New book looks closer into Hizmet Movement with questions, answers

A newly published book by Professor Muhammed Çetin, a sociologist who has done extensive academic work on social movements and who now serves as a lawmaker in the Turkish Parliament, offers comprehensive information on the faith-based Gülen movement, answering hundreds of questions on the movement.

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Book Review: Pearls of Wisdom

Michael Starzinski

This work by M. Fethullah Gülen is a continuation of a long tradition of books and articles promoting the cause of serving society through the advancement of universal education. Fethullah Gülen is a widely known and respected Turkish scholar, religious leader, educator, and social reformer, whose values stem from his Islamic faith, and whose overriding interest is in the well-being of Muslims as well as all of mankind.

Fethullah Gülen's many life experiences including a teaching post in Edirne Turkey, and those acquired throughout his life within his faith, have contributed to his understanding of the role of education in shaping the world we live in. His corresponding beliefs that tyranny can be eliminated and justice achieved through education for all mankind are copiously illustrated in this and all of his former works.

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Book Review: Civic Service Without Borders

Anwar Alam *

The Gülen Movement, as it is usually referred to in English, has attracted the attention of “critical public minds and scholarship” throughout the world in recent years for two important reasons. First, Fethullah Gülen’s ideas and praxis demonstrate the potential role of religion in reshaping the present violent, conflict ridden world into an inclusive, humanistic society and world order based on the principles of pluralism, intercultural dialogue, and mutual living. Second and more important, Gülen, through his twin tools of Islamic hermeneutics and public actions, particularly in the field of education, has restored the “humane face of Islam” in the public eye—something that was lost due to centuries of a radical, positivist, secular and Orientalist narrative of Islam and more recently due to acts of violence in the name of Islam—and has demonstrated the complementarity of Islam and modernity. This reconciliation of faith and reason—both in terms of theory and action—solves a conundrum that has plagued the Islamic scholars for long.

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Islam without Extremes: A Muslim case for liberty

Şahin Alpay

“Is Islam a religion of coercion and repression? Or is it compatible with the idea of liberty -- that individuals have full control over their lives and are free to be religious, irreligious or whatever they wish to be?

There are many good reasons to ask these questions. Islamic societies in the contemporary world are really not beacons of freedom… Not a single Muslim-majority country today can be defined as ‘fully free’…”

The above questions and assessments are the starting point of a new book by Mustafa Akyol, a young Turkish journalist who has recently distinguished himself for dealing with questions that are truly worth asking. It can be said that Akyol’s book, “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case For Liberty” (Norton, 2011), primarily addresses the widespread prejudices in Western societies about Islam -- though neither prejudices about Islam nor those who need to learn more about it are confined to the Western world.

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Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey

K. Adamson

Review of James C. Harrington’s Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey: The Political Trials and Times of Fethullah Gulen. 2011. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 185pp. ISBN 978 0 7618 5461 6.

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Book Review: Speech and Power of Expression

Nisa Nur Terzi


Mankind has been given exclusive possession of speech-a weapon so powerful that it is mightier than the sword. The power of speech extends vast distances, far enough to revive a mortified soul yet deadly enough to start a war. In his book Speech and Power of Expression, Gülen argues that speech is the sword of humanity. "Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies will be defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls will become like the buzzing of bees."

Speech and Power of Expression is a book about the art of speech, and it comes from the master of this skill. While Fethullah Gülen is known for his authority as a scholar and an activist in promoting education and dialogue, his power of expression and oratory skills as a prolific writer and poet earn him equal renown and surpass his counterparts.

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Strategic Defamation of Fethullah Gülen: English vs. Turkish

Strategic Defamation of Fethullah Gülen, by Dogan Koc consists of close to 500 defamation articles, books, and other forms of writings which are analyzed according to their languages. Koç concludes that these defamations are not random and that they appear according to their respective audiences. Fethullah Gülen is a moderate Turkish Muslim scholar who is known mostly for his education and dialogue activities. The Hizmet Movement, inspired by Gülen, has established hundreds of education and dialogue institutions throughout the world. Several books and hundreds of articles and news reports have been written about Gülen himself and the movement. In recent years, a defamation campaign has been launched against Gülen and the Hizmet Movement. Although these defamation articles may seem random, this book shows that the articles are written strategically in a campaign manner.

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New Book: The Gulen Hizmet Movement and its Transnational Activities

A project that was conceived at the East and West Encounters: Hizmet (Gulen) Movement conference comes to life in a new book.

The Gulen Hizmet Movement and its Transnational Activities: Case Studies of Altruistic Activism in Contemporary Islam is a book put together by Sophia Pandya of California State University Long Beach and Nancy Gallagher of University of California in Santa Barbara. This volume of essays on the Gulen, or Hizmet (service) movement, a Turkish Sufi, Sufi Muslim and humanitarian civil society group, looks at the recent activities of its followers to practice their form of Islam and carry out collective interfaith projects at the international level. It adds to the newly burgeoning discourse by focusing on the ways in which participants challenge ideological and sectarian boundaries. Included are the essays which discuss how the movement is organized, structured and institutionalized in many parts of the world, explore Turkey's global influence, evaluate criticisms of the movement and suggest directions for further research.

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Book Review: Islam and Peacebuilding

Stanley Ridge*

Fethullah Gülen's work and thinking starts and ends in faith. In a world that commonly extends conflict by speaking of religion either in stereotyped or in ideologized terms, this is a refreshingly engaged perspective.

Faced with the challenge of mounting hostility between the Islamic world and the West, and with belligerent and increasingly fundamentalist groups on both sides supposedly speaking in the name of religion, the need for peacebuilding with integrity is pressing. The writers of different traditions whose essays resonate here explore the faith-based ideas of one of this century's seminal thinkers and tease out their implications and potential for peacebuilding.

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A memoir out of a culture both deeply Ottoman and deeply Jewish

(c) Stanford University Press

Years ago sitting in the manuscript room of the Israel National Library, Aron Rodrigue came across something and as soon as he laid his eyes on it, he knew it was going to be something very special.

What he had come across that day was the earliest known memoir in the Ladino language, written sometime in the early 1880s by a Jewish printer who lived in Salonica, Greece in the days of the Ottoman Empire named Sa’adi Besalel A-Levi.

After years of having the manuscript sit on his shelf , unsure of what to do with it, Rodrigue and his co-editor, Sarah Stein, finally translated and transliterated the book from its original Judaeo-Spanish text in to English and launched the book at an event hosted by the center for Jewish studies at UCLA, Wednesday.

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