Turkish Islamic Imam’s Worldwide Schools And Millions Of Disciples Follow His Teachings Of Tolerance, Interfaith Dialogue, And Education
By Ghulam Mohiyuddin, New Age Islam
14 June 2012
Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish Islamic Imam at the centre of a popular and growing movement, with millions of disciples who follow his teachings of tolerance, interfaith dialogue, and education. Some have even started a chain of successful quality schools in the U.S. and several other countries, with an emphasis on math and science. Yet Gulen himself remains shrouded in mystery.
Over the past decade scores of quality schools have popped up all over the U.S. and in several other countries, all sharing some common features. Most of them are high-achieving academically; they stress math and science, and one more thing: they're founded and largely run by immigrants from Turkey.
Fethullah Gulen is the spiritual leader of a growing and increasingly influential force in the Muslim world -- known as "The Gulen Movement" -- with millions upon millions of disciples who compare him to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Gulen promotes tolerance, interfaith dialog, and above-all, he promotes education. For example there is the Harmony School in Houston, part of a rapidly expanding chain of 36 charter schools in Texas. They serve mostly underprivileged students and they all emphasize math and science. The education in these schools gets high marks, as students get state-of-the-art technology and extensive one-on-one tutoring. Harmony school has 20,000 students, and 30,000 more are on a waiting list hoping to be admitted. Many of the teachers are Turkish.
There are a total of about 130 charter schools like Harmony in 26 states in the United States. They are founded and run by immigrant businessmen and academics from Turkey. Imam Fethullah Gulen tells his followers that to be devout Muslims they shouldn't build mosques - they should build schools; and not to teach religion, but science. In sermons on the web, he actually says: "Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping God." So Gulen's followers have gone out and built over 1,000 schools around the globe - from Turkey to Togo; from Taiwan to Texas. His message is that if you want to solve any social problem for the longer term, the solution has to go through education.
In Turkey Gulen's schools are everywhere and considered the best. They're often multi-million dollar hi-tech facilities where girls are equal to boys and English is taught starting in first grade. Gulen didn't only influence education. Starting in the late 60s, as a young imam, he urged crowds of middle class Turks to learn from the West and embrace its values - including an unexpected one: making money. In his Internet sermon, he even told followers: "If you don't seek ways to be wealthy...that is a sin in the eyes of God." So his disciples in Turkey became successful businessmen and built a multi-billion dollar Gulen empire that goes beyond the schools and includes TV stations, a major bank, Turkey's largest trade association, and biggest newspaper.
Gulen tells his followers to reach out to people of other faiths. Tolerance is a very key part of their message. Gülen teaches an Anatolian version of traditional mainstream Islam deriving from Said Nursi’s teachings and modernizing them. To his followers, Gulen is like a living prophet, and he has used his influence to change the course of Turkey's politics; helping to make it a functioning moderate Islamic democracy.
Very few people ever see Gulen in person. He preaches via webcasts from a prayer room in an isolated and unlikely location. He came to the United States in 1999. For over a decade, Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile and seclusion in, of all places, the Poconos - in this gated Pennsylvania retreat. It is believed that if he went back to Turkey there would be a big brouhaha and he does not want to be seen as being too powerful. Too powerful because it seems his followers have taken over key positions in the Turkish government and the police.
Questions have been raised about immigration fraud but David Dunn of the Texas Charter Schools Association says that because of a deficit of qualified Americans, the schools are allowed to bring in math and science teachers from Turkey. Islam is not taught in these schools. That would be illegal since these are public schools that go out of their way to distance themselves from any religious affiliation. What matters is the results in the classrooms. Are kids learning math, science, reading, writing at a superior level? And clearly in these schools that's happening. Newsweek voted two Harmony schools among America's top 10. More of these schools open every year across the country, and waiting lists just keep getting longer.
(Based on CBS Television’s “60 Minutes”.)
Ghulam Mohiyuddin is a US-based retired physician of Indian origin.