bruinessen imam hatip graduates studying in europe-libre

Martin van Bruinessen,

“Pious Muslims as a bridge between Turkey and the West: The amazing case of the Imam Hatip graduates studying in Europe”

Foreword to:

�smail Ça�lar, From Symbolic Exile to Physical Exile: Turkey’s Imam Hatip

Schools, the Emergence of a Conservative Counter-Elite, and its Knowledge

Migration to Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013 (pp. 5-21).

Bruinessen, Imam Hatip graduates studying in Europe 1

Pious Muslims as a bridge between Turkey and the West:

The amazing case of the Imam Hatip graduates studying in Europe

Martin van Bruinessen

Paradoxes of Turkey’s secularism

Turkey’s particular form of secularism has given rise to a number of surprising paradoxes,

one of which constitutes the subject of this study. Pious Muslims, who were prevented from

entering Turkish universities by a secular elite fearful of losing its control of state and society,

have been sending their best and brightest to European (and American) universities, thus contributing to the emergence of a well-educated counter elite with an international outlook.

Turkey’s secularism or laiklik – after the French laïcité, which constituted its source of

inspiration – is not based on the idea of a separation of the political and religious spheres, but

rather on the rejection of all religious authority independent of the state. The founders of the

Republic intended to liberate the population from the influence of Sufi sheikhs and traditional

ulama, banning Sufi orders and replacing the medreses (traditional Islamic schools) by

universal education in modern, Western-type schools. However, their successors recognized

that society needed some form of religious education and religious knowledge, and rather than

relegating those to the private sphere, the state has consistently made sure it kept a close control of religious education and knowledge.

While on the one hand the main institutions of the old religious establishment were abolished

– the office of the sheikh al-islam, the religious courts, and medreses of all levels all were

closed in 1924, and the Sufi orders and saints’ shrines followed in 1925 – the secular Republic

soon established its own institutions in order to take care of the religious needs of its subjects.

Since the political liberalization that began in the 1950s, the involvement of the state in

matters of religion has gradually become more and more massive. Through the Directorate for

Religious Affairs, Diyanet, the Republic controls all major mosques in the country and is the

formal employer of prayer leaders (imam), preachers (hatip, vaiz) and other mosque

personnel. Even most saints’ shrines have been reopened and placed under the supervision of Diyanet – which is supposed to keep the expressions of ‘popular’ Islam also in check.

In September 1980 the armed forces, the chief guardians of Turkey’s secular order, carried

out yet another coup d’état. The ostensible reason for this intervention was the inability of

civilian politicians to stop the increasing political polarization and street violence that pitted

leftists and Kurdish activists, Islamists and Turkish ultranationalists against each other. All

political movements were banned; thousands of activists were arrested, tortured and tried.

Islamists were also brought to trial, and the recent revolution in Iran was held up as a


threatening example of the danger of Islamic ideology. But it was precisely the military

regime of the early 1980s that, perceiving the left to be the greater danger, made religious

education in public schools obligatory and embarked on a campaign of building mosques in

villages that did not yet have one. The Diyanet organization further expanded, and was also

deliberately used by the regime to extend its control over the Turkish communities in Western

Europe, which were considered ‘vulnerable’ to various ideological influences. The religious

functionaries at the consulates and the Diyanet-appointed imams in Turkish mosques constituted the most effective means of overseeing Turkey’s European subjects.

Turkey’s military establishment has been and remains fiercely secular and highly suspicious

of personal piety. The armed forces are wary of infiltration by practising Muslims, and

officers who publicly pray (or are discovered to be praying in private) and who refuse to drink

alcohol are passed over for promotion or even dismissed from the armed forces. The generals

have consistently considered the founder of Turkey’s first ‘pro-Islamic’ political parties,

Necmettin Erbakan, as the country’s most dangerous civilian. However, aware that religion

remains important to a large part of the population, and wary of the influence of socialist

thought among the heterodox Alevi minority, the imposition of a state-oriented, nationalist

brand of Sunni Islam appeared to them to be the lesser evil. They adopted the ‘Turkish-

Islamic synthesis,’ a set of nationalist ideas, in which Islam appeared as part of the Turkish identity, as the core of the official ideology.

The Imam Hatip schools

The secular Republic of Turkey thus has tens of thousands of religious personnel on the

payroll of its Directorate of Religious Affairs, primarily prayer leaders and preachers to serve

in the mosques but also more highly educated personnel for more specialized functions. (And

although many secular Turks may not set foot in a mosque in their lifetime, the funerary rites

usually include a service in the mosque. Even the most staunchly secular military officers are

taken to the mosque before their burial, for a service in which at least some people participate

in the prayer for the dead. Even if only on the day of one’s burial, therefore, almost everyone

needs an imam.)

In order to train this personnel, the state has established special schools, Imam Hatip schools,

which combine a general school curriculum with a fair amount of religious subjects, including

Arabic language training. These schools are not administered by Diyanet but by the Ministry

of Education. Over the past half century, the level and number of these schools has gradually

increased. Currently, they are of the lycée or upper high school level. An Imam Hatip Lycée

diploma makes the graduate eligible to a modest appointment as a mosque official, but it also

gives access to higher education in one of the Faculties of Theology (�lahiyat Fakültesi).

There used to be only one such faculty, but their number has significantly increased. The

imams who are sent to Europe by Diyanet as well as those of Milli Görü� are usually graduates of one of the theological faculties; some even have completed postgraduate studies.


The Imam Hatip schools have expanded so much that they are producing many more

graduates than will ever find employment as mosque personnel. And in fact, many if not most

of their graduates have no intention whatsoever to just become prayer leaders or preachers.

The schools have turned into something different from what their founders intended: schools

of preference and a channel of upward social mobility for the children of an important,

conservative segment of the population. Many conservative, religious-minded parents in rural

and small-town Turkey sent their children after primary school to an Imam Hatip high

school, because this is the only school type where they would study Islamic subjects besides

the general curriculum and where the teachers were believed to impart traditional moral

values – much like many parents in Europe would prefer a Christian over a neutral school.

Many of those parents would, however, wish their children to pursue modern careers and find

more prestigious and better-paid jobs than that of a modest preacher.

In electoral politics, Turkey’s religious conservatives are influential, and to please this

constituency, conservative governments gradually made it possible for Imam Hatip Lycée

graduates to continue higher education in other institutions besides the Faculties of Theology.

The secularist establishment – politicians, bureaucrats, and especially the military – has

always considered this a serious threat to the Republic’s secular order. The issue became

especially contentious when in the late 1970s Erbakan’s National Salvation Party (MSP)

began to plead for the right of Imam Hatip graduates to be admitted to the military and police

academies. The secularists did all they could to prevent religious conservatives from

infiltrating those sectors of the state that really mattered – security, the judiciary, education, culture – but were only partially successful.

The 1980s and 1990s were a period of great and rapid social mobility for many people of

religious conservative background. Whereas Muslim entrepreneurship had previously been

associated with small and technologically backward companies based in Central and East

Anatolia, Turkey’s neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s resulted in the emergence of a

dynamic new class of Muslim businessmen, dubbed the ‘Anatolian tigers.’ These were

internationally oriented and confident in their ability to transform the country. Unprecedented

numbers of pious young people, including numerous Imam Hatip graduates, gained entrance

in the universities (through competitive entrance examinations) and performed well. In

municipal elections of 1994, the ‘pro-Islamic’ Welfare (Refah) Party won in both Istanbul and

Ankara, giving the religious conservatives the opportunity to show that they were at least as

capable administrators as their secularist predecessors and allowing them to appoint numerous party activists as municipal officials and civil servants.

As Ismail Ça�lar shows in this report, many of the conservatives who rose to prominence in

those years, in business, politics and education, shared a connection with the same Imam

Hatip school. ‘Old boys networks’ linking cohorts of school graduates are a well-known

phenomenon in Turkey, but they usually united friends who had studied together at the old

elite schools, such as the Galatasaray Lycée, the (Francophone) Lycée Saint Joseph or

Ankara’s Mülkiye, the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. The Imam Hatip schools had


established similar networks of alumni and, as these were becoming more affluent, the

networks were increasingly able to support promising young graduates and helping them find placement in good universities.

One of the ways by which the secular elite has attempted to check the upward social mobility

of religious conservatives has been the enforcement of the headscarf ban in universities. The

more affluent conservatives could, like prime minister Erdo�an, send their daughters to

prestigious universities in the US, where the headscarf has never been an issue. For others, the

enforcement of the ban presented a serious dilemma. In the wake of the veiled military

intervention of 1997 (known in Turkey as ‘the 28 February process’), a more systematic

measure was taken to stop the rise of Imam Hatip graduates. The regulations for university

entrance were so modified that it became practically impossible for them to gain entrance in

any other faculty than that of theology. It was this measure that provided the main impetus

behind the phenomenon studied in this report, the organized migration of many of the best

graduates from Imam Hatip Lycées for higher education in Europe.

The rich landscape of Turkey’s unofficial Islam

Whereas Diyanet may be said to embody Turkey’s official, state-sponsored Islam – although

the secular elite have always had an ambivalent attitude towards Diyanet, perceiving it to be a

potential Trojan horse – a significant proportion of the population adheres to socially

conservative varieties of Islam and reject the secularism of the Republic’s founders. These

religious conservatives have long remained deprived of political power and cultural influence;

they constituted a ‘symbolic diaspora’ as the sociologist Yasin Aktay calls it, a community in

exile, forced or self-imposed, from the centres of culture and politics. Since the authoritarian

single-party system was replaced by a multi-party democracy, in the aftermath of the Second

World War, parties right of the centre have appealed to their vote and made symbolic gestures

to please them without properly representing them – with the partial exception of the ‘pro-Islamic’ National Salvation Party and its successors.

Turkish Islam differs from that of the Arab lands in its high degree of organization, noticeable

both in Turkey itself and among Turkish immigrant communities in Europe. Sufi orders were

the most important and influential forms of social organization in the Ottoman Empire, in

urban as well as rural society, with a following among all social classes. The sheikhs or

spiritual leaders of the Sufi orders wielded a great influence over their followers and were

therefore potentially important political actors. The Sufi orders (tarikat) varied in their rituals

and to some extent also in their belief system; they ranged from the orthodox and sober

Naqshbandi order through the more ecstatic Qadiri and Rifa’i orders to the Shi’a-influenced

Bektashi order, that was especially attractive to higher bureaucrats and intellectuals. After a

large Kurdish uprising in 1925, which was led by a Naqshbandi sheikh and appeared to be

directed against the first secularizing measures, all Sufi orders were banned. Public activities

of the orders were henceforth practically impossible, but many sheikhs retained much of their


influence, and after 1950 we repeatedly find sheikhs or their relatives acting as vote-getters

for one of the parties of the right. From the 1980s onwards, the Sufi orders have become increasingly visible, although formally remaining banned.

It was not only the secularist founders of the Republic who objected to the superstitions and

the blind obedience to sheikhs that have often been associated with Sufi orders. There was

also considerable criticism from within, and various alternatives for traditional Sufi orders

emerged. The single most important of them is the faith movement initiated by the Kurdish

mullah Said-i Nursi, which became known as the Nur (‘Light’) movement. Nursi was a

remarkable man, obsessed with the ideal of finding a synthesis of traditional faith and modern

science. Although coming from a background strongly coloured by the worldview and daily

devotions of the Naqshbandi order, he rejected the authoritarian pattern of organization and

the unthinking obedience that were often typical of the Sufi orders. Instead he advocated

modern education, combined with personal spiritual guidance in a mystical understanding of

Islam. Nursi’s writings, collectively known as the Risale-i Nur (‘Treatise on the [Divine]

Light’), present a mystical and visionary interpretation of the Qur’an and have become hugely

influential in Turkey.

During Nursi’s lifetime, the Nur movement was a very loose network of people inspired by

him, who in small groups read and discussed parts of the Risale-i Nur and often made hand-

written copies of those sections. After his death, his closest disciples (known as the abi, ‘elder

brothers’) continued to lead the movement, which developed into a nation-wide network of

reading circles that regularly hold meetings or sohbet, in which a senior member (also known

as abi) reads and explains the Risale, and in which also various practical daily matters may be

discussed. In due time, the Nur movement split into a number of distinct groups as differences

emerged over matters of interpretation and political alliance. Somewhat distinct from the

original Nur movement, but also inspired by Nursi, is the Fethullah Gülen movement (known

to its followers as Hizmet, ‘Serving’), which is the most dynamic and rapidly expanding Islamic movement not only in Turkey but possibly worldwide.

The Nur and Gülen movements differ at least theoretically from traditional Sufi orders in

rejecting the principle of initiation, the unconditional obedience to the sheikh, and various

‘superstitioous’ practices for which some tarikat are known. Membership in these movements

is fluid; there is no clear line separating actual members from sympathizers, and authority is

less clearly hierarchical: abi are respected because they are knowledgeable, not because of

some presumed spiritual superiority. The movements may be called ‘intellectualist’ because

of the importance they attach to reading and understanding a written text (the Risale-i Nur),

whereas in traditional Sufi orders the person of the sheikh used to be the dominant factor.

Whereas outsiders may lump them together with Sufi orders proper under the name of tarikat,

they prefer the term cemaat (‘congregation’, but with connotations similar to ‘denomination’) as a neutral description of themselves.

In practice, however, the differences are not so great; Nursi and Gülen are venerated as much

as any Sufi sheikh if not more, and there is a ranking of abi within the movements that is


reminiscent of the hierarchy of the tarikat sheikh’s deputies. On the other hand, many Sufi

orders have also shed some of their old characteristics and have become more fluid in

organization and membership. Some tarikat have in fact transformed themselves into a

different type of organization. This is for instance the case of one particular branch of the

Naqshbandi order, led by Sheikh Süleyman Tunahan (which therefore became known as

Süleymancı, after the sheikh’s name). Tunahan and his disciples became influential in Turkey

as well as in the Turkish diaspora in Europe through the Qur’an courses, and later boarding

schools, that they established. Core members of this movement continue to practice some of

the devotions that are typical of the Naqshbandi order, but there is a large and fluid

community that is more or less in sympathy with the conservative and strict religious views

for which the movement became known, without actively participating in core activities. Like

the Nur and Gülen cemaat, the Süleymanci cemaat has a cohesive core and a large periphery, without clear outer boundaries.

Another branch of the Naqshbandi order, which had many businessmen and politicians among

its followers, became a major support of Turkey’s only significant Islamist movement, Milli

Görü�, of which Necmettin Erbakan was the political leader. Erbakan established a series of

political parties with a ‘pro-Islamic’ and initially anti-Western platform, of which the National

Salvation Party (MSP, 1973-80) and Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, 1983-98) were the most

successful. Many of the core members and supporters of the Milli Görü� parties were the

disciples of one particular Naqshbandi sheikh, whose endorsement of political participation

was believed to be crucial to the success of the MSP and its successors. Most of the other

tarikat and cemaat, however, did not support these parties but usually allied themselves with

the main liberal-right parties of the day, the Justice Party (AP, 1961-80), the Motherland Party

(ANAP, 1983-2009), or the Right Path Party (DYP, 1983-2007). It is only the current ruling

party, the Party of Justice and Development (AKP, established in 2001) that succeeded in mobilizing support from the entire spectrum of conservative Islam.

The tarikat and cemaat mentioned here do not exhaust the entire range of religiously

conservative Turkey. There exist various smaller cemaat and conservative writers and

preachers with large followings, and many conservatives do not belong to any cemaat at all.

Nor are the cemaat strictly separate from one another; individual people may move from one

cemaat to another (though this does not happen very frequently), and in a single family one

may find people affiliated with different cemaat. A range of newspapers, journals and

magazines, and more recently television channels target conservative audiences and have

found their own publics, that do not, or only partially, overlap with the constituencies of the

cemaat.

The Imam Hatip alumni network is not associated with any particular movement or cemaat

but rather provides a broader identity that subsumes the various strands of religious

conservatives. Religious functionaries, for whom the schools were originally established,

constitute a minority among the alumni, and they are definitely not the most conspicuous

group among them. As Çaglar shows, Imam Hatip lycée graduates have shown a strong


preference for continuing studies in the most prestigious ‘secular’ faculties such as

engineering and medicine, and relatively few list theology as their first choice. (Actual

placement of these students, as for students in general, was based on their test scores and did

not often correspond to their first preferences.)

The emergence of the ‘headscarf issue’ in Turkey in the 1990s is directly related with the

increasing numbers of women university students of conservative family backgrounds. Not all

of these were Imam Hatip lycée graduates, but a considerable number were. In state

universities it had been, and remained, virtually unthinkable for women to wear a headscarf,

but as a result of the economic liberalization and privatization policies of the 1980s, many

private universities were established, which were less strict in adhering to Kemalist norms of

sartorial modernity. As more and more women donned headscarves in public, students took to

wearing it on campus as well, giving rise to public outcry from secularists and ultimately a

stricter ban of the headscarf in universities. This in turn was an incentive for conservatives to

explore the possibilities for higher education abroad – something that became more urgent

when new regulations made it virtually impossible for Imam Hatip lycée graduates to gain

entrance in Turkish universities.

Turkey’s religious conservatives and Europe

Traditionally, Turkey’s Kemalists have been the advocates of modernizing Turkey by

adopting Western European values and dissociating the country from the Middle East, and the

conservatives tended to look back nostalgically to the Ottoman past. In his first programmatic

writings of the early 1970s, Necmettin Erbakan presented the (then) European Community as

a Christian-Zionist project that aimed to colonize Turkey, and he called for a Middle Eastern

common market in order to resist European economic expansion. His Milli Görü� movement

established friendly relations with the international Muslim Brotherhood. During the brief

period that Erbakan was prime minister, leading a coalition cabinet of his Refah party and the

secular Right Path Party (1996-7), he made an effort to strengthen Turkey’s ties with Arab

countries – one of the reasons why he was forced out by the military.

By the 1990s, the anti-European attitude of religious conservatives in general had been

replaced by an awareness that European liberal democracies allowed Muslims more freedom

to practice their faith than the Kemalist Republic did. Moreover, the radical neoliberal

transformation of Turkey’s economy had resulted in the emergence of a new class of

internationally oriented Muslim businessmen, who were strongly in favour of Turkey’s

accession to the European Union. It was the AKP, which came out of the Milli Görü� tradition

but broke with Erbakan’s anti-European bias, that brought Turkey closer to the EU than any

secular party had been able to do. It was supported in its pro-European policies by a broad conservative constituency.

The various Islamic movements cemaat had been present among the Turkish labour migrants

in Europe since the 1970s, and in the wake of the military coup of 1980 they strengthened


their organizations in Europe more successfully than the left did. The Süleymancı were the

first to establish a network of mosques and Turkish Islamic Centres, where Qur’an courses

were offered, but they were soon outcompeted by more broadly based mosque associations.

Diyanet intervened successfully after 1980 to bring most of the Turkish mosques under its

control, while Milli Görü� carved out its own network of mosques and associations, with a

central directorate overseeing the activities all over Europe from Germany. The Sufi orders

and the Nur and Gülen communities did not establish their own mosques but initially

organized their followings through sohbet in private homes. Later the latter established

dormitories and student homes as an important service to their constituency, and several Sufi

orders established small tekke, gathering places for carrying out their distinct devotions. For

all these groups and cemaat, the branches in Europe became an extremely important support

and safety net for the mother organizations in Turkey. Leaders from Turkey frequently visited

the European branches; at times of repression in Turkey, Europe offered to many a safe haven to weather the storm.

There must have been quite a few Imam Hatip graduates among the Turkish Muslims in

Western Europe, but they have not before been noticed as a distinct group. Most of the imams

serving in Turkish mosques in Europe were (and are) Imam Hatip graduates, but to the extent

that they are organized it is the mosque federations employing them rather than the common

school background that brings them together. In the course of his research reported in this

study, Çaglar found that there had been attempts, for instance in the Netherlands, to establish

an association of Imam Hatip graduates but that the association had not shown any activities

during the past years. The Imam Hatip alumni with whom this study deals belong precisely to

that segment that has moved away from the modest prospect of life as a simple religious

functionary to more ambitious non-religious professional careers, and who came to Europe for

the sole purpose of study. They constitute a network that is quite distinct from that of the imams and preachers.

Imam Hatip goes transnational: ÖNDER, WONDER and the European diaspora

It was the ‘28 February process’ and the measures practically banning Imam Hatip lycée

graduates from entrance in Turkish universities apart from the faculties of theology that

propelled many of the best of those graduates to academic pursuits in Europe. ÖNDER, the

association of alumni and sympathizers of the Imam Hatip schools in Turkey, selected the

most promising graduates and offered them grants for study at European universities. More or

less accidentally, Vienna became the destination of choice for the majority of them, although

smaller numbers settled for universities in other countries. For Turks as well as West

Europeans, the name of Vienna reverberates with memories of earlier Turkish-European

encounters. Hundreds of Imam Hatip graduates learned German and completed their

university education here, in such fields as international law, engineering and medicine. Their

association in Vienna, WONDER, provided a warm and welcoming environment for several

generations of students and helped them on finding jobs after completing their studies.


Almost without exception, the students in WONDER aim to return to Turkey and find

professional employment there – which at least for the headscarf-wearing women among

them remains impossible in the public sector. The private sector discriminates less against

qualified headscarf-wearing women, and several WONDER women did find good jobs there.

Others chose to become lecturers at a private Turkish (but English-language) university in

Sarajevo, which more recently has become a second important centre where Imam Hatip

graduates go to pursue higher education. This university was established by private

entrepreneurs of conservative religious background and is not affiliated with any specific

cemaat (unlike another Turkish university in Sarajevo, which belongs to the Gülen

organization). Thus a self-perpetuating alternative stream of education in exile appears to

have emerged. Students of Imam Hatip school background, many of them from small towns

in central and eastern Turkey, are receiving good higher education abroad – better perhaps

than they would have received in Turkey. They constitute a potential alternative elite in exile,

preparing for return and for the time being unlikely to seek integration in the countries of

residence. The WONDER community, which now counts around eight hundred students and

alumni, has a strong group coherence, which on the one hand has somewhat restricted

contacts with other students, let alone wider European society, but on the other hand enhances the strength of this alternative network.

Background of this study of the Imam Hatip diaspora

The existence of this transnational Imam Hatip network has not been noticed in academic

studies before; it was discovered more or less accidentally by Ismail Ça�lar in the course of

preparations for another research project. He heard about the presence of a large number of

students in Vienna and of smaller numbers in such countries as Bosnia and Romania. No

information was available on the extent of this transnational network, and whether there were also significant numbers of Imam Hatip alumni studying in other West European countries.

Ça�lar had earlier noticed that many members of the new political and economic elite whose

prominence was closely connected with the rise of the AKP belonged to the same age cohort

of alumni of one particular Imam Hatip lycée in Istanbul. That cohort had reached maturity in

the years when there were no restrictions keeping Imam Hatip graduates from obtaining

higher professional education. From 1998 onward, the possibilities of social mobility for

Imam Hatip graduates were drastically reduced, at least in Turkey. This made it interesting to

take a closer look at those promising graduates, usually the best of their class, who were given

grants for study abroad. It was decided that Ça�lar would begin with a study of the student

community in Vienna, using participant observation as the major method, and from there would move on to other places, following connections of his respondents.

Ça�lar stayed in Vienna in June and again from September to November 2009, interviewing

numerous students and alumni and taking part in all activities of WONDER. It was hoped that

their networks of friends would yield contacts with Imam Hatip graduates studying in other


countries, but that proved elusive. The only significant contacts were with the secondary

cluster of Imam Hatip graduates (and their teachers) at the Turkish private university in

Sarajevo. A number of individual students could be found in Germany – some using their

ÖNDER grant at a university where they had applied for admission, others paying their own

studies – and slightly larger numbers in East European countries, but the only significant

clusters found were those in Vienna and Sarajevo. Interviews in those two places were

complemented with interviews with officers of ÖNDER in Istanbul. However, it proved

impossible to obtain systematic data on the numbers of students who had been given grants,

the universities and faculties where they studied, the rate of successful completion of studies,

and employment after graduation. This is an exploratory study, that may raise more questions than yield definitive answers.

The Imam Hatip graduates network compared with other transnational networks

Ismail Ça�lar’s research was part of a broader research project on transnational Muslim

networks that are relevant to the Muslim communities in Western Europe. Other networks

studied concern Salafi networks emanating from North Lebanon and the Turkish Gülen movement.

One of the things that makes the Imam Hatip network interesting is precisely its difference

with the other Turkish Islamic transnational networks. The most impressive of those

networks, that of Diyanet-affiliated mosque associations, emerged initially from grassroots

initiatives in the European diaspora but was completely taken over, reorganized and expanded

by the Turkish state and is controlled through Turkey’s embassies, consulates and local

dependencies of Diyanet, such as the Netherlands Islamic Foundation.1 The movement of

people, goods and ideas in this network is meant to serve and control the Turkish

communities in Western Europe and prevent them from coming under undesirable influences.

This is the most centralized of the various Turkish-Islamic networks, and many of its active

members (the imams and diplomatic attachés for religious affairs) are civil servants, who are

recalled to Turkey after a few years of foreign service. This significantly reduces the potential

impact on the Diyanet organization and its social circles in Turkey of ideas and practices

developing in the European development.

The earliest Turkish-Islamic transnational network was that of the Süleymancı movement,

who in the 1970s were the first to establish mosques and provide imams. In Turkey, the

Süleymancı were oppressed as a banned tarikat and had to operate with great caution; the

European environment provided them with unprecedented opportunities to organize and

1 This network is studied in the recent report by Sunier, Landman et al. , 'Diyanet: the Turkish Directorate for

Religious Affairs in a changing environment', VU University Amsterdam / Utrecht University, 2011. Available

online at: http://www.fsw.vu.nl/nl/Images/Final%20report%20Diyanet%20February%202011_tcm30-200229.pdf


spread their conservative religious views among the pious segments of the Turkish migrant

population. Through their Qur’an courses they reached out to a much wider constituency than

they would have found in Turkey itself. Arguably, the influence they wielded among Turks in

Europe strengthened the leadership in Turkey in negotiations with the political establishment.

The expansion of the Diyanet network around 1980 was to a large extent intended to curtail the influence of the Süleymancı network, which the state considered as a serious threat.2

For the Milli Görü� movement, Western Europe has similarly provided a safe haven at times

when it was repressed in Turkey (especially during the first years following the 1980 coup).

The most radical wing, led by Cemalettin Kaplan, who soon was to break away from Milli

Görü� and lead his own Caliphate movement, proclaimed his intention to carry out an Iranian-

style Islamic revolution in Turkey from his German exile. Both Kaplan and the more

moderate leaders of Milli Görü� in Germany pursued dual goals: on the one hand they

organized a following in Europe and represented their interests as Muslim immigrants; on the

other hand they made great efforts to harness the strength of their diaspora organizations in

the service of political struggles in Turkey. Milli Görü� especially proved to be a successful

fundraiser for various activities of the mother organization in Turkey. (That there have been

complaints of insufficient transparency and accusations of embezzlement is a different matter.)

The European Milli Görü� communities appear to be in a stronger negotiating position vis-à-

vis the mother organization in Turkey than the mosque associations under the Diyanet banner.

One reason no doubt is the division of the movement in Turkey, as Erdo�an and other

younger generation leaders broke away from Erbakan to establish the Justice and

Development Party, leaving the latter in command of a much smaller new party, the Felicity

Party (SP); a more recent split resulted in a third party with its roots in the Milli Görü�

movement, the HAS (People’s Voice) Party. At least as important a reason consists of

developments within the European Milli Görü� itself. As second generation leaders, who had

grown up in Europe, gradually took over from the founding members of the first generation,

the focus on Turkey decreased and discourse and action were steered away from the earlier

Islamist preoccupations and towards integration in European society – a trend that one close

observer has called ‘post-Islamist.’3

2 The Süleymancı network remains rather untransparent, even though it appears to be opening itself up to contacts with other Muslim communities and the European host societies. One of the few perceptive studies is:

Gerdien Jonker, Eine Wellenlänge zu Gott: der "Verband der islamischen Kulturzentren" in Europa, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2002.

3 Werner Schiffauer, Nach dem Islamismus. Eine Ethnographie der Islamischen Gemeinschaft Milli Görü�,

Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. This work should be read in combination with an earlier study, Günter Seufert, 'Die

Milli-Görü�-Bewegung (AMGT/IGMG): zwischen Integration und Isolation', in: Günter Seufert and Jacques

Waardenburg (eds), Turkish Islam and Europe / Türkischer Islam und Europa: Europe and Christianity as

reflected in Turkish Muslim discourse & Turkish Muslim life in the diaspora, Istanbul-Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999, pp. 295-322.


Mutatis mutandis the same may be said of the Gülen movement. With a central leadership

based in Istanbul (and the charismatic leader himself residing in Pennsylvania), this

movement is not only active in Turkey and among the Turkish diaspora but also in numerous

countries in Asia and Africa where there are no significant Turkish communities. In Western

Europe, however, its activities concern primarily the Turkish immigrant communities, and the

local leaders are a mix of ‘elder brothers’ (abi) sent from Turkey and locally educated young

activists. The movement engages in a much wider range of activities than other cemaat, but a

central concern in all activities is the formation of a well-educated and disciplined elite of

pious men and women, selected from the Turkish community, who may act as its moral and

practical leaders. Stronger than other cemaat, the Gülen movement is characterized by a

missionary spirit, a desire to lift the economic and moral status of the Turkish communities, in

the wider societies where they live. The locally trained activists are expected to adhere to a

strict code of moral behaviour and to follow given outlines of activities in the service of the

movement, but they appear free to adapt the concrete forms of those activities to local

conditions. The Gülen movement has shown great adaptability to the situation and

opportunities of each of the countries where it is active. Ideas and practices developed in the diaspora are unlikely to have much of an impact on the movement’s functioning in Turkey.4

In all these transnational networks, the movement of people with religious or political

authority from Turkey to the Turkish immigrant communities in Western Europe is a

conspicuous element, and organizing and educating those communities is an important aim of

their activities. Leaders also emerge from within the local cemaat, and it is usual for them to

travel to Turkey regularly for consultation with their Turkey-based elders. There is two-way

communication, but the mother organizations in Turkey are clearly invested with the higher

authority. Theoretically it is possible for developments in the European branches to have an

impact in Turkey, but such transnational influences in the reverse direction are not really in evidence.

The Imam Hatip network differs in a number of respects from these others. In the first place,

its members did not move to Europe for organizing and training the migrant worker

communities that were already in place there, nor to provide a Turkey-based organization

with a foreign foothold and safe haven. Their aim was simply to get the good higher education

that had been made inaccessible for them in Turkey. Although student members of WONDER

did establish contact with Turkish workers in Vienna, such contacts have remained incidental

and relatively insignificant. The entire network consists of young people in the same age

range, most of whom were among the best graduates of Imam Hatip lycées in Anatolia. They

are a potential counter elite, preparing themselves for leading roles in Turkey when they can

return. In this respect, they are reminiscent of that other exile group of a century ago, the

4 Martin van Bruinessen, ‘De Fethullah Gülenbeweging in Nederland’, report presented to the Netherlands

government, September 2010. Available online at: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/ministeries/bzk/documenten-en-

publicaties/kamerstukken/2010/12/14/kabinetsreactie-inzake-onderzoek-fethullah-gulenbeweging-rapport-de-fethullah-gulenbeweging-in-nederland.html.


Young Turks. It is ironical that the religious conservatives, having been prevented from

attending Turkish universities by their secularist opponents, have been obliged to become more internationally oriented than their foes.

bruinessen imam hatip graduates studying in europe-libre

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