The "Hizmet" ("Service")
Movement of Fethullah Gülen is Turkey’s most influential Islamic identity
community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate
variation on Islamic political identity, the Gülen Movement has long been a
topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. In Gülen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that the Gülen Movement should
be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global
prominence.
Hendrick draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork
in Turkey and the U.S. for his study. He argues that the movement’s growth and
impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its
followers as indicative of a "post political" turn in twenty-first
century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey’s
political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular.