[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: _Sociology of Islam_ Special Issue on the Gülen Movement

[Gonul Pultar]

from: Joshua Hendrick <jdhendrick at loyola.edu>


CALL FOR PAPERS

Sociology of Islam (SOI)
Special Issue on the Gülen Movement (“Hizmet”) in Turkey and the World


Sociology of Islam, a peer reviewed quarterly journal published by
BRILL, plans a special issue on Turkey’s Gülen Movement to be published 
in October/November 2013 (Volume 1, Number 3). (Website at 
<http://www.brill.com/publications/journals/sociology-islam<https://inside.loyola.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=ki-92SzEDEmnn_so4yiH_P2Cs8Hoyc9IbydiCxOaOzc_GcnKYJqVXT5_5oQRuJI8-rjMA6lSHSc.&URL=http%3a%2%2fwww.brill.com%2fpublications%2fjournals%2fsociology-islam>.)

Referring to itself as “Hizmet” (Service), the Turkish network of
people and institutions also known as the “the Gülen Movement” (GM) aims
to put into practice the teachings of Turkey’s most famous, and most
controversial, faith-based community leader, M. Fethullah Gülen.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the GM first emerged as a faith revival
community whose attractants were inspired by Gülen’s applied
articulation of Turkey’s most widespread twentieth century commentary on
the Qur’an, the Risale-i Nur Külliyatı (The Epistles of Light) - the
collected teachings of “Bediüzzaman” Said Nursi.

Expanding throughout the 1970s, many young people of Anatolia were 
attracted to Gülen’s blend of science and Islam, and of the Islamic 
faith and national Turkish identity.

Taking advantages of political and economic reforms in the 1980s, the GM 
has since emerged to become Turkey’s most influential faith-based 
identity community, and has become a primary organizational player in 
education, mass media, trade, and finance. Its organizational network 
now spans over 120 countries, and its affiliates now control one of 
Turkey’s largest media conglomerates, a number of the country’s most
globally linked companies, and approximately 1000 math and 
science-focused schools throughout the world.

Moreover, in 1998 Fethullah Gülen moved to the United States, where he 
now resides in self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg. Pennsylvania. Since 
Gülen’s move to the U.S., loyalists in the GM network have expanded 
their operations in that country, and are now highly active in 
intercultural and interfaith outreach, commerce and trade, political 
lobbying, and charter school education.

For these reasons, in addition to assessing the GM’s impact inside the 
borders of “the new Turkey,” this issue also aims to account
for the ways in which the GM’s transnational activities both complement
and contradict the network’s collective identity and mission.

Considering its emergence as a source of social power in Turkey, the GM
is not without its critics. Since the early 1980s, many news columnists,
public intellectuals, and politicians have regularly declared that the
GM’s real aims are to slowly and patiently initiate an “Islamic” overall
of the “secular” Turkish Republic.

Not surprisingly, correlated with the GM’s organizational expansion 
throughout the world, are the emergence of similar criticisms in 
Australia, the United States, Holland, Russia, and elsewhere. As they do 
in Turkey, in many other countries GM affiliates must wrestle with 
sometimes legitimate, sometimes outlandish, criticisms of their 
ambiguous organizational strategies and apparently contradictory social, 
political, and economic aims.

In response, GM actors both in Turkey and elsewhere have strategically 
presented themselves as nothing more than “selfless,” “service oriented”
democrats, peace activists, and headstrong advocates for interfaith and
intercultural dialogue. To spread this message, they have actively
sought to publicize Gülen’s teachings to eager foreign audiences.

Their primary strategy has been to sponsor and organize a number of 
academic conferences that have all led to book publications, which, in 
turn, have saturated the academic marketplace on the topic of the GM’s 
growth and impact.

In an attempt to fill a glaring void in the literature on the GM’s
collective mobilization, this special issue of SOI hopes to attract
well-researched scholarship whose author’s intend neither to
promote/praise the activities of actors inspired by Fethullah Gülen, nor
to demonize them. Rather, the intent is to publish a volume that
contextualizes the GM’s impact from a perspective that foregrounds
academic skepticism, critical sociology, and social movements. Original,
empirically informed, research-based articles from any discipline are
welcome, but papers whose authors focus on the GM from the perspective
of social movement studies, political sociology/anthropology, and global
political economy will be given priority.


Submission Information:

Please submit manuscripts for this special issue via MS Word attachment 
to the following address: <sociologyofislam at yahoo.com>.

The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2013. Length should be limited 
to 9000-10000 words including all notes and references (not including
figures and tables).

Because SOI follows a double blind peer-review process, authors should 
remove all self-references (in text and in the bibliography).

Please include the paper’s title and the abstract on the first page of 
the text itself.

Authors should submit a separate title page that includes full contact 
information.

For initial submissions, all standard social science in-text citation 
and bibliographic forms are acceptable.

All submissions will be evaluated upon receipt and, if judged 
appropriate, sent blindly to referees for review.



Please direct questions and queries regarding this special issue to Dr. 
Joshua Hendrick (jdhendrick at loyola.edu<mailto:jdhendrick at loyola.edu>).