Learnings, Challenges and Impulses for Hizmet Youth Leadership Development: Drawing on Research into Fethullah Gülen‘s Hermeneutic of Islam and into Hizmet in Contextual Transitions

Dr. Paul Weller

Something of a Foreword

Over the around two decades in which I have had some experience of engaging with Hizmet, it has always struck me that it is noteworthy that Hizmet invites people who, like myself, are from beyond Hizmet, both to critique and even to interpret it in ways that not many groups of any religious background are willing to do. Of course, this readiness in part comes from the teaching emphases of Fethullah Gülen, in which he argues that it is precisely because of what should be learned from Islam, that one should be open to embracing such critiques. And for those of us who are outside Islam or Hizmet, the fact that we do not always take the opportunities afforded to us and the invitations made to make our honest (including properly critical) input is not the fault of Hizmet but is rather a matter of our scholarly and/or religious/ethical responsibility and/or failings.

One of the by-products of engaging with and researching Hizmet over a couple of decades is that one is sometimes asked by Hizmet people or groups for recommendations. In general, such an invitation is something that in the role of a scholar in the non-confessional study of religion one is somewhat reluctant to accept. As the scholar George Chryssides noted when reflecting on questions arising even from the fact of engagement in such study of religion and religious groups:

“Am I disturbing the ‘ecological balance’ of the religions I study? I think the answer must be yes. Does it matter? Yes, it probably does, but to ask the question, ‘Should I help to effect change in the religions I study?’ is really to ask, ‘Should I be studying these religions at all?’ The only live question is, ‘How much should I be changing them’, for changing a religious community by one’s presence and one’s study is inevitable, even though the change may be small.” (quoted in Weller 2022b, p. 232)

However, whatever is thought about the above, what would probably be seen as legitimate by the vast majority of scholars is for a scholar to try as fully as possible understand what is going on within a movement (in this case Hizmet) that is being researched; and, when setting that within a broader analytical framework, as far as possible to be in a position, in a responsible way to hold up what might be called an ‘informed mirror’ of the movement to people both within it and to those beyond it. Trying to offer such an ‘informed mirror’ is what I will at least be attempting to do in this paper.

In doing so, I will draw upon material from two scholarly monographs that were written by myself and were the first to be completely researched and written following the July 2016 events in Turkey and their aftermath. These are Fethullah Gülen’s Teaching and Practice: Inheritance, Context, and Interactive Development (Weller 2022a) and Hizmet in Transitions: European Developments of a Turkish Muslim-Inspired Movement (Weller, 2022b) both of which interview contributions from people who are themselves within Hizmet, and whose voice and perspectives I will be trying as faithfully as possible to bring forward and reflect in terms of what I also personally might have to say.

Challenges and Opportunities for Hizmet Youth

Working within the issues and limitations noted in the previous section, in what follows I am going to try to identify, highlight, and to some extent myself briefly attempt to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that I think are presented in the context of growing leadership among Hizmet youth – albeit that much more important than my identification and preliminary discussion of these will be your reception and affirmation or otherwise of these challenges, and then your own discussion of any such, in formulating your own ways forward for the future. In relation to Hizmet youth, close associate of Fethullah Gülen, Hakan Yesilova, referred to a dream that his father had, in which:

“He saw in this dream that he and my younger brother enter a mosque to pray and then somehow my younger brother goes to lead the prayer, and he can see other people unhappy seeing a young man to lead the prayer. My father turns and shouts at them, “Look he is young but he knows Islam better than you.” (G 69)

Within both Turkish culture and more broadly within what might be described as Muslim majority cultures, a primacy of respect, and especially so in religious matters, is generally given to elders. And there is, of course, good reason for this in terms of the accumulated life experience that such can achieve in working through the implications of Islam in relation to the changing individual, familial and societal circumstances of life. However, age alone does not confer wisdom, while youth alone should not disqualify one from making a valuable contribution from which others, if they are humble and open enough, can and should learn. Indeed, with reference especially to the time that will follow the departure from this earthly life of Fethullah Gulen, one elder in Hizmet, Şerif Ali Tekalan refers to Gulen himself as saying:

“I cannot speak for the future, but I am here now. I can speak about the issues of today. In the future, the people who will be present in the future will decide themselves,’ while Tekalan himself said that “I think that for the future after Fethullah Gülen, the Hizmet Movement will continue. There are so many young people all over the world who didn’t even see Fethullah Gülen, but they know his ideas.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 202).

Indeed, from his earliest periods of teaching onwards, Fethullah Gülen has spoken of the need for the raising up of a “Golden Generation” of young Muslims, deeply formed with the spirit of the meaning of the Qur’an and shaped by example prophet and his Sunnah while, through their educational development, also being fully equipped to engage in all contexts and at all levels in the wider society. Originally this vision was developed with reference to Turkish society, but in arguing that: “The generation that will become responsible for bringing justice and happiness to the world should be able to think freely and respect freedom of thought. Freedom is a significant dimension of human free will and a key to the mysteries of human identity” (Gülen 2004, p. 99) Fethullah Gülen’s words, I believe, continue to have a resonance, challenge and promise for the development of leadership among Hizmet young people, albeit now on a much wider global stage. In relation to his own approach as a scholar, Gülen himself has explained that, while “Taking the Qur’an and Sunnah as our main sources and respecting the great people of the past,” one should also proceed “in the consciousness that we are all children of time” and that, because of this “we must question the past and the present” (Gülen 2002, p. 118). And this is why Hizmet young people, who are children of the most recent time, in principle have such an important role to play in taking Hizmet forward. Put simply, Gülen summarized his challenge in the following way, which is a challenge that, I believe, is one of especial relevance and opportunity for young people as they develop leadership within Hizmet, and which is, namely: “We must review our understanding of Islam.” And as Fethullah Gülen went on further to explain:

“I’m looking for laborers of thought and researchers to establish the necessary balance between the unchanging and changing aspects of Islam and, considering such jurisprudential rules as abrogation, particularization, generalization and restriction, can present Islam to the modern understanding” (Gülen 2002, p. 118).

But the question is, how ready to take up this challenge are emerging young leaders within Hizmet?

Rootedness in Qur’an and Sunnah and Openness to Revelation in this Age?

As one of Fethullah Gülen’s close associates, Mustafa Özcan, has put it, “Hojaefendi is going to the true and authentic, mainstream resources of Islam” but also that he does this “according to the needs and the requirements of this age.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 71). And it also to this creative combination that young people in Hizmet are called to do since because of your youth, you have the potential to be in tune with the present age. In other words, as Fethullah Gülen himself endeavored to do, it is important for young people within Hizmet to recognize that, while it is important to recognize the social fact that temporal and geographical contexts profoundly affect and shape one’s interpretation and application of Islamic sources, it is additionally important consciously to take these contexts into account when working with these sources. Combined with this is what Fethullah Gülen’s close associate, Ahmet Kurucan highlighted from his own experience of Fethullah Gülen’s basic methodological approach and pedagogical practice. And this is that, apart from the mainstream sources of Islam, everything else should be open to question:

“On October 23 1985, when we started our first circle with Hojaefendi, we picked up some of those classical books from the main literature of Islamic scholarship, like Bukhari, and others. He said before we started reading, I’m not asking you to adopt skepticism as a profession, but you should be skeptical with whatever deductions I may come with those readings. You should always ask the reason and the main ground for those arguments. So that’s how we started off. But, certainly, we worked with the Qur’anic scripture and Hadith; this literature has everything very clearly defined. With the exception of these sources, there is nothing else that you should not approach with skepticism.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 81)

But in addition to this, while Gülen’s teaching does not depart from the basic sources of the Qur’an, it also does not see the truth or revelation as being either historically ‘isolated’ or ‘imprisoned’ in the ‘frozen’ historical deposit of an ideal past, but rather calls to each different generation in each different place to engage with it in fresh ways that will bring new insight to the whole. Or, as another of Fethullah Gülen’s close associates, Hamdullah Öztürk, explained it, in Fethullah Gülen’s understanding:

“Revelation is not something that was revealed fourteen hundred years ago, but is something that is being revealed to each and every one of us right now, right in this moment. And how we are going to understand that message in this time and space, and actualize it in our relations with nature, with the environment, and with the rest of the human beings.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 77)

And in terms of the some of the implications of this for emergent young leaders in Hizmet, as another of Fethullah Gülen’s close associates, Muhammad Çetin explained things with reference to the somewhat flowery and classical style of Fethullah Gülen’s Turkish, Fethullah Gülen himself says of himself and his teaching that “I know that the younger generations will not understand me, will not understand my books, will not have that language capacity.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 211).  However, in terms of his vision of what lies at the heart of Islam, when asked about this in interview, Fethullah Gülen said, “I think if you are going to name one thing that lies at the heart of Islam I would say that is love.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 234). In relation to this central principle, as Gülen’s close associate Reşit Haylamaz explained the dynamic of Hizmet from its beginning as being that: “Only perhaps the major principles were taken from Hojaefendi. For instance, one of those principle was to establish contact with other people. People took on this principle and put it into practice in their own way. It was an ongoing interaction”. (quoted in Weller 2022b, p. 146). Because of this, as Çetin has also emphasized: “Hojaefendi is encouraging – take the message and you yourself do something: it’s not my work, you process it.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 211). So if emergent young leaders with Hizmet can rise to the challenge and opportunity of reinvigorating Islam by a questioning and contextualized encounter with what is at its heart, then it should be possible for Hizmet to continue dynamically to evolve into the future rather than become frozen in time.

Muslim Reactivity and Islamic Confidence in Facing New Challenges

In contrast to the insecure, reactive and combative forms of Islam that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the face of the marginalization of Muslims and injustice towards them, in his teaching and his practice Fethullah Gülen has tried to emphasize and also to embody that being Muslim in reaction to something is at best limiting, can also at the least become distorting and at the worst turn into something that then becomes destructive of both others and of oneself.

Away from that danger, Fethullah Gülen’s teaching arguably promotes the kind of practice in which authentic Islam can itself become a resource for Muslims to engage with the issues and challenges of the world as it is, while also being capable of communicating in a serious way with people of other religious traditions, as well as those of secular perspectives and thus become a form of Islam that engenders a proper sense of self-confidence which is fully contextualized and engaged in a way of individual integrity and collective proactive action.

If this is the case, then it will be important for emergent young leaders in Hizmet to be shaped not only by the sources of Islam since, as Fethullah Gülen has strikingly expressed it, “If Islam is understood in its original nature, I think in conjunction, in combination with other systems, it has a potential to make a great contribution to humanity” – a perhaps challenging statement in which Fethullah Gülen goes beyond the relatively commonplace attempt to distinguish between a culturally inherited Islam and a ‘proper’ Islam to refer to the potential of Islam “in combination with other systems” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 131) rather than seeing Islam in a kind of self-sufficient isolation.

This in turn leads to a challenge for emergent young leaders in Hizmet to discover the Islamic confidence to explore what can be universally shared with people of other religions and none and to be ready to engage in practical projects together, all of which entails a readiness to undertake Muslim self-criticism as well as to be challenged mutually and to learn from one another. As Hakan Yeşilova explained it: “What Hojaefendi brought to us was that the world is, as he kept saying, a global village now, you have to go anywhere you can to interact with the world; give whatever you may; but also learn from them. And this is the true nature of our times.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 101).

In relation to such opportunities and challenges, what Gülen’s methodology offers can perhaps be characterized as an ethical theology or a theological ethics that bears witness to the revelatory truth that it claims to have received and which translates that into a style of Muslim living in a religiously plural world in which modesty and integrity are combined with realism and distinctiveness. Such living gives Muslims, but also people of all religions and none, the social and theological space to witness their own understanding of truth as well as to be free to make their response to what is shared with them by others.

Indeed, as Hizmet and Islam are taken forward, the likelihood is that completely new and unanticipated challenges will emerge and will need to be faced. And as Kerim Balcı has noted, it is likely that the main human challenges of the future will be global in scope and will have impact not only on Muslims and Hizmet but also on people of all religious traditions, and indeed on all humanity. Therefore, in order for Hizmet to be equipped both to face and to contribute to meeting many of the challenges of the future, emergent young leaders in Hizmet will need to be ready to engage in what might be called a dialogical form of ecumenical ijtihad in action. In recounting a talk that he had given in a Jewish context, Balcı notes that:

I spoke about the challenge of artificial intelligence and genome editing. I said you might think religion is altogether finished, you know, written, we have the Mishnah, Talmud, and you know, what do you need further, but I am going to ask you a few questions. All these driverless cars, they are not learning from the code. They are learning from themselves, from observations, and in critical situations they are making decisions to kill this person and not this person. And they are actors: for the first time in human history, somebody other than a human being is an actor [agent]. We don’t have theology for non-human actors [agents], you know.

In Islam, especially, we don’t have much place for non-human actors, we altogether erased everything other than human being and jinn, from theological discussion, you know. We simply say that animals do not go to heaven or hell, finished. I have problems with that. But robots – is there a place in Paradise for robots, or hell? Or if a driverless car kills somebody, who is going to pay for it. Do we just switch it off and that’s it? How many people were involved in writing of the code? Are we going to go back to the coders and so on? People buy code from a code library and use code from there. Are we going to go back to the code library? It’s a challenge. (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 226)

In thinking Islamically about such challenges in relation to which it would seem likely that there are no direct Qur’anic answers, Ahmet Kurucan invoked the relevance of a traditional Islamic model, as follows:

“There is this very great example of when the Prophet was sending away as an envoy one of his companions – Muadh bin Jabal – as a governor to Yemen. And he asked him, how are you going to give your decisions? He said, well, I will look up in the Qur’an. If you cannot find it in the Qur’an what are you going to do? Well, I will look it up in your example. And if you don’t find anything in my example? Well, I will develop my own reasonings and come to my deductions out of it. And then the Prophet praised God and said I am grateful to God for giving me such friends who can use their own deductions.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 207)

Indeed, this is an example which, arguably, Fethullah Gülen himself has followed. Therefore this example also points to the possibility that the most appropriate way of understanding Gülen’s inheritance might not be so much to do with the substance of a body of his teaching that then gets passed on. Rather, it could be something which, despite its rather ‘clinical’ sounding tone, might be closer to that of a methodology, a way of understanding, developing, living out the impulses from Islam in the world, and therefore, as something which is more to be inducted as a way of living, being, and acting. As Keles ̧ neatly expresses it, this is: “The difference between internalizing the methodology of your teacher, or the methodology of a particular line of thought, versus reproducing the product of that methodology that is time bound.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, pp. 215-216)

Towards Some Ongoing “Conclusions”

In moving towards a conclusion in this paper, though not, I hope your own reflections and discussions, it is perhaps important to note that, with reference to the future, Gülen is himself quoted as saying, “They will not understand me anymore, and they will do their own thing.” (quoted in Weller 2022a, pp. 184-185). For emergent young leaders in Hizmet to take forward its distinctiveness and vitality, the creative way forward will likely not be one based on any combination of the receipt, preservation and transmission of the substantive body of Gulen’s inherited teaching, pregnant though that remains with matters that will remain important into the future. It will also not rest on the veneration of his person and/or practice, inevitable as that is likely to be given the inspiration that he has brought to so many lives. Rather, the most faithful way forward to the inheritance is likely to be that of a readiness to undertake a contextual dialogue with the foundations of the Qur’an and the Sunnah leading into a ‘doing of the truth’ which, in turn, then leads to a newly transformative understanding that, in itself can then in turn inform yet more new ‘doings of the truth’. This is what, elsewhere, I have called, “a methodological commitment to learning by doing through the embodiment of love as a verb into concrete actions” (Weller, 2022a, p. 220).

In reflecting on Hizmet, its past, its present and its future, Kerim Balcı has utilized a striking image in which he says that: “Hizmet is a bicycle. We have to move. We have to do something. It might be a mistake. It has to be something very different.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 232). Rather than becoming frozen in past models of doing Hizmet that, even if they were revolutionary for their time and place, may no longer always be appropriate, or being too nervous to take new steps in relation to future challenges and opportunities, Balcı locates the possibility of Hizmet’s creativity as being rooted in Gülen’s encouragement to Hizmet to be willing to make mistakes rather than to attempt nothing: “Hojaefendi brings action and says, you might have done wrong, but the fact you have done something is going to be the basis that next time you might do the right thing. If you do nothing, there is nothing to step on. So, that also gives a lot of courage to the Hizmet people, to do something.” (quoted in Weller, 2022a, p. 233)

In closing, for emerging young leaders in Hizmet, I would argue that if you can find ways to do this that are informed by a dynamic methodological call to continuously renewed and contextualized engagement with those religious and spiritual sources that are centered on love and on the human, then in your generation you will also be able to find ways of contributing positively, both to future of Islam and to that the wider world. You will know that in teaching and living Islam in the way that he has sought to do, Fethullah Gülen successfully broke through many ‘taboos’ which had otherwise restricted the experience of love and the human, although in doing so he often experienced misunderstanding and/or opposition. When, as emergent young Hizmet leaders, you also seek for yourselves to put love for the divine and for other human beings at the heart of Hizmet practice, you will likely also run into new ‘taboos’ in the context of which you might also become subject to misunderstanding or opposition and in potentially uncomfortable ways find yourselves encountering the disturbing question that Özcan Keleş posed in one of his tweets about Hizmet, namely that of, “If Gülen were a thirty-year old volunteer, would he be part of this movement, would the movement allow him to be?” (quoted in Weller 2022a, p. 184). At the same time, for those of you who were once pioneers in Hizmet and are now elders, there is the question of how far you might be ready to facilitate the emergence of new young leaders who might bring challenges to inherited traditions, understandings and ways of doing things. And for both elders and young leaders together, there is the challenge of what can beneficially and mutually be learned from an honest sharing in relation to past, present and future.

Author Bio

Paul Weller lives between Germany and the UK. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of Derby; a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow in Religion and Society at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, where he is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion; and a Visiting Professor in the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations of Coventry University. He has been an Adviser to the Dialogue Society, UK, over a number of years. He is author of Hizmet in Transitions European Developments of a Turkish Muslim-Inspired Movement, Palgrave Macmillan (2022) and of Fethullah Gülen’s Teaching and Practice Inheritance, Context, and Interactive Development, as well as of a number of other publications concerning Fethullah Gülen and Hizmet. Beyond this his academic and practical work specializes especially in relation to matters of religion and belief, state and society relationships, with a particular emphasis on equality, human rights and freedom of religion or belief.