Abstract
This article analyzes how members of the Gülen community in Brazil have mobilized the Islamic tradition in order to make reason of critical changes in their lives, since July 2016 failed coup in Turkey. This community is part of the Gülen Movement, a transnational Turkish Islamic network that operates mainly through educational and cultural activities. The Movement’s charismatic religious leader, Fethullah Gülen, was held responsible for the failed putsch and its participants have since been persecuted by the Turkish government both at home and abroad. The article shows how Gülen’s discursive articulation of the notions of hizmet (religious service) and hicret has been mobilized by his followers settled in Brazil as an Islamic framework that provides them with moral reasoning to carry on in what they define as the Prophet’s path. It also shows that changes in economic and political context may lead to different motivations and objectives in one’s trajectory, producing a reconfiguration of meanings related to travel, migration and diaspora.
Highlights
In the Islamic tradition, travel is an important means of connecting with God
Travel as pilgrimage, migration, and search for knowledge occupies a special place in religious imagination among Muslims
It is important to look at the complexity of personal motivations, which may combine diverse systems of social and cultural values and cannot be reduced to conscious choices (Schiocchet 2011)
Summary
In the Islamic tradition, travel is an important means of connecting with God. Travel is in one of the five pillars of belief, the hac (pilgrimage to Mecca); in the doctrine of hicret, migration of the faithful when unable to practice their religion freely in their land; in the Quranic sura “The Night. In the context studied it means “religious service” and is the term used by the community members to refer both to the Islamic movement in which they are participants as an imagined global community—the Hizmet Movement, as they call it—and to the morally invested actions in which they engage in order to implement their religious leader’s “civilizational” project. Those actions have an individual dimension, that of self-fashioning, and a collective dimension, that of community building and the spreading of Gülen’s worldview throughout the globe. Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D. (Masud 1990)
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