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Read more: Turkish Imam Gulen's School Movement: Modern Islam? - TIMEThere are an estimated 1,000 Gulen-affiliated schools in 100 countries from Malawi to the U.S. offering a blend of religious faith and largely Western curriculum.
All are inspired by Gulen, an enigmatic retired preacher who oversees the schools and a multibillion-dollar business empire from the unlikeliest of locales: rural Pennsylvania.
Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns.
The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they'd make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.
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The Turkish-affiliated schools focus on math and science and often appear as top scorers on standardized tests.
Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam
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Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it, said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. But let our kids have their religion as well.
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it.
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Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God, and described Mr. Gulens followers as Muslim Jesuits who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.
The purpose here is very much power, Mr. Yavuz said.
The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.
The Global Imam
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Even as the movement has sprouted numerous organizations and companies, the schools have remained at the center of the Gülen orbit. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gülen dispatched his students to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where he rightly suspected that they might find some post-communist youths in need of religion. But it is not just Central Asia that hosts Gülen schools. They also exist in far-flung Muslim countries like Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as mostly non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan. In total, according to Ebaugh, Gülenists operate over 1,000 explicitly secular schools and universities in more than 100 countries. They emphasize science and technology, teach the Turkish language, and, by many accounts, are very good schools. Gülenist businessmen build these institutions and sponsor scholarships to them. Whenever you ask whos funding anything, Gülenists reply a group of Turkish businessmen, a Turkish businessman, a Turkish-American businessman, or our Turkish friends.
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Turkey doesnt yet have the broader political, economic, and cultural footprint to follow through on this, but one can wonder whether there is a longer game being played--that the movement is putting Turkey on the map culturally and in advance of a greater Turkish economic and political presence in the longer term.
In Germany, the European country with the strongest Gülen presence, there are at least a dozen of these schools and more than 150 smaller educational and cultural centers.
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To some extent, the polarized views concerning Fethullah Gülen and his followers stem from the fact that the movement does not easily fit into existing categories of religious organizations in the Muslim world. The movements rapid expansion is also a factor in the increased scrutiny: The larger the movement grows, the more scrutiny it attracts, particularly in the West
This is not a type of Islam which wants to create protective spaces for the vulnerable and the marginalized, but rather to control, to be in power, like Opus Dei, said Hakan Yavuz, a political science professor at the University of Utah who has written about the movement.
Opus Dei is an ultra-conservative Catholic organization.
"This organization will transform Turkey from a regional power to a world state," enthused Ali Agaoglu, the CEO of one of Turkey's biggest construction companies.
Known to be no great fan of the movement, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even offered unstinting praise recently.
"These days, when I go abroad, I see our flag flying not just in our embassies," he told the audience at the Istanbul gala night, where he had been invited to make a speech. "I see it in the schools too, and that makes me proud."
And the Sufi-inspired Gülen Movement, led by Fethullah Gülen, a popular Turkish cleric, has opened over 1,000 schools from Asia to Africa, with the goal of creating a generation of students well versed in the secular sciences and a distinctively Turkish form of Islam.
(...) this new, independent-minded Turkey is here to stay.
(...) The new Muslim entrepreneurial middle class, which emerged thanks to Özal's free-market revolution of the 1980s, already outnumbers and economically outperforms the staunchly secular old elite (...) and its vision is likely to guide Turkey in the years to come.