A radical consequence of modernity

Project Report from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 1,3, Middle East Technical University, language: English, abstract: This work deals with the broad topic of 'Politcal Power beyond the State' and shows with the particular example of the Fethullah Gülen movement in Turkey how a non-state actor takes political power beyond the nation-state and slowly but surely transforms the identity of the Turkish Republic. A motivation to work on Fethullah Gülen as a political power beyond the state is the fact that Gülen in a survey of the British magazine on Foreign Policy in 2008 surprisingly was voted to be the most public intellectual in the world This paper will try to evaluate how a single person could become that influential during the last decades that he is supposed to be one of the leading forces within the Turkish state at the beginning of the 21st century. What aims follows the person whose name is associated with a media empire, with business enterprises and especially a huge education network in Turkey and worldwide? While writing this paper the author assumes that the Fethullah Gülen movement of today is already a political power beyond the Turkish nation-state which influences the economy, media, politics and education sustainable in an immense radius according to its own interests. Therefore, the main focus of this work will be to take a brief look at the motivations, origins and goals of the movement in regard of its activity in the educational sphere. In summary, as a starting point for this paper and a general research question serves the demand: Is the Fethullah Gülen Movement just ´a´ force beyond the Turkish state, or meanwhile through its strong educational network even ´THE´ force beyond the Turkish Republic? As a matter of fact that this a term paper and not a thesis the author will concentrate especially on the movement's educational engagement while claiming that it can be seen as the key for the community-transforming network. After a brief introduction into the life of Fethullah Gülen, his main point of views and convictions will be examined. In a further step the educational network of the movement and its major fields of activity will be highlighted. Afterwards, the characteristics of the movement as a power beyond the state will be explained to finally come to a conclusion in Chapter Five. Regarding the literature the author concentrates mainly on works from M. Hakan Yavuz, who is one of the main researches on political Islam in Turkey and Islamic inspired movements like Fethullah Gülen.