ISBN10: 0199336415, ISBN13: 9780199336418, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. David Tittensor offers a groundbreaking new perspective on the Guelen movement, a Turkish Muslim educational activist network that emerged in the 1960s and has grown into a global empire with an estimated worth of $25 billion. Named after its leader Fethullah Guelen, the movement has established more than 1,000 secular educational institutions in over 140 countries, aiming to provide holistic education that incorporates both spirituality and the secularsciences.Despite the movement's success, little is known about how its schools are run, or how Islam is operationalized. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey,Tittensor explores the movement's ideo-theology and how it is practiced in the schools. His interviews with both teachers and graduates from Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, and Turkey show that the movement is a missionary organization, but of a singular kind: its goal is not simply widespread religious conversion, but a quest to recoup those Muslims who have apparently lost their way and to show non-Muslims that Muslims can embrace modernity and integrate into the wider community. Tittensoralso examines the movement's operational side and shows how the schools represent an example of Mohammad Yunus's social business model: a business with a social cause at itsheart.The House of Service is an insightful ...
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