New book counters Turkey’s claims about exiled Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen

Author Jon Pahl. Image courtesy of YouTube.

NEW YORK — In a recent sermon posted on his YouTube channel, Fethullah Gülen sits in a beige armchair flanked by bookshelves and laments the state of the world.

“Every day we hear heartbreaking happenings,” Gülen says, according to the video’s subtitles. “All these happenings are like drops of blood, dripping to my heart, too. They disturb my sleep and trigger my various illnesses. But we have to grit our teeth and be patient.”

The 78-year-old Turkish Islamic scholar’s teachings started an international movement among Muslims that embraces modern democracy in Muslim-majority countries and focuses on individual morality and faith. After serving as a state imam, Gülen left Turkey in 1999.

A new biography, Fethullah Gülen: A Life of Hizmet by Jon Pahl, a historian of religion and a professor at United Lutheran Seminary, examines the imam’s life and philosophy as well as the claims made against him by the Turkish government. Hizmet is a Turkish word for service to the common good.

Pahl addresses Turkey’s narrative about Gülen in three parts: that he is the leader of an armed terrorist organization, the leader of a religious cult and the leader of a parallel state designed to undermine the Turkish government. Those are lies, Pahl told an audience in Manhattan on Nov. 13.

“They are inherently implausible if you actually read anything that Mr. Gülen has written, if you get to know the people he has inspired and if you understand authentic Islam,” he said at Peace Islands Institute New York, a nonprofit run by supporters of Gülen.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Gülen used to be allies. Both called for a return to Islamic values in Turkish public life after years of secular rule by a military-controlled government. After being arrested, detained and then freed, Gülen traveled to the U.S. for medical treatment in 1999. He has diabetes and a heart condition. He remained in the U.S. after formal charges were filed against him in Turkey in 2000. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Erdogan came to power with the help of Gülen’s followers, said to number in the millions in Turkey. The Hizmet or Gülen movement gained widespread support because of Gülen’s focus on education reform. His supporters ran schools throughout the country and obtained positions in all levels of government. 

This vast bureaucratic community helped Erdogan wrestle control from the military. As prime minister, he and his party, the AKP, then struggled for power with Gülen’s followers. Erdogan threatened to shut down schools in 2013 and began purging suspected Gülen supporters from public agencies.

In 2016, an attempted coup killed more than 200 and injured more than 2,000. Erdogan held onto power but blamed Gülen and his followers. Thousands of suspected Gülenists were arrested and many more purged from public roles. Media outlets suspected of being loyal to Gülen were shut down. Gülen denied any responsibility for the coup and suggested it was orchestrated by Erdogan as a justification for consolidating power and crushing dissent.

Pahl argues that Erdogan used Gülen and his movement to gain power and turned on them once he had it, a dynamic that continues today. It was never really an alliance, he said, and understanding Gülen through a primarily political lens is a profound mistake. Erdogan has attained tremendous political power while Gülen has lived piously at a humble estate in the Pocono Mountains.

“Just compare the living styles if you want to know the ethical weight of one versus the other,” Pahl said.

He listened to Gülen’s research in the course of his research but said their arguments don’t hold up. There is no objective research to support the Turkish government’s narrative, he said.

“The critics are almost universally motivated by political interests,” Pahl said. “Either they are secularists who oppose any role for Islam in Turkish public life, or Islamists who oppose Gülen’s openness to dialogue with Jews and Christians.”

The biography’s author being American is significant, said Emre Celik, executive director of Peace Islands Institute New York. Pahl’s perspective is unbiased by Turkey’s political winds, he said. The book also stands to bring the concept of civil Islam, or a democratizing vision of the faith, to Americans who are more used to reading about Islam in the context of conflict and terrorism. 

Pahl said that any effort to deport Gülen to Turkey should be resisted, as it would be a death sentence. President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn was investigated for plotting to kidnap the cleric and fly him to Turkey, and Rudy Giuliani each reportedly pushed for that to happen. Trump was open to it, The Washington Post reported, but decided against it after aides advised him it could lead to a legal mess. Gülen is a permanent U.S. resident.

Assimilation is one of the issues Gülen preaches about. The millions of Muslims living in countries that have different belief systems and lifestyles should endear others to Islam’s values by exalting them, he says. Muslims should display “exemplary action and conduct” that reflects what they profess their faith to be about.

“Standing firm against luxury and pomp, we should build greenhouses and stay safe inside them,” he said.

After nine years of research, Pahl spent three hours interviewing Gülen at his home in Pennsylvania. Having studied the emergence of religious peacebuilding, Pahl said he deserves recognition as one of the religious peacebuilders of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

At the heart of his teachings is the Sufi notion of the power of love to transform people and societies from the ground up, he said. The politicization of Gülen has been in spite of the man, and serves the interests of Turkey’s ruling class.

“But of course this isn’t happening only in Turkey,” Pahl said. “This kind of backlash to globalization is occurring in many different contexts now including, unfortunately, here in the United States where people are organizing a base -- a political base -- by scapegoating, by generating an enemy ‘other’ that can organize a fragile political power base.”