Islamic Counter-Hegemonic Legal Knowledge and Its Unofficial Interpretation and Glocal Dissemination

Abstract

Despite the Kemalist repressive secularism, several Islamic groups and Sufi brotherhoods have either continued to exist or new ones in addition to modern ones such as faith-based civil society organizations (to satisfy both the official and unofficial laws) have emerged. All these have their own knowledge bases, religious outlooks and interpretation mechanisms. Gulen Movement, albeit being the most known one, is only one of these myriad number of religious or religio-secular societal formations. It is an Islamic civil society movement originated in Turkey. It has mainly focused on science and secular education. It is urbanite, composed of mainly educated participants. The movement has created its own spaces such schools, hospitals, dormitories, universities, cultural centers, think tanks, newspapers, TV stations, web portals and political lobbying associations to form and express an identity of a modern Sufistic Turkish Muslimhood. Even though Gulen is the main actor in the movement who has engaged with producing new Islamic knowledge in his constant responses to the socio-political affairs and challenges by reinterpreting Islamic sources in tune with contemporary time and space, the movement participants contribute to this process in different ways, such as by giving transferring knowledge to him from their own local contexts or by contextualizing and disseminating the knowledge produced by Gulen. There are interesting outcomes of these processes. For instance, many of the movement participants are of the view that something that I dubbed as “Muslim Secularism” is possible, an idea that unofficial Islamic law is compatible with Alfred Stepan’s twin tolerations. Similarly, following the maqasid conceptualization, many movement participants support universal human rights, liberal and/or social democracy and equal citizenship regardless of religious affiliation. There are also several expert participants in the movement who have been producing knowledge as theologians, social scientists and intellectuals in different parts of the world. Some of these are critical engagement with the movement itself and their critical stance on some actions of the movement (e.g. the movement’s Turkish nationalism, its existence within the Turkish bureaucracy, its close but problematic proximity to the AKP politicians until 2013, its media’s poor democratic performance, transparency and accountability problems) sometimes faces anti-expert sentiments from some other movement participants.