrecy and informality—while more exposed to the spread of repression—are also better suited to local re-appropriation and reconfiguration.

Bayram Balci’s article charts the impact of the movement in transition in Europe, with a particular focus on the French case. His discussion emphasizes the localization of the conflict between the Turkish state and the movement there and how Gülen institutions in the country, such as the Zaman France newspaper, were adversely affected by the AKP–Gülen split even before the 2016 coup. He contends that in France especially the institutional decline of the movement is likely to continue, especially in light of the tensions with other parts of the significant Turkish diaspora in the country. He notes, however, that the distant past may be a good guide to the future, noting that—like Said Nursi’s before him—Gülen’s followers are likely to fracture into scattered cemaat communities after his departure.

In her article, Liza Dumovich focuses on the GM in Brazil and Latin America more generally. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work over several years, her article analyses how ordinary followers of Fethullah Gülen have been negotiating their mission of hizmet in the transition to political exile after 2016. She argues that in the region—where the movement has not had a particularly strong or large footprint—community building and social action have been enabled by what she terms ‘pious creativity’, an ‘agentival capacity’ for engaging in alternative forms of action. Through her reading of members’ agency, she finds a wellspring of resilience among ordinary members in Brazil, a factor that will no doubt have a major impact on the survival of the movement there. She also reminds us that ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to at the more senior levels in the network), this is a religious community of pious Muslims who draw profound personal inspiration from Gülen himself but also the life of the Prophet Mohammed.

Luca Ozzano sheds light on the (relatively) late migration of the GM from the ‘New Rome’ (an early Byzantine designation for the city that would become Istanbul) to the original city of seven hills in the early 2000s. Analysing the trajectories of several Gülen organizations: the Tevere Institute, the Alba Intercultural Organization, and the Milad Intercultural Organization. He maps a distinct downsizing of GM activities in Italy since 2016, impacted by limits in human capital and recruitment, but also more in relation to intra-diaspora cleavages, where many members (especially those belonging to the outer circles, who attended Gülen events only occasionally) have distanced themselves from the movement since the start of the feud with the Turkish government and the crackdown on Gülen. He notes as well how Gülen organizations have been affected by the pro-AKP government orientation among many non-Turkish Muslims living in Italy.

Focusing on London—which she contends has the chance to become an increasingly significant centre for Gülenist activity in the post-coup era—Caroline Tee’s article analyses the strategic outreach and cultural diplomacy of the movement in generating a large stock of political capital in the UK, from which it has been able to draw as it transitions to political exile. Within the frame of Mahmoud Mamdani’s discussion of the narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims after September 11, the article shows how the GM has capitalized on this narrative in recent years and established itself as a voice of ‘good’ Islam in the context of British debates on Islam and radicalization.

Very much in line with Caroline Tee, David Tittensor’s article focuses on the capacity of the GM in Australia to legitimize its schools through association with powerful institutional players within the Australian political firmament, largely through a process he calls ‘knowledge capture’. His article shows how argue the GM has made excellent use of opportunity structures in both academia and the NGO sector where it has been able to effectively control the narrative about it and to engage effectively in cultural diplomacy, particularly amongst the political class. While the GM has taken a significant hit financially it still has capacity going forward in Australia to function as an ‘outpost of resistance’. He concludes that, given the current political climate around Islam in Australia is likely to continue, the GM is more likely to be welcomed than shunned.

Acknowledgements

We would very much like to thank the editor of Politics, Religion & Ideology, Naveed S. Sheikh, for his generous encouragement and support of the Special Issue, our seven authors for their outstanding contributions, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Simon P. Watmough is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. His research interests sit at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics and include varieties of post-authoritarian states, political change in developing societies, the role of the military in regime change, and the foreign policy of post-authoritarian states in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His work has been published in Urban Studies and Turkish Review. In addition to his academic publications, he is also a regular contributor to The Conversation and other media outlets.

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is currently a PhD candidate and a research assistant at the Faculty of Law Social Science and History at the University of Strasbourg and he is EUREL’s (Sociological and Legal Data on Religions in Europe and Beyond) Turkey correspondent. He is also a Swedish Institute fellow at Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) for the year of 2018 and a former fellow at Centre for Southeast European Studies at University of Graz. He is the co-editor of Authoritarian Politics in Turkey: Elections, Resistance and the AKP with Bahar Baser (IB Tauris, 2017). He has also published articles in Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism, Oxford Bibliographies, Journal of Research and Politics on Turkey, Muslim Year Book (Brill) and Journal of Balkan and Near East Studies, and Religion and Politics.

ORCID

Simon P. Watmough http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5137-9119

Notes

1 The question of what to call the sprawling transnational network of which the Islamic scholar and preacher Fethullah Gülen is the undisputed leader is no trivial matter. For an organization that polarizes Turkish opinion like almost no other, how one chooses to designate the group is often an indication of where one stands in ideological relation to it. Gülen and his followers generally refer to the network as a community of Hizmet (service), to emphasize it apparent commitment to the service of humanity and peaceful dialogue. Another common name, used most widely among ordinary Turks, is Cemaat (congregation), which implies an organization of individuals working together under the same leadership, aim, and philosophy. Others have called it the ‘Gülen community’, and the ‘Voluntary movement’, while highly pejorative labels have more recently come into vogue, including ‘Parallel structure’ and the Turkish government’s preferred moniker since the July 2016 coup attempt, ‘FETÖ’ (Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organization). In the interests of academic objectivity and critical distance, in this Special Issue we prefer to use the more neutral term ‘Gülen movement’ (GM).

2 Anthony Skinner, ‘Turkish Business Suffers Under Erdogan’s Post-coup Gulen Purge’, CNBC News (online), 7 November 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/07/turkish-business-suffers-under-erdogans-post-coup-gulen-purge.html.

3 M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balcı, eds., Turkey’s July 15th Coup: What Happened and Why (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018).

4 Ibid.

5 Galip Dalay, ‘The Kurdish Peace Process in the Shadow of Turkey’s Power Struggle and the Upcoming Local Elections’, Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 25 March 2014, http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2014/03/2014324115034955220.html; Mahmut Bozarslan, ‘Did Gulenists Sabotage Ankara’s Kurdish Peace Process?’, Al-Monitor, 17 August 2016, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/08/turkey-did-gulenists-sabotage-kurdish-peace-process.html.

6 Dani Rodrik, ‘Ergenekon and Sledgehammer: Building or Undermining the Rule of Law?’, Turkish Policy Quarterly, 10:1 (Spring 2011), pp. 99–109.

7 This is why Filkins could note in 2012—when the AKP-Gülen alliance was still (at least as far as the public was concerned) strong—that the GM ‘is reviled and feared by much of Turkey’s population’. ‘Letter from Turkey: The Deep State’, The New Yorker, 12 March 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_filkins?currentPage=all.

8 David Tittensor, ‘The Gülen Movement and the Case of a Secret Agenda: Putting the Debate in Perspective’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23:2 (April 1, 2012), p. 163.

9 İştar Gözaydın, ‘The Fethullah Gülen Movement and Politics in Turkey: A Chance for Democratization or a Trojan Horse?’, Democratization, 16:6 (2009), pp. 1214–1236.

10 Muhammet Çetin ‘The Gülen Movement: Its Nature and Identity’, in İhsan Yılmaz (ed.) Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the Gülen Movement (London: Leeds Metropolitan University Press, 2007), pp. 377–90.

11 Doğan Koç ‘Hizmet Movement’s Effects on PKK Recruitment and Attacks’, Turkish Journal of Politics, 4:1 (2013), pp. 65–84; ‘Strategic Defamation of Fethullah Gulen: English vs. Turkish’, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, 4:1 (2016), pp. 189–244.

12 Ali Bulaç Din, kent ve cemaat: Fethullah Gülen örneği (Harbiye, İstanbul: Ufuk Kitap, 2008).

13 David Tittensor, ‘The Gülen Movement and Surviving in Exile: The Case of Australia’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 19:1 (2018), p. 5. doi:10.1080/21567689.2018.1453272.

14 Helen Rose Ebaugh, The Gülen Movement: A Sociological Analysis of a Civic Movement Rooted in Moderate Islam (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2010).

15 M. Hakan Yavuz ‘Towards an Islamic Liberalism?: The Nurcu Movement and Fethullah Gülen’, The Middle East Journal (1999), pp. 584–605; Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2003); Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

16 Joshua Hendrick, Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013).

17 David Tittensor, The House of Service: The Gulen Movement and Islam’s Third Way (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

18 Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

19 Bayram Balcı, Orta Asya’da İslam misyonerleri: Fethullah Gülen okulları (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005).

20 Filiz Başkan ‘The Fethullah Gülen Community: Contribution or Barrier to the Consolidation of Democracy in Turkey?’, Middle Eastern Studies, 41:6 (2005), pp. 849–61.

21 Ahmet Erdi Öztürk and Semiha Sözeri, ‘Diyanet as a Turkish Foreign Policy Tool: Evidence from the Netherlands and Bulgaria’, Politics and Religion (March 2018), pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S175504831700075X.

22 Jeremy F. Walton, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

23 Hendrick, op. cit, p. 122.

24 Kahraman Şakul, ‘Bir SPIN Şebeke Örneği Olarak Gülen Cemaati: Sarımsak ve Soğan Demetlerinden Bir Öbek’, T24 Online, 29 July 2016, http://t24.com.tr/yazarlar/kahraman-sakul; Luther P. Gerlach, ‘The Structure of Social Movements: Environmental Activism and Its Opponents’, in John Arquilla and David F Ronfeldt (eds) Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001), pp. 289–310.

25 The concept of ‘parapolitics’ we use here serves as a useful way to frame the movement’s well-known aversion to transparency and penchant for evasion. According to Peter Dale Scott, a seminal figure in the field of parapolitical studies, a parapolitical organization is one that engages in a ‘practice of politics’: (1) ‘in which accountability is consciously diminished’; (2) in which political action is ‘covert’ (i.e. based on ‘indirection, collusion, and deceit’ and that; (3) typically involves ‘political exploitation of […] parastructures, such as intelligence agencies’ or other coercive arms of the state’. See Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), p. 238.

26 Simon P. Watmough and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, ‘From “Diaspora by Design” to Transnational Political Exile: The Gülen Movement in Transition’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 19:1 (2018), pp. 1–20. doi:10.1080/21567689.2018.1453254.

27 Ibid.

28 Martin Sökefeld, ‘Mobilizing in Transnational Space: A Social Movement Approach to the Formation of Diaspora’, Global Networks, 6:3 (2006), pp. 265–284.

29 ‘How Far They Have Travelled’, The Economist, 6 March 2008, https://www.economist.com/node/10808408.

30 Liza Dumovich, ‘Pious Creativity: Negotiating Hizmet in South America after July 2016’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 19:1 (2018), p. 11. doi:10.1080/21567689.2018.1453267.