I’d like to add prejudice to a phrase by Sakalli Celal who famously said “this much ignorance can only be brought about by education.” Fethullah Gulen, unfortunately, has been the target and victim of prejudices of a group of people who call themselves “enlightened” in Turkey. He also suffered the consequences of competition, jealousy, grudge, hatred and animosity caused by the same prejudices.
Who are these people? A group of people who, painstakingly, try to be westerners even though they belong to the “east” in the contexts of thought, culture and sentiment. They sometimes appeared as bureaucrats and businessmen, sometimes as members of the media and politicians. We still see such people and it looks like they will always exist. In other words, borrowing from Hilmi Yavuz: “Those who are not westerners, but try to be like westerners.” A block of people who look at themselves and the community to which they belong and in which they live from a western point of view. Therefore, we’re talking about not westerners but local orientalists; in the sense that Orientalism expresses the West’s own ideas about the East. A group of people who, when it comes to Islam, lack the necessary knowledge and have nothing to do with either the religion or the religious; who also placed gaps, that are impossible to close, between themselves and religion; or as Sakalli Celal put it (with a little addition) “those who think they can become Western by running towards west on the deck of a ship that sails to East in Turkey.”
Slanders, accusations, lies
I shouldn’t personalize the issue; however, in the final analysis, people who constantly try to defame Fethullah Gulen are flesh and bone persons. Therefore, the subject shifts to a personal axis. Now, many people who fit in this frame, depicted above, have been disseminating defamations about Gulen and the Hizmet Movement with an endless ambition. Everybody has the right (sometimes the duty) to criticize Fethullah Gulen, Hizmet Movement, and people and institutions in the movement; however, if the critique—either constructive or destructive—takes the shape of slander, false accusations, and lies, one is not able to interpret such criticism as sincere or well-intended. Forasmuch as aforementioned group takes the slander as a job for themselves and search in every nook and cranny to find “proof” of what they suspect of. After such fruitless work, they distort some facts and export their slanders and lies to the world. In short, there is no doubt that there exists a block that placed Fethullah Gulen and the Hizmet Movement in the enemy lines and works for a systematic defamation since 1994, when the movement opened itself to public opinion with the founding of Journalists and Writers foundation.
The question “why would they do this?” and its answer is a different dimension of the issue, but the fact that they do is obvious. Doğan Koç talks about this with proofs in his book titled Strategic Defamation of Fethullah Gülen: English vs. Turkish. Koç points out how the slanderers fall into a contradiction by examining their materials in two languages (Turkish and English).
Here is what Koç did: He created a database of 450 books, articles, printed and onlines news stories that aim at defaming Gulen an the Hizmet Movement; some in English and some in Turkish. Then he conducted a comparative study of the data. The conclusion he reached is this: according to these publications, Gulen is a CIA agent, a hand puppet for the Vatican or the Pope’s hidden cardinal, Crypto-Jew, the Trojan horse of radical Islam, an advocate of moderate Islam, America’s Khomeini, wanting to destroy the secular regime in Turkey to establish a Sharia order, someone who awaits the revival of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate, Turkey representative of US’ great Middle East project, an Ultra nationalist with Zionist ties and a hidden agenda…
As you see from what I briefly narrated, there is a big contradiction. Gulen is depicted as a hardline Sharia advocate and a catholic cardinal, an ultra nationalist and a foreign spy at the same time. We can easily predict that the language and jargon is determined based on the readers’ profile. For example, in Turkish defamations, Fethullah Gulen is libeled as an “American/CIA agent”, “hidden cardinal”, “Zionist puppet”; while, to the English speaking audience, he is presented as “radical Islamist”, “second Khomeini”, “new Ottoman and Caliphate advocate.” Long story short, without the faith based or humanitarian principals, this defamation campaign turns into quite the “vae victis” situation.
Timing of defamationsc
Doğan Koç underlines some other very important elements. One of these is the timing of the defamations. He alludes to the fact that the vicious campaign.,that accelerated in 2009 and looked like being coordinated from the same center, might be tied to the Ergenekon trial (Ergenekon is the name of an illegal clandestine organization that is on trial in Turkey). A sharp increase in the defamatory publications—right after the Ergenekon trial took off—backs up that claim. Another crucial fact Koç points out is the similar characteristics of Hizmet Movement’s “volunteer enemies” and obvious tactics they employ during this evil campaign.
I think anyone, who wants to evaluate Fethullah Gulen and the Hizmet Movement objectively, will benefit greatly from this book, which is published by University Press of America. From what I hear, the Turkish translation is about to be completed as well. There is no doubt that this is a good book for readers who like looking at things from different perspectives. I hope it gets published in Turkish soon, for everyone needs that “different perspective” offered by the book. Especially for those who spend their lives in the hubbub of the ever changing agenda in Turkey.
By Ahmet Kurucan (Translated from Turkish)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
