Towards an Islamic Enlightenment The gülen Movement By M. Hakan Yavuz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 320 pages.)

Abstract

M. Hakan Yavuz was one of the early contributors to the literature on the
Gülen movement, co-editing a major volume on the subject with John Esposito
in 2003 (Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito, Turkish Islam and the Secular
State: The Gülen Movement [Syracuse University Press: 2003]). In the intervening
decade the movement has grown considerably in size and influence
both within Turkey and beyond, and has emerged as a major source of interest
and apparently perennial controversy. Towards an Islamic Enlightenment is
therefore a timely if ambitious book, for it sets out to provide a comprehensive
account of the movement. The author opens with an analysis of Fethullah
Gülen’s theological teachings and then explores the movement’s structure and
organization, as well as its emergence and development in the context of Turkish
social, religious, and political history. No other scholar has attempted such
a holistic analysis, for others tend to focus on just one of its many areas of influence,
namely, education (Bekim Agai, Zwischen Netzwerk und Diskurs -
Das Bildungsnetzwerk um Fethullah Gülen (geb. 1938): Die flexible Umsetzung
modernen islamischen Gedankengutes [EB-Verlag, 2004]), politics
(Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement
[Stanford University Press: 2007]), and economic enterprise (Joshua D. Hendrick,
Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World
[New York Press: 2013]).
Yavuz lays out his thesis of “Islamic Enlightenment” in the introduction
by drawing a paradigmatic distinction between the Muslim intellectual tradition’s
literalist/fundamentalists and modernist/reformists. He acknowledges
the impact of Enlightenment ideas on the major thinkers in the latter category,
but notes that those ideas have historically remained the preserve of the Muslim
elite and never “penetrated the masses” (p. 6). According to Yavuz, the ...