Fethullah Gülen

[Lord Daedra]

Who is this guy?

[l'Enfermé]

I think Devrim is from Turkey, he might help you solve this mystery.

[Lord Daedra]

Bump.......................

[Ocean Seal]

Please stop spamming our boards with threads and bumps. You've posted a thread about a relatively not well known figure, and expect an answer. All I know is what I just read on wikipedia. Basically I think that they guy is a western bootlicker that the US pays to troll the Middle East. See what he had to say about the Gaza Flotilla. Seeking Israel's consent to send food in... So yeah US payroll to compete with the influence of other Islamic preachers.

[Leo]

It isn't quite so simple. This one has quite a lot of power on his own.

Even in Turkey, him and his organization, commonly referred to as the Sect or the Cult, is quite an enigma. It is claimed that they have seven million members worldwide, and thousands of schools, universities, community centers, think-tanks and so on in close to a hundred countries, including the United States. Obama's Muslim affairs consultant is from Gülen movement, and they are among the strongest lobbies in the United States, and the strongest according to some.

In any case, they are practicing a Turkish imperialism the secularists couldn't have even dared to imagine when they were in power.

The Global Intelligence Files on the wikileaks are worth checking on them for more detailed information:

http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-03-07-14-turkey-s-gulen-movement-in-the-global.html

http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-03-16-18-gulen-sleeping-cells-in-turkey.html

[Lord Daedra]

That's what i thought due to a website i read and wasn't able to link due to my post count. Ya see, i'm not spamming

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I don't have the details off hand but his organisation runs a charter school system in the US. There was a 60 Minutes piece on him about a year ago. He seems to be a highly secretive Sufi mystic/businessman with some odd agenda all his own.

Louis Proyect's blog may have info on him.

[Red Commissar]

Gülen's been getting some traction and acknowledgment in the US and Europe because he's held up as a thinker of Islam, introducing a forward thinking religious doctrine that accommodates for liberal democracy. The United States's noise for finding moderate and reform-minded Muslims gave Gülen's guys room to advance up and act like they represent a modernizing tendency in the "Muslim world".

Thing is moderate Muslims have existed before Gülen and there have been plenty of people who have tried to fight back against reactionaries, be it from a religious viewpoint, a secular one, or atheist. Gülen, for various reasons, has come out ahead of them.

Gülen has manpower and money, and that comes from much the same way the evangelical movement in the United States move. They were more attentive to developments in communication, education, social problems, etc. rather than just sitting in the mosque and waiting for their flock to come. They are active in getting their message out there and educating people in their thought. And again like the evangelical movement in the United States, they essentially reconciled with liberal democracy and capitalism and became hard line advocates of neoliberalism, while at the same time acting like they care about the community by advancing- wait for it- charity. Yeah, that should sound familiar to anyone seeing the way the religious right has operated here.